2011: The Year That Was

It’s been a strange year, hasn’t it? Many have pegged the year as one of global upheaval, when things have fallen apart all around the world and all we could do as individuals was tweet about it. The year has raised further questions about the upcoming generation (not that anyone has had faith in upcoming generations since the early 1700’s) and there’s widespread panic that technology has continued to make us lazier and slower. It’s been a year where we’ve had widespread infrastructure breakdowns, floods, earthquakes and riots and it’s also been a year when the world has hailed Lady Gaga and Rebecca Black as revolutions in music. It’s been a year when someone called Snoop Dogg is slightly more popular than Saddam Hussein, and a year where 12 year olds are more confident about the words to Party Rock Anthem than their own National Anthem.

Seeing no logic in the behaviour of society, people resorted to planking.

No year is complete without some kind of a financial meltdown, it seems to be fashionable for at least one country to declare that their currency is worthless at one point or another to trigger global unrest, but this time things were taken to the next level when a group of countries decided that they’d do so together, perhaps just to get a little more attention than Zimbabwe in 2010.

The internet continues to blossom with weird photographs.

In August, NASA announced that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had captured photographs of possible water sources on Mars, but seeing no sign of an alien invasion or an Autobot symbol embedded in the planet, people lost interest within seconds. Dan Schechtman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but since no one gives a shit, he didn’t talk a lot about it.

End October, the United Nations declared that the world had reached a population of seven billion people. Still no word on which one of these seven billion people will be able to make sense of the movie “Bride Wars”. These seven billion people however have unanimously agreed that the coolest person of the year is Ryan Gosling.

HTC is still being allowed to make cell phones, Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox every three hours, Microsoft continues to develop new versions of Windows and Apple has trapped a woman in the new iPhone.

Even after so much advancement in technology, no one has a color photograph of the moon in 2011.

Syria, Libya and Egypt saw an array of protests with people taking to the streets and hurling molotov cocktails at one another. Worldwide news agencies went ballistic and fired out news report after news report. Analysts concluded that the protesters were just pissed off about too much sand. Meanwhile Prince William and Kate Middleton got married.

Rupert Murdoch and the phone hacking scandal came into the picture, various news agencies claiming that Murdoch had tapped into various phone lines and listened in on conversations nationwide in Britain. Later in the year, Rupert Murdoch was named as the person with the most amount of free time on his hands.

Leaving all that behind, we move to a bright new 2012 with fresh resolutions (85% of them are the same as the ones made from the transition from 2010 to 2011). We do however, move into 2012 bearing in mind that the world might end this year. Seeing as how the last 4,087 predictions of the world ending haven’t come true, why pay attention to this one? The obvious answer of course is because John Cusack was in a movie about this particular prediction.

Not sure about everyone else, but I think once December 21, 2012 comes and goes, the world should unanimously shout, “FAIL!” at the Mayans. And in case the asteroid does hit, the world can unanimously shout, “FAIL!” at me. Just giving everyone an excuse to unanimously shout.

Still no word on Santa Claus, the manhunt continues.