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A beautiful roundup and current events summary, and some important words for the year ahead.

Minnie Louise Haskins was a professor at the London School of Economics. She taught there from the end of World War I to the near-end of World War II. Interestingly, Haskins is best known not for her scholarship – as distinguished as it may have been – but for dabbling in poetry. Her most noteworthy work, particularly fitting for the start of the New Year, is one of the most quoted poems of the past century: God Knows And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: “Give me a light that I may tread...

A Carrier Address found in the last year and identified as Henry Livingston's by statistical tests carried out with Emeritus Professor Mac Jackson. Identification was carried out by creating a set of unknown poems, which took the place of the body of Moore's poetry for comparison, and a set of known author poems used as a control, and subjected to the same statistical analysis tests, including small words, phonemes, rhymes and noun phrases. The 1812 Carrier Address is significant because it reuses the Christmas poem's night visitor, but here it's a nightmare sprite awakening the narrator. The Henry Livingston website...

Santa brought me a nice new crepe pan for Christmas. I haven’t seasoned and tried it out yet, but my first endeavor will be this recipe from Allrecipes for crepes with crab filling, which looks like a pretty classic one, and would make a nice late-night supper on New Year’s Eve: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/233544/crab-crepes/And here's a link to a video from the French Cooking Academy on crepe-making technique. This is for a sweet crepe with rum, but adapt the technique to your recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFXFeOU1nIMany recipes that I've seen suggest letting the batter rest for a few hours or even overnight, and here...

News boys, who might be 50 years old and delivering their papers on horseback, would traditionally exchange a poetic summary of the year's news for a tip on New Year's. It was commonly a separately printed sheet, though it would occasionally appear within the newspaper, itself. Henry Livingston mainly wrote New Year's pieces, rather than Christmas ones.

Winning over China: Donald Trump's five-year-old granddaughter becomes 'friendship messenger' after video for her singing in Mandarin takes the country by storm Ivanka Trump attended a lunar new year party at the Chinese Embassy in Washington DCShe went with her daughter Arabella as the guest of China's ambassador to the United States, Cui TiankaiIvanka posted a new video of Arabella performing a song in Mandarin on Thursday to her Instagram page The 5-year-old started learning Mandarin when she was just 18 months oldSome web users praised the Trump family for the idea while others said they wanted a greeting...

By now, many people in the West have long recovered from their New Year's Eve hangovers. But for many people in East Asia, especially in China, the real new year just arrived and the most significant new year celebrations just started.  Of course, I'm referring to the Chinese New Year. The date of Chinese New Year is determined by a traditional Chinese lunar calendar, which is based on the lunar cycles, aka the phases of the moon.  Like many things in China, the lunar calendar has been around for a long time (I'm talking about thousands of years). Traditional Chinese...

1. The Obama family’s final White House “Christmas” card actually made no mention of Christmas for the eighth straight year the first family has resided at 1600 Pennsylvania. We can only surmise that, while President Obama maintains he is a Christian, neither he, nor the first lady, nor their two daughters believed Jesus was the reason for the season. 2. Following last week’s death of actress Carrie Fisher and, the very next day, mother Debbie Reynolds, actor Charlie Sheen, who is HIV positive, who has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, who has multiple arrests on domestic violence and...

"In Spain, revelers wear red underwear on New Year's Eve for good luck. They also eat a dozen grapes at midnight." (NOTE: my favorite, heh)

My favorite YouTuber, Dale Calder, posted a video today about Hogmanay, which is the Scots word for the last day of the year. He showed how to make ‘Tablet’, a fudge-like treat that is traditional for this day and very easy to make. Here is a link to his video, where he also tells some New Year memories from his boyhood in Canada; and also one to Wild-Eyed Southern Celt’s recipe, which includes a link to making a whiskey-flavored tablet: http://dalecaldersblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/making-tablet-for-hogmanay-stories.htmlhttp://wildeyedsoutherncelt.com/traditional-scottish-tablet/************************************* I think it was Freeper Boatbums who posted a nice recipe for Zucchini Pie last week, and reminded me...

Who's ready to end this year with some silliness?

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, so thought I'd remind one and all. At the second Trump-Clinton debate, Anderson Cooper was a moderator. Trump missed a golden opportunity to really take one to the media. The liberal media is having a ball with Trump's use of the "P" word. But Anderson Cooper had his "P" moment too on live television. I would have loved to see Anderson's face and the media reaction had Trump reminded the national audience that in 2013 during the New Year's Eve countdown in Times Square on CNN, Kathy Griffin ( not Kathy Lee Griffin )...

The traditional New Year's Eve celebrations on the Champs-Elysees will be the first large assembly to be sanctioned in Paris since France's state of emergency started in November. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people gather on Paris's Champs-Elysees to celebrate the "Reveillon," as the French call December 31. But after a year that started with the Charlie Hebdo attacks and ended with the November 13 shooting and bomb attacks that killed 130 people, it was unclear whether New Year celebrations in Paris would go ahead as usual. France has been under a state of emergency since November 13, and...

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei may be urging the Jewish state’s extinction and anticipating its demise, but Iranian President Hassan Rouhani still took time Sunday to wish the Jewish people a happy new year, just in time for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. ...

Will the Real January 1st Please Stand Up? A Homily for New Years By: Msgr. Charles PopeThis feast day, of January 1, is a very complex tapestry, both culturally in liturgically. Perhaps we can use the second reading by St. Paul to the Galatians as a way to weave through some of the many details. We can look at it in three parts.I. The Chronology of our celebration. The text from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians says, When the fullness of time had come…Most people, both in the wider culture and in the Church are going about today...

“Alas, Alas for the Great City!” An Urgent Plea for Prayer at the New Year! By: Msgr. Charles PopeWe are very close to the new year, 2015 AD. And most of us at the new year have it in mind to pray for the future year not only for ourselves, but also for our family, country, and culture. With that in mind, there is something of an admonition to us all that I would share from Scripture. For while we look to the new year with hope, we do well to soberly assess the warnings of God that are seemingly...

Some 12% fewer cars were set alight on Wednesday compared with 2013, in a measure of what has effectively become an annual event in French suburbs since riots in 2005 in Paris and elsewhere. The number of vehicles torched fell from 1,067 a year ago to 940, the interior ministry said in a statement. Security was high in France overnight following a series of street attacks. While the car-burning can be easily traced back to 2005, some correspondents say the idea of burning cars as a form of protest in France dates back into the 1990s.

2014 Saw the public exposure and admission by Progressives of the true natural of the philosophy of Government. Progressive Professor Jonathan Gruber was caught on Video and Audio mocking the alleged ignorance of the American masses. (You review this here: We've been Grubered). Essentially Progressive Jonathan Gruber openly and brazenly exposed our Progressive Government's belief system. That belief system being that "Progressive Educated Elites have the right and duty to lie to the American Public because rank and file Americans are allegedly too stupid to know what good for them." This writer exposed that Progressive belief system in this article...

It's 2015So....here are some calendars to start the year

Every year many of us do it. Make those same, predictable, boring resolutions. We keep making these same resolutions year after year...and don't stick with them, so I’ve come up with a more reasonable list of resolutions for 2015. 1. Eat more carbs. You’re going to anyway. Why suffer without bread, potatoes, and for God’s sake, even orange juice. We all like our carbs and you should be sure you include them in every meal. You’ve been eating them all along, and you probably don’t weigh 400 pounds, so who cares? 2.Forget exercising. You’ll waste your money joining a gym...