The Best Recap

So it's a new year, and 2010 was certainly a mixed bag. In my personal life it was pretty great: my family expanded to include a new, ever-cuter niece, two new sisters-in-law and whatever you call the Speaker (Longest-Friend-In-Law? Whatevs). Also, I did a triathlon and baked a couple of fairly impressive cakes.

In world events, things were closer to terrible much of the time. But I'm not going to re-write what's already been said so well, so I'll be a blog slacker and just re-post Dave Barry's year in review.

I should note that I grew up reading Dave Barry's weekly column - when I could wrest it from the clutches of the rest of my family. He made my mom laugh Every. Single. Sunday. for years and years, and I have to thank him for making her almost spit-take her post-church coffee a few times. He made my dad snort a few times, too (Dave Barry is also one of the few people who's made Dad do his patented "running out of breath" laugh, which is very hard to describe, but when my siblings and I try to imitate it we usually just end up running out of breath laughing, ourselves).

I stopped reading his stuff, though, when it started to feel stale. I do think Barry probably ruined a lot of his readers by raising their humor standards to a difficult-to-meet level. This recap just made me love him all over again, though: He's at his best when he's making a reader guffaw about something that is essentially pure tragedy.

I've been reading Gene Weingarten too much lately. I'll write about him later, I'm sure.

Anyway, here is Dave Barry's year in review. I'll have another, way less interesting "Schmei's Year in Review" post in a bit, and then it's so long to 2010, since we're already 6 days in to the new year. I work better when I'm past a deadline, clearly.