What happened in 2019? It was a very important year by any standards. Not only have we survived almost a full term of the current administration (this phrase works no matter who you support), but it’s also the end of a decade.

Closing any decade with the number 9 makes perfect sense to those who count by 10s.

Sit back with your macaroons, sip your gin and tea, and get ready to recap 2019. If you want to review previous years–namely, 2016, 2017, and 2018– my recap posts are archived on this page.

The year 2019 was assigned the Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. What does this mean to you, Dear Reader? Absolutely nothing.

If you are sharing a sup and a bite with your favorite spouse–one to whom you may or may not be married–don’t ask him or her to pass the closest member of the alkali group of elements. Don’t ask for Na or sodium chloride, either, you smart aleck. Just ask them to pass the salt, for cripe’s sake, and then ask them to tell you what happened in 2019.

Not since the sixth grade have I had to worry about the Table of Elements. So without further ado, let’s find out what happened in 2019 since your spouse ain’t talking.

*As always, the following are all true events capped with a twist*

January

January 01:

• Everything published in 1923 enters the public domain and becomes fair game. This means that instead of plagiarizing stuff for which you can be easily caught, you can claim you wrote an entire book that was really written in 1923. Your friends and family will wonder what you’ve been smoking when you send them an author copy of your new book titled: The Model T and How it Changed my Life. If they don’t believe that, maybe they’ll believe you wrote The Ego and the Id, The Prophet, or Bambi.

January 01:

• The unmanned space probe, New Horizons, makes a close approach to the Kuiper belt object, but doesn’t connect. Therefore, young men will continue to let their pants fall below their butt cheeks for the foreseeable future. Space travel and an advanced species be damned; we’ve got trou dropping to do.

January 03:

• Chinese spacecraft the Chang-e 4 becomes the first to land on the far side of the moon, prompting protests from the Man in the Moon, who discovered from the feedback that he has a bald spot back there.

January 09:

• Hyundai unveils the model of a walking car in Las Vegas, built for first responders. Fred Flintstone offers to demonstrate how it works after he finishes his poker game. Dino, his pet, pokes his head through the roof and ruins the car.

January 15:

• The World Economic Forum says plastic will outnumber fish in the world’s oceans by the year 2050. Executives at the Forum take a break and go to the nearest coffee shop to charge fish and chips on their plastic Mastercards.

January 23:

• Nancy Pelosi rescinds President Trump’s invitation to make a  State of the Union speech, citing the government shutdown as the reason. This is a prime example of the Neener, Neener doctrine of presidential rulings.

February

February 02:

• More than 40 mummies from 323-30 BC are found at a burial site at Tuna el-Gebel south of Cairo, Egypt. CSI teams organize to collect forensic evidence to find out whose mummy went missing a zillion years ago, and whether Jimmy Hoffa is among them.

February 06:

• Canada’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange is unable to get to $145 million of bitcoin after the company’s CEO dies with its access passwords. They tried using his birth date and the word “Rosebud,” to no avail. It’s suspected that he buried the money, but despite digging up hundreds of computers from his backyard, none of them has anything encrypted on them but pictures of his cat.
• According to research from RMIT University in Australia, honeybees are able to add, subtract, and understand the concept of zero, which is why they boycott all Winnie the Pooh products. Winnie typically eats all the honey from a honeypot, while bees wearing green visors and working adding machines sit next to him, shaking their heads and looking grim.

February 07:

• New kangaroo fossil research, published from Riversleigh, Australia, shows kangaroos learned to hop 20 million years ago. Rabbits everywhere protest, saying that they learned to hop 30 million years ago and are the ones responsible for the phrase, “Hop to it.” They are willing to give the kangaroos credit for the phrase, “Shake a leg.” Negotiations are continuing.

February 09:

• Pope Francis visits Abu Dhabi, the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula. Since he and the men he visits wear long white sheets, there’s no need to find something appropriate for the pope to wear–like an I Dream of Jeannie outfit.

February 18:

• The 25-year old murder of a woman is solved when Minnesota police run DNA though a genealogy site and find their suspect, who was only trying to find out if he was one quarter Lakota and could demand his share of tribal money.

February 19:

• New York city bans hair discrimination to limit racial stereotyping. Bald people are banned from this discrimination and take to the streets in protest. Due to the high gloss on hundreds of angry, shiny domes, flights into and out of JFK are canceled.

