Stupid Viral News Stories, a Year in Review

This is what we have learned in 2017: that, by being just wrong-shaped enough, too snobby, or too psychotic, or too desperate – by being you but more – you can bust through from nothing to something, the world's eyes suddenly all on you.

In a way, it’s a sort of worldwide digital retelling of the American Dream: you, too, can achieve prominence and success, or at least some sort of fame/unfame, just by doing something wrong enough, in front of the right portrait-facing iPhone camera, while doing just the right racist rant.

Anyway, here are all the worst people to go viral this year:

Don’t want to be all "2017! Heh! What a LITERAL DUMPSTER FIRE!" about it, but I had very much forgotten Donald Trump only ascended to power proper in January of this year.

What we learned from his first calamitous month as president is that it doesn’t matter what happens – even if it's a really real-feeling rumour about him pissing on a load of sex workers once in Russia – Donald Trump is somehow bombproof. He seemingly cannot be taken down by rumour or truth or gossip or explicit audio tape of him being sexist. Nothing can stop this train from rolling; he is the world’s first true unstoppable force and we will be stuck with this bullshit for seven more years.

I don’t think it is a boast to say this, but: I truly don’t believe anyone on Earth has thought about the Domino’s Pizza Shaggers more than I have. Ever since the story broke in February – followed by a photoshoot where Craig Smith rutted up behind his girlfriend, Daniella Hirst, and made manic shagging poses while pointing, red-faced, at a prop pizza, which I still cannot after hours of sustained thinking quite imagine the motive for – ever since then it has troubled me in quiet moments. 'Wonder what the Domino’s Pizza Shaggers are up to?' I would think, while with friends, family, loved ones. While trying to enjoy my life, the reality of theirs would push in, like a penis prodding shallowly into a vagina in a Scarborough branch of a chain pizzeria. And the answer I would always come up with is: 'Shagging, probably.'

Where does a relationship go after you’ve been nationally shamed for shagging in a Scarborough Domino’s? It can’t go down, exactly – addicts always talk about "rock bottom", a sort of conceptual idea of self-hell, an ultimate base from which progress can only be made, and I suppose fucking in a Domino’s is most people’s idea of that – but it can’t go up exactly, either. I mean, you cannot re-ignite the thrill of fucking – but not finishing! – in a Scarborough Domino’s. Yes, you could try shagging in Nando’s. You could try to fuck in Pizza Express. But it’s just not the same. It’s rare, in life, when the spirit captures you, and you and your partner are caught in a perfect electric moment of sympatico, and you just do that glance at each other, and then you fuck like jackhammers in Domino’s. Normal sex, in a bed, after that? It’s just not going to compare. Where art thou, Domino’s Pizza Shaggers. What’s going on with you these days.

March was good because it was the sort of groundswell of the whole "and if you stop buying avocados, millennials, you can buy property in this broken and disgusting world" which came most especially to a head when the BBC dropped an article titled "How to own a home by the age of 25", which featured a load of lads who only had one pair of jeans and had never been on holiday ever in their lives standing in front of freezing-looking new builds being sort of hollowly cheery about the whole thing, even though they had condemned themselves for infinity to live there, and— nope, sorry, forgot my point a bit there. The point is I’m going to eat avocados in 2018, just you try and fucking stop me. I’m going to eat a hundred times more avocados than you ever thought I was capable of before.

Once again, with feeling: it is the housing market that is broken and not the spending habits of the people trying to get into it.

In April, a high school student from something called Nevada asked Wendy’s (Wendy's is a fast food chain) how many "retweets" it would take for him to get a year of unlimited "nuggs", and I just want you to zoom out for a moment and imagine how long it would take you to explain to your granddad this fact. Over Christmas dinner, or something. You know granddad, don’t you: little cardigan, wide grey trousers, weird-shaped ass. No granddad alive has a normal-shaped ass. That’s not slander, that’s just a fact. A fact about granddad’s asses. They are all insane shapes like you see in a maths exam. Granddads do not do squats! And so they have insane-shaped asses. This is just a fact. Now: imagine explaining the Carter/nuggs thing, from earlier, to your squishy-ass granddad. It’s just hours of your life you’re not getting back from him. It’s truly not worth it. His ass is shaped like the first slice of a commercial Hovis loaf.

Carter, The Nugget Boy taught us a lot about ourselves in 2017. He taught us: hey, it’s OK to be weird. He taught us: the bored desperation of a high school boy can be turned into great power when handled by the wrong tools. He taught us that three million-plus retweets gets you a load of Wendy’s gift cards, an entire spin-off begging sub-economy between viral teens and unhip brands, and a charitable donation in your name. I suppose when we dismantle this year and put it under the stairs to be boxed up with the rest of them, what will happen to Carter, The Nugget Boy is this: he will go on the same strange scrapheap as the weird-voiced Damn Daniel kid, in that when he gets to college he’ll have to explain to everyone why he has a blue tick and a load of leftover vouchers for stuff, and that once he touched the face of glory, but only fleetingly, only once. Then never again.

Kind of weird to think of it now, but we had a snap election in June, if you remember that, just a year after the Brexit referendum, which itself was a year after the last General Election, in 2015, and at the current rate we’re probably going to have to have another election when Theresa May finally falls from her throne as being a begrudging leader of the Conservatives, and then after then when Brexit is finally all negotiated and signed off we’ll probably have another, Are We Sure referendum, and every one of them will go wrong and be terrible in some sort of additional new way, to the point that we’ll have to start having them at two a year, three a year, election one month and referendum the next, on-off, on-off, the Tories ascending and descending each time but still somehow always clenching on to power, the country as a whole undulating in and out of the EU.

It’s jokes, what I just said, but also: is it? It started as a joke. I wrote it with the intent of a joke. But now the more I think about it, the more it very much seems instead like a horrible prophecy. Brenda from Bristol saying, "You’re joking… not another one!" will be the soundtrack of our future. I cannot believe how many elections we have to keep having.

What happens when it looks a lot like two people are shagging openly on an easyJet flight while one of those persons – a turns-out-to-be-engaged man who claimed in all follow up interviews that, essentially, "I didn’t put it in, honest!" – desperately yells for a "jelly", the most Lads-On-Tour-1997 term for a condom ever said out loud over the last two decades, is this: we acknowledge that we are all, deeply, feral.

There is something about easyJet flights that unlocks something primal within all of us. Something happens to you, and me, and these two people, whenever we go into an easyJet cabin: we devolve, noticeably, pedal back a few thousand years of civility, become sort of snorting, fucking, primal little animals, shagging away in a dirty corner, daubing our shit on the walls. Look upon these two easyJet passengers, grunting sort of wetly away, and realise: we’re all just the wrong combination of drinks, the right amount of pre-holiday summer spirit, an accessible pair of shorts and a desperate plea for a jelly away from being them. If anything, it should teach us empathy for our fellow man.

Big Davey Attenborough rounded out the year with a to-camera plea to save the ocean, or whatever; stop throwing plastic in the ocean, or something. And yes, good David Attenborough, thank you: you are the only true, pure being left in this cesspit world. But also, remember literally this year when your producer went – and I know this isn’t the wokest way to say it, but sometimes you have to run against the grain – went completely fucking crazy and threatened to citizen’s arrest a baby? Because I remember that, and it was great:

Think the main takeaway story from the Tinder Poo Girl story going viral is this: all of us can feasibly enter a headspace where we might think wrapping a turd in tissue paper and flinging it weakly out of a window might be the most sensible course of action. We did not, any of us, ask: why did she throw a turd out of the window, wrapped in tissue. We went: that turd being thrown out of a window, wrapped in tissue, is an ugly-if-neat analogy for some of the trickier situations I have been in during my life. I’ve never wrapped a turd in tissue paper and thrown it out of the window before, but: like, I get it. We’re all the same, deep down. We’re all capable of moments of extreme turd-throwing mania. Isn’t that something to be celebrated?

