That was the year that was: Adios to 2024

It was a stupid year, writes Dave Barry in his annual year in review in the Miami Herald.

"Let’s start with the art world, which over the centuries has given humanity so many beautiful, timeless masterpieces," he writes. This year, "a cryptocurrency businessman paid $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction for a banana. Which he ate." He told the press: ”It’s much better than other bananas.”

For the first half of the year, the nation was menaced by a rerun of the 2020 presidential election, he writes. It was like "a 1970s slasher movie."

"Some teenagers -- played by the major political parties -- are in a creepy house." They "pause by the dark, scary-looking doorway leading down to the basement, and despite the fact that the theater audience — played by the American public— is shouting “DON’T GO DOWN THERE! JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE YOU IDIOTS!”, the teenagers decide to go down into the basement, only to find 'OH GOD NOOOOOO' ...”

President Biden shouts the State of the Union Address, writes Barry. Several hundred members of the Washington press corps independently describe the speech as “fiery.”

In aviation news, a Boeing plane flying from Australia to New Zealand suddenly goes into a nosedive, injuring 50 people. Another Boeing plane, taking off from the San Francisco airport, loses a piece of landing gear. A Boeing spokesperson says that the company, after conducting an in-depth review, has tentatively identified the root cause of the recent problems. “We think it’s gravity,” said the spokesperson. “It seems to be getting worse.”

By June, the Biden re-election campaign "struggles to change the public perception —largely created by videos showing the president looking lost and confused — that the president is sometimes lost and confused," writes Barry. "Democrats insist that these videos are “cheap fakes,” and that in fact Biden is sharp as a tack, but unfortunately the public never sees this because he only exhibits this sharpness when there are no cameras around to capture it, kind of like Bigfoot."

In July, "Biden announces that he’s quitting the race after reassessing the situation and waking up next to the severed head of a thoroughbred racehorse," writes Barry.

Kamala Harris decides to run "on a platform of joy, and being joyful, and a general vibe of joyfulness, as well as a set of policies to be specified later that will take America in a new, completely different direction, in stark contrast to the policies of whoever is running the country now."

We know how that worked out.

"In other news, a horrific crime on a New York City sidewalk leads to a national conversation about the U.S. healthcare system," he writes. This "reveals that a truly disturbing number of people believe the following three things: 1. The healthcare system is bad. 2. Therefore, murder is OK. 3. Especially if the murderer is cute."

As we await the giant ball dropping in Times Square on New Year's Eve, Barry concludes, we like to think that "the people gazing up at it will all be united, if only for a moment, by a common hope — a hope shared by the millions of us watching on television — specifically, the hope that the giant ball was not manufactured by the Boeing Corp."