The Sequel - News headlines from the year 2012 - PART II

Back by popular demand: the second part of the News headlines from the year 2012!

Again, let's activate the magic and powerful crystal ball, and see what the near future holds for us (see the video)

And on we go with PART II of the predictions...July to December, 2012.

July

- July 1, Euro 2012 (soccer), Greece makes it to the final but they had to withdraw from the game because the country is so broke, they couldn't afford to provide the players with soccer shoes and uniforms.

- July 6, NBA basketball player Greg Oden (Portland Trail Blazers and former Ohio State University) wins the award for the oldest looking 24 year old man in the world. "On the bright side, I might be able to get an Applebees restaurants Senior Discount Card". His body must be as old as he looks: he hasn't been able to play a complete season yet.

Greg Oden

- July 28, London 2012 Olympic games: Dang Yun, an alleged Chinese female gymnast, is not human. Olympic Officials conducted the appropriate tests and found out that Dang Yun was a cat. "Meow!!" responded Dang Yun to her disqualification. (Just for the record, "meow" is not a Chinese word but kitty cat language).

August

- August 16, Stunner: Google buys Greece at a very low price. Spokesman for Google said: "We wanted to rename the country Google but we had some static from the European Union. Then we settled for writing Greece with the Google fonts". Google Greek headquarters will be located right in the Parthenon. The lobby shall be decorated with a giant harp, a spiral tube slide and robots from the 50's and 60's. The hallways will be full of unicycles (knowing how to ride unicycles is a prerequisite to work there), Pacman and Asteroids arcades.

- August 24, Cirque du Soleil launches a new show in Las Vegas called "Lindsay!". It's a musical and theatrical production. The storyline is the biography of Lindsay Lohan, but played by clowns. The lead character, Low Ann (a.k.a. Lindsay Lohan), is a clumsy clown that tries to survive in Hollywood but has a tendency mess everything up. The stage is a specially built circus ring at the Circus Circus Casino. Clowns of the show perform stunts like DUI's, car accidents, road rages, trying to sing without talent and escaping from rehab centers. Mickey the Goofball clown (a.k.a. Michael Lohan, Lindsay's father) steals the show.

- August 26, Women's Equality Day, George Carlin came back from the dead and makes an HBO Special including this (see the video...mostly for the bit starting 8:15):

September

- September 1, Microsoft buys Italy at a very low price. Italy was having major financial difficulties. Bill Gates declared: "Google has it's own country. We wanted ours." Rumours are that the country will be renamed to Finestre (Windows in Italian).

- September 3, Labour Day, children of the United States continue to go to school after US Congress officially cancelled Summer and blamed Barack Obama for the decision (see my article News headlines from the year 2012 - PART I, posted last January 7, 2012). "If there are any survivors to the end of the world, we are planning on cancelling Christmas. And if Barack Obama is re-elected, we'll blame him for the decision too" confirmed an anonymous US Congressman that started too laugh out loud, just like Vincent Price used to do (see the video).

- September 9, my beloved New England Patriots win their first game of the season...smells like a Super Bowl year!!!!

- September 15, NCAA Football - BCS Championship: the National Championship game will be exclusively for SEC teams. President of the BCS, Jim Norton, announced that the BCS Bowl will always have two opponents from the SEC conference. "There is no point in letting teams from the other 10 conferences and waste everybody's time. And, coincidentally, that will solve the playoffs non-sense controversy" said Norton. From 2006 to this day, the National Championship game was exclusively won by SEC schools: Florida (2006), Louisiana State University (2007), Florida (2008), Alabama (2009), Auburn (2010) and Alabama (2011).

October

- October 11, Apple, Inc. refuses to follow Google and Microsoft. "We won't buy a country. We will build our own country. It shall be called iLand", said CEO Tim Cook. However, it won't be possible to visualize iLand with Flash Player.

- October 31, Halloween night, Bill O'Reilly, host of The O'Reilly Factor, on Fox News channel, tried to disguise himself as Mickey Mouse, scared some children, forced them to take his book The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America's Families (a real book...Google it!) instead of candy, scared them some more, screamed at them and called them socialists, communists and liberal pinheads. "Get me out of this straight jacket" O'Reilly scream as he was escorted by policemen to an undisclosed mental health facility.

Bill O'Reilly Mouse

November

- November 6, The United States presidential election of 2012: the results were so close between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama that the recount of the votes may last until the end of  times...which conveniently is next month.

