So 2012 is about to come to an end. In some ways it was a
big year full of change and in other ways it is just the same old shit.
The Summer Olympics were the irritating waste of time they
always are, essentially being a competition between the US and China for medals… how exciting. The
United States
went through the most annoying and vicious election season I have ever heard of
and in the end… nothing really changed. In fact, our lawmakers are just as
gridlocked now as they were last year and I don’t see that changing in 2013. Same
old, same old.
Television was the same as always. Cable shows, while still
better than network shows, remain under-appreciated in lieu of mind-numbing
schlock like crime procedurals, high-end karaoke contests and reality shows
about horrible people doing stupid things. A few shows ended such as Chuck, a
show I seldom watched, and House, which if you ask me ended a few years too
late. Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment
23 showed us that there’s more to James Van Der Beek than Dawson and obscurity
thereafter. Nothing really monumental happened on the small screen.
The Hollywood trend of
exploiting comic books for blockbusters has continued in stride with The
Avengers making a gajillion dollars (that’s a kadillion more than a fazillion!).
Chris Nolen’s Dark Knight Trilogy ended in controversial style; people seem
pretty divided on their feelings about The Dark Knight Rises.” Sony gave Disney the middle finger by
restarting their Spider-man franchise with a well received hit movie, thus
ensuring Marvel Films will be without their figurehead web-slinging character
for years to come.
However, Disney was able to console themselves by buying
Star Wars in their latest bid to own every aspect of my childhood. (They don’t
own Mattel yet, do they? I’m not sure I can handle a crossover with Mickey
Mouse and He-Man!) Just as soon as the ink dried on the contract, Disney
announced plans for Episodes 7 through 9, beginning with a projected release on
2015… the same year as Avengers 2. With all the money they make from those two
movies, Disney will then buy the moon and build Lunar Disneyland or Disney
Universe or something. (“The Happiest Place Orbiting Earth”)
Marvel Comics did their"not a reboot" called Marvel Now because, I suspect, all the good names were taken. Aside from bringing back the mutant population and a bunch of new X-Men and Avenger titles, I don't know what all is different. I will say that so far the Uncanny Avengers book is pretty good. The new Deadpool book co-written by comedian Brian Posehn is awesome. DC Comics continued the New 52, which isn't nearly so new. The luster of rebooting their entire universe is wearing away as the realities of throwing away decades of continuity are setting in.
We lost a lot of cool people this year, such as Ernest
Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Ravi Shankar, Davy Jones, Maurice Sendak, Andy
Griffith, Sherman Helmsley, Phyllis Diller and the first man to walk of the
freakin’ moon Neil Armstrong! We need to stop letting these cool people die.
Perhaps we can create some kind of cloning device and transfer aging celebrity
brains into them or something. We can’t afford to lose the likes of William
Shatner, Christopher Lee, Leonard Nemoy, Bob Barker or Stan Lee!
The music industry continued its slow death at the hands of
the internet. Soon there will be no stores, only warehouses to send people
packages they ordered online. And everything will be sent by pneumatic tubes
and we will drink recycled urine and eat Soylent Green… IT’S PEOPLE I TELL YOU,
PEOPLE! I still refuse to commit entirely to the MP3 downloadable music format.
I still like CD’s. I like having a permanent hard copy of my music with song
liners with lyrics and pictures. MP3 albums don’t seem real to me, probably
because they aren’t tangible. I do download music pretty regularly, but its mainly
stuff that I am sure I can’t find in stores or just the random individual song
that I don’t want to buy the whole album to get.
Nintendo’s newest console, the Wii U, launched shortly
before Thanksgiving. I’m still not sure anyone noticed. I got one for Christmas
(from Lil’ Toaster) that is still sitting in it’s box, next to me, as I wait
for a cord or something in the mail to hook it up to the HD TV. I don’t know. This
is Tivo-Girl’s domain. I just sit around and look pretty.
I don’t know how well the Wii U will do versus Playstation
and X-Box, but I don’t have a lot of faith in it’s success. For one thing, the
advertising for the Wii U was abysmal! I swear, I didn’t see a commercial for
the Wii U until the beginning of November two weeks before its release!
Now I get that gamers are well informed of these things and I knew about it for
a couple of years, but what about the casual gamers? Hell, what about getting
the kids excited for it before Christmas? A $300 game system (for the basic
unit) is something a kid has to work at with his/her parents (through summer at
least) to convince them to pay that much to buy it for them, let alone any
games!
On a personal level, 2012 has been a monumental year for me.
In May, Tivo-Girl and I welcomed our first child… who (for the purposes of
cyberspace) is known as Toaster Jr. or perhaps Little Toaster. Either one
works, really. I will just refer to him anyway I feel like whenever I bring him
up. Maybe someday I will call him ‘Little Ivan Drago’…but only if his first
words are “I must break you.” From
then on, naptime will be purely on a voluntary basis.
And as for Jonny Prophet… I imagine that he is still hard at
work in his lair developing some sort of super weapon to destroy all birds.
Thankfully, between surfing the web and the hundreds of cable channels at his
fingertips, he’s usually too distracted to do anything more than send me videos
of ostriches getting mauled by tigers or try to petition the nation of
Australia to restart the Great
Emu War.
Hopefully 2013 will be good… maybe less mediocre (beyond, of course, the whole baby being born thing). Anyways,
have a Happy New Year… unless you are Chinese, then you have to wait a month.
Or if you’re Hebrew and you already had yours in September... in which case,
how is 5773 going for you?
Stay Strange this 2013.
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