Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Lessons learned this year? Kindness matters. The other crap? Not so much." -- shadowkat, 2022-12-31 (thanks to fidhle for suggesting this)

[To everyone observing Asara B'Tevet by fasting today, may you have an easy fast.]

"It's been observed multiple times:
 * poverty can be eliminated - & it costs less than dealing with consequences of poverty;
 * providing housing costs less than dealing with consequences of homelessness;
 * universal health care costs less than a less healthy population;
 * & so on."
  -- David Boxall (david_boxall), 2022-06-27

"I hope all your doubts turn into clarity and your 'maybe one day' turn into 'finally' this year." -- ghost (deadpoet______), 2022-12-30

Today is
Gregorian: 2023 January 01 -- New Year 2023
Julian: 2022 December 19
Hebrew: 5783 Teveth 08
Islamic: 1444 Jumada t-Tania 08
Persian: 1401 Dey 11
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.10.3.3
Indian (civil): 1944 Pausa 11
Coptic: 1739 Koiak 23
Discordian: 3189 Chaos 01
Today is the seventh day of Kwanzaa, the second day of Hogmanay, Japanese New Year, Thai New Year's Day 2566, and the birthday of J.D. Salinger, Betsy Ross and Paul Revere.
For Western and new-calendar Orthodox Christians, today is the eighth day of Christmas; depending on denomination, it is also the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ / Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.
It's also forty years since ARPANET switched from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).

"#DearTeachers,

"Some of your students may be requesting a day off to celebrate the Chag Milat Yeshu, also known as the Pope Gregory Rosh Hashanah, and is observed by Christian people as the #Christian #NewYear.

"Although Rosh Chodesh has already passed, #Christians do not observe our secular Rosh Chodesh. Instead, Christian people follow a #religious #calendar established by Pope Gregory, and the Pope Gregory Rosh Hashanah does NOT coincide with a new moon.

"(Christian #holidays are set according to the Pope Gregory Calendar, which is not a lunisolar calendar like the normal one, and is why most of their holidays move around the year.)

[...]

"This year, Pope Gregory Rosh Hashanah falls on Tevet 8-9. You may assume that since their Rosh Hashanah has two days, that it must be a two-day yom tov, like the secular Rosh Hashanah.

"Wrong!

"The Christian day starts in the middle of the night, so the Pope Gregory New Year begins in the middle of the night, on the night of Tevet 8th, then continues until the middle of the night on the 9th.

[...]

"Other Christians daven all night long for Christian Selichot as they prepare for the 'feast' of their prophet's bris.

"(Although it is called a 'feast' there is no seudat mitzvah in honor of the bris and the festive meal may consist of a variety of appetizers.)

[...]

"Secular Christians celebrate the yom tov, and the adjacent preceding holiday, Yom Saint Sylvester Ha'Kadosh, with parties and drinking until they can no longer differentiate between the old year and the new year.

[...]

"Like Yom Christmas, there are typically no morning services for Pope Gregory's Rosh Hashanah. The frum Christians have already davened all night and the secular Christians are hungover from their parties.

"Check http://GregCal.com if you need to know the exact date of Pope Gregory's Rosh Hashanah or any Christian holiday. It is a good resource for Christian holiday dates since they move around so much from year to year.

GregCal

[...]

"It is appropriate to require a note from their Christian rabbi if they will be absent for these observances.

"Kol tuv,
Principal Noga Jacobsen
Yochanan Cohen #PublicSchool
#MedinatAmerica"

-- JewWhoHasItAll (JewWhoHasItAll), 2022-12-29 [I tried not to spoil the best lines, because y'all should read the whole thing and enjoy those in the flow of the whole piece. Set down your beverage first though.]

[Something went wrong this morning and I had to re-do this entry. I had a longer comment that got lost. Argh.]

"It's funny how recognizing AI art nowadays is just the same old rules as recognizing the fae in old tales.

"'Count the fingers, count the knuckles, count the teeth, check the shadows...'

"... and under NO circumstances should you make deals with their kind."

-- Erkhyan (erkhyan@yiff.life), paraphrasing something he saw elsewhere

"no new years resolutions. it is the circumstances turn to improve" -- Sarah Lazarus (sarahclazarus), 2021-12-15

"Every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed, and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machines." -- Vannevar Bush, inventor and politician (b. 1890-03-11, d. 1974-06-30), "As We May Think", Atlantic Monthly, July 1945

[Today is the seventh day of Yule, the fourth day of Christmas, and the third day of Kwanzaa. It is also the 119th anniversary of the birth of John von Neumann (b. 1903-12-28, d. 1957--02-07), polymath (mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, & more) another key figure in computer science born at this time of year (we just passed Charles Babbage's birhday).]

