NEW YEAR'S WISHES: Well, here it is, New Year’s Eve, and I have not looked back on the past year nor have I made any resolutions for the coming year. I am not altogether sure why people insist on celebrating the planet’s passing an arbitrary point in space, but any excuse for a party is a good one, I suppose, even if the event we celebrate simply means that we are all that much closer to death. Once upon a time, of course, New Year’s Day was on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation (add nine months and figure out why for yourself), but one of the many Pope Gregorys, and it does make you wonder why there are so many Pope Gregorys but no Pope Rodneys or Pope Archibalds at all, as far as I can tell, put an end to that. I am not sure why he moved the New Year to January 1st; there isn’t any particular theological significance to the day, other than its being the seventh day of Christmas and therefore qualified buyers can get a two for one deal on the seven swans a-swimming with the trade-in of any 2006 Chrysler car or truck, so this may have been just a clever way for His Holiness to get more time to pay his income taxes.

I do not, as a rule, make New Year’s resolutions, other than to resolve that I will not keep any New Year’s resolution I do make. This simplifies life more than you can imagine, since I know that this is one resolution I can keep. Indeed, it is a resolution that I will be proud to keep. This is a perennial resolution too, so I can keep renewing it every New Year’s Eve and know that when the next new year wanders around I, unlike so many others, will have kept to the letter of the resolution as well as its spirit, unlike so many other people, whose resolve to lose weight or be kinder to the kids or try to get along better with their co-workers fades away in the face of pepperoni and sausage pizza, aggravating kids, and lobotomized co-workers who hang onto their jobs only because no one in their right minds wants to do what these morons are only semi-competent at for the lameass money your employer is shelling out to pay these dolts.

Still, you should, at the end of a year, stop and take a look around and reflect a bit on the past year. This is the year, for example, that The Passing Parade saw its 25,000th visitor, which is a considerable number, even if you disallow all the times I come back to the sight to check for spelling and grammatical mistakes. The great event happened during the Christmas weekend and in the middle of a renewed burst of interest in last year’s piece about the origins of the twelve days of Christmas, and I’d like to thank Kevin at The Smallest Minority, Kim at The Other Side of Kim, whose link last year was the source of this blog’s single best week ever, and Dick at Texasscribbler for the link; linking is always appreciated, as are comments, Tatyana, and I do appreciate yours, both here and at the photoblog. I would also like to thank Snoopy at Simply Jews for keeping the Israeli Air Force from bombing my house into oblivion. I am still a little mystified as to why the IAF would want to bomb my house in the first place, but Snoop is an agent of the Elders of Zion, and therefore is in a position to know this sort of thing, and it never hurts, of course, to get in good with the people who run the world (it was that lousy knish that did me in, wasn’t it? That had to be it. You complain once about an undercooked knish and all of a sudden, you’re a member of Hamas. It ain’t fair, Snoop; that knish was terrible).

I am no closer to posting as prolifically as Fran at Eternity Road would like. Ideally, I could bat these puppies out as fast as Neil at Citizen of the Month can, although I should point out that Neil lives in LA, where, by definition, everything that doesn’t happen in New York happens two years ago, and who can always use his relationship with the always lovely Sophia as grist for the comic mill, while I am stuck here in our happy little burg, working at this egregious mold pit where absolutely nothing ever happens, except for the dead guy in the bathroom, the naked guy on the computer, and the children’s librarian’s new breasts. I am endeavoring, however, to speed up production and I am happy to announce that for the New Year I firmly resolve to post here more often. Until then, Fran and his pet Curmudgeon will have to put up with Munchkin real estate problems and revolting Episcopalians for just a little while longer. In any case, I’d like to thank all of you who came here this past year, if only for a little while, and I hope you left The Passing Parade a little gladder than when you arrived.