It's not about the Football.... Honest. 

The internet has been awash with football of late, or soccer as they like to say over here and, well... nowhere else.

Speaking to the few Americans I have met that are very keen on football I have noticed a trend. They are usually bleary-eyed, stinking of drink, and regaling me about their excellent evening watching a game the night before.

If not that, they are avidly speaking about the game sat across from me in a pub or a bar. 

It made me realize something that I have never before considered. Despite having an awful tattoo of my local football team emblazoned on one arm, and having a season ticket for several years before I joined the military, it has never been about the football.

Its a social event.

And I guarantee that all of the fans that treat it as such come to love the beautiful game. Even if like me, they don't actually spend that much time watching the football, and even if they do, often remember little of it the morning after anyway.

Every match I ever saw with my Dad, or my Grandfather, or my friends, has absolutely always involved drinking in several pubs for a few hours beforehand, and then drinking in several pubs for many hours afterwards. 

Essentially, its an excuse for a social event. Its an excuse to ditch the kids at your mothers house, forget about that coursework for a day, leave the newspaper closed, leave the office early. You then meet a group of friends and spend a good few hours drinking socially, interspersed with a little topical football.

If you are an American and you are reading this, you might be thinking "Yes that is all well and good but I think soccer sucks" If that is the case, try going along with your friends anyway the next time you get an invite. You can even sit with your back to the screen, because doubtless there will be plenty of other people doing the exact same thing, and you can spot them easily if you are all facing in the same direction and perhaps make some new friends as well.

Humans are social animals, and absolutely any excuse for a get-together in these stressful modern times should be treated as a good one. 

Football works so well because it can be your excuse, and nobody has to die. You don't need to wait until your Aunt gets hit by a train to get together with your relatives and have a drink in a big room, you can do it at the pub under the pretense of watching a game.

Its probably why it is a very male thing to do, because we are famously bad at staying in touch. My wife and her mother talk all the time, her mother calls her sisters all of the time too. 

I get on well with my brother, father, uncle, and male cousins, but the only time we speak is when I need to borrow a power tool, when attending a funeral, or possibly when someone has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and only very briefly then. 

So you might not think you like football, but I am asking you to try it anyway, let a game be the excuse you need. Drink, talk, sing, be merry, enjoy yourself.

It isn't about football, its about having some fun, and we shouldn't need an excuse to do that but the older we get, the more it seems like we really do need one.

  

The True Cost of Monarchy

Today I felt moved enough by this video to talk about the monarchy. 

Despite not being a sentimental chap, or a pensioner, I'm actually something of a monarchist. Not the sort to go and peruse a website with pictures of the Royal baby, or even one to watch the Queen's Speech on Christmas day because frankly, there are much better ways to spend the day (drinking heavily and watching James Bond for example) but a certain kind of disinterested monarchist nonetheless. 

And I can very easily explain why. 

Politics is a nasty business. Such a nasty business that you can guarantee that anybody who excels at it is a capable liar. Not only that, but also a ruthless individual who is not afraid to do exactly what is required to come out at the top of a large heap of equally ruthless and pitiless individuals. Such is the way of the game, Indeed, it has long been known that if you want to succeed in politics you need to be willing to do what it takes to ensure you defeat your rivals. It is precisely why sleaze and lies inevitably follow politicians and bureaucrats around like a bad smell. 

Naked ambition is the root cause, and if you want to climb that slippery slope to power you need to be willing to do what it takes.

Barrack Obama is probably not the most dishonest American President ever, in fact, he's probably done a half decent job. I always preferred Hilary personally, but he has at least done a capable job of not being as incompetent as his predecessor. Regardless, even if you are an avid fan of Mr Obama and think he is more honest than many former presidents, he has also been caught lying numerous times. 

Barack Obama categorically stated that "Nobody is listening to your phone-calls" only days after Edward Snowden was arrested. It really is part of the job. Tony Blair was caught lying so often I would be unlikely to believe him if he told me he was feeling a bit warm seconds after being engulfed in flames following a gas explosion. Such behaviour comes with the turf, and there are many times when lying must be necessary when navigating the murky waters of international politics, so it obviously becomes a habit. As such, there is a good reason why most kids are told not to listen to the words of politicians or lawyers by their cynical grandparents, and it is because they know from experience. 

The most obvious reason to like a monarch, is precisely because of the way the job is imposed on the monarch in question using the hereditary system. Ambition is removed from the table. Queen Elizabeth II was told from a young age that she would be the Queen one day, so why bother with ambition? To bestow hereditary rule onto any individual ensures that they have no need to stab those that surround them in the back, they are getting the job whether they want it or not. It also ensures that the individual in question is schooled in the role from a very young age, they are told to do a duty, and few could argue, save for the most militant republican, that the current British Queen has at least done her duty. Can self serving politicians, Prime Ministers and Presidents really say the same? 

