It's day three of voting for the 2012 Miserable Crank Awards. You have until Thursday, December 20th, 2012 to vote. If you haven't already, vote on the previous two posts (here is Day One and here is Day Two), and the final vote post is going up tomorrow.
The Greatest Disruption From Allowing Us To Live A Comfortable Middle-Class Lifestyle
Chicago
Teacher Strike
Errybody's
gots to get paid. Yet there's a certain expectation that when fall comes around,
you get to drop your kids off somewhere where they do a lot of stuff that
involves them not being in your house any more. There are entire religions
based solely on this sweet, sweet relief. So when that ritual is disrupted, it
can cause huge waves of panic to reverberate throughout a community. In
Chicago, as teachers went out to the picket lines, parents had to scramble to
renew Y memberships, suddenly get interested in that neighbor lady who is always
sweet on the kids, and lower the bar on how creepy you think your uncle with a
lot of free time is. Thankfully, the strike was eventually called off just in
time for parents to start bitching about school property taxes again.
Encyclopedia
Britannica Ends
Everybody
grew up with access to a set of encyclopedias. Maybe they were the slim,
embarrassing volumes parents got on the cheap through some guilt-trip-laden
sales pitch by overzealous primary school organizations. Maybe they were the
higher-end sets that starry-eyed parents bought for their Harvard University
Graduate State School Student Wheatgrass Community College
Attendee Copper Smelting Correspondence Course Certificate Recipient. Or
maybe it was simply a trip to the trusty library. And maybe they were used less
for looking up the occupation of Clement Atlee previous to his becoming Prime
Minister and more for getting things off of a high shelf. Still, the inevitable
finally happened: the iconic dead-forest Encyclopedia Britannica announced the end
to its print edition this year, citing the rather obvious fact that selling
something for a few hundred dollars for something you could easily look up in
seconds for free on your phone was not, in fact, a particularly sustainable
business model.
Apple Maps
What kind of
year would it be without Apple making some smug, ill-conceived business
decision, papering over the massive mistake without including some glossy feint
about how superior their overall product is? After kicking the vastly superior
Google Maps off of their system and installing an embarrassingly inferior Apple
Maps application in its place, the iPhone suddenly became (slightly) less
indispensible. While it obviously wasn't a horrible product, it was clearly not
as good, and the childish power-play of the competing Google operating system at the expense of the consumer seemed like
something Steve Jobs would never do. OK, I tried really, really hard to not laugh while writing that. Jobs would
have been all over that shit.
Hostess Goes
Bankrupt
Everyone
knew about Hostess. Everyone has had a Twinkie, or a Ding Dong, or a Hostess
Cupcake or ten, or any of the other well-known snack cakes made by the
long-established baked goods company. Sadly, time finally caught up with the
company; after declaring bankruptcy a few years ago, a reorganization failed to
make any headway. An ill-conceived baker's union decision to reject a deal, the
company folded for good. Thankfully, the actual Hostess brand--along with their
popular products--will no doubt be sold off during the liquidation process, but
there's going to be a sad delay when the Twinkie is not going to be part of a
nutritional breakfast. It...it used to be, right?
Droughts
Sure, when
one thinks of droughts they think of it in terms of how awful it is for farmers
(and, if we are feeling particularly cosmopolitan, Africa). Farmers have it
tough enough as it is, what with getting up at four in the morning in the
searing heat and being forced to carry those huge sacks of cash from their government
subsidy checks all the way to the bank in enough time to make it back to the
homestead to bitch about Uncle Sam getting off their backs. But it's easy to
forget that the drought hurts everyone; food that used to cost small amounts
suddenly become more expensive, since most of it has turned into dried-up husks
out on the prairie. It sucks about the farmers and everything, but would
someone please think of the Hot Pockets and beef burritos?
The Worst Thing Everyone Else For Some Reason Loves But I Hate With A Passion Unparalleled
Nate
Silver
Nate
Silver became the darling of punditry in 2008 because he accurately predicted
49 of the 50 states in the Presidential election that year. Somehow charming
himself into the New York media elite, he managed to snag his own entire
section of the New York Times online
website and kept tabs in the much less predictable 2012 election. While he's
certainly a good numbers and a capable stats guy, his feats are not exactly all
that impressive--plenty of people besides himself also got 49 of 50 right in
2008, after all. While he did make some bold (and what turned out to be
accurate) predictions in 2012, his other predictions (namely Senate seats) were
much less impressive. His importance has been enhanced less by his abilities
and more of his media savvy, which makes him out to be more lucky than
skillful.
Magic
Mike
It's not
exactly a trade secret that sex sells. Regardless of whether you are trying to
sell clothes, jewelry, taco-shaped ice cream, or donations to the United Way,
you can get people to pony up more cash if you routinely show a little cleave.
