A Year's 'spection

Another year and another blog full of spections - Intro, retro, and there must be a third type of spection. If there is, then I claim it. Nobody actually reads these things apart from you dear reader, though rarely beyond the first paragraph and rightly so. Swathes of mediocrity fill the Internet, and I am no different. I wallow in mediocrity. I live in Hong Kong for a start, reputedly a first rate place for third rate people.   I have no idea who said that originally. Perhaps nobody did and I invented it after misreading something somewhere. I misread most things. It’s the source of my genius.I do know that the sublime thinker who gave us Winnie The Pooh once said that third-rate minds are only happy when they are among the majority, second-rate minds are only happy when they think they are in the minority, and first-rate minds are just happy thinking. Reputedly he was a bit of a dick head. And he got it completely wrong because the first-rate do a lot of doing as well as thinking.No matter though because we hate first rate people who go out there say all the right things, have deep thoughts, big bank balances, happy families and stellar sex lives. We like our heroes flawed, suffering, tortured, and ultimately dead. Then we don’t have to feel so bad about our own piddling indifferent lives. Here’s a resolution for you all to ignore: do not conclude without evidence, make sure the evidence isn’t fake, and judge logically.   You probably won’t have time to do any of that because life just comes at you, and you’re probably a bit thick, but a few more people making decisions based upon real evidence instead of magic and so-called intuition, would just make life a little more fun for more people.As it is, I thought 2010 a good year. Lots of corrupt businessmen got thrown in jail. Which is always good. I made more money. Which is also always good. I got lots of nice e-mails telling me what a brilliant teacher I am, which is sort of good as I’d rather be known as a brilliant writer and film maker, but hey, I like doing a good job even if it’s not necessarily the job I really like doing! And I made a zombie movie!My father asked me how long it was and I told him that it was about fourteen minutes because that’s sort of how to get in the short film festivals. “Huh, where’s the money in that?” he said. Where indeed! But hey, not everyone’s made a zombie movie… well, apart from every single film school student on the planet. But there are billions of people who actually are zombies and they don’t make movies. They just live off quantitative easing and scavenging off road kill, which can’t be fun. Making the movies is always more fun than living like one of the characters.With that, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to all who made it past the first paragraph and as for the rest of humanity; I can say anything I like about them. I could, that is, except for the prospect of a Chinese Psycho-Bot fishing out some key phrases and setting the thought police onto me. They come in your sleep you know, and short out electric blankets or scribble anagrams on your mirrors and make you buy iPads. You know I speak the truth. Check the evidence about you.