And like magic, it somehow got worse.

Welp, the end of another year is upon us and it's time to take stock, evaluate our lives and most importantly tally up our dead and see where we stand in this futile contest with the inevitability of death.

"Ok...lets see, that's fifty million six hundred twenty four thousand to zero.
So...uh...best hundred and one million two hundred, forty eight thousand out
of one hundred fifty one million, eight hundred seventy two thousand?"

-Humans

See these randos in the background
of a movie? That's all of us. Enjoy.

And by 'our dead' I am of course referring to people of note. The rest of us are the nameless, faces masses whose sole purpose is to lift up the exceptional among us. To provide a contrast of anonymity for the famous. We are, essentially, background. Extras in the crowd scene of the movie that is the saga of the human race. Sure, we tell ourselves that our lives have meaning, but have you starred in a reality show, leaked a sex tape or come up with a dumb phone app? No? Me neither. Welcome to the background.

Above: sportsman playing hockey,
which is known internationally as
fútbol American. (source: me).

So, on to a by no means comprehensive list of dead famous people. Let's start with music. Obviously tons of famous musicians die every year, but I'm incredibly out of touch when it comes to music. Not like sports out of touch, but when I searched for lists of musicians who died this year I recognized like three names. So sorry this is kind of perfunctory, guess you'll just have to look up one of the other thousand or so lists of "2018: Those we lost..." Anyway, music lost Delores O'Riordan from The Cranberries, Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit, and Aretha Franklin of Aretha Franklin.

TV, movies and books are a little more my jam, so let's move on to some of the people who died in the non-music part of arts and entertainment. You know, the arts you don't have to get up to enjoy.

Let's hear it for sedentary pursuits!

Oh, and I looked it up: a schlemiel is
 incompetent, a schlimazel is unlucky.

Just a couple weeks ago the world lost actor/director and 50% shareholder in Hasenpfeffer Incorporated, Penny Marshall. The entertainment industry also lost John Mahony, the dad from Frasier, playwright Neil Simon, noted writer and white suit enthusiast Tom Wolfe, noted actor and mustache enthusiast Burt Reynolds as well as actors Tab Hunter, Charlotte Rae, Verne Troyer, and Harry Anderson. Spongebob Squarepants creator Stephen Hillenburg and writer, food critic and professional curmudgeon Andrew Bourdain.

Just the other day British actor Dame June Whitfield, whom you might remember as Gran from Absolutely Fabulous and Doctor Who and pretty much anything British from the last sixty years died peacefully in her sleep. And yeah, Dame means that she was a knight. In Britain you can get knighted for acting. How about that?

Yes, of course she was on Doctor Who. She's
British. They only have like twenty actors. 

No, really.

On the topic of nerd things, we lost sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin whose works included A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Also gone is the less literary, more litigious Harlan Ellison whose contribution to the nerd cannon included tons of sci-fi short stories, novels and screen plays, numerous lawsuits, assaults and oh, and one time he groped a fellow writer on stage while she was presenting him with a Hugo award. Class act. Oh, and he also wrote a Star Trek episode where Kirk saves the future by shoving Joan Collins into traffic.

Comic book fans lost writers Steve Ditko and Stan 'Frequently Confused for Hugh Hefner' Lee. Louis Lane actor Margot Kidder. And most shocking of course, half of the Marvel universe who were wished to death by Thanos in what was no way a cheap cliffhanger soon to be reversed by next year's Avengers sequel.

Pictured: The tragic death of Peter Parker...whose totally dead now you guys.
Yup, not coming back. Ever. Yeah, I'm like a dog with a bone with this.

Don't worry Wilson Cruz fans, a
combination of time travel and fan
backlash means he'll be in season 2.

Speaking of fictional losses, and yes, spoilers. Like, don't read this if you don't want me to ruin things for you. Still there? Great, we suffered the off-camera death of Rosanne from who passed away from a tragic combination of opiates and the real life Rosanne saying horrible, racist shit. Aunt May died in-wait for it-Spider Man the video game. Which, while not cannon, for a video game actually has a pretty solid story. And finally Doctor Culber from Star Trek: Discovery. And I mean, who on that writing staff thought killing off half of Star Trek's first gay couple was a good idea?

Yeah, the party of Dave Lincoln of Macon,
Georgia...who'd you think they meant?

It was a particularly difficult year for conservatives loosing former President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush, columnist Charles Krauthammer, Senator John McCain and, of course, whatever semblance of decency the GOP had left. Gerrymandering, voter irregularities and and tantrum-prone man-child who's under investigation for pretty much everything he's ever touched and who's recently shut the government down over a preposterous and racist border wall. But still, party of Lincoln, right guys?

