Year in Review - Before Christmas!

Yes, most people save their best of lists for the week after Christmas, well, I'll try to have a real one (or two) next week, but for now. Just a few thoughts about the year in review.

Just a thought about the year, for me, it's been a year of trivia. One of the things that makes me born to be a writer, and an amazing conversationalist, is my encyclopedic knowledge of trivia. Not for the sake of anything except for the fact that I love knowing stuff. Not real knowledge of course, you know, like how to fix a car or fix a leaky faucet, but knowledge like knowing rhubarb really means 'barbarian food from near that river in Russia'. 

What else did learn in 2011? Lots of stuff. According to my research (meaning, it appeared on my ‘what your poo is telling you’ desk calendar), the world’s oldest known joke, appearing in some sort of archeological find, goes like this:

“A young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap”

Huh. I hope that isn’t the best the ancient world has to offer. I’m sure if the person writing that down knew it would have been discovered again four thousand years in the future they would have at least tried to make it funnier. I mean, I was pulling off better jokes than that when I was like, five years old. Lame.

But reading about that made me think of another piece of trivia I’d heard, this one was from some scientist guy who said the oldest recipe we've ever recovered was a recipe for Beer!

Oh, and of course, that figures. The oldest written records we have of humans daring to write down their abstract thoughts are recipes for homemade beer and fart jokes.

I was sorta aghast at the thought, then I realized that if some far future archeologist turned up some computer hard drive of a typical person from today, they would probably find it full of porn and cat videos. Then I was more aghast at what a future person would learn about us, I mean, we haven’t just been recycling fart jokes and alcohol recipes for the past 4000 years have we?

Well, when a coworker took a look at the cream cheese cupcakes with chocolate pudding on top that we had yesterday and made a poop joke, I thought the answer has to be yes, because that’s just what we do.

Anyway, I wanted to do a year in review, but found out that I have nothing to review, as I don’t pay that much attention to things as they happen. So here are a few items that I remembered that I think happened this year.

1)      There was some sort of natural disaster made worse by people doing something they probably shouldn’t - People shouldn’t be messing around with the fires of creation. Or, rather, they need to give it its proper respect. A tidal wave striking Japan in the way that it did might be a once a century sort of event, but so what - engineer your NUCLEAR facilities to handle those once a century cataclysms… especially if you expect to use the facility for several decades.

2)      The TV show, The Six-Million Dollar man, yes, it was about a cyborg that battled bionic bigfoots and insane Venusian probes, but in 2011 I looked for it on Netflix and could not find it… I’m not sure who to be angry with, I want to see Steve Austin use his awesome car phone to talk to his boss.

3)      I tried to watch Stargate the TV show, I watched season 1, and a few episodes of season 2. It was hard for me to watch, real hard. I’ll in 2012 to make it through season 2.

4)      I did watch the first 5 seasons of Psych, best show in the universe.

5)      I saw movies at the theater, but I don’t remember any that were so good I might need to force my grandkids to watch them when I’m an old man. Am I forgetting any? I liked the Marvel movies, I liked Cowboys vs Aliens one, all in all, I was a bit underwhelmed.

6) I've realized that outside of writing, reading, and pop science, I have no idea what happened in the world in the past year.

Maybe next year we'll all be jazzed about The Hobbit coming out.