This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
3:06 PM Monday, January 1, 2007
[With predictions for this new year!]
Espresso Roma was closed today, so here I sit inside Royal Grounds. It's nice and sunny and not too cold out: an auspicious day for 2007 blogging. Last night at eleven we visited a friend who sets off fireworks every year in his front yard. As I write this I'm importing video clips of the fireworks into iMovie, which have been uploaded from my cameraphone. If there's anything worth keeping I'll send the finished movie to YouTube or Vox. Hey. it's 2007. Video rules.
This is the traditional day for the mainstream media to rehash 2006. The blogs I subscribe to tend not to do that, which is good, because I find the rehash boring. Janus, the Roman doorkeeper god has one face looking forward and one looking back. I prefer to think of the backward looking face as the one interested in history, going back much more than one year of mainstream media tripe. The more I write for the Coffeeblog, the more I have become interested in history.
My site view statistics seem to suggest that my readers like the history stuff too. Of the last 4000 site visits, going back to August, 2006, over fourteen percent of the visitors went straight to the "gods and myths" page, which is mostly history stuff, though I stick a lot of history into the other blogposts too. I generally start my research on the Wikipedia (is it the Wikipedia or just Wikipedia, and what difference does it make?) However I am proud of the fact that I spotted what I think is misinformation on the Wikipedia, namely, that the coffee historian Abd al-Qadir al-Jaziri was one and the same as Malaye Jaziri, the Kurdish poet. The identification of the two was posted on many weblogs and sites. The moral take-home lession: trust but verify. Who said that? Was it Nixon or Reagan? It was good advice. After Wikipedia, there's a lot of other good stuff on the Internet, and if that fails, I may even have to open a (shudder! gasp!) book.
Another mainstream media shtick is to make predictions for new year, which is less boring than the pablum rehash (how's that for a mixed culinary metaphor?) so I'm going to try my luck at it. Here goes: 1. There will be no lasting truce in 2007 between Sunni and Shia Muslims, nor between Hamas and Zionists in the Israeli government; 2. Apple will ship the Leopard OS, which however, will not be 100% free of bugs or glitches; 3. Taxes will increase, although the taxpayer may not be aware of the increase when he is paying; 4. No cures for benign prostatic hypertrophy, herpes simplex, the common cold, or perimenopausal hot flashes will be discovered in 2007 through embryonic stem cell research; and finally, 5. Jonathan's Coffeeblog will not be monetized in 2007.
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