“It’s been a year”, says Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba.
31 December 2017: Kris an’ Murphy argue that the New Year should begin, not on 1 January 2018, but on 6 November 2018 – when voters in the Untied States of America have their first real chance to undo the damage for which they were responsible in November 2016. (It didn’t happen.)
13 January 2018: At the height of the North Korea Missile Crisis, Hawaiʻi Civil Defense sends out a false “incoming missile” alarm, and He and She cower, and bicker, in the bathroom while they, and a distressingly large number of their fellow citizens, wait for Governor Ige to remember his Twitter password and get the “all clear” sent out. The gaffe nearly cost Ige his re-election bid.
29 January: The Dudes have to wait around backstage during one of YFNA’s orchestra gigs. BOOOOOOORING!
25 February: The shade of the Rev. Billy Graham finds itself in the tender loving care of Screwtape III.
15 April: Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba finally kicks the Facebook habit. This does not stop him from hearing about, and making rude noises about, the decision by a California judge that coffee needs a Proposition 65 warning label.
4 May: Hot lava nights (and days) begin on the east flank of Kilauea volcano. The eruption will continue for the next four months, and dominate the fake, and even, on occasion, the real news from Hawaiʻi. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba and Quilly, as well as The Dudes, continually assure people that they are not at immediate risk of evacuation or lava inundation. These assurances do not stop tourists from avoiding the Big Island and allowing the locals to actually get from A to B in something like reasonable traffic for a change. Locals cheered when the eruption stopped and the vog that had plagued the island for years finally went away. Then the tourists, and the traffic hassles, came back. Near the end of the eruption, He and She complained that Pele hadn’t properly processed the permits for her construction efforts.
20 May: The Amoeba, after years of increasingly untenable compromise, comes out as a nonreligious person.
15 July: He and She themselves escape the vog, and, on the mainland, reacquaint themselves with license plates on cars that don’t all have rainbows on them.
14 August: The sad story of Tahlequah, the orca whale, and her dead calf goes viral. Granny, the titular head of the whale pod, is unimpressed with the attention.
21 August: Mere weeks after the end of the Kilauea eruption, one of the strongest, and wettest, hurricanes ever to hit the Hawaiian Islands camps out just west of the Kona coast, much to the displeasure of The Dudes.
16 September: The Amoeba reads about the ongoing obesity epidemic, and imagines the reimplementation of a time-honored cure.
18 October: The scientist chases the sun home.
6 November: See 31 December 2017. See also 22 December.
18 November: Reg and Syd finally get a chance to review the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, issued during October. They are, of course, dismissive.
25 November: The Dudes find out about, and try to pound out an understanding of, the redefinition of the kilogram.
9 December: The Dudes see a really cool rainbow and fail to catch the unicorn responsible.
22 December: The third US Government shutdown in a year starts, and promises to extend through all 12 days of Christmas. In response, YFNA channels Clement C. Moore – probably not in a way that Mr Moore would have appreciated.
24 December: He and She discover the extent to which medical machinery is spying on them, and wonder aloud what could go wrong with this. Neil, a gentleman from the near future, finds out.
May your 2019 be all that you hope from it!
(Alas, YFNA reckons, that’s not the way to bet.)