Welcome to the Twelfth Edition of the URI! Zone, guaranteed to be a smashing literary success, because everything is better with an elf in it. Of course, this maxim doesn't apply to the The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, which could have sported a more-tightly plotted pace by cutting out fourteen elves, thirteen shots of Frodo looking constipated, and at least one scruffy, white actor that looked like all the other scruffy, white actors. Middle Earth should have had more racial variety in its human inhabitants, maybe employing some FOB¹ Asians for the battle scenes. But, I digress.

Today's post marks the 1,500th time I've ever written a news post for this site. Granted, some updates were much less involved than others (see exhibit A on the right), but in an age where the average life span of a web site is only 44 to 75 days², surviving for eleven full years is surely worthy of a pat on the back (or a pat on the ass if you are now, or will someday be, a player on an American football team or a shamefully defrocked member of the clergy).

Here are some of the new features you will find in the Twelfth Edition:

• New news archive navigation! Pop-up menus are retarded, so you can now look at news archives using the monthly calendars on the left (each letter is the first letter of a month! WOW!)
• No Google-Images Allowed! The Google Images search engine has been denied entry, which means my overall site traffic will decrease, but which also means that those MySpace pissants that like to steal my images and bandwidth for their purple and orange corduroy Profiles will no longer be able to find me.

• New visual design! The new layout is much cleaner and more simplified than it was before. The animated llama head of Molly the Llama has (tragically) disappeared in the name of progress, but her visage has been immortalized in the sign at the top of the page (which will also take you back to this front page if you click on it from anywhere else in the site). If the layout seems very peculiar, or looks a lot like the old site, please make sure you have cleared your browser cache and history, since you may have a few leftover relics from the previous version laying around.
• No more Olio section! The Olio section was interesting for people bored at work, but most of it was unoriginal content reposted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader (and by now, loyal readers should already have a complete library of Bathroom Readers in their homes). A few original features, like Allen Bachelder's Theory Quotes, were moved to the Words section, but the rest were trashed like a hotel room occupied by an 80s hair band.

• More Boobies! As a personal favour to Carlos Adolfo Dominguez³, there will be at least 1 more booby per month than before. Here is your first pair.
• Cleaned up Bloglog! Friendly Blogs in the left sidebar are occasionally reshuffled and organized by who has the most recent update, which means that the slackers towards the bottom of the list should start updating more frequently. If I removed your blog because it was inactive, but you have started writing again, please let me know and I'll be glad to give you a link!
• No more Links section! Other than the list of blogs, I hadn't visited any of my links in years, even www.fatchicksinpartyhats.com⁴. Rather than maintain an outdated list of links, I chose to destroy them like an Internet ninja.

I don't have any major plans for the 2007-2008 timeline other than to keep on truckin' with daily doses of music, reviews, absurdity, and interestyng news story links, but if you have anything you'd like to hear me talk about, feel free to let me know! For today, I will leave you with the following interestyng statistics about the URI! Zone and my news updates.

Number of Files: 7668 (185 megabytes of junk)
Pictures in my Photos section: 2545
Number of News Updates: 1500
Number of Times I Mentioned Booty: 332
Anna: 263
Alias: 256
Sex: 204
Amber: 136
Poker: 117
Warcraft: 103
Kelley: 59
boobies: 29
Doobie: 24
your mom: 11
the pretentious word, panoply: 6
the pretentious word, ineluctable: 2

Happy Birthday Gabe Ahlbin!

Footnotes
¹: Fresh Off the Bilbo
²: The Washington Post, May 15, 2007
³: Composer of the artful song, Boobies,
³: Fat Chicks in Party Hats, circa 1996,