A Brief History of What Didn't Happen This Year

The Earth has made another 584,020,177-mile sojourn around the sun (give or take 3 inches), which compels us annually to mark the occasion. We have to by fiat, and because it’s in our genetic makeup to dutifully mark anniversaries as if they meant something vital to our survival. Other than orbital patterns and their accompanying seasonal changes, a 365.25-day period itself is rather arbitrary, and I’m sure the constellations had no intention of our looking to them for our frequency of paying taxes, having birthdays, or demarcating school years or football seasons. Oh no, we’ve gone around the sun again! That means we have to crown a new Super Bowl champion! See, we tend to be that way and things.

Now we’re ready to start a new compartment of days with a new number. Then when we’ve got ten of those, we’ll call it a neat little decade. That way, we’ll know kind of music we’re talking about. Everybody goes home contented as clams and happy as cows. (Larks are happy too, aren't they?)

Arbitrary chronomatic designations? Of course. But then so is any time period, be it an hour, a day, or a millennium. They’re just pretty numbers, and that’s precisely why we can’t resist them. They seem to us to carry inherent meaning in them, if not for the fact that they were contrived by us, with us, for us and on behalf of us. Otherwise, they’re virtually dripping in intrinsicness. (Note: It would appear that my lexicon is more extensive than spell checker’s, so sue me)

At any rate, what was the big deal about this 2012 glob we just encountered? We want to feel a heightened level of importance, thus we want to attach some degree of legitimacy to our experiences, particular the more recent ones, and so we want to encapsulate and memorialize our latest journal of entries. Our accomplishments, our memories, our veritable legacy, as it were. At the essence of the matter, we want to come more in touch with our core identities, thinking we can throw a lasso around a set of unrelated random occurrences and associate ourselves with it in some adroit metaphysical maneuver. Or at least that's my initial impression at face value. And with that, we now look at a list of things that didn’t happen in the past 12 orbits of our unassuming yet ever-chronicling moon.

2012 — The Year That Wasn't

What didn’t happen: Siegfried & Roy didn’t perform complex algorithms at a Bon Jovi concert.

Why it didn’t happen: Siegfried perhaps did, but definitely not Roy. Somebody has to keep the operation with its feet firmly planted on the ground, and that would be the aforementioned ever-resolute Roy. Side note: Siegfried is admittedly partial to Rage Against the Machine.

What didn’t happen: The world didn’t end*. (*-except in strategic parts of New Jersey)

Why it didn’t happen: The Mayans were instead merely trying to predict when Desperate Housewives would be going into syndication, and everybody gets their knickers in a bundle.

What didn’t happen: Dick Clark didn’t do the New Year’s Eve countdown.

Why it didn’t happen: He’s grown bored of the whole saga and feigned his death so he could enter the witness protection program and live out the rest of his days with high school buddies Elvis and George Burns in Bora Bora.

What didn’t happen: The Cubs didn’t win the World Series.

Why it didn’t happen: So 1908 wasn’t good enough for you greedy Cubs fans?

What didn’t happen: You didn’t win the lottery. OK, so I got lucky guessing on that one.

Why it didn’t happen: Because nobody wins the lottery except for imaginary people and incredibly lucky zombies.

What didn’t happen: Penn & Teller didn’t invade Belgium.

Why it didn’t happen: Penn ran into complications communicating by walkie talkie with Teller, plus they ran out of army tanks.

What didn’t happen: A news anchor didn’t act nonchalantly about an incredibly unextraordinary occurrence while donning a King Kong suit, doing the backstroke on the newsdesk and singing the full lyrics to “Moving in Stereo.”

Why it didn’t happen: Like they would ever act nonchalantly about something.

What didn’t happen: A mass exodus of squeegee operators didn’t infiltrate a laundromat at closing time.

Why it didn’t happen: Philosophically speaking, feasible if but only for a glut of factors coming together in a perfect storm, so they’d be just as likely to infiltrate an auto parts store at an undisclosed location in the Alps. Stay tuned, because this could get quiet intriguing.

What didn’t happen: A diva once again didn’t make a noteworthy song. Webster’s: noteworthy, n. — something that’s either worth writing home about or that will matter to anyone on the planet in ten years besides their mother.

