Rick's b.log - entry 2016/12/31

It's -4.2°C and that's today's high. So here's a nice cheerful blog entry to warm the cockles of your heart.

Haha. Anybody alive in 2016 with a functioning memory will know that 2016 was a horrible year and any warming that isn't bombs or blood splatter is about as unlikely as Trump becoming president. Oh... wait...

How hard did 2016 suck?

America, not wanting to be outdone, elected Mr. Donald Let There Be An Arms Race Trump. He hasn't even made POTUS status yet, and already the only person in the world that seems to like him (aside from his crew of sycophants) is Mr. Putin. Need I say more?

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by all of this nonsense, the medieval terror bastards are promising a reign of terror that would read like a story out of the bible. Maybe Angela Merkel might want to think very carefully about Europe's position regarding migrants; and France, Belgium and Germany both on the tricky situation of what to do about the nutjobs while not alienating the peaceful.

So while the Brexiteers are metaphorically blowing up Britain, the terror bastards blowing up Europe, and Trump possibly blowing up everything that remains...

The Russians diddled everybody's elections for the lulz because that's more fun than blowing stuff up. Obama has responded to this by throwing out some Russian diplomats. Putin responded to that by inviting American diplomats and their children to a dinner party, and mercilessly mocking the "lame duck" president. Yeah, Obama 0 : Putin 1.

Other news stories of the year are Samsung devices blowing themselves up. Yahoo! blew itself up and somehow took over three years to notice. Angelina and Brad blew each other off (if not up). The Panama Papers showed the world how corrupt everything is, and oddly enough nothing much happened. Funny, that.
Japanese company Funia made the last video cassette recorder in July, almost exactly forty years after the introduction of VHS cassettes. Although the VCR is now officially extinct, it helped to greatly shape the change in how people accessed television. Once upon a time you had to go and watch the programme when it was on, generations of kids would have hurried home to watch Grange Hill, for instance. Or be let out of class early on Saturday morning so we could go watch The Chart Show. The video tape changed that. Once you got to grips with the method of programming the machine (and believe me, in some cases it was easier to raise the dead than program the VCR), you could leave a tape in the machine, do whatever, and then come back and watch the programme when it suited you, not the broadcaster. Today we have PVRs and VOD, but it was the simple humble video tape that gave us the appetite for watching stuff as and when we wanted, not to mention the whole idea of video rentals - a thing that todays seems like a gigantic anachronism from the eighties and early nineties.
The sad fact is that while some older technology is going through a renaissance of sorts - Polaroid-style cameras are making a comeback (though god only knows why), and vinyl records never entirely went away - there is pretty much no attribute that makes the video cassette likely to make any sort of come-back. VHS was inherently rubbish and there's nothing a VCR deck can do that my little PVR can't do better. My PVR, I should add, records at 720×288 because it can't quite manage to run an OS and do full-frame video at the same time, and it still delivers a better picture than my four-head flying-erase high-tech VHS deck. Now imagine what a modern PVR can do? HD, for starters, something that's completely off the menu for domestic video recorders.

Dylan won the Nobel prize for Literature. I'd have given it to Cohen, but there you go, that's me...

Israel, never one for knowing how to deal with not getting their own way, are throwing all of their toys out of the pram over the long-awaited UN resolution (2334) on Palestine. France has also demanded that products made in the occupied territories (the parts of Israel that are not actually parts of Israel, not that Apple Maps or Google Maps will even show you that a place called "Palestine" exists) are labeled as such. The Zionists consider this a movement to "boycott Israel", which is not technically true - nobody is interested in Israeli products from actual Israel. They're interested in Israeli products from, well, all those other places that are only Israel in the minds of the Zionists.
Note - I'm using the word "Zionist" instead of "Jew" because I do not consider the two as being the same thing - a Scottish person is British (for the moment!) but not all British are Scots.

But we aren't done with the death and destruction. Only one country in the world has tested nuclear devices so far in the 21st century. This year, it was North Korea. Twice.

One wonders if Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Wogan, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, Harper Lee, Garry Shandling, Gene Wilder, Princess Leia and Mom had the right idea? Step off this broken circus ride before it's too late...
Of course, millions more people died and tens/hundreds of thousands more were killed, a great many in Syria, but since they weren't famous, the world didn't care.

Dominion (from 1988), made into an animé called New Dominion Tank Police (1993) (and other media), is a manga series by Masamune Shirow (Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell). It is set in a future where pollution and bacteria have become such a problem that people wear gas masks outdoors, and the protagonists are a police squadron that use tanks. It was set in 2016. A vision of the future that was far less ludicrous than Back to the Future, but still off the mark, as tends to be the case.

About the only good bit of news to come out of the twenty four hour treadmill was that twat hunter who shot and killed a proud Lion. Well, karma got its revenge a few months later as he slipped to his death while aiming at something else.

Also - Obama visited Cuba, and Mr. Abe (Japanese PM) visited Pearl Harbor. Both historic, but is this enough to help direct the world to calmer more peaceful times? Trump. Norks. Terror bastards. Uh... Maybe not.

Oh yeah... and don't forget, if the bombs don't get us, there's always Zika, Ebola, or Bird Flu.

You know in SimCity when the tornadoes rage, the meteors fall, and everything is about to burst into flames? That's 2016.
Seriously. In twenty years time, assuming we aren't glowing a nifty shade of Simpson Yellow, if there is a pub quiz and the person asking the questions says "In what year...", the answer will be 2016.
Trust me. Just say "2016".

...or maybe "2017".

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-, 9th January 2017, 12:41

Listen good, you stupid c--t. An overwhelming majority of the public voted OUT so we are OUT. You lost. We are OUT. England OUT! England OUT! [Rick - edited for objectionable language, 2016/01/09 @ 18h30]

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