Up until recently, however, this tactic has purely been in the domain of
attracting men, saturating the ad world and the television screen with hot
women to move money from wallets. Not anymore! Magic Mike's secret--a movie about male strippers (or about drugs
and friendship and Remembering Where You Came From; I don't really know)--was
the hit of the summer, getting droves of women to see the movie, with the
unspoken chant of "Now it's finally our turn" and the men adding
"to clean the theater seats before you leave."
Fifty
Shades of Gray
Reading
is fun, kids, and there isn't much justification for not encouraging
everyone--of all ages!--to read. However, one can certainly draw an unseemly
line at what amounts to librarian-endorsed smut. Sure, literacy has a long and
glorious history of fighting against censorship and pushing the boundaries of
creativity, but there's still something unseemly about the bodice-ripping trash
that many people appear to enjoy. Books such as Fifty Shades of Gray--a
"book" whose "plot" centers primarily around BDSM fantasies
and women with low self-esteem hot enough to justify two (I hate to add the
sadly accurate "best selling") sequels--certainly get people to read.
But it is also a reminder that just like movies, television, art, culture, and
politics, there's always a base-level percentage that is always just trash.
Call Me
Maybe
This
year's ear-invading pop anthem, "Call Me Maybe" isn't, really, that
bad of a song. Sure, it's trite and corny, but it's quite catchy and you could
do a lot worse in this world of synthesized emotions and factory-farmed teen
stars. What does irritate me,
however, is the perpetual insistence that every cultural reference needs to be
framed in this manner. Simply stating "[verb] me, maybe?" has
replaced wit as an acceptable form of humor.
Royal Baby
The
usual rumblings over the uselessness of the royal family aside--last year's
wedding fed into the usual plaints of sucking the news away from war-torn
countries and famine to cover a bunch of rich unemployed folks wearing
comically outdated uniforms--the announcement of Kate Middleton's pregnancy, as
usual, vaulted to the top of the tabloids. While there's a tiny justification
for the news--it's the next baby to pop out in a long line of monarchs that
did, in fact, affect history, after all--the royal family has (quite rightly)
been relegated to the celebrity depths of the news. Although it's tempting to
simply ignore the royals, it's worth it for the entertainment value alone;
you'd be hard-pressed to see the likes of Katy Perry dress up like an SS
officer at a customer party.
The Most Painfully Awful Event or Idea the Year
Italian
Cruise Ship Disaster
Cruise ships
are supposed to be pleasant experiences, but tell that to the poor folks on the
Costa Concordia. With an itinerary of stopping at several Italian ports, the
captain decided to treat the passengers to a closer look at the coast, but
instead hit a reef and forced the evacuation of all 4000+ people on board. It
ended up partially capsizing and causing the death of over 30 individuals.
Hardly a proper way to spend your vacation, but it's the only way i can think of that makes the stomach flu the more appealing choice to ruin a trip.
Aurora
Shootings
During the
premier of the hotly anticipated Batman movie, a man in Aurora, Colorado decided to
show up and start shooting people. One could go into the psychological reasons
as to why this might happen, but all you really need to know is that he dyed
his hair Crayola-level red-orange for the trial, apparently in a bid to garner the batshit crazy faction's support from the jury. Sadly, this incident led off a
series of various shootings in other states around the nation, presenting an
unfortunate cocktail of hatred, violence, and mental issues in one
unexplainable mess.
Hurricane
Sandy
Another
year, another geographical disaster. This time, Hurricane Sandy hit the
Northeast, including New York City and New Jersey. It caused billions of dollars
of damage in the world's financial capital, and--we can all pretend it doesn't
matter if you want, but it does--it hit a week before the Presidential election. You
have several things to consider: Obama's role in the disaster cleanup, New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie's assistance in that
effort, Mitt Romney's no-win tepid response, Mayor Bloomberg's originally
effective response followed by a series of very bad decisions, and finally the
actual destruction of New York and New Jersey's infrastructure, including the
subway system that holds the Big Apple together. While the response of the
nation was pretty charitable, it doesn't stop the fact that there was massive
disruption in a large swath of the United States population in a region that's starting to get sick of disruption.
The Benghazi
Attack
The
September 11th attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi ended up
with a dead ambassador and a huge embarrassment for the Obama administration.
When the attack was first announced, the administration attributed the cause to
the release of an American-produced anti-Muslim video. However, it was also
alleged that this was a planned attack that the administration had ignored the
warning signs of. In either case, the destruction of the embassy, the death of
the diplomat, and the allegations on both sides (especially being so close to
the Presidential election) made this a saddening event on each side.
Treyvon
Martin Shooting
A case that
manages to combine all sorts of social issues into one very awkward package:
you have gun control, race relations, police procedures, social media,
prosecutorial misconduct, and a high dose of symbolic emotional responses, the
Martin case--where Hispanic George Zimmerman, in his duties as a neighborhood
watch patrolman, shot and killed African-American Treyvon Martin in what he
claims was self-defense--has the high probability of coming out with zero
winners regardless of the outcome.
[Voting is now closed.]
