Steve Ballmer
Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft who took over after Bill
Gates retired to live on his house made out of bricks created from bundles of hundred-dollar bills,
retired in a remorseful blaze of poor performance and bad decisions. True, he
held his own early in his tenure, but the failure of cracking the smartphone
market and losing billions of dollars eventually forced him to call it quits. A notoriously
difficult manager, he clung to a horrid employee-evaluation system that seemingly
rewarded ass-kissery and blind luck instead of actual talent, and showed an alarmingly myopic view of the software market. The universal
judge of all things important--the church of the stock market--saw Microsoft's shres soar after the announcement,
which tells you everything that you need to know about Ballmer's reign.
Amy's Baking Company
Poor Amy from Amy's Baking Company. After appearing on
Kitchen Nightmares, where Amy and her husband, Samy, seemingly pulled off the
impossible and out-assholed Gordon Ramsey, they became very,
very angry at the internet. Knowing as much about social media as they do about
running a restaurant, they proceeded to make about as many bonehead mistakes as
possible--threatening people who left negative comments on their Facebook page,
bringing out the lawyers, and, when the blowback was too fierce, claimed that
they were (ahem) "hacked." They were pretty much the poster children for How Not To Run
Social Media For Your Small Business 101.
Blackberry
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Not even five years ago,
Blackberry was the phone to get if
you were getting a smartphone. In fact, they weren't called smartphones--they
were just called Blackberries. They had captured nearly all of the business and
government worlds with their secure email servers. Sadly, their dominance also
left them lazy. The iPhone came out, then the Androids, and yet Blackberry still
clung to their old ideas. It barely took a half of a decade to completely
decimate their market share, going from the very top leader to the single
digits. Now, being seen with a Blackberry is about as dated as a Friends reference or being employed.
Bitcoins
Who says you can't get something for nothing? Bitcoins, the
anarcho-capitalist's wet dream as to how a currency should operate, hit its
stride this year as people who weren't street criminals started to buy them.
A completely virtual currency, backed by nothing except hopes, duct tape, and a
copy of the works of Noam Chomsky, Bitcoins were very, very popular with the
sort of people who are uninterested in people knowing how they are spending
their money. But for those who aren't interested in sex trafficking, hit men, or
opium, it started to garner some legitimacy in business and academic circles and
caused their value to increase...and subsequently crash, then rise again, and then
fluctuating wildly with no rhyme or reason, further legitimizing its place in
the global market as a valid currency.
Horseburgers
Enjoying that burger? Well, hopefully it didn't come from
Europe, because as it turns out that a lot of the meat that people assumed was
beef turned out to be made out of--of all things--horse. Aside from the normal
Ick Factor, there's also a host of other issues, such as how the supply chain
of meat could break down so badly. Horse in and of itself isn't bad for you, of
course--I prefer it if for no other reason than it means there are less horses around--but it may be prudent the next time someone offers you a burger to just
say neigh.
Harlem Shake
A absurd--if, truth be told, charmingly unique--internet activity where
seemingly bored individuals, usually a group, went about their daily lives filming themselves doing not much of anything
during the opening strains of the eponymous song. At the song's break, the
individuals then cut immediately to the same location and are shown dancing or
gesturing or...doing something, anything, while the rest of that line in the
song is sung. It's over in about a minute. It's about as stupid as it is hard to describe without actually seeing it.
But at least it has one thing going for it--it's not planking.
The Royal Baby
Oh, I'm sure it's important to some, and a new baby is
always a joyous occasion* (*results may vary), but the standard absurdity that
is the royal family acts as a force multiplier when discussing the actual birth. Naming him
the rather anticlimactic name of George (to be fair, they weren't exactly going
to be naming him Snoop Dogg), he was met with a mixture of fanfare, indifference, or resentment, depending on what phase of history your nation declared independence from the UK. While the birth and subsequent life of Prince George
was surprisingly drama-free (well, as far as the British Tabloid version of
drama-free goes), it will be a great setup for future entries on this list, I'm sure. Now if only Henry could find himself a nice ginger girl. to knock up and give us some good tabloid fodder.
Candy Crush
The video game world has been turned upside down. It's no
longer dropping quarters in an arcade game (OK, that hasn't been a thing for
about a decade) and it's no longer about waiting in line for the next big
beautifully rendered first-person shooter. It's downloading an ad-laden free
(ahem, "free") game onto your Facebook page, counting its "innovation" of begging
your friends with free advertising for the game free lives to continue
playing as its claim to success. Candy Crush was this year's hottest gimmick, which sadly did not
involve cute animals such as , oh, I don't know, birds, that could be as easily
marketable.