Most of the Queen's offspring serve the nation by enlisting in the military, can Prime Ministers and Presidents say the same? Where was Tony Blair's spoiled son Euan when Prince Harry was an pounding the sand as infantry officer on the ground in Afghanistan? 

He was at Yale.

After graduating with an immensely unspectacular 2:1 in Ancient History in 2005, he spent two months working as an intern at a French radio station owned by France’s richest man. A year later he landed another internship working for Republican politicians in Washington DC. He then left to study for an MA at Yale, and of course, he was awarded a scholarship of $75,000 into the bargain... I'm sure his poor pauper of a father would struggle to afford to pay for his tuition. 

Such obvious nepotism is commonplace among the politicians of the world, and only serves to drive me into the arms of the Queen and her kin, a very nice old lady who seems to work pretty hard considering her advanced age. Not that I care much for Royalty in the strictest sense, but there is no shortage of politicians serving the nation.....and themselves, obviously. 

But there are only a few Royals. Would the UK really gain anything from firing them, and adding a few more politicians and a president to the roster? I'm of the opinion that the 30,000 politicians we already employ are more than up to the job, and the 500 million pounds a year they cost seems a tad high, especially when it transpires they are all fiddling their expenses and charging the taxpayer for pornography, Christmas decorations, and picnics. What do politicians think their salaries are for?! 

Indeed, at 31 million pounds a year, I conclude that Lizzie and her ilk seem almost a snip. 

The Benefits of Sitting on the Fence 

I've spent most of this week reading about GM food and immunization. The two topics are often in the news these days, and I've recently started reading more about them because my brain aches every time I log onto Facebook and read the endless inanity that haunts the worlds most intellectually vapid social networking site. Merely sticking the words "like" and "share" underneath a badly edited photograph seem to magically imbue an image with validity, and then lo and behold, something obviously wrong and factually ridiculous to all but the most slowed high-school student is plastered all over my wall by some enthusiastic sharer, and I am forced to gnash my teeth and berate people that alas, I once called friend. 

They teach you how to process this nonsense at a very young age In high-schools back in England. My teachers expertly displayed the power of propaganda to me at a very young age in fact, by showing my class an anti-abortion video in one lesson of Personal and Social Education, a mandatory hour long life lesson that we were forced to sit through each week because presumably many parents don't have the brains to teach their kids not to be idiots. After only ten minutes watching said video, I was indeed anti-abortion, because I was convinced that an 8 week old fetus was capable of defeating me in a game of Connect 4. Indeed, according to the video I had just seen, the unborn children of the UK were patiently sat inside the wombs of the nation reading novels and tapping their feet to the music on Mom's Ipod. 

Totally True Fetus at 6 weeks

Well, it was more of a battery devouring cassette player with headphones that weighed two kilos back in 1990, but you get the idea. 

A week later, the class was made to watch a different video, one that was aggressively pro-choice. I recall finding it somewhat amusing, because if you watched that video on its lonesome you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that heading for an abortion was a pleasurable experience, and children are so devoid of life that any parent with a particularly moody teenager should be allowed to perform a retroactive abortion by legally drowning their kids in the bathtub before their eighteenth birthday. 

I'm not sure if they teach PSE these days, but it appears that the lesson has been entirely lost on today's youth. The message was an obvious one, and its painfully simple to put it into practice. 

If you see a picture of something on the internet, check the source. If there is no source, Google the "fact" and see for yourself. If you have never heard of the source, check that out as well. There are numerous well known groups and factions that are politically active today, and countless thousands of not well known ones. Obviously nobody can be expected to know them all, but here is a hint, if the groups title infers an obvious choice, then you should treat their message as suspect and take the time to check things out for yourself.

If you are capable of using a computer, you are capable of thinking for yourself. If a group is called something clearly inflammatory like "Gays Cause Hurricanes" or "Blacks and Jews Wreck Your Week" it should set some alarm bells ringing. The BBC is a pretty good source for news, but its still got a slant, so does the much maligned Daily Mail. Here's the rub though, Greenpeace don't sit on the fence either, neither does The Guardian, or groups called "If you don't recycle, you are practically a baby raper"  

Every publication is written by a fallible human being with a word processor, few of them will be as fallible as the writer of this particular blog, but the message is clear to anyone with even a basic understanding of how information works. Check the left, check the right, and then somewhere around the middle you will probably arrive at something like an answer, because everybody is desperate to sway you to their cause.