"The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve are a liminal space. Lose track of time. Spend all day in your pyjamas. Organise your wardrobe and accidentally stumble into Narnia to have tea with a faun. There are no rules." -- Icona (iconawrites), 2022-12-27

"'Booty call' and 'butt dial' has been offered up as an example of where the literal meaning of two phrases is the same but the implied meaning is very different (denotative vs connotative meanings).

"Today a coffee mug gave me another example: 'dad bod' and 'father figure'"

-- Wendy Palmer (wendypalmer@mastodon.au), 2022-12-25

[Today is the first day of Kwanzaa; the second day of Christmas (Western and new-calendar Orthodox), Boxing Day, Wren Day, Feast of St. Stephen, and Mummer's Day; the sixth day of Yule; and the eighth day of Chanukah (which ends at nightfall). It's also the 231st anninersary of the birth of Charles Babbage (b. 1791-12-26, d. 1871-10-18), father of the digital computer.]

"Part of the reason this story continues to ignite the imagination is because certain things do not seem to be different. Over and over again, governments make decrees that require the people who have the least to take on an undue burden of travel, to wait in lines, to put their health and comfort aside in order to meet the demands of the bureaucracy they need to navigate in order to survive. Ask anyone who doesn't have the money to pay for the state ID they need to access benefits. Ceaser is still calling for the world to be enrolled. Over and over again, we hear there is no room at the inn, that it is more important to prop up a system of wealth disparity than to ensure that all of our neighbors have the dignity of secure, safe shelter. Mary and Joseph are still seeking a place where she may be delivered. Over and over again, tyrants put the lives of children at risk, or even threaten them directly, in order to consolidate their power. We hear that refugees are dangerous, and so families must find some other way to flee or perish. Herod is still cutting short the lives of the innocents.

The Nativity story continues to be relevant because some of the evils of the world come back around again and again. At the same time, we are offered some paths of resistance and response. When there seems to be no room, we make room in surprising places. [...]"

-- Rev. Lyn Cox, 2017-12-24

Today is
Gregorian: 2022 December 25 -- Feast of the Nativity / first day of Christmas, in Western and new-calendar Orthodox churches; fifth day of Yule
Julian: 2022 December 12 -- thirteen days before Christmas
Hebrew: 5783 Tevet 01 -- 7th day of Chanukkah (8th candle this evening) -- I think I got this wrong yesterday?
Islamic: 1444 Jumada t-Tania 01
Persian: 1401 Dey 04
Mayan: 0.0.0.13.0.10.2.16
Indian (civil): 1944 Pausa 04
Coptic: 1739 Koiak 16
Discordian: 3188 The Aftermath 67

The start of a Twitter thread by Glen Weldon (ghweldon), 2018-12-22:

MARY: How's the room?

JOSEPH: Um ... rustic.

MARY: It's clean, though?

JOSEPH: Well, it's not immaculate. (To self) But then who is.

MARY: Hm?

JOSEPH: Nothing.

MARY: A BARN?

JOSEPH: A bungalow!

MARY: A STABLE?

JOSEPH: A cabin!

MARY: THAT... IS AN OXEN.

JOSEPH: "Ox." There's just one.

[MOO]

JOSEPH: Nope ok two sorry my bad

MARY: You didn't call ahead?

JOSEPH: Yeah about that see I sort of figured the omniscient omnipotent being whose son you're carrying might you know HANDLE THE LOGISTICS

ANGEL: Need anything? Tiny bottled water?

[...]

[A happy Christmas Eve and seventh day of Chanukah (8th candle tonight) to everybody celebrating one or the other of those!]

"The Ndom language of New Guinea only has specific names for the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 18, and 36. Everything else has to be built out of those eight basic figures-so the Ndom word for 100, 'nif-thef-abo-tondor-abo-mer-abo-thonith', literally means '(36 x 2) + 18 + 6 + 4'." -- Haggard Hawks (HaggardHawks), 2022-12-11

"'Quatre-vingt dix-neuf' doesn't sound so hard now, does it?" -- Erkhyan Rafosa (Erkhyan), 2022-12-12

"Joy is not in things, it is in us." -- Richard Wagner

"On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole." -- Frank Zappa (b. 1940-12-21, d. 1993-12-04), liner notes for the album Freak Out! (1966)

[Happy first day of Yule, third day of Chanukah (4th candle tonight), fifth day of Saturnalia, and Winter Solstice (16:48 EST/21:48 UTC) to everyone celebrating one of those!]

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by wanting to make extremely stale jokes about trans people" -- Emily St. James (emilyvdw), 2022-12-12

"First, diseases spread. Each person's choices inextricably affect their community, and the threat to the collective always exceeds that to the individual. The original Omicron variant, for example, posed slightly less risk to each infected person than the variants that preceded it, but spread so quickly that it inundated hospitals, greatly magnifying COVID's societal costs. To handle such threats, collective action is necessary. Governments need policies, such as vaccine requirements or, yes, mask mandates, that protect the health of entire populations, while individuals have to consider their contribution to everyone else's risk alongside their own personal stakes. And yet, since the spring of 2021, pundits have mocked people who continue to think this way for being irrational and overcautious, and government officials have consistently framed COVID as a matter of personal responsibility.