Duck Dynasty
Take any reality show that follows a subset of our
culture--such as Jersey Shore or Bridezillas--and move it to Louisiana, only feature a clan of
rednecks. but only the best kind of redneck, of course--independently rich. Sure, there's a certain
novelty in this concept (they
made bank on, of all things, duck calls) and it certainly has a "Beverly
Hillbillies" vibe to it. Still, taking the tropes of any corner of America
and playing it up for all of America is something that tends to get old pretty
quick.
Google Glass
Sure, sure, sure, it's the device of the future. Every
impractical, crazy invention that everyone makes fun of Google over turns out
to be incredibly useful and innovative. Still, the entire concept of Google
Glass is pretty creepy: it's the sort of thing that dystopian science fiction
novels are built off of. (Then again, so is Google Plus. Amirite?) While the opportunities to advance media,
technology, medicine, and society are endless, the appetite to basically turn
it into a way to profit from upskirt pics is even more endless.
Steubenville
What is more important than high school football? Not much,
apparently, with the possible exception of college and pro football. At least
so it goes in Steubenville, Ohio, where several members of the football team
(Big Red, for those interested in that sort of thing) were caught up in a rape
scandal that involved local authorities covering it up (surprise!) a community
more or less on the side of the players (surprise!) and a very alarming amount
of slut-shaming (surprise!). The entire situation was sad for everyone
involved, from the victims to the reputation of the town to the national TV
reporters who seemed alarmingly sympathetic to the accused. Individuals are still being indicted over the
affair, so the effects of this will linger for years to come.
North Korea
With the rise of Kim Jong Un--the son of legendary
basketball phenom, curer of diseases, and lifelong dictator of North Korea--Kim
Jong Il, the small, brutal nation has been looking for new and creative ways to
display their might and power to the rest of the world. When their missile
launches failed to impress, they took to threatening the United States with a
pre-emptive nuclear strike, then went and actually conducted a nuclear test, then rescinded any
non-aggression treaties with South Korea, and basically escalated everyone everywhere to the
brink of war between North Korea and South Korea, Japan, and the United
States. Things sort of eventually settled down, not because of any sort of
resolution, but probably because someone eventually told Kim Jong Un that he
would probably be annihilated i any sort of war if he didn't shut up and to just go back to his
room and play Counter Strike or collect fingernails in a jar or something else instead.
Boston Bombings
The Boston Marathon is usually a fun of unexciting national
event every year, where people on the East Coast all gather in Boston so they
can uploads pictures of themselves running while a Kenyan inevitably crosses
the finish line. Sadly, this year, a bomb crafted out of a pressure cooker was
set off at the finish line, killing three people and injuring hundreds. After a
long and eventful search, and ending with a drama-filled manhunt in the middle
of the night, one suspect was caught and the other was killed. Unfortunately, the
incident was also the source of a lot of confusion and bad decision-making
(some misidentification, the failure to read Miranda rights of the suspects, and so on) even
though the conduct of the investigation overall was fairly efficient. Still,
it's the source for at least two other items on this list, so it was a fairly unfortunate affair all around.
Hurricane Haiyan
Southeast Asia hasn't fared very well with recent disasters,
and 2013 was no exception. While the area is generally used to discordant
weather such as hurricanes, Hurricane Haiyan made landfall with unexpected force. In the
end, over 5000 people died in the Phillipines alone, and weather conditions
made it difficult to get aid to the people who needed it the most. Given the dense
population, the massive number of homeless, and the fact that most of the
people on call to help were victims themselves, and the recovery will be long
and difficult. It also did not help that China--you know, right next door and
one of the biggest nations on the earth--sent a face-slappingly small donation
of $100,000 to the aid effort due to political differences (by contrast, the
band Journey--you know, the guys that
haven't had a hit song in thirty years--donated $350,000). They eventually
kicked in more, but it proved to be a real dick move for the Red Dragon that only made the disaster, and its subsequent recovery, even more painful.
Syrian Civil War
Syria has been fighting what amounts to a civil war for over
a year now, a casualty of the Arab Spring from a few years ago. The United
States, weary from two other involvements in the Middle East, has refrained
from getting tied up in the nation. However, when word leaked that chemical
weapons had been used by the government against its own people, it created a
bit of a crisis as to whether American should start a bombing campaign to aid the rebellion. Significant opposition by
the public more or less halted that option and created an embarrassment for the
White House, who was now stuck with a public declaration that they were willing
to do so but not the political will to back it up. The horribleness of the
civil war itself is bad enough even without the US getting (or not getting, as
it were) involved.
[Voting is now closed.]
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