Dad was just trying to capture some early Christmas spirit before the Light Parade... |
Mom and I were in the Light Parade this year! |
We were also all in the Holiday Half Marathon again this year... in the 5k walk... |
There was really only one scenic spot along the 5k route... |
Unless, of course, you count anywhere that we were! |
Also this time of year you can assume I was singing in the choir... |
Fortunately Dad included that close up since you might not find me in the choir... |
And don't get me started on what happens when you combine choirs and orchestras... |
Dad had to include this picture for Tanto (but I'm the one who put the ornaments on the tree like this...) |
Someone knows Mom pretty well... |
Christmas Eve almost wasn't... Fortunately Dad remembered and we set out a plate for Santa and the reindeer! |
Oh look! The Christmas collage! |
Dad just wanted to prove that we did finally complete this puzzle where all the pieces basically look alike. |
These are not the faces I made while making that puzzle... I just did this for fun! |
Then we did this puzzle... It seems impossible, but it wasn't as bad as the other one... |
We ended our year not with a concert but with a comedian, but it still required an ussie... oh yeah, Flynn went with us... |
We went to see John Oliver... he didn't really look that blurry... |
He really looked like this! We didn't have the best seats, but he was still really funny! |
I celebrated the end of 2019 with a New Year's Eve brunch... Gill came over to keep Mom company... |
Tens We Hardly Knew Ye...
Well we're finally entering the safety and security of "The Twenties"... Sure, "The Tens" or "The Teens" weren't as uncomfortable as "The Two Thousands" or "The Aughts" or "The Noughts" or "The Aughties" or "The Noughties" or "The Naughties"... Twenty Twenty... Finally a year that just sounds right. It has been a long gap since Nineteen Ninety Nine (7305 days to be precise). Maybe we can finally party again, even if the prince is dead...
What does a look back at the tens tell us?
Clearly it was a decade of terrible disasters: the Haitian 7.0 earthquake, the Japanese 9.0 earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima Da-ichi nuclear power plant disaster, the Somalian famine, Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Hurricane Maria, the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, Sakurajima (Cherry Blossom Island) volcano erupted for months, great white sharks killed 4 people off the New Jersey shore leading to mass panic, and the Spanish flu pandemic wiped out 3% to 5% of the world's population.
It was also a turbulent decade with unrest around the world: Iran made progress on its nuclear program, US combat operations ended in Iraq though we're still there, The Arab Spring occurred resulting in peace and prosperity... no, of course not - there is continued unrest in the Middle East, Osama bin Laden was killed, Moammar Gadhafi was killed, Kim Jong-Il died, the Syrian conflict began, the Benghazi attack occurred, the Xinghai Revolution began with the Wuchang Uprising, World War I started, Germans used chlorine gas on the French, the Armenian Genocide occurred, the Russian revolution began, and the Treaty of Versailles was signed ending World War I but setting the stage for World War II.
Of course, no decade could be all bad. We made great technological progress in "The Tens" as well... Ernest Rutherford described a model of the atom, The Large Hadron Collider reached maximum power, the first BASE jump was completed by a dummy thrown off the Eiffel tower with the first parachute, the first space jump was completed by Felix Baumgarner jumping from a balloon at 128,000 feet, Henry Ford opened the first automobile assembly line and sold the 1,000,000th Model T within the decade, we reached 1,000,000 electric vehicles on the road in only 125 years, people across the country looked up to see Halley's comet and to see a total eclipse of the sun, Alexander Graham Bell made the first transcontinental phone call, and web-connected video devices exceeded the global population.
I'm sure by now you've realized I've been mixing my tens... Heck you probably realized it as soon as I mentioned Sakurajima erupting - you couldn't possibly have confused it with Eyjafjallajokull erupting (which did happen back in 2010.)
There are a surprising (or not) number of connections between the 1910s and the 2010s...
The Boy Scout Association was founded in the 1910s... and finally recognized girls in the 2010s...
Two craft went down with great loss of life in a short period of time in the 1910s - the RMS Titanic and the RMS Lusitania... two went down close together in the 2010s as well - two 737 Max jets... it is a bit of a stretch of course, but both the Titanic and the 737s were "guaranteed" to be safe and as far as the Germans torpedoing the Lusitania, North Korea torpedoed a South Korean ship in 2010 and Russian rebels shot down Malaysian Airlines flight 17 in 2014 so that's almost the same thing...
The Panama Canal was completed in the 1910s... and the Panama Canal Expansion was completed in the 2010s...
Daylight Saving Time started in the 1910s... and we almost got rid of it again (at least here in Oregon) in the 2010s...
Rockefeller became the first billionaire and Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to congress in the 1910s... the first billionaire to become president prevented the first woman from becoming president in the 2010s...
"The Birth of a Nation" portrayed African Americans negatively and renewed interest in the KKK and Adolf Hitler joined the right-wing anti-Semitic and nationalistic German Workers' Party in the 1910s... and we had very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville in the 2010s...
Margaret Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn and was promptly arrested in the 1910s... and we tried hard to get back there in the 2010s...
Maybe I should stop comparing the tens at this point... Of course, the twenties started with an old white guy running for president on the platform "America's present need is not heroics, but healing..." so there will probably be a lot of 1920s to 2020s comparisons in the future...