I do one of these Baby New Year cartoons every year. It’s a silly cartoon trope that for some reason I still get a kick out of. When I’m cooking up the idea and writing the caption it serves as an opportunity to review the year in pop culture news. I don’t recommend it.
If you thought the pandemic destroyed your sense of time try reading a year-end wrap-up of pop culture. If you had asked me yesterday when the Titan submersible imploded I would have scratched my head and said 2019? It was June. The Burning Man monsoon was in August. The Chinese spy balloon was in February. Taylor Swift is on her third relationship of the calendar year and time has no meaning.
Maybe it’s the disposable nature of events like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg threatening to jiu-jitsu each other that make popular culture an unreliable way to mark time, or maybe I’m just old. I’ll blame the internet, because why not? The online content hose is blasting our temporal lobes 24 hours a day with a constant barrage of YouTube apology videos and royal memoirs, you’re forgiven for not remembering the Gwyneth Paltrow ski-crash trial or when Ariana Grande started dating the guy from the SpongeBob musical.
Wait... King Charles was coronated in May? That can’t be right. Whatever, I need a nap.
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