Why it didn’t happen: See also: duh.

What didn’t happen: Soccer moms didn’t traverse the Serengeti on mopeds.

Why it didn’t happen: They wouldn’t be caught dead out of a mini-van, their natural habitat. So the imagination winces to consider the unlikelihood of the event, let alone its reality.

What didn’t happen: The fiscal cliff wasn’t averted, as lemmings catapulted to their ultimate demise.

Why it didn’t happen: Um, the government is in charge.

What didn’t happen: People didn’t read blogs while looking at this sentence without having déjà vu or flashbacks. People didn’t read blogs while looking at that last sentence.

Why it didn’t happen: Just would never happen. Too pie-in-the-sky for my pragmatic propensities. (Did I read that already? I didn’t think so. For a minute there, I thought I might be hallucinating. Hmm. Is it safe to come out of the parentheses yet?) Ah, thanks. A little stuffy in there. Feel like I can breathe now…

What didn’t happen: We didn’t see the first woman U.S. president.

Why it didn’t happen: Women are too smart to mess with such tomfoolery or chuckwoolery.

What didn’t happen: Metallica didn’t write a song called “Smurfs Are Our Friends.”

Why it didn’t happen: Because Smurfs aren’t their friends. Like it took a neurosurgeon to analyze that one.

What didn’t happen: I didn’t get rich and move to Paris.

Why it didn’t happen: Paris, meh. Furthermore, Eiffel Schmeiffel.

What didn’t happen: Gerunds were not expanded to include the word “Peking.”

Why it didn’t happen: Asiatic linguists were heard all around to be saying “No Peking.” Actually, they were just in a grumpy mood. OK, so linguists are always in a grumpy mood, but that’s beside the point.

What didn’t happen: Hell didn’t freeze over.

Why it didn’t happen: Global warming.

What didn’t happen: Reality shows didn’t exist.

Why it didn’t happen: I continued to fail to recognize them as part of my perpetual moratorium against inanity.

What didn’t happen: Monkeys didn’t create the complete works of Shakespeare.

Why it didn’t happen: They were busy writing popular romance novels.

What didn’t happen: Hypnosis wasn’t added to general health insurance premiums.

Why it didn’t happen: All in good time, once there's money in it.

What didn’t happen: Pigs didn’t fly.

Why it didn’t happen: They were engineered for taste.

What didn’t happen: The Cowboys didn’t make the playoffs.

Why it didn’t happen: Global warming.

What didn’t happen: We didn’t change to a Base-17 numbering system.

Why it didn’t happen: People are too firmly ensconced in tradition. And it doesn’t match our toes.

What didn’t happen: There was no “Land Before Time” animated dinosaur video release.

Why it didn’t happen: It was an even-numbered year. 2013: Fossil Retaliation.

And there you have it, the things that we unfortunately didn’t see happen in our illustrious 52-week period of non-events. That’s what we were missing, in case we start to pat ourselves on the back with an overinflated false sense of accomplishment. It’s now quite evident we could’ve done much better.

And then my annual predictions of the coming year…

None.

Gee, I sure hope I’m right.

Ruminating 3.0 Upgrade Patch Fix

The following is required reading in order to update your synapses to the latest version of Rusted Ruminations and stay on course for any subsequent posts. Use of your own perspective is generally recommended, though you may occasionally suspend your psyche and rely on other more convenient methods as needed. You are reading this statement. In a few seconds, you will no longer be reading it. Madagascar 3 is advertising on my banana with a QR code sticker. I seriously need to fire my publicity director. I'd like to propose a toast to Metta World Peace... Life is coming along quite nicely, just as planned. My birthdays are occurring right on schedule. Hey, you over there in the corner... what are you lookin' at on your screen? Haven't you ever seen anyone typing before? Realize that you have no limits. But you may need to take a nap first.

