On a more relevant note...

By Guardian Unlimited / UK news 01:01pm

Any smoker intent on quitting on New Year’s Day should think again, writes Hélène Mulholland. Don’t take it from me but heed the words issued by Ash, the lobby group set up to stop everyone from lighting up. It doesn’t appear to be a case of paradoxical intervention either. They remind us that New Year can be stressful and so why stop then?

Frankly, they may be on to something. New Year’s Eve is going to be a chokefest of fags and booze followed by a big comedown the next morning in which you’ll have time to ruminate at your leisure on to what degree you pretty much wasted most of last year. You know for a fact you’ve wasted more than enough money on tobacco to fund a first-class round-the-world air ticket - both ways. And did you really do all those things you said you were going to do last year? Hands up who scored 10 out of 10? Those that didn’t even set targets so could not possibly have failed put your hands back down.

It's New Year's Eve!

Up at the crack of noon and what better way to start the day than with a cold beer, cooked breakfast and a leisurely trawl through the archives of Satire Wire? I can't name one off the top of my head so I'll stick to what I know.

Here's a little of what they have (or had as it's not updated any longer) to offer:

85 Percent of Nation's 2.9 Million Jobless
Say They're Not Just Statistic

Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com) — In a new Gallup poll on the dehumanizing aspects of job loss, nearly 85 percent of the nation's 2.96 million unemployed said they "agreed somewhat" or "agreed strongly" with the statement, "I am not just some mind-numbing statistic."

"I think what we found quite interesting was that the overwhelming majority of respondents, 75 percent, said they were genuinely hurt by efforts to categorize and compartmentalize their difficulties," said Gallup researcher Evan Krest. "This was particularly true of women between the ages of 30 and 49, and men who have been unemployed for six months or more."

But the most empirically moving answers, Krest added, were given by the 62 percent who said they hoped the study would finally put a human face on their anonymous plight.

"One 18-to-29-year-old woman said she was a real person with a real name and real problems that could not possibly be adequately conveyed using cold-blooded numbers," he recalled. "Unfortunately, her responses were within the margin of error of plus- or minus-3 percent, so she didn't count."

Something else borrowed from TV Go Home. I know it's about four years old but I still like it.