2020 has been an awful year. So it goes when the world gets hit by a deadly pandemic, a devastating recession and a toxic U.S. presidential campaign.
But it’s also been a deeply weird year, and weirdness sometimes can be wonderful.
To be clear, this particular roundup of the Year That Was will offer nothing about politics. We all know our politics has become very weird -- and very divisive. We’re going to concentrate instead on the kind of weird that unites us, the quirky and goofy kind that elicits a collective, Say what now?
Below is our Top 10 list of strange news. The list, like 2020, could have gone on and on and on …
Bird-brained voter fraud
The beloved kakapo -- seen here on a mural called “From So Simple a Beginning,” at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology -- won the vote, but not without controversy. (Photo courtesy of Ink Dwell)
Voter fraud rocked New Zealand’s annual Bird of the Year competition, with the little-spotted kiwi garnering some 1,500 dubious votes.
“That is an amazing bird … but unfortunately these votes had to be disallowed, and they’ve been taken out of the competition,” said a spokeswoman for Forest & Bird, which runs the avian contest.
The Bird of the Year election is closely followed in New Zealand, a land of birds and birders.
The winner ended up being the kakapo, a.k.a. “night parrot,” which edged out the Antipodean albatross. The colorful, waddling kakapo is critically endangered. It’s the first bird to win the 15-year-old election twice.
Another bird story? Yep
The race is on -- for the most expensive racing pigeon. (Staten Island Advance/Anthony DePrimo)Staten Island Advance
Pigeons are sometimes called “rats of the sky,” because they’re known to be disease spreaders and they poop all over our cars, balconies and public art.
But some pigeons are highly coveted -- specifically, the ones that can fly really fast.
That’s because pigeon racing, long an obscure, fringe hobby, has suddenly become very big business. So big that in November a Chinese man paid $1.9 million for a single Belgian-bred pigeon.
It was proof, CBS News wrote, “that an age-old hobby in Western Europe identified with working-class men now has a new, elitist foreign lease on life. Top breeders relying on generations of family experience can now sell their birds for prices unheard of merely a decade ago.”
The upswing in prices has surprised even successful, long-established breeders -- such as Gaston Van de Wouver, who recently sold his 445 birds at auction for $7 million. Said Van de Wouver after the sale:
“The only thing I can say is we are in total shock.”
Mr. Peanut meets a violent, fiery death
Mr. Peanut was a healthy 104 when tragedy struck. (Kraft Foods)HAR
Mr. Peanut and his road-tripping pals, actor Wesley Snipes and “Veep” alum Matt Walsh, were tearily belting out the 1980s classic “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” as they cruised along a winding mountain road in the Nutmobile.
Suddenly an armadillo loomed ahead of them, and the Nutmobile swerved.
Messrs. Peanut, Snipes and Walsh were thrown from the vehicle. The two humans survived, but the monocle-wearing, top-hatted Planters mascot fell into the valley below along with the Nutmobile. They exploded on impact.
The bizarre marketing video surprised viewers when it landed on social media in January. Even more surprising was the Planters tweet that followed:
“It is with heavy hearts that we confirm that Mr. Peanut has died at 104.”
Peanut’s Planters mascot successor is Bartholomew Richard Fitzgerald-Smythe, or Bart. Bart’s advice for those struggling with grief over the death of the iconic legume was about what you’d expect.
“Celebrate the life of Mr. Peanut,” he said, “with a salty snack in his honor.”
The adventures of Florida Man (and Florida Woman) continue
Maguire Marie McLaughlin, a.k.a., "Florida woman." (Photo: Indian River County Sheriff’s Office)
Florida is known for its wild and weird denizens, giving rise to the “Florida Man” meme -- that is, the worldwide sharing of real news headlines about strange goings-on in the Sunshine State.
In 2020, Florida Woman got things started, earning the January headline: “Florida woman arrested for threatening to get McDonald’s sauce by ‘any means necessary.’” The coronavirus pandemic soon hit the country, but that didn’t slow down Florida Man. In fact, it inspired him. Thus the headline: “Blowing a hair dryer up your nose won’t kill coronavirus, despite what a Florida commissioner said.”
Not to be outdone by a mere county commissioner, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in April declared pro wrestling an “essential business,” exempting the spectacle from pandemic restrictions.
Whoops, have we accidentally broken our no-politics rule for this annual roundup? Well, Florida gets an exemption.
The truth is out there
This is a "flying saucer" photographed in 1990 by a Swiss man. The “unidentified aerial phenomena” spotted by Navy pilots in 2004 apparently were more impressive. (Advance Local archive)
Do UFOs exist? Of course they do -- and now we have officially-sanctioned proof. In April, the U.S. Department of Defense, famously secretive about such things, released three videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The images, shot by Navy pilots in 2004 using infrared cameras, were leaked years ago.
A Pentagon spokesperson said the department decided to claim credit for the videos “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.”
The footage is definitely real, says one of the pilots who encountered the UFOs.
Retired Navy squadron commander David Fravor told CNN that as he approached the object seen in one of the videos “it rapidly accelerated to the south and disappeared in less than two seconds. This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball bouncing off a wall.”
