Cheer up, it hasn't been all that bad!

Look at the bright side - Lewis Hamilton won the F1 Championship and the Big O won the US Presidency. OK, Arsenal is still making it a habit of shooting their foot, but Rafael Nadal won a great Wimbledon and Spain a great Euro 2008. They've been some great movies this year, even though my best movie of 2008 was the last one I watched in a movie hall - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Quite a few nice albums this year - even though I'm a mainstream music sucker - and I'm currently enraptured by The Killers' (again?) new album Day and Age.
It has been a fun year hasn’t it? Until the first half of the year the mad rush for ill-planned launches continues along with shoddy, ill-informed and often inexcusable journalism by all and sundry. And then the house of cards collapsed and well, it is still collapsing. I really don't know who or what will go under in 2009, but I certainly expect some channels and publications to fail and at the cost of sounding callous, I won't feel sorry.
If you are a student in a media school (other than the very best) and hoped to make it big in journalism in 2009, I’ve got bad news for you. Go do a better degree and improve your job prospects. Of course, even better there were hundreds of delicious conspiracies fuelled by maniacal egos and tons of money and in some cases several cases of Champagne.
But I digress, I honestly hoped when that when 2008 that I would manage to wind down this blog and move bag and baggage somewhere saner where I could sign of with something a bit less cryptic than K, even though as the year comes to a close, my identity has become a bad open secret and this blog itself has made me a discussion topic over dinner tables. Last year, I could maintain a smug smile when people discussed the blog in front of me – the quiet satisfaction being, “Little do you know, you f***ers.” But this year it is more like, “You should write about X, Y or Z”, or worse still, “I want to write on your blog.” Dang!
But that said, pageviews touched some pretty incredible levels this year and I must admit that did take me by surprise. I think I needed my recent two weeks away from blogging because I needed a couple of weeks away from the internet in general. Heck, I even gave up my favourite web-comics. Even Google Adsense paid out this year, and though it would ridiculous to suggest that I am making anything resembling ‘good’ money out of this blog, I can see how the business model can work. Now, how on earth can I monetise my Twitter stream?
On a personal note, not much to note really other than getting a lot of nice new stamps on my passport. Oh, and I rolled a car over, and got a grand total of one scratch. But then I rode on the X2 coaster at Magic Mountain and though three seconds when you suddenly think you might die is a lot worse than 90 seconds in a ‘safe’ roller coaster, the coaster was scarier. But this was a rather adrenalin filled year, a Launch Control start in a 911 Turbo, a maniacal take-off in a LearJet. The discovery that I can knock down twenty Martini’s in a night (I didn’t drive back) and that life doesn’t have to be half bad.
Life can be quite good actually. Have a great 2009 everyone, and don’t drink and drive!