31 thoughts on “A Brand New Day in a Brand New Year”

  1. and a brand new word *gougnafier* applicable to denizens of the old year

    Attribution: Happy New Year by Pierre Ballouhey, France, PoliticalCartoons.com

     

    *gougnafier*: knucklehead, ne’er-do-well, bungling idiot

    [pronounced goo-naf-yay)

  3. not so good a day however in japan

    Japan issues tsunami warnings and tells residents to evacuate after strong earthquakes – live (theguardian.com)

    Tsunami warnings have been issued in parts of Japan after a number of earthquakes – one with a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 – hit the country’s central west coast.

    Footage circulating on social media showed shaking inside shops and a railway station. NHK TV warned torrents of water could reach as high as 5 metres and urged people to move to high land or to the tops of buildings.

  4. Ukraine war: Zelensky promises more Ukraine-made weapons in new year speech (bbc.com)

    President Volodymyr Zelensky has promised a sharp increase in the amount of weapons Ukraine produces next year.
    In his new year’s message, Mr Zelensky repeated his pledge that at least a million drones would be built.
    There was more fighting overnight into New Year’s Day with five people killed in attacks in Odesa in Ukraine’s south, and the Russian-held Donetsk region.
    Earlier Vladimir Putin gave his new year address, praising his army but without explicitly mentioning the war.
    The Russian president hailed his soldiers as “heroes… at the forefront of the fight for truth” and also referenced economic issues, a key topic for many Russians, and declared 2024 the “year of the family”.

    Speaking on Sunday, as the war against Russia approaches its third year, Mr Zelensky said: “Next year, the enemy will feel the wrath of domestic production.”
    He said Ukraine would produce “a million” extra drones in 2024 – something he said earlier this month – and that F-16 fighter jets would be delivered by Ukraine’s Western partners.
    “Our pilots are already mastering F-16 jets, and we will definitely see them in our skies,” he said. “So that our enemies can certainly see what our real wrath is.”
    The new year’s message came just hours before more attacks. In Donetsk, which is occupied by Russia, four people were reported killed and 13 wounded, according to Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed head of Donetsk, on Telegram.
    He described the attack as “massive shelling from multiple launch rocket systems”.
    […]
    Mr Zelensky urged his Western allies to keep up support for Ukraine, as the country faces the prospect of a slowdown in aid from allies in Washington and Europe.
    Ukraine has received its last package of military aid from the US – with any further aid packages being held up by a row in US Congress.
    Mr Zelensky has admitted his country’s spring offensive has not been the success he hoped, but in his message insisted that his country had become stronger in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
    Mr Putin did not broach the war in Ukraine during his new year address, which was noticeably scaled back compared to last year’s.
    But he said: “To everyone who is at a combat post, at the forefront of the fight for truth and justice: You are our heroes, our hearts are with you,” he said. “We are proud of you, we admire your courage.”

  5. I have been checking the media for reports about the firefight that went off around my home.  Nothing so far.  Seems to have started just before midnight, woke me and the animals up, went on for almost two hours.  I hope it was a skirmish otherwise the idiots for miles around me bought fireworks again.
     
    Happy New Year, 1124.  I do miss the old tradition one of the political couple held at their home every January 1.  Bloody Mary’s and a spread from a local caterer.  I would bring my big pitcher full of my Bloody Mary recipe delight, with baby octopi mixed in.  Sometimes I would add shrimp too.  My pitcher was empty first, including all the little delights!  That was long ago in a different world.  The couple split up, the party ended, most of the politicians stayed in politics.

  6. BB, now that’s a Bloody Mary mix I could buy into. Sounds phenomenal. 

    Well we got a little more dusting last night – may not have been a white Christmas but it’s a white New Year’s Day (if you don’t look too closely).  

    Happy New Year to all and to all a … well, you know.

  7. According to some, 2024 will be the 2nd year of the global boiling epoch. WaPo 

    The climate future arrived in 2023. It left scars across the planet.
     

    The year will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling,” as the U.N. Secretary General called it.

    AVAS, Greece — By the time the flames were barreling down the slope, heading for 40 miles of parched forest, the fire chief said he already knew: This was the big one.
     
    His part of Greece had gone two months without rain. A record heat wave had bakedthe area for weeks. Within hours, the fire had sprinted through acres of pines, hissing and spouting 120-foot flames, reaching the brink of a village where a single home — belonging to Kostas Dinas, a retired attorney — was perched on the hillside outskirts.
     
    Dinas, 66, had figured he’d live in that home until they “carried me out flat.”

