Thursday 22 December 2005

Io, Saturnalia!

Last night was the shortest night of the year (northern hemisphere --the longest in the southern). It was the Winter Solstice.
From today on, the day will be a little bit longer every day and the sun will be hotter and Spring, slowly, will take over Winter.
In Roman Times, around this date (it used to fall on the 25th of December at the time, before the calendar reform), they used to celebrate the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the Festival of the birth of the Unconquered Sun, in honour of Saturn; and the main day, last night, was called Saturnalia. During that time, Romans feasted, postponed all business and warfare, exchange gifts, and temporally freed their slaves.
On the 4th century it was replaced by a conveniently chosen date for the birth of Jesus Christ.
It has always been a very special date, as many cultures have celebrated it. Other feasts in and around the Winter Solstice are:
  • Chinese: Dong Zhi
  • Christian: Christmas (including Saint Stephen, Saint John the Evangelist, Advent), Saint Nicholas (12/6), Holy Innocents (12/28), Sylvester (31/12), Feast of Circumcision and Feast of Fools (01/1), Candlemas (01/2) and Orthodox Christmas or Wise Men/Kings of Orient's day (01/6).
  • Germanic: Modranect (Mother's day on the Saxon Winter Solstice Festival), Yule (Winter Solstice).
  • Jewish: Hanukkah (Festival on the Commemoration of the Miracle of the Candles).
  • Neopagan: Yule and Imbolc (Festival of Candles).
  • Persian: Yalda (Winter Solstice, Birth of Sun God Mehr).
  • Secular: Life Day (12/20, Wookiee), Agnostica (Celebration of the Birth of the Quantum Physics), Zamenhof Day (12/15, Birthday of Dr. Esperanto), Festivus (12/23, from Seinfield's Show), HumanLight (12/23, Secular Humanist Midwinter Holiday), Chrismukkah (slang for Christmass and Hanukkah in the mix families), Yuletide, Giftmas, Newtonmas (12/25, Birthday of Newton), Boxing Day, Kwanzaa (12/26-01/1, festival of African-American culture), Hogmanay (12/31, Scotish New Year's Eve).

I wish you a wonderful Feast of the Invincible God Sun and a hopeful Kalends, the first day of the year, and I encourage you to keep the festivity's happiness along the year.

Look at the Sun, He is Life, Love and Happiness.

[Bottom picture: Saturnalia, by Antoine-François Callet]

Wednesday 21 December 2005

White, blue, black and grey

This certainly is the era of information and communication. Well, you know that, you are reading a blog: the coolest and latest way to communicate with people you know and people you don't. With blogs you get to know all kind of people, and, what is great about it, who (shall) like what you'd written.
I had a computer at home since I can remember and this made me the "IT" of the family. Everyone comes to me to ask me 'why is that happening?', 'how can...?'s' and 'where can...?'s'. Now I have a little bit of competence, but it is fine by me!
I am talking about that because I discovered Blogger one day checking out Google's tools and services. And just the other day I discovered a wonderful tool recently bought by Yahoo!. I am talking about del.icio.us, a site where you can place your bookmarks and links so you can find your fav's wherever you are, whichever the computer you are using. And on top of it, it is a search engine, too, so you can tag your links with multiple tags so you can find it easily, later on.
But the funniest thing is that it is also a community since you can see who else has this link and the links other people have. Which is as well glorious as e.g. I link a site about Phonology of the Xhosa language and I see that someone else has this site linked, I check it out and I see this person has also a link to a site about the Phonetics of the Xhosa language, and now I can learn about both the Phonetics and the Phonology of the Xhosa language. Isn't that great?
The only pity is that it is bought by Yahoo!, that I don't like. But at least you don't need a Yahoo! account to be del.icio.us.ed.

Tuesday 13 December 2005

Christmas, oh Christmas...

I hate the falsity of Christmas.
Why do I have to smile?
I know many people has talked about that but I need to say it.

It is not fare that if you behave badly for most of the months of the year, suddenly you come to me (or make someone come to me) to try to make things better. For the sake of Christmas Eve's Dinner!
As Americans would say: Come ........... on!
This year I am not going to spend money on gifts (not because I am short of money now, because I have enough for a few presents). I don't want to participate of this Christmas Shopping Event. I will make presents: hand made or bought on charities or wherever the money I spend goes into a cause, not just for the next boat or trip of the owner.
Down with Shopping Centres, down with El Corte Inglés!
This reminds me of a chapter of The Simpsons where the owners of a Big Shopping Centre (Inspired in Wal-Mart, perhaps) suddenly invented a new feast: The Love Day, when you buy silly presents for your beloved ones, decorate your house with hearts and teddies and after that day you throw everything away.
Just after opening the presents Marge says: "We better start our Love Day cleanup! Kids, you take care of the wrapping paper, I'm going to dismantle Love Land." (Marge goes outside where Bears are playing Violins).
This is when Homer is Springfield's Sanitation Commissioner with the slogan "Can't Someone Else do it?". [The Simpsons, "Trash of the Titans", Episode 200th or 22nd of the 9th season].
(Here you can see quotations of The Simpsons and videos of this chapter, I haven't seen them, so I don't know what are they.)
This is it! We spend because they want us to spend.
I normally do not buy presents even for birthdays: I buy them if I am walking around and I find something I'd like someone to have it.
Christmas could be all year round.
We should be good people all year round.

But again: Human Behaviour...

Wednesday 7 December 2005

Poor Garfield

As I said, this week for me is: Sunday, Monday (I only worked morning), BH, Wednesday, BH, Friday.
So this means that I have (as I said on the previous post earlier today) three Mondays.
Garfield would be dead by Friday.

I love Garfield.
This mini-post is dedicated to SSG.

A week

I have been told off about not posting lately. It has been 7 days already. A week. But, you know, it has been quite hectic these days.
The think, even though the hectic-ness, nothing really important has happened. The best of all is the sun that, even though it is cold out there, is shining like in a beautiful Scandinavian spring. I am so loving it.
I have had some nice thoughts and I have been doing some research, i.e. I have some half-written posts.
I am feeling very lazy today. Yesterday I was off as it was Spanish Constitution day. Tomorrow I am off as it is the Immaculate Conception. So, as it has been said, this week is an aqueduct (when we have e.g. Sunday - day - Bank Holiday and we take that day off we call it to have bridge) or as well the week of the three Mondays like for me as I am not off today. Now I am sitting on my desk (luckily the boss is out and my colleague went to the shop --the other two people of the office are not in this morning), being told to increase work "quantity" as we are so much time off this month. What is what is worth? Quantity or quality? Humph! I hate my job. I so want to change. I want one what we call "intensive", i.e. 8 hours in a row (or even 9 with one for lunch). 8-4. To have all the afternoon to study (I haven't been able to go through all my books yet), to write, to read, to look at the sky, to post, to email, to meet people, to go to the cinema, to listen to all the new music I have and to do all those things that I have in my to-do list (which, actually, has at the bottom: to fall in love).