What's happening to all the icons? David Bowie. Prince. Muhammad Ali. These have been the biggest, but don't forget about Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Maurice White, Lemmy Kilmister -- all of whom were legends to their fans and friends alike, and all of whom (plus many more) passed on in 2016.

In writing this column, I often put ideas on the shelf for a while. Sometimes, world events conspire to make one of these shelved ideas suddenly relevant. That happened this past weekend.

So it has been a week since the Association of National Advertisers report on media transparency came out. It paints a dire picture of agencies using all kinds of smoke and mirrors to generate income for themselves, while still being able to claim they are upholding their contractual obligations to their clients. The report has a whole chapter devoted to what is probably the root cause of the whole problem. And that is: as much as agencies have become clever "obscurers," marketers at the same time have let themselves become "ignoramuses."

A month ago, Apple invested a billion dollars in Chinese ride-sharing business Didi Chuxing. Not an AI play. Not a chatbot play. Not a wearable, VR, music or a telecommunications play. Chinese ride-sharing. Which begged the question: "Um, why?"

Recently a media buyer asked me, in the course of a presentation, whether certain insights were modeled. It's a good question, sort of. When I qualified the answer, telling him that the network in question had 30% return paths, and a census of declared data based on actual customer addresses, he repeated the question: Sooo it's a model, (becoming terse) right!? Yes, but ... this model, in the grand scheme of things, was very predictive. In retrospect though, my answer was not too great either. We both fell into the widening gulch (like Thelma and Louise?) between assumption and reality …

Last week was Christmas for the ad industry, as Mary Meeker released her annual report on all things digital, globally. If I were someone at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest or Snapchat, I would be pretty stoked by what I read! These platforms are growing rapidly, and what Meeker had to say about the behaviors of the younger audiences engaged with these kinds of platforms was extremely positive.

Science, like almost every other aspect of our society, is in the midst of disruption. In that disruption, the very nature of science may be changing. And that is bringing up a number of very pertinent questions.

The industry was abuzz last week with rumors that the long awaited Association of National Advertisers agency holding investigation report was going to be published by Friday. Business Insider and The Wall Street Journal reported extensively on what was to be expected, and the WSJ published statements from the large agency holding companies all stating the same: "we operate within the rules and the laws of the land and we have done nothing improper." Still, the report did not come. So instead of reading and interpreting the ANA findings, I spent the weekend with Mary Meeker. Well, not with her …

My relationship with social media is somewhat complicated. It's that way for many people who are striving to balance their professional and personal lives.