Remember when it was the year 2010?

I do.

It seems like it was just yesterday or three days ago at the most. Unemployment was stuck at ten percent. State governments across the nation were facing unbridgeable budget gaps. Justin Bieber was a music phenomenon. I know — it is hard to believe what life was like.

But people survived somehow. They dipped into their hard-earned consumer credit or tax cuts and upgraded (finally) from DVD players to Blu-Ray players. They began to question union benefits. They discovered that there was an educational value to playing video games where the object was to make body parts fly as far as possible from the principal. They did what humans do best – innovate, adapt, and find new reasons to spend money they did not have.

And here we are in a new age, far from that sepia-toned time. We face the same problems our ancestors faced, but must find different solutions to those problems. We must learn how to reduce pollution beyond driving miles out our way for a lightbulb that is five percent more efficient. We must learn how attract the brightest young minds to fields other than banking, investing, and financial alchemy. We must learn how to fire public employees.

And most of all, we must learn how to make monkeys fly out of my butt.

Happy New Year, faithful readers.