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As the keenest readers will already have intuited, in this valley between the two high holidays of Christmas and New Year’s, I’d like to extend the scant list I began in my most recent aria of this previous year’s great zaniness. There is no means of grading these, as each was unique in its folly, but they do give the flavour of the times we live in.

Photo by Eva Marie Uzcategui/Reuters

We had a superlative example even in the very closing days of the departing year. The rap star tycoon and Toronto’s very own love child Drake “dropped” as they say in current musicology, his latest video. Mr. Drake, as did in an earlier time his precursor Michelangelo, included present-day faces in his work — one of which was that of the Instagram “influencer,” the wonder known as Toronto’s chair girl. Few here in this city need the reminder that this was the youthful fame hunter who threw a chair from a high-rise balcony to a bustling sidewalk and highway below.

Why Drake (“Dizzy” to the cognoscenti) felt a need to enshrine the little vandal in his artwork, or why he thought this would augment his already stupendous stature, is a mystery known only to him. Throwing a chair from a high building requires less skill and talent than sitting in the same object, and less point. Drake was, in his way, taping another banana to another wall.

If he were looking to dignify his efforts or give a pedestal to one worthy of it, surely the cheerful and cannonading tennis wonder, Bianca Andreescu — a fan of his to boot — would have been a supreme choice for both of them.