All you need is love

Channel 5, as mentioned, didn't show the Sentosa Island Countdown Party out of respect to the tsunami victims. They instead showed the movie One Fine Day, comforting many, I'm sure, and at ten seconds before midnight switched to a computer-image countdown to the new year. Then they went into various good wishes from local celebrities while they played The Beatles' All You Need Is Love, which I think I've mentioned when I become president I'm going to make the national anthem. I love this country. It brings to mind when Channel 7 would run Yellow Submarine right before the Dick Clark countdown, but that was a long time ago and there's no Channel 7 here, and for no good reason I haven't bought the DVD.

Two T-shirt-clad men walked into the Singapore Press Holdings headquarters and handed over to the relief fund two thousand S$1,000 bills. (That's around US$130,000.) They wanted to stay anonymous. One said he'd won a lottery. I've held two S$1,000 bills -- Singapore currency gets larger and brighter as the amounts go up -- and they're mighty impressive, feeling like a lot of money; the pictures of almost cartoon-like stacks of currency is startling.

I couldn't find the Times Square countdown on TV, the first year I've missed it, but I got to Fort Canning Park to see the Time Ball. That's not an intriguing science fiction story; it's one of the steel balls which in the old days would be raised to the top of a pole -- on a hill high enough to be seen by the whole downtown and harbor -- at 12:55 p.m. and dropped at 1 p.m., giving all a time check. It's left now in a partly-raised position, just as well as its location isn't very visible anymore past the skyscrapers.

Trivia: Auguste Comte's reform ``Calendrier Positiviste'' dedicated January to the abstract concept of humanity, and the concrete person of Moses. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, E.G. Richards.

Currently Reading: In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov 1920-1954, Isaac Asimov.