A pandemic and a U.S. election happened in 2020, but did anything else happen? The Week has a list of things that happened that might have seemed more important in a more ordinary year.

• The U.S. assassinated a high-ranking official in Iran. This is clearly an act of war. Well, our countries have been involved in a low-intensity war for half a century and it grinds on. Hopefully we can de-escalate in the coming years and make sure nuclear weapons are not involved.
• There was a record-breaking hurricane season, plus some fires and floods. Also, I hadn’t heard this, but parts of the U.S. mid-Atlantic including New York City were classified as humid sub-tropical. Central and north Florida are humid subtropical, but it turns out the criteria are a summer average above 72 degrees F and a winter average above 27 degrees F. A Florida summer vs. a New York or Philadelphia or D.C. summer aren’t really that drastically different, but there is still a drastic difference in winters and just one cold snap can still kill off sensitive vegetation (and hopefully some nasty critters we don’t need.)
• We didn’t discover incontrovertible proof that aliens exist let alone actually talk to any aliens. But the U.S. military admitted it has, and publicly released, videos of unidentified flying objects. Also, some gas was discovered around Venus that some scientists think could be created by life forms. I’ve seen other articles casting significant doubt on this though.
• Astronauts went to space on a private rocket for the first time.
• Some stuff happened in physics with stars and subatomic particles and wormholes. I’m sure it’s important and profound for some reason.
• The article lists the following things that I DO NOT consider news. I guess they didn’t want to be just another “top 10” list, so they padded their list to 17. Planters discontinued their Mr. Peanut mascot (not mentioned is the retirement of the Aunt Jemima brand, which seems slightly more interesting to me. I learned in 2020 that Aunt Jemima was a real person and her descendants have some mixed feelings about the issue.) Kanye West and other third party candidates ran for U.S. President, and nobody noticed. (Thank you Bernie, for not running as a third party candidate. It was the right thing to do. It would be nice to have ranked-choice voting but obviously the parties are going to fight that tooth and nail. I did see yesterday that Pennsylvania is considering open primaries, which would be a small step in the right direction.) Bob Dylan wrote a song (doesn’t interest me personally, but congrats to Bob Dylan for going strong at 79.) Murder hornets. Murder hornets are big scary hornets from Asia that kill a couple people a year, on average. Mosquitoes and ticks kill millions of people every year. Elon Musk had a baby and gave it a weird name (don’t care, doesn’t deserve attention.) Some people got seeds in the mail from China that they didn’t order, and planted them. They were vegetables of some sort and nothing in particular happened beyond that. Kellyanne Conway’s teenage daughter did something or other that attracted attention. Monoliths (just dumb).