The categories are:
- Worst Government Decision
- Worst Technological Advance
- Worst Sports Event
- Worst Embarrassment
- Worst Business Decision
- Worst Popular Trend
- Worst Incident
- Worst Entertainment
- Worst Person
- Worst Inconvenience
Simply vote for one candidate in each category over the next three days. Then, you can vote again for any one event
as the "Worst Thing About 2015" on day four. On that day, you can vote for the same
candidate as you had in the past or a different one; it's up to you. Whichever one wins the
overall vote wins the Worst Event, and whoever the runner-up is in that
category wins that category instead. I retain a little bit of judgement
and discretion on this one, however, since not all of the candidates
are appropriate.
(The second day of voting is for Business, Popular Trends, and Incidents.The third day of voting is for Entertainment, Person, and Inconvenience.)
(The second day of voting is for Business, Popular Trends, and Incidents.The third day of voting is for Entertainment, Person, and Inconvenience.)
Hillary Clinton's Private Email Accounts
Hillary
Clinton, who--if you aren't aware, is running for President--has had a bit of a
rough go of it. While she is still the frontrunner, she has been dogged for
years over her handling of communications. During her time as Secretary of
State (remember that?) she used an unsecured email account for official business, which is something federal employees really shouldn't be doing--official documentation and all that. According to her
team, she didn't use any classified information on this account, but according to
Republicans she might as well have pasted her password (hunter2, one presumes) on her Google
Plus account. We can all agree that, regardless of your political leanings,
that Hillary is the sort of person to use a Google Plus account, right?
Indiana
Religious Freedom Law
Not much goes
in the Hoosier State--a little bit of basketball, a little bit of David
Letterman, and a whole lot of Gary, Indiana. So imagine everyone's surprise
when they passed a law that would prevent even more things from
happening--namely, not serving people who (whatever the code words were for
being gay.) After a backlash, the law was effectively amended as to be useless,
but by then the damage was done, and most of the nation could get back to
forgetting that Indiana exists.
Anthrax
Shipments
We don't
expect much from our government here in America; we're used to having the
powers that be hold a recklessly cavalier attitude about daily governance. A
government that does little is best, so they say. That said, citizens do have a
bit of a problem when the incompetence of the government actively causes harm,
as it did when it mistakenly shipped out dozens of live anthrax cultures to
labs--you know, the exact sort of thing that a decade ago sent the entire
nation into a panic. If nothing else, the recipients were all labs capable of
handling the poison, but still.
Greek Bailout
There's some
old saying--by Socrates, I believe--about throwing good money after bad. Third
time's the charm, after all. Greece, which has been on the verge of anarchic
mayhem for roughly a decade now, has begged for, and received, yet another
bailout by the EU. And by the EU, I mean mostly Germany. Granted, this was
after the Greek people roundly defeated a public referendum to get the bailout
with what every other person in the room considered modest reforms, so the the
chances of this one succeeding any differently than the last two bailouts are
slim at best.
Central
Command Gets Hacked
We expect our
armed forces to be at least somewhat prepared for unexpected attacks, but
apparently that doesn't extend to social media. CENTCOM covers (surprise!) the
Middle East, and as such their Twitter account was hacked and converted to a
pro-ISIS mouthpiece, including an avatar that stated (I am not making this up)
"I love you ISIS." They then proceeded to tell all the followers that
"You won't BELIEVE what the Jihadists have in store for America! (#3 will
cause you to EXPLODE!)"
AOL-Verizon
Merger
AOL, the
once-proud internet service company, is merging with Verizon, the once-proud
leader in communications. In theory, it's a merging of synergies--the old
landline system with a bolted-on telecommunications center and the new digital
master of the modern age joined together for a communications behemoth. And yet
once one knocks all the cobwebs off the merger, they're going to find even more
cobwebs, because none of these companies have had anything close to synergy for
decades. And one half expects Time Warner to make drunk phone calls to the new company at 3 am.
Amazon Prime
Day
It was hyped
as being the single greatest sale of the history of the universe—Amazon, the
king of online retailing, was holding a sale that rivaled Black Friday in total
dealage. People waited patiently, refreshing their browser, tagging their favorite
items—only to find out most of the deals were on generic detergent and
144-packs of canned peaches. Aside from a few mid-range electronics, most of
the sales lacked the flashy buzz of, well, pretty much every other sale in
existence save the occasional Martin Luther King, Jr Mattress Sale.
Windows 10
A new upgrade
to Windows—for free (at first), no less!—is a hard thing to complain about, but
leave it to Microsoft to ballsack it up anyway. While the upgrade itself was
relatively harmless (and useful), it got pushed to customers more or less
without their approval, causing some customers on limited bandwidth plans to
get outrageous bills form their providers. In addition, they chose to take it
off the market in response, which served to confuse the non-confused users even
more.
New iPhone
Design
Another year,
another round of questionable decisions by the iPhone design staff. One's gut
is willing to give them a pass--what with them designing the single greatest
electronic device in recorded history--and yet let's not forget that someone
made the world's greatest punchcard machine at one point, too. Some of the new
ideas--no headphone jack being the biggest issue--perplexed even the company's
biggest fans.
