Right around this time of year, people begin posting retrospectives of the year which is rapidly passing away.  Creepy Sleepy, is of course, no different though clearly we are better. What follows is 2010, a fairly eventful year for a few, and a generally eventless mundane year for most of us. 

For example:  Few of us, relatively speaking, will be involved in some life changing event.  Most of us will have kept our jobs.  Few of us will either be married or divorced this year.  Most of us will not complete a degree program.  Even fewer of us will be involved in a natural disaster or catch a life threatening disease, or win a gold medal in the Olympics, or obtain windfall profits in the stock market, or be elected to a high public office.  Most of us have incredibly boring stories to tell, most of them dealing with doing exactly the same thing every single day, meeting with the same exact people, drinking the same coffee and alcohol, and so on and so forth.  Unfortunately for all of us, we are not the special ones:  we are not the stuff that stories are written and told about.

What follows therefore is not the history of us.  It is instead the history of those lucky (or unlucky) few who did experience very important events first hand.  To some people, history happened for them.  To others, history happened to them.  So relax, pour yourself a cup of your same old coffee, sit back, and read about people who are not you.  And on balance, you should thank God or whoever it is you thank for good fortune that this is NOT the tale of you.  I suspect that nearly everyone listed in these events, even if they were fortunate in history, would prefer to have your mundane boring life, and not their own, in some way or another.

January

This month was canceled in Haiti as a massive 7.0 earthquake hit their capital city.  230,000 Haitians were confirmed killed by the quake.  Things weren’t bad enough in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country:  Generations of corrupt government, crippling poverty and lack of basic social services for most of the population of the country was compounded when many thousands of people lost their homes.  The humanitarian disaster was compounded by the outbreak of cholera which spread through the country later in the year.

In the US, our political landscape encountered an earthquake of its own, as the pro-business, pro-wealthy fascisti on the US Supreme Court opened the door for massive inflows of cash into our election system.  Citing the fact that we allow non-human, non moral agents called corporations to refer to themselves as “citizens” while simultaneously relieving them of the burden of following the law the way normal citizens have to (through limited liability and various out risk reducing strategies that lead to the wealthy becoming wealthier at everyone else’s expense) the SCOTUS decided that wealthy corporate institutions should be allowed to dump unlimited amounts of money into whatever political campaign they want.  The only speed bump:  self-regulation and some ridiculous form that must be filled out for some bureaucracy.  While corporate donation is unlimited, my limit for an individual candidate is around 2400 dollars.  So I can compete with Pharma and AFL on a level field, right?

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, one of the only people to survive two atomic bomb blasts at the end of World War II died this month.  So did Teddy Pendergrass and Howard Zinn.

February

The Olympics in Vancouver occurred.  As we only really got coverage of events that Americans were favored in on our corporate news networks, I don’t much to say about Jamaica’s bobsled team.  Given my limited coverage of the events, there were two truly amazing things that happened at this year’s winter Olympics.  The first is Evan Lysacek’s long program.  And the second was that most of the rest of the US team, especially the ones who received big endorsement deals, just… sort of… underwhelmed…  I am incredibly impressed when people do things well that I can’t do.  But when people are hyped big time for doing things that I can’t do and then they sort of fail to do those things, I have to admit, I am rather amused.  Let’s let the athletes be great amateur athletes, instead of making them into rock stars, please, and thank you.

In other news, a largish earthquake registering 8.8, or nearly 100 times the strength of the one that shook Haiti, struck the coast of Chile this month, killing perhaps 500 people.  The response of the government of Chile was much better than the response of the government of Haiti, (as was, apparently the infrastructure of Chile) which is, of course not saying much.  Consequently, Chile endured little deprivation as a result of the massive earthquake, while Haiti is still trying to deal with the disaster, almost a year later.

The mess over the recalls of Toyota continued this month as the CEO of the company, Toyoda-San (that’s not a joke:  his name really is Toyoda) is required to come to Washington to confess his sins against a few American drivers out of the tens of millions who drive Toyotas with no problems whatsoever.  This political Kabuki may seem rather ridiculous, especially given the support than most of those same people who were demanding a public confession from Toyoda-san have shown his company in past years.  You can’t support business on one hand, and then to score political points, chastise the same business that you helped, no, encouraged to cut corners on the other hand.  Needless to say, a fairly shameless display of pandering all around.  Toyota soon began to recall millions of vehicles to fix them, whether they needed it or not.  Because that’s the way the Japanese do things.  They say sorry and then they fix things.

