In case you missed it.

I try not to dwell on world events, but It could be argued that the shit pretty much jumped off this year. I, for one, have a hard time remembering last week, so for my sake and yours, we'll recap the highlights. For you the viewer, i will scientifically rank the importance of these events, in this, the last of the year's "of 10" ranking game.

-Tsunami becomes a household word. A quarter of a million brown people get "a very bad feeling about this" before they and everything they know are taken away by a wall of liquid death. Stupid American news insists on first reporting number of American dead. U.S. response: could that happen to us?/10

-Indian Earth quake kills nearly 100,000. No one has any more info on this. Didn't "those brown people" just have a tsunami? me: what the hells going on?/10 U.S. BOR-ING!/10

-A hurricane proves how close society is to calapsing at any given moment. This event is memorialized by the rape, murder and random gun fire that follow. Neighboring towns close their borders to refugees with a makeshift wall of shotguns and redneck cops. Gas goes to 3$/gal and i wait with baited breath for gun fire to erupt in my neighborhood. The revolution never comes. In the end, though saddened by he misery, I can't help thinking, this is why I don't love below sea level. Also, the used car market is flooded with flooded cars. (carfax.com your used car purchases for the next 3 years). Finally, news reports inevitably interview locals who draw obvious connections to the "t-sue-naa-mi" that recently wrecked residents of the Indian ocean, even though the number dead from Katrina was about 0.01% the number dead from wall of liquid death.
Army Corp of Engineers: "I told you"/10

-The big Cheese bites the big enchilada. (the pope is dead.) Worry not, little little camper, for in no time a replacement old man who is completely out of touch with reality is ushered in to replace the hat diva of yore. me: 0/10.

-Civil unrest in France. i'm still not sure this even happened. Me: [null]/10

-Michael Jackson wears pajamas to court. Why is it that i can go from sweat pants and wife beater to full suit in less than 3 minutes when the Raging Cajun is in town, but MJ's team of freak herders can't wrastle that man-boy into a pair of slacks? If the world had ended that day, i would not have cared. me -6/10.

-1000's of U.S. soldiers die in Middle East. 10,000's of other people die of the same disease. Thankfully, the fighting ended months ago. As a result, Iraq has an election. I don't know how i feel about this anymore. Numb, i suppose.

-"Tear'rists" bomb British public transportation. Can we even FEEL shock anymore? me: I still wish we had public transportation/10

-A guy is shot for running off a plane suspiciously. Some claim the man made bomb threats, while most maintain the word "bomb" was never uttered. Events are made more disturbing by the fact that almost every citizen agrees the man had it coming, thus proving The idea of living in fear has firmly been rooted into our society,
me: 9/10

-I get a well-paying job that requires little actual work and even fewer original thoughts. I slip into a coma of boredom and fill my days writing absurd blog postings. To dull the pain, i buy a 1979 Fiat Spider and fulfill one life-long dream, that of having a fun, second car. In order to combat the inevitable death of my brain, i enroll in grad school, thus fulfilling a second life-long goal, actively participating in the official study of alternative energy technology; A science for a future. My cynicism is briefly sidelined.
me: 6/10

There was some other stuf... a slew of airplane incidents, some political deaths (both national and local, figurative and literal), and some of us finally become a member of Steve Job's I-Pod nation. ( i feel so urban and silhouette-ie) So in conclusion, just in case you forgot, this year sucked bad for a lot of people. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. But then again, if you're going to study Alternative energy technologies you gotta have some hope for the future.