Get this year outta here!

There are 8 hours left in 2014, and I've already seen my alma mater kick off Big Ten action in a good way today with a solid win over Penn State. The game was also noteworthy for using a live DJ over the band because of Winter Break (Madison's Nick Nice, and I actually think it worked well, since the Badgers already do NBA-ish stuff anyway), and for being sponsored by....KOCH INDUSTRIES???? C'mon Bucky! As I tweeted out, I'll gladly start a fundraising drive so you DON'T need to have Koch Industries sponsor the game. Do you really need the few thousand dollars that much, Barry?

I digress. It's been a bad year for the state of Wisconsin electorally and fiscally, and much like the rest of the nation, it feels like a lot of the decisions made in 2014 will come back to haunt both the innocent and the guilty in the coming years. But here at the Funhouse, we keep rolling along. We got over 18,000 pageviews in the month before the November election (so my 5 regular readers have now grown to 10, apparently), and enough of you even clicked on the site and its ads that I got a (tiny) paycheck out of this hobby.

I want to let you know that I appreciate those of you who take the time to read this site, as well as those of you that relay these ramblings onto other media. It's still really cool to see references from this blog be made in comments on state media sites or Facebook or Twitter or other places. What I do isn't necessarily major-league journalism or academic paper-worthy, and it certainly isn't my day job, but if a few of you learn some things and it changes the way some others might understand or look into a subject, I'm glad to help.

See you guys in 2015 (a year that's gotta be better than this one, doesn't it?), and I'll try to keep up the info in what seems sure to be a significant budget year in Wisconsin.