- November 12, Bravo! channel announces that a new innovative reality show will air next season. The show will be called Roommates: Ex-wives and mistresses. Each ex-wife of the show will have to cohabit for a year with the mistress(es) of her husband. Sharp objects, baseball bats, gasoline and other possible weapons will be available to all the participants. Spoiler alert: one wife and a mistress become a lesbian couple.

December

- December 14, Glenn Beck declares: "I'm not worried about the end of the world. I've been preparing for this all my life. After the apocalypse, my ratings should remain just about the same. And am I glad I invested in gold, Goldline International and foodinsurance.com." (see the video)

- December 20, National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) is furious: the end of the world, scheduled to occur on the first day of winter, will be disastrous for the ski industry. "The government has to compensate us." Others, like Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, Santa's Little Workshop and major alcoholic beverages companies have already requested government financial aid.

- December 21, D-DAY, the day the world ends...(see video)

- December 22, Walmart announces its first annual Post-End of The World Sale. Always the low price. Always. Almost a month after Black Friday, that new special shopping day shall be called Doomsday. The rules: there are only a few items for sale and people have to fight to grab them.

- December 31, Time Square, New Year's Eve: lowest attendance ever.

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THE HODGEPODGE

This week’s lucky number: The Clue. The starring number of the following video (from 0:21):

Happy and Dandy Clowns of the Week: A Pennsylvania couple. Last week, they claimed, at Maryland Lottery Headquarters, their $128.8 million dollars Powerball prize. They chose to remain anonymous (good for them!!!). It was the second-largest jackpot ever won in Maryland (USA). The record for the largest jackpot prize in that state is $183 million dollars, won in 2003.

Sad Clown of the Week: Netherlands. The country's largest wooden clog, which is 4m in length and weighing almost 2 tons, disappeared without a trace (or should I say, leaving no foot steps!!!). The alleged theft of the clog is being investigated by the Dutch police...which confirms that Netherlands is a very calm and secure country, if the police force worries about the disappearance of a wooden clog. By the way, they should investigate Shaquille O'Neal (an ex-basketball player that wears size 23 (US) shoes).

The missing clog

Clever song lyrics: "Honesty is such a lonely word." - Song: Honesty - Artist: Billy Joel

Cheesy song lyrics: "Bitch niggaz (bitch niggaz)...Bitch niggaz (bitch niggaz)...Bitch-ass niggaz (beotch)..." Song: Bitch Ass Niggaz - Artist: Dr Dre (feat. Snoop Dogg, Hitman & Six-Two) (I can appreciate the fact that Dr Dre went out of his way to make a sharp difference between Bitch, Bitch-ass and beotch. As a true artist, Dr Dre didn't want us to confuse any of the three words. And now, the world is a better place).

Philosophical Quote of the week: "We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the Internet!" Character: Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) - Movie: The Social Network

God has a sense of humour...: Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos won their Wild Card round game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But God has a plan: My beloved New England Patriots will eliminate Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos tonight (Saturday night, January 14, 2012)...just kidding...He has nothing to do with the result of a football game.



Love letters, comments, opinions and complaints: reflectionsonamoderncircus@gmail.com

Every day Hell-oween

This week, I will stay off politics. So, instead of disgusting you, I will try to scare you. It's our Halloween special, Modern Circus style.

People love reality shows because they have the impression that it is real. Nowadays, we all know that most of them are scripted. At the very least, they're either staged or provoked by third parties...which are themselves, scripted.

But how would you feel if something straight out of the movies happened to you without notice? How would you feel if you became the hero (or victim!!) of a horror story writing itself as it occurs? It's all fun and games when you watch it on television. Living vicariously makes everyone a brave know-it-all hero. But if you became the one calling the shots, would you know what to do? Would you be a hero or a zero?

Let's say that you go to the mall. You want to buy a pair of slackers or maybe a Shamwow at the "As seen on TV" store. Then, the plan would lead you to the food court for a burrito or a two-scoops cone of ice cream. As you enter the mall, you smile like a child, knowing you are only a few minutes away from a double scoop of triple fudge and caramel ice cream when suddenly you feel something coming behind you. Is it a young boy running and not looking he's going? Or a policeman running to catch a shoplifter? As you turn around, holding the entrance door, you feel that something is just not right. Your brain finds it almost impossible to compute.