Charlie Wilson and Alexander Haig, two bastards, both died this month.

March

The first woman to win an Academy Award for directing a Movie, Kathryn Bigalow, won an Academy Award for directing a movie this month.  So the next “first”:  First African American Woman over the age of 25 but under the age of 50 to win an Academy Award for directing a film.  I didn’t see her movie, and really have no interest in seeing it, despite its multiple awards.  The reason is that I heard from EOD that this is not the way the dispose of unexploded ordinance.  The process was, shall we say “sexxed up” for Hollywood.

The Health Care bill, correctly known as “The Affordable Health Care Act” but derisively called ObamaCare by a bunch of idiots, was passed into law this month.  The entire process of building and passing this legislation goes to show that if you use big words that people don’t quite understand there will always be some asshole who comes along and happily “explains” it to them in a way that makes you look like a Marxist gerontocidal maniac.  The bill, which promises “big things” to come does nothing to address the primary problem which it set out to address: which is cutting costs of health provision.  As noted by NPR, within minutes of its passage, no fewer than 13 states’ district attorneys, all arguing states’ rats, filed suits against it in their respective jurisdictions to try to use the courts to nullify the law.  The problem is that none of these have been able to show damage (a key component in the determination of judicial standing), given that most of the provisions of the bill won’t take effect until 2014- well after the Mayan calendar runs out and we are all incinerated in December of 2012.  This fact was conveniently omitted when Republicans spent the rest of the year running against the proposals that they had originally proposed, and which were put into the bill in a vain attempt to get a single Republican to vote for it.

In world events:  Korea attacks a Korean coastal patrol ship, killing 46 Koreans.  Korea of course denied the action, though an independent investigation laid the blame at their feet.  They used the markings found on the conveniently discovered wreckage of an exploded torpedo to make their determination that Korea was responsible.  Heightened tensions between Puppet Korea and Puppet Korea followed, with nuclear threat hanging over the discussion.

Corey Haim and Robert Culp both died this month.  That’s kind of odd.  The only other thing that these two men had in common was that they were both white actors.

April

Riots in Kyrgyzstan result in the fleeing of the anti-American President and the replacement of his administration by the opposition.  The only reason Americans care is because this change of administration coincides with American efforts to deepen our war against the people of Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan had already once tried (unsuccessfully) to close our airbase there.

In the middle of this slow news month, A massive volcanic eruption on a mountain with an incredibly unwieldy Scandinavian name (we’ll call it Mount Bjork, for short) in Iceland basically shuts down travel to and from Europe.  Stranded Americans are predictably annoyed that pilots won’t jeopardize the lives of passengers and crew to get them home for the long Easter holiday.  Luckily, perhaps, for most of us “stuck” in America, the only people put off by this volcanic explosion are the infinitesimally small percentage of our population which can afford to fly to and travel in Europe.  Most Americans’ lives are entirely unaffected by the volcano. 

And while we’re discussing environmental damage caused by smoke, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform off the Louisiana coast caught on fire and subsequently sunk this month, causing a massive oil spill that leaked an insane amount of crude oil (200 million gallons by official estimates) into the Gulf of Mexico.  11 people died in the accident, and many pristine beaches were marred with tarballs, but the biggest damage came to the commercial fishing industry, which was put on ice during the spill.  As soon as the first spark ignited, and the platform burst into flames, you could almost hear the lawyers prepping up for the cases that they would soon be litigating. 

But this disaster did have some of its funny moments:  For example, the effete CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, complained that he was not satisfied with how the progress on capping the well was going, using the ill-timed words “I’d like to have my life back” (followed with an implicit “Thank you”.) And then, following the example of Toyoda-San, he was called before some Congressional committee to do some explaining.   Unlike Mr Toyoda, who is perhaps the exemplar of grace in political theater, Hayward instead acted like an American would:  he spent the better part of a day stonewalling and shifting blame and parsing language, and it was rather surprising to me that the Congressmen took such offense to this.  (Most congressmen did anyway:  Apparently Joe Barton from Texas felt the need to apologize to BP for the way it was being shaken down by the Obama Administration.  This action scored him political points which earned him re-election in November.)    Hayward was subsequently replaced when it was determined that he was undermining the PR campaign launched to make up for him (by attending a yacht race on a “day off”.)