Of course, by 'future historians' I'm
referring to evolved apes that will sift
 though the remains of our civilizations. 

Welp, here's to another year over and another step down the long, dark path towards societal collapse. But we should probably take a moment to let future historians know that 2018 wasn't all bad. I mean, sure, we're mired in nationalism, there's massive wealth inequity, half a million Americans are homeless, and we're probably past the point of reversing climate change but...what were we talking about? Oh right, the things about 2018 that we're horrible and depressing...um, let's see...is it telling that I really have to think about this?

Well, ok, I guess HD TV's are fairly affordable, and streaming television means we never have to leave our homes or contemplate the world around us and...uh, oh! You can rent bikes and scooters with your phone. So I guess there's that.

And then we abandon them in ridiculous places, which,
goddamnit, this is why we can't have anything nice.

Today in the pot calling the kettle delusional:

Pictured: people who would have voted
for rectal polyps if rectal polyps promised
jobs and to lock up Hillary Clinton.

In some ways Donald Trump being President is the gift that keeps on giving. In many more ways he's a symptom of what happens when one party convinces white conservatives that gay Mexican Muslims are going to steal their jobs, impose Sharia law and outlaw Starbucks cups that say 'Merry Christmas' on them, but in the sense that the President has been an inexhaustible supply of morbid entertainment, he's a treasure. A treasure that likely heralds the balkanization of the United States, but a treasure.

"Um...General? This whole tracking Santa
thing is cute and all, but...are we getting paid?"

-Some Air Force person

Since it's Christmas, I'll keep this brief: because Trump can't do anything, anything, without making an absolute shitheel out of himself, this happened. And again because this is Christmas, I'll just explain what the link links to. It's a story about how when a child spoke to the President about Santa-which, yes, since the Eisenhower Administration, there's been a tradition of children calling NORAD on Christmas to see where Santa Claus is and some of them get to talk to the President.

"Hey kid, since I've got you on the line,
is your mom hot? Huh? She's right there?
 Ask her if she's in to leathery old rich guys." 

Look, I don't know, let's just say ours is an insane country and leave it at that. Anyway, the seven year old whose parent inexplicably allowed her to call the hotline and speak to a man famous for bragging about sexual assault to Billy Bush, got this response from Trump:

"Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven, it's marginal, right?"

-Donald Trump, taking a break from tanking 

the stock market to crush a child's dreams

Above: The magical man who seems
to bring better toys to kids whose
parents have more money. 

I'll be the first to agree that lying to kids about Santa Clause is a dumb tradition and we should probably knock it off but part of being a functioning adult is knowing that you don't question a kid's belief in him. And moreover, should a man who routinely holds rallies for himself just so people will applaud him, and who recently gave himself an A+ as President, should such a man really, really be questioning the delusions of others? Like, he can't even handle a phone call with a seven year old without outing Santa Clause as a fraud.

Oh well, I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on him, after all, he's trying. Did you know that he had to give up his bi-weekly at-tax-payers-expense Mar a Lago trip because he had to shut down the government because the Democrats won't give him what he wants? That's right, he's going to have to spend Christmas in that dump, the White House. Which is also at our expense, but still, so unfair right?

I hope someone let the ghosts of Christmas past, present
and future know that there was a change of plans...

The Metaphorical Fudd

It's sort of like a Kabuki of
blogger/reader futility.

I'm not a Twitter person. Like, I set up an account once, but I've never actually sent a tweet and I don't think the app is even installed on my phone anymore. But this might be the thing that gets me to use it...did you click on the link? No? That's fine, I'll just explain it anyway. It's been eight years of me linking to articles and eight years of no one clicking on them, and then eight years of me explaining what they're about. It's a little dance we do and besides, like fourteen point font on a middle school english paper, it pads out my blog posts.

Apologies to actual TV clowns.

So according to this, the cool new hashtag everyone's hashtagging is #TrumpResign. It's come in response to this nonsense about the TV clown who, despite losing the popular vote and then being personally responsible for the GOP getting its collective ass handed to it in the midterms, is petulantly folding his arms and stomping his foot and insisting that either he gets his five billion dollars for his racist border wall or else government employees won't get paid.

Because leverage I guess? I mean, I know those of us on the left just love crime and hate America, but shouldn't one be in a position of power before making demands? Sure, there's no reasoning with the unreasonable, but holy shit:

Citation needed. Like, for everything he says.

Well, since he seems to spend half his time
holding rallies for himself in stadiums full of
supporters, maybe he can be that deluded?

