My only question is this: Why hasn't Smoog been elected grand Empress of the Entire Galaxy yet? cat - website of choice 2006-01-01 01:43:56

Bow down! Smoog - website of choice 2006-01-01 02:12:47

Amen! My friend Maria wrote a piece for our newspaper that centered around that same idea. Here's to making changes whenever the fuck you want to make them! Meany - website of choice 2006-01-01 02:26:11

I knew I couldn't be the only one who ponders the idea of the Coriolis Effect suddenly reversing and sucking hyperactive children off the face of the planet. And you all thought I was weird. Smoog - website of choice 2006-01-01 02:32:58

Yeah. I mostly agree with you. Resolutions on New Year's Day have never been my thing. It's just another day in the cycle of cycles. (I also wish, sometimes, that the year began with the Vernal Equinox because I can see something new happening out there. Usually.) Still, it's a great thing when I can sing traditional Christmas and New Year's songs on a front porch with friends at 12:00 am and the surrounding neighbors don't seem to mind cause their out whooping and hollering too. Yeah, we set this day as the beginning of a calendar, but if not this day, it'd be some other day. If you take away order, even if it is self-imposed order, lotsa folks would go stark ravin' mad. Well, maybe not quite like that. Not all. Some like order to be more like a flowing, endless circle, others like a stick to carve notches in. Some like both. Time allows for both. A day has a beginning, middle and end, and starts all over again until I have know idea when. Yeah. Both. That's me. Heather O'Neill - website of choice 2006-01-01 04:31:20

Chatty Cathy here again: I like the idea of the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox. Starting at a point that is equal, or nearly equal, and then adding to or subtracting from, and all that. For calendar creating purposes,I suppose creating a beginning is a somewhat arbitrary thing. There are so many ways and reasons to mark the start of something, from the significance of historical events to the Sun's effect on the Earth. Ok. Blah, blah, blah all done. Heather O'Neill - website of choice 2006-01-01 05:03:34

Calendars weren't created so we wouldn't go nutso. Calendars were created because one of our evolutionary advantages is our pattern-seeking abilities. Calendars help us anticipate future events and change our behaviour in advance accordingly. We don't need calendars, and likely got by for thousands of years without them, simply because we used natural environmental cues to build those patterns. "Hmm, berries ripe on weird bush by rock wall. Time to kill buffalo and wear skin to keep testicles from shivering into abdomen." We don't even need to think about those kind of cues - our genetic make-up has given us all our own internal recorder to give us a general idea of what to do when to stay alive. What calendars do is allow us to have even more control over our environment and manipulate it and ourselves so we can be safer and more comfortable. We just don't know when to quit. We just keep building more and more intricate patterns to try and predict more and more of the future so we can have more and more control. In fact, I suspect that drives us crazy far more often than not knowing when February 24 of next year is going to occur. Smoog - website of choice 2006-01-01 12:33:20

dear smoog, i could not agree with you more. december 31 is just another day on a calendar that, in the grand scheme of things, hasn't been around for so long. and we got by for thousands of years just fine without our current calendar. it is a good excuse to party and have a few days off work though. but mostly, it's just another day. pumpkin queen - website of choice 2006-01-01 13:38:22

THIS is why I never make any resolutions for the "new" year... because a) I never fulfill them, b) they're always something I have yet to attain and probably never will, and c) the whole idea is ridiculous. I just want to be able to say that THIS year will be better than the last. That's my only hope. Have a good one, whatever that may be... :) G - website of choice 2006-01-01 15:06:57

Thanks for the link! Woof an licks an stuff. The Dog - website of choice 2006-01-08 22:13:25