On The Turning Away

Perhaps it’s fitting that plummeting temperatures put a chill on tonight’s reveling in Time Square – a bitter end to 2008, annus horribilis?

There seems to be some glaring incongruities this holiday season. And it’s not just wacky mother nature that gives us 67-degree spring breeze one day and showers us with sleet the next.

On the one hand, about half of people surveyed by NBC News/Wall Street Journal believe 2008 was one of the worst years in American history. On the other, if you had spent half an hour in the vicinity of Rock Center in New York City, you would probably not use “sour” to describe the public mood.

Granted, there’re loads of foreign, aka boorish, tourists who tend to either step on your toes or push you as if you were a stroller. Or perhaps they merely delight in taking pictures with you – not the skyscrapers – in the backdrop.

In what the media claims to be the most severe economic downtown since the Great Depression, the city’s service industry must be doing well, luring those globe-trotting cuckoo mobs to paint the town red, at the expense of those staying in town.

Speaking of which, Bernie “ponzi scheme” Madoff’s pad has become a tourist attraction, sort of. Last we walked past it, there were couple paparazzi chasing a gentleman stepping out of the building at the corner of 64th St and Lex. It added a certain comic splash to an otherwise sombre affair.

That said, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind?”

In the spirit of the season, We’ll celebrate the New Year’s by attempting to draw up a list of non-binding resolutions for 2009, or sleep through the ruckus.