Friday, January 06, 2012

Taking Another Trek around the Sun

Well, it happened again. The Earth has made a complete revolution around the Sun. “Wahoo, the Earth did not come free of its orbit and fly into a great gaseous nuclear mass obliterating everything we understand!” After all, even Bruce Willis and a crack team of rugged scientists couldn’t stop that from happening, at least not without a lot of help from J.J. Abrams.

The upcoming year is so momentous and full of unremitting action the powers that be decided it needs to be 366 days long (long enough for Kim Kardashian to get married and file for divorce 5.1 times), one full day longer than each of the previous three years.

A quick scan of Wikipedia shows the United Nations has designated 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All which proves how important this year is. Just think, the UN is going to send every man, woman and child on the planet a wind turbine. How cool is that? I’m going to put mine on my car so I don’t have to buy gas anymore. (I live in western Kansas. The likelihood of getting stranded on some lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere because I ran out of wind is infinitesimal.)

2012 is the year for the Summer Olympics. Also known as the only time anyone can be bothered to care about events like the 400 meter hurdles. This time around the Olympics will be hosted by England. I know nothing brings to mind high athletic achievement like the pasty, rain-soaked, dentally challenged British. If there was an event requiring people to carry umbrellas while eating crumpets and reciting Shakespeare the gold medal is in the bag. Alright, before I get any hate mail from the Anti-Defamation League of Queen Loving Tea Drinkers I would like to say I am a card carrying Anglophile and fully realize at least three of the Spice Girls are very fit.

2012 is the anniversary of two very important happenings in the world of international espionage. One hundred years ago Alan Turing was born. Turing was an Englishman (see I do like the British) who is often credited with being the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence. He played a major role in breaking Nazi codes during World War II (which, oddly enough, was the most useful time to break Nazi codes). He did a lot of work with something called the Enigma machine which truly sounds like something a bald man living in a hidden lair deep inside a dormant volcano would be using. This leads us to the other major event in global intelligence. It was fifty years ago that Sean Connery first played James Bond.

Perhaps the most important event scheduled to occur during 2012 is yet another triumph in the process of mankind carefully, intelligently, and nonviolently setting in place a government designed to best serve the needs and wants of its people. I am of course talking about the election of Burkina Faso’s Parliament. The election season in the United States is not remotely careful or intelligent and the violence against reason, logic and grammar in an American political debate is a veritable bloodbath.

It is more than a little depressing to think the actual election is more than 300 days away. We have months and months of sitting through political discussion, political arguing, political advertisements, political fear-mongering, political name-calling, political sleight-of-hand, and political dog-grooming (Huh? I think I went one too far.) Especially, when you take into account the Republicans have been doing a Presidential shell game for the past few months already.

It seems to change every time I turn around. Bachmann wins the straw poll and is the front runner and now Bachmann has dropped out of the race. Herman Cain is the front runner and now he is back to being a guy who used to run a pizza chain. Rick Santorum is a guy with severe issues just because of some quirk with Google (I have yet to google his name because everyone seems to think it takes you places you’d rather not go) and now he is considered a viable candidate again. Next thing you know Ronald Reagan’s ghost will appear and endorse Anthony Weiner for President and every news organization from Fox to MSNBC will vibrate with excitement, realize the massive cognitive disconnect inherent in such an event then simply explode. The resultant silence will make it possible for the American people to make a much better decision.