Fidget spinners were… so 2017

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/01/2018 (3109 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s the eighth day of 2018, and all you hip and happening kids know exactly what that means, don’t you?

It means you need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourselves the following insightful question: am I ready to rock in 2018?

Well, are you? Excuse me! You ARE ready to rock in this bright shiny new year?! Ha ha ha! Excuse me while I laugh in a derisive manner, because the mere fact you think you are ready to rock simply proves you could not be less ready.

Fortunately, help is on the way today in the form of Uncle Doug’s much-beloved Annual Super Cool Guide to What’s In and What’s Out for the New Year.

This is the informative and educational feature I do every year, except when I forget, which is what I did this year until my wife reminded me while I was lying on the couch watching sports highlights on the big-screen TV and eating Haagen-Dazs directly from the container.

Anyway, the new year is not getting any younger — and you are not getting any hipper — so let’s get started…

OUT: Fidget spinners

IN: Whirling dervishes

BECAUSE: Fidget spinners are a mind-numbing, ball-bearing-powered toy that, during most of 2017, you would typically see spinning between the thumb and forefinger of kids, teens and adults with way too much time on their hands. It supposedly provides a pleasant sensory experience, kind of like sitting on the floor when you were a baby and spinning the lids to your mom’s metal pots, but as far as we can see it was kind of like a hula hoop for people with only a handful of functioning brain cells. Whirling dervishes, in contrast, are people in Turkey who perform a super cool spinning dance that represents man’s spiritual ascent through mind and love to truth. Yeah, we’ll go with that second thing.

OUT: Trump tweets

IN: Tasty treats

BECAUSE: According to CNN (and if you are yelling “FAKE NEWS!” at this point, maybe you should skip to the sports pages), U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted more than 2,300 times in little less than a year in office. The Donald has said his use of social media is not just presidential, it’s — and we’ll quote him here, “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” We especially loved when, without any evidence at all, he tweeted: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory.” Which is why, instead of following him in the Twitterverse, we are going to devote more time to gobbling doughnuts and chocolate bars and yummy candy, because if you are going to ingest empty calories, they might as well be delicious. If that doesn’t tap your wires, nothing will.

OUT: Swedish death cleaning

IN: Swedish massage

BECAUSE: You couldn’t go within 100 kilometres of an IKEA outlet last year without hearing about Swedish Death Cleaning, which has something to do with taking a hard look at all your stuff and imagining what will happen to it when you shuffle off this mortal coil, so to speak. If you think an object will give someone joy, you keep it around, or just hand it over to them before you join the Choir Invisible. Sounds like 20 pounds of fun in a 10-pound designer bag, right? Instead of sorting through all your junk, wouldn’t you rather lie on a table and let a person of Scandinavian origin hammer you between the shoulder blades? Also, they make wonderful meatballs, which always rub us the right way.

OUT: Rock stars dropping dead

IN: Rock stars dropping out of coconut trees

BECAUSE: We can’t take another tragic year wherein we lose such beloved rock ’n’ roll icons as Tom Petty, David Cassidy, Malcolm Young, Fats Domino and Gregg Allman. The thing about iconic rock stars is they are supposed to live forever, not trash rooms in the Big Hotel in the Sky. Call us sentimental, but we’d like to go back to a simpler time, namely 2006, when the worst thing we can recall is Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree on a private island near Fiji. Yeah, those were the good old days.

OUT: Sexual harassment

IN: Sexual healing

BECAUSE: Unless you have been hiding in a drain pipe for the past 12 months, you have heard more than enough about disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who is facing so many allegations of sexual misconduct that it snowballed into a global phenomenon that rolled over a host of powerful men who abused their power over women. Maybe this year men will get the message and we can sit around listening to the classic 1982 hit (No. 233 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time), wherein Marvin Gaye sings: “And when I get that feelin’, I want sexual healin’.” On the other hand, maybe we should just talk to our human resources department.

OUT: Unicorn anything

IN: Corn on the cob

BECAUSE: No matter where you went in 2017, you ran into some manner of unicorn-themed product, everything from multi-coloured unicorn fingernails and ice-cream and cupcakes and toast to Starbucks’ Unicorn drink, which was a sort of pink-hued nightmare that, if we were to drop it on our enemies, would send them into a sugar-induced coma. It makes more sense to us to celebrate good old corn on the cob, because nothing is more delicious when slathered with butter. Except, possibly, lobster. Or our fingers.

OUT: Torn jeans

IN: Spliced genes

BECAUSE: Really? What is wrong with you young people? Look, when your parents were young they wore hole-filled jeans that made them look like hoboes. Still think they’re cool? We mean the jeans, not your parents. So stop wearing tattered trousers, and head to a laboratory where you can splice a few random genes together and create some new superfood or monster that will make you a ton of spare cash. Also, call your mom.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca