Update, October 6, 2009: Hi there! This is just a little announcement for anyone who has wandered over here and is confused as to why there is no new content. I closed this blog on December 31, 2006, and opened a new one for 2007. See the original post content below. But if you want my latest web ramblings, please go to the main page for all the links to all my sites, or head straight over to my current blog, The Spleenville HQ Chronicles. What does this mean in the great scheme of things? Well, for one thing, it means NO, I DON’T WANT TO ADD ANY ADVERTISEMENTS TO THIS SITE. (Yes, I periodically get spammed from my old sites for this purpose. Stop it. It is irritating, and is not making your business any more attractive.) Now everyone, change your links to either spleenville.com/ for the main site, or spleenville.com/v2/ for just the blog.

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The end of an era — Dick Clark looks as if all his old age dropped on his head at once. Sad. Oh well — here’s the new blog. Have a happy, and all that. This blog is officially closed.

Hm, a little less than three hours to go. I suppose I should start preparing my New Year’s Eve nosh. Today I went to the store (it was packed with last-minuters like me, but except for the slight feeling of claustrophobia from all the tot-packed “fun” carts — Publix provides these ridiculous shopping carts with carapaces of fanciful bulging plastic for people to place their infants in, and they take up twice the space of a regular shopping cart — it wasn’t that bad) and stocked up on a few things. I have taken to not doing a regular dinner on New Year’s Eve, instead snacking on finger foods like cheese and crackers and fancy olives, salty stuff to go with the champagne. Of course I bought the champagne — I decided to go with Korbel this time instead of Martini and Rossi. They were both about the same price (not cheap, but not as expensive as the French stuff.) There was something called “Verdi Spumante” which was dirt cheap, but I took a good look at the label and saw the words “malt liquor beverage with natural flavorings.” Fwoaaarrr! No thank you, I am not a teenager. We drink the real stuff in the House of Spleen.

People have been setting off fireworks all night already. Or firing their guns in the air — I can’t really tell the sounds apart. Especially as I am blasting (well, not really, it’s just on loud enough to hear) the classical music station. They are sticking to playing music tonight except for their glum intervals of NPR news headlines. Eventually I will turn them off and turn on the tv, looking for whatever festivities the networks decided to air.

And those are my exciting evening plans.

Man, I can’t wait to kick this year in the ass out the door. It’s not exactly sucked for me… but it could have been better.

Hm. Better spiff up the new blog too. (Yes, chilluns, there will be a New Blog for 2007. It’s a Spleenville tradition!)

Update: I have changed the title. I like this one better.

Update 2: nah, this one is better.

“That’s not how you mangle a quote. This is how you mangle a quote!”

Good lord woman, write more posts and you’ll get people linking to you and visiting your site the old fashioned way. Quit worrying about the few lazy clickers who can’t be bothered to set up a blogroll or click “bookmark site” on their browser menu. “But– but I didn’t get a cattle prod up my ass to let me know you’d posted again!” Do you really need people like that?

I never did set up a category called “I Hate RSS,” did I? Well, maybe I will.

I’ve been reading some blog entries and blog comments whose authors are waxing concerned about how the execution of Saddam Hussein is making Baby Jesus cry because the death penalty is bad. Well that’s as may be, but Steve H. shows that it is possible to be against the death penalty on general principles without being a total pussy about offing someone who obviously deserved it.

Soon Saddam will be hung by the neck until dead dead dead. “Get over here and pick up his crap,” his lawyers have been told. I hope they don’t get into any undignified fights over his personnal effects. Soon to be available on Ebay.

I think I’ll take my swing cds to work today.

Update: I ended up forgetting the cds. It was just as well. I also corrected the title, which was off a bit.

One more update until the end: a die-you-fucker roundup. I don’t have any hard liquor in the house (yet), but I do have a bottle of wine and some Alka-Seltzer Plus cold medication. Party!

One more one more update until the end: ridiculous.

And one more: they wait at Iraq the Model.

And the end: I turned on the tv just five minutes ago. The sad-faced idiot on 20/20 made the announcement, and also took the trouble to mention how Saddam considered a death by hanging “demeaning,” and had requested a firing squad instead. His request was not granted.

They can’t be serious. Surely these dreadful (awful, hideous, there I go writing like a pr0n-ographer!) passages weren’t written for any other reason but to win this silly prize. I can’t believe that someone sweated these out and really, really meant them to be considered serious, important prose:

Take oaf yir clathes then, let me see the goods, Mary rasped in lecherous cheer.

she could hear herself panting now, like a dog, but she didn’t care.

she trembled and clung on to him and mewled with pleasure in his ear.

Mewled?

she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter

Aflutter?

He slid a hand beneath her arse

Thud, went the romance.

The first half-inch was cold, and moist only with brine, and he
encountered stiff resistance which, while not without appeal, made him
fear for a moment that he might do her an injury if he pressed on with
excess zeal.

Yeah, like that.

To say nothing of the dog. (No, you must read.)
(Via Kathy Shaidle, who is not drunk, but should be. If only it were Friday night, I’d be tying one on right now. Oh, not like that!)

Presented unreformatted and unedited is this bizarre poem — or something — I received in the latest batch of spam to inundate my email box:

And so I gaze avidly
and the Splendid Splinter. For a few dreamy dollars,
Upon from the right by far trees, that white place
whose soft bristles graze the top-racks.
The road, but not far enough ahead
II. Quest and Conquest
Never does any motion, sound, or light
References
Only a whiter absence to my mind,
Green lilac buds appear that won’t survive
To pick up even the quickening of wind
Wind, sleet. The branches sway,
Dismal, endless plain—

Rest easy, parents of Liberal Studies majors, it looks like your freakish children are employable after all.

It’s possible that not even many people who were alive in the Seventies will get the joke of my title… I was trying to think of something to illustrate the way even horror was flattened out into something banal… But don’t bother with me. Kathy Shaidle encapsulates the Seventies perfectly: “…that bitter, corrosive yet oddly sacharine pall.” Yep. That’s why every time another disco bunny who was born in 1981 came up to me and insisted “but the Seventies were fun!” I came this close to committing murder. Then I shoved a swizzle stick through each ear drum and it’s been sweet, sweet peace ever since. (Okay, just kidding — but that’s what I wanted to do for almost my entire childhood and teenage years. And I wanted to pour lye in my eyes too. Never to have to hear the laugh track again, never to have to see Sid and Marty Croft on my tv, never to have to endure the idea of the only shade of green being avocado…)