What happened in 2017? The year opened with the Inauguration of a new president of the United States, a time of hope and reassurance that the US government would change hands peacefully with nary a shot fired. And even if one was, say on 5th Avenue in New York City by the incoming POTUS himself, no one would know or care.

Or so said himself.

This year, 2017, has been designated the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development by the UN General Assembly. I’m not sure what this means, but since people don’t feel safe traveling anywhere, I think the meaning is moot.

There isn’t room in this post, or any other post, to include everything of note, particularly how the new administration was shaking down in the months following the Inauguration. The game changers hardly had time to change their clothes and unpack their paper clips before they were moving on out.

That being said, 2017 was stuffed full of noteworthy happenings:

January:

• Nevada legalizes recreational pot, and I almost forget to write the rest of this post.
• An investigation is launched into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to get Trump elected. They reputedly use internet trolls to spread misinformation on Facebook. Instead, the Nevada based trolls, stoned out of their minds and giggling hysterically, post pictures of their dinners and vacations and urge voters to elect Kim Jong Un for president. The North Korean dictator, unaccustomed to being elected to anything, launches a missile at Nevada in response. No one in Nevada notices or cares.
• La La Land wins lots of Golden Globe awards and Sea World hosts its final show with a killer whale. The two have no connection except that the killer whales have no jobs now, so they pack their duds and try their luck in Hollywood. They’re  immediately molested by Harvey Weinstein and are going to need a bigger movie.
• As an act of reassurance to NATO allies, the Obama administration deploys over 3,000 American troops to Poland to ensure protection from future aggression from Russia, which calls the act a threat to their national security. In a supportive move, Russian internet trolls post pictures of Polish sausages and tell Polish jokes on Facebook.
• Women think otherwise about the 5th Avenue shooting thing as millions of them march on Washington, DC on Inaugural day in protest of Trump being elected. Eyewitnesses said the new POTUS fired his tiny pocket pistol in the air before giving his inaugural speech, and Democrats yelled “Grab that pussy gun!” Which looked kind of big in his hand.
• Trump thinks the protestors are there to support him and boasts that he won the election bigly. Biglier than he originally thought.
• Hilary Clinton’s email issue recrudesces, but it turns out they were written when she was tipsy on Champagne and are all self-congratulatory missives to world leaders on her winning the election.  The investigation into her putative wrongdoing is dropped and she’s sent to the Betty Ford clinic to ‘write her book’, a euphemism for drying out. Boy, was everyone surprised when a book really did come out. Most of it is complaints about how the clinic personnel wouldn’t let her use their computers.
• Trump issues an executive order to begin construction on the border wall between Mexico and the US. He spray paints his name on the order instead of signing it and the Mexicans are not amused.
• He also signs an executive order to withdraw the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership. I can’t find anything funny about this, but I’m still looking.

February:

• North Korea fires a ballistic missile over 5th Avenue, but due to not understanding the International Dateline and thinking the Inauguration was taking place in February, they miss their target by a month and the missile goes wide and lands in the Sea of Japan.

• Betsy Devos is confirmed as the new US Secretary of Education by the United States Senate in a 51-50 vote, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaker vote, the first time a vice president has done that for a Cabinet nominee. Later, it’s discovered that Mike Pence can’t read or write and was just asked to put an X on a dotted line, as per Betsy Devos’ new educational standards.
• NASA announces that TRAPPIST-1, a star system 39 light years away, has been found to contain seven Earth-sized planets. At least three are in the habitable zone, but all seven have the potential to support liquid water. L. Ron Hubbard hears about it and makes his long awaited return from the ether to set a course for one of them, having heard none of them have flags. He establishes a new outer space base for Scientology, because the rent has gone up on the Milky Way. Scientologists line up in the thousands to go, except for Tom Cruise, who remains behind to make a new movie, starring himself as Jesus Christ. Killer whales clamor to audition for it and Tom Cruise sends them to outer space with Hubbard.

