January 2008 already?

(long pause)

Really?

(heavy sigh)

Fuck.

Look, we’ll be honest with you here. We had a shit Christmas, succumbing to each and every one of the godawful lurgee viruses that folks have been cheerfully coughing around in circles since mid-November.

Consequently we haven’t been across the doors of a single boozer during the entire festive period, so if you’re looking for scathing put-downs of the latest additions to Newcastle’s drinking scene then we’re afraid it’s tough tits. We've been nowhere worth cussing out, not even the fucking Tup Tup Palace.

So what the hell are we going to have as a welcome to the New Year and to sweep away the old? Maybe we should do an in-depth report on our alcohol consumption this winter, focusing on the 24-can slab from beneath the Christmas tree, or stick up some tips on winning broken-barcode machine roulette against the daft old bat in the Nisa along the road (a 1945 Château Mouton-Rothschild? £2.99. A single can of Skol, some Benylin and a bag of Hula Hoops? Twelve quid) On reflection, though, maybe we shouldn’t.

What, then? How about cribbing the shite that every other fucker has on their internet homepage at this time of year?

We could do some Mystic Dog horoscopes, predicting that the entire nation will be cold, skint and seriously fucking pissed off, whilst trying to convince the lonely, the desperate and the wilfully deluded that it’s all the design of the heavens above.

Or we could knock up a Dog in shades and a Hawaiian shirt, cruelly teasing you with all the exotic holiday destinations you won’t get to this year, not even if you mugged a granny a day and two on Sundays. Yeah, that might work. We could stick on a little search engine that flashes images of luxury before your eyes before matching your budget with five miserable days in tacky resort, surrounded by the exact same ill-tempered inner-city shite you’re trying to escape from in the first place.

Perhaps we could throw in some insulting diet tips, sticking them next to enticing and heavily sponsored featurettes about cosmetic surgery, and pointing out to the populace just what a disgusting porker they’ve allowed themselves to become over Christmas. You are a fat fucking twat. And you make us retch.

Or maybe we could write yet more hypocritical poison about Heather Mills, gleefully pushing the nation’s number one figure of hate (has anyone asked her when she last saw Madeleine, hmm?) towards suicide. What do you reckon? A weeping Dog in a blonde wig, tottering on three and a half legs in front of £30million? That would be just the ticket.

I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. To celebrate the Burglar’s Dog branching out into the entertainment world* we’re once again going to inflict a calendar on you, praying that anyone who was with us back in the glory days of 2006 will have either forgotten that we also did one then, or will have had the gumption to move on to other and better websites than this creaking ship of fools. (* for the purposes of this shit feature only)

This time, instead of photos of pissed up idiots lying in puddles of their own vomit, we’ll be dressing the Dog up as the most newsworthy celebrities of our age and attaching the pictures to the first blank calendar we managed to filch from the internet. Your calendar is guaranteed to be more or less accurate, and has an inordinate amount of wasted white space for you to write stuff in, mostly around the bits where we chopped out all the bloody American days off that we don’t get (Martin Luther King day, aye, but who the fuck is Casimir Pulaski?)

We’ll be adding further months to your calendar throughout the year, with the aim of ripping the piss out of the troubled souls in the public eye, hopefully just before the fuckers cark it in spectacular-yet-hackneyed fashion.

This month: it’s that raddled bag of bones, Amy Winehouse.

Here she is: