silvestergala

Like old Father Time says in the New Year’s card, “May good health attend you and happiness befriend you throughout the coming year.” Our greetings to remind you, that wherever fate may find you, there may joy be—and good cheer. All the best to you and yours and thanks for visiting.

katzenjammer

Der Spiegel (only in German, although this subject, I think, does not require much translation) has a biography and collection of images from piglet, puppy and kitten photographer and proto-meme-artist Harry Whitter Frees of Florida. I think I might have seen a few of these patiently staged vignettes before, billed last year as the original LOL Cats, but such things of course bear repeating (ad absurdum). From the 1880s through the 1930s, Frees’ pictures sold as sweet and carefully posed postcards and calendars were insanely popular, and now everything old is new again.

bright lights, old business

Predictions generally are groaning vagaries or soaring hopes and notoriously hard to makes, unless one will safely (usually) posit that we’ll be getting more of the same. Human nature and human needs tend to be stubborn and not framed as much by the fashions of the season or more meaningful Zeitgeist as we’d like to believe. Projections, on the other hand, are something quite different and science is getting better and better telescoping events, trends into the future. One specific omen that we can look forward to, astronomers foresee, is the spectacular arrival of the comet Ison, having been hurtling towards us for millions of years from the incubating edge of the Solar System, in early autumn.

The comet’s scintillations will outshine the full Moon and be a historic experience for all. It will even radiate for those who cannot see the procession of the stars and planets for themselves either because of light-pollution or impatience for the mathematical harmony of the skies.  It is interesting how such astronomical apparitions, comets, novae, conjunctions and transits, became markers of the ages, a fixed reference point in time, that are equally accessible to us as inheritors and far in the future, who are able to trace backwards and reliably match our measures against those of our ancestors. I wonder how people will reckon this upcoming year of the comet.

yearbook and mizzen-mast

There is a virtual blizzard of engrossing and niche superlatives covering the past year from all angles—journalistic oddities, new discoveries in the natural sciences, a review of important archeological finds, chronicling the year with spectacular photography, advances in space science, and the lists go on. But be sure to not forget to check out Jib-Jab’s annual tradition of lampooning the past year.