It is an irrefutable fact of life and human nature that New Year’s res­o­lu­tions for self-improve­ment on a grand scale are “made to be bro­ken”. Ergo, instead of per­pet­u­at­ing my annu­al fail­ures, this year I’m sim­ply resolv­ing not to con­cern myself with vex­a­tions over which I have no con­trol, will nev­er under­stand and don’t need to give a tinker’s dam (or damn) about anyway.

That they are of lit­tle rel­e­vance to my week­ly effort to come up with rea­soned analy­sis and com­ment on grander world events is a break I feel the need to take.
When I launched my “perch”, friends and fel­low blog­gers insist­ed I need­ed a Twit­ter account. I resist­ed and resolve to con­tin­ue to do so because;
a) I’ll nev­er fig­ure the plat­form out,
b) my ten­den­cy to vis­cer­al reac­tions would earn me more oppro­bri­um than I can han­dle, result­ing in being “can­celled” faster than I commenced,
c) on avail­able evi­dence, Twitter’s most ardent fans seem to have short atten­tion spans and no inter­est in con­text, and
d) Elon Musk has proven my point. Any­one who renamed a uni­ver­sal­ly iden­ti­fi­able brand to a sym­bol asso­ci­at­ed with pirates’ trea­sure maps (as in “X marks the spot”) and an ill­ter­ate’s sig­na­ture, was bound to turn it into a ver­biage cesspool.
Was I wrong?
Anoth­er “trea­sure” I shall con­tin­ue to avoid in 2024 is cryp­tocur­ren­cy, which I only recent­ly realised is one word, as opposed to two, or hyphen­at­ed. It doesn’t exist in any tan­gi­ble form, requires an uncon­scionable amount of fos­sil fuel-gen­er­at­ed elec­tric­i­ty to pro­duce and seems to be a mag­net for peo­ple who ought to know how to invest yet are greedy enough to hand over ludi­crous sums of real mon­ey to 20-some­things with no invest­ing track record (think Sam Bankman-Fried) and then whine with sur­prise when they lose it.

                          THE EINSTEIN TEST

My guide­lines for which pun­dits and com­men­ta­tors are wor­thy of time and atten­tion will be based on whether they meet Albert Einstein’s stan­dard: “If you can’t explain it sim­ply, you don’t under­stand it well enough.”
Hav­ing resigned myself to the depress­ing fact that news broad­casts now con­sist of few­er prop­er reporters and more  “experts” who, when­ev­er they spout on a sub­ject about which I know some­thing, seem to be the antithe­sis, I have there­fore resolved to change the chan­nel or hit the “Off” but­ton the moment one of them begins a sen­tence with “Well”…”So”…”I mean”…“Obviously” or any com­bi­na­tion of the pre­ced­ing, inserts “like” where it is point­less, repeats the ques­tion to which he/she/whatever, has just been asked as part of the sought-after answer. The same applies to any whose voice ris­es at the and of a sen­tence, there­by turn­ing it into an interrogative.
In fair­ness, I must fur­ther resolve to avoid the trans­gres­sion I have just com­mit­ted of break­ing my per­son­al record for a run-on sen­tence: by my count, 99 words. As Char­lie Brown would say: “Good grief”.
If  a news sto­ry includes quotes from, or an inter­view with any­one whose adjec­tives are lim­it­ed to the over-worked and as often as not inap­pro­pri­ate, espe­cial­ly  “awe­some” , “amaz­ing” or “empow­er­ing”, I shall  turn the page or change the chan­nel after the sec­ond infringement.
Use of “game-chang­er” and “tox­ic”, nei­ther of which any longer have pre­cise or even use­ful mean­ing, won’t get a sec­ond chance.
I may, or more like­ly may not be as well-informed as I had hoped, but nei­ther will I be frus­trat­ed, irked or enraged. How­ev­er, no one in my vicin­i­ty will be left won­der­ing about my san­i­ty because I won’t be bark­ing invec­tives at said “expert” and the “news organ­i­sa­tion” that saw fit to pass off the inchoate as useful.
It will also give me more time to seek infor­ma­tion from prop­er news sources and relax with enter­tain­ing diver­sions from real­i­ty, includ­ing books and films. To that end, for yet anoth­er year I will avoid any that are based on a com­ic book series, or get rave reviews for being “inclu­sive”, which gen­er­al­ly means the per­pet­u­al­ly insult­ed are catered for at the expense of plot and mem­o­rable dia­logue. Those praised with buzz­words of the day will also be ignored.

                                CLEARING THE HAZE

To free my mind of a minor per­plex­i­ty, I resolve to stop won­der­ing why auto­mat­ed call respons­es call the sym­bol # “the pound sign”, a form of social media which I do not and do not wish to under­stand or use, des­ig­nates it “Hash Tag” and I was taught, in those dark age days when use­ful every­day knowl­edge was actu­al­ly impart­ed to young minds, that it sig­ni­fied  “Num­ber”.
In the face of the crush­ing weight and impor­tance of world events, Gaza above all, part of me says that writ­ing about my whim­si­cal “res­o­lu­tions” is both friv­o­lous and some­thing of a cop-out for a puta­tive pre­sen­ter of a self-pro­claimed “atyp­i­cal perspective”.
But we all need a break from the vile and per­ni­cious, which will be there, more or less unchanged tomor­row, next week, month and depress­ing­ly, most if not all of the com­ing year.

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