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Wild cards turned whole year into game of 'Crazy Eights'

Monday, December 29, 2008 9:51 AM EST

As someone born on the eighth day of a month, I was fascinated in 2008 by the figures eight in the most tumultuous year since 1968, when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.

Eight was certainly enough years of the Bush administration, so we tuned in obsessively to the never-ending '08 election.

People working eight days a week couldn't afford gas when it soared north of $4 a gallon.

And don't forget, the Olympics began on 8-8-08 in China.

It was eight days before the election that a jury found Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, 85, guilty of accepting and concealing tens of thousands of dollars in home renovations and gifts. The bringer of the bridge to nowhere and other bacon was voted out.

Swimmer Michael Phelps, Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year, eclipsed Mark Spitz with - that's right - eight gold medals.

SI called 2008 "The Best Year Ever" in sports - not counting Mark Reynolds. The Arizona Diamondbacks' third baseman led the majors in strikeouts (204, an alltime record) and errors (34).

How old was the girl kicked out of an August New Zealand tennis tournament for wearing a hidden earpiece to receive her dad's coaching? Eight!

Eight was also the number of Washington state high school girls who did the right thing at the state track and field championships in Pasco May 23.

When Nicole Cochran was wrongly disqualified, Andrea Nelson, Sarah Lord, Kate Stuart, Sandra Martinez, Annie Dear, Alyssa Andrews and Lyndy Davis reawarded their medals to insist justice be done.

Welcome to the 26th annual Lefties - 2+6=8.

Barack Obama, Time's inevitable Person of the Year, a left-handed smoker, took to heart all that criticism about his thin resume and selected Joe Biden from the Nixon era as his vice president, put the Clinton administration back to work (Hillary as Secretary of State on a resume which already includes Watergate staff attorney, Arkansas first lady, New York senator and first female presidential candidate to win a state primary) and hired the Fed chairman before Alan Greenspan.

Of course, he's using the Lincoln administration as his change model and road and bridge work haven' been mentioned so much since Eisenhower built the interstate highway system.

His 100 days are up and he hasn't even taken office.

What will "Countdown" consist of with a Democrat in the White House?

"We're switching to all Mariah Carey," Keith Olbermann joked in the New York Times.

"Print journalism is not dying, it's committing suicide," said Ted Rall, president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

Jon Stewart read an obituary on "The Daily Show" as the Chicago Tribune filed for Chapter 11, the Christian Science Monitor scuttled its paper product and the Detroit papers reduced home delivery to three days a week. Pasadena, Calif., news jobs were outsourced to India.

Best downsizing: Rolling Stone's new look.

Great moments in live entertainment: Arlo Guthrie, Dogwood Fine Arts Festival, May 17.

I'm really looking forward to 2009. Roger McGuinn's Byrds and John Sebastian's Lovin' Spoonful' have always been two of my favorite Rock and Roll Hall of Famers. In fact, Sebastian at Notre Dame was the first concert I ever attended. I believe in magic and jangly guitar!

Rotary's Golden Trowel award in Hastings, Oct. 21; Karl Rove at the Economic Club, Sept. 22; hundreds of PALM bicycles visit Dowagiac June 22; Dowagiac invaded by 96 historic brass-era automobiles built before 1916, July 18; Sarah Wilkinson's "Dial C for Chaos in Cass County" dessert theater at SMC Oct. 18; "The Lady with all the Answers" (Ann Landers) and lunch with Judy Ivey in Skokie, Ill., June 18.

Michael Collins: Now that the author moved to Dowagiac to teach at Southwestern Michigan College, I ran into him twice.

Change, literally: St. Louis sculptor Andy Magee's likeness of Obama crafted out of Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Washington coins sold for $1,376 on eBay.

Oxymorons of the year: business ethics and clean coal. AIG tipped the scale. Just a week after American International Group received $85 billion from Uncle Sam - ostensibly to rescue the insurance company from financial ruin - 70 of its top performers blew $400,000 at a California retreat. To put $85 billion in perspective, that four-hour Olympic pageant with 15,000 performers directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou in Beijing cost a mere $100 million.

This year's girl: hockey mom Sarah Palin, the pit bull in lipstick. Turned out John McCain ("The fundamentals of our economy are strong") needed a $150,000 makeover more than Caribou Barbie, who accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists."

Honorable mention: Palin's doppelganger Tina Fey, who besides her dead-on imitation of the governor has a great show in "30 Rock." Ann Coulter nominated Palin for Time Person of the Year for "her genius at annoying all the right people. I haven't seen liberals so enraged by a woman since me. Once John McCain was nominated, the election was a snoozefest until our hero bounded out of the Alaskan tundra. Palin is wildly interesting, charismatic and charming, so Democrats fixated on her inexperience - meaning she is only five times as experienced as our next President."

