That was the year that was.

January

Israel extends its attack on Gaza with a ground invasion, killing nine h- … oh, great news piece with which to start a comedy recap of the year.

Russia cuts off gas supplies to Europe after the EU forgets to pay the bill. France says it was Italy’s turn to pay, but it turns out Poland used all the money in the jar to buy dope.

Barack Obama is inaugurated as 44th President of the United States, with the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 45th tentatively scheduled for March 28, 2011.

Novelist John Updike, lodged these late days in life’s  promontory, a bare-scrubbed hospice, the air of its quiescent corridors mussed with the cleansing odour of pine wood and ammonia, the latter even now acridly semenous, transcribing to the olfactory redoubt, the deep vacuum thud, Dasein’s hard shunt from the male apex, and the residue curling like a mark of interrogation, chrome-bright gleaming in memory, the signature of its mystery in the satinine lash of her jet nethers, dies.

Iceland’s banking system collapses after the IMF announces it will no longer accept herring as a currency reserve.

February

Patriarch Kirill, of Moscow, is enthroned as patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Yeah, memories huh. Takes you back.

Johanna Sigurdardottir is appointed prime minister of Iceland, the first openly lesbian head of government apart from Sir Robert Menzies.

On February 7, fires in Victoria kill 173  people and devastate millions of hectares.

April

The G20 summit meets in London, PM Kevin Rudd’s role as instigator and organiser of the G20 summit unknown to many, including the instigators and organisers of the G20 summit.

Hell’s Angels attack a member of the Comancheros gang in the security area of Sydney airport, removing his laptop, shoes, belt and head.

Despite launching a new missile, North Korea is downgraded as a threat after it is realised that the leader known as Kim Jong Il is in fact Liza Minelli.

Fiji had a coup, an event now printed in diaries, beneath Tasmanian Show Day.

The world responded calmly and rationally to the outbreak of a lethal infectious flu in Guadalajara by stretching a surgical mask across the whole US-Mexico border and napalming the country to a crisp.

In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers are defeated and surrounded. Internments, summary executions, mass civilian killings and ethnic cleansing create a whole new bunch of queue-jumping economic refugees.

June

The 2009 competition of the NSW Rape League is briefly disrupted by accusations that players have been involved in rugby league.

The World Health Organisation declares swine flu to be a pandemic, just to see what happens. My, how people jump. It’s kinda cool.

Malcolm Turnbull arranges to have a TV crew on hand when it is revealed that he has been fooled into putting on record an email faked by a mentally unstable public servant, though the ABC does not screen the scenes featuring him visually inspecting a spear gun barrel for flaws, visiting a sawmill and then a hospital, and entering the Taronga bear enclosure wearing a suit made entirely of veal.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wins the Iranian election with a surprisingly slender margin of 187%.

Europe sleeps a little safer with the announcement that Albania has joined NATO.

Michael Jackson dies following administration of a sleeping drug he’d been using for more than a decade, not the first time he’d been rendered stiff by a 10-year-old addiction.

A military coup in Honduras is arranged by the CIA as part of Latin American Heritage Week.

July

Police investigating the murder of Des Moran make a list of suspects, later described as a who’s who of Melbourne crime and Melbourne University Publishing’s spring list.

Farah Fawcett dies of anal cancer. So yeah, OK, there goes f-cking youth, happy now?

Bill Clinton journeys to North Korea to help free two young American female journalists, following reports that they may be wearing halter tops.

Tim Holding goes missing on Mt Feathertop. John Della Bosca confesses to affairs. They’re dots people, join them.

After years of flouting justice, Roman Polanski is arrested and charged with making Bitter Moon.

Right-wingers scornfully suggest that Greens would blame climate change for a series of earthquakes in the Pacific region. Greens blame climate change for a series of earthquakes in the Pacific region.

November

Kevin Rudd apologises to the “forgotten generations”, a generation of people who suffered, umm, ohhh, what was it? No, it’s gone. Something to do with cheese? Gliders? Whatever.

CERN restarts the large hadron collider, whose operations had been ceased following concerns that its operation might destroy the universe. In a large but finite number of them, it has.

Tony Abbott replaces Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party and immediately denied he was taking the party back to the 1950s, saying the 12th century was more what he had in mind.

December

The Copenhagen Climate Conference organised around targets universally held to be pointless, reaches an agreement well short of them, their full uselessness mitigated only by the fact that its non-binding nature means no one will bother to keep them anyway. Leading figures refuse to call the outcome a failure, if only because there is no possible state of affairs that could be called a success.

The body of Al Martino is found in his LA home. A crooner of easy-listening hits such as Here in my heart and When you’re mine. Police later estimate time of death as approximately 1957.