A record number of crazy people showed up for the New Year’s Day Coney Island Polar Bear Club’s annual dip into the Atlantic yesterday, and it looks like they had more fun than ever. Oil-stained environmentalists (looking a bit like blood-stained Elvis impersonators) sprinted alongside girls in bikinis. Perhaps it was the unseasonably lovely temperatures that drew the big and jubilant crowd, or the money being raised for Camp Sunshine. Or maybe, even though science has disproved it, the age-old “2012 myth” and that Roland Emmerich movie have all of us subtly convinced that this year could be the planet’s last (or, if Sarah Palin runs for president, the country’s last). So let’s make it count!
