Regularly And Guiltily

      So 2006 has arrived, and with it a few changes for this blog, including a slightly different design, and a half-hearted decision to be at least slightly more vigilant about its maintenance.   I also, with some hesitation, decided that I'd see if there was a way I could make this blasted blog do something for me, so I surrendered to the temptation to allow Google to provide advertising links on the sidebar.   I suspect it'll be 2060 before those ads begin paying off, but I confess to being curious to see if there's an ounce of profit to be made.   So, kind readers, follow Google's links-- effusively, if you please, and click me to riches beyond my vague and limited imagination.  

      New Year's and Christmas have come and gone, Christmas as usual the languid fruition of a few weeks of frenzy, and New Year's Eve the typical gallivanting among alcohol-vending establishments.   Now I can return to being my shirty, cynical self, divested at long last of the niceties, and most of the imbibements, compulsory for the season.   Work awaits, naggingly: with my kids' exams marked, I now have to trudge through their forty-odd essays and, more laboriously, through Pride and Prejudice, which begins with one of the most pretentious and heavy-handed sentences in English literature ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife"), and so calls to mind the delicious homophony of the word "ostentatious."   Jane Austen, I'd continue to contend, is a pleasure like prostitution, better suited for those willing to pay for it, regularly and guiltily.

      Several of you out there, I know, are waiting for me to return calls or emails, and I promise to do so sooner or later.   In the interim, Happy New Year, everyone, and may this one be a damned sight better than the last one.