Dave Barry looks back at 2011

The inimitable Dave Barry has produced his usual look back at the old year. This one's even better (in my opinion, anyway) than his previous efforts. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite.

This was a year in which journalism was pretty much completely replaced by tweeting. It was a year in which a significant earthquake struck Washington, D.C., yet failed to destroy a single federal agency. It was a year in which the nation was subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of highly publicized pronouncements from Charlie Sheen, a man who, where you have a central nervous system, has a Magic 8-Ball.

This was a year in which the cast members of Jersey Shore went to Italy and then — in an inexcusable lapse of border security — were allowed to return.

. . .

As the year wore on, frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things. Incredibly, even this did not bring about meaningful change. The economy remained wretched, especially unemployment, which got so bad that many Americans gave up even trying to work. Congress, for example.

. . .

In Europe, the economic crisis continues to worsen, especially in Greece, which has been operating under a financial model in which the government spends approximately $150 billion a year while taking in revenues totaling $336.50 from the lone Greek taxpayer, an Athens businessman who plans to retire in April. Greece has been making up the shortfall by charging everything to a MasterCard account that the Greek government applied for — in what some critics consider a questionable financial practice — using the name “Germany” ... Moody’s announces that it has officially downgraded Greece’s credit rating from “poor” to “rat mucus” following the discovery that the Acropolis has been repossessed.

There's much more at the link. Great fun.





Peter