I’m rolling into 2010 with all the enthusiasm of a frog pinned to a table in a high-school science lab. Lets just get it over with. What’s the new years equivalent of scrooge? Whatever it is, I execute it perfectly. I simply don’t get what the big who-hah is all about. Yes your clock is going to flip over from 11:59 to 12:00, wow, it only does that twice a day, every day, all year long. Woo, its the start of another month, so what we get 12 of those a year. Yippee it the start of a new decade, who cares, do people think that just because the last four digits in the date are now 2010 instead of 2009 that magically everything will be different?

Wrong. It is January 1st right now, and it feels just the same as December 31st. Yes, its slightly warmer, but I still slept in, I’ve eaten food, I’m cruising the internet, I’m still on leave. The globe is still warming, the US are still on their never ending quest to gain control of the world’s oil supplies so that the rest of use can pay exorbitant prices to fill our cars so that we can drive places, thus contributing the aforementioned ‘warming’ that our planet is experiencing.

People in third world countries still get sick and die from diseases that the better-off folk haven’t had to worry about for years. Science still hasn’t found a cure for cancer, aids or the bloody common cold. Swine flu is still over sensationalised by the world media, perhaps if they focused their scare campaigns on one of the many more serious health issues in the world then they wouldn’t be so easy to target in our everyday satirical lives.

…all the birdies Tiger had been collecting in the quest of his own personal grand slam

The financial “issue” that is the GFC still has us by the cojones, yet the annual boxing day splurge has resulted in a level of debt that is simply hard to believe. The figure mentioned by one weekend newspaper was something like an average $74,000 debt per person. Granted that figure likely isn’t just form the boxing day sales, but probably also takes into account the massive mortgages, gambling debts and all the money that the lovely tax payers donate so that our politicians can spend as much time as possible in any country so long as its not the one that they are supposed to be running. And remember that stupid stimulus package that Captain KRudd put in motion last year, well that amount to something like $22,000 debt per person as well. Is this included in the $74,000 figure that is now being reported? Unlikely.

The behaviour (or lack there of) issues in sport have been topical for years, 2009 didn’t disappoint, but 2010 will be different right? Sure whatever helps you sleep at night, although it might be hard to top the previous years adventures. The NRL started a great year by selecting a new pin-up boy in Brett Stewart who would go on to make an arse of himself before the season even started. Then the media would dig up a 7 year-old incident involving Matt Johns resulting in him being hung up to dry while all the others involved got away without even being named.

I’m not by any stretch of your imagination condoning what he did, but there were half a dozen other dim-witted morons connected to the incident, none of which were ever named or pursued by the media. Why? Probably because they didn’t have careers or lives that could be harmed by bringing it up. And it would be remiss of be to not mention the new movement within Rugby League that was started by Nate Miles. Unfortunately he started this new movement when he locked himself out of his hotel room and proceeded to dump some promotional material at the door of another hotel occupant. Charming.

As if sexual misdemeanors, and drunken midnight bowel movements weren’t enough the league year ended on high when Danny Wicks was busted in connection to a “significant drug distribution network”, lining up charges for both the possession and supply of a prohibited substance. He proceeded to quit his team, quite possibly an indication of guilt or more ‘stories’ threatening to come out. Either way it was a fine example for the footy world to end on, by demonstrating exactly just how many players don’t have access to that other substance, which is not prohibited, not expensive, and provides them with safety as well as numerous other things. Logic, if they all just had a little then what would sports broadcasters have to report on?

But sporting events weren’t limited to just our own shores, lordy no. The instant Tiger crashed his big black SUV in his own driveway, he was probably beginning to wish he hadn’t. It didn’t take long for the revelations to spill out about all the birdies Tiger had been collecting in the quest of his own personal grand slam. There is a joke that about the difference between love and divorce, that “love is grand, and divorce is a hundred grand”. Tiger will be wishing this were true, for a man worth as much as he is a hundred grand is play money, with the mass exodus of sponsorships, and his Swedish wife bound to take him to the cleaners, poor Tiger could experience a slight GFC of his own. Mind you, he’ll still have more money than the rest of us.

Britney mimes at her concerts - wait, everyone already knew that, why was it news?