Comeback of the year: Pirates. In Somalia on Nov. 15, they captured Sirius Star, a Saudi supertanker laden with $100 million in crude. On Nov. 28, in the 97th ship hijacking of 2008, Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden seized control of a chemical tanker. The Pittsburgh Pirates, meanwhile, with 16 straight losing seasons, tie the 1933-48 Phillies for the longest streak in any major professional sport.

Spectacle of the year: Who would have bet that more than 30 years after being an angry punk sensation, Elvis Costello (who inspired the This Year's Girl category) would host a talk show, let alone having Bill Clinton on as a guest?

Read 21 books, including "Burning Rainbow Farm" by Dean Kuipers, "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama, "The Last Juror" by John Grisham, "The Entrepreneurial Journey of Ed Lowe" by John Duggleby, "America: Our Next Chapter" by Chuck Hagel (received a handwritten card from the Nebraska senator in response to a column about it), "Write It When I'm Gone" by Thomas M. DeFrank about Gerald R. Ford, "Mike's Election Guide 2008" by Michael Moore, "Here, There and Everywhere" by Beatles recording engineer Geoff Emerick (with a cool forward by Costello), "Bridge of Sighs" by Richard Russo and "Empire Falls" by Richard Russo, whom I met Oct. 22 at Dowagiac Middle School.

Gone but not forgotten: 2002 Dowagiac visitor Studs Terkel, Franz Jackson, Bo Diddley, Charlton Heston, Yankee Stadium, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bobby Fischer, South Bend's Sydney Pollack, Tony Snow, Edmund Hillary, Deep Throat (Mark Felt), Michael DeBakey, Sammy Baugh, Jim McKay, Heath Ledger, Bernie Mac, Dock Ellis, Tim Russert, Cyd Charisse, Bobby Murcer, Gene Upshaw, George Carlin, William F. Buckley, Paul Newman, the print edition of the Christian Science Monitor, Polaroid instant film, Lehman Brothers, Bill Gates as Microsoft CEO, Isaac Hayes, Danny Federici, Neil Aspinall, Levi Stubbs, Rick Wright, Mike Smith, Mitch Mitchell, Dwight White and Tom Tresh, whom I used to see around the CMU campus.

Just gone, thankfully: President George W. Bush who, thanks to starting two disastrous wars, bungling the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and presiding over the demise of the American economy with his radical credit-card conservatism, enjoys approval ratings lower than Richard Nixon's. Mission accomplished! There was something oddly satisfying in the Groundhog Day spool of him dodging shoes Dec. 14 at a Baghdad press conference - full circle from the pelting the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein took in 2003. "I saw his sole," Bush quipped, referencing his remark about meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Couples: Heidi married Spencer on "The Hills."

Splitsville: Hannity and Colmes; Madonna and Guy Ritchie; Brett the Jet Favre and the Green Bay Packers; and Hugh Hefner and Holly Madison.

Religion and politics converge: Rick Warren moderated Obama/McCain; ex-preacher Mike Huckabee becomes a TV host after a credible presidential race; Rev. Jeremiah Wright distracted Obama.

Next year's nostalgia: Joe the Plumber.

Best impersonation of Gary Hart: Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich dares his critics to wiretap him. By the way, whatever happened to Donna Rice (and Fawn Hall)? Honorable mention: Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili daring the Russian bear to invade.

Villains of the year: Bankers, starting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who engineered a $700 bailout that didn't exactly work like Americans were promised. Banks didn't lend out that pot to restart the economy. Some went to acquire other banks, including overseas. We're not sure, though, because they told the taxpayers who came to their rescue that it's none of our business. They didn't exactly get the scrutiny given the auto industry.

Rising star: CNN's John King.

Fallen stars: Eliot Spitzer and Detroit mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick. "It sucks. I used to be governor of New York," Spitzer said of his new gig as a Slate columnist.

Shooting star: receiver Plaxico Burress, whose New York Giants won Super Bowl XLII in a 17-14 upset of the previously unbeaten New England Patriots.

Previous shooting star: Vice President Dick Cheney, advised that two-thirds of Americans do not support the Iraq war, famously said, "So?"

Biggest disappointment, sports: the last-place Detroit Tigers, picked by SI to win.

Tampa Bay's Rays, the baseball season's Cinderella squad, lost the World Series in five for the Philadelphia Phillies' first title since 1980, the city's first in a major sport since 1983 - 25 years.

Biggest disappointment, politics: John Edwards, whom I admired after hearing him speak to the Economic Club March 8, 2006, cheating on his wife of 31 years while in the middle of a presidential campaign and her breast cancer was in remission.

Don't know that the Magic Eight Ball saw any of it coming.

John Eby is managing editor of the Dowagiac Daily News. He can be reached at john.eby@leaderpub.com

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