The greatest election of all time? Should we be worried that he believes his own press? Also, convincing a minority of Americans who happen to live in electorally valuable parts of the country that you're going to create more coal mining jobs and throw your political rivals in jail isn't the same thing as winning an election. It's more like he was foisted upon us by Facebook, Russia and a broken voting system. He can't possibly be so deluded as to think that his inability to accomplish his agenda is due to anything other than his unpopularity and incompetence, can he?

Of course, people who are bad
at their jobs don't get cookies.

Oh, and then, and then, he went on to brag about how he's giving up his vacation to deal with the shutdown that he caused:

"I will not be going to Florida because of the Shutdown - Staying in the White House! #MAGA"

-The President, apparently 

angling for a cookie.

Did you hear that Democrats? The President won't be going on his sixteen day vacation because of the shutdown. I hope you're happy. But back to the hashtag thing. So yeah, I love the idea that the President's precious social media space is full of calls for him to resign, but I don't think it's going to work. 

Because again, this horseshit.

"Wait, what? I mean, what?"

-The Press 

He has something of a track record for active aggression towards public opinion. We say he's the cause of the shutdown, he says Democrats are the cause of the shutdown because they won't give him what he wants. We say that climate change poses a clear and inarguable threat to the future of life on Earth and that we have to act now to avoid further catastrophe. He says "No. No. I have a strong opinion: I want a great climate, we're going to have that." The point is #ResignTrump is the right idea, but the wrong approach.

We have to use reverse psychology: instead of hashtags about how he should resign, we should fuck with him by making all our hashtags positive. Like, we still tweet at him about what a terrible job he's doing, but then we end with #DoingSuper! or #NotaColossalFailureasaHuman. Even if it doesn't work, we'll have the satisfaction of pushing him to ever increasing, vein-throbbing heights of frustration.

I call it the Duck Season/Rabbit Season approach,
and Trump of course would be the metaphorical Fudd.

No, worries. For the rest of your days.

Not content with owning Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and the State of Florida, the Disney company is currently fighting the Swahili language over, get this, Hakuna Matata.

"Lower your shields and surrender your ships. Your trademarks and
intellectual properties will be added to our own. Resistance is futile."

-Disney spokesdrone Four of Six

It's a beloved film that teaches kids not to
question hereditary authority and to accept
that their leaders will one day eat them.

A petition on Change.org calls on Disney to abandon its trademark on hakuna matata, which it secured in 2003. It's a Swahili phrase meaning something like 'no worries, for the rest of your days.' You see, it's a problem-free philosophy, hakuna mata-goddamnit Disney! Yeah, in America we all know hakuna matata from that song in The Lion King and if you're anything like me you're hearing Nathan Lane in your head right now, which is exactly Shelton Mpala's beef. Wai-wai-wait. "Whose beef" you might reasonably ask?

Pictured: Europeans using their guns
and whiteness as a legal basis for
claiming the entire continent of Africa.

Shelton Mpala, that's whose. Mpala and fifty-five thousand petition signers, have taken issue with the fact that Disney trademarked a phrase that they not only didn't invent, but one that's common among the people of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which, if you're a geography wiz like me, you might notice are all in Africa, a continent famous both for being the cradle of humanity and also the victim of centuries of colonialism. That is, white people moving in and appropriating things like resources and culture. 

Droid droid droid droid droid.
Come at me Lucas, come at me.

You might remember that George Lucas once trademarked the term 'droid,' despite it having been coined by a sci-fi writer called Mari Wolf in 1952. And now, every time someone says the word droid, Lucas gets a cut of that sweet droid pie. Bullshit, right? Yes. But hakuna matata is a cultural concept and not a made up contraction. Or a phone I guess. The point is that cultural appropriation by a company that already seems to own everything, I mean everything, isn't a good look. Look, I'm not an intellectual property lawyer (surprised?), but it seems like maybe we need to rethink this whole idea that someone can own a phrase.

Could you imagine if someone trademarked some common phrase like 'how's it going?' or 'no problem,' or 'hey, isn't 'The Lion King just a rip-off of Kimba the White Lion?' I mean, is that the kind of world we want to live in?

I mean Disney probably should have just called
their movie Schmimba the Schwhite Schmlion.

It's just Walter Pecks all the way down...

Have you ever heard the expression 'sometimes helping is not helping'? No? Huh...now that I think about it, I might have just coined it. Let's just say I did. Anyway, do you know who should hear my newly minted expression? The Landmarks Preservation Commission in New York. How come? Because the commission wants to declare The Strand Bookstore in New York an historical landmark.

