Calendar Schmalendar!

Today is January 1^st. Actually I am writing this over three days starting on December 30^th and it won’t be posted on this site until 4:00 a.m. on January 2^nd and goodness knows when you are reading it – assuming anyone is actually reading it.

There is this day called New Year’s, on a 12 month calendar, the first day of the first month. January is named for Janus, the Roman two-visaged god of beginnings, looking back to the old year and forward to the new. As far as I know human beings are the only animals who mark time in this way. According to scientists’ observations, most animals mark time around their reproductive cycles. Maybe mayflies and elephants have a different sense of time from each other and from us.

We humans, mostly, mark time by days, months, years (and hours, minutes, seconds nanoseconds and centuries). For quite some time, people have been marking months and days in a calendar. Every year my wife gives me a wall calendar with interesting pictures and my nephew and his wife send me one with Japanese woodcut prints that sits on my desk. This keeps me on track in retirement where every today is like yesterday and/or tomorrow. Appointments, both for me and Billie, go into our laptop calendars and into our phones, so we don’t schedule colonoscopies that conflict with dentist appointments. There is probably a synching technology to make that process easier, but my “late-adopter” persona hasn’t discovered it yet.

The first calendar (that we know of) dates to about 8000 BCE and was discovered in 2004 by archaeologists digging in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. It is a series of rocks and pots in the ground from which one can track the movement of the sun and moon, a luni-solar calendar. The calendar aligns with the winter solstice sunrise so day markings can be corrected once a year. Most calendars in use today are either lunar like the Chinese and Jewish calendars or solar like the twelve month Gregorian one that we use.

Our current calendar was created for Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 CE, because the previous calendar invented by Sosigenes for Julius Caesar in 40 BCE lost 11 minutes a year and so by the sixteenth century was off by about ten days. The Julian calendar itself was created because the previous Roman Republic calendar, supposedly created by Romulus in 738 BCE was off by three months. I don’t know what that did for colonoscopy scheduling, but it apparently messed up sowing and reaping crops.

What’s in a date?

We say it is January 1 and most of the world abides by the Gregorian calendar so you don’t show up for the United Nations twelve days late, but for religious celebrations and for New Year’s, well everyone does their own thing.

Eastern Orthodox Christians in Greece, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and Georgia keep the Julian calendar for religious celebrations. Former Byzantines didn’t buy some Roman pope’s idea. January 1 is a saints day part of advent of Christmas, celebrated on January 6^th or 7th. There isn’t a Eastern religious New Year’s celebration, but some observe New Year’s on January 14^th.

The Chinese New Year is based upon a lunar calendar and so it moves around between January 21^st  and February 20^th.  It is February 10^th in 2024.The Korean Seolial is celebrated the same day as is the Vietnamese Tét Nguyên Dán. The Japanese Shōgatsu is  a multi-day festival that has been celebrated on January1st  since 1873, during the Westernization of the Meiji period.

Many peoples celebrate the New Year in the spring, which makes sense to me, new growth, new year. Nyepi, the Balinese New Year, Nowruz, the Iranian New Year are celebrated in March. Vikram Sawant, the Hindu New Year is also a March holiday, (though I’ve been told that some Hindus celebrate Diwali, the fall festival of light as New Years; some celebrate in the spring. “It depends on where your family is from”). Buddhists in Thailand and India celebrate Songkran in April close to the New Year’s celebrations of Tamils (Puthandu) and Sri Lankan Sinhalese (Aluth Arevudda).

The Muslim Hijri celebrates the journey of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medini. The sacred month of Muharrum is determined on a lunar calendar and celebrated differently by Shia and Sunni Muslims.

Fall New Years include the ancient Celtic Samhain (November1), Rosh Hashanna, The Jewish New Year (October 2-4, 2024), Enkutatash, the Ethiopian New Year, (September 11) and Western Australia Aboriginal Murador New Year (October 30).

It’s all in the superstitions and traditions?

