By Dave Hurteau & Chad Love

2008 is almost in the books, and with it go all those goal-oriented lies I happily deluded myself into stating at this very time last year. I now have a fresh and unsullied set of lies ready to go. All I need is a good hangover cure, a few spoonfuls of black-eyed peas, a short-lived sense of purpose and optimism and a week or two in which to stave off reality.

To be honest I get a little melancholy this time of year because I know that January is the final gasp, the last fading exhalation of the season before the deep freeze of late winter sets in.

But hey, I've still got two weeks of bow season, a couple more weeks of duck season if the water stays open and the quail and pheasant are still out there mocking me. Plus, the good folks at Cabela's just sent me their official February survival kit. They may call it a spring fishing catalog, but that and a warm, cozy bathroom is all I need to make it through those long late-winter days.

Happy New Year's everyone, and may all your hopelessly optimistic and ultimately doomed New Year's resolutions come to fruition for at least one fleeting moment. 

By John Merwin & Joe Cermele

Fifteen degrees and snowing hard here in the North Country this morning, a very wintry New Year's Eve.

Today brings thoughts of New Year's resolutions, of course,  but I have to say I'm not big on resolutions I already know won't be kept. So instead of promising myself things like weight loss or more rigorous exercise in the new year ahead, here's my one resolution: Fish more, work less.

Sounds pretty good, huh? I have not yet figured out just how I'm going to make that work, but I'm going to try. It's not that fishing is necessarily so important, but, as the late John Voelker once said, that so many other things are equally unimportant and not nearly as much fun.

Don't party too hard tonight, folks, and drive safely. Happy New Year!

By David E. Petzal and Philip Bourjaily

“Coach says it’s OK to bleed from the ears.”—Reggie Ray, in Not Another Teen Movie

For fear the hearts of men are failing,
For these are latter days we know.
The Great Depression now is spreading;
God’s word declared it would be so.
I’m going where there’s no Depression,
To that lovely land that’s free from care.
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble.
My home’s in Heaven; I’m going there.
—A.P. Carter, from Songs of the Depression, by The New Lost City Ramblers, 1959

Some of the following is already fact. The rest of it will probably be fact before 2009 is out.

On December 18, one day after Washington announced its new “reasonable” gun-ownership laws, MSNBC news bunny Mika Brzezinski was mugged outside her D.C. hotel by a robber who did not carry a gun. Meanwhile, the murderer of Chondra Levy, the intern who was killed in a Washington park in 2001, remains at large.

President Obama will push a new firearms-control law through a Congress that is distracted by a debate over whether to bail out kitty litter manufacturers (unsympathetic reporters label the pro-litter faction “The Pissing Pussy Posse”). It establishes the National Bureau of Gun-Owner Control, and requires anyone possessing a firearm in the U.S. to carry an I.D. card issued by the Bureau. One of the requirements for obtaining a card involves passing a psychiatric exam and, to set the example, Vice President Joe Biden takes the first one. He fails it.

Stung by the shooting public’s rejection of the 592nd variation on its basic mid-20th-century rifle design, a major gun manufacturer will develop a breakthrough “game-harvesting system” that is actually a hand-held miniaturized heat-seeking missile with an effective range of 12.7 miles. Called the GHS and mounted with a celestial telescope, it requires no aiming—only pointing in a general direction--and cannot miss.

The GHS is given a radical advertising campaign (“Fair chase is so 20th century.”) and is a raging success; a black-powder version for special seasons soon follows. BATF chief Chelsea Clinton attempts to classify it as a destructive device, but Congress, distracted by the $13.5 billion in severance paid to top execs at GM, Ford, and Chrysler after their companies’ respective bankruptcies, does not go along.

And: This past hunting season I drove to hunts in South Carolina, Maine, and West Virginia, thereby depriving the airlines of the money they would pay ramp apes to dance on my gun case. I also avoided the TSA, getting stranded, the Ritalin-deprived 12-year-old sociopath who always sits in the seat behind me, and the awful despair in the eyes of all flight attendants.

My thanks to all of you who read this thing and contribute to it. I get a tremendous kick out of what you have to say, even if you disagree with me, which is surprising because I am always right.

Happy New Year.

By Ben Romans