February 21:

• A 30 million page digital library, known as the Lunar Library, is launched on board Israel’s Beresheet Lunar Lander to be stored on the Moon. The Man in the Moon requests a library card and is denied due to his banned bald head and having no ID. He claims to have been born on the Moon, but is suspected of really having been born on Mars.

March

March 18:

• Champion racing pigeon Armando “the Lewis Hamilton of pigeons” sells for a record $1.42 million in Belgium. Pigeons everywhere begin training for the New York marathon. Clouds of them obscure the sun, and hundreds drop from exhaustion and dehydration on to the heads of people below.

March 20:

• Finland is declared the world’s happiest country amid protests at Disneyland. Mickey Mouse decides to take a steam and then roll around in the snow to see if it makes him as happy as a Finn, but is stymied when it refuses to snow in Los Angeles.
• A woman in England can smell Parkinson’s disease on people and helps researchers identify the molecules on people’s skin. This is so weird that I can’t find anything funny about it.

March 21:

• A Bangladeshi woman with two uteruses gives birth to twins 26 days after having a baby from Uterus Number 1. Amazon demands to know her secret to Prime childbirth.

March 25:

• NASA cancels an all-female spacewalk citing not enough spacesuits to fit women. However, they find a tailor who will hem the men’s spacesuits for less than they would charge the female astronauts.
• British Airways flies to Edinburgh, Scotland instead of Dusseldorf, Germany because the wrong flight plan was filed. The Germans suspect a plot and WWIII breaks out, grounding all flights out of Germany. A covey of small boats sets sail for Germany in order to rescue stranded British Airways passengers.

April

April 08:

• A record 17ft long invasive Burmese python pregnant with 73 eggs is captured in Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve. Amazon sues Burmese pythons everywhere for stealing their secret to Prime childbirth, which they stole from a Bangladeshi woman with two utereses.

April 11:

• Ex-Pope Benedict XVI claims Catholic sexual abuse is caused in part by the 1960s sexual revolution. He goes on to blame arson on fire escape doors, greed on the invention of money, and porn on the internet.

May

May 01:

• New York City officially names a street Sesame Street at the intersection of Count Chocula Avenue and Big Bird Way in honor of the show’s 50th anniversary. However, they aren’t sure how to spell any of them. The Cookie Monster gets lost in New York City and is eventually roped into prostitution.

May 02:

• A drone delivers a kidney for the first time for transplant surgery in Baltimore, Maryland. Amazon claims credit for the fast and efficient service and urges everyone to buy Prime membership for all their transplant needs.

May 09:

• French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin (72) arrives in Martinique after a successful crossing in a barrel. After investigating further, it is discovered he never intended to do this, but donned the barrel after losing his clothes in a poker game on a floating casino and then falling overboard.

May 13:

• American diver Victor Vescovo dives to the bottom of the Mariana trench, the deepest dive ever at 35,849 ft, and finds a plastic bag. He immediately goes to the self service checkout counter to pay for his marinara sauce and pasta. This isn’t very funny and I urge anyone who thinks they have a better joke to drop me a card with their idea on it. Since you don’t have my address, bags of these cards will be lost at sea and sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

May 16:

• British people get drunk more than any other nation–51 times a year according to the Global Drug survey. This means they get drunk on average of once a week each year, and give it up for one week only, probably during Whitsun Monday week. English-speaking countries drink the most, according to the survey. No one knows why this is the case, except that Brits have a national health service, so if they fall down and break their heads, they’re sure someone will take care of them. Also, they have things like figgy pudding they’re expected to eat.

June

June 18:

• A sex-changing Australian bush tomato study is published in the journal PhytoKeys detailing how Solanum Plastisexum can change from male to female to hermaphrodite. Zuccinis, bananas, and yellow squash everywhere protest, while Solanum Plastisexum wanders around looking for the right bathroom to use.

June 20:

• Iran shoots down a United States surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz after claiming the drone violated their airspace. The U.S. claims it was shot down in international airspace in an “unprovoked attack”.  Amazon claims ownership of the drone, saying they suspected that all Iranians are secretly Porch Pirates.

July

July 10:

• Taylor Swift is named the world’s highest paid entertainer by Forbes. She earned $185 million in 2018. Had I known I could make a ton of money singing about old boyfriends, I would have started a long time ago.