There are many superstitions and traditions for the New Year around the world. My mother served a meal of salmon for wisdom, rice for riches, cornbread for the golden glow of happiness, black-eyed peas for peace, and greens for growth. (We usually had kale or spinach, because you couldn’t find the collards of my mom’s Alabama youth in New England.). My father always said “what you do on New Year’s day you will do throughout the year.” I remember him writing a letter to his sister in Florida when long distance phone calls were too expensive. I try to talk with each of my children spread across the United States on New Year’s Day.

First footings in Scotland (first across your threshold in the New Year) dictates the year and he or she better bring coal, salt or whiskey. Brazilians wear white and jump in the ocean. The Spanish eat grapes. Italians wear red underwear. Japanese eat soba noodles. In Denmark I’ve heard they smash plates. Bread and salt seem to be important in a lot of places, as do apples, dates, pomegranates and various fruits.

Regrets, reflections, and re-visions

Amid the laughs, libations, and general frivolity, however, many cultures have a sober, somber side to the passing of the old year and welcoming of the new. Some see the old-year-new-year transition as a time to reconnect with ancestors especially those lost in the old year.

The ancient Celts viewed Samhain as a time when the spirits of the dead roamed freely between the Otherworld and our own, which is why we have ghosts on Halloween and why the Church coopted the holiday to All Hallows Eve a time to pay respect to your forebearers and the saints. All Saints Day, November 1 was to be spent in church praying, which probably curtailed some old Celt carousing the night before. Even the Robert Burns song, based upon a Scots folk hymn, which we sing at the stroke of midnight, faking the lyrics we’ve forgotten or never knew, has  roots in respecting memories of the “old long since gone:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to mind

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And days of auld lang syne

For auld lang syne, my dear

For auld lang syne

We’ll take a cup of kindness yet

For auld lang syne.

It’s like the toast, ‘To absent friends.” We remember.

The night before we Caucasians show up in Chinatown for the rice cakes, dumplings, dragon dances and fireworks, a Chinese family makes offerings to ancestors and gathers for a family reunion dinner. In Chile, some celebrate New Year’s Eve in a cemetery saying goodbye again to family.

It is a time of saying goodbye. Even American broadcast news has a segment In Memoriam to those we lost this year. This year that list included singers Harry Belafonte and Tony Bennett and a segment on Friends TV show star, Matthew Perry, “much loved and gone too soon.”

Many of us take stock of the previous year, and our lives to date at New Years. We are where we are as a consequence of decision and actions we made in the past. Some of us are reasonably happy about those consequences; some are feel less sanguine about where our previous selves have dumped us.

January is always the biggest sale month for health club memberships. Workout rooms are full all month. Drinkers of alcohol, especially those who partied a bit too much on New Year’s Eve, join the “Dry January” movement. Many set New Year’s resolutions about working harder, or smarter, spending more time with family, losing a few pounds, or being more positive. I don’t mean to denigrate such efforts; many succeed in improving their lives this way and I believe in improvement.

When I have failed at New Year’s resolutions, it was because I had a result-goal without a corresponding process to achieve it, including milestone measures and planned contingencies when things didn’t go quite as planned. My life is on a pretty even keel right now. Sure, I need to take off the holiday weight, but I know how to do that: Eat less, move more stay out of the Hãagen-Dazs. I can get a little less depressed about politics and a little  more active in the causes and candidates I believe in; 2024 is a big political year in the U.S.

We have much to do together starting this year, but ending war, world poverty, hunger and homelessness, and slowly climate change are all disconnected goals without a clear corresponding process to achieve them.  Let us start by listening with care, even while we stand up to hate, do so with love. Think Big – start small. Darkness gives way to light; be a candle.

I’m going to work on that – and taking small actions. I’m a writer; I’ll write about my progress.

What about you? How do you re-envision yourself and your contribution to the general good this year?

 

 

 

 

“Aaaask Alan”

In the late ‘80s when my wife’s children were young and we first began dating, when an unusual question came up and I would know the answer, they’d say “Aaaaask Alan!” Everyone would laugh that I was the font of useless knowledge.

