Daily Slow Chat

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1. My computer desktop, my smart phone, and my sport watch, all show a weather prediction temperature of -9ºC, but both of my thermometers (front and back yard) display -15ºC. A big gap, I’d say. Also the coldest day of the entire winter thus far in this part of the country. Edit to add: that does not stop a couple of kids, maybe 8 or 9 years of age, from riding down a hill with their bicycles in order to do huge skids on the snow, by locking up the rear brake.

   I keep forgetting it’s New Year’s Eve, and that some people will be out there partying and watching fireworks.

2. I was reading a bit yesterday and it seems like the majority of people are against these individual amateur fireworks. The majority of people are also for speed limits on highways. I wonder why the majority of people then fo vote for parties that don’t want they want. Go figure.

   I do love to party but I can’t bear leaving my cats alone when the fireworks go. I guess we’ll finish the party at home like last years.

   Yesterday I brought some mail to the post office and the post office lady swooned at my beautiful Japanese stationary 😁.  Anyone want a letter on beautiful Japanese washi paper?

   I had a beautiful dream where I was flying low over a green tropical forest. We were going to Bangladesh for vacation or still deciding where to go. Don’t remember exactly. But it was nice.

3. What are you going to eat this evening? Do you have a special or traditional NYE dinner where you are?

   In Sicily we usually eat lentils (good luck for the New Year) with some kind of pork,like zampone or cotechino.

   This evening we’ll have a traditional Czech meal… which apparently will also involve pork and lentils! They are supposed to bring good luck in many different cultures.

4. When I was wrapping presents (Christmas Eve, naturally) I was convinced that I was missing something, but couldn’t think of what it was so assumed I was wrong. Low and behold last night my partner mentioned a T-shirt she’d seen that she liked the look of and something clicked. Queue a couple of minutes of rummaging in the spare room and there it was!

5. Going to be alone with my wife on new years eve for the first time in 20 years. Daughter has found out her hourly rate is 60% higher on days like this, so she’ll be working tonight, our little moneygrubber. 🤣

6. Got a cold or something else so I’m spending this NYE alone (tbh I didnt want to do any partying anyway so this is a great excuse). I bought some classic anime movies over the year, so I thought I’ll do a marathon. Then I came across a thread discussing what games people play online on their PS3s. That really surprised me thats still possible, so I pulled out Modern Warfare 3 and BAM: a full Lobby with mostly FR and NL people. Not a big Call of Duty or Multiplayer guy, but might be fun for today.

7. Do you have a specific greeting for someone you meet (hours, maybe days) before New Year’s who you won’t see again until (long into) the New Year in your language?

   In German you wouldn’t say “Happy New Year!” until midnight on the dot. Instead we use “**Guten Rutsch** (ins neue Jahr)!”, lit. have a nice slide (into the new year).

   Anyway, I hope you all have a nice evening and night. Be it quiet or crazy, however you want it to be!

8. So I ended up in the International UFO museum in Roswell yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, Roswell was the site of the landing of a flying saucer in the 40s witnessed by a number of people who were allegedly silenced by the US military.

   In the first room you’re presented with a timeline of the Roswell incident and bunch of eyewitness accounts that are meant to convince you that the Roswell incident was totally real, but they’re so incredibly text-heavy that nobody with the attention span reduced to 3 seconds though excessive smartphone usage is going to read them. Then you move on to another room about UFOs in pop culture that feels like it hasn’t been updated in at least 20 years and contains very easily-disprovable factual errors like “Independence Day was the highest-grossing movie of all time” (it wasn’t, and it isn’t). Then you move on to another room that talks about eyewitness accounts of alien abductions and alien implants, and a bunch of photos of flying saucers that only look as real as the CGI of the time was capable of making them look. Finally, you move on to a room that talks about upcoming space missions to detect life on other planets, which all seemed very legit but had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with UFOs.

   I must admit, some of the stuff (particularly the bit about alien implants) did make me go “hmmm”. But then again, I was also never presented with any other contradictory information debunking these claims for me to have an informed opinion.

   I then went into their “UFO research library” and picked up a book about supposed proof of alien civilisations on Mars, which, being a Mars scientist myself, I thought would make for entertaining reading. One of the “proofs” he had was a “deliberately-blurred” photo of a Martian rock formation that was placed next to a photo of Voldemort played by Ralph Fiennes with the implication that they looked similar (they didn’t). In another bit, he implied that doing a NASA-funded postdoc means you’re “in the pockets of NASA” and therefore part of the cover-up, apparently not understanding that NASA is a massive bureaucracy where most employees absolutely despise their White House-appointed leadership regardless of who’s in the White House at any given moment.

   Roswell itself is actually quite a depressing town, only made slightly livelier by all the alien-related tourist traps and souvenir shops. I guess everyone has to hustle somehow