My New Year’s Eve ritual

Every New Year’s Eve, I look back on the events of the past year.  I do so by reading Dave Barry’s Year in Review.  The month by month retrospective has the virtue of being very funny, which makes the survey of the year’s madness much easier to take.

Start it and follow the link after the jump.From Dave Barry’s 2015 Year in Review | Miami Herald:

Sometimes we are accused — believe it or not — of being overly negative in our annual Year in Review. Critics say we ignore the many positive events in a given year and focus instead on the stupid, the tragic, the evil, the disgusting, the Kardashians.

OK, critics: We have heard you. This year, instead of dwelling on the negatives, we’re going to start our annual review with a List of the Top 10 Good Things That Happened in 2015. Ready? Here we go:

1. We didn’t hear that much about Honey Boo Boo.

2.

OK, we’ll have to get back to you on Good Things 2 through 10. We apologize, but 2015 had so many negatives that we’re having trouble seeing the positives. It’s like we’re on the Titanic, and it’s tilting at an 85-degree angle with its propellers way up in the air, and we’re dangling over the cold Atlantic trying to tell ourselves: “At least there’s no waiting for the shuffleboard courts!”

Are we saying that 2015 was the worst year ever? Are we saying it was worse than, for example, 1347, the year when the Bubonic Plague killed a large part of humanity?

Yes, we are saying that. Because at least the remainder of humanity was not exposed to a solid week in which the news media focused intensively on the question of whether a leading candidate for president of the United States had, or had not, made an explicit reference to a prominent female TV journalist’s biological lady cycle.

That actually happened in 2015, and it was not the only bad thing. This was the year when American sports fans became more excited about their fantasy sports teams — which, for the record, are imaginary — than about sports teams that actually exist. This was the year when the “selfie” epidemic, which was already horrendous, somehow got even worse. Of the 105 billion photographs taken by Americans this year, 104.9 billion consist of a grinning face looming, blimplike, in the foreground, with a tiny image of something — the Grand Canyon, the pope, a 747 crashing — peeking out in the distance behind the person’s left ear.

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