That actually used to happen to me a lot. Billie would ask me about a crossword clue and I’d know the answer. watching Jeopardy I would know the tough question that stumped all the contestant. People, in a social setting, would ask a question or wonder out lout and I would know the answer.

“Aaaask Alan.”

People would jokingly ask “How do you know this stuff?” and I would answer,

“Years of reading the rotogravure section of the Sunday paper.”

This rarely happens anymore. This may be because no one (including me) reads a hard copy Sunday paper, or knows what rotogravure means (description of the unique printing press for the color magazine insert). It may be my 75 year-old, deteriorating synapses limit access to the useless knowledge database.

Or it may be that “Aaaask Alan.” has been replaced. Now at a dinner party when anyone says “I wonder. . .” at least three smart phones  are whipped out and the race is on to see whose fingers are nimbler than Alan’s brain. Billie and I participate in this contest too, even when home alone, and when the answer springs forth, we say,

“Google – the death of wonder.”

Now when she asks me crossword clues, I don’t know the answers as often. I speculate how much of my growing trivia ignorance is from the loss of the color insert, and how much is decaying neurons in my brain.

Techno-erasing knowledge and skill

Nan Culler, my mother quit teaching high school math when I was eight (1956) and embarked on a new career as a computer programmer. My mother’s math skills were prodigious.

When I bought my first house, I worried I couldn’t afford the payments and she asked me the price, my down payment, the interest rate (8%) and the tax rate, and calculated my monthly payment,  thirty-year compound interest, in her head, to the penny. “You can afford it,” she said, ‘Now close your mouth; you’ll catch a fly.”

When I started using a calculator, she said, “Alan, don’t use those things; they rot your brain.” I didn’t listen. Occasionally now I catch myself dividing numbers by ten on the calculator on my phone. In business school I bought a fancy Hewlett Packard 37E financial calculator and now have to look up formulas for basic accounting ratios.

I drove a cab in 1969 in Boston and knew all the street names in the city, my suburb, and most towns in between. When I lived in London I was amazed at black cab drivers who knew most streets in the 300 page A-Z map book.

We didn’t own a car when we lived in New York City, but in 2008 moved to New jersey and bought maps, not realizing GPS adoption. We bought a Garmin. Now GPS is on our phones and on the car “Nav” system. I periodically catch myself using GPS to go where I know the way, and I know few street names.

Several years ago years ago at Christmas time we gave our then eight-year-old granddaughter the job of handing out the presents from under the tree. She picked up  a package and said “ I can’t do this. I can’t read cursive.” She’s almost twenty now and that’s changed, but I saw a video about a new service designing signatures and teaching cursive for your name to those who never learned.

Lost knowledge and skill isn’t new. I remember helping my father clean out his workshop in the 1970s. I found a canvas bag with four tools I didn’t recognize.

“Oh, those are the old Model T wheel tools,” my dad said. “This one is from that later model, a wire spoke straightener. This is a spoke shave for wooden spokes. This is a true-form for the 21” wheel rim.”

“An what’s this?” I said, holding up a weird small sledge hammer-hatchet combination.

“If you hit a hole and you had the wooden wheels, you had to cut a spoke from a tree branch. The mallet was for truing the wheel. I got to where I made and carried spare spokes. Then the wire wheels came out. Still needed the mallet and true-form.”

I wish I’d hung on to those tools as a symbol of knowledge and skills lost to new technology.

Artificial Intelligence, a “hair-on-fire” moment

“ChatGPT, Google’s Deep Mind, AI is changing everything!” There is a story nightly on the nightly news that only people my age still watch. (At least we use the DVR and speed through all the drug commercials.)

OK, I admit that deep fakes in political ads are scary and I watched the “Terminator” movies so I have free-floating anxiety about “SkyNet becoming aware and saving the earth from humanity.”

Tech companies invent things because they can and we should think about the unintended consequences of AI, but, call me crazy, I’m not sure it is worthy of the “hair-on-fire” news coverage right now.

