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Happy New Year!!

This is where I spend at least a month being absolutely astonished that it is 2015 already.  It happens to me every year, you’d think I’d get used to it by now.

I have a love/hate relationship with New Year.  I love the fresh feeling of a new year, all the potential laid out in front of me, even though it’s arbitrary.  I love having Christmas (which is a difficult time for me) behind me.

But for the love of all things sacred, I fucking hate all the resolutions, New Year/New Body/New Me, let’s get fit/get healthy/off the couch, the public announcements of how “good I’m going to be this year” bullshit.  It’s like a fucking tsunami of thinly veiled moralism coated in self aggrandisement.  It’s the once-a-year parade of “Look what a good cookie I am!”

Now don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for self…

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs). The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” – J. R. R. Tolkien. The Letter of J. R. R. Tolkien.

A member of the Israeli group ‘Breaking the Silence’ has published accounts of Israeli soldiers being authorized by their commanders to carry out revenge attacks against civilians in the Gaza Strip “to enable the soldiers to take out their frustrations and pain at losing their fellow soldiers”.

Parents grieving the loss of their children at the attack on a UN School on Monday

Eran Efrati reports, “Soldiers in two different units inside Gaza leaked information about the murdering of Palestinians by sniper fire in Shuja’eyya neighborhood as punishment for the death of soldiers in their units. After the shooting on the Israeli armored personnel carriers, which killed seven soldiers of the Golani Brigade, the Israeli army carried out a massacre in Shuja’eyya neighborhood.

“A day after the massacre, many Palestinians came to search for their relatives and their families in…

A few years after the twentieth century ended the world became terrible. The economy shit the bed, everyone lost their jobs, the government started to become evil, and all educational programing was systematically replaced by “reality” television. It was as if Orwell made a half-assed attempt to write a comedy but it ended up being our actual lives instead of a single work that permanently defamed him. This new world worked out great if you wanted to live in perpetual poverty watching idiots argue wide-eyed about nothing in particular over a staccato soundtrack between fifteen minutes of advertising. But, if you were interested in being more than a culture zombie, things were going to get rough the second you left college and entered the intellectual desert of everyday life.

The internet had become our last bastion of cultural hope but that too had begun the slow decent into repugnancy. Advertising…

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, an annual event launched in 2003 by the Tolkien Society. (The date of 25 March was chosen in honour of the fall of Sauron in the Third Age, year 3019, in Tolkien’s fiction.) The reading day promotes the use of Tolkien’s writing in schools and library groups, and is celebrated in numerous countries. To mark the occasion, we’ve put together ten of our favourite quotations from John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The first quotation, about Beowulf, is especially timely because of the recent announcement that Tolkien’s translation of that epic poem is finally going to be published!

On Beowulf and myth: ‘The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender…