- Washington Post: 21 good things that happened in 2021
The best thing that might be said about 2021 may be that it wasn’t 2020. Naming 21 good things that happened this year was a challenge — could we count the trio of coronavirus vaccines as three, we wondered?
A less friendly missive from space arrived this month when a surprise asteroid almost hit Earth. The good news, of course, is it missed. See? 2021 could have been so much worse.
(Hahahah, I saw "Don't Look Up" on Christmas and...yeah.)
Other things mentioned: Chauvin verdict, Britney's free, coup failed, another holiday, Mars exploration.
- Washington Post: Dave Barry’s 2021 Year in Review
Is there anything positive we can say about 2021?
Yes. We can say that it was marginally better than 2020.
Granted, this is not high praise. It’s like saying that somebody is marginally nicer than Hitler. But it’s something.
He swiftly receives the harshest punishment allowed under the Constitution: He is permanently banned from Twitter, the first sitting president to suffer this fate since Chester A. Arthur. Also he is impeached again.
- Washington Post: The 10 best things Biden did in 2021
- Rolling Stone: 10 Moments That Made Us Smile in 2021
Do you remember the first person you visited once you were vaccinated? Mine was my college roommate, in May, who’d recently had her first child. We shrieked and hugged on the sidewalk outside her Philadelphia home. Memorial Day Weekend 2021 was a high point of our Covid-ridden year. That Saturday, CDC data showed we’d reached the milestone of vaccinating more than half the population. With the shot, it was finally safe to visit loved ones, host dinner parties, even plan vacations. We were blissfully unaware of what Delta (and now Omicron) had in store, the proliferation of vaccines last spring ended the era of total lockdown, and for many greatly reduced the overall misery of work, school, home life, and, well, existence. -AM
In 1961, NASA chose Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk as the youngest of 13 elite women pilots to train to become astronauts in the nation’s first human spaceflight program. But she never got to go — until now. In July 2021, Funk, at 82, became the oldest person at the time to go to space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, fulfilling her lifelong dream (and making the Amazon founder’s publicity stunt feel a bit more meaningful). After Funk returned from the 11-minute suborbital flight, she said, “I want to go again, fast.” –AM
Though actor Coyote Shivers and his partner Pleasant Gehman started visiting L.A.’s Hollywood Forever Cemetery early in the pandemic, it wasn’t until last December that we found out they had been training ducks to visit Dee Dee Ramone’s gravestone every day. They used the Pavlovian tactic of a “dinner bell” that rings to the tune of “Blitzkrieg Bop”, titled “Duckskrieg Bop.”
This viral tale of two workplace cats sprang up mid-December on the “Am I the Asshole” subreddit. A user posted about a dispute involving two cats who live at their worksite: an intelligent tortoiseshell named Jean, and a not-so-bright orange cat named Jorts, who has a habit of falling into trash cans and accidentally closing himself in closets. Conflict arose when the user’s coworker tries to teach a dumb cat new tricks, like how to clean himself properly, and the user suggested Jorts may not have the capacity. (To quote a top commenter on the thread, “I can’t believe she fuckin buttered Jorts.”) HR gets involved. A debate flares about who manages the cats. In an update, we learn the cats have staff bios. What is this company — and is it hiring? It’s impossible to know whether the post is true or just a piece of online storytelling brilliance. It doesn’t matter. The Jorts saga is pure joy. -AM
- Washington Post: America has had plenty of good news. You just have to look hard for it.
- Washington Post: Some Things That Didn’t Go Wrong in 2021
– The ice at the North Pole did not melt and release the Unspeakable, Nameless Thing that has been trapped there for a thousand generations, which did not begin slithering on its hideous belly toward civilization, unhinging the minds of everyone who encountered it and leaving only devastation in its wake.
– No big meteors!
– Nobody pressed any civilization-ending wrong buttons by mistake. Can’t always take that for granted!
– Did not learn more than two new letters of the Greek alphabet.
– The Ever Given is not still in the Suez Canal.
– No pop songs this year opened a portal to any sinister dimensions!
– Book-banning efforts still not entirely successful in all places!
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