Tag Archive: 2009 Year in Review

(Hurting) Headitor’s note:  Its late, its New Years Eve, and I’SATIREd, sauced please accept that some (or all) of my ^wrec_kollections of the year gone by might be a bit scotchy.  You should double-check my fracts with some more staid and reputable news sources before using any of the stories that I have dismembered from last year in a serious conversation.

Nadya Suleman, an unemployed 33 year old mother of six children that had been living with her children and mother in a small three-bedroom house that was in mortgage default and scheduled to be sold at auction elects to undergo an in vitro fertilization treatment which leads to … octuplets.  A beaming mother claims she will get by with the help of family, friends, and her church. She plans to return to school in the fall.  Meanwhile her 69 year-old mom who is taking care of the other six children ages two through seven (all of them also conceived through in vitro fertilization) indicated that she is already overwhelmed looking after them.  She said she warned her daughter: “I’m going to be gone” [when you get home].  Her 67 year-old father says he is leaving the country to return to his native Iraq as a translator and driver in order to financially support his daughter and her children.

Shortly after George W. Bush was finally shooed out of office, the Iraqi reporter who jumped the gun a little and tried to shoe him out with a penny loafer was convicted of assaulting a visiting head of state and sentenced to 3 years in an Iraqi prison.  Like all good Texans, “W” may die with his boots on but it could well be the shoe that he is most remembered for.  See ya later alligator.  Shoe now. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

In a related story, Two weeks earlier, across the pond in New York City, a technology firm executive, George Anderson was sentenced to fifteen days in jail, 200 hours of community service and a $500 fine when he plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge of driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of an accident.  The previous year, he struck and killed Florence Cioffi with his $100,000 Mercedes SUV. It was apparently the opinion of the court that Cioffi was also guilty of walking while drunk.  Sounds to me like the scales of justice might have themselves been guilty of being a little bent out of shape.

Nortel Networks Corp., a company in bankruptcy protection and already under fire for handing out executive bonuses earlier this year, approved a plan this fall to give another round of raises to its top managers.  Sources say 72 Nortel executives will have a total of $7.5 million US added on top of their current salaries in 2009.  Of those 72 executives, 14 will be getting compensation of $500,000 or more. The biggest earner under the new compensation plan is former treasurer John Doolittle, who took over as head of the company’s corporate group in August after the departure of chief executive Mike Zafirovski. Doolittle’s total compensation has been bumped to $1.68 million this year, an increase of 1.12 million over 2008.  Before departing, his predecessor told a House of Commons finance committee looking into the situation that the company’s constrained cash resources and competing creditor claims meant it wasn’t possible to pay severance to laid-off employees. He also said the company decided to trim the value paid out for pension benefits to reflect their pension plan’s current funding levels.  He further enraged retired Nortel employees when he made a filing in October with a U.S. bankruptcy court naming himself as a creditor and claiming more than $12 million US from the company, about half of which was for his own pension benefits. That claim is still under review.

After years of fighting in an attempt to nurture a stable democratic regime in Afghanistan the allied forces are shocked to find one of their good guys cheating at the poles.  You can lead a horse to water, but perhaps it would have been better to nurture a local horse that can find the water himself as opposed to a westernized breed that knows (and prefers) what we do, as opposed to what we say about democracy.

With the installation of its final set of Solar Arrays the international space station usurped Venus as the second brightest heavenly body visible in our night sky.

Our “run this country like a business” Conservative Party who have long ascribed to the mantra pigs will fly before we would ever run a deficit, proudly announce they will record a $33.7 billion oops $50billion (and counting) deficit. Oh well, the headlines everywhere were reading “swine flu” so at least their mantra is unimpeachable.

Lost in the “Big Deal” (especially if you were marketing the vaccines and other associated drugs) surrounding H1N1 was another “big deal” over a little pig. Technically they are called micro pigs and they are the latest must have “arm candy” pet sensation that the still rich and famous celebrities of the world are falling over each other to acquire. Word has it that the little guys literally “flu” off the shelves and there is a world-wide shortage as irate celebrities everywhere are lining up to get theirs.  Micro pigs start out as big as a teacup.  Two years later the pigs are fully grown – but still only weigh up to 65 pounds and stand at around 14 inches tall. They are clean, sweet, and they love to be around people. David and Victoria Beckham have scooped up two, reportedly at a cost of over $1,200^US each.

Egyptian officials in Cairo outstrip the competition in what can only be described as a race among world leaders to overreact in a “pig” way.  Fearing for their lives they order the immediate extermination of every living pig in the greater Cairo area only to realize that the pigs were the foundation of Cairo’s garbage disposal system.  At last report, Cairo is still sweltering in mountains of garbage that have no ready means for disposal.

“The whole area is trash. All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”

– Ramadan Hediya, Cairo resident

A picture of 735 ships at anchor off the coast of Singapore with no where to go pretty much summed things up in early 2009