Looking forward to next year was not enough for some New Yorkers Tuesday. First, they needed to shred1 the bad bits of 2010.
对于一些纽约人来说，仅仅展望来年还不够。首先，他们需要“粉碎”2010年的那些令人不快的记忆。
Andrew Call(L) and Omar Lopez-Cepero, cast members of Green Day's Broadway musical 'American Idiot', prepare to shred a bad memory provided by Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong at the fourth annual Good Riddance Day in New York's Times Square.
So on annual Good
Riddance Day（摆脱，大解脱） , members of the public were invited to
jot2 down（草草记下） their least favorite moments and memories, then stuff the paper into a giant
shredder（碎纸机） set up at Times Square.
Big Apple resident Melissa Altman said she shredded3 "a name, a person I liked for a while, a person I just want to get rid of."
"It's the guy who didn't know I existed," another woman said, throwing her piece of paper into a bin4, which then dumped its cargo5 into the truck-sized shredder.
Two cast members from the musical "American Idiot" tore up a note inscribed6（题写） "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," referring to the recently overturned law that barred gays from serving openly in the military. That too went into the big shredder.
One woman said she had scribbled7 "California" on her paper.
Others had less grandiose8（宏伟的） grudges9 from 2010. "Inhibition, passive smoking and restless leg syndrome10（不宁腿综合症） ," Seth Magee, a graphic11 artist, wrote on his paper.
Whether the high-tech12 voodoo（伏都教） works is one thing. But the shredder certainly shreds13 -- and the shredded paper is recycled as toilet roll.
"You can trust me: none of these memories will ever be seen again once they enter this truck," said organizer Lori Raimondo, with the Times Square Alliance.
The crowd was much smaller than usual on Good Riddance Day on account of the snow left over from a major blizzard14 on Monday. But on Friday huge numbers of people are expected to greet 2011 on Times Square in relatively15 balmy（芳香的，温和的） conditions.
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