Oh yes, 1972 was the longest year ever, and I mean that in every which way. It was a leap year, and instead of just adding a day, they tossed in two seconds, too, because calendar math is hard and they had to make up for lost time. The seventies were like that. The world was circling some kind of drain, and it was all you could do to keep up with it. You could have tossed in a decade and still found yourself behind the eight-ball.

The RMS Queeen Elizabeth caught fire and sank in Hong Kong. Not too long after that, Hong Kong kinda disappeared too. In Idaho, the piquantly named Sunshine Mine had a decidedly non-piquant fire that resulted in 100 miners seeing the sunshine for the last time. Japanese Red Army members, of all people, killed 26 people in Lod airport in Israel in support of Palestine, because they didn’t have enough to keep them busy at home, I guess. Not to be outdone, Black September killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics before they could come in 14th in their respective sports. A man you couldn’t pick out of a lineup became the last man to walk on the moon. A train crashed in Mexico and killed 208 people while the world shrugged. On the military-industrial-complex front, a Sabre jet crashed in Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor in Sacramento and killed 23 people, including 12 children. Jigme Singye Wangchuck succeeded his father Jigme Dorji Wangchuck as King of Bhutan. It would be another decade or so before everybody could Wangchuck tonight, however.

Five unauthorized room service personnel were caught wandering around the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Burundi decided to scoff at the scale of our nuclear weapons program and hacked 500,000 Hutis to death with kitchen utensils. The US and the USSR pinky-swore never to develop biological weapons — if anyone was looking. The NVA decided it was a good time to cross one of those dotted lines and start wandering around in South Vietnam. Mount Fuji decided it had 19 more climbers than it needed. Enough VW Beetles got made to pass the Model T in all-time production numbers. The American Beetles arrived just in time to be pushed to a gas station on either an odd or even day to get their rationed gas in a year or so.

A Nazi was named the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In his defense, he said he wasn’t really all that into it, you know, the Nazi thing, and even though prisoners were shot about a football field length away from his desk in the concentration camp, and his immediate superior was executed for war crimes, all he knew was that, you know, some people did some things. The Club of Rome got together and tried to decide what kind of bugs we should all be eating by now. A flood nobody much remembers in Rapid City, South Dakota killed 238 people. And Shoichi Yokoi, a sergeant in the Imperial Japanese Army, staggered out of the jungle in Guam, after 28 years of refusing to surrender to the Americans at the end of WW II.

If it were me, I would have blinked, rubbed my eyes, looked around, and walked back into the jungle.