By Clint Younts.
I am back out on the Crow’s Nest unwinding after a whirlwind of a Christmas, sipping on a gift from the kids who know what to give a dad who has everything. Christmas with two adorable grandkids has a way of zapping the energy from ya. There’s all that shopping in the toy aisles, and then hauling so many toys to the truck that it takes three trips. Wrapping those gifts required endless hours and countless trees before they were all stacked to the ceiling. It’s amazing how fast a three-year old can shred a pyramid of wrapped boxes. There was so much paper on the floor, we lost our baby granddaughter for a few hectic minutes.
After all the unveiling, it was time for grandpa to work at getting the toys unbound from the toy factories’ sadistic packaging. I can cut steel pipe and acres of cedar trees, but give me one of those toys packed in a plastic casing that would undoubtedly survive a nuclear explosion and there will be some bloodshed. And once the plastic is off and my fingers are bandaged, I have to grab another tool to cut the zip-ties that keep the toy strapped to the package. I suspect there is a special place in hell reserved for a bunch of Taiwanese toy makers.
So now, stretched out on some patio furniture and trying to twist open my medicinal elixir with Band-Aids on every finger, my mind is again searching through the egg nog fog for the light at the end of the tunnel. I am aware that there are literate people across this land who yearn for my astute observations over the past year and some preposterous predictions for the upcoming days of 2014. As much as I would love to just sit here and decompress, I feel obligated to reveal my list of “Stuff That Could Happen in 2014” to all my loyal readers. Now due to all the senseless hullaballoo over recent statements from the patriarch of the Robertson clan, I should say that this newspaper should not be held responsible for any predictions forecasted in my column, mainly due to the fact that this prognosticator is known to write under the influence.
In the world of entertainment, there will be a new television show to air in the fall of 2014. With the end of the extremely successful series Breaking Bad, a spin-off has been created starring Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford as a drug-crazed government official who is hell-bent on destroying his own little world. Tentatively titled Breaking Wind, it will appear on A&E sometime after his release from a Canadian rehab center.
On the music scene, two icons of pop music, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus join forces and go on a worldwide tour, performing in front of millions of tone-deaf adolescents. The “Jerk and Twerk Tour” will cover four continents and make a ton of money for the teen idols, but the tour will abruptly come to an end when the two pop stars are arrested in Singapore on marijuana possession.
In the world of country music, Garth Brooks comes out of semi-retirement and begins his tour. Being a true patriot, he donates the proceeds from his first month of concerts to the United States government, totally erasing the federal debt.
In sports, the Dallas Cowboys fire their head coach at the end of the 2013 season, and club owner/GM Jerry Jones hires Mack Brown who promptly trades Tony Romo for Colt McCoy and signs Ricky Williams as their starting running back. After a 0-8 start in 2014, Jones sells the Cowboys to a Saudi sheik and turns his stadium into a shopping mall.
At the winter Olympics, United States ambassador, Billie Jean King, creates quite a stir when she publicly announces that she has become engaged to the star center of Russia’s female basketball team, Katriana “Bronco” Bronkovitzky.
Over in North Korea, supreme wackadoodle, Kim Jung Un, appoints Dennis Rodman as his chief advisor, and a day later, shoots the ex-NBA star in the leg after losing a game of beer pong to the tattooed athlete.
Back in the good ol’ USA, we have some major changes in our government. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, or ACA, has to undergo some considerable tweeking when policy holders read the fine print at the bottom of the enrollment form that read “This policy may be terminated and considered null and void if policy owner actually gets sick.” A new version of Obamacare is created and named the Comparatively Affordable Care Act, or CACA.
In 2014, eight more states, including Texas, legalize marijuana. Here in Texas, Rick Perry appoints Willie Nelson and Matthew McConaughey as the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
To save tax dollars, the Dept. of Motor Vehicles will stop taking unflattering photos for your driver license. Applicants are now required to supply a selfie when applying for a license.
As social networking and texting spreads throughout this country as the major form of communication, the English language as we know it today becomes supplanted by a new vernacular that will consist of acronyms, abbreviations and misspelled words. Already in use by millions of Americans in this Electronic Age, Congress will declare “Twitterese” as the official language of America.
Alright, seeing the near future has gotten me all depressed. My Christmas joy has dried up and this bottle of Lone Star is also bone dry. Perhaps my vision is blurred a bit from the thin frost on my Ray Bans out here on this chilly deck, but I suspect 2014 will be just as crazy as 2013. But then, if we didn’t have crazy folks in sports, entertainment, government and just north of Hays County, then how would I find something to write about every week?
Clint Younts can be seen cheering on his favorite crazies from his ranch deck. Good thing his cows don’t understand his language.