As always, I'm writing this in real time. So it was live when I typed it. Now let's see if technology can keep it live. Lotteries are a scam because you have to first buy the ticket, and then remember not to set it on fire. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they do everything.  Does who carry more -- Drew Carey or Drew Barrymore? And then does Drew bury more or Drew carry more? Don’t ever feel authentically flattered by someone who’s seeking your money. For anyone who treats me poorly, when I go back in time I'm going to reconfigure your life history. That'll teach you to not be so crass. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall win a cockroach eating contest, and lose his own soul? Things cost more because we have lawyers manage them. We have lawyers manage them because people can't be trusted. And lawyers are people. You may have already won something! Then again, you didn't. All 'if' statements reside within the hypothetical, therefore are excursions into the unreal. 'If’, while fascinating, is ultimately a poor diversionary substitute for truth. There should be an even number of Supreme Court Justices. What, afraid of a tie? The biggest pumpkin or largest kumquat doesn't really mean anything. It doesn't make them qualitatively better than the second-heaviest one. Testing, testing, 4, 9, 7...... Nope, didn't work. Ask your doctor if bloating, nausea, and vomiting are right for you... Ah, so it's going to be one of those days... I'll see your day and raise you a week. So take that. I wrote this twenty minutes ago, projecting myself into the future. And then I realized I made a typo, so I had to go back and have deja vu. My cell phone battery charge never goes down because I always keep my phone plugged in. Alert/Notice/Warning/Danger: Beware and be very afraid of things in general just to be on the safe side. Repeat as needed. Miley Cyrus should be incarcerated for stealing someone else's 15 minutes of fame. I outlasted my to-do list until it became obscure. Mission accomplished. Psychoanalysis: People who use the word 'actually' a lot are rather insecure. That didn't count for me using it, incidentally. If life were a job, anyone possessing sanity would be considered overqualified. Am now taking requests for my impersonation of Bee Gees tunes sung in a Slavic accent by a rebel mime drowning in a vat of chowder. It's evident that the inmates are running the asylum, but then I guess the bigger question is why I'm in an asylum in the first place. Drum roll please... OK, keep that going for a few hours because I like the sound of a drum roll.

I never have chocolate before noon, but occasionally I do have it up to 11 hours after midnight. Stop wearing light-blue dress shirts with beige khaki pants... It's creeping me out thinking you very well may be an army of clones. The greatest human folly is in being surprised by human folly, acting as if all error was somehow avoidable and being human is negligence. Even when I don’t need to do anything there, I like going to the DMV just for the exciting drama of the number countdown. I'll take the high road, you take the low road, and here's an ingenious plan — someone else can take the middle road. 69% of insects surveyed say they don't like being called 'bugs'. Yawn, and the world yawns with you... Cough, and you are on your own. An expert is someone who knows how to talk about something in a way so that other people can't understand it. It doesn't matter whether something is possible if nobody ever tries to do it. Is your hobby sleeping? Do you cry during comedies? Do you relate well to reality shows? Is your favorite color gray? You may be depressed. Actually, great minds do not think alike. Their originality is the very thing that makes them great. Testing, testing... alpha, delta, gamma..... Nope, didn't work either. Huffington Post headline referred to Dee Snider as a "Rock Legend." Well, I guess everybody's a rock legend then. ‘Like’ if you think this is Facebook. I can't get to sleep tonight. Sure, write a song about the lion having no trouble just to rub it in a little why don't you? Why can't my phone just let me enjoy the last 15% of its battery life in peace? You'd think I was about to start a nuclear war. With the many things that are always going on in the news, it almost makes you wonder if the media gets paid by commission per story. I went to a Rent-A-Center and asked them how much it costs to rent one of their centers so that I can sub-rent their merchandise out to other people. 27 years later and I've still yet to meet any woman named Kyrie. What do you have to say for yourself, Mr. Mister? Birds sue Twitter over the tweet design patent. Supreme being files concurrent suit against all avian phyla, threatens extinction. I think yogurts are just making up berry names now. At least Wonka wasn't being pretentious about it when he did it. Leaf blowers are just pushing their work on other people. What said forth rational inside germane flotilla prospect ingratiates angioplasty yeomanlike spectrum hoax malfeasance acquiesce and so is. The weather says it's 48 degrees but it feels like 46 degrees. They must be having a clearance sale. Don't try to be someone you're not... unless that's something you'd normally do. DVD players, CD players and tape decks all give me pause. I found out this week that I'm addicted to placebos, and it’s irreversible. My doctor is giving me 43 more years to live.

