Calling Batman 'the Dark Knight' is like calling Papa Smurf 'the Blue Patriarch':you're not fooling anyone.
— Charlie Brooker
New Year's resolutions work like this: you think of something you enjoy doing and then resolve to stop doing it.
Apple excels at taking existing concepts - computers, MP3 players, conceit - and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
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.
Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money.
I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.
When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the Internet? Chances are God won't find out. Being ancient, God probably can't work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it's made of fine china.
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.
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.
We don't sit down and look at the news pages and think, 'How could we do an episode about that?'
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.
My brain knows best-before dates are a con; my panicky gut treats them like a nuclear countdown.
My bookshelves chiefly function as a snapshot of what I was reading prior to the invention of the Kindle.
Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.
The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.
I do worry about civil unrest, or complete collapse of society, or having to flee, or Europe falling into a war.
A cupcake is just a muffin with clown puke topping.
I can't imagine voluntarily standing beside an F1 track in the rain, watching motorised wedges plastered in corporate decals zooming past at 500mph.
Nothing happens in cricket, ever. Even the highlights resemble a freeze frame.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
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.
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.
It must be awful, being a homophobe.
In the early '80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen.
We humans are great at creating tools with unforeseen consequences. For instance, when we invented the wheel, we had no way of knowing we were also laying the foundations for the TV show 'Top Gear.'
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.
If you're living in a dystopia, you don't necessarily want to look at another one.
It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.
'MasterChef''s preliminary stages deliver just the right level of almost-drama for viewers feeling shagged out after a hard day's fruitless existence.
Our metropolises are blighted by two problems: a lack of public transport and a lack of public loos.
The fashion industry is the worst possible vessel for conveying an ethical message about anything.
People bemoan the loss of watercooler chat, but I think that there's more of that than ever. It's just that it's online.
My career path is like crazy paving - it goes all over the place.
Rather than setting yourself a New Year's resolution, why not simply pick a reason for hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it's easier to stick to.
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.
Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.
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.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.
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.'
Youth fare aside, I have generally always been interested in what's going on culturally.
I didn't pass my degree due to never handing in an acceptable dissertation, and while it didn't harm me in the long run, my failure to complete the course properly probably led me to spend the next six years or so coasting, unsure of what to do next.
Online, you play at being yourself.
God, people say 'Black Mirror' was horrible - it's nothing compared to the stuff that happens in 'Grimms' Fairy Tales.' It's mind-bending.
With Boris Johnson, you don't think of him as a politician, oddly. You think of him as a media personality because he's a comic character. He's basically Homer Simpson. That makes him strangely bullet-proof.
I like technology, but 'Black Mirror' is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.
'MasterChef' delivers all the reassuring, cadenced repetition of an endless chore without any of the bothersome elbow grease.
What's odd about the selfie stick is that while it might faintly improve the photo you'll post on Facebook, it definitely makes you seem like a shallow, awful clown to any bystanders in the humdrum physical space you're posing in.
Getting a moral lecture from the fashion industry is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticising your diet.
I never really thought of myself as a TV critic. I was presenting TV before I was writing about it.