LOL REMEMBER HOW MUCH YOU CARED ABOUT HETTY DOUGLAS IN THAT ONE WEEK YOU KNEW WHO HETTY DOUGLAS WAS, EVEN THOUGH YOU HADN’T REALLY EVER HEARD OF HETTY DOUGLAS BEFORE, BUT THEN THE HETTY DOUGLAS THING HAPPENED – REMEMBER HOW MUCH YOU USED TO DEFEND THE GCSE RESULTS OF BUILDERS!!!!! WHAT WERE U ON ABOUT – AND THEN IT ALL SORT OF WENT AWAY AGAIN, AND YOU REALISE, DON’T YOU: NOTHING MATTERS UNTIL IT MATTERS DEEPLY TO YOU, AND THEN IT DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL. DOES THAT EVEN MEAN ANYTHING????? NOT REALLY SURE IT DOES, MATE, SORRY. NO MORAL.

Don’t think I’ve ever identified more with anything, ever, than that picture of a baby in a Batman outfit crying because he filled a drawer with piss, because remember being a kid: remember being gross and illogical and emotional and full of piss? Remember that. But also: Piss Drawer Baby discourse immediately went from "very, very fun" to "a real downer" in like record time. "Kids shouldn’t fill drawers with piss!" people cried. "That’s not what healthy kids do! Don’t piss-shame the Batman baby!" It’s astonishing how quickly something good can turn to something bad in the hands of the concerned. Anyway: Piss Drawer Baby and Nirvana Baby mash-up album in 2035, please.

No dignity in the tasing. No dignity there. A lot of other police attacks you can grunt grimly through and pull off with a sort of violent elan. You can be hit with a truncheon in the head, I think, and nobody will think you undignified for it. There’s something to be said for the dignified, stoic mace. But tasering? In public? All of your muscles, most especially your piss muscles, collapsing at once? Seconds after you yell "I'M A LEGEND!" and slap a coffee cup out of someone’s hand? On a Monday? No, no. There is no dignity in the taser. Try not to do anything next year that leads to you getting tasered. Your whole skeleton, alive with electricity. Your whole bottom half, wet with your own hot piss. No. Not for me, thanks. There is no dignity is tasering.

Surprise, v., is defined as "(of something unexpected) cause (someone) to feel mild astonishment or shock", and what I guess I am saying is it is something I did not feel earlier this month, when you all did, when that Sunderland fan really really looked like he shat on his fold-down seat at the Stadium of Light. This is because I lived with a Sunderland fan in my third year of uni, where I learned that this is what Sunderland fans do. Being so catatonically drunk that you mistake a sealed, hole-less, fold-down seat – in a roaring football stadium, outside – for something you can piss or shit through is, like, as close to the purest and most original form a Sunderland fan can take. In many ways, every Sunderland fan who doesn’t wee and allegedly poo all over the fold-down plastic seats at the Stadium of Light needs to try harder.

Mind you, there are levels even to this, because after the initial wave of stories there was another wave, in which it was claimed there was in fact no soiling of the seat whatsoever. "I am apologetic for it, I am sorry," Callum Mawson told the Record. "I didn't defecate on the seat, that's the God's honest truth. I can't recall any of it." In case further proof was needed, the police later backed him up on his claim that he didn't defecate on the seat.

Anyway, the reason he was so pissed was because he’d drunk 12 beers, six ciders and only eaten two advent calendar chocolates. Digestively, psychically, it’s a wonder the man is still alive. What can we learn from Callum Mawson, not shitting but very much looking like he was shitting? The human body is a fantastic machine, a beautiful engine, capable of great feats of athleticism. Consuming only beer, cider and calendar chocolate – and not only being alive after it, but alive enough to apologise to a newspaper – is as impressive as anyone who has completed an ultra-marathon.

I mean, that’s the real moral of the story here, isn’t it. We all lived another year – in these horrid, crumbling bodies – consuming news and memes and memes and news, and a sort of weird grey liminal version of something that lives between the two, and everything is sort of terrible and sometimes things are good, and with everything only being polar and in extremes there’s no real room for, in the centre, a lukewarm take. In essence: what is the point of anything. Even if we get noticed – for being shagged, for being tased, for being classist – we’ll ultimately be forgotten. Well! Happy New Year!

@joelgolby

(*1) This story broke in September but happened in August, and I only say this because there’s always someone, isn’t there, some smart arse in the Facebook comments – you think I don’t see the Facebook comments, do you, but I do and they hurt – and what I am saying is it’s very hard to put together a list-based fun article for the end of the year and pin rigidly to the skeleton of the Gregorian calendar, give me a fucking break, it happened in August, shut u—