July 11:

• The last Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the production line in Puebla, Mexico 80 years after it was launched. Bugs everywhere protest and refuse to drive any other car.

July 14:

• US President Donald Trump ignites racial controversy by tweeting that four Democrat women of color “Go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” They comply by catching the next flight to Detroit.

July 18:

• The children’s songs Baby Shark and Raining Tacos are played by the city of West Palm Beach, Florida to drive homeless people away from the waterfront. The plan backfires when 50,000 toddlers take over the area. The city then plays Watching Scotty Grow, by Bobby Goldsboro, and the entire state eventually empties out when everyone moves to Texas.

August

August 02:

• 526 teeth were found and removed from a 7 year-old boy in Chennai, India. The Tooth Fairy declares bankruptcy and resigns, sparking protests among 8 year-olds everywhere, while dental stocks soar.

August 21:

• Donald Trump cancels a state visit to Denmark after Danish PM Mette Frederiksen was “nasty” to him about his interest in buying Greenland. Realtors protest at the lost commission and refuse to list any other countries on the MLS until Denmark apologizes.

August 22:

• To disprove a 25 year-old theory, Bielefeld in Germany offers a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who can prove the town doesn’t exist. Existentialists everywhere protest, saying that nothing truly exists, and they want the money for saying it.

September

September 20:

• SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers propose that aliens may have bugged earth’s nearby orbiting rocks, according to The Astronomical Journal.  People everywhere start talking loudly and saying nonsensical things in order to confuse the aliens. The aliens, believing correctly that most of the noise is coming from Washington, DC, put off visiting us until after the next election and maybe not even then. Earth residents all change their banking passwords at the same time, setting the internet on fire. Aliens don’t care about money; they just wanted to take selfies to send home.

October

October 16:

• Pete the Fern takes the first plant powered selfie at the London Zoo as part of research into the use of microbial fuel cells. Ferns everywhere open Instagram accounts and spend all their time taking selfies, instead of cleaning the air around them. Greta Thurnberg stops and yells at random plants wherever she goes.

• Netflix reveals its most popular movie is Bird Box with Sandra Bullock, proving that it hardly takes anything to entertain us now and that covering our eyes is the go to way to get through life.

October 21:

• Australia’s biggest newspapers leave their front pages blank in protest against press restrictions. It’s the best front page news anyone has read in sixty or more years.

October 21:

• The Amazon Catholic Bishops synod proposes that married men be ordained as priests, which would reverse the Church’s centuries-old discipline of celibacy. Amazon–the company–approves this move and sends an ordained drone to perform the ceremonies. Ex-pope Benedict XVI blames priests getting divorced on marriage, and he blames childbirth on sex.

November

November 04:

• The largest mass commutation in US history occurs when 462 non-violent inmates are freed from Oklahoma prisons as part of state prison reforms. They are all released at once, begin bumping into each other on the way out, and fights break out up and down the line, effectively ending the commutation as police conduct mass arrests for disorderly conduct.

November 07:

• Humans walked upright 12 million years ago–not 6 million as previously thought– according to a study of a new species of ape found in Bavaria, Germany, published in Nature. Kangaroos do a Neener, Neener hop because they stood upright and learned to hop 20 million years ago, according to their PR (the Publicity Rabbit) firm.

December

December 01:

• The Cosmic Crisp, an apple grown in space, that can last an entire year, goes on sale in Washington state. This brings new meaning to the phrase, “You can’t have your apple and eat it, too.” Apparently, you can. We don’t know how this works, but we have an open mind and open mouth.

December 17:

• A young girl’s 5,700 year-old DNA is extracted from birch tar, which was used as chewing gum, from Lolland Island, southern Denmark. It got stuck in her hair when she went to bed chewing it, just like her ancient mom told her would happen. A lollipop she had in her hand holds further DNA evidence.

December 18:

• The US House of Representatives votes to impeach President Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. No one seems to mind and he continues to be president for the foreseeable future.  Mr. Trump claims to have “the best impeachment ever,” especially if no one gets to say, “You’re fired.”

December 20:

• Just in time for Christmas, Donald Trump signs the Space Force into existence, an arm of the United States Air Force and dedicated to space warfare. We are dedicating an agency to warfare before there is anyone else up there to fight. Star Trek and the Prime Directive appear to be just a chimera in the desert.
• We are writing this on Christmas Eve and everything is quiet. We want to wish you all a very Merry and peaceful Christmas of your own.