Februrary 2014: I Will Not Miss You

Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.

An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).

Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.

That's a Year

I sincerely doubt I'll be posting anything until 2011, so here is a list of predictions about 2011:

1. US political drama will continue to exceed all forecasted expectations.


2. Terrible storms will wreak more havoc on very specific shorelines.


3. North Korea will secretly retract into China without anyone's permission. China will withhold dumplings.


4. At least one person will be on a toilet at 23:59 on December 31st, 2010. 

4.1 - Anyone who passes out before 00:01 on January 2011 will be left in 2010 forever.*
(*Babies, small children, and narcoleptics are exempt)


5. All television shows will be in 3D in 2011. Anyone without a pair of special $200 glasses will be unable to watch anything.


6. Lists will be forbidden in 2011 by decree of Vladimir Putin, which is why I'm making my fist list article.


7. By mid-2011, even Mongolian sheep-herders will get sick of Auto-Tune.


8. Salmon will go extinct, most birds will grow a third wing, and all bears will crossbreed with sharks. This is all due to Global Warming and might lead to the extinction of humankind.


9. Someone's grandmother will discover Twitter.

10. All television programs which have titles beginning with "C" will be canceled.

That's all the nonsense I could think up on short notice, I'll be free of the internet for the next two weeks impersonating socially healthy people and getting drunk. If I get stuck in 2010 you will know by next September, because I'll be reposting old material. Goodbye, dear audience consisting almost entirely of web-crawling search-index bots, and a happy New Year to you.