Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wishes you all a happy new year in this, the last year of the first decade of the Twenty-first Century. Your Maximum Leader can’t tell you all how friggin annoyed he is by all the “decade in review” peices he’s had to suffer through. If President Obama wanted to do something useful he’d go on tee-vee with some flip charts and timelines and have a “teachable moment” with the American people explaining that since there was no “Year Zero” that decades begin on ones and end in zeros.

Who the hell starts counting with the number zero anyway? Do we have nine fingers and one digit symbolically stands in for zero? It annoyed me when the year 2000 rolled round. He fears that this annoyance will grow to near rage as he gets older. Indeed he’s been more annoyed about it this year that he was in 2000. Perhaps he was willing to psychologically grant people a “waiver” because it isn’t often you see the calendar roll over to three zeros. But it is just friggin ridiculous.

Happily, your Maximum Leader’s loving wife Mrs Villain was teaching her children (her second graders that is) that the decade really doesn’t end for another year. We can hope that some of these kids will remember this lesson and stand up for decade integrity.

Your Maximum Leader would have written yesterdary, but he never thought about writing a post from his PDA. He got up early and took the train from DC to New York City to visit Kevin and Kevin’s Mom. Your Maximum Leader must say that he likes that Acela train. Very nice. He thinks it is now his preferred method of getting to the Big Apple. This was the most focused trip to NYC your Maximum Leader’s ever taken. On all previous visits he’s had time just to “do” something. But this trip was much more goal oriented. As he left Kevin and the hospital he lucked out and found an available cab on E 70th street (he’d excpected to have to have to walk over to Second Avenue to catch one) which would take him to Penn Station. Your Maximum Leader asked for one indulgence, namely that we drive slowly past Bloomingdales so that he could look at how they had the windows decked-out for the holidays. (The Wee Villain would have enjoyed the windows. There was a big superhero window with Batman and friends in it.) He tried to snap some photos of the windows from the cab (and another of Herald Square and Macy’s as he passed), but they didn’t turn out well.

Today your Maximum Leader will be smoking some bacon and relaxing.

Carry on.