Well, at least this is kind of neat.

It's Palindrome Day on Twitter.

01-02-2010 backwards is, 01-20-2010.

Does that mean I now have to everything I did today backwards? I hope not. It was painful enough forwards.

***

If some Sherlock Holmes nut tells you that they didn't mention Holmes' cocaine use in the movie, they did-they just came at it obliquely. At one point, Watson says to Holmes, who has just consumed something from a vial, "You know that's intended for eye surgery!" Cocaine hydrochloride used to be used as an anesthetic for eye surgery.

***

My son's theory is that the aliens are coming to kill us all in 2012. My response was, "Well, I guess I won't be worrying about how to pay for your college, then."

2009 Can Suck It

Or, as the immortal Bono once put it, "Nothing changes...on New Year's Day..."

So, we can take 2009 and relegate it to the back of the shelf. It's over. "Put it on the board, yes", as Ken Harrelson says. I posted 5 fewer blog entries in 2009 than in 2008. If this trend continues, I will be posting 1 item per year by 2135 or so. So you have that to look forward to.

It's a semi-quasi fraud of a holiday. People don't go to work because, well, you have to throw out your old calendars, right? That must be the reason. My son actually stayed up to witness the new year for the first time, and now he realizes it is as much of a fraud as flossing your teeth.

Resolutions? Never make promises I can't keep.

Thirty years ago, I can't remember anything significant. Rumor has it it was 1980.

Twenty years ago, I was in college, and very deeply in love.

Ten years ago, I was married with a toddler.

So it goes.

Here's hoping that the nice, round, symmetricalness of the even number, 2010, is better than 2009.

"Things are Sh&^ty..but I'm pretty sure they can't get worse."

-Rent

It Ain't Us, Bay

Jason Bay, formerly known as Everyone's Favorite Canadian, has flown the proverbial coop, leaving good sense and Boston behind to become a New York Metropolitan. With the Mike Lowell trade having vanished into the ether, this leaves Boston oversupplied with aging semi-respectable batters with health issues (Lowell, Ortiz, Drew) and undersupplied with legitimate major league batters (Our Man Youk, and Our Man DP, and...uh....did I mention Youk?)

So hopefully, a deal of some sort is in the offing, or you can expect to read sentences like "Sox lose 3-2" on here quite a bit in the months to come.

I Win! I Win!

What do I win, you may ask?

Well, nothing at all, but I did, in fact, win my Fantasy Football League this year. Thanks, in part, to Philadelphia's own Donovan McNabb, the Arizona Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald, the Packers' Ryan Grant, and the Colts' Dallas Clark, along with my shrewd picking-a-pretend-football-team skills and the fantasy advice of the Talented Mr. Roto, @matthewberryTMR on Twitter, I have managed to triumph over my brother and 10 other worthies.

What do I win, you may ask, again?

Nothing. Not a goshdarn thing.

But it's all mine.

The War On Christmas

Well, we lost, because it came anyway.

Anyway, someone sent a bulk email at work wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, then bragging parenthetically that they were "not politically correct".

I forget where I heard it, but I heard a comic say once that complaining about being politically correct is basically saying, "I want to be rude, and I don't want to be called on it."

The recipients of that email don't all celebrate Christmas. That's just a fact. Saying "Merry Christmas" necessarily excludes people who don't celebrate that particular holiday. It's inappropriate. It's rude. If you want to show off your freedom of speech, start a blog.

(It shouldn't be sent on a work email system anyway, but that's an issue for management to ignore, not for me.)

(Also, that being said, in the United States in 2009, if you're honestly offended by the use of the phrase "Merry Christmas", you really have to learn to pick your battles.)

Sometimes, you're looking for nothing in particular, and you find gold.