That wasn't the year that was.

Well, I suppose - As it's the last day of 2012, I should do some sort of hoitsy-toitsy review of the year... High points, low points, mid points - What trended on Twitter, how many people found the Blog interesting, how much my personal Facebook index flopped around like a halibut in a Zumba class.

But I'm not going to, I have a memory like a sieve and the few things that I can remember actually happening, I can't remember when it happened or to who and with what.

I might make some stuff up I suppose - Hey, that might work - In fact, that's what I'm going to do! A month by month guide to things that didn't happen in the last year.


January.

An early news report from Khazakstan informed us that civilian contractors were transporting a Sperm Whale by air, using one of those huge Russian sky-hook style helicopters and an intricate system of thin straps and pullies - It turns out that the whole thing had been organised by an Italian company and the instructions had been translated from Italian to Khazakstani by the same Icelandic chap from the Dutch East Indies who writes out the instructions for Ikea. Within minutes of taking off, the poor cetacean suffered terminal garroting and fell into six neat pieces. Luckily, local villagers were able to follow some supplementary instructions, and fashion the remains into three free-standing bookcases and a very avant-garde table-lamp.

February.

Shoppers in Sheffield, UK, were startled to find that due to an issue with autocorrect at a local advertising agency, a launch event for the BluRay release of the X-Men origin film 'Wolverine' had become a little more feral than expected. Where the original instruction had been 'Make sure the guy in the Wolverine suit gets to Meadowhall by 09:00' - It appeared on the Talent-Wrangler's iPhone as 'Make sure you release 900 live Wolverines in Meadowhall - Guy'. In the ensuing chaos, four people were bitten to death - two seriously, one by a policeman.

March.

March will be remembered, more than anything, for the temporary repealing of the laws of conservation of momentum by the US Senate. The reason that this was a temporary change was that not much research had been done beforehand and no-one realised that this would make any form of 'Coasting' impossible - This alienated one of the largest US demographics - i.e. The 15-35 year old, itinerant, disallusioned skateboarding company director - And Google threatened to launch a class-action suit due to lost productivity at its HQ, as no-one was able to use the swings and slides.

April.

Apple fanboys were shocked to learn that they had been taken in by a complex ruse perpetrated by Samsung. An email had been sent to anyone with an @overpricedtoy.com or @moremoneythansense.org email address, offering them the chance to take part in the new Beta Test of the printable iPhone 5. The 'dupes' queued for hours at their own home printers, after being told that the device would be launched at 00:00 on April 31st, a completely new day, that would only exist for the Apple glitterati - At 11:59 on the 30th, a print job was generated that printed out a picture of a house-brick with a smiley-face painted on it by a duck. The joke was on Samsung however, as this proved to have slightly greater functionality than the standard iPhone 5.

May.

Plans were unveiled by NASA to recreate the original Starship Enterprise in Earth orbit. The $60 Billion dollar project stalled however, as not enough people could be found who were willing to be boarded into the walls for the entire five-year mission and operate the sliding doors whilst making the 'Shhhht' noise.

June.

June played host to the hottest day ever recorded in the history of the known universe. It occured when an office party prank at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland went horribly wrong. A group of scientists, bored with making drinks that changed colour indicating the arousal level of the drinker, decide to see what would happen if you accelerated a shish-tikka-donner mixed kebab (with extra salad) to lightspeed. The effect was devastating, but thankfully shortlived. As the chilli sauce reached 299,792,459 m/s its quantum state changed to anti-chilli and a small, but quite fragrant sun was instantly created - raising the local temperature for Western Europe to approximately 74.2 bajillion degrees.

July.

On the 8th. Due to an unusual weather pattern, 95% of the world's remaining 17,600 White Rhino performed The Timewarp - from Richard O'Brien's Rocky Horror show. The quake produced when they all initially 'Jumped to the left' caused massive flooding in Botswana and large cracks to appear on the peak of Kilimanjaro - It's not known why the remaining 5% didn't join in, but the prevailing research shows that they were probably Mama-Mia fans.

August.

August shall be remembered for the temporary cessation of all sporting activity on the UK mainland - Absolutely nothing competetive happened. TV programming that would normally have been sport related was replaced by re-runs of Come Dine With Me. Even conkers was outlawed. Anyone caught flouting this new ruling was taken to Sebastian Coe's underground hideout and birched ruthlessly until they'd learned their lesson.

September.

Danish inventor Myrtryk Von Hunboltzon premiered his world-beating new invention - The Cat-a-porter, a method of instantly transmitting cats from place to place globally. Initial trials proved effective as cats of all sizes, colours and personalities were transmitted around the world. Unfortunately, it all turned out to be a massive con, as the cat that was being 'transported' was in fact, being minced by hidden equipment and not transported at all. All Von Hunboltzon had actually invented was a device for spontaneously creating cats out of thin air.

October.

