I’m going to throw my cards clearly on the table. I really couldn’t give a flying fart about NYE.  To me it’s just another lame excuse for people with too much hop juice in their flat heads to further illustrate the strong link between very low IQs and ink square inch.

To add to my bag of humbug I’ll go to the crackers.   I’ve had my fill of pyrotechnics.  With a cost of a butchers blade under $7M I think we deserve a little more.  Every Saturday night some dope at Darling Harbour celebrates some corporate misdemeanor by lighting the wick.  To me crackers say “I’ve run out of the smarts and I give up….I really don’t have that much to say.”

Each year there is apparently a need to present the crackers in a new light.  Why because fundamentally all your are going to get is noise and light. So this is achieved by the roping in of artists and others under the bullshit title of creative director.  It doesn’t improve the show it really only does one thing – it creates a new angle for the media feed to the parrots.  This year it was Reg ‘Mental’ Mombassa – a beautiful sort of subterranean rock creature with a head only a cheese grater can produce and a blind mother could love.  I like Reg.  I like a bloke who looks like a debt collector on ice.   But if anyone thinks the putting of a bloody big eye on the Bridge actually created anything other than a candle in the windstorm they are parlaying the ‘pud’.

If Reg wanted to really impress us with his credentials then his one minute display at 10.30pm required the personal touch.   I wanted Reg to drive his ute down to Foti Fireworks at Marulan and pack a few bungers himself.   In fact all of the bungers.  I don’t think Fortunato Foti would mind as Reg has a wide enough palette to be able to make the crackers sing and if he doesn’t there is enough information on the web to tell him how to.   But he didn’t.  He just copped his fee and fed the chooks.

But the disappointment I felt with Reg not putting in was nothing compared to slop bucket that was splashed across our screens for four hours by the ABC (allegedly).   I say allegedly because I only saw the last bit of the this dumb play.   So to quote SMH journo Neil ‘Mustard’ McMahon:

“Lawrence Mooney and Stephanie Brantz attempt to wrangle the annual harbourside celebration into something new, fresh and interesting. It was – in case you missed it and have only your own embarrassments to contemplate today – like watching a Quentin Tarantino remake of The Sound of Music.”

I came in at the bum end of the coverage to see Mooney and Brantz flanking some harmless clown with hair that looked as if a bunger had gone off in the middle of it.  It was mindless fill banter so inane that I thought the ABC must have been taking a feed from the Shopping Channel.  Moody has been defended by ‘Mustard’ as a man of “great and varied wit”  – well what I saw was a half-witted effort of a sinking man scraping his stomach across the cringe zone of poor taste.  To add to the sloppiness of the coverage was Brantz’s totally inappropriate plug for the sequined shimmy she was wearing.  This farce was of course the perfect starting flag for the frothing right to say ‘chop chop’ to the ABC.

In hindsight the same old crackers and the ABC cringe coverage cocktail were the perfect entrée into 2014.  The bad news is that there is more to come with an inept government in Canberra and a gutless one in NSW you’ll soon see the real crackers go off in this Year of the Rabbit – and that’s Tony Rabbit folks.

Belated Happy 2014 to all you poor lucky bastards.