"Second, a person's circumstances always constrain their choices. Low-income and minority groups find it harder to avoid infections or isolate when sick because they're more likely to live in crowded homes and hold hourly-wage jobs without paid leave or the option to work remotely. Places such as prisons and nursing homes, whose residents have little autonomy, became hot spots for the worst outbreaks. Treating a pandemic as an individualist free-for-all ignores how difficult it is for many Americans to protect themselves. It also leaves people with vulnerabilities that last across successive pathogens: The groups that suffered most during the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 were the same ones that took the brunt of COVID, a decade later."

-- Ed Yong (edyong209), "The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear: All of this will happen again", The Atlantic, 2022-09-30

Rabbi Emily Cohen (ThatRabbiCohen), 2022-12-16 (I couldn't figure out where to cut it to just extract a couple sample paragraphs):

Hanukkah starts Sunday night. It matters this year. Maybe more than it has in decades. Antisemitism is up- not just the subversive stuff but blatant, dangerous words and deeds from elected officials, popular figures, regular folk. It hurts. And that's why this holiday matters

"But rabbi, I always heard that Hanukkah wasn't a major holiday!"

Yeah. That's right. Hanukkah isn't Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. It's not Passover or even Shavuot. It's a rabbinic innovation without Biblical precedent celebrating a dubious miracle. And it still matters.

"But rabbi, if we make a big deal of Hanukkah isn't that just trying to make it into Jewish Christmas? We don't wanna do that!"

So don't. Don't make Hanukkah Jewish Christmas. (Not that we could if we tried.) Don't make Hanukkah about gifts or consumerism.

Make Hanukkah about light. 'Cause it is. 'Cause we made it so.

The story of Hanukkah is a story of guerrilla warfare waged by a more extremist sect of Jews on both a domineering Empire and, to an extent, less extreme Jews. It's pretty gory stuff in a pretty rough time.

Jews weren't allowed to do Jewish then. The Empire had outlawed Shabbat and other practices. Assimilation was the only way. When the Maccabees won, they retook the Temple and rededicated it- hence "Hanukkah" which means dedication. But here's where things get interesting.

The whole "miracle" story? The oil lasting for 8 nights? Yeah we added that in later. That wasn't a part of the original framing of this holiday.

"But rabbi!" you gasp, "If we added it in doesn't that make it all...fake?!"

No. It makes it all the more meaningful.

Hanukkah could have just been a military victory. It could have just been triumph over enemy forces with blood in the streets. Instead (or at least in addition), it's a story of goodness, of literal light shining in the midst of a dark passage in our people's story.

I'd like to think that on some level our ancestors (literal, mythic etc) understood that we'd need that in times like this. We'd need the hope of light when things seem grim. Not the flood lights of military might but that tiniest spark of flame that warms a whole room.

So this year, our hannukiahs (our menorahs) matter. When we light the shamash, and we transfer that flame to 1 candle, and then 2 and 3 and eventually all 8, we remind ourselves that we have the light and the strength within our tradition to outlast whatever's out there.

Light the candles each night this year and enjoy them.
Put your hanukkiah in a window so your neighbors can enjoy the light too.
Eat something fried in oil and go back for seconds.
Sing silly songs and tell the story.
Celebrate with gusto, now more than ever.

[I am not Jewish, but I have noticed the rise in antisemitism, it being more visible, less subtle, and it scares me.]

A good fourth sunday of Advent to everyone celebrating it, happy Hanukkah to everyone who'll be lighting the first candle this evening, a good Saturnalia to anyone celebrating that (and sorry I missed saying so on the first day, yesterday)!

Hmm. Maybe I should adapt my code that draws an Advent wreath, to draw a hannukiah and a Kwanzaa kinara as well.

"'pronoun rituals' is the new rightwing buzzword for 'asking people to respect my pronouns' and i think its fucking awesome. pronoun rituals, pronoun incantations, pronoun wizardry of the highest gendertomes" -- jay Dragon is at ArteSumapaz (jdragsky), 2022-12-12

"brb summoning some pronouns" -- shork (parody account) (n0i0b), replying to jay Dragon

"summon 2d6 lesser pronouns or 1d4 greater pronouns" -- jay Dragon is at ArteSumapaz (jdragsky), replying to shork

"I love when the right tries to insult anything but just ends up making it sound more based." -- I'm Old Gregg (ritual_coffee), replying to jay Dragon

"The right used to just assume they owned all the guns. Now that they know that's not true they're going to want to make it true." -- Violet The Alligator Parody Account (LapineViolet), 2022-11-24

"you do not need to be good at art to make art
 youre allowed to just have fun"
  -- maze finals (m0sstrx), 2022-12-12