The world of Fortean Research gained another martyr in early October as Brigadier Hawksworth McTavish-Silverplib (Retd.) completed his two year stalk-fest of the Beast of Bodmin in spectacular fashion. The Brigadier, known to local Beastarians as 'Mad Dangler McTavish' due to his habit of hunting the beast a Magic-tree car air freshener tied to his genatalia to mask his scent, was believed to have cornered the animal in a disused barn. His mangled remains were discoved in various places scattered around Cornwall. He is survived by an English Springer Spaniel called Leonard.

November.

Almost nothing of any note happened in November, the tides continued in their sploshey up-down motion, birds flew south, cheese matured and the complex system of checkes and balances that we call life continued unabated. Right up until the point where every man, woman and child who lived through the 1980's was discovered to have been some kind of pedophile or assorted rapist, sheep worrier or sodomiser. Apart from Bruce Forsythe, he was outed as a vampire and ritually staked by Tess Daley on the set of 'Strictly Come Dancing'

December.

Hollywood news that peaked in December was centered around the revelation that Kristen Stewart, 'Star' of the Twilight films and Snow White and the Huntsman, did not actually exist. She was outed as a completely digital construct by her ex-partner Cedric Pattinson. When questioned by a representative of the Jo McCarthy Rights for Real Humans group, Pattinson admitted that he thought it strange that Stewart dissapeared every time there was a power outage at their shared apartment in East Compton, LA. However he thought that this may have been due to her childhood spent in California. It was also discovered that it was during one of these power outages that her facial expression subroutine had been deleted.


Well, there you go, a month by month list of things that didn't happen in 2012 - I hope to continue making youse guys shake your heads in mild disbelief in the new year.

Let me leave you with a quote from my good friend Pedro Vader that I think sums this year up.

'If you stick your hand right inside, and I sort of make a sawing motion like this, do you think you can feel it?'

A/S/L?

In the early 90's I had my heart torn out and handed to me on a plate - Luckily, I'm a big boy and I got over it fairly quickly, with the help of massive amounts of alcohol and free Compuserve CDs. Compuserve? What's Compuserve I hear you youngsters cry.

Well, remember before Hotmail? No?.. OK, do you remember AOL CDs on the front of Games magazines? Right, excellent, we finally have a frame of reference. AOL gave you an Email address and access to the Internet, before Sky & BT and everyone and his brother were including it in monthly packages - It was rubbish, and it used to frak your PC on a regular basis, but it was pretty much all there was.

Now, imagine that, but having to pay by the minute... using a dial-up connection at 56Kbps - There was also a monthly fee, but if you uninstalled the software and re-installed it from a different CD every month, you didn't have to pay (It just meant that you had a different email address every month).

Compuserve used to filter the Internet for you, not that there was a great deal of content back in the day, but it was mainly comprised of what they called 'Forums' - Which were just posh chatrooms really, divided into different subjects and interests. I say different, they were all pretty much full of teenagers (or people pretending to be teenagers) trying to get off with each other. and Usenet Newsgroups - Which were the forerunner, I guess, of places like Tumblr and Twitter.

It was through being a part of these forums that I was introduced to the mating call of the early 90's Internetter, "A/S/L?" which of course stood for Age / Sex / Location which in turn, was shorthand for Am I commiting a federal or statutory crime by talking to you about your underwear / are you the complimentary gender that I am looking for / are you local enough for us to meet up or far enough away for your parents to not be able to kill me when it all goes horribly wrong.

And while we're here, I'd just like to state on record that, despite evidence to the contrary, I never pretended to be a precocious 14 year old girl from California called Mindy to go trolling for paedophiles... *cough* not once.

If I were to use a fishing analogy, the A/S/L is the 'bite' and then you'd have to 'play' the 'fish' until 'it' was 'tired' and could be 'landed' - The most effective, and certainly most popular method of playing with your fish would be (and I kid you not) to quote popular songs of the day to your intended paramore - I didn't recognise a lot of the lines that were being used, as they were American songs that hadn't 'broken' in the UK - But towards the end of my Compuserve years, the chorus of the Savage Garden song Truly Madly Deeply became the go-to track for reeling love-sick teens in hand over fist - It went a little like:

I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lay like this forever.
Until the sky falls down on me

Remember it now? I never saw this fail, not a single time, never used it myself of course... That would have been immoral, and not to say a little creepy, as I would have been fast approaching 30 at the time, and therefore, positively pre-historic in comparison to everyone else there.

No, I moved to the much more sanitary newsgroups. These were like a notice board where people could post images, of anything, although the subject matter did all tend to be much of a muchness (Certainly in the alt.binaries. groups) - With pictures of young, and not so young ladies, in various states of deshabille and / or contortion - that would load, onto your 640 x 480 256 colour screen, at the rate of approximately 1 line per second... Meaning that a full screen image could take up to ten minutes to load - Just enough time to make a nice cup of tea and get control of any unnatural urges that you might be having.

I think that this was a secret plan by Compuserve to try and get young boys out of their bedrooms and into the fresh air... What I think actually happened was that those young boys who were too shy to quote Savage Garden lyrics to cheerleaders halfway across the world spend all their time getting the grainy, false colo(u)red images of 'Debbie, 21, from South London' to download faster.

And thus was High-Speed Broadband created.