Tag: 2020

2021 Year in Review

“Happy New Year 2021” by Shahid Abdullah is licensed under CC PDM 1.0

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In some respects 2021 was a great improvement over 2020. People were rarely locked at home. Travel resumed. Vaccines and toilet paper were plentiful. In other ways, however, 2021 was disappointingly similar to 2020. Fights broke out in public places over sundry items. The Rockettes again cancelled their Christmas spectacular. One man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Iowa for beating up and coughing on someone who asked him to pull up his mask.

In celebration of New Year’s Eve, let us review some of Brown’s Close’s highlights from 2021:

January: While there was an obvious riot in the Capitol, there were a few other, much neglected, events. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West broke up; Bernie Sanders wore mittens; and Anne Hathaway demanded everyone start calling her Annie.

February: The Kansas City Chiefs failed to score even one touchdown in the Super Bowl, devastating my coworkers in Kansas City. Also on Super Bowl Sunday, I participated in Alaska Ski for Women dressed as an apple.

March: While murder hornets plagued the world in 2020, a swarm of locusts pestered the citizens of Kenya in 2021. In other, chillier places, I finished near the bottom (but not last!) in the Tour of Anchorage ski race.

April: A blockage in the Suez Canal halted international commerce for six days. This made me wonder, when was the last time the Suez Canal was in the news — 1956?

May: In the normal course of my shopping, a retail store worker informed me Donald Trump was still the president. Her proof was a cell phone video of him walking out to “Hail to the Chief.” The video was presumably filmed in 2018.

June: Twitter was banned by the entire nation of Nigeria.

July: Simone Biles backed out of the Olympics due to a case of the “twisties.”

August: I took my dad to see “The Guess Who” at the Alaska State Fair. The entire week leading up to this event, I kept telling people we were going to see “The No Doubt,” and/or “The Good News.” At the concert, a pair of 60-year-old women seated in the wet section stormed the stage and sat on the edge of it for the remainder of the concert. The lead singer gamely came over and sat with them for a few songs.

September: The QAnon Shaman plead guilty to entering a restricted building. Not only known as the “QAnon Shaman,” I discovered he sometimes goes by “The Yellowstone Wolf.” He’s also the accomplished author of two self-published books.

October: Scared straight by news stories that Christmas would be cancelled by the supply chain crisis, I began my Christmas shopping.

November: I concluded my Christmas shopping, just in time for all gifts already purchased to go on sale for Black Friday.

December: One of my friends is from Minerva, Ohio. In lieu of a traditional Christmas movie, we sat down to watch famed Bigfoot documentary, “Minerva Monster.” The film, with an audience score of 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, does not have a critics rating.

Minerva, Ohio, is, apparently, one of the most prominent sites for spotting Bigfoot. In 1978, Bigfoot terrorized the home of the Claytons over the period of several months. The Claytons claimed they mistook Bigfoot for a large hairy man who weighed over five hundred pounds.

It’s unclear whether they know an actual person who fits this description. Nevertheless, the residents of Minerva were somewhat unconcerned with ensuring they proved Bigfoot’s existence. For example, one of the Claytons did claim he had photos of Bigfoot bites on his brother’s neck. He did not think to produce these for the documentary. Also, while the residents went through the trouble of collecting a sample of Bigfoot’s fur and sending it to Malone College for analysis, when the sample went mysteriously missing they took no steps to retrieve it.

Just as the Claytons quietly accepted their Bigfoot DNA analysis was going awry, I am dutifully plodding into the new year expecting the chaos of the last two years to continue. However, let us be optimistic. From this mighty army of one at Brown’s Close, Happy New Year, and may we all have a more peaceful 2022.

Sarah Brown had an action-packed year. Before she gets too busy in 2022, tweet her @BrownsClose1 or email her at sarah@browns-close.com. “Close” is a British term for an alley or cul-de-sac.

2020 Redux

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It’s the end of January. I gave it some time. I, like my 7.8 billion fellow Earthlings, looked forward to 2021 with good spirits. With the turn of the calendar, we all could usher out the most outlandish year in modern history.

There’s an old Yiddish saying. It goes, “Man Plans, and God Laughs.”

Once again, the joke is on us. 2021 is merely an extension of 2020.

The year started off lamely enough with the announcement of the death of Bond Girl, Tanya Roberts. Normally, there would not be anything unusual about that, except that Tanya Roberts was very much alive. Once this was established, she died for real.

Then there was the dissolution of the marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. As a lifelong follower of Kanye’s work , I was saddened, but not entirely surprised. The divorce was reported a scant two months after Kanye gave Kim a hologram of her deceased father, Robert Kardashian, as a birthday present.

Kim and Kanye, however, were promptly upstaged. The next day, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, where they broke into Statuary Hall, and proceeded to march around in neat lines within the confines of the velvet dividers. Things descended into bedlam, however, when the invaders began pooping in the hallways.

Out of this stinky rubble, we met a few characters who have since become national folk legends. Most notably, there’s “The QAnon Shaman,” (so dubbed by The Daily Mail) who after donning fur, horns, and face paint for the Capitol siege, has since refused prison food because it is not vegan. Learning this surprised me; if ever there were a group of people I assumed were big time meat eaters, it was the MAGA crowd.

And speaking of QAnon, I’ve learned a lot about this society in recent weeks. Before, I was never entirely sure what the group believed, other than that it was a “loosely organized …community… who embrace a range of unsubstantiated beliefs” (per The Wall Street Journal).

I’ve come a long way since this vague interpretation. I now know that QAnon thinks the Chinese military is massing at the Canadian border, and that furniture company Wayfair uses product listings to send secret messages concerning human trafficking. Supporters also maintain the closely held belief that Tom Hanks is a cannibal.

At a more innocent time in my life, I would have thought all of this totally bonkers. But I now have to give it pause. As of mid-January, there is a celebrity who is a confirmed cannibal, it’s just not Tom Hanks. Multiple women have come forward accusing Hollywood A-List actor, Armie Hammer, of anthropophagy. One former flame claimed he used to suck her blood, another that he branded her, and still another that he designs his own bondage attire. Other screenshots of texts to paramours, allegedly from Armie Hammer, go into detail about wanting to eat them, and not in the traditional way.

I’ve never had the pleasure of receiving a text message from Armie Hammer, or one of his famous requests to remove and barbeque my ribs. Instead, I must settle for my own peculiar correspondence. Not to be gainsaid, a stranger emailed me on Jan. 25 in response to this column, published fourteen months ago. The unsolicited message detailed the many years of life he’s spent in therapy because he likes to wear women’s underwear.

Those of us who expected life to go back to normal at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1 were sorely mistaken. It’s going to be a long hard road back to sanity.

Sarah Brown resides in a bunker in Oklahoma. Only there can she find some godd*mn peace. Clearly, she is forced to check email occasionally, so, if you really must, you can reach her at sarah@browns-close.com, and on Twitter @BrownsClose1. “Close” is a British term for alley or cul-de-sac.

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