The moon is bright tonight, and the first full moon of the new year will arrive in a few days, but the nights will probably still be too cold to spend much time outside looking at it. I find that my tolerance for cold (as well as my tolerance for heat) is rapidly diminishing as I age. Most annoying is that there is only one day in the next week when there is any possibility of rain, and that is slight, plus the day will be comparatively mild, so I'm going through all this discomfort but the cause of it will be doing nothing to assuage the drought. The misery would be much easier to tolerate if I thought that it was going to bring a pleasantly green spring and a summer with plentiful water.
New Year linkage: Something
scottobear linked to last night is this page from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain about a number of works of various sorts that would have entered the public domain this year had copyrights not been greatly extended by the law passed in 1976. Under current law they will enter the public domain in 2054, by which time I expect to be quite dead. My guess is that the law will be extended still farther before then, though, and maybe none of them will ever become part of the public domain. Meanwhile, all the stuff that can no longer earn a profit (the great majority of published works) will have vanished altogether. I have resolved this year to make no resolutions for the New Year. This has worked well for me for decades now, and I see no reason to interrupt a winning streak. I might make a resolution or two for Groundhog Day. We'll see.
