(Can you redo a whole year?)
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Pardon me? Another scandal? Who now?
Oh. It’s just the Pope.
Last week, Pope Francis slapped a woman. He didn’t slap her in the head, of course; after all, he’s the Supreme Pontiff, not some plaid-sporting televangelist. But … still.
It’s been that kind of year, hasn’t it? This rapidly-receding twelve-month slog called 2019 was basically a big bucket of they did WHAT?
And the collection of personal and professional scandals this past year reads like a self-serving buffet. From college admission bribes, to fake fishing quotas, to football fraud, to private sex islands, to re-gifted fruitcakes, humans during 2019 seemed determined to out-embarrass each other. From soup to nuts, Earthlings continued to make it blisteringly clear why we don’t get visited by intelligent galactic lifeforms.
Hey, Milky Way: if you got the pearls, we got the swine.
The weirdness continued until 2020 was knocking on the door. Last week on New Year’s Eve, while greeting vast amounts of Catholics in St. Peter’s Square, the Pope got power-gripped by a visiting pilgrim, who jerked his arm as if he were a misbehaving husband at Victoria’s Secret. Il Papa tried to take his arm back (which he has every right to do according to the Apollo’s Creed, established in the 4th century by Pope Rocki Balboae). When the overwrought woman still refused to relinquish the papal flesh, the Bishop of Rome went rogue and slapped her wrist.
(It turns out the hand-grasper was actually not a Catholic pilgrim at all, but a myopic Jewish woman who’d gotten bad directions and thought she was meeting Barbra Streisand.)
Later, during a speech to thousands of disoriented Jews at the Vatican, Pope Francis apologized in Latin for losing his temper (paenitet me, y’all). But the damage was already done, and celebrity attorney Gloria Allred will be representing the slapped woman’s battery case.
Meanwhile, in Iceland and Namibia, a list which is funny enough already, commercial fishing bigwigs were resigning all over the place as they faced accusations of bribery over trawling rights (trawl, an ancient Icelandic word, is the past tense of troll).
For years, allegedly, a guy that somehow got named Þorsteinn Már Baldvinsson, who was the CEO of an Icelandic fishing firm that somehow got named Samjerji, has been paying influential Namibians to ensure access to fishing quotas for seafood that somehow got named “horse-mackerel.” (This, according to over three thousand documents released by WikiLeaks and a TV show that somehow got named Kveikur.)
There was an official response from Iceland’s prime minister, but I can’t share that with you because when I tried to pronounce Katrin Jakobsdottir, I swallowed a tooth.
Back at home here in America, you can be sure we were doing our best to keep up. In March, federal authorities released the results a scam investigation code-named Operation Varsity Blues, which coincidentally is the name of an album by Steely Dan, or should be. The investigation charged at least 53 people with the crimes of bribery, and of having more money than sense.
It seems these fifty-odd folks were parents desperate to get their kids into various colleges, so the children could get busy reading revised American history and applauding all those countries where Socialism has succeeded. (The bribers listed in the scam sting included various celebrities, including an actress that somehow got named “Felicity.”)
And speaking of acting, an actor I never heard of that somehow got named “Jussie” was busted for acting like he’d been attacked by white guys in Chicago, something that hasn’t happened since Capone. As it turned out, the actor had faked a hate crime against himself, something that hasn’t happened since somebody committed suicide on Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2019, there was another scandal involving politicians in Baltimore, but that’s redundant. Of course, there were a couple of scandals implicating the NFL’s New England Patriots (see redundant).
Also last year, actor Johnny Depp starred in an ad for a men’s fragrance product that somehow got named Sauvage, which sounds like a kielbasa that needs some anger management. After cleverly reading the script, Depp deftly portrayed a Native American, and was immediately attacked for portraying a Native American.
In other words, the actor was accused of acting.
Happy New Year, Milky Way. Oh… and don’t bother.