With music already come and gone, we must press on together to find out what else happened when:
June 16, 1940 – The day Wilford Brimley’s swimming instructor is corrected when he praises his student’s natural fishiness with a, “Great job, Wilfred!”
February 16, 1955 – The day Burt Francis successfully walks the fine line between confidence and arrogance.
April 22, 1996 – The day of the airing of the final episode of a long-running sitcom set primarily in a high school, which concludes when the most important teacher, who has always represented the show’s creator, turns off the light in an empty classroom as they look longingly at the emptier desks and says, “Class dismissed.”
December 4, 2004 – The day of the final of an international Scrabble tournament, in which the overwhelming favourite is unable to find a place to lay his already collected tiles that make up “j-a-z-z-i-l-y”.
June 14, 2017 – The day the overweight overtook the underweight.
January 1, 2019 – The day Peter Gallagher tweezes his eyebrows for the first and only regrettable time.
January 3, 2019 – The day Slavoj Žižek, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, forgets who he is.
June 4, 2023 – The day the eight billionth living human popped out.
March 23, 2025 – The day that Tim Gurtz, after spending the better part of a decade in the Ural mountains learning Russian in order to fully appreciate Tolstoy, finishes War and Peace with a yawn and reconsiders his life.
May 28, 2026 – The day that the Linguistic Institute of Speech Pathology is founded, with none of the seven original board members noticing its acronym.
September 21, 2034 – The day that fishtank underwear ends its reign as top summer Pacific Northwestern fad.
November 7, 2038 – The day that an inflatable moose head gazes widely at a sentient virtual assistant.
Emptober 33, Year of the Dependent Adults – The day that the octahedron earthers are proven right, to little fanfare.
December 31, 2099 – The day the world shut down. Finally. Sheesh.