Happy Ned Year: Everyday is a gift

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So, I left you a year ago when the government was shutting down and with no park rangers around, people were stringing Christmas lights on ancient Joshua Trees.
The image tantalizes me, on one hand, as the crummy crime against nature that it was.
Or, a humorously offbeat way to celebrate the season — the closest we’ll get to a tannenbaum that was around when Jesus walked.

All of the criminal year 2019 lay before us; the one thing we know will never recover from it is the Joshua trees.

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But, speaking of crimes, the shutdown did teach me one of two wonderful words: Protestors in a federal building were arrested for “crowding, obstructing, and incommoding...”

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Incommoding!
And in the UK, the police term for fighting in public is “affray.”
Hey, enough about Brexit …

I feel incommoded by the affray, so I will move on ...

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2020 will be the year that the term “the opposite sex” ceases to have use and meaning.

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Business idea: A chain of “Participating” restaurants, as in, “get it now only at Participating ...”

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I loved the inspirational poster I saw in a hospital this year: “Everyday is a gift.”
Note the structure: Everyday.
I agree: We should celebrate the mundane. Everyday really is a gift.

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Business idea: Novelty utility meters fashioned after gargoyles ... the spinning arrows instead of eyes.

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I learned from personal experience that there is such a thing as “pseudogout” — a painful joint condition that’s like gout but not quite.
Also known as “Boggy Knee.” Which is a term I actually like.

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The word “oblivion” just keeps going on and on ... I think “oblivyin’” ought to be a verb for some endless task. While we’re at it we could make shove’l a contraction.
“When you’re diggin’ and oblivyin’, a shov’l help you get there ...” even as far as Boggy Knee.

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Maybe George Carlin once asked this:
Why do sportswriters and broadcasters write or say that a team “plays host” — but they never say the visiting team  “plays guest”?
Perhaps so not to confused people when they use the verb “plaguest?”
 Like in Psalm 60: “With heavy things thou plaguest us ...”
But enough about Tom Brady ...

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... who is not nearly as interesting as Salamao Mausse.
The most compelling story I heard all year might be about the “meteorological department janitor” in Mozambique who hikes three hours several times a week to mow the lawn and clean the weather radar station built near the town of Xai-Xai (shy-shy) in the early 2000s. The station was constructed to alert farmers and ranchers when torrential rains will come and cause flooding, as meteorologists in the impoverished country try in vain to keep up with climate change. But the radar stopped working in 2013; no funds to fix it. Yet, Senhor Mausse goes three times a week to take care of the facility, hoping it will one day go back online.
When the Xai-Xai location opened in 2004, then-President Joaquim Chissano personally attended the so-called baptizing of the installation and gave it a name: “Life Radar.”

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We need a treatise on the rich and vital distinctions between street food and road food.

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Who is this guy, Oz Moses, I keep hearing about? “It was done by Oz Moses,” they say. I think he’s as busy as Mo Mentum, whose best friend is Con Gusto.

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Gone too soon, in 2018, Gord Dowdie of The Tragically Hip, whose sense of humor was razor sharp and Bay Rum bracing, once said during a concert: “I will remain motionless if you need a target.”

Gord called for a “National Stupid Day,” saying, “We could have our own motto: ‘Who Are We Kidding?’” and adding,
“If someone important asks you a question about something, do you answer it strictly because you’ll feel important?”
Uh, yes.

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While we’re talking music:
Most prescient lyrics ... ever?
“They’re putting us in identical little boxes/
No character just uniformity/
They’re trying to build a computerised community/
But they’ll never make a zombie out of me”
That’s from a song called “Muswell Hillbilly,” by The Kinks.
It came out in 1972 — 20 years before the home computer became common; yes, 35 years before “social media,” the Davies brothers sang about a conforming, cyber-prone “community.”

A few years after that, Kinky Friedman wrote in “Sold American”:
“Writing down your memoirs on some window in the frost/
Roulette eyes reflecting another morning lost ...”
Just heard the song for the first time, and I ask, “How is it other songwriters listen to lines like that and don’t simply give up?”

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Considering the Kinks’ take on things, it’s a good place to look way back to 2004, and the creation of Facebook, when the new online company’s “handful of imperatives” included “Find exactly the right profile picture. Change it regularly. Consider carefully how you describe your interests.”

And then there is academic Shoshana Zubroff, who wrote, “Social media marks a new era in the intensity, density and pervasiveness of social comparison processes especially for the youngest among us, who are ‘almost constantly online’ at a time of life when one’s own identity, voice and moral agency are a work in progress.” She calls it a “psychological tsunami.”

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All of which raises a few questions, given the famous lines from that album’s “Ballad of the Thin Man”:
“Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?”
By the way, what’s with all these Jones?
Was Mr. Jones of Dylan’s song married to lady in Marvin Gaye’s classic, “Me and Mrs. Jones”?
Is that the same Mr. Jones Counting Crows talked about (“Pass me the bottle, Mr. Jones”) and Talking Heads wrote about? (“Mr. Jones is calling.”)
“Basketball Jones” is here to stay, of course.
Were any of these songs ever covered by  the band Jesus Jones — or  The Smiths?

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End this TR3ND! The Tool song “7empest” ... D2REK J2TER hats and shirts reading “RE2PECT” ... a rapper named “6ix9ine”
Enough with numbers replacing letters! (How do you even pronounce “7empest”?)

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Why don’t we say “truthhood” as opposed to “falsehood”? Why “falsify” but never “truthify”?
Time to start truthifying.

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We have too many states. Let’s merge some: HawaiIowa, FlorIdaho, and OklahoMaryland would do nicely.

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In the 1960s, there used to be a product called “potato fudge.” That’s all I know about the topic.

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I also learned in 2019 that America is a place where advertisers imagine hordes of truck owners climbing to the top of a hill carrying their tailgates.
And numerous ones show people driving vehicles in way-unsafe manners, but it’s okay because they just flash the brief and tiny “Do Not Attempt” disclaimer.

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Hacking ... hacking ... hacking. Hacking means too many things now! Makes me want to hack something alright ...

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And what about the poor, overworked symbol #?
(No, %&@!*, I am not swearing...)
The # sign: It means hashtag, pound, AND number.
You didn’t know that # is formally called the octothorpe, did you? #%:!* No!

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“I Don’t Care If There’s Cursing” — best song title of the year. The band Phosphorescence.

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Are there such things as hash-tag hackers?

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Church attendance is way down, though: People are pew and far between.

Except in Zimbabwe, where one church burned its pews to help keep tsunami victims warm.

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The salad dressing biz is cutthroat: “Vinegar, vidi, vici.”

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Best names I heard all year: Lorenzo Nevermind (from “Garfield); Butsay Underscore (a Scottish fellow’s Twitter handle); Oholiab Nomad (I made it up) and ... these are real:
Jamaree Bouyea, a college basketball player;
Zigaboo Modeliste, a drummer.

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Early this year, I read a couple books by the brilliant and quoteable Chuck Klosterman, who came up with the phrase “casino of his imagination.”
He also described a character who “charged out the door like a black rhino with a bad haircut.”
And this: “The room smelled like gin and tonic and violence, which transmutes to evergreen trees and ozone and uric acid.”
No way I can top that.

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Election year in 2020: Consider that “polling” means both unofficial gauging of opinion and final voting results.
That is confusing and weird, and part of what is wrong with our “democratic” system, in a nutshell.