It’s a Global News tradition for Global News correspondent Mike Armstrong to take an alphabetical look back at the year that was. Here’s what made 2015 memorable for him, from A to Z.
A is for Artoo. Okay, so it’s R2-D2. I just want to get Star Wars out of the way right off the bat.
READ MORE: ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ becomes fastest movie to $1 billion
B is for blizzard. It’s still hard to believe the shots from the Maritimes last winter weren’t computer-generated effects.
WATCH: A Dieppe, N.B. man shovels his way out of his home. (WARNING: Strong language)
WATCH: See Moncton’s mountainous snow pile from a drone’s perspective
C is for Cosby. Bill Cosby went from comedy legend to pariah after dozens of women came forward with sexual assault allegations against the comedian.
D is for Deflategate. The NFL’s Deflategate gripped professional football after Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots were accused of using under inflated footballs. I like to think Tom Brady wasn’t involved. (He likely was.)
Sticking with cheating… E is for emissions. Volkswagen got busted for cheating on U.S. emissions tests Volkswagen admitted to cheating on. It sucks getting caught. “Our company was dishonest… We have totally screwed up,” Volkswagen’s U.S. CEO Michael Horn said in September.
READ MORE: 4 ways Volkswagen’s emissions scandal is costing it big time
F is for fired… which this Price is Right model somehow avoided after accidentally giving away a car.
G is for Google Glass. Killed by Google this year, it was a rare misstep for the Internet giant but perhaps a bullet dodged for society.
H is for Hello. Adele’s video — filmed in Montreal — is climibing toward the 1 billion view mark on YouTube.
But, I still think Lionel Richie’s version was better.
I is for intense. This video of a Taiwanese airliner crashing was easily the craziest video of the year.
J is for Jenner. Caitlyn Jenner, the reality star lived life in the public eye but for years held on to the secret that she is transgender. That changed in 2015.
K is for kilometre. Getting these pictures of Pluto took nine and a half years. The New Horizons spacecraft travelled nearly 5 billion kilometres to get close enough.
L is for lion, as in Cecil the lion and the questionable judgement of a certain Minnesota dentist.
READ MORE: Cecil the lion was just one of many killed by rich, foreign trophy hunters. Why is that permitted?
M is for mass shootings. It’s not that we’ve never had horrible things happen in Canada — we have. But there is a big problem south of the border and this was a very bad year.
N is for Nepal. Nearly 9,000 people were killed by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck the Himalayan nation on April 25.
O is for ‘Oh my God’. A reaction anyone who’s ever flown had when they heard the story about the Germanwings pilot who intentionally crashed his plane in the French Alps last March.
P is for Paris. Attacked twice — in January and in November — but Paris is still standing tall.
Q is for questionable. This is about Uber: questionable in terms of legality and questionable in terms of taxi driver reaction.
R is for Republican. The Republican presidential debates have been must-see TV.
S is for scandal. There was FIFA, Mike Duffy and Brian Williams. The common theme: “Really? You thought that was okay?”
T is for Trudeau. Our new prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He fought past the claims that “he’s just not ready” and won the election in a big way.
But, you kind of wonder how the folks in this commercial are doing.
U is for upset. Alberta’s Progressive Conservative Party lost to the NDP in a political upset few predicted.
WATCH: Reid Fiest discusses the NDP’s ‘orange crush’ in Alberta
V is for Vulcan. This year we lost Leonard Nimoy, who played the legendary Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek series. He was 83.
W is for The Weeknd because every second song I heard this year was from the Scarborough, Ont. native or from Ed Sheeran’s latest album, called X (two letters for the price of one).
And speaking of Sheeran, let’s take a moment to watch the video of the British pop star surprising an Edmonton fan on stage.
Y is for “youch”. Defined in the Urban Dictionary, youch is “an exclamation used to sympathize with someone who had just gone through something both painful and shocking.” That describes my reaction the screw up at the Miss Universe pageant.
READ MORE: Year full of unscripted moments highlight perils of live broadcasts
And finally, Z is for zero. I got to meet Syrian refugees in Jordan, families who left their homes as bombs dropped around them.
Some of those families are now coming to Canada.
One of the things I was most happy to tell the mothers and fathers we met was that their children will never hear bombs going off anywhere in our country. Zero times. You think it means nothing, but zero, in this case, it’s something we can share.
-With files from Nick Logan
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