The magnitude of importance 2020 played on our lives can only be matched by the sheer randomness of the events that took place within it.
And to make sense of it all is akin to something like herding cats or quantum physics: nearly impossible.
But nevertheless, lets look back on the most random things that happened in 2020:
20. The streaming revolution
While cutting the cord has been hardly a new revelation, there may have been no more important ally in the struggle against 2020 than streaming.
Seemingly around every corner or swipe of the app lay another riveting, watercooler-worthy show to binge.
Who could have expected the country would be so enthralled with the misadventures of big cat zookeeper Joe Exotic and conservationist Carole Baskins in Tiger King?
Then, April and May brought us a trip down memory lane and a ton of great memes with the release of the Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls docuseries The Last Dance.
Hamilton dropped in July. Season two of The Mandalorian dazzled home audiences starting in October, while the Princess Diana season of The Crown hit in late November.
The Queens Gambit which dropped in late October became Netflix most-watched scripted miniseries ever in just four weeks while sending chess sets flying off the shelves at the holidays.
From Love is Blind to Cheer to Some Good News, steaming content could be its own subset of the randomness of 2020.
19. Perhaps the only streaming service to strike out in 2020: Quibi
Ahh, Quibi. You were here one day and gone the next. Quite literally.
Just six months after the new streaming service launched in April, the Wall Street Journal reported the company would be going under due to a struggle to resonate in a crowded marketplace during the pandemic.
There was no question that keeping us going was not going to have a different outcome, it was just going to spend a whole lot more money without any value to show for it, founder Jeffrey Katzenberg told Deadline in October.
18. Planters kills off Mr. Peanut, replaces him with Baby Nut
Way back in January of 2020, Planters launched a new campaign leading up to Super Bowl LIV that would eventually see the untimely demise of beloved product mascot Mr. Peanut.
The ad, which featured Wesley Snipes and Matt Walsh, was quite literally a cliffhanger, with the trio hanging off the side of a mountain after swerving to avoid an armadillo in the Nutmobile.
A hero to all, Mr. Peanut sacrificed himself to save the other two by electing to let go and fall to his death.
Part two of the series of advertisements saw Snipes and Walsh, along with the likes of Mr. Clean and the Kool-Aid Man at the late Mr. Peanuts funeral.
But a tear from Kool-Aid Man and a little bit of sunshine brought us a new Planters mascot: Baby Nut.
In August, the company continued the campaign with the emergence of a 21-year-old Peanut Jr.
You literally cannot make this up.
No. 17 Rob Gronkowski wins the 24/7 Championship at WrestleMania 36
By the time the taping of WrestleMania 36 rolled around in March 2020, Rob Gronkowski had been retired from the NFL for a full year.
So, when the WWE came calling, the future Hall of Fame tight end and life-long wrestling fan answered.
Not only did Gronk host WrestleMania 36 which aired April 4 and 5 he took away some hardware: the 24/7 Championship.
To this day, the WWE recognizes Gronkowskis sole reign with the belt as 57 days, the longest period in the companys history.
Now, instead of smashing opponents into the mat, Gronk smashes footballs into the end zone of Raymond James Stadium as a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers following his un-retirement in late April.
Ironically, his home stadium would have been the site of WrestleMania 36 had it not been moved to the WWE Performance Center in Orlando amid the pandemic.
No. 16 Roger Goodell runs the NFL Draft from his basement
The sting of the NFL Draft scrapping its Las Vegas plans amid concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic was lessoned a bit by the wood-paneled amazingness of Roger Goodells basement.
Done virtually for the first and hopefully last time, Goodell announced all team selections during the draft from the comfort of mancave in Westchester County, New York, complete with an ever-shrinking jar full of M&Ms.
The workaround ended up showing a more human side of Goodell, softening the public image of the oft-heckled NFL commissioner.
