ON THE MARK.

 WHO STARTED ALL THIS YEAR-END STUFF?
  I'm sorry I haven't posted lately.  My brain is nearing the end of it's year as well.  We are in holiday mode, and 2012 was a tough year, maybe the toughest I've had since '89.  I actually ran out of ideas on Christmas Day.  I prefer to call it "Writers block" because it infers that I'm a writer.  Really,  2012 exhausted me.  I've noticed that all media outlets are bagged by this time of the year as well.  Everybody's running on fumes. That's why they plug in these yearender stories.   It seems that every single Top 10, Top 20 and Top 100 list has been invented solely for the purposes of  holiday "filler"  To take up time and/or space that would normally be filled with "real" stories.  Instead we get a rehash of the past 12 months when most of us can't remember what happened over the last 12 days.  Let's see: Top Sports stories (Usain Bolt), Top News stories (Gun violence in America),  Top Entertainment stories (all Bieber, all the time), Top Business stories (Fiscal cliff), Top Weather stories (Superstorm Sandy), etc.  We even pause to remember those who died by listing the necrology of 2012.   Kind of their final final farewell for the famous.
  Don't forget, this is the time of year when you don't NEED to come up with any stories because there's a year's worth of them at your fingertips.  A year's worth of tweets, posts, highlights, speeches, soundbites, texts and interviews to edit together and say "Here's what happened since last January."  I feel the same way.
      I've been blogging for a few months now, and I'm wondering if it's too presumptuous to come up with a "Best of" edition of my rants.  Am I entitled to take it easy during the Holiday season and let my previous blogs remind you of how clever I used to be?  I mean, they're all archived for a reason, aren't they?   If I reprint a previous post, do I now get the reputation as a re-user, a re-cycler, maybe a re-gifter?  Or, am I actually the one to blame?  After all, I helped start all this year-end stuff about 30 years ago with the Year End Hebsy Awards. 
      I'm told the Year End Hebsy's were a "must see" compilation because if you didn't see the actual
   Sportsline broadcast and you didn't tape it, you had to wait until the end of the year to see some crazy sports bloopers.    The yearenders we did back in the 80s and 90s ran about 6 or 7 minutes long and it meant physically taking all the tapes into the edit suite, pulling the index out of the box with all the time codes listed, and then fast forwarding to that spot on the tape.  It was very time consuming, but worth it.  Everybody looked forward to it, and I made sure nobody got to see a "preview".  You had to watch it "live" because Jim Tatti's reaction was the best part of the Hebsy Awards. I recently viewed the 1990 yearender and when one of the guys in the two-man bobsled slips and falls and then chases the bobsled down the track, Tatti starts to laugh and then is heard banging on the desk. Classic.  The element of surprise (and delight) was always entertaining.
    So, I guess I'm my own worst enemy.   Here I am complaining that I'm brain dead and in need of an excuse not to post, and I give myself up as a culprit in this whole end-of-the-year nonsense.   Look what I helped start.    By the way, since it IS the end of the year and I DID start a tradition, perhaps you might like to look in on Part Two of the Year End Hebsy awards.  That's next Monday night, December 31st at 5 p.m. Eastern time on CHCH TV.  Check your local listings.