"Hey, we're preserving landmarks here! Forget
about it-wait, don't forget about it!"

-L.P.C. Chair Sarah Carroll

at a recent unveiling

Above: monsters.

"But what kind of monster would declare a building a landmark?" You might say. The aforementioned L.P.C, that's what kind. But I haven't actually gotten to the outrage part, so like, simmer down. Back to the L.P.C. Their stated goal is, and I'm summing up here, to protect '...New York City's architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings and sites...' '...for the education, pleasure and welfare of the people of the City.' And all of that sounds pretty great, right? Well, here's the thing...

It does, unless you're Bess Wyden, the owner of The Strand. Wyden is pleading with the Commission to please, please, not recognize her building as landmark. Because, say it with me now: sometimes helping isn't helping.

Pictured: just another worthless eleven story
building in the heard of Manhattan. 

Seriously, nobody wants to hear about
how they didn't have turkey in 16th
century England. It's goddamn delicious. 

Recognition as an historical landmark means that Wyden won't be able to make improvements or repairs to the store without an ok from the Commission despite owning the building itself. The Commission, like that irritating pedant who takes the Renaissance Faire way to seriously, is super-into authenticity and preserving things like the architect's original intent and where possible, the materials available at the time of the building's construction. And yeah, hurray for historical preservation, but the result can be a potentially crushing financial burden for the owner.

And independently owned bookstores aren't exactly flush with cash right now. Not like online businesses like say Amazon...who after driving most bookstores out of business opened a few physical bookstores of their own. Which seems sort of like the retail equivalent of murdering someone and then wearing their skin, but then I'm not a business person.

Nothing beats the feeling of community you get from browsing an
unstaffed bookstore where algorithms make recommendations for you. 

"City government is famous for not getting
  shit done, how come this is so hard?"

-Bess Wyden

Hey speaking of Amazon, Wyden brought them up at the Commission's hearing reminding the comissioners that:

"The richest man in America, who's a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies. I'm not asking for money of a tax rebate...Just leave me alone."

-Bess Wyden, shortly before producing

a mic which she then dropped to the floor

So the obvious question is why am I talking about a shop owner's fight with a municipal agency in a city I don't actually live in? A lot of it has to do with the fact that I, like a lot of people with internet access, have strong opinions about things that don't materially affect my life.

People chiming in about shit they've got no real stake in is a major, load-bearing
component of the internet. Without us, the whole thing might collapse.

Without the L.P.C. New York might
look like San Jose...what? Have you
been to San Jose? It's basically a mall.

But the other part is that as someone who works in one of the increasingly few independent bookstores in America, I feel for Wyden. The Strand's historical and cultural value isn't so much the building or the architecture as it is its status as one of the last places to get books that isn't not owned by a faceless chain or Amazon. And I get that the L.P.C. does important work and without them New York might have lost much of its character. But you'd think they'd recognize what landmark status would mean for Wyden. New York is lousy with interesting buildings, you'd think the Commission could go bother one of them.

But instead they're blundering through with their well-intentioned but likely disastrous help that isn't help. They're like a commission full of Walter Pecks about to shut down the containment grid, smugly insistent that what they're doing is what's best for the city, but tragically unable to see that all they're doing is playing right into Gozer's hands.

Yeah, I kind of got lost in the metaphor
 there, but I think my point stands.

He's not a criminal, he's just crime adjacent?

Wai-wai-wait, the President's excuse is that his lawyer made him do it? Because I'm pretty sure that's not even...oh never mind. Here, please enjoy the endless tap-dance that is the President's twitter:

Ok, bullshit, but if your lawyer does come to you one day and says that he
 secretly paid off a bunch of people to keep affairs you had secret, it's probably time
to reevaluate not just your choice of lawyer, but also your life up to that point.

"Michael! Hush money? Oh, you shouldn't
have! And I didn't get you anything!"

-Trump after spending hours working 

on his 'surprised' face in the mirror

Um...you know who's also supposed to have a passing familiarity with the law? The President. And failing that, maybe the dozens of advisors that he surrounds himself with. Or maybe the political party that looked at the goat rodeo that was the Trump campaign and said: That's our guy! and then let him run on their ticket. The point is of course he directed Michael Cohen to pay off his mistresses. I don't care how close he is to his lawyer, the traditional lawyer-client gift is a bottle of wine, or tickets to a show. Nobody creates an LLC, funds it using his own house as collateral and then uses that money to pay off some other guy's mistresses as a surprise.

We continued his Tweet in his typically aggressive disregard of Twitter's 280 character limit:

Oh, suddenly his lawyers know what they're doing?