If you spend half an hour reading about either of the aforementioned topics, its painfully obvious that there is a sensible answer to both, so long as you are even remotely impartial about things. Choosing whether or not to have a termination is a painful decision, often a heartbreaking one, and always a difficult one, but there are a plethora of experts and scientists that have decided that a fetus is incapable of feeling or knowing anything at all before 20 weeks. Smarter people than you or I have decided such a thing, and funny thing, I like to ask an expert. Just because you have an opinion, it doesn't make it a valid one. 

I often point this out when I am being lectured about science by a scientific illiterate. Would you ask your dentist for psychiatric advice? If the flush isn't working in your bathroom, do you toss the plumbers number away and demand that the gardener take a look at it? How about asking the guy in Starbucks how to fix the gear box on your 1975 Austin Allegro? 

If in every single aspect of your life you are more than happy to follow the advice of those in the know, why would you allow your emotions to cloud your judgement and cause you to make absurd decisions on really important decisions, such as the health of your kids or your own personal well-being? This principal can be applied to almost all of the big issues of the day. 

Why not ask a geologist about fracking? Why not ask a General what he thinks of the war in Afghanistan? Why not ask a seismologist when he thinks "the big one" is going to hit California? 

The Facebook generation seems to think that all of the above is bad advice, and they should take all of their advice on myriad complex and confusing topics from people that are charismatic but entirely ignorant of the subject in question. I saw a guy talking about how 9/11 was an inside job which was actually carried out by Freemason affiliated Muslim Ninja's who secretly love George W. Bush even though he gave billions of dollars to Israel. He wasn't a world renowned scholar with long experience in economics and geopolitics though, he was a hippy with a loud shirt and a matted beard, and I'm pretty sure he was giving the interview in his mothers basement. 

To sum up, please don't listen to me, I may well have been typing in jest, but that is the pivotal point. Don't listen to anybody. Read several different sources from across the political spectrum and then sit down in solitude and make your own mind up. If you think you may be leaning unfairly in one direction, perhaps take a moment to ask yourself why. Nothing is black and white in reality, and almost everything is more complicated than it first appears if you take the time to learn about it. And remember, sitting on the fence can be boring and thankless, but it beats jumping down and putting your foot in dog-shit.

Oh and for the record, I eat GM food because I ate it for two decades before all this fuss started and It didn't seem to do me any harm, I will Immunize my kids, and I will always allow my missus to make her own decisions when it comes to her ovaries regardless of my feelings on the matter.

They are her ovaries after all...  

UK military cuts mean 'no US partnership', warns Robert Gates

One of the standout headlines on the BBC website today was a piece airing the views of Robert Gates, a former secretary of defence for the United States. Mr Gates says that because he "laments" American defence cuts, he also has concern for the cuts currently being directed towards the British armed forces. It may be a somewhat controversial thing to say in a nation that is so obsessed with having an overt military presence, but I find it difficult to be concerned about such a trifling issue.

Why is it a trifling issue? Well, lets look at the facts and figures. Currently the United Kingdom has the fourth largest military budget in the world, despite having the eighth largest economy. Britain spends more on the military than almost every nation on earth, and most amusingly, far more than all of the nations named as part of "the axis of evil" by George W Bush. Indeed, the combined military spending of the most belligerent states in the world today is still less than what the British spend on the armed forces, and I, along with many others, believe this sum is more than ample. 

Do the Dutch worry about their military spending? Do the happier, slimmer, fitter, more relaxed people of Austria, Switzerland, Denmark or New Zealand sit around worrying themselves silly about the fact that they can't muster a terrifying war host to barnstorm across the globe bringing flaming death to their perceived foes? 

Of course they don't. And according to the Mercer Quality of Living Survey from 2012, not one of the best cities to reside in on planet earth sits inside the borders of the militarily powerful nations of the earth.

And on a personal level, sit and think about it for a while, do you really care about how powerful the military of the nation who happen to inhabit is, as long as you are happy? Surely things like access to good jobs, health care, and schools, are far more important. As long as you and your children are prosperous, happy, healthy, and well educated, what does it matter if you can't drop napalm onto the heads of illiterate goat herding peasants halfway across the world? 

We don't live in the colonial era anymore, gone are the days of slavery and outright theft. Trade is the way of the modern world, and the easily available technology of the modern world is the ultimate force multiplier. As such, It has taken the world's only military hyperpower and her allies 13 years to fight the Taliban to a standstill, so where is all of this expenditure getting us? 

As long as your nation has enough military bite to police its own borders, and act as a deterrent to wantonly aggressive foreign powers, then the military of your nation is completely fit for purpose. As such, I believe that the United States could happily shave 20% from its military spending, scale back its operations accordingly, and still be fit for purpose, allowing American citizens to sleep safe in the knowledge that their nations military expenditure still more than trebles the spending of all of the nations combined which could be deemed to be even remotely hostile. 