Smells like middle-aged spirit?
Critics say Goop's unique scented candle is proof that Gwyneth Paltrow is out of control. (Goop.com)
This has to be an internet prank.
That was a natural reaction when the news started making the rounds, but Gwyneth Paltrow’s “This Smells Like My Vagina” scented candle is a real thing.
Send 75 bucks to Paltrow’s company Goop and you can own a “funny, gorgeous, sexy and beautifully unexpected scent,” the product description exclaims.
“The actress’s notoriously over-the-top lifestyle brand recently started selling a vagina-scented candle,” the website Pop Sugar wrote in February, “and if that fact alone doesn’t make you question your faith in humanity, the fact that it was sold out online for weeks and is now back in stock after popular demand certainly will.”
The Guardian’s fashion-and-lifestyle columnist Hadley Freeman was even more direct in her assessment of this development:
“Gwyneth no longer has just her head up her vagina; she has crawled all the way inside.”
Food for thought
Are you hungry? Are you starving? OK, then break out the steak starter kit where the meal is made from the diner’s own human cells.
Don’t get too grossed out. The bite-sized servings aren’t ready for your local supermarket -- yet. They were commissioned for the Designs for Different Futures exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“For the collection of sample steaks on display in the museum, the team used human cell cultures purchased from the American Tissue Culture Collection and grew them with donated blood that expired and would have otherwise been destroyed,” Fox News reported in November.
A group of scientists and artists created “Ouroboros Steak” as a critical response to the growing, though still-in-development, lab-grown-meat movement. The theoretical buyers of Ouroboros kits theoretically would be able to use their own cells -- taken from inside their cheeks -- to grow steaks.
“People think that eating oneself is cannibalism, which technically this is not,” said Grace Knight, one of the artists who worked on the project.
Star trek
An animation of what the disappearing star looks -- or looked -- like. (YouTube)
A huge star in a galaxy 75 million light-years away, studied by astronomers for two decades, suddenly disappeared.
What happened? One tantalizing possibility, said scientists when they announced in June that the “luminous blue variable” star had gone missing: it had “collapsed into a black hole without producing a supernova.” Such a fate for a “monster star,” they said, has never been detected.
Because of the star’s distance from Earth, astronomers can’t see it directly, only its signatures. That means it still could be out there, abruptly dimmed from a long life well lived and now hiding behind space dust.
But the possibility that the star just slipped away on little cosmic cat feet would be so 2020. Said Andrew Allan, an astrophysics researcher at Ireland’s Trinity College:
“It would be highly unusual for such a massive star to disappear without producing a bright supernova explosion.”
A Spike Lee joint
Director Spike Lee has a song in his ... heart. (Advance Local archive)
Spike Lee has made a lot of great movies, from “Do the Right Thing” to “BlacKkKlansman.”
So while the subject of his next film project is a bit of a surprise, who are we to question it?
In November, news broke that Lee is going to direct a movie about the discovery and marketing of the erectile-dysfunction pill Viagra. Oh, almost forgot: It’s a musical. (The website Deadline Hollywood, bless them, dubbed the upcoming movie a “tumescent tuner.”)
Lee’s statement about the project:
“So Finally Going Into My 4th Decade As A Filmmaker I Will Be Directing A DANCIN’, ALL SINGIN’ MUSICAL Spike Lee Joint And I Can’t Wait.”
A month of monoliths
The monolith that started it all. (Utah Department of Public Safety via AP)AP
On Nov. 18, a helicopter crew flying over a remote part of Utah’s desert noticed a “flash of metal” in a canyon. They headed for it -- and discovered a 10-foot-high slab of metal stuck into the ground. “What the heck is that?” asked one of the men in the helicopter. Good question. Here was another one: How did it get way out in the middle of nowhere?
Cue the theme music from the sci-fi movie classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” whose huge black monoliths are cinematic cultural icons.
Images of the real-world monolith quickly became a hit on social media, and so people started heading out into the pristine Utah desert to see it for themselves. They hiked in and even flew in -- until finally four men showed up in the middle of the night on Nov. 27 and dismantled the large metal plank, calling the structure “litter.”
But there’s no keeping a good monolith down. The same day the Utah piece fell, another one popped up in Romania. The mayor of a town near the new monolith jokingly blamed extraterrestrial teens who stole “their parents’ UFO.” This second monolith disappeared four days later.
Then, the same day the Romanian monolith was removed, Monolith III arrived on the side of a California mountain. It also didn’t last long. On Dec. 3, a group of young men pulled it down while chanting “Christ is king in this country. We don’t want illegal aliens from Mexico or outer space.” They replaced it with a wooden cross, which in turn was quickly removed.
Were the disappearing monoliths proof that nothing, not even 2020, lasts forever?
Nope. More monoliths continue to pop up: outside a candy shop in Pittsburgh, in a nature reserve in the Netherlands -- and, who knows, maybe tomorrow somewhere in your neck of the woods …
-- Douglas Perry
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December 27, 2020 at 10:03PM
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The bird vote, Mr. Peanut’s shock sacrifice, Spike Lee’s Viagra: 10 of the strangest stories of 2020 - OregonLive
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