Was it yet another politically incisive tweet by Lily Allen (my God that woman is thick as a brick)?
Was it Ricky Gervais becoming the pin up for atheists days after the death of Christopher Hitchens?
Perhaps it was the latest fuss over racist footballers in which there is a genuine discussion to have about the term 'coloured' but instead which gets hijacked by those who can't see what the fuss is about and those who can but relegate the arguments to 'everyone's a racist'.
It is not that complicated. Sometimes there are words or phrases which are unacceptable to a bunch of people but because they are used by the majority, they seem ok.
Black people, and I accept that not even all black people, find the word coloured unacceptable. It suggests there are white people and everyone else is coloured. Which is derogatory. It is also a reminder of apartheid and segregationalist America, both of which happened within my lifetime.
The point is this. If people find it offensive, then we, as intelligent people, should simply stop using it when there are alternatives. We have a choice. We can choose not to be offensive or to be offensive. Why would we choose the latter option? 'Oh but I have always used it' is not good enough.
I can remember when words like wog, coon, paki and yid were used a lot. Thankfully they are not any more. We can decide whether we want to use the excuse of 'tradition' to be offensive, or not. Simple.
Alan Hansen used the word because he is from a generation who can remember when it was ok. He then realised he should not have so apologised. And that's the matter closed. Hansen is not racist. Suarez, I think, is. Let's face it. Whatever word he used to Evra - and it was probably something like 'negrito' - it was not done to be friendly. He wasn't saying, 'I say, that tackle was a bit late my black friend'. Dalglish is making himself looking stupid for getting his team to wear those t-shirts supporting Suarez. That's a team containing Glenn Johnson and 10 white blokes by the way. Try finding one other Premiership side that only has one black player in its starting line up. You probably have to go back as far as the Premiership winning Blackburn side to find a team made up of so many white players. Which was managed by? Er, remind me.
No, what made me think that we are living in the age of the stupid was David Jason. Del Boy if you will. He came out and said, and I paraphrase, the current situation with Europe was akin to Germany wanting to run Europe like the Fourth Reich.
It was stupid and ignorant.
There are a lot of arguments for and against closer integration in Europe and a lot of intelligent ones at that.
One of these is not that Germany is looking to invade the rest of Europe. This kind of kneejerk, xenophobic attitude does no one any favours. The plonker.
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I'm not doing a review of the year. If you want a review of the year buy a newspaper, switch on the TV or click on a million different websites.
If you did read a newspaper, any newspaper, during 2011 you have been well informed with thousands upon thousands of articles about everything from Imogen Thomas to the Arab Spring.
Obviously, now that the News of the World has been closed down based on five per cent of a Guardian story being wrong, then you will be less well informed about a variety of subjects that didn't interest the likes of Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant but were enough to satisfy several million or so Britons every week.
But, hey, on the plus side, you have a much higher proportion of 'serious' newspapers to choose from so you can read a lot more about how much bread costs in Tuscany or how Michael McIntyre will spend Christmas.
No, of course not. There's loads of serious stuff in the broadsheets that are covered a lot more flippantly in the tabloids if at all.
Thanks to painstaking research by the excellent journalist blogger Jon Slattery, he found there were 2,346 articles on Osama Bin Laden in the national papers in 2011. I think it's fair to say this was spread across the titles.
But there were 2,381 articles on Andy Coulson. I think it's fair to say most of these were in one particular paper. So that's more wordage on Coulson than the man who, this year, was shot dead by US forces.
Of course one is a ruthless tyrant ordering crack squads of evil men and women to go out and destroy opponents of their crazed philosphy. And the other is Osama Bin Laden.
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I really tried my best to be hard and cynical and nasty about Christmas, moaning about the songs on the radio, the over commercialisation, the rubbish TV, the John Lewis ad and all the rest.
And then a mate of mine showed me a website from the RNIB which listed letters to Santa from blind children and, well, it's no good. I'm going to have to realise how lucky I am after all.
It's Christmas.
Have a good one....Solly
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