"I didn't not say I didn't un-commit a
non-crime. Which wasn't not a crime
to begin with. Amiright people?"

-Trump, on how guilty he's not

So in fairness, I'm not a lawyer and don't know what I'm talking about, but since that's never stopped anyone on the internet before, I'm going to power through. First of all, which campaign finance lawyers is her referring to? Many? Name three. Secondly, of course the laws apply, or else we wouldn't be talking about this. And lastly, whether or not he accepts responsibility for it, Michael Cohen is going to jail for-among other things-making payments to conceal Donald Trump's affairs-affairs that, at least in theory, could have damaged his chances of winning the election.

These are not people
who make good choices. 

And sure, knowing Trump voters as we've come to over the last couple of years, I'm not sure they would have turned on him for having had multiple affairs and then paying the women involved-or tabloids as the case may be-to keep it quiet. There was the Billy Bush Tape, the dozen or so women accusing him of sexual assault and then that time he leapt to the defense of actual Nazis. Yet none of these things seems to have moved his base away from their rabid-foam loyalty. Like, whether you love him or think he's objectively the worst ever, I think we all kind of assumed he was a dirt bag, but the point is that the information was concealed from voters.

Anyway, behold Tweet the Third in which the President outdoes even himself:

Donald Trump isn't the one going to prison,
but in may ways he's the real victim here. 

And did he even get a 'thank you for going
to prison for me'? No. No he didn't not.

Wow...I mean, wow. The President is suggesting that Michael Cohen agreed to plead guilty to crimes that carried a prison sentence just to embarrass him. You almost have to admire the deft way in which the President can can roll narcissism, paranoia and victimhood all into one big ball of Trumpy tweets of insanity. You almost have to admire him. This is, after all, a guy who secretly got his lawyer to pay people off to conceal an affair from the American people which-whether or not his fans would have cared-is totally a crime.

I know he's not the most self-evaluative person, but does Donald Trump seriously not look around at all his former friends and associates who are either under indictment or on their way to prison and not suspect that maybe he's the problem here? That maybe most Presidents don't have to split hairs over whether or colluding with Russians or paying hush money is a crime? And not for nothing, but how many Obama administration officials went to jail? Is it none? Because I think it's none.

"I don't get it...every full moon more and more people I know turn up dead,
with wounds consistent with what the coroner describes as an enormous, 
bipedal wolf-like creature. What am I missing? What's the connection?"

-Some werewolf

Sonic the Hedgehog: DTY.

So like, the other day I was judging the Avengers sequel by the title-a title which they clearly should have run past me first, and today I'll be judging a movie by its teaser poster. Now before you roll your eyes, look at this and tell me if I'm being unfair:

Someone, somewhere said to a room full of people:
"So what if Sonic the Hedgehog was real and had like
a sexy runner's body. You'd see that movie, right?"

"No! More 'tude damnit. More!"

-Some Sega 

exec circa 1990

Sonic, for those of you with lives and only a hazy awareness of the dark years of the console wars of early 90's, was Sega's answer to Nintendo's Mario. And by answer I mean the product of a company wide mandate to group-think up a mascot character to compete with Nintendo. He was cobbled together from a design contest at Sega of Japan where he was called Mr. Needlemouse, was in a band and had a human girlfriend named Madonna. He was then revised by the company's American branch to be a less batshit insane. They also added the requisite, yet difficult to describe 90's quality of 'tude.

"Kids are wearing scarves.
Give him a scarf."

-Same exec, in 2014  

The design they ultimately settled on was a pot-bellied cartoon character with eyes that sort of run together like two eggs in a frying pan. It sounds weird, and it is, but it's one of those things that works better in two dimensions which is all they needed for the games at the time. They did eventually start making 3D games, and I always thought he looked kind of wrong in those, but since they were all objectively terrible, who cares? Over the years the design has been updated and he's gone from kind of round and childish to weirdly tall and lanky in what I think is an attempt to make him appeal to whatever it is business people think kids these days want in a rodent video game character, but it all feels like what it always was: design by focus group.

And this new Sonic promises to be the logical extension of that: soulless and unnerving. And also kind of a furry. Furries-that is people who enjoy putting on costumes and embodying anthropomorphic animal personas-are often unfairly lumped into the kink-enthusiast category even though that's just a small part of it. In fact, according to this, only 4% of furries say that furry-ing is about sex. That said, this I think it's apparent from the Sonic poster that this particular hedgehog is clearly DTY.

You know, DTY as in down to yiff. In my extensive research
on the subject, the verb 'to yiff' is furry-speak for doin' it.