It's time for Dave Barry's annual year in review, looking back at the highlights, low lights and no lights of 2022.
Good news: "The looming apocalyptic threat of catastrophic global climate change was finally eliminated thanks to the breakthrough discovery that the solution — it has been staring us in the face all this time — was to throw food at art."
In January, the national debt topped $30 trillion. "Fortunately this is nothing to worry about," writes Barry.
“Cryptocurrencies” soared because the market is "not controlled by the government. Instead it is controlled by 13-year-old Justin Weeblemonger of Teaneck, N.J., who runs the whole shebang out of his PlayStation 5. (Justin also controls airline fares.)"
This was not quite true, but close.
In February, the Russian army invaded Ukraine, writes Barry. "Everyone assumes the Russians will easily prevail, but the Ukrainians put up a surprisingly strong resistance (we are using the term 'resistance' in the sense of 'physically fighting back,' as opposed to 'tweeting defiant hashtags')."
April:
Elon Musk says he wants to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which works out to one dollar for every apocalyptic tweet emitted about the sale by alarmed verified Twitter users who are deeply concerned about the precedent of allowing billionaires to buy major media platforms, which have traditionally been small mom-and-pop operations like the Washington Post and Facebook. Another verified concern is that Musk favors “free speech,” which we are putting in quotation marks because although it SOUNDS good — Free speech! — if everyone is allowed to have it willy-nilly, the public could be exposed to misinformation that has not been verified by the verifiers, as opposed to the current situation, in which everything on Twitter is 100 percent accurate.
July:
In financial news, Elon Musk announces that no longer wants to purchase Twitter and will instead use the $44 billion to buy two Springsteen tickets.
October:
… the national debt creeps up by yet another trillion and now exceeds $31 trillion, but again this is nothing to worry about because it has absolutely no economic consequences. We don’t know why we even bother keeping track.
Speaking of money: Elon Musk announces that he has decided to buy Twitter after all, because the only Springsteen tickets he could get for $44 billion were “way the hell up in the balcony.”
By November, writes Barry, the big finance story "is the catastrophic collapse of cryptocurrency giant FTX, which implodes as stunned investors discover that maybe it’s not such a great idea to trust your money to a company with a meaningless name and an incomprehensible business model headed by the fourth runner-up in a John Belushi look-alike contest."
He doesn't even mention pickleball.