    But then came thehottest year humanity had ever seen.
     
    It had been a year that had started with merely very hot temperatures and then intensified midway. What made the subsequent months stand out wasn’t so much any single record but rather the heat’s all-consuming relentlessness. It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared.
    …
     
    In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it “mind-boggling” The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600.
     
    In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce.
     
    In the Antarctic, wintertime sea ice was at an all-time low. An unprecedented marine heat wave upended coral ecosystems. At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub.
    ….
    One explanation for 2023’s extreme heat is El Niño—a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year’s heat — amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels — is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there’s not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat.

    That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame.
     
    This year,then, will wind up as the first — and almost surely not the last — in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid.
     
    Though different climate tracking groups wind up with slightly different measurements of the global temperatures, most are within the same margin of error.

    “All data sets tell us that we are uncomfortably close to 1.5 already,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
     
    Buontempo said Dec. 21 that 2023 had been so warm that even an immediate deep planetary freeze wouldn’t stop the year from breaking the all-time annual heat record.

    “You’d need an asteroid hitting the planet, and even so I don’t know if you’d manage,” he said. “The anomalies this year are just that much off the charts.”
    CONTINUES

    Buckle up.

  9. Pogo – I do not think I have the original recipe anymore, written on a scrap of paper I think.  The base is made of tomato juice, thick.  The flavorings are some beef stock, Frank’s sauce, a bit of ground white pepper, a bit of ground black pepper, some lemon juice, some lime juice, a spoonful plus of horseradish – not the prepared in cream, Worcestershire sauce, and the little critters.  I buy from H-Mart frozen.  I would make this for a gallon pitcher so exact was not necessary.  I normally do not drink Bloody Mary’s so I never proportioned it to a single or two glasses.
    And vodka.

  10. Not usually a follower of international oil markets, but found this interesting. All about how Biden Administration kept prices down by selling off some of our stockpile at peak prices, now buying it back at rock bottom prices for a big gain.

    This is what competency looks like when you have a president who doesn’t just hire idiots who sit around and tell him he’s a genius.

    Meet America’s Newest Oil-Trader Extraordinaire: Joe Biden
    WSJ free link:
    https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/president-joe-biden-oil-trader-extraordinaire-e97947fb?st=7dj3z5ru6xi86se&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

  14. Pogo… totally bare ground here.  We might get a dusting of snow next week… or maybe not.
     
    Rick and I went to bed before midnight for the first time in our 48 yr marriage…  getting older.

  15. “…went to bed before midnight…”

     
    That’s our new tradition to drop before the droppings regardless of our time zone. 
     
     

  16. I stayed up for the new year, not partying just my retired bedtime. In bed around 1 am, up around 8:30.  My  new neighborhood doesn’t get as enthusiastic about New Years as the old one. The old one celebrated with many rounds of gunfire up in the air. Last night was quiet, a little gunfire/fireworks in the distance but nothing to disturb the dog. 
    I’m doing tea this morning. with toasted homemade bread spread with orange marmalade. Life is good.
    Jack

  17. While the tea was making I drained the water off of the blackeyed peas I soaked overnight put a bone from the Christmas ham in them and have them on a low simmer. Should be ready to eat in about 3 hours.
    As I said, life is good.
    Jack

  18. BB

    The recipe sounds great except for the little critters part.  I have a certain fondness for octopi since reading Cannery Row.

     

  20. Never totally understood the Mummers but grew up with them as Claymont is essentially a suburb of Philadelphia. Kinda like an early Mardi Gras. 

  21. Back years ago, I used to make my annual fruit cakes. They have to be made several weeks in advance of the holidays. My sister shared her’s with a friend who declared it wasn’t a fruit cake. When ask why she said “Because I like it and I don’t like fruitcakes.” So I always assume  anyone who doesn’t like fruitcake has just never had a good one. 
    Jack

  23. BB
    Your bloody mary sound a lot like the shrimp/seafood cocktail that I would buy at the local Mexican grocer. No vodka but a very spicy tomato juice, probably flavored with clam juice.
    I would frequently buy a quart of it along with some fresh baked bread and eat it for lunch. Another thing I miss about the old neighborhood.
    Jack

  25. Jack…  one of my mother’s sisters (my Aunt Gussie) always sent us a white fruitcake as a present from Canada at Christmas.  It was delicious!  There was never any of it left by Christmas evening.  One thing I’ve always regretted was not getting the recipe from her while she was still alive.  My mother didn’t get it either.  But the memories are sweet…

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