Shut Up 'N' Play Yer Guitar

Well, here we are then. The kids are in bed, and I'm sitting here on my ownsome attached to the good old internet, just waiting for the worldwide outbreak of New Year festivities to reach this particular locale. This (here come the excuses, yet again. I'm so cursedly predictable), was supposed to see the long-overdue death-rattle of "Andy's inaccurate guide to a microscopic slice of the America that the rest of America studiously avoids" (think sub-sub-sub-Bill Bryson, but with added guitars), but isn't. If, and it's one hell of a big "if", that's disappointed anyone, then all I can do is once again say "sorry". (My "Word Of The Year", I reckon). Two main reasons for this failure to make good on earlier promises:

1. (The crap excuse) I've managed to acquire a bizarre 4mm cut across the tip of one of my fingers, which is making typing marginally painful and slow (because of sore finger-substitution...man, I'm so soft these days. Can you believe I ever played contact sports in horrendous weather? Or did competitive Olympic-style weightlifting? Sheeshhhh!! )
2. (The almost reasonable excuse) The piece I was intending to write would probably have stretched to nearly 2,000 words, (partially because I over-qualify, digress, deviate, and over-use adjectives in a ludicrous manner, I confess), involving far more typing than I felt like doing (see "crap excuse" above), and requiring a plethora of carefully-researched (hey, stop laughing! I know it sounds funnier than the planned "gags", but I'm renowned/derided/avoided in social situations for my "anality" when it comes to fact-checking) links, so would have taken about 3 hours to churn out. And since I'm feeling relatively old, tired, and spectacularly useless tonight, that could only ever have ended in a mess of tangled verbiage and harsh recriminations.

You'll be relieved to hear I'm not going to replace the scheduled content with the hoary old staple "A Personal Review of 2007", because such a piece would probably constitute several severe breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights, and lead to an arrest warrant for contravening little-known local by-laws against inflicting turgidity on minors without sufficient proir display of prominent warnings and disclaimers (Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, part 3, "Power To Advance Well-Being").

All I'll say is this - to anyone who, like me, has had a pretty crap 2007, here's hoping that 2008 sees an improvement in all our fortunes. And, as our parents used to remind us with annoying regularity, there are plenty of folk out there worse off than ourselves.

As for the other obvious "hoary old staple", the list of "New Year's Resolutions", well, I've got two. Firstly, I'll try to remember the person I used to be, but have slowly been burying over the last few years, (and maybe exhume the body if it turns out not to be completely dead and gone. Or transplant some of the bits in a psychological-Frankenstein manner. Could be fun! ). Apart from that, I'll follow the advice of the title of this post more often.

Might try to be more pleasant, too.

Oh, now that makes three. Might be pushing it a bit.

Well, we'll see, eh?

Happy New Year from this wee corner of Fife.