Getting away from sport for bit, and back to the more serious issues - you know all the exciting stuff like death, destruction, H1N1, GFC, climate change, twitter and Britney. Nothing brings people together like climate change (especially if its one of those disaster movies where the giant tsunami causes everyone to huddle together at the top of a mountain until the water subsides). So they held this big climate change conference (read: piss up) in Copenhagen, and invited all the world’s leaders with the plan to reach an agreement to cut omissions to a certain amount by a certain date. They even gave it a trendy acronym for the media to embrace, COP15.

Now I’m sure the intention was right, but this thing ran for 11 days and it was until there was about a day left before Barrack Obama even turned up. From all the reports I saw it seemed a lot like they spent 10 days talking about climate change related things to whoever was around to listen in an effort to make it look like they were progressing, and then at the eleventh hour they all of a sudden realised what they were actually supposed to be doing. Perhaps that is why so many people feel that COP15 was a failure.

How much global warming did the conference itself produce given that there were thousands of officials representatives there, not to mention the tens of thousands of protesters. I’m sure that a hell of a lot of them used planes trains and automobiles to get there, and I doubt any of them were electric or ran on bio-fuels.

140 characters became the new 15 minutes of fame, twitter took over the ‘popular’ space. Ashton Kutcher got twitter, then Oprah got twitter, and I’m pretty sure even Osama bin Laden’s got twitter (don’t be fooled by the sneaky pseudonym he’s using for his username - SexyBeard57). Twitter became the new way to find out what was happening as it was happening, we learnt that they found ice on the moon, we found out that the King of Pop was dead and we found out that Britney mimes at her concerts - wait, everyone already knew that, why was it news?

The problem is that twitter was better before it was the cool new thing. It was better when it was primarily used by people who actually know about the sorts of technology required to produce such a thing. That is probably a really pessimistic way of looking at things, but its the truth. People were using twitter before Ashton, yes kids Ashton didn’t invent the twitter apparently he just has nothing better to do with his time then sit on twitter all day.

MySpace was cool, then all the 13 year-old girls joined, made their pages hot pink with yellow & green text, with awesome background music & half naked pictures of wannabe vampires from the latest teen cash cow.

Long-time users of twitter answer me this, how many spam/warez/bot/porn accounts followed you before Ashton, Oprah, Britney and co joined the craze. Now how many follow you. Cause and effect. The same thing happened to mySpace (and I seriously hope this isn’t the way twitter goes). MySpace was cool, and then all the 13 year-old girls joined, and made their pages hot pink with yellow and green text, with awesome background music and half naked pictures of wannabe vampires from the latest teen cash cow (or whatever the 2002 equivalent of twilight was). Now, the only mySpace user that are left are those same 13-year olds, indie music and those who don’t have enough human friends to warrant the need for a facebook account.

I guess my point is, yes I was getting to one, what’s the point in making new years resolutions, when the new year is just another day with a different number on the calendar. No one lives up to their resolutions anyway, eg I could make a resolution that I will write with a less hate-filled pessimistic view of the world, but that’s not going to happen, is it?

But while we are still on the topic of new years lets quickly talk fireworks. Seriously, every year they are going to be bigger and better than the previous year, with more technology, colours, shape and innovation. And every year they look pretty much the same, or worse. As far a Sydney goes they’ve flogged every little piece of life out of the “lets put a silly image on the side of the bridge to make everyone excited, oh and while were at it lets connect it to a ‘cool’ theme”. Yes, themes are great, but what is the point when 99% of the people that you’ve got harbour-side are pissed seven ways ‘til Sunday. How many of them a re going to remember that the city’s theme was poverty despite the fact they’ve just sent millions of dollars up in smoke for a fancy light show to entertain some drunks. Or that the them was about being “green” in your everyday lives when the way that you’ve expressed it is by expelling large amounts of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.

I just don’t get it, maybe I’m thick. Most of last nights fireworks were just big glowing clouds because there was so much smoke being produced that you would have been forgiven for thinking that the harbour bridge was actually on fire or being demolished. Every year they seems to cram more and more explosives on to the coathanger, its like a giant game of chicken. “How many pounds of explosives can we get on here before the fireworks finale is the bridge collapsing into the harbour”.

Happy 2010 everyone.