See the rest here:
The top 20 most random things that happened in 2020: Nos. 16-20 - 104.3 The Fan
- And So It Begins Quantum Physicists Create a New Universe With Its Own Rules - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel - February 18th, 2021
- Quantum Theory May Twist Cause And Effect Into Loops, With Effect Causing The Cause - ScienceAlert - February 18th, 2021
- Extracting information stored in 100,000 nuclear quantum bits - Advanced Science News - February 18th, 2021
- Light and a Single Electron Used to Detect Quantum Information Stored in 100,000 Nuclear Quantum Bits - SciTechDaily - February 18th, 2021
- IBM Adds Future Developer And Software Details To Its Quantum Roadmap - Forbes - February 18th, 2021
- Physics - A Superconducting Qubit that Protects Itself - Physics - February 18th, 2021
- Black Quantum Futurism receives the Knight Foundations new art and technology fellowship - WHYY - February 18th, 2021
- Resolving to read more in 2021 - Powell Tribune - February 18th, 2021
- Warp Drives Are No Longer Science Fiction - Applied Physics - Business Wire - February 18th, 2021
- RI local and star of 'Ghost Hunters' + 'Kindred Spirits' on her search for the paranormal - The Providence Journal - February 18th, 2021
- Quantum Theory Proposes That Cause and Effect Can Go In Loops - Universe Today - February 14th, 2021
- The search for dark matter gets a speed boost from quantum technology - The Conversation US - February 14th, 2021
- A Magnetic Twist to Graphene Could Offer a Dramatic Increase in Processing Speeds Compared to Electronics - SciTechDaily - February 14th, 2021
- Yale Quantum Institute Co-sponsored Event - Alternative Realities for the Living - Quantum Physics & Fiction - Yale News - February 14th, 2021
- In Violation of Einstein, Black Holes Might Have 'Hair' - Quanta Magazine - February 14th, 2021
- Scientists narrow down the 'weight' of dark matter trillions of trillions of times - Livescience.com - February 5th, 2021
- Switching Nanolight On and Off | Columbia News - Columbia University - February 5th, 2021
- Photoelectric effect of physics in technology - The National - February 5th, 2021
- Quantum Physics Story Helgoland to Be Adapted by Fremantles The Apartment, CAM Film (EXCLUSIVE) - Variety - February 2nd, 2021
- 29 Scientists Came Together in the "Most Intelligent Photo" Ever Taken - My Modern Met - February 2nd, 2021
- Silence your stoner friends with this video of a room entirely constructed out of mirrors - The A.V. Club - February 2nd, 2021
- Valuable contributor to society - The Tribune India - February 2nd, 2021
- A Zoom with a view: Wintersession offers a virtual journey from the kitchen to Hollywood - Princeton University - February 2nd, 2021
- IBMs top executive says, quantum computers will never reign supreme over classical ones - The Hindu - January 31st, 2021
- Tech 24 - Welcome to the quantum era - FRANCE 24 - January 31st, 2021
- Physicists Are Reinventing the Laser - Gizmodo - January 31st, 2021
- Record-Breaking Source for Single Photons Developed That Can Produce Billions of Quantum Particles per Second - SciTechDaily - January 31st, 2021
- How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide - WIRED - January 31st, 2021
- Insiders say Comedy Central's top creative executives tokenized employees of color and fostered an environment - Business Insider India - January 31st, 2021
- Copperizing the Complexity of Superconductivity - Newswise - January 31st, 2021
- The Convergence of Internet of Things and Quantum Computing - BBN Times - January 31st, 2021
- Who You Really Are And Why It Matters | Practical Ethics - Practical Ethics - January 31st, 2021
- Improving LIDAR and GPS: Breaking Through the Resolution Barrier With Quantum-Limited Precision - SciTechDaily - January 18th, 2021
- Amy Noelle Parks Brings The Romance of Math and Science To YA - The Nerd Daily - January 18th, 2021
- Surprising Discovery of Unexpected Quantum Behavior in Insulators Suggests Existence of Entirely New Type of Particle - SciTechDaily - January 18th, 2021
- If Wormholes Are Lurking in Our Universe, This Is How We Could Find Them - ScienceAlert - January 18th, 2021
- New quantum technology projects to solve mysteries of the universe - Open Access Government - January 14th, 2021
- Exploring the unanswered questions of our universe with quantum technologies - University of Birmingham - January 14th, 2021
- Wormholes may be lurking in the universe and new studies are proposing ways of finding them - The Conversation UK - January 14th, 2021
