[Hello, dears! Think 2016 was a roiling garbage fire of bad news? Actually, some GOOD THINGS happened as well! Let’s take a tip-toe down memory lane for the BEST GOSSIP from this year of crap.—Ann]
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19
Big thumbs-up emojis to hunky actor Jamie Foxx who—NBD—jumped into a burning car to save an accident victim. The truck reportedly crashed, overturned, and burst into flames outside of Foxx’s Hidden Valley residence, prompting the actor and another onlooker to pull the trapped driver to safety. In a related story, Foxx has yet to respond to our cries to save us from being trapped inside our bra—which, while not literally on fire, is wicked hot.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7
Today—shockingly and wonderfully—Beyoncé made Super Bowl Sunday good for something other than giving professional football players traumatic brain injuries! “Many people have been commenting on social media on how Beyoncé used her [halftime] performance to make a point about the rights of black people,” the BBC reported, as awestruck as the rest of us by Beyoncé’s performance of her new song “Formation.” “Her dancers were dressed like radical political group the Black Panthers, and they formed an X during the performance, seen as a reference to Malcolm X.” But even Beyoncé’s halftime show—which gobsmacked millions who thought they were just tuning in to watch a dumb football game—paled in comparison to the video for “Formation,” which Beyoncé also released this weekend. “The brilliance of ‘Formation’ is that it boiled down and stewed black life, art, and culture into an epic five-minute music video,” wrote Tiffany Lee of Black Girl Dangerous. “‘Formation’ isn’t about Beyoncé or even about her constant conflation of capitalistic success with feminist liberation. This video is about how black folks have learned how to sing songs, kiss babies, yell for joy, make love, and recite poems all while holding a mouth full of our dead.” “This is a woman who understands her own power, how to harness and magnetize us to it,” Wesley Morris wrote in the New York Times. “I mean, I’m supposed to be out at dinner right now. Instead, I’m hunched over a computer contemplating the Beyoncé politic. No one running for president at the moment has managed to do that.” IN OTHER WORDS… Forget about Clinton and Sanders, everybody. BEYONCÉ FOR PRESIDENT! (Of the universe!)