Season's Greetings to All

Merry Christmas to all y’all!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs (Just back from Divine Liturgy at St. Basil’s Church in Metairie, LA. Currently enjoying a mimosa before brunch.)

Thank you. Bah Humbug and a merry winter solstice to you. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year and is perfect for those things that must be done under cover of darkness. I'm celebrating the holiday by moving and restacking a cord of firewood up 50 stairs (with some hired assistance).

Likewise and may your 2023 tax deductions eventually be accepted by your taxing authority.

I don't wish. I calculate.

A few days before or after the winter solstice is not going to make much difference in the length of darkness available for nefarious deeds. For example, we're now 4 days past the winter solstice. Plugging the numbers into a handy online calculator,

I find that the available darkness tonight (Dec 25) is: 16:56 (sunset) -> 07:23 (sunrise) while on the night of the winter solstice (Dec 21), it's: 16:54 (sunset) -> 07:21 (sunrise) which is a difference in the time of darkness of: (16:56 - 16:54) - (07:23 - 07:21) = 2 - 2 = 0 minutes.

In other words, you have the same amount of darkness tonight to pull off whatever nefarious deeds you had planned on the winter solstice.

Hanukkah finished on the 15th of Decemeber as well.

John, you can't seriously expect me to drink *rum* over Christmas. I'm flabbergasted by such a suggestion , quite frankly. In any event, this concoction is, it would appear, not what it claims to be:

"Ron Zacapa Centenario Sistema Solera 23 is a versatile sweetened rum that can be enjoyed neat or in cocktails. But if you care about the source of your spirits, there are better options: Zacapa’s packaging misleads consumers into believing it’s aged longer than it is, and it includes additives like sugar and artificial coloring. "

See the whole review here:

That's pre-history. What evidence is there for this assertion? Has an ancient still been discovered somewhere? ;-)

Or by a genetic condition such as haemochromatosis for that matter; even if you're tea-total.

People who can trace their ancestry back to certain places like Scotland and Ireland will have some enhanced level of built-in protection against the booze. Not so the Japanese. When I visited Japan some years ago, I was astonished by all these prostrate bodies on the streets and pavements where drinkers had passed out from over indulgence. No one seemed the least bit bothered about it and car drivers would just drive around them!

Tastes good to me, now that 10 Cane is gone.

There's a tradeoff between individual survival and tribal survival. Killing off older people isn't so bad for the tribe, but avoiding wars can be.

Read the book. Or if you perfer, keep believing that you have nothing to learn.

Fred thinks *everything* is calamitous to mankind. When you say alcohol's been a "net benefit" to civilization, that's a bit like saying that the atom bomb was a net benefit to ending WW2 in the far east. The cost of alcoholism to families where one or both of the parents are sufferers can be catastrophic. The stereotype of - for example - Irishmen being perpetually drunk wife-beaters is no exaggeration. In fact is was virtually the norm and extremely widespread in Ireland for much of the 20th century. I think you'd struggle to get the relatives of such violent and utterly self-centred individuals to accept there was any benefit whatsoever to alcohol consumption!

Which calendar would you trust? The 12 or 13 month Hebrew calendar, which has been functional since the creating of the world (5784 years) with little maintenance beyond adding an extra month 7 times every 19 years?

The calendar is also luni-solar, which means it handles both the lunar and solar cycles.

Or, are you going to believe in the Gregorian patch to the Julian calendar, which ran off the rails in 1582, after functioning for only about 1800 years? It only supports the solar cycles? How are werewolves going to predict the night of the full moon? My guess(tm) is that Pope Gregory couldn't handle the math and simply discarded the lunar calendar.

The Hebrew calendar is also indecisive about holidays, which are often celebrated for two or more days instead of just one.

I haven't counted, but I suspect that if I included leap months and minor holidays, every other day of the year will be a Jewish holiday, which might be a good thing.

It's not too late to depricate the Gregorian calendar and adopt the Hebrew calendar in its place.

Well, do keep in mind the old saw that all Jewish holidays are basically, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” Doing that every day would involve buying new clothes a lot. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yessir. So there'll be a new holiday to commemorate the seizing of Gaza and its absorbtion into 'greater Israel.'

Although the Jewish calendar can spontaneously spawn significant spiels, the Gregorian calendar is about fifteen times more accurate. And the Iranian calendar is about thirty-four times more accurate than the Gregorian calendar.

Danke,

People who drink a little live longer than those who don't.

The move we learn about the physiological effects of alcohol, the more surprising this gets.

The psychological effect of a small dose of alcohol seems to be to make people slightly more relaxed and sociable, which makes social events work better. My wife noticed that her lectures went over better if the audience had been given a glass of wine before the lecture got under way.

My suspicion is that very moderate drinking correlates with a better social life, which does have health advantages.

We probably need a better drug to create that effect. Canabis doesn't seem to be a promising candidate - ethanol is very simple chemical (C2H5OH) and anything better is going to be much more complicated and expensive.

Whatever they may come up with in the future it's hard to see how it can ever overcome the twin perils of tolerance and dependence. We've seen this time and time again in the development of drugs intended to treat anxiety. Despite all the grand claims from the pharmacutical companies over the course of decades, nothing has yet come on the market which is both efficacious *and* free from the adverse consequences of long-term use.

In fact we are celebrating the solistice, Hanneke, kerstmis, whatever. The exact date is immaterial. The solstice is something to be celebrated despite the hijacking of religious people of the feast. Spring is coming!

Coffee, yes. Chocolate no. ITYM *donuts* and coffee. We'd still be at sub-Saharan levels of development if we were relying on chocolate. Donuts have been shown to create an explosion of creativity in the brain, especially when consumed with strong coffee. OTOH, brain scans of test subjects given chocolate in place of the donuts showed no brain activity whatsoever. IOW, clinical death.

Keep in mind that John Larkin's grasp of science is so rudimentary that he recycle climate change denial propaganda, and his grasp of politics lets him assert that Donald Trump has "common sense".

Chocolate rarely kills anybody, except by inducing obesity. It is apparently a mild anti-depressant.