I mean, we know that it isn't Chinese New Year, or Jewish New Year, it is simply New Year for those adhering to the Gregorian Calendar. It is, I guess, pretty good or at least utilitarian as calendars go, but it can't remotely hold a match to the Mayan Calendar, which is to be expected because the Mayan one was based on empirical observation. I don't fully grok the Discordian calendar, but overall it has a certain attraction insofar as the myth it is based on can be readily seen to somewhat reflect reality by encompassing chaos, randomness, entropy, disorder, and the like, whilst the Papal one does not and cannot. Whatever. It is, in the US, a day of college football games and parades and hangovers. The first bowl game, fwiw, was the 01-01-1902 Rose Bowl in Pasadena between Stanfoo and the Michiganders. Stanfoo was getting hammered so badly that they just quit and left after the third quarter and wound up losing 49 to zip.

By coincidence or otherwise, this is also the date when 22 nations decided to adopt standardized time, allowing the global synchronization of clocks. This was, of course, soon pretty much deranged by the creation of Daylight Stupid Time, brought to us by some buffoons who wanted to stay up late at night while while it was still daytime. This is an example of discordianism at work, hail Eris! All the same, UNIX time started at January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00. What else? Both J. Edgar Hoover, responsible for an infinitude of bad vibes and Milt Jackson, who played some damn good vibes were born on this day. It is also National Bloody Mary Day in the US. Good thing too.

2020 Will be a leap year. February 2 will be a palindrome: 02022020. The new pocket calendar comes out today and the transfer of recurring items begins. The prematurely hung office calendar tells me that I am already on the road 7 days in January, 16 in February and 19 in April. Is the year already getting busy, or is it still mostly empty?

I met a woman acquaintance the other day who told me with some undertones or inklings of surprise and awe that she had just turned 81. I'm well off from that, yet I suddenly remembered that I too have reached an age (long ago in fact) that each new year, however measured or determined is something of a surprise and something new to explore, enjoy and poke at like one might poke at a mysterious newly discovered thing in the yard with wary curiosity, but I digress.

So, Resolutions: saayy what? Even as a wee lad I was inculcated into the cultural ritual of making a New Year's resolutions, but never got the point, and struggled to come up with one, until I pretty much abandoned the whole farce in childhood. If you pick a gimmie, what's the point and why pick this day to decide to do whatever it is by whatever due date, and if it isn't, then you are setting yourself up for failure due the uncertainties of life (see Eris, supra). Not an official New Year's resolution, but a recent projcet, jointly planned and figured out by my wife and I ran into two hernia operations, a resurgence of my plantar fasciitis, three of four urgent higher priority projects, broken stuff, intractable soil and much, much more. It is still incomplete, even after an agreed upon major scope reduction. So, should I make some sort of resolution? Why ever would one do so?

I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

As Robert Hunter must've known, that last line could be a resolution, could be a maxim for and of existence, so perhaps it shall be mine this year, or perhaps it has been one for most of my life and should no longer count? Must #NewYear'sDay resolutions be New, or can they repeat, as in "yet again I shall do this or that"? As above

I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

But! Should you feel compelled to make sort of resolution, consider this: Jenny Odell on Why We Need to Learn to Do Nothing: ‘It’s a Reminder That You’re Alive’ found here - https://getpocket.com/explore/item/jenny-odell-on-why-we-need-to-learn-t... Dig not too deep, because this too will be co-opted, just up and resolve to do some real, committed, serious nothing every now and then, sans schedule or time limits. A key take away from the article:

It may well be already happening. I catch myself asking Odell what she sees as the benefit or the outcome of doing nothing – is it increased creativity? Greater empathy, improved mental health?

“I think it could lead to any of those things, but I am careful not to instrumentalise it,” she says. “I am genuinely interested in nothing for the sake of nothing, rather than nothing for the sake of something. … Honestly, it will sound cheesy, but the impetus that is the most obvious for me is that it’s a reminder that you’re alive.

Can you say wu wei? Sure you can. For the Dutch, it is niksen. Here is an article on it https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/what-niksen-dutch-concept-doing... which was sufficiently out there for the articles author that it generated the following line: "Then I had the baffling thought, “Am I ‘doing nothing’ wrong?”", so there is a goal you can resolve to pursue, answer that question for yourself.

ceci n'est ce pas un bateau ivre

"Twenty-twenty"; kind of rolls off the tongue, maybe like "cement mixer" or "puti puti", and off we go:

NewYearsOroonie to all.

Title Image is Laguna_Oroonie

It's an open thread, so have at it. The floor is yours
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