
Godt Nytaar!


Tuba Skinny, featuring bandleader Shaye Cohn on cornet. Although we were in NOLA last May, I didn’t get a chance to see them because I was too busy chillin’ on a balcony with the dogs.
Formed in 2016, Lucky Chops began as a group of subway buskers from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, New York City, and now they perform world-wide.
German bluesman Timo Gross has been around for a while but he’s relatively unknown in the US; I had to run his Wikipedia entry through Google Translate.
One man ska band JER / Skatune Network rang in the New Year in 2016 and somehow I missed it. Turnitup!
Yep, it’s almost time to turn the calendar ahead again, but before we do, we have a porch that needs sitting on. See you there.



My late Papa Strutts always referred to it by its original descriptive, The Year of the Cock. Both he and I were born in those years, so go figger.
The photos above were taken during a Tet Parade in Little Saigon, California, the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam. The pretty girls in the bottom photo are waving the flag of the vanquished Republic of Vietnam, not the communist state.
Years ago I made friends with a local Vietnamese shopkeeper and gave her my copy of the current issue of National Geographic that had a lot of photos of the country. She and her non-English speaking husband were amazed, recognized a lot of the places pictured, and I asked her where she was from, expecting the name of a city or province in South Viet Nam. She replied, “Kansas.”

In hexadecimal, we are now in the year 7E1 Anno Domini.
At one second after 1:01AM on 1 January 2017 we’ll have another numerical palindrome:
1117111 = day / month / year, hour : minute : second.
If you missed that, there’s also this one: 1/1/17/1:11.
2017 is a Prime Number, Mertens function zero.
2017 is also a sexy prime, meaning that there’s another prime number (2011) within six digits in the numerical sequence.
20/17 is pretty good vision, too.
Nostram salutem MMXVII. Now go kick ass.

[Found here.]
I’m a pessimistic optimist, in that I expect the worst, and if the worst doesn’t come to pass, it’s gravy. This new year has the potential to be just as bad economically as 2011, but I have hope.
Trouble is, hope don’t feed the bulldog, so we’re forced to hunker down until the storm passes. There’s a small patch of blue sky on the economic horizon that suggests the worst may be over. Don’t bet on it clearing until after November when the political pendulum begins its slow return to normalcy, providing plenty of gravy and mixed metaphors for all.