The year was 2001. My wife and I were both second-year law students at Ohio State, and had just had our first date at what was then the Thirsty Ear Tavern. Casting around for second date plans, I learned that my old guitar teacher’s band was opening up for Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil at the Alrosa Villa. Oh great, I thought, this ought to be hilarious.

Exactly what Neil, who had just gotten off of a world tour with Crue, was doing playing an 800-person capacity club with a group of hair band hacks is an open question. It wasn’t a side project, as he was only playing Crue songs. Maybe he needed beer money? In any event, it was a mess of a show.

Neil was an astonishing ass who couldn’t sing for shit, and my wife still talks about the horrors in the woman’s restroom. Seared in my mind is this weird look of disappointment his guitar player had when a woman in the crown refused to take his suggestion to remove her shirt. In fairness, this was all sort of the point in going.

I recently stopped by a smoke shop on North High Street to visit a friend. From floor to ceiling, colorful glass pipes – small and large – graced expansive shelves. Several cost more than $1,000. Accessories aimed at every taste aligned well-lit display cases. It was a smorgasbord of everything weed, except for, well, the cannabis. I felt as though I had time traveled and arrived in the future. It wasn’t that long ago (2003) that Tommy Chong spent nine months in prison for selling this kind of glassware. My, how things have changed.

From this perspective, I look back on 2016: how far things have come. Will this contentious year mark the plant’s coming of age or when pendulum of progress swung back the other way?

Hidden Figures tells a fact-based story so fascinating that you wonder why it hasn’t been told until now. Of course, if it had been, they would have had to change the title.

“Hidden Figures” refers to complex mathematical equations that had to be solved before the U.S. could send men into space in the early 1960s. But it also refers to the people who helped to solve those equations.

Specifically, it refers to a group of black women who—because of their race and gender—labored under trying conditions. Directed and co-written by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) and based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film focuses on three of these women who worked as human “computers” at NASA’s Virginia headquarters in the midst of America’s frantic “space race” with the Soviet Union.

The year that seemed determined to crush hopes and smother dreams did have a few bright spots. For instance, the biggest competitive video game of 2016 also happens to be impressively diverse.

Created from the ashes (and creative assets) of a canceled MMO game known as Titan, Overwatch was almost an afterthought, an attempt to scrape something useful out of seven years of work. Now the competitive shooter is so popular that publisher Activision Blizzard is creating its own official esports league for it.

One of the biggest draws of the game, even for people who don’t actually play it (but are more than happy to spread its name and buy its merchandise), is the diversity of its characters. And though Overwatch has been out for months now, something that adds to that was just recently revealed: Tracer, the cheery young woman on the cover, the character whose likeness is incorporated into the Overwatch League logo, is officially a lesbian.

Many top Democrats are stoking a political firestorm. We keep hearing that Russia attacked democracy by hacking into Democratic officials’ emails and undermining Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Instead of candidly assessing key factors such as longtime fealty to Wall Street that made it impossible for her to ride a populist wave, the party line has increasingly circled around blaming Vladimir Putin for her defeat.

Of course partisan spinners aren’t big on self-examination, especially if they’re aligned with the Democratic Party’s dominant corporate wing. And the option of continually fingering the Kremlin as the main villain of a 2016 morality play is clearly too juicy for functionary Democrats to pass up -- even if that means scorching civil liberties and escalating a new cold war that could turn radioactively hot.

Much of the current fuel for the blame-Russia blaze has to do with the horrifying reality that Donald Trump will soon become president. Big media outlets are blowing oxygen into the inferno. But the flames are also being fanned by people who should know better.