10 Glorious moments of the last decade (that didn't fuck shit up)
10. Celebrating a new milleniumNow new years eve is generally an excuse to get drunk and spend the entire night sitting in a corner looking back over the last year and wanted to commit bloody suicide. It's only when something really special, like, say, witnessing the end of a fucking millenium, when you really start to get excited. People I speak to tend to take it for granted just how lucky we are to be the generation that gets to see in a new millenium. There's only been one other time like that since jesus was born for fuck sake. Get excited people. If we think, each new generation comes around every thirty years or so, a new millenium will not be witnessed by mankind for another 33 generations. That's mental. 33 generations ago our ancestors were invading England with William the Conqueror and throwing shit out of windows. If we imagine how far we've come in the last thousand years; people will probably be celebrating the next millenium on fucking Jupiter.
9. Reality T.V shows gave ugly, talentless people airtime
Reality TV has been around for ages - televised beauty pageants and talent shows popping up every now and then since the 1950s. It wasn't until the beginning of the new millenium that people actually started paying attention. Beginning with Survivor and Pop Idol in 2001, reality TV really kicked off and gave stupid freaks the airtime needed to become smalltime celebrities. Recently winners of such programmes as X Factor and Britiain's Got Talent have decided to showcase people who can actually do shit, rather than giving random nobodies a platform from which they can throw their dignity at passers by. Oh well, at least no one ever decided to throw a bunch of absolute weirdos into a house and watch them 24 hours a day while they slowly destroy all semblence of human behaviour.
Oh wait.
Yet we all love reality TV. I mean come on, what other programme lets you watch Tila Tequila pit men and women against each other in some crazy bitch fight? Or watch girls make tits out of themselves to become Paris Hilton's new BFF? This shit has become part of our lives. Get used to it.
7. The Large Hadron Collider didn't kill us
So in a bid to discover how the world was created (Take that, religion!) scientists thought it'd be a good idea to use a machine that is capable of creating black holes big enough to consume our entire universe in seconds, in the hope of not doing exactly that, and finding instead the particle that created the world. It's good to know that science has our best interests at heart, but apparently we're not dead yet.
6. Michelle Mcmanus topped the charts
Now I know for a fact, there's only one person reading this that will appreciate the woman that really embodies popular music, reality TV and really anything and everything she's involved in. Winner of Pop Idol in a year I can't be bothered to look up, this woman can do no wrong. From singing what is surely the finest pop song ever created, to appearing on You Are What You Eat, she's done it all. And been fucking good about it too.
Oh, and she got herself carved in wood.
5. The internet meant that videos of people having sex and animals doing funny things were just a click away
Seriously, the internet has grown unbelievably in the last ten years. The power of computers notwithstanding, we can now download music whilst simitaneously watching porn, speaking to a friend on MSN, and ordering groceries. There is very nearly nothing you can't do on the internest these days. And of course this is a huge double edged sword (e.g. Rule 34 - if it exists, there's porn of it) but i mean come on we all love looking at pictures of funny cats and videos of people getting hit in the nuts. Human nature now revolves entirely around the internet. Honestly have you ever wanted to know the answer to a question and said, quite seriously 'I'll google it.' The internet is part of ourselves now, and, quite frankly, it's awesome.
4. Facebook has bypassed any laws that make stalking illegal
Facebook is a brilliant site, there's no denying it. It's helped me keep in touch with loads of old friends from school and college, and is a nice way of letting people know what you're doing, checking out what other people are doing, and just downright stalking other people. If I want to know exactly what another person is up to, I just search for their name. If I'm friends with them, I can see evrything they're doing. If I'm not friends with them, I can either see everything they're doing anyway, or if they're a friend of a friend, ask them to tell me everything they're doing. It's ridiculously easy to stalk someone with facebook, especially if they're a trusting person. If someone in the street asks to see you in a bikini, or know exactly what you got up to last night, you'd refuse, and possibly call the police. But on Facebook it's all good
Ok I'm sure you're thinking this isn't a great thing about the new decade at all. But the thing is, it kind of is. Facebook is used now not just as a way of keeping in touch with old friends who you'll probably never see in a social setting ever again, but it's used as an ice breaker, a conversation starter. Before going to uni I got in touch with two people I was going to be living with, and when we met at uni a month or so later, that was the introductions already done. We already knew enough about each other for the initial meeting not to be awkward. And I'm generally a pretty shy person, so that was certainly a plus for me.
3. The Concorde's last flight reminded us how amazing we are
So even I'm a little shocked to see myself talking about aircraft in this post, but a while ago a woman I used to work with told me how her husband, for their 50th wedding anniversary, took her on the Conchord when it was still in business and, thought I've never flown in it myself, I honestly was gobsmacked at what this woman was telling me. In a later discussion with my dad, we both came to the comclusion that we will not ever, at least in his lifetime, see another creation quite like that of the Concorde. One would expect that in the next few decades we will have developed commercial space travel, or other such astounding forms of transport, but in reality the Concorde was simply not practical. For all its grace, beauty, and ball-shattering speed, it was extremely impractical and in the end was seen as a waste of money. Flying from 1969, these things were among the most impressive pieces of machinery ever concieved, let along created. 2003 marked the end of an era, but reminded us that as a technological civilization, we fucking rule.
2. Science makes us proud to be human
Science has always proven to be either dazzlingly brilliant, or unfathomably stupid. People who spend months and months figuring out a formula for the perfect marriage, or spending millions and millions of pounds to tell us some stupid fact that no one cares about. In the last decade science has come out with some of the best and worst stuff imaginable. However in this case, the good far outweighs the bad.
In 2003 earth saw the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and it went mental. This achievement heralded a massive resurgence into genetics, spawning the genome project, as well as advances to stem cell research, new vaccines, and really everything else inbetween. Since then we've come so far in understanding the body and how it works, it's unbelievable. We're finding cures we never thought possible for diseases we didn't even know existed. Advances in technology and research mean that this understanding of people and the world is expanding at an incredible rate. Here's hoping the chemists don't figure out that they could create a virus that could wipe out the entire population at the drop of a hat. Keep that on the downlow.
1. We survived
Well all know that along side these fantastic things that have happened over the last 10 years, there have been some unbelievable tragedies: Hurricanes, Tsunamis, earthquakes, bombings etc. as well as some more close to home; bird flu, swine flu, floodings. So really we should feel bloody good that we're all still here. With so much shit happening right now it's nice to know we've survived another 10 years, and who knows, maybe we'll get through the next 10 too.
That is, unless the Mayans were right.
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