As fall term draws to a close, so does 2004. For those suffering from short memories and, more indulgently, to relieve feelings of whatever you call nostalgia for events too recent to fit in the category, I present a brief history of 2004:
January 4: (Hopefully) outgoing pop princess Britney Spears spontaneously marries childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander. Sound bytes about the well-considered nuptials (which were soon annulled anyway) somehow turn into an argument about the legalization of gay marriage. (The reader should be warned here that this column is less a briefing of important social, scientific or political events, but rather a manifest of journalistic flotsam of a year gone oft awry.)
January 19: Former middle-of-the-pack candidate John Kerry, D-Mass., wins the Iowa Democratic caucuses, presaging a heated primary season and a divisive general election campaign. Ignoring Kerry’s electoral fait accompli, Oregon holds its cash-burning primary four months later (“Pointless primaries,” ODE, Mar. 5).
February 3: The Dukes of Hazzard updates to the post-Cold War era as the U.S. Coast Guard intercepts nine Cuban migrants trying to reach Florida in a seafaring 1959 Buick.
February 25: The year’s most controversial film, “The Passion of the Christ,” opens in the United States. Despite some fears, the film sparks little or no anti-Semitism. However, a Wichita, Kan., woman meets her maker, maybe prematurely, during the climatic crucifixion scene,
when she collapses and dies of a heart attack.
March 9: The spirit of youthful indiscretion folds in on itself as a judge in spring break hot spot Panama City, Fla., ruled that film of women under 18 voluntarily exposing their breasts for “Girls Gone Wild” — a film series depicting young women removing clothing — does not constitute child pornography.
April 14: The Saint Petersburg Democratic Club tops the later Swift Boat ads to claim the title of the least sensical campaign ad of the season, when they place an ad in area paper the Gabber (Gulfport, Fla.) saying of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, ‘This is one of our bad days,’ and pull the trigger.”
June 21: Privately funded SpaceShipOne successfully hits the (somewhat arbitrarily designated) 62-mile boundary of space. Meanwhile, nonsense on earth continues unabated.
June 24: History reminds us of its kinship to irony when the gun used by Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand is found in, of all places, a monastery.
August 20: Asa Hutchinson, under secretary for Border & Transportation Security, apologizes for a mix-up that delays Sen. Ted Kennedy, the other D-Mass., at airline gates three times on suspicion that he was a terrorist.
August 24: Japan issues a deportation order for chess great Bobby Fischer. The U.S. has sought Fischer since 1992, when he threatened the potency of American interests: Fischer violated economic sanctions by visiting Yugoslavia and winning $3 million by playing a board game well.
September 10: Bloggers pick apart memos “obtained” by CBS that negatively portrayed President Bush’s embattled Vietnam-era National Guard service. The nation spends some time mulling the trustworthiness of media, but eventually settles on a three-week conversation about the minutiae of 1970s typesetting technology.
October 21: University of Florida scientist Thomas DeMarse reveals that he has grown a network of rat neurons and trained it to fly an airplane simulator. No word from the pilots’ unions so far.
November 19: NBA 2003-04 Defensive Player of Year Ron Artest gets defensive, attacking a fan he believed threw a cup at him. That and a related on-court brawl, the biggest in recent memory in the league, land players suspensions varying from one to 73 games.

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