Hello, person and/or people and/or robots of the future! Thank you for coming to allnewyear.com. This project is over, but I wanted this post to serve as a beginner’s guide, so you can get a sense of what this this site all about.

What is this site all about?

Good question, fictional question-asker! All New Year was a project started by Opus Moreschi, in which he did something he’s never done before, once a day, every day, for a year, and blogged about it.

Why are there no more updates?

Opus started his All New Year on his birthday, March 5, 2007 and completed it one year later on March 4, 2008.

How many new things were done?

366 (as Opus’s mother pointed out, it was a leap year).

What are Taco Tuesdays?

Some of the most popular posts on All New Year were Taco Tuesdays, a weekly event in which Opus would eat something he’s never tried before, from freeze-dried larvae, to strange mexican candies, to dog food. Opus occasionally posts new Taco Tuesdays at his other site, HeyItsOpus.com.

I just saw you did something rather small and lame for a New Thing on this day or that. Does that count?

Listen, Fictional Question Asker. I used to like you, but now you’re getting a bit uppity. Yes, admittedly, some of the new things were lame. But you try finding something brand new to do every day while working full time, blogging daily, and trying to retain some semblance of a social life. It ain’t easy, chump.

What are your favorite New Things?

That’s like asking, “Which sharp stick did you enjoy getting poked in the eye with most” But here are the ones that resonated with myself or others:

• Skydiving

• Trapeze Lessons
• Hugging The “Hugging Saint”
• Attempting to get into a fancy fashion industry party
• Peeing in adult diapers
• Drive Naked
• Milk a Cow
• Ear Candling
• Working out with Richard Simmons
• Growing a Mustache for Charity
• Cleaning My Nose With A Neti Pot

What was the reaction? Were there any spin-offs?

The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, with people from all over the globe writing me with suggestions, and support, and only very very occasionally to tell me how stupid I looked. But by far, imitation was the most awesomest form of flattery. Several people attempted to do their own All New Years - to varying degrees of success. I am not judging that in the slightest - it’s a difficult thing to do, and just giving it a try is admirable enough.

• Emily decided to do her own Em’s New Year, along with a Taco Tuesday spin-off called Mini-Muffin Monday.

• Dani, from the UK, started up Dani’s All New Year,: her version of Taco Tuesday was called Fritters on Friday.
• Grace was inspired to do her own twist on the genre by making sure her next year was her Favorite Year.
• Erika brought the concept to her craft business, My Imaginary Boyfriend, and did a craft a day for a month.
• Popular YouTube vlogger Paperlillies recommended my blog to her many fans, her brother were inspired to do a Taco Tuesday, calling theirs Burrito Wednesday. Her accent makes here single edition far cooler than all of mine combines.

Are you going to keep doing All New Things?

God, no. From now on I will simply sit very still, concentrating very hard on never again trying anything new. (Fine, okay, I’m sure I’ll always be open to new experiences in a way I haven’t been before. Is that what you wanted?)

Do you realize you switched from third person to first person halfway through this list?

Opus Moreschi does realize that I did this.

How do you feel about it now that All New Year is over?

How do I feel? Honestly, relieved. All New Year was a huge pain in my ass. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad I did it, but it was exhausting, draining, frustrating, confusing and upsetting at times. Still, I wouldn’t change a thing.

What have you learned from the All New Year project?

I wish I had a pat, Carpe Diem, Oh-Captain-My-Captain, Bucket List sort of answer for that. But life doesn’t serve up easy answers - and if it did, it wouldn’t be as interesting. I started the project because I noticed a tendency in myself to remain too comfortable, to not step outside my own boundaries, and to not explore new things. If I saw those qualities in another person, I would probably be inclined to dislike them. By forcing myself to do new things, I was forcing myself to confront those qualities.

What I learned is that we have boundaries for a reason. And it’s always good to push those boundaries, test their elasticity. Maybe you’ll find what terrified you a year ago is easy for you today… or that something you’ve always shied away from is something you actually really enjoy.

But I think its just as valuable a lesson to learn that it’s okay to have those boundaries. If I don’t want to go clubbing until dawn listening to house music and taking illegal pills I buy off a guy in the bathroom who won’t give me his real name but tells me to call him “The Fixer” - that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. It means I know what I like - scrabble, ben & jerrys, and an early bedtime. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Do you have any other sweeping, grandiose projects planned for the future?

