Here are some New Year resolutions we can surely keep

There’s no use pretending that you’re going to be a better person this year when you have failed to make any meaningful changes in your life in the last decade.

Everybody makes New Year’s resolutions and everybody breaks them. The idea is to look like you’re making progress without making any actual effort. After all, life is hard enough.

Here  are tips to set such low expectations for 2016 that it is almost impossible not to meet them. At the end of the year, you can congratulate yourself with an appropriately self-indulgent celebration to mark another year during which you barely succeeded as a moderately functional adult.

1. Be better organised for optimal procrastination

Lots of people plan to be better organised, mistakenly thinking that by so doing, they can achieve more. The only valid reason you should learn how to use Google Calendar or task-management apps is to know what you need to procrastinate  first. Like the sages say, why procrastinate till tomorrow what you can procrastinate  today?

2. Watch a workout video

Everybody with body image issues tries to join a gym in January. Some even succeed in doing so for a few weeks before dropping out by March and never looking back.

Skip the hassle of going through something you will not follow through with anyway by watching an aerobics session on the Internet. Convince yourself that you could do some of the exercises then discard that idea and watch TV instead.

3. Take cheaper drinks whenever possible

The obvious benefits of taking cheaper drinks is that you have more money to drink more. People say they will quit in the new year but within weeks, often days, they return to the familiar allure of the bottle. Remember not to drink and drive, of course, because you’ll spill your drink.

4. Hide your smoking better

You might  not reduce your intake of cancer sticks but if nobody knows how bad it is, then surely it can’t be that harmful. Keep a pack of nice-smelling chewing gum near, or some other type of breath fresheners. Smoking gives you a husky voice that people love so much, so why stop?

5. Spend money on experiences you can show off on Instagram

It is true that you should spend your money on experiences, not material things. The only other qualification should be for experiences that look great on the gram. With a creative angle, half-decent lighting and the right filter, you can blow up Instagram with

your wonderful life. The likes alone are worth all the money spent on the experience.

6. Buy that book everybody is raving about

You’ll be pleasantly surprised how small The Richest Man In Babylon is. It’s just 144 pages and you have a whole year to read it. You can make references to it in perpetuity and you never have to read another text. Forget people who want to read a book a

month; that’s too much work just reading other people’s thoughts.

7. Shout at a politician on social media

Some idle people think civic engagement involves taking a stand against injustice and showing up at protests and stuff. That’s silly when you can just call a political leader colourful names on Twitter and leave it at that. Surely, you have already expressed

your displeasure as a good citizen, what more does the world expect from you?

8. Worry about what really matters, like the new Game of Thrones season

Winter is coming, my lord. Imagine having to wait until April to know Jon Snow’s true fate. And now literary murderer George RR Martin says The Winds of Winter won’t be out any time soon.

There is a lot wrong with the world we live in and you should spend time worrying about that. Keep in mind that Redsan still wears a durag in 2016!

9. Learn how to say “my love” in French

You can impress a potential flame with it and they will be none the wiser. There are apps for this sort of thing. You could learn a whole language but honestly, it’s too tedious to even attempt.

Think about all the foreign sentence structures, tenses and other aspects of the language you’ll have to learn. Totally not worth it.

10. Learn the art of the snarky retort

Pesky people will ask how you’re doing with your resolutions throughout the year. Find a witty response to throw them off. Repartee is how you will survive the year of doing nothing without scrutiny from your spouse, priest or guru.

“How’re you doing with losing weight?” they’ll want to know. “Why, do you want to eat the fat?” you should answer.

Let’s drink to another underwhelming year!

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Movement, political party, what is the difference?

Machakos Governor Dr Alfred Mutua got 5 TV stations and 19 radio stations to cover his Saturday event live. Who paid for it is anybody’s guess. It was the launch of Maendeleo Chap Chap, a movement, not a party.

He and his surrogates have been at pains to make that distinction. The man has a PhD in Communication and it shows every time he puts on a show, which is all the time. Whether doing an event in his county or giving an interview on national television, it is

always The Alfred Mutua Show. Part of the reason is that the man is genuinely likeable, a fact he must know and has learnt to use to great effect. His second act as governor is fascinating, considering his previous role as disgraced government spokesman.

Maybe both have prepared him for his stab at his third act – president of Kenya? Before then, he has to navigate the semantics of political ambition.

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Zuckerberg to build digital assistant to help run his home; can you beat it?

Boy billionaire, check. Saving the world with technology, check. Artificial Intelligence assistant, check! Iron Man has Jarvis, his digital assistant and now a real life Iron Man, Mark Zuckerberg, is building his own.

“My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work…I’m going to start by exploring what technology is already out there,” he wrote on Sunday.

“Then I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, temperature and so on.” It’s not even an extension of Facebook or a new business unit, just a personal project.

This is the guy who in recent years set for himself challenges like reading two books every month, learning Mandarin and meeting a new person every day. The 31-year-old Facebook founder continues to put us to shame with his sheer will and determination

to improve himself. He won’t even use the army of programmers already working for him on his Jarvis iteration. “This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself,” he concluded. What do you give to the man who already has everything?

His own digital assistant to manage his home, apparently. Except he’ll give it to himself.