New Year’s Resolutions are often times for radical shifts in what we like to think of as our personal brands. Maybe it is a diet. Maybe it is smoking. Maybe it is reading more. Maybe it is watching less television… Whatever the resolution, be aware that it affects your personal brand – both from inside and out.

The Resolution

Not everyone makes a New Year’s resolution – except maybe as a joke. The Resolution is a promise made to yourself, the universe, and anyone standing near enough to hear and bored enough to listen, about something you would like to do differently in the year to come.

What possible crime could be more heinous and threatening to public safety than a woman who forgot to swipe her bus pass?

It is a scourge on our society. We must root it out and brutalize offenders in a very public way so as to discourage future criminal acts.

I plan to write a letter to the City of Belgrade protesting the arrest of this woman. If the point of her arrest was to demonstrate the power of the police and the weak position of our citizenry, then jail is NOT the answer.

In times of crisis, we are called upon to become humanitarians.

The ongoing crisis in Serbia, the devastating effects of flooding on countless homes, buildings, people, and animals over a very large part of the country, seems to have brought the humanitarians out in droves. More than 3,000 able-bodied men and women marched on Sabac to shore up the floodwalls. Humanitarian aid to the victims of the floods poured in from around the country and from abroad. People have donated their time, their money, their clothes, their food, and their Facebook pages to the humanitarian effort.

LONDON - Asked to say a few words for a documentary on the sharp increases in student fees in British universities, I find that, in retrospect, I gave the opposite opinion to that my actual thoughts. And I spoke too fast.

As if this were not enough proof that PR and positioning preparation were not of vital importance, I also proved to myself the old adage that the doctor is always his own worst patient. In my case, the spin-doctor.

The past is in the future.

On December 23rd, my latest book, Grumpy in Belgrade: The Prehistory, will hit bookstores all across Belgrade. Impact craters from the collision are expected to form along Knez Mihailova. Please alter your routes accordingly.

The new book, which exists now in the future, is all about the past - the prehistory of my Serbian sojourn. The pieces collected in the new volume of grumpiness were written between 2002 and 2006 - just before I began posting them here on B92.

To whom it may concern:

I am away from my desk and unable to read my mail.

In fact, I am very far away from my desk and the city of its construction and even the country in which it is currently located.

On March 27, at 20:30, I am sure I was watching television when I could have been sitting in the dark, saving the planet.

It was Earth Hour (I learned today, a few days ex post facto). During this hour, we were meant to turn off all our electric conveniences including the lights, television, and phone chargers (I am not sure if we could use phones or not... I did not read the rules yet). And somehow someone was supposed to count all the kilowatt hours we saved during this hour.

LONDON, KEW. His Majesty King George III, loser of America to a unilateral declaration of independence, and raging loon brought on by porphyria (or so they speculate), was both a great proponent of its botanical gardens and detainee within the royal palace at Kew in the early 1800s.

Thusly do I follow in rather oddly assorted footsteps by my Tube-imposed sequestration here in Kew during the thirty-six hour long 24 hour strike of the London Underground. I do not complain; there are worse places to be sequestered (and let us not reopen the file on Slavonski Brod...).

I do what I do because I have always done it.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, having done what I do over a considerable time, I have become adept at it. But another reason is that it is more acceptable from a societal point of view to establish continuity and therefore predictability in my persona.