Horses are running towards you. And do you want to know why? A 300 pounds Bengal tiger is chasing them, soon followed by three leopards and one large grizzly bear. No it's not Jumanji. This is not taken from a movie. It's not fiction either. It happened for real, on October 18, 2011, in the woods surrounding the city of Zanesville, Ohio. A total of 56 exotic (and dangerous) animals were released from a local farm by its owner, who according to the latest news, committed suicide right after he freed them.

Schools were closed (thank God!!). Most of the residents stayed home, as the local authorities, none of them equipped with tranquilizer guns, hunted lions, tigers, leopards and grizzly bears (in Ohio...of all places!).

Of the 56 animals, 49 were killed (18 tigers, 17 lions, 6 black bears, 2 grizzly bears, 3 mountain lions, 2 wolves and 1 baboon). Those captured alive were taken to a local zoo. I guess that the Modern Circus wouldn't be a real circus without animals.

But just imagine the scene. You drive on the Interstate and suddenly, you have to hit the brakes to yield the way to a giraffe. By the way, just a question like that...Where do you buy lions, tigers, leopards, grizzly bears and baboons? Do you buy them on eBay? FedEx delivers them to you? But seriously, is it legal to own them?

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you make it safely to the shopping mall. The ice cream seems a little further than before, all of the sudden. As you walk through the mall, you have again this strange feeling that something is coming behind you. As you turn around, your brain finds it almost impossible to compute...you see a woman rushing towards you with not one, not two, not even three, but four knives. And in a flash of the blade (no pun intended), you get stabbed repeatedly. Farfetched, you say? Too much Hollywood? Well hold your horses before you rush to conclusions. It really happened.

On May 25, 2005, a woman armed with 4 knives entered a shopping mall in Bethesda, near Washington D.C., and randomly attacked shoppers.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that you made it safely out of the shopping mall. You ate your ice cream. You got your Shamwow. You decide to walk the streets of your city, you know, just to relax, when suddenly you are attacked by...mopeds!!!

Mopeds???

I promised I wouldn't tackle politics. But if you had to choose your poison, what would you choose? Bengal tigers, crazy person with knives or mopeds?

Although life is not easy, and in a blink of an eye it can become tragic and life threatening, we have to live our lives. If we stay home, isolated and scared, we are already dead. I believe that when your time has come, you will die, no matter what you do. In the meantime, might as well make the best of it. Live it as if it was your last day on this rock...because, it just might be!

Rule #1 of survival in this Modern Circus: Hope for the best, expect the worst.

And remember, it's all fun and games until someone steals your jersey...

I'm a huge New England Patriots fan. And it always hurts to see a favourite player, namely Rob Gronkowski, being attacked and having his Jersey taken away by a reckless thief. And don't be fooled by the size of the blond thief!! She must have tremendous powers to manage to take away the jersey from the 6'6 265 lbs Pats tight end. The blond burglar, Bibi Jones, is known to be a multi-tasker (Re: porn star) that has a specific talent to find the Achilles' heel in every sports' Trojans (no pun intended!). In this case, the weak spot is not a soft spot...So children, don't wear a Patriots uniform on Halloween. But if you have to, beware of petite blonds (unless you are a Dad and that's what you are exactly looking for!!).

But seriously, we are ways away from Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen...

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Happy Halloween to all the kids...and all the kids at heart!!!

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THE HODGEPODGE

This week’s lucky number: The clue…The _________ Wonders of the World.

Clever song lyrics:  "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do." - Song: Life's been good - Artist: Joe Walsh.

Cheesy song lyrics: "You pulled the trigger of my love gun" - Song: Love gun - Artist: Kiss.

Bold Halloween costume: Black man that wears a Hitler costume with the short mustache screaming "Nine! Nine! Nine!" (Name of the costume: Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 plan).

Bad Halloween candy: Apples. Message to people giving apples: They're not candy!!!

What should happen to people giving apples instead of candy: Their Halloween pumpkins ought to be frantically stabbed with grapefruit spoons.

Quote of the week #1: “Are you disguised as a prostitute? Oh...you are not disguised...” – Anonymous shopping for a slap in the face.

Quote of the week #2: “Are you disguised as a pregnant woman? Oh...you are not disguised...Are you pregnant? Not pregnant either...oops!” – Anonymous shopping for a six pack of slaps in the face.

New name for the Texas Rangers (MLB baseball): The Texas Bills.


Love letters, comments, opinions and complaints: reflectionsonamoderncircus@gmail.com