I’ve spent the last few days watching a vast number of war films for an article I’m doing (deadline today… time to start writing… damn…). I’ve done the whole range, from Lawrence of Arabia and The Birth of a Nation through Dr Stranglove, The Guns of Navarone, Barry Lyndon, The Battle of Algiers, Ice Station Zebra, Black Hawk Down, Apocalypse Now, and God alone knows how many others – including a few that are only tangentially war films, like The Manchurian Candidate. Then, having pondered various other old favourites, like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, All Quiet on the Western Front, Duck Soup, A Bridge Too Far, The General, The Longest Day, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Zulu and the like, I have finally reached a conclusion. My favourite war film (at the moment, at least) is Starship Troopers.

Thanks to that McKeating, I’ve spent the last 24 hours slaughtering goats and throwing their entrails around the flat, as well as sneaking in to Highgate cemetery to dig up some knuckle bones, in a desperate attempt to live up to expectation and provide six accurate predictions for the coming year. So here we go, then:

1) The [tag]German EU preseidency[/tag] will achieve precisely nothing of any substance. Neither will the Portugese presidency after that.

2) The Socialists and [tag]Ségolène Royal[/tag] will win the [tag]French presidential election[/tag]. France’s attitude and policies will change not a jot – but right-wing bloggers in the US will suddenly find themselves experts in the policies and history of the Parti Socialiste, and make highly convincing cases (bolstered by links to the EU Referendum blog, which will unearth some “damning” photographs of some description) that France is now more evil and Communist than even the USSR under Stalin (because “at least the Soviets fought the Nazis – the French just ran away”), and that it is the world’s worst example of a “Dhimmi state” and threatens the very existence of everything we (they) hold dear when Royal is seen shaking hands with a man of Arabic descent on a visit to the Paris suburbs.

3) The accession of [tag]Romania[/tag] and [tag]Bulgaria[/tag] will have precisely no serious impact on the current functioning of the [tag]EU[/tag], either economically or institutionally

4) When [tag]Tony Blair[/tag] leaves office, all senior European politicians will hold a massive party to celebrate, doing more for further integration in one night than has been achieved in the last ten years after a succession of incredible breakthroughs caused by the sheer bubbly brilliance of the champagne laid on by France. But the next day they’ll all be too hungover to remember anything, and everything will carry on as normal.

5) The accession of Romania and Bulgaria will prompt umpteen scare stories about impoverished gypsies stealing our jobs/daughters/sheep/caravans in the right-wing press Europe-wide during slow news weeks

6) A minor EU directive concerning digital television will be interpreted by some idiotic minister/mandarin in Whitehall in such a way that they try to force us all to have microchips surgically implanted into our skulls to ensure that they can keep track of just how many hours of Price Drop TV we watch every day. Those who do not watch the requisite ten hours of television per week supposedly demanded by the [tag]European Commission[/tag] will be given ASBOs and denied all access to benefits, rubbish collection, the NHS, and their fellow human beings until such a time as they have “txted 2 w1n” – or rung up the lovely Abbi and Traci on Television X to ask them to run their elbows together while calling your (made-up) name and sticking their tongues out in the most unerotic way imaginable.

Christmas, eh? Goodwill to all men?

Bollocks, more like – not historically, at any rate. And let’s face it, Herod’s massacre of the innocents was hardly a great start, was it? Following that, we had this little lot:

800 – Christmas Day – Charlemagne has himself crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor, the result of thirty solid years of warfare

1066 – Christmas Day – William the Bastard is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, becoming William the Conqueror in the process, and kicking off a good three centuries of sporadic warfare within what is now the United Kingdom – first suppressing the Saxons, then the Welsh and Scots

1261 – Christmas Day – 11-year-old Emperor John IV of Nicea blinded and deposed by Michael Palaiologos

1481 – Boxing Day – The Battle of Westbroek (Holland vs. Utrecht)

1715 – Christmas Eve – As part of the Great Northern War Swedish troops occupy Norway (and Sweden was, at the time, at war with the United Kingdom, Hanover, Russia, Prussia, Saxony and Denmark – good work…)

1776 – Boxing Day – The (first) Battle of Trenton – the American revolutionaries defeat us proud Brits

1793 – Boxing Day – Battle of Geisberg – the French defeat the Austrians. War continues pretty much uninterrupted for another 22 years nonetheless…

1806 - Boxing Day – Battle of Pultusk and Battle of Golymin – both France vs. Russia, total casualties estimated to be around 13,000

1862 - Boxing Day – The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou begins, kicking off Union General Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign against the Confederates along the Mississippi. It’s safe to say that quite a few died over the coming months… (The same day, Mankato, Minnesota saw 32 Native Americans hanged, in the country’s largest ever mass execution. Christmas spirit, eh?)

