New Blog

So, I have a new blog which is pretty the same as my old one.

With the rate everything is crumbling around me, it's only a matter of time before my half-dozen domain evaporates. That's okay, it was never popular and hasn't served any real purpose for the past few years, anyway. It was, I guess, just a vanity thing.

I moved my old blog over to this Blogger address to make sure that my immortal words of wisdom could be found until Google decides to shut this feature off. In the meantime, maybe it will be quicker for them to search if they care to and have a spare robot.

This particular entry is just to introduce my new site. I don't have any more wisdom to impart or anything particularly witty to say, but maybe writing offline and uploading when I can will entice me into using up some of Google's generous disk space offer and might even get me to update more frequently.

I can hardly update less often. I'm not convinced what I'm thinking about things is any more interesting than it used to be and there's still much more that I feel I shouldn't say than I should, but at least I have a new spot to post entries when the mood strikes.

And, it seems to be okay for just posting ramblings.

My Half-Dozen.net site is still up and running (at least for the time being), but I'm too scared to actually look to see when it will die. Feel free to steal any of the wonderful pictures of me that are there and there's still time to make a $20 donation to a worthy cause (me) to keep my phone working even if you can't afford the $10,000 gift to lower your taxable income. Yeah, it will look as if you're paying for editing services, but I won't tell.

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Another Happy New Year

I'm a big fan of nice, round numbers and order, but that puts me at odds with the part of the universe that isn't made up of humans, which is to say most of it.

Today is New Years day in most of the world. This is a day heavily laden with moment and meaning, but I'm not sure exactly why it's today. It's not that I object to January being the first month, but it feels pretty arbitrary to have the new year begin right now.

People, being what we are, have probably always counted days. Well, they're pretty noticeable, what with the sun rising and each one separated from the rest with all that night time and cooler temperatures. And, I suspect that it didn't take us too long to notice that days get longer or shorter, that leaves change into beautiful colors before falling off some of the trees, and that snow shows up. Early humans, I'm thinking, when they weren't busy trying just to survive, must have noticed these things and ended up thinking in terms of years.

Days are easy to figure out, years are pretty obvious, but weeks are entirely made up.

The thing is, though, that January first isn't anything special. If we're not going to say a year begins with something sensible, like being the shortest one, the longest one, or one of the two that have equal daylight and night time, we're pretty much down to just picking one at random and saying “It starts now.”

I could even accept a year beginning on some momentous, special day, even something as meager as the birthday of the guy who came up with this silly calendar with its leap years and weird structure. Sadly, though, as near as I can figure out, January first simply is, and that's all there is to it.

The thing is, no matter how much I may want it, one year isn't a nice round number of days that we can sensibly divide up. We have to take the world for what it is and attempt to make it fit some ideal we have, and what we have now just barely works. There are people trying to come up with better calendars with leap weeks every several years instead of leap days every fourth, but I'm afraid even that Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar still has the year starting on a day we wouldn't look twice at if it weren't just for some lucky placement.