No matter how you slice it, why on earth are you using a metaphorical knife in the first place? Your birthday is a rip-off. It's essentially an excuse for people to ignore you the rest of the year. I'm Rusty, and I only somewhat approve of this sentence... but overall I'd say I'm pretty much in favor of it if really pressed on the matter. Whichever civilizations have siestas, those are the ones that are closest to finding enlightenment. I saw a commercial on TV about this revolutionary new diet, and it's so exciting to me that they've finally solved that dilemma. 30 days hath September, April, June and November... So that means Halloween is in October again this year. An alien will probably come down from the sky and tell us that the answers to all of life's mysteries are hidden exclusively in Oingo Boingo songs. Peaches & Herb have reunited. Reportedly, they both are so excited. The OCD in me says cars should not be allowed on the road without hubcaps, just like the college football helmet rule. We're all famous in our own little corner. I'm the Elvis of this 2 x 2 sq. ft. of real estate. I'm legendary right where I'm standing. This is precisely how I draw on my sense of self-worth. Gonna need to keep the lip gloss and super glue farther apart on the shelf so they're not confused. Accidentally tried to bond something with lip gloss, and it just slid right off. Marking an e-mail as 'unread' is an unethical practice. In fact, there should be another option, like 'unattended', or 'hullaballoo'. Every day, it's the same routine — awaken, bathe, get dressed, eat, drive to work, smuggle weasels into Canada, return home, eat, sleep. A room full of chimpanzees that just re-created all of Shakespeare's works are now writing my blog for me, in the third monkey. I keep having to remind myself that space is predominantly empty. And it also means that we're totally getting shafted on furniture. Solid, my ear. Testing, testing... baritone, polyester, giraffe..... Nope, still didn't work. Hmm. At the end of the day, talking accomplishes very little. At the beginning of the day too. Phyllis Diller was still living? And now she's not?? I can only take one big surprise per day. Somebody's stalking me, and if they weren't invisible it would make it much easier for me to ditch them. Either the world has gone insane or the prescription on my rose-colored glasses has run out. You have now successfully completed the most current Ruminating upgrade and are thus sufficiently prepared to encounter 83% of life's most important situations. Identifying what those specific situations are will be covered at a later time.

Topical Guise: Motif Legerdemain

Quick, give me a topic. All right, I'll give you ten seconds if you must... Maestro, cue the orchestra for the Jeopardy! soundtrack... (Does Jeopardy! really need an exclamation point? While I enjoy the show profusely, I've never gotten so excited about Jeopardy! that I wanted to exclaim its title in a fit of jubilation. Just be on notice that if they start pulling this tactic with the nightly news broadcasts, I'll be just a tad dubious.) OK, your time is up. Whatta ya got for me? Hmm. This medium clearly is not conducive to an interchange of ideas, as I can't hear a word you're saying. Perhaps you could speak a little louder? Mime got your tongue? You can't say I didn't try to involve the reader, which would be you in this case. (I'm just guessing that it's you on a hunch)

Life fits together in many ways that we don’t see right away, or maybe ever. We just assume that everything is the way it is for no particular reason when it doesn’t formally announce itself over a loudspeaker to a vocal throng of evidence-starved wannabes, also known as us.

And as much as the universe would suggest otherwise, pairs figure skating has an underlying theme. The male participant, it turns out, must be burly and stout. Meanwhile, the female she must be petite as well as aerodynamic. If not, then the Earth would spin off its axis. This is ostensibly so the woman can be hefted by the man and twirled about through the air with the greatest of ease. Highly patterned and verily predictable. It's so every-four-years. We get it already. How about we give them extra style points for pushing the weight envelope. Degree of difficulty extended even further to forces of nature. Let's see Scott Hamilton and Katarina Witt as a doubles team, because as soon as Hamilton tried to lift Witt up above him, she’d squish him into the ice like a frozen parfait with blades sticking out. That would be worth maybe an extra 0.4 in their score for attempting to defy the laws of gravity. Considering this duo in a routine, a more plausible hypothetical would be Witt hefting Hamilton up above her instead. Look at Scott twirl about! That’s the kind of improvisation I would like to see. Shake it up a little bit. We can only dream.