Finally, in this month, the Arizona law called SB1070 was passed into law, demonstrating that either the people in Arizona are incredibly racist, or the state is attempting to build a new type of Jim Crow in the US.  The law, ridiculously called the Papers Act by detractors, permits local police officers to do the job of Federal agents who are charged with enforcing immigration law, but according to Arizona, aren’t doing that job well enough.  Any police officer who suspects that a person is in the country illegally can request to see the visa of the person they suspect, and if the person can’t produce that document, they are taken into custody for violation of the law.  Supporters of the law fail to point out that it is impossible to close the boarder of a state which is separated from another country by an incredibly inhospitable desert.  They also over emphasize the amount of criminality of the people who are coming into the state.  The result is, of course, an overreaction, but the fact is that the law was passed, and it was supported 3-1 by the people of the state of Arizona, or at least those who cared to voice their opinion on the matter.  This fact of course does nothing to stem the general alienation of the Latino Community from the Republican Party, a fact which has already been noted in elections in Nevada and California.

Malcolm MacLaren died this month.  And now, I guess Punk is finally dead.  Sorry Exploited.

May

The Greek debt crisis, which began at the end of April, spread into this month, as the Greek government, controlled as it was by socialists, announced austerity programs, which of course gives the cynical US Right yet another data point in their “Failure of Socialism” data set, even though it should be more correctly described as a failure of market liberalism.  Unfortunately for Greece, regardless of US political debates, massive and destructive riots followed, and Greece is still no better off now than they were seven months ago.  Later in this year, Ireland would follow Greece into austerity.  Long (relatively speaking anyway) hailed by hardcore market liberals as an example of the power and benefits of the market, capitalism proved to be ultimately unsustainable when built on a country whose only real resource is its people.  Capitalism is demonstrated to be ultimately speculative, much to the chagrin of the EU, who has to bail out both of these economies to keep their currency afloat.

In Thailand, a badly coordinated protest against military dictatorship ended predictably in a military crackdown and slaughter of dozens of people in the streets of Bangkok.  More than 2000 people were injured.  The revolution was called off.

A flotilla, bent on defying one of the pre-eminent military forces in the world attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.  They may have been justified in the attempt, but it is ridiculous to think that Israel was just going to let them through.  Consequently, the death of the nine people as a result of Israel stopping this flotilla can be charged to the provocation of the flotilla trying to break the blockade.

In the US, the TEA Party was well on its way to upsetting the GOP establishment.  TEA Partiers won primaries against the candidates preferred by GOP insiders in Kentucky and Utah.  These threats from the so called “conservative right” ousted others throughout the country, most notably in Delaware and Alaska, where the GOP candidate as picked by the rightwingers who vote in Republican primaries actually lost the election because they were too far out.  The one who won the primary in Utah, Sharron Angle was notably an opponent of water fluoridation, and the one who eventually lost in Alaska, Sarah Palin’s prodigy Joe Miller (seriously, who would elect a dude named Joe Miller to Senate?  Talk about uninspiring) lost to the person he defeated in the primaries, Lisa Murkowski, who ran a successful write in campaign.  This marks the second time in the history of the US that a write in campaign produced a winner in a national level election.  Some TEA Party favorites did eventually get elected, where they were promptly co-opted by the GOP and shown that a candidate can have all sorts of great ideas when on the campaign trail, but Washington DC itself is not conducive to great ideas.  In other words, so sorry, TEA Partiers:  Your men and women are no different than any other politicians who has to be popularly elected.  Looks like you all weren’t so special after all.

In this month, Gary Coleman died of a brain hemorrhage.  In honor of the man, “What you talkin’ bout Willis?”  Lynn Redgrave and Dennis Hopper both joined him in the ground.

