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The Most Absurd News Stories Of 2020: The Year That Broke Satire

The Most Absurd News Stories Of 2020: The Year That Broke Satire

“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal Chinese curse, and rarely has a time lived up to it as in 2020.

I’m a big fan of the bizarre news story. Not only do they remind us of life’s rich tapestry, they provide a momentary escape from our own drab existences. This year left us trapped in our houses, making us increasingly desperate for those escapes, but we can take small solace in the fact that it compensated by providing so much strangeness that it’s hard to tell what even counts as a “weird” story anymore.

Every day was a circus. The average day in 2020 was so surreal that it basically made satire impossible. The only comedy that could possibly do justice to the year Rudy Giuliani has been having is the Three Stooges, and living performers not weaned on Vaudeville just aren’t that good at slapstick anymore. Publications used to have sections called “Odd News” or “Stranger Than Fiction” devoted solely to these kinds of stories. Mostly those don’t exist anymore, because the line between the Odd section and A1 has been forever blurred. Partly that’s because no one wants to pay for real reporting anymore and partly it’s because the “top stories” really are that stupid now. Actually, those two factors are probably interconnected.

For our purposes here, I tried to steer clear of the more mundane “crazy” stories, like having a deranged, narcissistic, wannabe dictator for president, his party essentially standing by him through every insane pronouncement, our ongoing kleptocracy, and the senile ineptitude of the supposed opposition party. I kept a few tangential Trump figures and stories on here, but in general, I wanted relive the kind of novelty fun crazy, not the crushing ever-present collective mental illness kind of crazy. I think you get it. I also mostly stayed away from wild headlines. Those make for great one-liners, but a truly absurd story must have levels. It should make you groan at the thought of even attempting to explain it.

Anyway, enough analysis. Let us now take a stroll through repressed memory lane.

One consequence of our increasingly automated lives is that I frequently find myself screaming “REPRESENTATIVE!” at a computer, or some such. Rather than pay humans to do necessary work, we’ve instead created software to slowly drive ourselves insane. Nowhere was this illustrated more beautifully than in a virtual paleontology conference whose software censored the word “bone.”

As recounted in this Vice article, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) was forced to hold its normally analog event virtually. Unbeknownst to them, the virtual Q&A software they used had a built-in profanity filter, which banned certain “naughty” words. The banned words included terms like “pubic” and “bone,” which would tend to make discussing paleontology kind of hard. One attendee attempted to compile all the banned words so that they could unban them and find workarounds:

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