Happy New Year!
Here it comes again, folks, the day it’s obligatory to have a rollicking good time.
Why, I’m not so sure. Perhaps because the passage of the years can be depressing, especially after the age of forty or so. Or perhaps it’s because we have to face learning to write a different number on our checks, just when we’ve finally gotten used to the old one.
And then there’s the drinking. In previous years, I offered this hangover recipe for the day after, even though I (she says smugly) don’t really drink.
As for tonight, I’m not planning much, although I might change my mind at the last minute. That’s the prerogative of age (and iffy weather).
And then there are the ubiquitous resolutions. This year I’ve fastened on a single one: to go to bed earlier. It’s one I’ve focused on before, and obviously had a lot of difficulty keeping, since I’m trying again. I’ve always been a tremendous nightowl, and being a blogger hasn’t helped me any in my (admittedly weak) efforts to change my nightowl proclivities.
So a very HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you! Are you planning anything fun?
[ADDENDUM: Bumped up.]
What can I say neo except thanks for everything this year and for all the years to come.
Happy New Year!
I have crossed that threshold where NYE seems best spent quietly at home. It used to be my favorite night of the year, the one time when everyone forgot their cares and hoped for a fresh start.
Today my TV and radio bombard me with threats from the cops about “enhanced enforcement”. Tomorrow some raft of new regulations go into effect. What used to be a fun party is now chaperoned.
Thank You, Neo, for all you do for this fine site. The Landlord has Class.
We X-Drinkers call tonight,”Amateur Night”, for good reason. I will be home with my Magical Sicilian Lambchop watching a just arrived DVD-screener from my Producers Guild of either “War Horse” or “The Descendants”.
Happy,Healthy,Productive,Prosperous,Magical,
Wondrous LAST Year of The Boy King’s carnage strewn reign.
I want to wish Neo, and everyone on here a Happy New Year. I want to also say that I have a strong degree of respect for those who post here, even those I may have had disagreements with. Its obvious that those who post here have a great love for our country, and concern for its future. Thats something I can respect, even when there is disagreement about what to do. Thats what debate and free speech is all about, and let it long live.
Best wishes to all of you in the New Year!
All this fascination with affixing numbers to time… What’s with day of all days? What’s with this “decades” stuff–the Fifties, the Sixties etc.–when it’s obvious the historical and cultural manifestations they’re known for can easily span the decade before or after, and just as easily omit part of the decade? Would duodecades be any more real if we counted in base twelve instead?
But those who let philosophy interfere with life are a sad bunch indeed, so don’t be like them; go and have a Happy New Year! And keep safe.
(Oh, and I already celebrated New Year a few months back. I’m Jewish.)
Neo and Everyone:
Many thanks to you all for the intelligent hours put into this website. All of you are lights shinning in darkness.
My wish for you is that you look back a year from now and say: “That was worth living through…”.
“…the best is yet to be/the last for which the first was made…”
Good Ole Charlie
On a personal level I am always optimistic simply because there is nothing to be gained from being negative. As far as the country and the world at large are concerned I’ll unambiguously note that 2012 year of the dragon will be an interesting time.
Best wishes to Neo-neocon and all who follow this unique blog.
Yeah, I haven’t gone out on New Year’s Eve for years. My friends and I also call it “Amateur Night”. St. Patrick’s Day is another one.
Here is a map showing New Year’s around the world (and be sure to check out the rest of the site):
http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/newyearmap.html
I like the Italian custom of throwing broken household goods out of the windows on New Year’s Eve. My piano is out of tune . . .
Happy New Year, Neo. Glad you’re still in the fight. Gonna be a rollicking New Year, no doubt there. we live in interesting times.
I still remember my teacher talking about Haley’s Comet coming in 1984. Wayyyy in the future. Hell that comet’s about halfway back around again. 2012. Jeeezzz.
Happy New Year everyone. And Neo thank you for all you do.
Rose said, “We live in interesting times.” Yes, we do! Made more interesting by partaking of neo-neocon’s daily posts and her interesting and intelligent commenters.
My wife and I will dine with our daughter. We’ll partake of our traditional (at least since we’ve been in the Puget Sound area) meal of Dungeness crab and artichokes. Takes a lot of time to eat and creates a mess, but we can put all the crab shells out and the sea gulls will have a feast as well. We’ll watch the celebrations as they work their way across the U.S. Topped off by watching the fireworks at the Space Needle. We’ll toast the New Year with a bit of the bubbly and then off for a good sleep. Very boring but a big night for a couple of old codgers.