CMU
Admissions Procedure
In a
spectacular moment of pure hubris, Carnegie Mellon University--the place where
robots are building robots that will eventually take your job--had their own
major flare-up. One would think their tech team would be on top of, well,
everything, and yet somehow the university managed to send out over 800 false
acceptance letters to 800 pasty-faced, broken-hearted nerds. They blamed it on
"human error," a blatant lie since no human has worked there for decades,
but it sounds better than "The algorithm in the AI for our Admissions
Department was flawed." If that isn't rolling a 20 on a 20-sided
die, I don't know what is.
Deflategate
Woe be the
lowly Patriots! Having had to wait almost a decade to not win every single
Superbowl ever, and even suffered a humiliating and completely unfair loss only
a few years ago, they finally made it to the championship game based on their
own merit and skill. Oh, and, possibly, by cheating. The method of cheating in
this case was the deflating of footballs, which apparently makes it easier for
some quarterbacks and/or receivers to handle. The Patriots are no stranger to
cheating being accused of cheating in football games, so this incident wasn't
simply brushed off--and to many, the behavior after the fact was much worse
than the crime itself.
Mayweather-Paquino
Fight
Boxing is
supposed to be exciting, right? Two trained professionals hamming it up before
the fight, getting everyone to pay insane amounts of money to see it on cable,
and then watching two grown men who should know better beat the ever-loving
shit out of eat other. Well, that is what is expected, but that's not what most
fan believed they got in what was billed as the "Fight of the
Century," a bold claim in 2015. Floyd Mayweather played defensively (read:
boring) while Paquino failed to land much by way of offense (read: boring) and
the bout was scored the old-fashioned way, by boring judges. To top it all off,
not one ear was bitten off.
FIFA Scandal
Soccer--or,
rather, what Europeans call "football" and Americans call
"What's in the next channel?"--has long had FIFA as its governing body, including running the highly lucrative World Cup. It's also long been
accused of being a corrupt pit of dark arts and chicanery, all of which came to
a head this year as fourteen (and counting) high-ranking officials were
indicted on charges of racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud. In fact,
as you are reading this, six more executives have been charged.
Qatar World
Cup
While the
financial scandals are the ghost of FIFA past, let's look at the ghost of FIFA
future. Qatar--a nation not known for hosting large, logistically intense
foreigners--won the World Cup hosting privileges for 2022. To prepare, they had
to build a series of stadiums and other supporting buildings in their copious
arable land. Qatar, however, has had a few logistically intense issues of their
own, but instead of soccer players being paid millions of dollars to kick a
leather bladder around, they're scooping up foreign slaves to build stuff.
Allegedly.
DraftKings
and FanDuel
If you've
watched any football this year, you've no doubt seen some commercials for both
DraftKings and FanDuel. And when I say "some commercials" I mean
"100,000 commercials." The for-pay fantasy football site has come
under fire for a variety of reasons: it's technically gambling in many states,
which is, um, illegal; but more importantly allegations that insiders at
DraftKings were using the data to win money for themselves, which is also, um,
illegal. (Apparently the workers at FanDuel know better or else aren't as good at cheating.)
Ahmed And The
Clock Bomb
When
14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed built a clock, he was proud of it; so proud that he
brought it to school to show his teachers. The engineering teacher approved;
the English teacher, not so much. And when the principal got hold of it--well,
watch out, cause the cops are getting called! Islam + electronic device =
potential threat! While there's some debate about intentions--Ahmed's father is
a known political troublemaker--what isn't under dispute by most individuals is
that the administration and the cops, who proceeded with a full-on arrest of a minor, mug
shot and all, overreacted in the worst possible way.
Brian
Williams, War Hero
Respected
news anchor Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News found himself in trouble
after it was found that some of his claims about the Iraq War were
false--specifically, that a helicopter he was in was fired at by enemy forces. Journalists, who
are generally expected to err more on the side of truth than fiction, don't
have a whole lot of leeway about this, especially the sort of story that could
easily be fact-checked like this one. Williams lost his job, but quickly
bounced back, a testament to both his reputation and/or the rather thin excuse for
journalism that exists today.
The Duggars
The Duggar
family, known primarily as that family that has enough kids to field the number
of people in the TLC Network executive’s room it took to OK a reality TV series
featuring the Duggar family, has always had its fair share of controversy,
although up until this year the complaints were largely in the realm of
small-ball low-grade nataliphobia. Well, that all came to a screeching,
uncomfortable halt when it was revealed that Josh Duggar, the oldest of the
brood, was accused of molesting two of his many, many sisters. Their TV show
was taken off the air and criminal charges are pending and the family was reduced to a
meager few career options, which boil down to 1) Christian musicians traveling
between Branson, MO and Salt Lake City or 2) invading force large enough to
conquer Hobby Lobby.
Subway
Spokesman
Jared Fogel,
the nice-enough guy who rode to fame as the spokesman for the Subway chain of
restaurants, is a proper American cultural icon. He’s been around forever, starring
in Superbowl commercials and showing up in bit-part cameos in movies about
sharks and/or tornados, all hanging off of his (admittedly impressive) claim of
losing a lot of weight. Sadly, it turns out he has other interests that involve
child pornography, and so his long, inexplicable life in the spotlight came to
an end this year.
The View Vs
Nurses
The View, a
show where four miserable women complain to other miserable women, received a
fair amount of criticism due to some throwaway comments while discussing the
Miss America Pageant—comments that basically dismissed nursing as “not a
talent” after a contestant claimed as such. Since there's nothing more that miserable women love than to make everyone else miserable as well, the story barrelled through social media at lightning speed.
[Voting is now closed.]
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