As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.
[Editor’s note: For those of you following the Jewish calendar, look for my special Rosh Hashanah “You won’t believe what the Goyim world did to our people this past year” Edition, to be published at sundown on September 28, 2011, the start of the Jewish New Year. – TEJ]
Consider this my Holiday gift to you – a week late, sorry. Blame it on the Post Office. Here is the annual View from the Bleachers’ Year in Review – 2010 Edition, or as I like to call it VFTBYIR-2010E, for short.
Oh, just one thing: Pay no attention to the subtle and repeated placement of gratuitous links to previous VFTB articles scattered throughout this week’s post. My tech person told me search engines like that sort of stuff. Hope you don’t mind. Let’s get started, shall we?
January: Avatarsmashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time). Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).
In the past week, WikiLeaks, the controversial organization that claims its goal is to keep governments honest by revealing classified documents, made news again. They announced that in the upcoming weeks, they will be releasing more than 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables and internal documents – to the dismay and embarrassment of top government officials in the US and the world over.
Government leaders from Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi to Libya’s Muammar Gaddifi to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il have been privately ridiculed and derided as incompetent, sexually promiscuous, behaving like a thug or having amazingly bad hair. WikiLeaks’ Australian-born editor and Internet activist, Julian Assange (right) has been characterized as everything from an anarchist to a terrorist – but he has not been ridiculed for having bad hair. This reporter thinks it’s quite stylish, actually.
But this is just the tip of the WikiLeaks iceberg. Thanks to my own painstaking Pulitzer-Prize-deserving investigative journalism and my extensive network of contacts within the Latvian intelligence community, I am about to blow the lid off the latest WikiLeaks scandal. In a View from the Bleachers EXCLUSIVE, I have uncovered WikiLeaks’ secret plans to release everybody’s email communications from the past ten years – Yes, everybody’s – including yours. The reasons for this latest attempt at public humiliation are unclear. My own speculation is that WikiLeaks chief Assange is trying to get back at an ex-girlfriend. But whatever the reasons, the consequences could be potentially devastating for millions of Americans, Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and potentially as many as three Greenlanders.
Life is pretty stressful at times. When I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, I like to find a comfortable couch, close my eyes and listen to a relaxing sound. And no sounds are more soothing to me than the rhythmic sound of ocean waves crashing into the shore or the gentle gurgling of a babbling brook or the soothing hum of 35,000 rabid South African soccer fanatics at the FIFA World Cup, blowing their lungs out with their plastic 4 dollar and 95 cent vuvuzelas. If you still haven’t heard of a vuvuzela (pronounced “Voo-Voo-ZAY-Lah), it can mean only one thing: You’re an American.
Surely by now you must have seen and heard a vuvuzela. Click here to listen to its soothing sound. Now, wasn’t that relaxing? Now just imagine that soothing humming sound TIMES 35 THOUSAND …. for an hour and a half….. non-stop…. without commercial interruption. Originally used to summon distant African tribal villagers to attend community gatherings, the vuvuzela has become synonymous with the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, with its distinctive nonstop, deafening, monotone buzzing sound. The vuvuzela may come in 275 different colors, but they all come in just one note: B flat.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed into law a controversial immigration reform bill that has stirred up strong emotions from Republicans and Democrats alike. Underpinning much of the debate is the concern by many that this new law will unleash a tidal wave of abuse as racist rogue cops and INS agents target Hispanics – reminiscent of the roundup of Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There are protests from some unusual corners: Several prominent Hispanic Major League baseball players are asking other players to boycott next summer’s All Star Game (slated to be played in Phoenix) or at least pledge not swing at anything outside of the strike zone.
(* Translations for the TI– “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”; GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”; Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”; TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)
In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.
Please help us avoid another Katrina catastrophe, won’t you? Turns out the next imminent disaster we have to fear is ourselves – or more specifically, our own U.S. Navy. If we don’t act fast, thousands of people on the tiny island of Guam stand to perish as their island capsizes into the sea. Don’t believe me? Listen to the ominous words of one informed federal government official.
Last week, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-GA. (right), was questioning Navy Admiral Robert Willard during a House Armed Services Committee meeting about the Navy’s plans to relocate 8,000 Navy personnel and their families to Guam. After noting at some length that the island is rather narrow, Rep. Johnson solemnly stated “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated it will tip over and capsize.” (I can’t make this stuff up. And, no he was not being facetious.) Admiral Willard paused and replied, “We don’t anticipate that.” You can watch this riveting testimony here.
As a professional journalist, it is my job to stay informed about important news stories and trends, so you don’t have to. This week, as I have done every year since this blog’s inception in 1975, I take stock in the people and events that shaped our world over the past 365 days.
January: Avatar smashes box office records as the biggest grossing movie of all time (not to be confused with Cannibal Holocaust, which gets VFTB’s vote for grossest movie of all time). Thanks to Avatar’s amazing 3D effects and unprecedented profits, Hollywood begins unleashing a tidal wave of 3D films for 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, Toy Story 3, Rocky XXXVII and Oscar-buzz, early odds-on favorite for Best Picture, Jack Ass 3D (right).
help us avoid another Katrina catastrophe, won’t you? Turns out the next imminent disaster we have to fear is ourselves – or more specifically, our own U.S. Navy. If we don’t act fast, thousands of people on the tiny island of Guam stand to perish as their island capsizes into the sea. Don’t believe me? Listen to the ominous words of one informed federal government official.
Last week, 
