New Year's resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing and then resolve to stop doing it.
Calling Batman 'the Dark Knight' is like calling Papa Smurf 'the Blue Patriarch':you're not fooling anyone.
I can't imagine painting my face in a team colour and roaring with delight as a multi-millionaire kicks a ball at a net.
What I disliked most about working as a shop assistant wasn't the occasional snooty customer or the shop or the hours, but the way people reacted when I told them I was a shop assistant - their automatic assumption that I didn't enjoy it.
If I ran a national burger franchise - which I don't - I'd make it a rule that no two customers can be greeted with precisely the same words and that every third customer must be grossly insulted as a matter of course. Just to keep the atmosphere nice and lively. And to keep the staff laughing.
The majority of people are perfectly capable of interacting with retail staff without spitting on them or whipping their hides like dawdling cattle, but Planet Earth still harbours more than its fair share of disappointments.
Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of 'SpongeBob SquarePants.'
It must be awful, being a homophobe.
Youth fare aside, I have generally always been interested in what's going on culturally.
Online, you play at being yourself.
Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can't decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.
Short of finding a place on the witness protection programme, you don't get many opportunities to completely reinvent your life. Going to university changes that. Away from home, away from parents, away from anyone who remembers you from school, you can pretend to be far cooler and more experienced than you are.
God, people say 'Black Mirror' was horrible - it's nothing compared to the stuff that happens in 'Grimms' Fairy Tales.' It's mind-bending.
If the Walkman had, by default, silently contacted your friends and told them what you were listening to, not only would no one have bought a Walkman in the first place, its designers would have been viewed with the utmost suspicion.
We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, 'How could we do an episode about that?'
It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.
I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.
'MasterChef''s preliminary stages deliver just the right level of almost-drama for viewers feeling shagged out after a hard day's fruitless existence.
