Looks like sunrise or sunset, doesn't it? No, it's absolutely midday in Madison. On the ice, beautiful light and intrepid skaters.

From the "In the Land of the Possible/Samantha Power has the President's ear. To what end?" by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker:

Her mother, Vera Delaney... a nephrologist... married a Dublin piano player, raconteur, dentist, and drinker named Jim Power—"a fearsomely formidable pub debater," as the Irish Independent once put it. "I was extremely close to my father, inseparable," Power said. "Where we hung out most of the time was the pub." Her father expounded on the day's papers, while she read mysteries by the light of a slot machine in the basement. Her parents' marriage didn't last. "My mother, in effect, started leading her own life," Power said. At the hospital, Delaney fell in love with her boss, Edmund Bourke. Divorce was illegal in Ireland, and they wanted more opportunities in medicine, so, when Samantha was nine and her brother was five, the family moved to Pittsburgh and, later, Atlanta. Jim Power remained in Ireland. She said, "We stayed in touch, and, then, the drink, I think." She trailed off. He died when she was fourteen. [Power's husband Cass] Sunstein recalled that, decades later, on a trip to Ireland, Power took him to visit her father's favorite pub, where they met a woman who had worked behind the bar and remembered her dad. Others seemed to drink just as much, and Power asked, "Why do you think my dad was the one who died?" The barwoman answered simply, "It's because you left." Power told me, "I knew he was drinking too much. But I had no idea he was sick—he was just forty-seven, and his death was devastating."

On this year's list, there's the book "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the movie "Vertigo," and the song "Johnny B. Goode."

There's also plenty of junk that few people care about, that might be snapped up and repurposed and given some amusing new life.

But it does seem right that Chuck Berry still gets the royalties from his song that has never fallen out of popularity in all this time.

"... and a juice fast or some 'journaling' was not going to cut it.... I vowed that every day, for 365 days, I would enforce a strict routine of belly laughter and orgasms...."

Enforce, eh?

Yesterday, I wrote about the "self-marriage" trend. Now, it seems, we're confronted with the possibility of self-rape.

I'm up at 6 a.m., so you can imagine the kind of New Year's Eve revelry that took place at Meadhouse.

I live by days, but I acknowledge years. I hope 2015 is a good one.

ADDED: A year ago, on New Year's Day morning, I was up a 5 a.m., and the message was the same in so many words:

Happy New Year. Yes, I'm up early. To bed early and up early.

It's the way of the old, but I'm glad to be old — old and alive here on Planet Earth, with all you other Earthlings, young and old, who have made it this far....