Now anyone who knows me, a “late adopter “ with a dubious relationship with computers may be saying. “Alan is not the person to listen to on technology.”

Fair point. Take this with a grain of salt, but “Aaaask Alan,”  I’m going to opine anyway.

There are three complaints drawing media “ink” and airwaves at the moment,:

• AI will steal jobs.
• AI is stupid!
• AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate.

AI will steal jobs

Probably. All new technologies change jobs. Farhad Manjoo, the New York Times columnist wrote recently describing how AI will eliminate the need for basic computer programming, which was the job that was supposed to be safe in a digital world. “Learn to code” was what politicians told displaced workers.  Now AI is coding. Is that a bad thing? Yes, if you are a coal miner who just learned to code. Manjoo goes on to show how advanced coders are using AI to enhance their skills.

Does AI do a better job than people? Do those chat bots really replace a good CSR? Not in my experience, at least not now. Will Chat GPT replace all writers? Maybe the bad ones. (Hope that’s not me. Who decides?)

AI is stupid!

A story in Futurism.com complained how AI aided search came up with a parody of Vermeer’s painting “Girl with Pearl Earring”  instead of the real thing The girl in the painting found had lightbulbs for earrings. Horrors! Culture will be destroyed. Maybe if Vermeer were alive and considered the parody defamatory, he’d have a point, but AI is an infant.

New technologies take some time to get as good as the old or as human skills.

For years steel companies showed TV ads where a man first in overalls, later in a heat suit, controlled a bucket pouring molten steel to be rolled into sheet steel.

When I moved to Pittsburgh people still mourned the loss of the highest paid union job in the mill. The worker judged steel viscosity by the color and the feel of the heat and by the way it sloshed in the bucket. What could go wrong with that?

Many people died, before the mills replaced that job with computers. In the beginning the computers were stupid. It took five years for computers to get as good as a human..

AI will learn faster, but it’s going to be stupid for a while.

AI will change everything in ways we can’t anticipate

Another New York Times story told the tale of a lawyer who used AI to put together a brief. AI made up cases that didn’t exist to support his client’s case. The judge found out. Oops.

This may be an example of the stupidity of AI. Or it may be an example of the potential misuse of technology by people with bad intentions. The news has its “hair on fire” about “deep fakes,” exchanging faces and voices on photos and videos, to show people saying and doing things they never did.  Some twenty five-year-old made those for the news show. Scary.

Some people of bad intent may make themaand post them on social media spreading conspiracy theories and other misinformation to influence elections. More scary..

From my uniquely techno-incompetent point of view, we shouldn’t be concerned about the stupid AI. It will learn.

We should be slightly less concerned about lost knowledge and lost jobs. Knowledge gets lost. We are still trying to figure out how Stonehenge was built. Some programmers may be displaced, some people will forget how to compose a sentence, but the majority will figure out how to survive and the chosen will still make art that speaks to the human condition.

What we might want to think about is how to protect ourselves, our children, and our societies from people of bad intent. AI may be faster.. The stakes seem higher, but humanity has always tried to limit the damage of people of bad intent.

 

Let’s keep working on that.

On #66

The bus was almost full when she got on. There were two empty seats, both on the aisle, both in the middle of the bus. In one window seat sat a mid-twenties woman, finger-twirling her long dirty-blond hair, swivel-staring back and forth between an open laptop and some papers spread over much of the seat. I was in the other window seat.

“Do you mind if I sit the window seat? It helps take some of the pressure off my back.”

“Certainly,” I said. I preferred aisles anyway, but had moved to the window as the bus filled up on the way from my New Jersey suburb to New York City. As I got up I remember hoping she wasn’t a talker. I had a meeting with a prospective client and wanted to “keep my head clear.”

She was a talker.

I guessed she was in her late seventies maybe early eighties. I was sixty-three then, beard still more blond than gray. Her hair was auburn with tight curls and didn’t look died, though it surely was.  She might have been five feet tall, but probably not and roundly block-like in a diminutive way. She had an accent – Russian, or perhaps Eastern European.

