Fare thee well 2011…

"I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me." Anais Nin

"Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough." Mark Twain

"Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us."  ~Hal Borland

"New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time." James Agate

"New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions." Mark Twain

"Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account." Oscar Wilde

"Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words." Plautus

"New Year's Day:  Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."  ~Mark Twain

So, farewell 2011

"You must be the first mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise," he said. Tom Watson addressing the great James Murdoch. How dare he!

"Calm down dear… calm down dear." Cammers

“If I was going to be the face of anything it should be the face of full-fat coke.” Singer Adele on endorsements
“Can you believe that? A female linesman.” Former Sky Sports presenter Andy Gray
“Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep, looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat.” Jeremy Clarkson on diplomacy
“I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families.” Jeremy Clarkson again, this time on public sector strikers.
“If my revelation of having bipolar II has encouraged one person to seek help, then it is worth it.” Catherine Zeta-Jones on suffering from bipolar disorder
"I am on a drug. It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available because if you try it you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body." – Sheen talks about his bizarre behaviour and drug use after being fired from sitcom Two and a Half Men.

…and so on and so forth in 2011 quotes. And there was me saying we weren't' going to do 2011 rundowns/best ofs/barrys. I justify the 2011 bit above by admitting to pretty much nicking it wholesale from here

So there's me banging on at Christmas about oooh yeah music's so rubbish these days and there's been no decent 'albums' released recently – pop music is shit, it all sounds like eurotrance to my ears FACT (what do you mean Wil, this is an absolute banger – and then what drops on my door step but two wonderful albums from Bella Union in the form of Rimar and I Break Horses… then I go and finally discover Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti last album – courtesy of a Xmas present; Simon Reynolds' new book Retromania – and Bjork and PJ Harvey's new albums and I'm eating a large amount of humble pie. I realise I'm stating the obvious here and preaching to converted about the above but my point being be to point out that I'm not a massive philistine and that there's great music out there, there's just a lot more swill to trudge through.

OK rant over and onto the New Year. Soooo much good stuff on NYE and NYD… catch y'all at some or all.
Havin' a little break next week see, you may see a R$N or we may decide to take our first ever week off since we started… have mercy and understanding on us. Nothing happens next week anyway, go see The Artist & a seemingly unneccessary but actually good …Dragon Tattoo. Buy some records, drink good whisky and hibernate. It's what the first week in January was made for.
Cheers for all the love and support this year… not going to get all sentimental on yo' ass cos that'd mean I was being massively cynical like normal. But yeah, ta n' all that. Here's to a super fly twenty twelve… ooh them Olympics eh?! Can't wait for them.
Leave you with the best advert of 2011… by a mile. Check this banger:

"The Old Year has gone.  Let the dead past bury its own dead.  The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.  All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!"  ~Edward Payson Powell

"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

Love n' all that. x