How to avoid being as popular as erectile disfunction in 2014. 

I started this bright and sunny morning in the same manner as so many others in the modern age, by logging in to Facebook so I could start the day bright eyed, bushy tailed, and filled with rage and spite. A friend sent me a photograph of a girls Facebook page today, and her status for New Years Eve read something akin to this. 

This year I got a promotion at work, I got a new car, I got a new house, I had a holiday in Australia and my gorgeous and talented son came top of his class, go me!

 

After I was done gouging my own eyeballs out, I decided to ring in the New Year with a short introduction to online ethics, something I wouldn't have thought necessary in 2014, but apparently the internet savvy youth of today have the social graces of a convicted rapist with Tourette syndrome. 

If anybody has a differing viewpoint, feel free to share it with me below, at which point I will delete it and the normal humans can get back to socializing without looking like a twat. 

Something I learned at a very early age, I think I was perhaps 4 or 5 years old, was that bragging is an instant way to stir up dislike. If someone ever told me I did something well and I gratefully accepted the compliment, it seemed to almost instantly cool the air around me, indeed, my own parents would always tell me that nobody likes people that brag, and if ever I forgot the lessons of my Father he would reinforce them in a most ingenious manner that could be used to good effect in modern schools, by smashing my arse to bits with a flip-flop.  

Anyway, fast forward to 2013 and it appears that many peoples parents didn't bother to point this trivial stuff out. In fact, judging by the behaviour of the average twenty something today they also seem to have skipped several other vital lessons regarding personal hygiene, such as "wash occasionally" and "don't brush your teeth with stout" 

In a nutshell, absolutely everybody hates a braggart, even if the bragging is well placed. For example, several sports stars are famous for bragging, and at least in those cases they are almost always perfectly within their rights to do so. If David Beckham decided to announce that he was excellent at crossing a ball, or Sebastian Vettel decided to call a press conference to announce that he was confident he could parallel park better than Ray Charles, there would be little disagreement, but people would still grumble and say things like "Beckham doesn't just dress like a tit, he actually is one."

So as we move into the New Year, remember that if you wish to be popular in 2014 you should try and practice a little humility. Beckham is actually supposed to be a nice guy, so Im sure even if you did start extolling his virtues, he would say something like "Oh thanks, but I'm sure you could do it if you trained hard and practiced" 

He would obviously be lying, but the point is a simple one, even if if you are absolutely convinced that you are a paragon of virtue and talent, at least trying to pretend that you aren't even for a little while will show people that you aren't as unwelcome as a bastard at a family reunion. 

Sure false humility and modesty may be a little dishonest, but it is almost always preferable to the belief that the motley collection of almost strangers that make up your circle of friends in cyberspace actually give a flying fuck about how handsome your husband is, or where you decided to go on holiday. 

Always Outraged, All of the Time.

As the year comes to a close, the news has been following the same familiar pattern of outrage and despair over trivial things, which is strange because the world is replete with things that people should actually be getting outraged about. Yes, it is all well and good pointing out that babies are getting raped and teenage girls are having their genitals hacked to bits by their relatives because they think that Allah wants to rethink the whole clitoris thing, but according to the local news such things pale into insignificance when compared to the fact that occasionally people say silly things very quietly. 


I am of course referring to the fact that the England cricketer Graeme Swann was lambasted last week for commenting on his brothers Facebook page that the national team had just been "raped" in Australia. He didn't call a press conference and announce that rape should be legalised, or perhaps write a column in the Daily Mail and extol the virtues of horsing one into a stranger and hoping they didn't notice, no, he simply told his brother that his team had been "raped" via Facebook, and this somehow saw him placed on a pedestal alongside Fred West. Oddly, it seems that the casual use of the word rape as a slang term for being soundly thrashed is pretty common in this day and age, and I recall a football commentator being similarly pilloried a few years back for saying a player had raped another when he left him in his dust on the wing. It must be a storm in a teacup, because using a word casually obviously doesn't mean that you endorse the meaning of the word. This is evidenced by the fact that my grandmother often says "Bugger me!" but still has never been given the shock of her life by a passing stranger. 


 The Chinese are outraged that the Japanese Prime Minister went to visit a grave. It seems a tad hypocritical to complain about such a thing when the Chinese are currently almost as famous for torture and state sanctioned murder as they are for sweet and sour sauce. Not that I would like to endorse the truly awful behaviour of the Japanese during the Second World War, but it seems a bit silly to get so offended about a guy visiting a grave, when this type of thing is still actually happening today. The Chinese apparently had more prisoners killed during 2013 than the rest of the world put together. This would not actually be such a big deal if they at least ensured that the people they were hanging or shooting had actually done something wrong, but apparently the Chinese Police are about as thorough as a partially sighted private investigator with a drink problem. On that note, the United States has seen capital punishment decrease by around 10 percent this year, which is actually a pretty sad thing in my eyes because they have due process. 


 Plenty of people get outraged about that as well, and like to whinge about how cruel it is to kill people merely for doing things that are so monstrous Peter Mandelson would blush if he was asked to watch. The whole thing would only be cruel if the state was murdering convicts via the medium of crucifixion, and they were always left to hang by their recently nailed wrists in front of a big screen TV that was playing "Dude, Where's My Car?" on loop. Those limp wristed hand wringing always outraged types also claim that even if the process of elimination was entirely painless, the knowledge of their eventual demise is a form of emotional torture all of its own, and nobody should ever have to endure the knowledge that they will soon be killed. If mental cruelty is such a big deal, surely the most humane way of doing things would be to tell the convict that they were pencilled in to be killed with lethal injection in October 2034, and then quietly sneak in at 4am that morning and shoot them in the head?

 The people of Catalonia are outraged because a Spanish copper poked fun at them by asking if they would prefer to be ravaged by infantry or tanks if they voted for independence. The fact that the whole thing was clearly meant to be taken in a lighthearted manner and was prefaced by the word "humour" apparently being lost on all of those poor souls that are desperate to be offended all of the time on Twitter, which of all the social media tools seems to be the most pathetic and hand wringing. 

 I even saw an outraged feminist on Twitter complaining about supermarkets selling FHM because they have semi naked women on the cover, as if FHM is demeaning to women! If anything FHM is demeaning to men, because from the outside it actually looks like it might be worth reading, but when you open it you don't even get to see any nipples, and certainly no crotch shots. As such, the magazine is an appalling halfway house located somewhere between a pornographic magazine and a novel. Its far too tame for a hand shandy, and far too dull to read. In fact I would rather read the back of a toothpaste tube while sat on the toilet, and If I ever need some quick relief, Id be better off trying to fap one out using the Virgin Atlantic brochure.

 It all seems a little unfair considering I haven't heard any of the so called "Meninists" complaining about the fact that girly or gay magazines have much more much male nudity on the cover, to the point where full blown nudity is acceptable as long as they hide the guys bellend behind a rolled up magazine. Which begs the question, if some fully naked footballer was adorning to cover of a magazine, but was using FHM to hide one of his testicles, would the rolled up magazine cover be more offensive than the publication itself?

 Regardless, as we move into 2014, my new years resolution is to not get as offended by people who are always offended. Fortunately, my resolutions only ever last a week, so I will be able to blog my rage and spite into 2014 with few issues.  

 Happy New Year fellow ragers, and let us hope that 2014 is as much of a mess as 2013.