Me no lift her... More like other way around

Not only did the authorities prohibit this otherworldly scenario from playing out, but they would ultimately confiscate all photos of the two of them together, suggesting that they were never in the same room at once. Any notion that Witt and Hamilton could've ever been an item on ice is to be melted away in the burner of speculation. The propagandists even threw Kristi Yamaguchi up above the pair as a makeshift guardian angel just to distract everyone. These are not the humanoids you're looking for…

Don't have fits

Grouping Hamiltons and Witts

You'll soon figure out

It's as good as it gets

There's a correlation — not always apparent — lingering about. Watch for it, for it can sneak up on you. Hold onto that thought. Let it take residence in your mind and pay rent, along with a last month's deposit. Mull it over. Let it simmer a skosh. You might need it later.

When officers are giving somebody their Miranda rights, if that person is already talking, do they have to wait until that person has stopped talking so they can then say to them, “OK, now you have the right to remain silent”? Because in that case technically they aren't currently silent, so they can’t very well remain that way. Maybe they should tell them, “You have the right to first become silent and then remain in that condition once you have achieved silent status.” 

I think they should make the whole rights thing somewhat less specific in order to cover all possible instances: “You have the right to either be silent or talk, or both, or neither, regardless of what you’re already doing. You can remain or change whatever you happen to be doing at the moment, and you will have that right based on whatever that is, e pluribus unum.”

People talking with-out speaking
People hearing with-out listening
People writing songs... that voices never share
No one dare... disturb the sound of silence

Then they go on to say: “Anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law.” Which, to me, is essentially saying, “When you get to court, we’re going to get you any way we can. Basically, whatever words come out of your mouth are not going to be for your benefit, so heed the words of Thumper very judiciously, e pluribus unum.”

On further inspection, the ‘can and will’ combination is a curiosity, clearly a product of legalese. Let’s break it down a bit. First of all, they’re saying “Anything you say can backfire.” And then they’re also saying “Anything you say will backfire.” So when we combine those, we get “Anything you say can but will anyway be held against you.” Get that? The function of the ‘can’ in that sentence is merely nothing more than to make the person saying it sound important, which is what most of legalese is anyway. Otherwise, ‘will’ is already part of ‘can’, so you can’t have a ‘will’ without the ‘can’, thus all ‘wills’ are also ‘cans’. The fact that all ‘cans’ are not necessarily ‘wills’ is immaterial to this exercise, and no more than a diversion.

So let’s double-check to make sure…

Yep, it’s all included. Just barely, but it made it.

So the ‘can’ part turns out to be redundant after all. Hmmm. “Anything you say can and will and would and should and is and otherwise does and all that be held against you…”

And the whole court of law thing… is this to distinguish it from a court of merriment, or possibly even the court of ergonomics? As a person being arrested, I suppose it could get confusing as to which court they are referring, so specifying the court of law really helps bring it all into focus for me. “By the way, did you happen to say ‘law’, or was it ‘cole slaw’? I don’t particularly want to be called into a court of cole slaw, just so you know. I don’t feel that I would get proper type of jurisprudence served that way. My first preference would be the kind of court that has law in it, if it’s not too much trouble.”

So after we cut out all of the fat, basically what we get is: “You have the right to do whatever you want, but just don’t talk.” There, was that so hard?

The whole idea of Miranda Rights is filled with deceptive misnomers. Police officers are required to read people their rights, but do any of them actually read them? No, you never see that. If I get to court, I’m going to claim that the officer didn’t read me my rights, but instead he had the gall to recite them from memory.

How about this one: You're under arrest... I am? Hope it doesn't fall on me. Must people be arrested so idiomatically? Do criminals truly appreciate the formal linguistic nuance of their incarceration? Why not just "Hey, you're arrested"? Short and sweet, but effective. So who writes this stuff? What backroom meetings are attorneys holding to come up with this extraneous mumbo jumbo to confuse the masses? Somebody should complain to somebody about it.