Shhh. Daddy’s trying to rest.

I’m getting a lot of interesting comments, links, and emails from people who have only discovered the blog now that it’s all over. Hi, new people! Sorry that my life is boring now. I need a break.

However, I couldn’t quite leave Taco Tuesday behind… there are brave new frontiers of weird food to try. So I’ve moved it over to my “personal” blog at Heyitsopus.com. Check out the all new episode.

Also I want to give big props and thanks to Alaskan singer/songwriter Marian Call, who was touring through Los Angeles and came by my All New Year Wrap Party. She was moved to write a song for the All New Year, of which she has yet to record, but sent me the lyircs, which I find hearbreakingly charming. This is Marian’s song:

A poor girl on her own in
the city, bemoanin’
The troglodyte males who molest her
Found welcome relief,
reinforcing belief
In good breeding, when her host impressed her –
At a very fine party
Not snobbish, but arty
And full of the finest of folks –
With wit and panache
And a grand ex-moustache
And punchy yet civilized jokes.
Oh, heaven preserve us
from louts who unnerve us
And bastards who pinch us and grope us
Here’s to the hepcat
who brook have none of that –
Our very own maaaaaaaaagnum Opus

Wow. Nobody’s written a song for me before (and I am guessing they won’t from here on out) so I am speechlessly thankful to Marian. Thank you to her, and everybody who has supported me in this crazyass project.

–opus

Many thanks to everybody who came out for the All New Year Wrap Part a few days ago, including Erin Gibson, who took these phenomenal photos.

All New Year may be over but I’m going to try to post a few more times - to get some closure on the project and thank the wonderful people who helped me so much. And maybe one or two new Taco Tuesdays. Stay tuned.

Do your eyeballs like viewing things? Sure. So why not view some things related to All New Year?

Remember back when I voiced some drunk flowers for a PSA? Well the commercial is completed, and I think it’s pretty fun. Watch the whole thing yourself and let me know what you think. I play the flower on the left. The pretty, pretty pink one.

Also, if you’re one of the 7 people in America who get the cable channel “Fuel TV” you can watch me, my boss, and some waffles on The Daily Habit tomorrow night at 9.

Finally, you can see the season finale of Lil’ Bush tomorrow night at 10:30 on Comedy Central if you enjoy seeing what I actually get paid to write.

Get your eyeballs to work!

–opus

Hey gang.

I’m sitting here, feeling guilty over the weakness of yesterday’s post. I was busy, I was tired, and what I wanted to do fell though, but still… signing up for a web site isn’t exactly thrilling entertainment. I have an obligation to you fine folks.

So I’d like to pre-announce that tonight’s thing will be pretty awesome. Not for me. But hopefully for you.

Stay tuned.

–opus

There has been a constant drumbeat of requests (okay, one) for more details on my skydiving adventure. So here you go.

First thing that happens when you arrive at the skydiving place is they make you sign dozens of papers. These papers describe the various ways you could die or be maimed, and you have to sign to acknowledge that you could die or be maimed, and that basically you’re cool with that. While you do this, there is a television in the corner playing a video in which a man with a obscenely long beard sits behind a large desk droning about the various ways you could die. And to top it off, they have you record, on camera, not unlike the Iranian hostages, the fact that you accept that you could die. It’s hard to pretend it’s not a big deal after you’ve done everything but pick out your epitaph.

Note that this contract includes the possibility of poisonous snake bites. Snakes on a plane?

I also got the chance to pick which song I wanted in my video. I had many choices, but it soon became clear that I really only had one. What other song can you get but Jump by Van Halen?

Then we waited. And waited. Apparently there were several groups in front of us. So we sat around the airstrip, stomach juices churning. I pooped at least three times - probably a good thing, because we were all unnaturally preoccupied with the idea that would could accidentally poop mid-air out of fear. (Little did I know how tightly my ass would be clenched with terror).

I thought we’d be humming “Free Falling.” But we ended up humming “The wai-ai-ting is the hardest part.”

After three hours wait, we got the official word: They were putting all jumps on hold due to high winds. Crankily we sat down to eat, all of us certain we’d be going home soon. No sooner had I bitten into my turkey sandwich than our names were called over the loudspeaker. We were going up.

