"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> As the counter changes digits, let us rejoice that humanity has gone
> another entire year without blowing itself up. As we celebrate the random
> division of an arbitrary time period, let us look away from the true
> twenty-billion-year chronology of the Universe; let us forget the
> unthinkable vastness of the space between stars, and rejoice in whatever
> microscopic significance our infinitesimal selves might have.
>
> This festival of passing time reminds us of our ephemeral lives, like
> candles flaring up whitely for an instant and then diminishing to a red
> glow, sinking until even the embers fade. As the Earth completes
> another cycle around the Sun, we rejoice in the repetition of the
> ancient, futile pattern of birth and reproduction and death. Let us
> celebrate the irrevocable passing of another year of wasted time,
> another year of missed opportunities, another year of broken dreams.
>
> It's a time when we accumulate years of debt on our credit cards to mask
> our true selfishness. It's a time to brighten our meaningless existences
> with mercantile frenzies of acquisition. It's a time when carols of love
> and hope deny our true loneliness and despair. It's a time when false
> smiles and ostentatious declarations of friendship hide the dark pits of
> fear and hatred that lurk in our souls. It's a time to recite insincere
> prayers to a bleak and uncaring Universe.
>
> It's a time when our nervous laughter tries to drown out the sound of
> hydrogen freezing in the interstellar void. It's a time when the radiant
> warmth of a fire or a loved one lets us forget, for a brief moment, the
> bitter three-degree-Kelvin cold of the endless night.
>
> ** ON THE BRIGHTER SIDE **
>
> Only 1,547 shopping days left till the Singularity!
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> ... tick ... tick ... tick ...
<Chortle> Thanks for the humor, Eliezer! This is one that I'll hold in
stock to send back to those well-meaning fools who send me those moronic
"Jesus loves you" spams.
-- Doug Jones "The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow." --M. Twain "I guess that explains why us comics are such screwed-up losers." --D. Jones
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