Friday Funday: Just The Beginning...

As we hinted at on Thursday, we're taking our annual holiday vacation starting today, immediately after we publish today's edition. As usual, there will be brand new Paul Fell Cartoons published over the next week and a half, including the annual Paul Fell Holiday Card, and a special Paul Fell Prediction cartoon before the Capitol One Bowl game, featuring the Nebraska Cornhuskers (and some other dog-eared team).

There was some political news on Thursday, primarily the collapse and failure of Speaker Boehner and the Republicans in Congress to pass their own middling 'tax and budgetary 'Plan B.' You might call it the first major public battle of the GOP civil war -- or the Republican-caused political apocalypse if you wish.

Today is also supposed to be the end of the world, according to those nuts who believe in the Mayan apocalypse theory. We hate to spoil their end-of-the-world/holiday festivities, but by the time you and most others read these words, the sun will have already come up in Australia on December 22nd - proving that December 21st wasn't the end of the world. Maybe the Mayans just got bored with giant stone calendar making and quit with 2012.

We've always thought that's when they must have discovered paper.

As we do every year at this time - especially in light of the events of last Friday - we want to thank you, our readers, both in the U.S. and around the world. Whether you're a subscriber to our e-mail edition, or you come to these pages through our Facebook or Twitter pages, we're incredibly grateful to you for reading, appreciating, and passing on our work to your friends, family, and coworkers.

This year has been anything but boring, with a seemingly never ending stream of news and a political campaign season cranked up to 11 - though as Jamelle Bouie noted yesterday, the odds were always good the President Obama would win re-election.

Our annual countdown - or count up - of important numbers was thankfully less eventful this year than it has been for much of the last five years.

As usual, our reading lists topped 16,000 news, opinion, and commentary stories, not including the ever-growing numbers of books we also read - in either digital or "dead tree" formats. As of today's edition, we'll have published 237 issues this year, on top of the regular jobs of our staff members. Paul also drew somewhere around 400 cartoons this year, just for this publication - which averages out to more than one cartoon every day of the year.

For the first time in many, many years, we're not entirely sure of what to expect next year, politically, in the United States - a feeling that's both exhilarating and a bit worrisome.

Like most sensible people in positions similar to ours, we're still concerned that the collateral damage from the GOP's civil war, and the total inability of Republicans in Congress to actually govern, could push the U.S. and world economies into another recession.

Even so, we still have hope.

After all - if you believe the Mayan apocalypse theory, the entire Earth should be gone right now. Which it's quite obviously not. Seriously - the Mayans weren't even worried about today.

Looks like somebody on our staff will have to take back the overdue library book lying around the office after all.

May your 2013 be the best year ever.
Happy holidays from all of us.

We'll return to our regular publication schedule January 2, 2013