Consider the New Year’s Day edition of the comic strip “Non Sequitor”. It’s such a post 9/11 type of New Year’s comic with its “theme” on the year’s “Top 10 news stories” (“I didn’t die, I didn’t lose my job, and maybe I’ve earned some money.”).
Dick Clark and the Times Square ball – umm, did that ball come down a little fast or was it just me?
NY Times’ food critic William Grimes turns in his last review on 12/31/03. There’s also a fascinating Interactive Feature “A Grimes Retrospective,” where Grimes is unmasked (literally, he is; his one-time appearance on a PBS show in NYC, his face had to be blurred so that the restaurants wouldn’t recognize him).
January 1, 2004: NY Times article about an art exhibit in Paris about the historical Confucius.
There are other interesting 1/1/04 articles, which I’ll read later, once I feel like I’ve made a better recovery of the whole New Year’s eve thing. Enjoy the bowl games in the meantime. It’s not like I know who to root for. I just don’t see the bowls as nearly as fun as NCAA basketball, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons include: (a) I don’t really appreciate seeing all these corporate names attached to the bowls’ names (Capital One Bowl; Fed Ex Orange Bowl; Tostitos Fiesta Bowl; like I’ll use the services/products of these corporate sponsors because I watched the bowl game). (b) And, I get such a sadistic kick out of watching my March Madness brackets be completely wrong, which the bowl’s don’t provide. ( c ) Plus, it’s not like my alma mater and its league are great in football either, such that I don’t have a reason to follow college football (but at least Alma Mater had a better record than last season, at least).
But, watching the bowls is a New Year’s tradition to enjoy. Cheers!