Irresolute

Happy New Year!

I'll spare you the long list of resolutions because I'm sparing myself the same. It'd be a list so easily written, so difficult to execute.

I need to get in shape, but I know what the gym is like in January, and besides, joining a gym would violate another would-be resolution, to be better about spending money I ain't got on shit like gym memberships.

I'll also spare you the year-end roast. What would be the point, for instance, of beating up on George Bush today? He's just as awful all the other days of the year. And the press he gets, it's so obviously slanted it about makes you want to like him. When he was pushing for the so-called troop surge, the stories were all about how impossible the surge was, and how it wouldn't work no matter what. Then, when the news started to become that the surge was working (up to a point*), the headlines all became how Bush was told to do a surge way earlier and didn't listen.

I will go ahead and kick Carl Peterson for having the gall to keep his job despite his abject and total failure. I don't know if Clark Hunt just hasn't grown his own pair of testicles, but in what universe does Peterson not get fired after a 4-12 season? Lots of times, over the years, Peterson has done childish and unprofessional things and kept his jobs because asses were in the seats. He even survived Lynn Elliott, a never-should-have-been kicker we got when Peterson let Nick Lowry, the best kicker of his generation, go to the New York Jets for a measly $150,000. Because Peterson didn't like Lowry. Our best shot at a Super Bowl in modern times, and Peterson lost it for us as sure as if he tried to make those three missed field goals himself.

See also the mutiny of the team in Marty Schottenheimer's last year. Peterson signed a bunch of players with no character and huge troubles with the law, and when they bucked Marty, Peterson hung with the degenerate players. The result was Marty Schottenheimer, the winningest coach we've ever to not win the Super Bowl, went on to greener pastures. So I'm bitter that in the new year, Carl Peterson hasn't been given the chance to spend more time with his family (the wolves who raised him, for instance).

I did something tonight I don't think I ever have on New Year's Eve. I went to a bar. Not for the whole evening. Most of the evening was tied up with laundry, and fiendish plots in Rocksim (I'm thinking of a smallish rocket that will actually go supersonic, also fiddling with some creative park flyers). The pub I went to was a pleasant surprise, even with the New Year's crowd, not smoky and only obnoxiously noisy.

I thought they were going to do a champagne pyramid, they had the glasses stacked for one. I've never seen anyone actually do that in person, so I was kind of intrigued. Then they just poured the midnight drams in individual plastic champagne glasses and handed them around. Go figure.

*The Union hasn't fully pacified the Confederacy. And the North and South of America's Civil War had a hell of a lot more in common than the United States has with Iraq. If you want another example of how impossible it is to 'pacify' an insurgency as an alien occupying force, see Northern Ireland.