Happy New Year etc.

we can consider any day New Year's Day because one year begins just after the last ended, coming full circle. circles and circular processes have no beginning and no end save what the perceiver chooses. you can consider your birthday your personal New Year's Day.
i prefer to start the year count with Year Zero, not Year One. European cultures came to the zero concept in mathematics late. the Hindus of India and the Mayas of Central America had it much earlier.
i prefer to count the years not around the purported time of the birth of Jesus, but from the estimated age of the earliest known cave paintings (about 40,000 years ago) or, better still, from the estimated age of some gold mines in southern Africa (about 100,000 years ago). that far back, also, the purported ancestor of every human alive today lived: a woman whom anthropologists have nicknamed Eve.
the day corresponding to May 28th in the Gregorian calendar makes the most sense to me as the year's first day for common usage, because on this day in the year designated "585 BC" in the Gregorian calendar, the earliest event in human history to which we CAN assign an exact date occured: the cancellation of a battle between the Lydians and Medeans in Asia Minor. this bit, subsequently verified in other sources, first came to me from Isaac Asimov's book Of Time and Space and Other Things.
but enough about May 28th. TODAY marks the anniversary of the birth of American jazz pianist Billy Tipton and the death of French mathematician Joseph Saurin...so a toast to them.
my one New Year's resolution: to read The Grapes of Wrath. i got inspired to do that from a recent visit to a museum: the John Steinbeck Center in Salinas. on that visit, i also discovered, in one of the rooms there, something with no obvious connection to Steinbeck: some collages and assemblages by a Carmel artist named Kay Villalobos. WONDERFULL stuff! so a toast to John Steinbeck and Kay Villalobos as well.
for now, i continue with the book on Critical Mass Day mentioned in an earlier blog entry. concurrently with that, issues 5 and 6 of Found Magazine.

good night.