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2020 is No Longer the Worst Timeline, It’s the Most Surreal One

KQED
Published November 13, 2020 at 4:20 PM PST

For much of 2020, the internet joked about us being trapped in the worst timeline. But something seems to have happened during last Saturday’s post-election celebrations that very quietly transitioned the world into another timeline—a deeply surreal one in which everything appears to be a parody of itself. In fact, so much weird crap went on over the last seven days, it casually transformed 2020’s go-to phrase from “I can’t believe this is happening!” to “Dude—did that really happen?”

Observe the evidence in these 6 easy steps.

1. The Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle

Minutes after Joe Biden was declared president-elect on Saturday, Rudy Giuliani held a press conference in the dilapidated parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, after a White House staffer mistook it for the luxury hotel. That the location was directly next to a sex shop named Fantasy Island and a crematorium, did not deter Giuliani from moving forward with the event.

At first, people assumed headlines about the event were made up.

Once reality set in though, the internet exploded with jokes, commentary, a fake Four Seasons Total Landscaping Twitter account, parody commercials and even a line of merch direct from Four Seasons Total Landscaping. (Orders for the “Make America Rake Again” and “Lawn and Order” T-shirts have since overwhelmed the company.)

2. The most unbelievable hole-in-one … ever?!

The “Can that possibly be real?” party continued during the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It’s tradition during practice rounds at the golf tournament for players to skip a ball across the pond at the par-3 16th hole. When Spanish golfer Jon Rahm attempted the impossible shot, he got a hole-in-one that in no way looked real at all. OH. And it happened on his 26th birthday because of course it did.

3. The virtual reality furry party (a.k.a. the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle part two.)

It took furries a little over 24 hours after Giuliani’s weird press conference to come through and make the situation even more surreal. A tom cat named Cooper went about building Four Seasons Total Landscaping as a virtual reality chat world, and promptly invited all his furry friends in for a hangout. Probably knowing the event sounded too ridiculous to be true, Cooper did the world the kindness of sharing some footage. (The background music really pushes this thing over the edge.)

4. THAT Spanish restoration

Mid-week, word began to spread about an attempted restoration of a statue in Palencia, Spain that had gone terribly wrong. The results reminded the internet of both “Mr. Potato Head” and what 2020 has wrought upon us all collectively.

5. The cat translator app

While you were busy worrying about the end of the world as we know it, a former Amazon engineer was building a cat translation app called Meow Talk. “[Cats] have a vocabulary that they use consistently,” Javier Sanchez told NBC’s King 5 with a straight face.  “It’s not a language. They don’t share words and they don’t communicate with each other… But they can tell you what they want you to do.” Translated phrases on the prototype Meow Talk app include: “I’m in pain,” “I’m hungry,” “I’m happy,” “I’m gonna fight,” and “Where’s my mommy?” (I am not making this up, I swear.)

6. The Dean Browning/Dan Purdy Fiasco

On Tuesday, a straight, white, former Republican commissioner from Pennsylvania tweeted: “I’m a black gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me, my life only changed a little bit and it was for the worse. Everything is so much better under Trump.”

The internet quickly concluded, after hours of social media sleuthing, that Browning had a fake Twitter account where he posed as a gay Black Republican named Dan Purdy, and that he’d accidentally tweeted from the wrong account. First, Browning offered this explanation that nobody believed at all:

Then a video emerged of a man claiming to be Dan Purdy. (I would post it, but his account has since been suspended.) In the clip, “Purdy” says, amid a number of pro-Donald Trump messages, “I sent that message to Dean, Dean accidentally posted it somehow, and that’s the end of the story. No, he’s not a sock puppet. No I’m not a bot.”

But this being this week, Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi (!) then intervened with proof that “Dan Purdy” was not who he said he was:

Then, the internet did even more digging and found out that Dan Purdy/William Holte is in fact, none other than Patti LaBelle’s nephew/son! (LaBelle adopted him after her sister Jacqueline Holte died in 1989.)

It was the perfect end to a week in which nothing ended the way that we expected it to.

This Twitter user sums it up quite nicely.

Can’t wait to see what timeline we end up on next week!

Copyright 2020 KQED
Regional Interests