So should the British Government carry on with military cuts despite the warnings of the esteemed Mr Gates? 

Of course it should.

Release those endorphins! ..... and those bowels. 

I had an amusing day at the gym recently when a random but very fit looking young man who appeared to be harbouring a secret desire to pummel an unsuspecting and slightly overweight member of the public into submission handed me an impromptu challenge.

 I had never seen the guy before in my life, but he stepped onto the treadmill next to mine in 24 Hour Fitness and wordlessly threw down the gauntlet. The whole affair started innocently enough as I stepped onto a free machine and began an easy loping run to warm up. Two minutes after stepping onto it however, a much taller, leaner, and frankly far more energetic looking young chap about 10 years my junior got onto the treadmill next to mine. Nothing strange about that, but he then proceeded to ape my movements speed identically, and when I sped things up a few minutes later copied the exact same speed and elevation of my machine. At this point I gave the dominant male to my left a quick questioning glance, and he inclined his head slightly towards me in a movement which seemed to wordlessly state "Now we must battle for ownership of the virile females in this building." 

Ten minutes later I had ramped things up and added another kilometre an hour to the speed, and my unnamed challenger proceeded to do the exact same ten seconds later, clearly the gloves were off. My would-be destroyer had ceased any pretence of coincidence, and this sudden and unexpected attack went on for another 30 minutes of soul crushing effort. Regardless of the settings I was choosing on what was supposed to be a relaxing run, my leaner, obviously fitter tormentor would match me on both speed and elevation. And so began an unspoken battle of wills, where neither man spoke, but both silently acknowledged they were savagely butting heads in a battle that first began when mankind's ancestors first crawled from the primordial ooze eons ago.

At the 40 minute mark I was running up a treadmill that was so savagely inclined it was like a rubber version of the steep side of K2, and I was smashing my feet so hard into the treadmill that my teeth were threatening to vibrate out of my skull, but still he pursued me. My shirt was so wet it looked like I had been blasted off my feet with a riot hose before entering the gym, and my already bushy eyebrows were proving inefficient at keeping the sweat from my painfully itchy eyeballs. At this point, heart hammering against my ribcage but unwilling to do the smart thing and concede, I attempted to send my mind to a better place, took my eyes off the timer, and grit my teeth against the pain. Approximately 4 and a half minutes later, with a strange tingling up my spine and an odd buzzing sound reverberating around my skull, my foe finally gave his head a slight shake, and then knocked 5 or 6 kilometres an hour off his own machine. I carried on as best I could, desperate to try and show that I was above such a childish display of machismo. Surely because he instigated the whole thing I could plead ignorance? I could simply pretend that I regularly went for a leisurely jog and proceeded to run at such a pace that my shins were blasted to bits and I thought I was going to defecate in my shorts?

It was no good however, and I was forced to knock the speed down to a brisk walk only 30 seconds after him as I had started to see stars blinking across my vision and feared losing consciousness at great speed. This would be less of an issue if we were running outside, because such an act here would see my vomit and blood soaked body thrown across the gym and into the free weights area forty feet away. When I slowed my machine down, the sadist to my left gave me a grin, shook his head slightly, and then stopped his machine. He grabbed his towel and his keys, leapt from the machine in a sprightly fashion, and made his way towards the exact with a fair sheen of sweat but looking none the worse for wear. 

 The same could not be said for me however, and things went from bad to worse as soon as I stopped the treadmill a few minutes later. Despite feeling merely light headed and a little bit sick as I got off the machine, I suddenly felt extremely ill when I stood upon still earth once more. I somehow began staggering while simultaneously looking like I was clutching a pencil between my arse cheeks, and made my way to the changing room. Not wanting to faint or vomit in-front of any of the other men present, I made for the bathroom as swiftly as my recently liquified kneecaps would allow. Mercifully it was empty, and on shaking legs I locked myself into a cubicle and proceeded to collapse next to the porcelain and spewed acid and bile into the pan. I then started shaking uncontrollably, and bizarrely, found myself immensely drowsy. I drifted in and out of consciousness for about ten minutes before I finally had the strength to operate the flimsy handle on the door.

As I passed the large mirrors on the way to the exit on unsteady legs, I caught a glimpse of my pallid, green tinged reflection, and found myself wondering two things. First of all, if I was the victor of this impromptu battle, why did I feel so demoralized and dejected? And secondly, if exercising is apparently so good for the health, why did I look like a recently reanimated corpse? 

I never look that rough when I'm sat in the pub..... 

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.