A very preliminary list of musings (purges will come later) from the year that's about to be mercifully put down. In no particular order.

I'll admit to mixed motives in picking up the Iraq Study Group Report. I have been involved in my own personal Iraq-like quagmire of a relationship, and was desperately seeking "a way forward," and in real need of "fresh eyes." I didn't have anybody I could force to step down to placate anybody else, so when the Baker-Hamilton report came out, I thought maybe I could apply some of the Commission's recommendations to my own situation (as in, "um, we've got a situation here").

We all have our own personal Iraqs of the heart, don't we? At first it seems like it's going to be a cake-walk. Greeted as liberators. We'll show them the way it's done. But it turns into a bloody conflagration, endless skirmishes, downward spiral, no way out. We've all been there. Love is hell.

But after reading the report it was clearer than ever to me that sometimes the best thing really is to cut and run. You can do it in a nice way, y'know.


So what's with all the commercial spokescritters for various companies coming at us with these funny accents? DaimlerChrysler brought out the mustache-twirling "Doctor Z," the actual Dr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the board, to resounding, erm, bewilderment. They have since stuffed him back in his box.

Little known fact: they wanted the Nasonex Bee, but he was obviously otherwise engaged. Why does Nasonex have a Spanish- or possibly Portuguese-speaking spokesbee, you ask? Because Ashton Kutcher was busy doing voice-over work for Sony Pictures, and Antonio Banderas* agreed to do it at a discount.

The Nasonex Bee is himself an old friend of Geico's gecko. They met a couple years ago during a talent search launched by Fallon, but the ad agency went with Roman and Victor instead. You know, Citi's "Rewards Guy"—"a doorman named Roman," according to one wiki-source, "at 444 Park Ave South (main entrance)"—and his wacky sidekick, who tries to distract him while he aims for his "rewards," which are "very, very, very rewarding." Again, I can't imagine the pitch here that got Citi to spend a cool hundred million on this particular approach, but here I am blogging about it, so it was probably worth the money.



Occasionally I dig out my notebooks, which go back twelve or so years, where I used to take notes on things I'd read or make observations about things I'd seen. You can see from the pictures above how my note-taking skills have, erm, evolved over time, due in large part to the fact that nowadays I cut-n-paste rather than transcribe by hand.

There is something that bad penmanship adds to a text, though it's not legibility, that's for sure. Mood, temperament, maybe—a level of personality you can't get to with a word processor. But even the turning of the pages—and the pages themselves, some of which are yellowed and crinkly now—adds something poignant to the perusing of these notebooks.

And then there's the news clippings, picture postcards, and fortunes from old fortune cookies stuck in randomly for good measure, physical artifacts of places and times long-gone. Like this one, with the date "2-25-95" scrawled on the back:
But did I listen? No. I said, hmm. Probably stroked my chin while I said it. Stuck it in my little notebook, and forgot all about it. And now—now, after the damage is done and I'm sitting here all knotted up in the tangle of uncharitable loves, flipping through my notebooks—now I find it.

Probably why I tucked it in there in the first place. Not so much a reminder as a kind of personal I-told-you-so, the punch-line to a cosmic joke that goes something like this: character is fate.

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*There's actually a good deal of dispute online that I don't have time to resolve as to who voices the bee: Banderas, or Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida. Both men are credited on various wiki-powered sites, which is the problem with wiki-power. A cursory inspection of the Nasonex site yielded no clues.