1865 - Christmas Eve – that lovely, loving organisation the Ku Klux Klan is formed

1932 - Christmas Day – seemingly annoyed at allowing mankind have all the killing fun, God sets off a great big earthquake in Gansu, China, killing 70,000 (12 years after another earthquake there had killed 120,000. Nice guy, God…)

1941 - Christmas Eve – after 18 days of fighting (with about 8,500 killed) Japan occupies Hong Kong ; the same day they also take Kuching in Malaysia

1943 - Boxing Day – after being hit by the HMS Norfolk and HMS Duke of York, the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst sinks, with the loss of 1,932 lives

1944 - Boxing Day – a German counter-attack kicks of the Battle of Bastogne. When it finally ends three weeks later, between 25,000 and 75,000 had lost their lives

1953 - Christmas Eve – God has a bash again, with the Tangiwai Distaster in New Zealand – 153 losing their lives

1974 - Christmas Day – God gets in on it once more, as Cyclone Tracy pretty much destroys Darwin, Australia

1979 - Christmas Eve – The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. And, as we know all too well, the aftermath is arguably still being felt to this day. The Soviets lost around 30,000 men during their nine year occupation. No one knows how many Afghans died – either during the Soviet occupation, or during the two civil wars that followed their withdrawal in February 1989, and lasted until the Taleban takeover in 1996

1989 - Christmas Day – sixteen years and one week to the day before the country joins the EU on 1st January 2007, Romania decides that the best way to move from dictatorship to democracy is to execute their former dicator and his wife after a brief show trial

1997 - Christmas Eve – The Sid El-Antri massacre sees between 50 and 120 people killed by terrorists in Algeria

2003 - Boxing Day – God gets in on the act yet again, killing tens of thousands with a devastating earthquake in Iran

2004 - Boxing Day – God evidently had such fun the year before, he decides to kill another 230,000 with a great big tsunami (but he is a loving God, let’s not forget, and he did give up his only begotten son to die for all our sins, after all…)

Peace on Earth? Goodwill to all men? Humbug… If even the big bloke in the sky can’t refrain from raining down natural disasters around the time of his boy’s birth, what hope is there that us mere mortals can refrain from killing each other?

(This has been a partly political broadcast on behalf of the Cynical-Pretty-Much-Atheists Party, whose sole member is now going to bugger off for a few days to indulge in fine food and vast quantities of booze… Have fun, folks…)

Let’s get this out of the way sharpish. Via Not Saussure, ten things I’ll never do:

10) Slap a nun with a haddock

9) Travel faster than the speed of light

8) Shag Jean Arthur (damnit…)

7) Swim the Sea of Tranquility

6) Meet a nice South African

5) Eat Brian Blessed

4) Kill a man using nothing but a single baked bean and a rolled-up copy of the Tablet (though I would consider it with the Church of England Newspaper)

3) Staple a monkey to a tree

2) Staple an elephant to a tree (although, to be fair, largely only for logistical reasons)

1) Join a political party

We must ban Britain’s most popular daily newspaper, and we must ban it now: Sun kills 60,000 a year, says WHO:

“Laura-Jane Armstrong, cancer information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “This report provides clear evidence of the dangers of over-exposure to the sun“.

(By the by, reading the otherwise perfectly decent New York Times coverage of the reshuffle, something struck me. When referring to that infamous WWII incident, I spell it Pearl Harbor, without a “u”, because it’s an American territory and that’s how Americans mistakenly spell it. So why is it that the New York Times, which prides itself on being accurate and all that, insists on spelling the Labour party’s name without a “u”? It just looks stupid, as well as simply being wrong. I don’t go around calling the Republicans the Repubicans, do I?)

Still, good to see it’s not just the Scottish parliament with a dodgy roof that could collapse at any moment, ensuring that millions of pounds of public money have been wasted… And we’re going to get the Olympic village finished on time? Yeah, right…

Up and down the land people will be forking out the best part of three quid a pop on badly-poured pints of Guinness, doing bad Oirish accents and then falling into gutters (normally while wearing novelty hats). Tomorrow our pavements will be awash with black vomit, our toilet bowls clogged with the particularly viscous after-effects that an evening on the black stuff tends to produce. I doubt the real St Patrick would have approved…

So I tell you what – how about we all drink one pint less tonight, and instead bunk the money to a good cause. Not only will we all be less hungover in the morning, we might do some good.

Following this observation back in January, EDM 1500 is doing rather better, with nearly 70 signatories – including my MP at number 4. But it’s still a fairly pathetic turnout by MPs for what is, in most people’s books, a bit of a no-brainer – how is it possible NOT to support extra funding to allow people, and particularly terminally-ill children, to die with a bit of dignity?

As such, how about giving the price of a pint to Roisin & Wallace Murray to help them raise money for the Rainbows and Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospices?

At the very least, go and give them some support on their fundraising blog as they prepare for their 1000km walk. They’re hoping to raise �1million – how about us British bloggers help them get some publicity, eh?

Update: Tell you what, to make it even easier you can bunk donations to my (empty) PayPal account in the far right column, and I’ll pass on all money received. I have a track record of being trustworthy on these things.

Update 2: Thanks to one Mr Worstall, the kitty is no longer empty – plus I’ve realised I had a small amount of advertising revenue in there, which will naturally join the total.

Update 3: Now also up at AgoraVox.