June

This month was dominated by the World Cup.  Being an American, I have to ask who cares?  The rest of the world will likely have an answer for me, but just so you know, football is played on a field 120 yards long, with a pointed oval shaped ball, by overweight and over-testosteronated men in tights.  And there is no such thing as a free kick in foot ball.  Thank you very much, I rest my case.  Incidentally, Spain won the World Cup of Soccer, beating the Netherlands.  The US lost in the first round of the finals, to Ghana, so there was really not a lot we had to pay attention to, unless we were Spanish, Dutch, or, as the case might actually be, both.  The event itself was supposed to be South Africa’s event:  This was overshadowed by the apparently lousy refereeing, even though the beneficiaries of the supposedly lousy calls were not lining up to complain.

In the US, the top military commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, was relieved of command after making disparaging remarks about Obama’s advisers and the Vice President of the US in a Rolling Stone interview.  The firing of McChrystal, which represents a severe breech of discipline and military protocol, nonetheless predictably drew sharp criticism from rightists in the GOP, (most notably John McCain) who seem to forget that the officers of the military serve at the pleasure of the President of the US.  The President of the US is at the top of the chain of command, and if the President adopts a policy that military men do not like, this is too bad.  The military carries out all lawful orders, regardless of what they happen to think about it.  Apparently the GOP believes that the President of the US needs to ask the military if they will do this or that, especially if the President happens to be from a Party that the GOP believes lacks testicular fortitude to continue to make war the way he is supposed to.  Or we could just chalk it all up to more political theater.  Obama subsequently one-upped the hawks on the right by putting their beloved David Petraeus in charge.  We didn’t hear anything more about Obama’s firing of McChrystal after this.

Rue McClanahan and Senator Robert Byrd both died this month as well.

July

Massive floods in Pakistan kill 2000 people and ruin the lives of tens of millions.  Similar to the situation in Haiti, this natural disaster reveals how bad governance can exacerbate an already horrible situation.  The government staunchly attempted to defend itself against allegations that it was not up to the challenge of dealing with the crisis, nor the economic damage done to agriculture and industry in the country.

As if it wasn’t bad enough for Pakistan, this month marked the massive release of secret documents on the site called Wikileaks.  Debate still continues over the implications of the release of tens of thousands of secret documents with zero context to a public which is largely ignorant.  But most damaging in these documents is evidence which supposedly shows that Pakistan is not entirely on board with US plans to maintain war in Afghanistan and expand the war to mountain regions of Pakistan.  In fact, these documents supposedly show that Pakistan has been actively resisting American efforts to oust the Taliban from the mountains of Pakistan.  Pakistan, for its part fell all over itself to insist that the US has no better friend in the region, though apparently dissident sections of the Pakistani government are acting either entirely or partially on their own in support of US enemies in the region.  So the documents supposedly show that either Pakistan is not really on the US’ side in the region, or a part of their government apparatus is not on the US’s side.  Either way, this does not bode well for the Pakistani government, in the eyes of the US.  Wikileaks would later go on and publish thousands of copies of stolen diplomatic “cables” which inform the world exactly what our diplomats think of them, but tell us nothing that a reasonably bright undergrad at any generic 4 year institution who studies botany doesn’t already know.

Harvey Pekar died this month.  They made a movie about that guy a few years back.  It was strange.

August

Combat operations in Iraq officially ended, and American soldiers, sailors, Marines and Airmen began returning home.  Mission accomplished?  Not quite.  50 thousand US troops remain in Iraq, supposedly to be withdrawn by December 2011, if all goes well, and the generals allow it.  Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan still continues, with practically no end in sight.

This month, according to the World Health Organization, apparently the H1N1 pandemic, which terrified so many millions of people, officially ended.  According to WHO statistics, this pandemic, which was supposed to be the end of the world and kill all the people in it, killed a grand total of 18000 people, or 4% of the normal number of people killed by the regular flu every year.  As was noted on Wikipedia, The Times of London has the WHO as saying that its handling of the epidemic was a waste of money.  The WHO began an investigation into whether or not it had scared people unnecessarily.  Drug companies were implicated in the over-hype and findings on this question have predictably not been released.

In the Atacama desert in northern Chile, a gold mine collapses, trapping thirty-three miners inside.  To underscore the fundamental soundness of the public infrastructure of Chile, which was witnessed earlier in the year, Chile organizes a massive rescue effort.  A week after the mine collapses, the miners inside the mine are discovered to still be alive, and in good spirits.  They will live underground for more than two months following the collapse of the mine, with food and water eventually provided from above.  69 days of darkness ends when, under the watching eyes of much of the world, the miners are themselves extracted from the mine in mid October, one by one, in the process teaching the world the “Chi-chi-chi Le-le-le” soccer chant. One of the miner’s spouse and girlfriend meet at the mine site, and the world is treated to a bit of real life tele-novella.