March:

• SpaceX fires the first missile with reusable parts. North Korea, not to be outdone, unsuccessfully scrambles to find the pieces of its missile in the Sea of Japan. Instead, they find pieces of World War II Zeros and throw them in the general direction of Washington, DC.
• Trump signs the Energy Independence Executive Order intended to boost coal and other fossil fuel production by rolling back Obama-era policies on climate change and the environment. Big business breathes a sigh of relief, but coughs bigly instead, causing the stock market to drop.
• President Trump’s revised travel ban on Muslims and refugees is blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii. Muslims are dragged off their United flights and forced to go to the beach and eat poi.
• Sebastian Gorka, a top advisor to President Trump, faces calls to resign after it’s revealed he’s a member of a Hungarian Nazi group. He refuses to resign on the grounds that he’s being discriminated against as a member of a minority group.

April:

• Workers in New Orleans begin to remove Civil War monuments. Everyone in the South immediately forgets who won the war and the South rewrites the history books. Pigeons don’t know or care whose statue is in the parks; they just need a shoulder to perch on and poop. They march in protest on Washington, DC waving Confederate flags. L. Ron Hubbard invites them to come to his new planet.
• Vice President Pence visits near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, walking all the way to the military demarcation line, sending security personnel scrambling. He wanted to retrieve his baseball, thrown there during a pick up game with Kim Jong Un, who won by virtue of being a dictator.  When Pence claims he won, Kim Jong Un calls it fake news and  launches a missile into the demilitarized zone.
• David Dao, a passenger on a United Airlines flight, refuses to give up his seat and is dragged off the plane into the terminal where he promptly gets back on the plane and is given a free drink for his trouble. L. Ron Hubbard invites him to come to Scientolakia to live for billions of years.

May:

• Computers around the world are hit by a ransomware cyberattack. Ransomware holds data for ransom. If it isn’t paid, the kidnappers send a piece of data every day until it is. One day past the deadline, when they still hadn’t received dollar one, the perpetrators send back the first three of everyone’s Social Security number in plain unmarked envelopes, sending chills of horror up everyone’s spine.
• President Trump is reported to have shared highly classified information with Russia provided by Israeli intelligence, but stands by his “absolute right” to share it. Kim Jong Un applauds the sentiment and asks Trump to share information with him, too. Trump shares classified information with everyone about everything, and intelligence agencies have to change their designation to dumb and dumber agencies.

June:

• The World Expo opens in a country that starts with a ‘K’ and ends with a ‘stan’. Therefore, no one in America even knows it’s going on and goes to Disneystan instead.

• Trump announces his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ between him and clean air. His former wives agree that his tendency toward early withdrawal ticked them off, too.
• The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a decision blocking President Trump’s revised travel ban on people from six mainly Muslim nations. In response, Trump launches a North Korean missile at the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals.

July:

• Russia and China urge North Korea to stop testing their damn missiles, but they fail to follow through with a time out. Busybodies everywhere give them a lecture on good parenting.
• The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is voted for in the UN by 122 out of 193 countries. 71 countries come under intense scrutiny after the votes are counted, and Trump fires his weensy pistol in their general direction. No one notices or cares.
• The first gene editing of human embryos in the USA is reported to have taken place using CRISPR, prompting nutritionists to urge everyone to stay out of the sun and to quit eating fried chicken.

August:

• The first observation of a collision of two neutron stars is hailed as a breakthrough in multi-messenger astronomy when both gravitational and electromagnetic waves from the event are detected.  I don’t know what this means, but it happens directly over 5th Avenue in New York City, and no one notices.
• A total solar eclipse is noticed by a few people on August 21. Trump takes credit for it, stating that people who can’t make their own total eclipse are total losers. The eclipse lasts for about 2 minutes and 40 seconds, prompting Melania Trump to say even an eclipse outlasts her hubby.
• White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirms in a daily briefing that two supposed phone calls to President Trump never took place – the first from the Boy Scouts, who Trump claims praised him for the best speech ever delivered in the organization’s 100-year history; the second from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, who Trump says complimented his border control efforts. Trump appoints himself National Scoutmaster and removes any part of the Boy Scout code of honor that mentions honesty. The Mexican president merely rolls his eyes and facepalms.

