The Big Trip 16 is imminent

The cover of a Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias'
 album from 1976. It hasn't really stood
the test of time!

Because I know we are about to go to India on The Big Trip 16 I could not get out of my mind a line from a song by a band called Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias. The line is “Here come the Rupees” and the reference, of course, is obvious. I rescued the album (the sleeve is pictured here: it dates from 1976) and played it to see if I could find the reference. It’s on a track called “Lost Gurus” which also contains the somewhat memorable line “Deutschland Deutschland über Vanessa Redgrave” which put me in mind of the song by Half Man Half Biscuit which (from memory and without retrieving that particular album) was called “Fuckin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmus” (apparently the funniest song ever written about an England and Middlesex cricketer).

Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias are not represented on Spotify and neither can you download their stuff from iTunes. Wikipedia contains a brief reference which describes them as a “a comedy rock band” and says the name is a corruption of the Latin American band Alberto y Los Trios Paraguayos. Be that as it may I smelt a whiff of influence by Frank Zappa particularly “We’re only in it for the money”.

Vedic Mathematics refers to a technique of mental calculation based
on a set of 16 Sutras, or word-formulae and its 13 derivatives
with which any mathematical problems can be solved rapidly.
It teaches pattern-observation using the Sutras, and therefore
leads to speedy calculations. Now you know!!

Whatever the arcane rock reference the rupees are indeed coming (or perhaps The G and I are coming to the Rupees). In a week’s time we depart for the Indian sub-continent. I learn that nobody knows very much about Indian history because the early Indians wrote nothing down – or at least very little. But this does not prevent the publication of mighty tomes about Indian history. A trip to Wikipedia (always advisable) finds an article called “History of India” which contains a chronology of shit that happened. My rapid assessment is that things hotted up in the subcontinent in about 1750BC with what’s called the Early, Middle and Late Vedic periods that ended in about 600BC. Apparently Sanskrit originated at the time of these Vedic dudes. There are claims of texts from the middle second millennium BC but they're lost so I guess they don't count. I have tried to read Vedic mathematics (even to the extent of starting to read Kim Plofker's "Mathematics in India) but I have given up.

Anyway we are flying to Dehli (North India) and will be there on 9 and 10 February and then we go to Agra for 11 and 12 (which is where the Taj Mahal is) and finally Jaipur on 13 and 14 February. We leave to go to the UK on 15 February. We’re only in the UK for 10 days or so and then we come home. I will say more about the UK leg of the Big Trip 16 in due course but its prime purpose is to drop in on The Parents.

No doubt I will get into the holiday groove!

I should like to be able to say that I am looking forward to all this. I would like to but I cannot quite. I will of course enjoy myself hugely when I get there but the idea of the flight is off-putting. There was a day when I would hop on and off planes with gay abandon; but not any more. But I know I will get over the flight.

There is another thing that I have noticed about work and holidays. Why is it that things start to get interesting or that deadlines loom immediately before I go on holiday? They always say that the only person who needs a holiday is one who has just come back for one. I think this is true. I’m working on a couple of projects at present and both of them will get really interesting just at the tie I an away. I don’t want to miss anything. Of course, I’ll get over it and those things that seemed so important won’t be that important when O look back in a few years! Nonetheless it’s frustrating.

But be all that as it may we shall be flying out next Saturday and The G is already busy preparing me for this. As ever she has a solid program of activity lined up and all of will be enjoyable. I expect to learn something and to see stuff I have not seen before. We will see.

New Year's Day: load of old nonsense

I have always regarded New Year’s Eve with a sceptical eye. It’s possible that this is just a “bah humbug” sort of response but I don’t think so. The G and I were in bed last night (New Year’s Eve) by 2230 and I was asleep by just after 2300 so whatever strange change in the universe’s mystical lines occurred was unknown to me. This morning I awoke and the world looked pretty much the same. Here is the view as I ate my breakfast. It’s not a bad view as views go; at this time of the morning and at this time of the year it’s too hot to sit out with the view of the lake.

The view from the back deck complete with weird totem pole thing

But back to New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Why is it that a single tick of the clock in a single location (the one you are in) is such a cause for celebration? After all that particular tick of that particular clock holds no particular significance for someone in another time zone. So it’s all arbitrary really.

I saw a post of Facebook yesterday that said something like “I am not planning to make any resolutions for the New Year. I was fabulous in 2015 and I will continue to be fabulous in 2016”. I wish I had thought of that.

I had a quick look at the history of the New Year celebration. The Babylonians, about 3,000 years ago, appear to have celebrated their New Year at the time of the vernal equinox which, as we all know, is on 20 or 21 March (it depends on the position of the sun and the earth). In the southern hemisphere it’s called the autumnal equinox. You will immediately be on to the fact that there must be a September equinox to match up with the March equinox. And you would be right.

If the Babylonians were celebrating the start of a New Year with the onset of Spring then, by rights, an antipodean New Year would be celebrated in September. In fact, that is just how the French Republican Calendar saw things. They kicked things off on 22 September which, if the Babylonians were right, is about when everything starts dying off in the northern hemisphere. There never was any logic to the French and their ways.

The Romans celebrated the New Year on 1 January 153 BCE but it wasn’t until Julius Caesar came along in 46 BCE and introduced a new solar-based calendar that the whole thing got regularised. At least it got regularised in the Western canon. The Chinese did something different at least in part because the Chinese calendar is different from the Julian (and later the Gregorian) calendars. We won’t go there but I think the message is that, because the sun goes round the earth every 365 days, 6 hours, 45 minutes and 48 seconds, we’re all hanging around until it comes back again.

I knew, of course, that when I awoke the headline news on abc.net.au would be trumpeting a Sydney firework display like no other. I expected that the report would tell me that revellers thronged every available space and saw the New Year in with whoops and shrieks. I was not disappointed; this is pretty much what the headline said.

And, as it happened, the day passed pretty much like any other.