Patricia Neal died this month.  if you’ve seen anything she’s been in you are a true movie buff.  Also dead: the Alaskan crook and graft-monger Ted Stevens, who was lionized immediately after dying by Republicans looking for an alternative to Palin.

September

The Election campaign takes center stage as The Republicans unveil their “Pledge to America” which is roundly mocked, even by some Republicans, as a less eloquent and MUCH less specific version of the Contract with America which preceded the 1994 midterm election.  It is hard to take seriously a proposal which has almost nothing of substance to it, which consists primarily of euphemistic rhetoric about policies which have been tried and “refudiated” (a non-term which was coined by Sarah Palin in July, was subsequently “refudiated” and then endorsed by Palin herself claiming that it put her in the same league with other such linguistic inventors like Will Shakespeare.) by economists, historians, and people with an ounce of common sense.  And yet because we Americans have an excessively short political memory, we bought it, as if it were a shiny 1979 Ford Pinto.

Republicans run interminable ads complaining about this fictional creature called Obama Pelosi, and Democrats run ads claiming that Republicans support strange gods like Aqua Buddha.  Lies and half truths abound, and people, especially those to the right of the normal Republican median voter, get fired up about the election and become bound and determined to turn the Democrats out of office, for no other reason than they are Democrats.  Meanwhile, many Democrats become resolved to sit out the election, to punish Democrats for not taking principled stands on bills like Health Care reform.  Socialists, who provide intelligent analysis the entire time, would cry for the inane election process, if they could stop for a second from laughing at the absurdity of it all.  Meanwhile, Libertarians swallow the faux-populist rhetoric of the TEA Party, only to be disappointed in early 2011 by the mass sell out which is waiting for them.

On the 26th of this month, the website you are currently reading, creepsleepy.org, was launched.  As of current writing we have acquired 1056 followers, a mere 3 months later.  And these are perhaps the 1056 most intelligent, well-informed people in the entire country.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, a massive mudslide kills seven and causes the disappearance of hundreds.  The disaster is hardly reported on American television, which is obsessed with discussing Christine O’Donnell’s forays into witchcraft and refusal to admit to masturbation a decade previous.

Eddie Fisher and Tony Curtis did not live to see October or the Christin O’Donnell witch commercial.

October

O’Donnell releases the commercial which sums up the absurdity of the 2010 midterm election.  The laugh riot and several parodies, including this one and this one and this one followed (the last one is reminiscent of this one…) 

In somewhat related news, it was revealed in October that several banks had been automatically foreclosing on a number of people.  While many of those people were speculators, the millions of automatically signed foreclosure orders certainly caught a few honest people who were attempting to take advantage of the government’s programs aimed at keeping people in their homes.  As a result, following the lead of Bank of America, several major lenders suspended foreclosures while they review their policies.  Foreclosures were eventually resumed, but in November, foreclosures were down 21% over the previous month.  Home repossessions dropped 28% in November.  What a surprise.

Curaçao and Sint Maarten become two newly autonomous countries under the Kingdom of the Netherlands.  This one-two punch for the Netherlands (the first hit coming with the loss in the World Cup of Soccer) proves to be very popular with fans of the classic game Sid Meyer’s Pirates!, who declare “Hey!  We know where those places are!”

An 7.7 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra kills 400 people.  This earthquake was roughly seventy times as strong as the one that hit Haiti.  The death toll is a far cry from the number killed in the tsunami that hit Banda Ache in Indonesia.  Associated with the earthquake is a volcano that apparently continues to erupt, has killed an additional 240 people and forced many to evacuate the area.

Gregory Isaacs and Nestor Kirchner both kicked off this month.  Isaacs was a Jamaican musician and Kirchner was the President of Argentina.  Tom Bosley of Happy Days fame also died.

