General

Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, 2024 style

Which means going to bed before 11 p.m. Technically, I might still be up reading at midnight, so I might be awake for the calendar to flip from 2024 to 2025, the year in which flying cars and baby machines become reality.

I am surprised as I type this that I haven’t heard any fireworks. Maybe people are just quietly drinking heavily instead.

Happy new year.

UPDATE: It seems one person had a small cache of fireworks, and they set them off precisely at midnight. It lasted less than a minute, so my drinking heavily theory was probably correct.

The song most stuck in my head in 2024 is from 1976

And that song is “The Things We Do For Love” by 10cc, released as a single late in 1976. It was a big hit in Canada, peaking at #1, and I clearly remember it all over the radio at the time (I was about 13 years old, so just developing my taste–or lack thereof–in music). I found the song to be catchy, but schmaltzy, and declared it worthy of being mocked. I mocked it, with my friends, because we were extremely cool kids in our own minds.

The song resurfaced for me when I watched a few pop songs on YouTube from the late 70s/early 80s, which told the YouTube algorithm that I wanted to watch these videos to the exclusion of everything else, thus my home page became clogged with almost nothing but. One of the songs clogging things up was “The Things We Do For Love” and it made me reassess this now 48-year-old song. And it’s still schmaltzy, and still catchy, but there is more to it, that almost indefinable something that makes it more than just a tidy pop song.

I’m not a music-titian, so I can’t use the proper terminology to describe the things, but as a layperson, it comes down to these:

  • The song starts with lush background vocals that serve as an intro, swelling to the “start” of the song. It’s a welcome variation from the usual verse/chorus structure.
  • Piano and guitar are both featured and used well.
  • The lyrics, given the song title, are not as banal and mindless as one might expect. They’re not deep, either, but at least they’re not cringe-inducing.
  • Did I mention the background vocals?
  • The whole production is very lush and layered for a pop song.

The only down note (ho ho) is the way it fades at the end, as was the style at the time. It’s not terrible, but it still makes me think, “They didn’t know how to end the song.”

And they actually made a video for it, which is positively quaint. The two main band members appear to have just walked off the street and picked up their instruments, which is a fair bit better than having them wear matching sequinned jumpsuits.

I can’t say the song has made me want to check out the entire 10ccc oeuvre, but I did listen to “Not in Love” later and almost a half century later, I finally learned this is the song featuring the repeated, whispered vocal “Big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry”, which my friends and I mercilessly mocked at the time. It still comes across as just kind of weird in 2024, but at least I now know where the weirdness originated.

Anyway, that’s my Song of the Year 2024. I know I’ve heard contemporary music, too, but can’t think of a single song that stuck with me.

Clearing skies for 2025

Here’s hoping that 2025 will be better than 2024. I mean, maybe aliens will save us. FOR DINNER. Or maybe they’ll save us because they find us worth saving. It could happen.

And if it doesn’t, then maybe 2025 will be better in other ways. I can’t think of them right now, but I am optimistic that they will come to me in time. Presumably before 2025 concludes one year from today.

Clearing skies, as captured by me on my officially ancient iPhone 12, December 28, 2024

2024: The Year in Review (Spoiler: It kind of sucked)

I wasn’t sure how to summarize the year. It was not a good year. Bad things happened, and the stage is set for more bad things to happen in 2025. Global politics are a mess and fascism is on the rise.

I won’t even mention the U.S. election except to say that Americans have given themselves a generational black eye by putting Trump back in the White House when he belongs in jail. So much for accountability and consequences.

For me, the year was a series of health-related issues. I got sick twice for the first time in years, one minor illness, one that lingered a bit. I hurt my right knee again, but managed to bounce back and resumed running sooner than I had in 2023. I even posted some of my best run times in two years, which was nice. But health problems dogged me right to the end. I am only a day out from weeks of antibiotics to deal with a bacteria infection. This wiped out most of December, but I did manage to lose weight and keep most of it off as a result.

My return to running yesterday ended in disaster, as noted in an earlier post, when I tripped and fell hard on a sidewalk. A day later and I feel like I’m recovering from a car crash. Do not recommend.

Strata nonsense consumed much of my time. Too much. Stress was a constant companion. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, or dark. I just see the tunnel and it is very long.

Hopefully I’ll emerge from it in 2025.

May we all get through the next year intact.

Good riddance to 2024.

A cat trying, symbolically, to run from the year that was:

EDIT: Comics Outta Context had an apt choice to ring in the new year:

Trite or profound? Maybe both.

I saw this, uncredited, on Mastodon. On the one hand, it’s kind of trite. On the other, I like the actual colour and composition of the photograph and agree with the sentiment. It seems so much of our world is built around competition and while competition is not bad in itself, it perhaps shapes too much of what we do in our society, and encourages a kind of selfishness that isolates us from each other.

Anyway, that’s my deep thought for the morning!