Welcome to 2021. It’s got to be better, right?
Here’s your Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2020.
“JPS Health Network is experiencing something of a quarantine baby boom, seeing as many as three times the number of babies born in a shift as are expected on an average day.”
“Common holiday cookie shapes, he’s found, don’t typically fit together very neatly. Bulbous Santas, candy canes, and gingerbread men tend to leave lots of dough scraps behind. In his quest for a festive yet efficient cookie cutter, he’s designed a shape that can punch out neat ranks of cookies with minimal leftover dough.”
“The big picture lesson from 2020 is that ensuring an accurate result isn’t enough. Elections also have to be able to prove to a skeptical public that the result really was accurate.”
“Operation Warp Speed is set to miss the first distribution goal it laid out, Trump administration officials said last week”.
“Almost everyone agrees that the ATF is in trouble. But this obscure federal agency may be President-elect Joe Biden’s best chance at having a real impact on gun policy—if he takes the opportunity to restore the beleaguered agency’s reputation and revive its mission.”
“The end of the year is usually a good time for retrospection and one of our favorite traditions: digging into the archives and recognizing the best cybersecurity stories of the year. Stories so good, we wish we had written them ourselves.”
“Reality TV Couple Check In: Who’s Still Together and Who Split in 2020″.
“Amongst other things that we are worried about — the big things, the things that actually matter — when I think what we do for a living going forward, I start worry about just the future of entertainment because I don’t know what it looks like. It’s hard to imagine being in a writers room, it’s hard to imagine being on a set, how do you shoot a scene with 200 extras ever, how do you go on location in someone’s house, who in their right mind will let us into their house to shoot a scene. It seems so crazy to imagine going back to the old ways that we did this. We will figure something out because we always do. Hollywood has a knack for ingenuity, and there is a long way to go with the other, more important issues before we get to that point but I’m very nervous to figure out how this works after this is all over.”
Apparently, there was a bucatini shortage this year. I should pay closer attention to these things.
Predicting the future is hard.
“Kelly Loeffler’s Conflict of Interest Is Even Worse Than Reported”.
RIP, Pierre Cardin, fashion designer and entrepreneur.
RIP, Luke Letlow, incoming freshman Congressman from Louisiana, from complications related to COVID-19.
“There is a likely future in which America’s immune system learns lessons from COVID-19 but its collective consciousness does not.”
RIP, Dawn Wells, actor best known as Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island, of causes related to COVID-19.
RIP, Joe Clark, high school principal on whom the movie Lean on Me was based.
“As Statues Of America’s Racist Past Were Removed This Year, So Were Tattoos“.
Apparently, the guy who invented the CueCat is now one of Rudy Giuliani’s “election experts”, now making crazy claims about the Georgia Senate runoffs.
RIP, Paul Westphal, Hall of Fame player and coach mostly with the Phoenix Suns.
I love Pierre Cardin, but I didn’t even realize that he was still alive. Here he was cut down in his prime at age 98.
Also, the list seems to have missed (or maybe I just didn’t notice the link) that legendary guitar player Tony Rice died on Christmas day, supposedly when he woke up and started making a cup of coffee. He had some health problems in recent years, but his flat picking was amazing.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/27/950648546/tony-rice-a-giant-of-the-acoustic-guitar-dead-at-69
“Why not Ginger AND Mary Ann?”