The strange fascination with New Year’s Eve celebrations

When I was young, we would as a family go to church at 11:00 pm on New Year’s Eve. The minister Rev. Arnold Cooper had an excellent sense of timing and the service would reach a climax right at midnight and he would pause while fireworks went off all over town and then briefly resume to give us an uplifting final blessing and send us on our way. During that pause, my father would slip a large denomination currency note into my hand, a tradition that I continued with my own children until they grew up and moved away. Then all the parishioners would mingle outside for awhile wishing each other all the best for the coming year. (This was Sri Lanka so it was warm and we could hang out outside indefinitely.) The family would then go home and eat and drink something before going to bed. It was low-key but nice.
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The real Louis C. K. reveals himself

After the blizzard of revelations about sexual harassment and abuse by a whole slew of famous people, it was only a matter of time before many of them started to plan their comebacks into the public’s favor by various levels of statements and acts of contrition. One of those is comedian Louis C. K. who has used the mechanism of turning up unannounced at the Comedy Cellar venue for stand-up comics to try out new material as part of his road back, though the reaction has been mixed to say the least.
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Bizarre kidnapping case

It is unfortunately not uncommon for the parent of a divorced or separated couple that was denied custody of the children to abduct the children. But one kidnapping case had so many bizarre and disturbing features that it merited some comment, the chief one being that the child who was kidnapped had been ‘married’ to one of the kidnappers, so it was simultaneously a wife kidnapping as well as a child kidnapping.

Four members of “extremist Jewish sect” Lev Tahor were arrested Friday and charged with kidnapping two children in upstate New York, the Department of Justice said. U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York’s Southern District charged Nachman Helbrans, Mayer Rosner, Aron Rosner, and Jacob Rosner with kidnapping two children from Woodbridge, New York and transporting them to Mexico, with the eventual goal of returning them to the sect’s base in Guatemala. The children’s mother had fled the Guatemala compound six weeks before the kidnapping, reportedly fearing for the safety of her children, and gained legal custody of all six. The release notes that “Public news reports indicate that children in Lev Tahor are often subject to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.”

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Just get lost, John Kelly

As is almost always the case with those who served as enablers for Donald Trump, once they leave the administration they try to distance themselves from him and his actions in order to regain some of the credibility, integrity, and self-respect that they shredded by their association with him. The latest to do so is former chief of staff John Kelly who now says in an interview that he should be judged not by the actions that Trump took while he served him but by what he did not do.
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The old two-step being danced again

It is the same old script. The Republicans give out tax cuts like candy that mostly benefit the wealthy and then when the budget deficit increases, they express surprise at this development and claim that salary and services for everyone else must be cut in the name of fiscal discipline because there is no other solution. I’ve lost count of how many times this stunt has been pulled and am amazed that people haven’t revolted in anger at being treated as if they were too stupid to know what is going on. Donald Trump has followed the pattern and used that same reasoning to cancel salary increases for nearly 2 million federal workers.
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Kevin Spacey’s weird video

When news broke on Christmas Eve that actor Kevin Spacey was going to be criminally charged with felony indecency assault and battery for sexually assaulting a teenager at a bar, few expected that he would respond with a bizarre three-minute video titled “Let me be Frank” where he channeled his character Frank Underwood from the show House of Cards for what seemed like an passive-aggressive pre-emptive defense.
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TV review: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (no spoilers)

I watched this show yesterday and have to agree with Kevin Fallon that it was a gimmicky disappointment, not up to the level of earlier episodes of Black Mirror that I found thought-provoking even if somewhat dark. Set in 1984, the main conceit of this latest offering is that it has a ‘choose your own story’ interactive structure where at various points you, the viewer, are asked to make a choice between two options that the chief protagonist Stefan is confronted with as he designs a ‘choose your own adventure’ computer game based on a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. You can already see the interweaving of multiple layers of reality.
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