November

The aspirations of many millions of idiots were realized this month as the Republicans, who had been roundly tossed out of many an office around the country in 2008 were welcomed back into power as the ostensible saviors of the US polity.  What was initially called a “shellacking” by the President and hailed as a mandate by giddy Republicans was actually misinterpreted, by apparently everyone but Creepy Sleepy, who correctly called it a referendum on Pelosi.  Turns out that the Republicans only won among the majority of the population who turned out to vote, which wasn’t even a majority of the population of the country.  More people chose to stay home or vote for the Dems than voted for Republicans.  The effect was to punish the weak willed Democrats for failing the progressive base on health care.  After the election, the politicians all said that they heard the electorate loud and clear.  While nobody believed them, apparently they weren’t far off the mark.  The post election lame duck season saw the passage of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the START treaty, benefits for 9-11 survivors, and expanded unemployment insurance for those who can’t find work.  In return, the GOP got to continue tax cuts and they get to have the majority in the House come spring.  Turns out that the Dems got a pretty good deal.  But before we start thinking that a new bi-partisan era has dawned, the passage of that legislation reflects the removal of constraints that re-election places on some Democrats.  Since they will not have to answer to anyone, given that they are on the way out.  See:  when Democrats stop helping the GOP to defeat the President’s agenda, the GOP stops feeling so bold, and actually feels the lack of cover that conservative democrats offer them.  Consequently, they actually feel like they should probably cast some votes for some things.  All I care is that the TEA Party is going to know what frustration is when they see how the folks they places so much hope and trust in turn out to be just like the people they thought they were replacing.  I get sort of a perverse enjoyment at seeing the right frustrated.

In more important news, Scientists trapped anti-matter for the first time.  And strangely enough, we didn’t turn into a black hole, the way some predicted we would.  What the ramifications of this will be, I am not smart enough to understand.  But I do know that the anti-matter only existed for a sixth of a second and then vanished, leaving the scientists to say “It was here, I swear.  You didn’t see it?”

A human stampede in Cambodia kills 347 people.  This is only slightly less than the total number of people who died when Tickle Me Elmo arrived at stores in the US in December of 1996.

In related news, Korea shells an Island claimed by Korea, which is thought to provide a casus belli in Korea.  This is only the latest and most serious provocation between Korea and Korea, and Puppet Korea declares that this unacceptable behavior from Puppet Korea must stop.  It does, in December, as Korea assumes responsibility for its actions, and Korea offers talks.  The actions produced ripples in global financial markets, and some speculate that Korea’s motivation for shelling the island was the accession to the Dictatorship of Korea by Kim Jong-un.  Apparently he feels that in his first few months in office he has to shank someone in order to establish that he is nobody to mess with, demonstrating that Korea is indeed just one big prison.

Dino DeLaurentis and Leslie Nielson both died this month.  Please, don’t call either of them Shirley.

December

Don’t ask, Don’t tell is repealed, ending more than a decade of institutionalized segregation of the US military.  What this means is that there is still a very long row to hoe in the military before gays are actually accepted as servicemen and women the way straight people are.  But this is the beginning of the process of allowing gay men and women to serve openly, as they are, and to allow their partners to have the same right as the partners of straight people have.  Most servicemembers report that allowing people who are gay to serve honestly would probably improve morale, though if you ask the “generals” they say just the opposite.  SecDef Gates said it best that he cannot think of a single decision where military members are consulted on policy or the law before a law is passed:  Should we let them vote on whether or not they have to go back to Iraq or whether or not they get x amount of months between deployment? he asked.  Of course not.  Military members are told to do something and if they don’t do it, they are insubordinate.  Asking them their opinions on this matter is equally ridiculous, even though this is precisely what social conservatives and Republicans seeking to score points with this group are demanding.

The year ends with a lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice, making it officially the darkest day since the first half of the 17th century.

Santa arrives and distributes toys to everyone.  My mother came for a visit, and that was difficult.  My International relations class finishes with a non-curbed class average of 90.5.

Creepy Sleepy hits 1000 followers.

The year ends with a lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice, making it officially the darkest day since the first half of the 17th century.

This month, Richard Holbrook, Blake Edwards, Captain Beefheart (surprisingly, it took a guy with a name like beef heart this long to die) and Teena Marie all died.  Of these four, I think Teena Marie will be missed the most.

Thank you for reading this.  I hope your 2010 was less eventful and more mundane than all of this.  I thank Wikipedia, Yahoo news and NPR for the source material for this retrospective.  The analysis, of course is my own.

Happy New Year everyone.  We’ll see you in 2011.