To shift gears a bit (from 5th into reverse), as we follow up on boundaries, addressing the salient point that the shapes of states are not their own. States share shape properties with all their neighboring states. It matters how many are around them, and it matters who got there when… The first state that was there gets to claim the most shape credit, though natural borders like oceans and lakes were there even before that. Delaware was the first state, but it did precious little to take advantage of the situation, merely camping along the bay front and then putting a short horizontal line below, a vertical line to the left, plus a small arc at the top. We find that Delaware was quite timid as far as staking its claim and expanding its horizons. How it got to the front of the line is a mystery. It probably just pulled out in front of some other state and then went 15 miles an hour once it got on the road. Delaware could’ve taken as much of the United States territory as it wanted, but it settled for a small plot of land representing about 1/1900th of the entire size of what would become the U.S. In other words, you could fit over 1,900 Delawares in the United States. It had a chance to make a big splash, but all it did was dip its toe in to see what the water was like. Had Delawareans been big thinkers we might see a huge chunk of land extending from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, as one big humungous superstate that nobody would want to mess with. Such was not their vision, but they had their chance. 200 years later, because of its tiny dimensions we can't even find it on a map. It's more like Dela-where? It's the place that Waldo calls home as well as everyone in the witness protection program.

Next, Pennsylvania took the top impression of Delaware and rested on it comfortably, and then New Jersey played off the right side of Pennsylvania — almost like some kind of existential puzzle. This pattern followed for over a hundred years. What it all translated into in the end is that basically Utah, Oklahoma and Arizona took what was left after all the other states had chosen up sides, in literal fashion. Of the contiguous states area, Arizona took a look at all the available options and said, “Hmmm…”

OK, where should we put our state? Decisions, decisions...  (circa 1912)

Realtors everywhere heaved a huge sigh of relief after having posted "Prime desert property" signs all over this blackened area for years and years without any kind of success. And that, my friends, is spatially how the west was finally won. 

You may think it to be trifling, but this is precisely what nations throughout world history have fought wars over: what shape each of them should be. If civilizations over the course of time could have just agreed on shapes, everything would have been fine. Something so simple yet so onerous to negotiate. Someone ought to send us to our rooms with identical miniature square plots for bad behavior.

You inherit your environs, or is it they inherit you?

To segue a tad, historians will note that back in the ‘70s, an inauspicious commercial claimed that 4 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommended Trident for their patients who chew gum. But what did they recommend for that 1 patient who didn’t chew gum? And since when do dentists talk to their patients about gum? “Hey, um, dude… are you a gum chewer?” And the patient replies, “Dude! How did you know? I thought I hid it so well.” “Yeah, we keep a log of which of our patients chew gum so that we can track these things and answer surveys about it.”

So it turns out that for the 1 patient who didn’t chew gum, dentists curiously recommended Hubba Bubba. To me, this would be an even bolder claim, because then you’re saying “1 out 5 dentists surveyed recommend Hubba Bubba for their patients who don’t even chew gum.” How cool is that? In spite of the fact that you don’t chew gum, I’m recommending that you in fact start chewing gum. And not only that, but I want it to be Hubba Bubba. So to summarize… if you’re already hooked, stick with Trident. But if you’re just beginning the habit, my professional advice is to go with Hubba Bubba. That’s what dentists are here for. That other stuff is all for show.

Let's see the gentlemen genuflect like this without getting a hernia

Whenever I go to a new dentist, the first thing I ask them is "Can you recommend some gum for me?" And if they can't think of anything, I know I can't trust them as a competent dentist. I want an expert in the synthetic confectionery field.

Bringing this all together, think figure, think stick, think quiet, think shape. You surely have an imagination that can make them coalesce not unlike the way Oklahoma and Texas form their geometric symbiosis. You as the reader want me to bring some semblance of order to this melange and help it to have a happy ending suitable for framing. And yet not everything necessarily fits together for what we would deem as obvious reasons. Which is neither to say that they don't fit at all. Round pegs and square holes have a way of morphing into their counterbalances. Which is to pose once again: Why? as well as its cousin Why Not?