From the time my turkey melt was dropped on my plate to the time we were taking off took less than 20 minutes. It was a whirlwind of jumpsuits and goggles and straps and instructors whose gallows humor didn’t put anybody at ease. Next thing you know I was in a tiny shitty loud plane watching the ground drop away through a little bitty window.

At 14,000 feet the door opened. It was, quite simply, terrifying. Standing on the edge of that plane, seeing the ground so far below. If you would like to know what I look like frightened, here it is:

I cannot take any credit for the jump itself. The burly man strapped to my back did all the work (how many times have I used that sentence). But a few seconds after I was out of the plane, my terror went away completely.

The best I can explain is this: When you are standing on a roof, or a mountaintop, or even a plane, looking down at the ground, there is an instinctive biological fear. Millions of years of evolution has caused your noggin’ to say “Careful! That could kill you, and thus deprive you of the chance of passing your twisted little sperms on to a lady and continue with the species.” It is natural to be afraid. Those who do not are probably some sort of clone or alien or alien clone. I do not trust them.

But nothing in all of human history has prepare the brain for the process of falling from 12,500 feet. It is just air and noise and whooshing. Objectively, you know you’re falling. But because you have nothing to compare it to, there is no fear. There is just an odd sense of “Huh. This is weird.”

First person to photoshop this into Nirvana’s Nevermind album cover wins a prize.

Eventually the chute deployed (my Burly Guy did the honors) and we drifted slowly to the ground. The Burly Guy pointed out sites of interest that were not entirely that interesting. This was my least favorite part - I don’t like small talk in general. Its even worst at 5,000 feet, in a forced-spooning position with a Burly Guy.

After a few “so, where are you from?” minutes, we touched down. For the record, I was told to land on my ass. Honest.

All in all, I can’t say if I fun or not. It was more of an experience. It’s hard to even imagine it, even though I’ve done it. But I’m very glad I did it. And I’m even gladder I did not poop my pants.

PS - For more photo fun of my trip, feel free to check out my Flickr set, and leave a few dirty comments while you’re at it.

Yum. And goodnight.

–opus

Thanks to Jennie CC and her boss and her boss’s client to does a bunch of voices, I was able to attend a fancy-ass big-shot red carpet hollywood premiere for Disney’s latest glassy-eyed animated epic, Meet the Robinsons.

I am not sure what I expected, but I sort of figured the “red carpet” was just that -a
lovely, velvety carpet one walked on, leisurely, on the way to the theater. In fact, it’s a strange a grueling gauntlet of photographers shouting, security guards shouting, and fans shouting. A lot of shouting.

Not that any of it was directed towards me, really. Because the Red Carpet has two sections: The front section, where the beautiful and formerly-beautiful people go to get right front of cameras, and the back-section, where schmoes like myself are yelled at because we’re in the photographer’s shot.

Witness, for example, Mr. Magnum. PI, who plays a character named “Tom Selleck” or something:

You’ll notice some schmuck that is either: A) Standing a few feet behind Selleck PI’s back, trying to be unobtrusive, or B) growing from Selleck PI’s shoulder. That head is me.

Other famous people there included:

Sabrina, The Teenage Witch

Rufus Wainwright

One Of The Monkees

Angela Basset

The All-American Rejects (A band consisting of men in tight jeans whose model girlfriends man or may not be surgically attached to their arms)

Jodie Foster

Louden Wainwright

Opus Moreschi

There was also numerous child actors there. You can tell child actors because they:
A) Are dressed like little adults, even if that’s wildly inappropriate
B) Have a glassy faraway look in their eyes not unlike the computer animated characters in the movie
C) If you look at them for more than five seconds, you can feel your own childhood being destroyed, not just theirs. That is the power of the child actor.

Because Jennie was working, we were following her client, the incredibly nice and graciuos Ethan Sandler, as he made his way from station to station on the red carpet. Which meant it took us over and hour to walk the 50 yards of red cloth into the theater.

I’ll leave the reviews of the movie to the reviewers, but I will say this: They gave us free popcorn and drinks, and our seats were better than Angela Basset’s.

Afterwards there was a huge tent party which fun and activities for the entire family. Since I have no family, I had to act like both adult and child. Jennie CC was more than willing to do the same.

I still have a child’s inate and, in my opinion, appropriate fear of costumed characters. There were people at the party who looked and acted like Cirque Du Soleil understudies - in stretchy colorful spandex, balancing on balls and juggling things and riding unicycles. I do not have photos of these people because they made me very uncomfortable. I worry for the people inside: Either they hate this job, which is sad. Or they love the job, which is even sadder.