This has been a year of drifting further toward economic disaster. The portents are easy to see in Europe, but we are still in a coma and drifting. My wish for the New Year is that we, as a nation, awake from the coma and move toward resolving these problems. Removing Obama and the democrat Senate will go a long way toward that.
Resolutions:
1.Proof read my comments more carefully.
2.Read more widely.
3.Work hard for the aforementioned electoral change.
4.Stay alive!
Happy New Year to all!
I just got home from our celebration with friends. It was very nice: good food, good wine, good conversation, and fireworks. I’m ready for bed, but I had to check in to wish you all a great new year. Thanks to everyone who comments here for keeping my brain functional, and thanks to Neo for hosting one of the best sites on the web.
In Wikipedia there is an extended essay on the salons and salonnié¨res of earlier times. Here is a paragraph:
“A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace’s definition of the aims of poetry, “either to please or to educate” (“aut delectare aut prodesse est”). Salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, were carried on until quite recently in urban settings, among like-minded people.”
It occurs to me that blog sites such as Neo’s and Lucianne’s have reestablished the concept in cyberspace. And we are all the richer for that. Thank you, Neo and all here.
Our world seems destined for a chaotic time; still we may wish one another the best to come of it.
SteveH Says:
December 31st, 2011 at 6:11 pm
No, not halfway around again; more like 1/3. However:
I first read about it when I was a kid in the 60s. I was 10 in 1968, and the previous appearance was in 1910, or 58 years earlier.
The next appearance is in 2061, only 50 years from now. So I’m closer to the next appearance today than I was to the last appearance when I was a kid.
Two beers, if I am feeling up to it, so I can pass on the hangover recipe. As for the depression after 40? I got that more after 30. It is now a thing of the past. I am not even sure what the new year really means to me at all, now, actually. Another miracle, perhaps?
Resolutions? I don’t make them. I have plans for the year, but that just coincides with a slightly improved health which allows me to do what I always intended and a few nickles more than I had ‘yesterday’.
By the way, my order through Amazon went very far astray. I had to dance with the payment method. I think their system was a bit fried from Christmas (and maybe they were dodging being out of some of my order). I hope it went to you, but figuring out when things were actually bought will be… tricky. (Some of the order went through right away, some from various sellers didn’t, and had to be paid for through other methods at various times. It was weird.)
Neo-neocon – Happy New Year to you as well, and to all your thoughtful commenters.
We have a lot in common, probably, maybe more in common than not?
Thank you for all you do! I love the photo on your home page, btw. It’s what first kept me coming back. So intriguing. Delicate. Spare. Precise.
I wish you all well and the very best in all things for the coming new year!
This . . . is New York. All is quiet now; it’s 4:40 in the morning, and the helicopters that were keeping station over midtown and downtown have gone. I can hear sirens careering through the streets, and a fire truck blasting its horn; now fading into the distance.
The City’s party is not what it was in years gone past, with revelers running freely through Times Square. Now there are cattle pens for all, and police to check their bags and backpacks for forbidden alcohol; foam-rubber hats to wear with Nivea and other corporate adverts; pop stars on platforms with city pols. God help you if you have to whiz — no one is allowed to return to the cattle pens once you leave them. People stand parched, arches aching, bladders bursting, hoping they can make it to midnight.
Tonight the local newsman thrust his mike into the faces of the “revelers,” and one young woman said, “I’m the only one who’s psyched about being here, but I’ve wanted to do this all my life.” Her boyfriend said, “Yeah, it’s exciting — I guess. . . .”
But it’s all over now, except for the street sweepers coming through to spin away the confetti and trash. Soon it will be a quiet Sunday morning.
I went to see Pina, Wim Wenders’s new movie about choreographer Pina Bausch: a remarkable 3-D film. (You can tell Anthony Tudor was her mentor.) It was all dancing, and an inspiring way to start the new year.
Not that I enjoy peeing in morning cornflakes, let me draw attention to Mark Steyn’s assessment of economic prospects for the new year:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286867/happy-new-year-mark-steyn
I’m no historian, yet it seems to me that this same dysfunctional economic process brought a long line of countries to collapse and ruin: the USSR, Argentina, the Weimar Republic, and the Roman Republic, for instance. It’s most likely that one or another of these histories is to be the future of the Eurocabal and the USA (China is generating its own version of future collapse).
Sic exeunt omnes; and we should do our best to prepare for the worst.
In the arms of the Master and in the hands of God,
lose the idea of wronged, and awed,
find yourself, find your song:
And sing.
Give them
all of yourself, and then:
Between the very small, and the very large,
Find the measure of man and why he’s in charge.
This contrasts with the excessive-risk buying and selling offered by leveraged Forex, CFD and spread betting.