Sayonara 2014

Happy Thanksgiving! And Happy Hanukah! And Joyous Kwanza! And Merry Christmas! And Happy New Year! Our family has been in illness purgatory since November 20th, so I have been unable to write anything. Well, not entirely true. I wrote a parody of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie called If You Give a Kindergardener a Craft Project that I didn't finish. You have that to look forward to sometime in the future. Whether I will actually finish it, or will just publish it unfinished like The Mystery of Edwin Drood remains to be seen. (Note to self: add opium den to If You Give a Kindergardener a Craft Project to make it edgier.)

According to Facebook, 2014 was a great year. Thanks for being part of it. You know what? Screw you, Facebook, 2014 kind of sucked. Okay, so it wasn't as bad as, say, 1934 (hard to top the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Great Depression, Hitler, and the dust bowl), but it wasn't all that great. On a global level, there was the Ebola crisis, Russia invaded Crimea, the Middle East continued to be a mess, Atlanta was paralyzed for days by a freak snowstorm, there were lots of plane crashes (and one plane that went missing and still hasn't been found), terrorist groups thought killing people was a good way to stop girls from going to school, we lost Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, and celebrities found out that their private cellphone pictures weren't so private (maybe that wasn't so bad; depends on your perspective). But Facebook has to be all Johnny Mercer and accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. The Facebook year in review for Malaysia Air probably featured the new snack offerings for passengers in the coach cabin.

Flight attendant: "Don't mention that elephant sitting in 12D."