Mike Corrigan

By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

It’s 2014 — you heard it here first — and time to review my performance on last year’s New Year’s resolutions. Please keep in mind that my resolutions, like some of yours, will have to be recycled again in 2014, since the word resolution can be broken into re(do again) and solution(solve the same dumb problem, over and over).

1. Lose 10 pounds. Success! In fact, I lost 15 pounds. Then, I gained back 20. They said it couldn’t be done by someone with my level of intelligence. I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.

2. Don’t join a health club. Success! I decided to get fit by exercising at home instead of joining a club, then faithfully actually going once and then diligently not going again for the rest of the year. I began working out with free weights instead, hurt my shoulder, and gained 20 pounds. Now there’s no point in joining an exercise club, anyway, since I can’t move my left arm without extreme pain. Mission accomplished.

3. Quit smoking. Success! I didn’t have one cigarette all year long. Of course, I don’t smoke… An easy target for me, sure, but experts in these things (Martha Stewart, Donald Trump) say you should go after the low-hanging fruit first, before moving on to bigger tests. Like…

4. Shutting down the government. Success! I accomplished this not once, but three times in 2013.

5. Celebrate a Red Sox World Series victory. Success! I rooted hard all summer and fall, and I can report that my will to win and expert managerial advice pulled the team through, despite inept ownership, weak management and sometimes idiotic bench coaching, while all season I had to work with a collection of ne'er-do-wells and minor talents.

Then, there were the resolutions that worked out less well.

6. Broker world peace. Partial success! I did manage to avoid war with Iran and Syria, and as of today, our boys are not fighting overseas. True, some of our men and women are still fighting in Afghanistan, but none of our boys are. I call this pretty good, considering the world I had to start with.

7. Turn back climate change. Partial success. I sold my car, turned down the heat, rode buses and tried to eat more local foods (windfall apples, dumpster leavings, trapped rodents, grass clippings). By the end of the year, scientific reports indicated that global warming had advanced by the lowest percentage in a decade! I can’t take all the credit, and I’ll try to do even better next year, perhaps by not eating at all, or by not even exhaling for that matter.

8. Win a Nobel Prize. Once again, my quest was sidetracked in 2013, not having stuck with any one field long enough to gain worldwide fame. Maybe mathematics? Last week, I squared the circle! For a 5cm-radius circle, I got a value of 8.862188372 centimeters for s, when the calculator showed an ideal of 8.862269254. Off by only 8/100,000th of a centimeter! That’s probably not close enough, mathematics not being horseshoes or dynamite (speaking of Nobel). Ah well, I hear that Stockholm is overrun with reindeer in the summertime, anyway.

This year, I have decided to go for the Nobel in column-writing. I’m off to a slow start. But world peace is something I promise to work on every day.

Mike was a slow starter when he worked for The News, too. In fact, most weeks, you couldn’t even tell whether he’d started or not.