Reflections on a Modern Circus: end of the world

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.

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

As we witness the sad images of violence from the suburbs of London, it’s easy to ask ourselves a few questions: has the whole world gone completely crazy? Is it the end of the world?

Add to that the never ending wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, etc. Even insignificant events turn sour in an instant…Like the riots in Vancouver after a Stanley Cup loss in the Finals. Or even worse: when they reintroduced the blue colored Smarties in May 2010, as we all remember. One must wonder if the Apocalypse is knocking at the door. We can already see The Nutcases salivating…Unfortunately, The Nutcase will be a recurring character in our silly blog.

Yes. Maybe we are crazy. As a matter of fact, we are quite sure we are. But we don’t think we are worse than the world was at other times in history. The media surely wants us to believe that every day. According to The Drama Queen Media (from now on, we will refer to the media as The Drama Queen Media), the world is on the verge of collapsing. For some crazy unknown reason, it seems we consume more when we are scared. As a result, we live in a culture of fear. No wonder terrorism is on the rise.

But for fun, just imagine how The Drama Queen Media would be covering the Crusades? Or the Spanish Inquisition? Or the French Revolution? Or the Crucifixion of Jesus? How about The Drama Queen Media covering a reality show of Cro-magnon men. All of them groaning and hitting themselves on the head with sticks every time they would disagree. Hilarious! Actually, they would not be able to air that today, you know, to maintain social order. Otherwise, people might think it’s a better (and cheaper) idea to hit their “ex” with a stick instead of hiring an expensive lawyer. I have to admit, it’s very tempting…

Violence is not only part of the history of the world, but it most certainly shaped it. People were killed for not believing in the same God, for believing that the world is round, for having epilepsy, etc. The world, sadly, has a history of violence. It looks like a big wheel that increases from level 1 to 10, turning round and round, clockwise, marking time.

Lately, we have only refined our reasons for killing. Nowadays, we read about killing the significant other for leaving (sometimes along with the children), stabbing a soccer referee for missing a call, shooting boss after a layoff, or murdering female students…simply for being women. Are we near level 10? Well, that would be like saying that World Wars I and II were level 5-6? Our humble opinion is that Holocaust has to be a solid 10. On the other hand, The Drama Queen Media would say that every day is a solid 10 on the nightly news.

So if you ever feel the urge to kick a guy’s family jewels for saying “at least you have your health”, or to puncture your bosses’ lungs with a crowbar, or to smash your 1999 Chrysler Cirrus in a government agency entrance, c’mon dude, be original!!! That’s nothing that hasn’t been done already during Medieval times (except maybe for the Chrysler thing).

But if you want to do something that hasn’t been done before (you know, because what we’ve tried yet as not worked): try to change your own small world. If everybody did that, we are optimistic that the world would change faster and more efficiently than whatever we are doing now.

On another note, we surely hope Mother Nature will read our modest blog (In our dreams…Yeah! Right! like she cares!). Mother Nature scares us way more than violence itself. We would like to bet that she is actually doing tests to wipe us off of this rock (See Japan, Haïti, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, etc.). Maybe she’ll come up with a bullet-proof-Ebola-like virus or a mega worldwide Tsunami (if you don’t swim, that might be a good time to learn).

In the meantime, The Nutcases around the world will have something to look for: the end of the world in 2012. I have to specify the year because we just “had” one this year, in May.

2012 is just another scare…or is it?

New Character(s) brought to this Blog: The Drama Queen Media (played any and all media) and The Nutcase(s) (played by your average local moron, screw loose, loser, goofball, dunce, loony, idiot, insane, screwball, round the bend, nut job and/or politician).

This week’s lucky number (we know it’s stupid...but please, just play along!): 7

Personal message: To the guy that keeps honking every time he picks up someone for carpooling very early in the morning: “Get off your fat ass, you lazy douche bag, and knock on the person’s door”.

Quote of the week: “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night” – Anonymous (stoner).

To do: say something kind to someone you really don’t know.

Bad choice of a rock band name: London Riots

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