Get your kicks on Route 2006

A selection of random thoughts that occurred to me as 2006 ushered itself in...

• Was it a good idea for ABC to trot out Dick Clark — poor stammering, mumbling Dick Clark — for New Year's Rockin' Eve? Hard to say. On the one hand, you have to root for a guy coming back from what was obviously a much more severe stroke than Clark's publicity people have let on for the last year. Clark gave it the old college try — even if he did sound as though the old college was Gallaudet University (oh, stop... you know you thought it was funny) — and you have to applaud his effort. On the other hand, what a sad sight to see America's Oldest Living Teenager in such sorry shape. Maybe it would have been better for us all to remember him as he used to be. Maybe better for him, too.
  
  
• Those US Army Reserve commercials in which they offer, as recruitment bonuses, sports watches and boonie hats drive me bananas. If you're willing to face insurgent snipers and suicide bombers in Iraq for a sports watch or boonie hat, I pity you, fool.
  
  
• I finally understood the real meaning of Roy Scheider's famous line from Jaws, "We're going to need a bigger boat." With the biggest storm in 20 years raging, a nearby creek overflowing its banks, and our storm drains impacted, our neighborhood became flooded early in the morning on New Year's Eve. The water never got higher than the middle of our driveway — just beneath the tailpipe of my Mazda minivan — but that was plenty high enough.
  
  
• We're halfway through the first decade of the new millennium, and we still don't all agree on how the years ought to be pronounced. Some people on the New Year's Eve bashes were calling this new year two-thousand-six, others were calling it twenty-oh-six. And don't even get me started on what we're supposed to call the decade.
  
  
• This year, instead of making a list of resolutions I know I'm not going to keep, I decided instead I would make a list of resolutions that I know I can't keep. Taking a cue from Joe Walsh's classic 1982 song "Waffle Stomp," my resolutions for 2006 are as follows:
  
  
  • Have doughnuts and coffee with Colonel Qaddafi.
    
  • Write a new novel that's perfectly awful.
    
  • Book myself on a flight to the moon.
    
  • Volunteer for a brain operation.
    
  • Go overseas and speak Japanese.
    
  • Do the Watusi.
    
  • Watch I Love Lucy, too. (No, wait -- I actually could do that. If I were so inclined, that is. Which I'm not.)