- University of Sheffield to lead multi-million pound project which could open up a new frontier in physics - University of Sheffield News - January 14th, 2021
- Raytheon UK part of team transforming the Royal Navy's technology, training and learning solutions - PRNewswire - January 14th, 2021
- Optical selection and sorting of nanoparticles according to quantum mechanical properties - Science Advances - January 14th, 2021
- The unhackable computers that could revolutionize the future - CNN - January 8th, 2021
- Birds Have a Mysterious 'Quantum Sense'. For The First Time, Scientists Saw It in Action - ScienceAlert - January 8th, 2021
- How understanding light has led to a hundred years of bright ideas - The Economist - January 8th, 2021
- Tokyo Institute of Technology: Quantum Mysteries: Probing an Unusual State in the Superconductor-Insulator Transition - India Education Diary - January 8th, 2021
- Quantum Nanodevice Can Be Both a Heat Engine and Refrigerator at the Same Time - SciTechDaily - January 8th, 2021
- Illumination at the limits of knowledge - The Economist - January 8th, 2021
- Detective Work in Theoretical Physics: Comprehensive Review of Physics of Interacting Particles - SciTechDaily - January 6th, 2021
- New Quantum-Based Distance Measurement Method for GPS and LIDAR - AZoQuantum - January 6th, 2021
- Raytheon Technologies Appoints Marie R. Sylla-Dixon as Chief Diversity Officer to Further Advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives -... - January 6th, 2021
- Quantum Superposition Evidenced by Measuring Interaction of Light with Vibration - AZoQuantum - December 24th, 2020
- Superpositions The Cosmic Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel - December 24th, 2020
- Here's Why Quantum Computing Will Not Break Cryptocurrencies - Forbes - December 24th, 2020
- Irish researchers reveal how Santa delivers toys to billions in one night - BreakingNews.ie - December 24th, 2020
- Eight ways Argonne advanced science in 2020 - Newswise - December 24th, 2020
- Scaling the heights of quantum computing to deliver real results - Chinadaily.com.cn - China Daily - December 24th, 2020
- MIT's quantum entangled atomic clock could still be ticking after billions of years - SYFY WIRE - December 24th, 2020
- Matter Deconstructed: The Observer Effect and Photography - PetaPixel - December 24th, 2020
- Everything you need to know about quantum physics (almost ... - December 21st, 2020
- Quantum mechanics - Wikipedia - December 21st, 2020
- Six Things Everyone Should Know About Quantum Physics - December 21st, 2020
- Counter-Intuitive Quantum Mechanics: State of Vibration That Exists Simultaneously at Two Different Times - SciTechDaily - December 21st, 2020
- A state of vibration that exists simultaneously at two different times - Tech Explorist - December 21st, 2020
- This Incredible Particle Only Arises in Two Dimensions - Popular Mechanics - December 21st, 2020
- Quantum Mechanics, the Mind-Body Problem and Negative Theology - Scientific American - December 17th, 2020
- Quantum Interference Phenomenon Identified That Occurs Through Time - SciTechDaily - December 17th, 2020
- 9 Most Confusing Sci-Fi Movies That Feel Like You Need a PhD in Quantum Physics - FandomWire - December 17th, 2020
- Expanding the Scope of Electronic-Structure Theory - Physics - December 17th, 2020
- Physicists attempt to unify all forces of nature and rectify Einstein's biggest failure - Livescience.com - December 17th, 2020
- Black dwarf supernovae: The last explosions in the Universe - SYFY WIRE - December 17th, 2020
- Orford 17-year-old is among brightest young minds in north west - Warrington Guardian - December 17th, 2020
- Meet the kaon - Symmetry magazine - November 10th, 2020
- There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli review - The Guardian - November 10th, 2020
- Digging into the 3D Quantum Hall Effect - Physics - November 10th, 2020
- Physicists Circumvent 178-Year Old Theory to Cancel Magnetic Fields - SciTechDaily - November 10th, 2020
- A Modem With a Tiny Mirror Cabinet Could Help Connect The Quantum Internet - ScienceAlert - November 8th, 2020
- Quantum Technology: Harnessing the Power of Quantum Mechanics - Analytics Insight - November 8th, 2020
- Will the Universe Remember Us after We're Gone? - Scientific American - November 8th, 2020
- Threat of Quantum Computing to Bitcoin Should be Taken Seriously, But theres Enough Time to Upgrade Current Security Systems, Experts Claim -... - November 8th, 2020