“Were you born here?” She asked.

“No. I’m from the Boston area originally.” I answered realizing mid-answer that she probably meant in the United States.

“But in this country? Maybe you know how good you have it?”

She told me how her daughter was born here and “had no idea what it’s in like most places in the world. And her children? Don’t even talk about it!”

She talked to me for most of the remaining forty minutes into the city. I learned that she and her husband had moved here when they were just married. Her husband had started a business and built it into a success. She talked about how they had no money when they came, but sent their daughter to college and graduate school.

“Three years ago he died. It was quick, thanks God, and not exactly a surprise. He wasn’t all that well and he didn’t need to be working still at eighty. Can you imagine? He had offers on the business, but he said ‘Retire? And do what?’ So he died. I ran the business. I worked there early and did the books for years and we have good people. But last year I said ‘what am I crazy? And we sold it. For stupid money really. Now I’m rich. My daughter tells me not to say that, and maybe it really ‘isn’t that much money’ like she says, but when I think what we came here with   . .”

She went all to tell me how she’d “give it all away to have him back” and she was looking a little sad, so I asked her the question I sometimes ask talkers:

“What is the secret of life?”

The question – a little history

I remember the first time I asked that question. It was to Mico, the guy who cut my hair. I remember that he tried to dodge the question, but then thought for a minute and gave me a pretty profound answer.

Over the years, I’ve asked this question to random people many times. I’ve asked it to cab and Uber drivers, bartenders and servers. I asked it to a homeless man in Pittsburgh who struck up a relationship with me as I sat on my porch by asking “Will you talk to me?” “Bill later thanked me for not just looking through him.”

I have asked this question to people a lot and, you know what, no one has ever said, “Gosh, I don’t know.”

People have said, “Oh, everyone will have a different answer to that” “True, what’s yours?”

Some people talk about their faith, “We just need to trust that God has a plan.”

Some talk about wanting or expecting less or being grateful for what you have.

The Golden Rule,  “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” comes up a lot, as does “Love one another.”

But no one says, “I haven’t got a clue” They just give me their answer.

My survey sample is biased. I ask the question of talkers and perhaps talkers are loathe to say they don’t know. Some do say, “Let me think about that.” But I’ve never had to wait more than fifteen seconds.

It seems to me that if everyone has an answer, the secret of life isn’t really very secret. We may be wrong. We may each only have a piece of it. We may not be doing what we believe we should be, but mostly we do have an idea.

“What is the secret of life?”

The answer

This woman told me her name, but the name has long since faded away. Let’s call her Rose. Rose did not hesitate one second,

“Oh that’s easy. I tell it to my grandchildren all the time.

Life is about choices. You choose to:

Love NOT hate

Learn NOT “know”  (I tell the kids ‘every time you say I Know you miss an opportunity to learn.) and

Laugh NOT whine  (I tell them when you laugh you make my heart sing; when you whine it’s like putting my ears by the wheels of a truck. ‘ isn’t it better to surround yourself with singing hearts – better than truck wheels?’)”

The bus pulled into Port Authority and I stepped back to allow her off the bus, which she did whining ever-so-slightly about her back. “It’s tough to sit. Who would think it would be hard to sit?”

But one person’s whining is another’s “God-given right to complain.”

Rose, like most people I ask, didn’t turn the question around to me. In fairness, we didn’t really have time for more discussion and I like her answer anyway.

My own answers to this question vary a lot by what is going on in my life “Work less – have more fun” “Take care of those less fortunate.” “Be grateful.” “Love those close to you and some who are not so close.” The answers vary, but I am never without an answer. I guess I’m a talker, too.

So is it really a secret of life? Maybe not. Maybe we just don’t think enough about how to be, how to work, love and live wisely. Maybe we think or even know,. . . but don’t do.

But we can learn;  we can follow Rose’s advice to her grandchildren, chose to Love, Learn, and Laugh. It would make for a better world.

 And that’s not a secret.