A backward glance at the coming year

Robot rebellion, twits, tweets and war . . . it’s all behind us now

As some of you know, my desk in The Irish Times is beside the rip in space and time that opened up when Kevin Myers left to go to the Indo. This is occasionally annoying but it has its benefits. For example, an article from the future just fell out of the wormhole and I think you’ll find its contents pretty interesting.

Roundup of the Year 2013 (auto-translated from Esperanto) by FuturePatrick

Kiel vi fartas, readers? And hello to all in the glorious federation. Here we are at the start of 2014 and it’s time to reflect on the year just gone.

What a time we had! Between the robot rebellion, the new series of the Good Wife and the Pulitzer prize I got for that tweet I did, I hardly know where to start!

Kanye West and Kim Kardashian create life:

When preposterous blow-hard Kanye West publically sought validation for impregnating soulless brand-icon Kim Kardashian little did we know how brilliant things were going to get . . . because Kardashian was not just pregnant with bickering quadruplets, but also a camera-crew, a publicist and a whole cadre of wacky neighbours and hangers-on. At Womb with the Kardashians was the breakthrough hit of 2013!

The rise of 4D glasses:

After pesky interweb hackers discover a way to pirate 3D films, the studios started making movies using a previously imperceptible fourth dimension. Once you get used to the Lovecraftian horror of it all, possession by the pan dimensional old God Cthulhu is quite an entertaining way to see Iron Man III.

Love/Hate Series 4 — wasn’t it brilliant?

The Mrs Brown’s Boys crossover? The episode in which Nidge just stared menacingly at a mirror for 50 minutes? The one in which the characters sat down and rewatched series one and admitted that it was much better than they remembered? I can’t wait for series 5!

The Gathering is a great success against the odds:so the diaspora were stranded in Dingle where their big city ways did not endear them to the eccentric, superstitious and drunken locals. All the diaspora wanted to do was make its way to Dublin in time to propose to its uptight boyfriend on February 27th (leap day) but instead found itself tottering around country roads on heels, accompanied by a surly but handsome innkeeper with whom it bantered flirtatiously and ultimately fell in love (editor's note: is this not the plot of grotesque US rom-com Leap Year?).

Irish Presidency of the EU is a triumph:on paper having Enda Kenny, temporary president of the EU, accidentally declare war on China sounds like a bad thing ("We didn't know the president had those powers," sighed François Hollande at the time, "but apparently he does"). However, it was a short war and it worked out okay for us (and let me reaffirm this paper's loyalty to our new Chinese overlords).

Twitter reduces its 140 word character limit to a solitary “angry” emoticon and a soundfile of someone crying:

Finally the social media company realised that having too many characters stifled the true expression of ennui, outrage, alienation and frustration that comes with living one’s life online.

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise get back together:

We knew those lovebirds couldn’t keep apart, but when Thetan level 7 Cruise’s body disassembled into a swarm of nanobots on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and enveloped the terrified Holmes, our hearts melted (literally, in the case of the irradiated studio audience!) “I/we/it are very much in love,” the hivebeast told Ellen, before scanning her for nutritional value.

Newspapers find a viable business model:

No space to go into it here but thanks to “science”, people suddenly found it acceptable to pay vast sums of money for content online [insert credits here].

Of course much else happened over the last year (cats talking now, my knee giving me gyp and Hector’s stint presenting Prime Time) but that’s all we’ve room for. Anyway, I must be off, my wives are waiting for me in my hover car.