Our first thing for New Year's Eve was more company. EJL, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's grad school friend who's still in town, came over for the first time in months. He's still teaching at Michigan State --- which had just announced it requires students to get vaccinated and boosted --- and we were hoping for gossip on how the pandemic is ravaging all possible plans for anything over there. Unfortunately, he somehow doesn't have any gossip about the place. Somehow he's got as steady as an academic job can be without having any idea what's roiling the department or what might be coming down the line. We don't know how he does it. So instead we just had a couple nice hours with a friend who's also an academic. Sunshine hid from the fire.
For the evening, and to ring in the new year? ... MJS had invited people to his pole barn, the one with forty pinball machines. He wasn't having a pinball tournament (although he was doing one on his ring-toss machine). And ... gads. The trouble was not having any idea how many people would be there. Like, that space, if there were ten people present? I might be able to take that. If there were forty people, as will sometimes happen? Especially considering the rate of Covid enthusiasts among Entitled White Pinball Guys? I didn't feel comfortable taking that chance. It would turn out that somewhere around ten people --- counting MJS's family --- showed up so maybe it would have been all right after all.
What we did instead was stay home with a fire going, and watch Yellow Submarine again. The return to a New Year's Eve tradition of my youth brought for us a 2021 that really, really sucked. But maybe this year will go better. We spent the first ten minutes of the film trying to figure out if we had the aspect ratio wrong. It turns out the movie was filmed in 1:1.66, that is, wider than a traditional TV without being, like, widescreen enough, and with the skinny vertical look of all the human figures we couldn't convince ourselves it looked right.
Yellow Submarine hit me pretty hard this year, in ways that I needed. I can't imagine why I would want the reassurance that a long, weird, confusing period of drifting uncontrolled through arbitrary perils because because a bunch of creeps decided to be mean would, finally, end happily and with a strong declaration of universal belonging, but there you go.
We finished the movie closer to midnight than would have been really good --- all that fussing over the aspect ratio ate time --- and so I didn't get our hors d'ouvres dinner ready until the last minute of the year. But then we could ring in the new year with our first meal, a late dinner, and a lot of vegetarian and vegan snacks, and the company of each other, and Sunshine giving a dirty eye to the last hour of 2021's last fire.
There's still several more days' worth of Potter Park Zoo pictures. Enjoy the look of things!
More of the reflections in that icy pond. It was lovely and I could not resist such a complicated set of lighting challenges.
The lights around the fencepost above that pond. Note that the strand on the left is incandescent bulbs, some of the few remaining against all the LED bulbs elsewhere in the picture.
The gazebo and the frozen pond that I'd taken the previous photographs from.
Trivia: The Battle of Pydna is known to have taken place the 22nd of June, 168 BC, as a lunar eclipse was recorded the night before. The Roman calendar had the date as the 3rd of September. Source: Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, Duncan Steel.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 17: Sea Dust, Tom Sims, Bela Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle. So the inciting incident is the discovery of Sea-Dust, the powdered, concentrated, ready-to-rehydrate compression of human knowledge. So that is a first-rate concept to start things out with and I can't wait to see how disappointing it is when the story abandons the premise and it all becomes Wimpy has to get on the other side of a door or something like that.
PS: From my Seventh A-to-Z: Big-O and Little-O Notation, something that touches on algorithms and errors, everybody's favorite topics!
