It really can't get any worse...right?

As we skulk dejectedly into the new year, it's tradition that we look back at all those we've lost this past year. Well, not literally lost, I mean, someone presumably knows where they are. Buried or cremated probably. Or maybe in a ring. Did you know you could do that? Have your grandpa or whomever's ashes compressed into a fake gem and then set in a ring? Well now you do, and you can't un-know it.

Yeah, it's a dead person you can wear on your finger.

Pictured: who cares?

And I know I just mentioned that the technology exists to turn your dead loved ones into tacky jewelry, but when I say it's time to remember the people who've passed in the last year, I don't mean people you or I know. I mean famous people. People who are so much more exciting and accomplished than us that we follow their lives with an interest that borders on stalking but it's ok because they're famous.

Privacy is for nobodies. We give these people our adoration, so they owe us. What do you mean "that's creepy?" Hey, I'm not the one making corpse rings.

I'm kidding, these people are vultures and celebrity worship is just there
to take our minds off of how meaningless our own lives are in compassion.

What I'm saying is that they could
have been Daryl Dragon and Tennille.
Seems like a real missed opportunity. 

Anyway, on to this year's who's who of who's no longer: fashion lost Gloria Vanderbilt and Karl Lagerfeld. Rich people Lee Iacocca and Ross Perot are dead and before you ask, they left you nothing. Typical, right? Music lost Peter Tork from the Monkies, Andy Anderson from The Cure and Eddie Money from, himself I guess. Also gone are Keith Flint from Prodigy, rapper Nipsey Hussle and Daryl Dragon, the Captain of 70's musical duo The Captain and Tennille...wait, he had a name like Daryl Dragon, but he put on a yacht cap can called himself Captain? Am I...am I missing something here or is this just a seventies thing?

Speaking of cocaine, it was a rough year for TV stars from the 70's. RIP Rip torn and Rip Taylor. Carol Channing and Tim Conway are dead, as are Julia star Dianne Carroll and Mary Tyler Moore Show actors Valarie Harper and Georgina Engel. And to be clear, that cocaine crack was about the seventies in general and not me suggesting that anyone I just mentioned was into coke.

Ok, I'm also not not saying cocaine wasn't involved.

"Spaceships, aliens, Kirk not catching an STD?
No problem. A women writer? Impossible!"

-Sexism

Doris Day is gone and so are Peter Fonda, Robert Forester, Luke Perry and director John Singleton. Nerds everywhere lost Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew as well as noted replicant Rutger Hauer. Star Trek fans lost Charlie X actor Robert Walker Junior, Deep Space Nine actors Aron Eisenberg and René Auberjonois who played Nog and Odo respectively and writer Dorothy Catherine Fontana who went by D.C. Fontana at the time because audiences who couldn't accept that a women could write a TV show and have a vagina at the same time were easily fooled by initials.

And finally, we all lost U.S. Congressperson Elijah Cummings, Pulitzer Prize wining novelist Toni Morrison and puppeteer Caroll Spinney who for fifty years played both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Which, goddamn, 2020 had better be something.

Look, we lost Big Bird in 2019. I don't even care which one
of you it is, just work it out. We need a win here people.