Above: Drizzly Hamilton weather robs me of my New Year’s Eve sunset bookend, so I must resort to an internet sunset. I dial up the streaming webcam from Mallory Square in Key West and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. Good enough! (Side note: Vodka tonics and G&Ts with cucumber slices = a revelation.)

I accidentally see the sun rise on the first day of the 00s. In the pre-dawn hours of Saturday 1 January 2000, I am in my car, somewhere in rural Central Virginia, doing an ill-advised two-hour drive home to Charlottesville from a rather low-key “Millennium Eve” party in Arlington. I have declined the party hosts’ offer of a couch or floor to crash on. I am sober but delirious with all-nighter sleep deprivation.

I travel due south between five-something and seven-something a.m., and in the middle of the drive the cloudless eastern sky to my left pours a slow, hour-long bloom of rainbowed dawn light over low silhouetted mountains and rolling hills and cold pasturelands. Eventually sunrise ensues. It looks like all sunrises look, only more so. There is something to be said for getting to watch the sun come up on the first day of the year/decade/century/millennium in such surroundings. (Yes, technically 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century and the second millennium, we’ve all been over this before, but it is the numerals, not the durations, that count.) A transporting experience, albeit one that might’ve been more pleasant had I not been occupied with furiously drumming on the steering wheel and slapping myself in the face the whole time, trying desperately to stop falling asleep.

Anyway, today it is the last day of the 00s, and, to wrap things up in a bookendish sort of way, I am hoping to accidentally see the sun set. At this latitude it is scheduled for 4:53pm. Just in time for cocktail hour! I will probably not be in the car.

Entertainingly unsavory tagline seen on the signage of a Southern BBQ restaurant that recently opened in Hamilton: WE PUT THE SOUTH IN YOUR MOUTH.

A bookmark: Photo of Laura and me, circa the end of December 2003, in Florida.

G. Clooney, Up in the Air, fooling no one: Photos are for people who can’t remember. Drink some gingko and let the photos burn.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon: “Spade stopped her with a palm-up motion of one hand. The upper part of his face frowned. The lower part smiled.”

Melville, A Very Moby Xmas:

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Above: Us in the car last month, in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, singing along to Robbie Williams, asking the musical question: Do You Mind?

Above: Xmas time, Hotel Fantod style (Part 2). The trees in front of our building have been elaborately adorned with winter-blue Xmas lights, but whoever did the job chose not to follow the traditional method of stringing the lights throughout the tops of the trees, opting rather to densely coil the lights around a section of the trees’ middles, i.e. the trunks and thickest limbs, starting twelve feet off the ground and stopping partway up each branch. At night, the overall effect is that the building is guarded by a line of floating luminous icy clawed tentacle-hands of death.

Above: Xmas time, Hotel Fantod style (Part 1). Our well-meaning superintendent has put up Xmas decorations, some of which, it must be said, are fucking creepy. The building’s corridors are already plenty creepy enough without the addition of tiny costumed homuncules lurking in the corners, waiting to give residents heart attacks. Shown here are a terrifying solitary elf on the loading/maintenance floor, and, in a shadowy corridor off the lobby, an uncanny child-sized snowman wearing clothes.

Riddle 47 from the Old English Exeter Book Riddles, in Charles W. Kennedy’s translation:

Book-Moth

A moth ate a word.      To me it seemed
A marvelous thing      when I learned the wonder
That a worm had swallowed,      in darkness stolen,
The song of a man,      his glorious sayings,
A great man’s strength;      and the thieving guest
Was no whit the wiser      for the words it ate.

M. Keaton and R. Wuhl, Batman (1989):

WAYNE   Bruce Wayne.

KNOX   Alexander Knox.

WAYNE   I read your work. I like it a lot.

KNOX   Thanks. Can I have a grant?

For the month of Descendbeer: Wendy Cope, “English Weather”:

January’s grey and slushy,
February’s chill and drear,
March is wild and wet and windy,
April seldom brings much cheer.
In May, a day or two of sunshine,
Three or four in June, perhaps.
July is usually filthy,
August skies are open taps.
In September things start dying,
Then comes cold October mist.
November we make plans to spend
The best part of December pissed.

Department of Ow But Then Again Yum: Woman Charged with Pouring Boiling Grits on Boyfriend. (Via Camps.)

Yesterday MarketWatch.com does a video feature on the just-published San Francisco Panorama, and at the 00:20 mark, in one of their citizen-on-the-street shots, who do they happen to show buying a copy (or two) but my brother Dave!