Jennie wanted her photo taken with the movie’s protagonist, Blonde Hydrocephaletic Boy.

She then wanted my photo with this same lad. He frightened me and also gave me a strange look as to how I would appear in my own personal hell.

But once away from the day-players in costumes, we had a great time. We ate food, did crafts, oogled the strange people and made our own soap. Everything was free and everywhere we turned a caterer was there to, well, cater to us. It was a strange and delicious taste of what it’s like to be rich and powerful. And frankly, I liked it. I could get really used to this, i thought.

So now, I have a plan. I am going to sew my head onto Tom Selleck P.I.’s shoulder. That dude is loaded, and nobody says no to him. Surely nobody would say no to his slightly less attractive second head. It’s so brilliant it just might work.

–opus

My friend Sandy and I were looking for something to do on Saturday. The logic chain went something like this:

Why don’t we do something?

Why don’t we get a drink?

Why don’t we go see a parade?

Why don’t we go on a day cruise?

Why don’t we get out of town?

Why don’t we go to a ghost town?

Why don’t we go to Vegas?

Somehow this made perfect sense. Honestly, I was hesitant. I am not the sort to run off on a whim. I like that whim to be researched, and backed up, and for me to have a week or so to steel myself to get ready for that whim, and significant built-in time to decompress from that whim. Fun isn’t easy, for me. It involves a lot of prep work.

Which is why I figured a crazy weekend jaunt like this might be a good idea. A terrifying road trip of fun and seat-wetting fear. Just my cup of tea.

Along the way we stopped at Calico, a ghost town. I had never been to a Ghost Town before, making this a New Thing for me. However, this was a ghost town in which the ghosts have been cleaned up, given uniforms and dour expression, and made to sell overpriced salt-water taffy to tourists. At one point, Silver was mined here. Now, the economy is based on three dollar bottles of water and faux-olde tyme photos. Of course, we had one taken.

When I asked the teenage girl behind the counter what she thought would be a good picture, she giggled and said. “I think a bunch of guns and a big bottle of whiskey!”. I had the feeling she didn’t hold this opinion only in the world of sepia-tinted souvenir photos.

We set off to Vegas where we soon realized that every year, in Las Vegas, on Saint Patrick’s day, there is a Jerk Convention. Jerks of every size and shape (but not every color - these jerks were pretty uniformly white) fill the town. Seemingly from nowhere materializes novelty T-shirts (”Fuck Me, I’m Irish!”), bright green plastic hats, and in an attempt to merge the holiday with mardi graz, plastic beads. We had not been in our hotel for more than a couple minutes when we heard a Jerk yell to a woman dancing in the lounge, “Take off your top!”. She did not oblige, but I did witness do a drunken “dirty dance” with four different men, and make out with two of them.

There is no bigger buzzkill than to see Jerk flaunt their jerkiness. Those who enjoy plastic yard-long beer steins and yelling “WHoooooo0o!” at the sign of anything resembling a breast. I wanted to get silly, have fun, have some drinks, have a good time. But these, as my friend Kevin calls them, “amateurs” were giving the holiday, heck, the whole city - a bad name.

So what happened in Vegas doesn’t need to stay there, for me, it was pretty tame. We had a few drinks, a nice dinner, played a little video poker, wandered around, and went to bed around midnight. Not a wild night, to be sure, but a fun time. I wouldn’t have thought the day before I’d be staring out the window of the Tropicana at a video screen looping an ad for Rod Stewart. Yet here I was. I may not have gone crazy, Vegas-style, but at least I wasn’t a Jerk. I cannot, however, promise anything for two weeks, when I return to Vegas to attend my first Bachelor Party.

–opus

Well, as often happens in television production, it’s another late night. Which meant both of my (admittedly fairly weak) ideas for New Things were out of the running. For a moment, i was absentmindedly fingering the change in my pocket, wondering if I would have to resort to swallowing a nickel.

Luckily, a dinner menu went around for our late-night writing session, and I saw my way out. So, as unexciting as it may have been, “Seafood Pho” was my All New Thing for today. I’m just glad I didn’t have to swallow a nickel.

Tomorrow I travel to San Francisco to discover what New Things that city has in store.

–opus