September:

• Vladimir Putin expels 733 diplomats from Russia in response to US sanctions. He shoots them out of a missile straight onto 5th Avenue, where they kiss the ground and then have a nosh.
• The International Olympic Committee awards Paris and Los Angeles the right to host the ’24 and ’28 Summer Olympics respectively. Both cities immediately raise prices on everything, saying that four years isn’t a lot of time to get ready.
• Cassini-Huygens, an orbiter/lander, ends its mission by plunging into a Saturn. Elon Musk lectures NASA on the benefits of self-driving spacecraft, asserting this would never have happened with his car. He then realizes his mistake and invents an app to erase awkward moments from memory. The driver of the Saturn collects millions from NASA, which fails to realize they’d been had by the driver of an economy car until after the guy leaves the state.
• Trump tweets that Kim Jong Un is Rocket Man, and the North Korean dictator responds by calling Trump a dotard. Trump doesn’t know what that means, and the men meet after work to duke it out in back of the White House. They try to fight but end up bumping bellies and rolling down the White House lawn. Their aides egg them on and upload the video to YouTube. Trump loses, but claims he won anyway. Kim Jong Un demands that YouTube be removed from the internet.

October:

• The United States announces its decision to withdraw from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, because no one cares about education, science, or culture. People care about cheap flights and want a UN agency to make airlines lower their fares.
• Catalonia declares its independence from Spain, but the government of Spain claims it doesn’t speak Spanish and never got the memo.
• The Harvey Weinstein scandal erupts about his decades of sexual harassment and assaults on women, and though Weinstein’s a liberal, Trump promises him his full support.
• Trump issues a ruling that employers no longer have to provide free birth control to their employees. He then says all boys born nine months hence will be required to serve as busboys at Mar-a-Lago.

November:

• A new species of orangutan is discovered in Indonesia, the first new ape to be described in almost a century. This causes great consternation in Washington, DC, leading many to point to the Orange Guy in Chief who was discovered in the heart of the urban jungle, lurking on 5th Avenue and playing with his pocket gun.
• The German newspaper, Suddeustsche Zeitung, publishes 13.4 million documents leaked from the offshore law firm Appleby, along with business registries that reveal offshore financial activities of politicians, celebrities, corporate giants, and business leaders. Once again, the world is reassured that we can depend on the Germans to fink someone out.
• Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe is placed under house arrest while the military takes control of the country. He resigns six days later, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’ between him and virtually everyone else on the planet, and then pockets several ashtrays and a Gideon bible from the Motel 6 where they’d been keeping him.
• A Leonardo da Vinci painting, Salvator Mundi, sells for $450 million at Christie’s in New York, a record price for a work of art. Salvator Mundi means savior of the world, but you couldn’t prove it by the bank account of the guy who paid that much for it.

• Nature publishes an article recognizing the high velocity asteroid Oumuamua as originating from outside the solar system, making it the first known interstellar object. Everyone thinks this is a dandy name, despite its overabundance of vowels, until they discover the man who named it had sneezed just then and really prefers the name ‘Steve’.
• North Korea launches another missile which goes further than any of the others. Hawaii decides to turn on their Bat Poop Crazy World Leader Missile Alert, which had been rusting since the Cold War, and Trump puts his foot down. He sends the CIA to North Korea to grab Kim Jong Un, bring him back to Washington, and makes him the manny for the whole Trump clan.

December:

• Russia is banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics. Athletes who are allowed to compete will wear neutral uniforms. If they win an event, the band will be expected to hum instead of playing an anthem. Athletes will lift glasses of vodka in salute. The medals will be chocolate wrapped in gold paper.
• The US recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. At last, airlines will know where exactly to fly when going to Israel, instead of just heading for Cleveland.

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