End of everything

Tsk, what a year 2011 turned out to be.  Luckily with the end of everything just around the corner come the 22nd december 2012, there really isn't anything to worry about; we should face-palm reality, cuddle up to schadenfreude, and bodge any attempt to be nice to one another - if we're all doomed anyway.

Papers, pundits and busybodies from here to there have been picking the bones of the vicious roller-coaster year that affected (and still does) many parts of the world. Going from one calamity to overthrown dictators, chattering mouths fell over themselves to splatter shocked disbelief, pressing, surprising and outrageous stories before our stapled-open eyes, with such an ever increasing fervour that for brief deja vu moments i truly thought i was watching marcus attilius go at it with nero's gladiatorial champion, hilarus.

Not that they needed much help, with nature also piling in with her own particular brand of devastation helped along by lots of our cities being placed exactly where they shouldn't be really.  But hey, it's not only easier that way, it's far more profitable.

In a decade or twos time when our appetites are sated on the cusp of disasters-brew, i'm sure the only thing that will cause us to gasp in true surprising astonishment will be nothing less than watching entire galaxies being subsumed by ginormous black holes and knowing that hundreds of civilisations are going through their death spasms, whilst dialling into our hyper-dimensional instant service provider to complain about the lack of a rewind function.

Nowhere is particularly stable -if we consider the long term instead of our brief gadfly existence- on the rump of this lovely rotating ball.  Although we should -as a species- be deemed a failure, if in a million years hence we're still fighting over the same bit of land in the middle-east (a land with more claims than a lost national-lottery bumper millionaire ticket) that will, by then and due to the actions of planetary motions, probably have moved to siberia, with the inhabitants fighting over who makes the best ice-cubes.  Yes, i know just how impossible that particular scenario seems to be.  Moving to siberia indeed.

By all reckoning, especially the financial one, 2011 -outside of the great depression in the 30's or the wastelands of the 70's- was our nadir for disasters.  Taking into account the entire species' is pumping more of the warming stuff up  into a slightly less pristine blue yonder, it'll be interesting to see how the following few years stack up.  Who knows, perhaps an event will take place around the globe so huge in its manifestations, that anyone with more than half a functional brain cell will simply go "blimey", by which time it'll be far too late for anything else except for saying, "oh well, i never", and by then i doubt whether anyone will give a fig for the latest great carbon offsetting wheeze.

My other abiding somewhat dystopic fantasy, after listening to screaming children running around in the communal garden breaking things (as they and their parents have discovered that management's of the "oh dear what can we do" persuasion as deck-chairs burn all around them and despite it all been in leases, is that their parents are indeed tasered.  Perhaps twice weekly with an additional tasering as a bonus.  Unlike last years record cold snap, this years measly average temperatures are nowhere near cold enough for the little monsters fingers to fall off.  Followed by the rest of them.  And before anyone bleats on about how horrid, some parts of capital life (oddly, like here) have more in common with the lawless antics of the old wild west than professed trappings of touted civilisation.  I could list, but that would bore even me.

Did someone say sidetracked?

As i look back over the year which was 2011, the only things (excluding my immediate orbit) that seem to stick in mind outside of the usual: wars, weather, starvation, greed, corruption, increasing unemployment, rich richer, poor poorer; which really skewers my pre-frontal cortex and still refuses to budge, are the the triple whammy which befell japan, and princess beatrice's hat!

What can i say, that's how it works.

And as our orbit around the sun is replaced by yet another one, and we've moved up or down a bit in space, there's all that heap of other space bits out there calling, waiting, where it's at.  Or should be, if we ever get our heads out of our bottoms.

Oh, nearly forgot.  Happy 2012.  In case you're unable to have a good 2012, at least try for a memorable one.