Thursday 18 December 2014: A Year In Review

This is always fun to write, and I can only hope it is equally fun to read. In this year’s edition of my review of the news; an explosive entrance, some highly controversial protests, political change, disappearances of large lumps of metal and whether or not certain celebrities’ names sound humorous. Then the headlines. That’s my favourite bit.

I always wonder how best to come crashing through the door every year on this thing. This time, I’ve decided for a particularly explosive entrance […] explosions. Because there were many, many explosions this year. Not least the fightings going on in Gaza. Many, many explosions there. Then the ISIS stuff in Syria and Iraq. I can’t even make jokes about that. I mean I’m probably about as much a Muslim as those guys – I don’t appear to follow any conventional religion and am bad at interpreting the Quran … anyway. Then the annex of Crimea into Russia that started a civil war in Ukraine. Putin probably made all of that political manoeuvring while shirtless and wrestling a bear. On horseback.

Then we move to conflicts of a somewhat more peaceful nature, democracy protests in Hong Kong and the protests in the US (and internationally) because of the unjustified killing of an unarmed black man. I’d use the ‘blind leading the blind’ analogy for racism – but if the people were blind, they wouldn’t see colours and there’d be no racism … so it doesn’t work.

But there were more successful politics as well. Well, successful as in ‘didn’t start a war.’ The Scottish independence vote returned a ‘no’ result by approximately a 58% vote, and Fiji held its first democratic election since the coup in 2008. Or something. I wasn’t paying attention back then. Had Scotland become independent, The United Kingdom may perhaps have become the Untied Kingdom. Certainly cheaper than other renaming options like RUMP UK and United Kingdom 2.0, or instead of Great Britain, it would become “good Britain”.

And, locally in New Zealand, we had our (very) own election. Where Kim Dotcom (he’s the one that either looks like a Russian doll, or he’s eaten several too many park benches) tried to stir up some dirt about spying and people’s right to privacy. Which fell flat. Unfortunately he didn’t literally fall flat, that would be fun to watch. Colin Craig (who looks like either he’s been electrocuted, he’s a pedophile or looks like Norman Bates from Psycho) attempted to get the Conservative Party into Parliament and failed. The spying stir-up actually resulted in Labour (the perpetrator) decreasing its share in parliament, resulting in a larger majority for National. Confusing.

So now the moving and slightly malevolent eye looks for mysteriously disappearing pieces of metal. No, I’m not talking about wedding rings, I’m talking about the two (yes, two) plane-related events we’ve had this year. One was definitely shot down, so it doesn’t really count as a disappearing plane, but I wanted to make the plane/wedding ring joke, so there ya go. I’m pretty sure they haven’t found it yet … the game of ‘Where’s Wally?’ continues. And there’s also the Ebola outbreak in Africa that resulted in Band Aid covering the song from the 80s by not changing many of the words so it doesn’t really fit the situation. Apparently we’re ready for an outbreak here. I guess we’ll hopefully never know. Because if the public health system is like the public transport system, we’re all buggered.

And the moving finger (yes, I know – first it’s an eye, then a finger; I need to make up my mind) points to the media in the final section of my review. Disappointingly little change here, with regards to representation of minority groups and women – very much still an ‘if we have to’ filling in of quotas, rather than a judgement of actual merit. Except for isolated cases, so yeah that’s a bit sad. But if there could be an upside of that, then it is the names of some specific individuals. I mean, I thought that Ariana Grande was a Starbucks coffee, Lana Del Ray a Spanish holiday destination and Kanye West a train stop. And, of course, as this is obligatory; Christchurch seems to have calmed down a bit in terms of the shaking (for anyone who’s interested, there’s a Taylor Swift song that covers my thoughts on the issue reasonably well).

So, that concludes this year’s round up. And now, for this year’s headlines that I could find;
• Potato chip factory burnt to a crisp
• Disgusted Central Park muger rejects Victim’s flip phone
• Missing woman unwittingly joins search for herself
• SWAT team heroically ends 6 hour standoff with empty apartment
• Statistics show teen pregnancy drops significantly after 25.