By Staff
Michiana made "Troubling Times," Rolling Stone's year-end "roundup of the year's most outrageous and disturbing news," for thieves stealing oven doors, repackaging them in Wal-Mart boxes and selling them on the street for $500 as flat-screen TVs.
Vice President Dick Cheney set the tone for 2006 when he accidentally shot friend Harry Whittington in the face in February while hunting quail.
Pluto, kicked to the curb after 76 years as a planet, proved no job is safe.
And Paul McCartney didn't listen to us fans about Heather Mills.
The roar was restored in the Year of the Tiger as surprising Detroit survived the Yankees, but contrary to 1968, lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the least-watched World Series.
Pass the envelopes, please.
It's time for the 24th annual edition of the Lefties, which pays homage to the original incarnation of this column as "The Sinistral Side" because I'm left-handed.
Man of the year: John Murtha, one of the military's staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill, choked back tears in late 2005 as he declared, "The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It's time to bring the troops home."
Republicans thumped the Pennsylvania congressman as a "defeatist.
Murtha, 74, connected with the public's growing unease, however, and people cheered him as he walked through airports.
His party began embracing his view and called for the administration to start withdrawing troops.
After they won control of the House, Democrats finally acknowledged Murtha's help in turning the midterms into a war referendum.
We're winning the war on ice: Alaskan climate change depletes food supplies and turns polar bears into cannibals, forcing them to kill and eat each other to survive.
Warmer Caribbean seas caused a record loss of coral reefs.
Link found between mental illness and support for President Bush: According to an analysis of psychiatric outpatients in Connecticut, the more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush in 2004.
"Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader," said researcher Christopher Lohse. "if your world is very mixed up, there's something very comforting about someone telling you, 'This is how it's going to be.' "
Sit down, stand-ups: Michael Richards, Sen. John Kerry.
Northwest Airlines slashed workers' wages trying to escape bankruptcy. To help employees cope with making ends meet, the airline distributed "101 Ways to Save Money."
Along with such helpful tips as "cut the kids' hair yourself" and "make your own baby food" was "don't be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."
Science project of the year: Jasmine Roberts, a seventh grader at Benito Middle School in Tampa, Fla., compared ice from self-service machines at five fast-food restaurants to water from the bathroom toilets. She found three of the five ice samples were dirtier than the toilet water, which contained lower levels of E. coli bacteria.
Song of the year: "When You Were Young," The Killers.
Best movie I saw: "Thank You for Smoking."
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "I think I'm in my middle years. I've got no retirement plans."
– Bob Dylan. "Modern Times" debuted at No. 1. He became an XM radio host, cast Scarlett Johansson in a video for "When the Deal Goes Down," sang "Someday Baby" in a cowboy hat for an iPod ad, inspired Cate Blanchett to dress in drag for the film "I'm Not There" and saw Twyla Tharp attempt to take his songs to Broadway in "The Times They Are a-Changin', which closed after 28
performances.
"(Fox News gives viewers) both sides of the story – the president's side and the vice president's side."
– Stephen Colbert, 42, with President Bush seated five feet away at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The host of "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central also applauded the president's disdain for reality: "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday." Colbert plays a character who is a vain and blustery pundit. The satirist coined a new word, "truthiness," to reflect our desire to believe what we want instead of facts.
"Actually, I thought we were going to do fine yesterday – shows what I know."
– President Bush on the midterm elections
"Before we went into Iraq in March of 2003, somebody should have just asked the basic questions. Do we know anything about this country? Do we have intelligence sources? The level of ignorance was pathetic."
– Bob Woodward, author of "State of Denial," his third book about the president since 9/11. He reports that as White House chief of staff, Andrew Card fought vainly for 18 months to get Bush and Cheney to replace Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld.
"It is now possible to go about your day in America and consume only what you wish to see and hear … The problem is that there's a lot of information out there that citizens in an informed democracy need to know in our complicated world with U.S. troops on the ground along two major fronts … Does it endanger what passes for the national conversation if we're all talking at once? … The whole notion of 'media' is now much more democratic, but what will the effect be on democracy? The danger might be that we miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we fail to meet the next great challenge … because we are too busy celebrating ourselves and listening to the same tune we already know by heart."
– NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in Time
magazine
Reality confronts Axis of Denial: At his December confirmation hearings to replace Rumsfeld, the first President Bush's CIA chief Robert Gates testified that the United States failed to send enough troops to stabilize Iraq, contradicting years of assertions by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Is the U.S. winning the war?
"No, sir," Gates replied.
"The committee really only had one question," Stephen Colbert said. " 'Are you now or have you ever been Donald Rumsfeld?' He said no."
This year's girl: Rachael Ray, star of four Food Network programs and her own daytime talk show and author of 16 cookbooks, is so hot (and one of Time's 100 most influential people to boot) that she won a poll of 1,000 people asking which of America's famous food entertainers could create the "dessert of their dreams" – and she doesn't even bake!
"I'm proud of my food, and I know it's tasty. But what people seem to like is that I'm an accessible person who's as real as they are," Ray told TV Guide.
Books read: Eight, including "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides, "Marley and Me" by John Grogan, "Take the Cannoli" by Sarah Vowell, "Father Joe" by Tony Hendra, "See Dick and Jen Run," the 2006 Michigan race for governor, by Tim Skubick and "Cell" by Stephen King.
Gone but not forgotten: William Styron, Syd Barrett, Peter Boyle, Lamar Hunt, Ahmet Ertegun, Augusto Pinochet, Billy Preston, Gene Pitney, Wilson Pickett, Proof, Buck Owens, Lou Rawls, Paul Nelson, Coretta Scott King, Shelley Winters, Red Auerbach, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ann Richards, Aaron Spelling, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Lay, Caspar Weinberger, Betty Friedan, Floyd Patterson, Maureen Stapleton, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Altman, Mickey Spillane, Ed Bradley, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, Steve Irwin, Jeane Kilpatrick, James Brown, Gerald R. Ford and Saddam Hussein.
TV: "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Survivor," "The Simpsons."
Almost gone: Fidel Castro in December was too ill to attend his 80th birthday celebration, already delayed four months.
Biggest tour ever: The Rolling Stones grossed $437 million to surpass U2, played for more than 1 million on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and finally played in China. Keith Richards cheated death again falling from a coconut tree in Fiji and the world's most durable rock band in October performed at Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party in New York.
Too famous to care that his 15 minutes are way up: Flavor Flav.
Dance with him: John Hall of Orleans made it to Congress.
End of an era: CBGB, the New York dive where the Ramones and Blondie got their starts, closed Oct. 15.