January Birthday Quotes

I KNEW IT WAS OVER when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring when you used to make the sun rise when trees used to throw themselves in front of you to be paper for love letters that was how i knew i had to do it swaddle the kids we never had against january's cold slice bundle them in winter clothes they never needed so i could drop them off at my mom's even though she lives on the other side of the country and at this late west coast hour is assuredly east coast sleeping peacefully her house was lit like a candle the way homes should be warm and golden and home and the kids ran in and jumped at the bichon frise named lucky that she never had they hugged the dog it wriggled and the kids were happy yours and mine the ones we never had and my mom was grand maternal, which is to say, with style that only comes when you've seen enough to know grace like when to pretend it's christmas or a birthday so she lit her voice with tiny lights and pretended she didn't see me crying as i drove away to the hotel connected to the bar where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had just because it shares your first name because they don't make a whisky called baby and i only thought what i got was what i ordered i toasted the hangover inevitable as sun that used to rise in your name i toasted the carnivals we never went to and the things you never won for me the ferris wheels we never kissed on and all the dreams between us that sat there like balloons on a carney's board waiting to explode with passion but slowly deflated hung slave under the pin- prick of a tack hung heads down like lovers when it doesn't work, like me at last call after too many cheap too many sweet too much whisky makes me sick, like the smell of cheap, like the smell of the dead like the cheap, dead flowers you never sent that i never threw out of the window of a car i never really owned

On January 1, 1919, all the yearlings in the big stable celebrated their second birthday. It didn’t matter that all of them had some months to go before they were actually two years of age. Officially, in the eyes of the Thoroughbred Racing Association, they were two-year-olds, grown up and old enough to begin their racing careers the following spring.

I read it twice, then I said, "Well, why don't you?" "Why don't I what?" "Why don't you wish her many happy returns? It doesn't seem much to ask." "But she says on her birthday." "Well, when is her birthday?" "Can't you understand?" said Bobbie. "I've forgotten." "Forgotten!" I said. "Yes," said Bobbie. "Forgotten." "How do you mean, forgotten?" I said. "Forgotten whether it's the twentieth or the twenty-first, or what? How near do you get to it?" "I know it came somewhere between the first of January and the thirty-first of December. That's how near I get to it.

Ten Things To Do In January: • Read a good book • Get a Library Card • Walk 30 minutes a day • Send a Birthday card to a friend • Invest in a Fitness Tracker • Buy a Coin jar and save those quarters and nickels • Donate to a Charity • Volunteer 45 minutes of your time to an Organization • Take a Yoga Class • Volunteer at Bingo night a Nursing Home

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose. However more abbreviated than it's cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old. February is pitiless, and it's boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within" February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui holding both progress and contentment at bay. If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Where you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

In a windowless nook of a downtown Roanoke funeral parlor, not far from where Tess once roamed the streets, Patricia caressed the back of the scar, as if cupping a baby's head, and told her poet goodbye. It was January 2, Tess's birthday. She would have been twenty-nine. Patricia tucked the treasures of her daughter's life inside the vest--a picture of her boy and one of his cotton onesies that was Tess's favorite, some strands of Koda's hair, and a sand dollar.

That’s swell. That’s what I call answering like a man. When is your birthday?” “In January.” “I’d have sworn to it. So is mine. I believe the highest types are born in January. It’s barometric—you can look it up in Ellsworth Huntington. The parents make love in spring when the organism is healthiest and then the best specimens are conceived. If you want children you should plan to knock up your dear one in that season. Ancient wisdom is right. Now science comes lately and finds it out.

She would, on the birthday of Christ, allow herself what she called "an extra helping of prayer." At the time of the Civil War, she would pray for peace. Always, she asked God to spare me and my father. But at Christmas, she talked to God as if He were Clerk of the Acts in the Office of Public Works. She prayed for cleaner air in London. She prayed that our chimneys would not fall over in the January winds; she prayed that our neighbour, Mister Simkins, would attend to his cesspit, so that it would cease its overflow into ours. She prayed that Amos Treefeller would not slip and drown "going down the public steps to the river at Blackfriars, which are much neglected and covered in slime, Lord." And she prayed, of course, that plague would not come. As a child, she allowed me to ask God to grant me things for which my heart longed. I would reply that my heart longed for a pair of skates made of bone or for a kitten from Siam. And we would sit by the fire, the two of us, praying. And then we would eat a lardy cake, which my mother had baked herself, and ever since that time the taste of lardy cake has had about it the taste of prayer.

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking 'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!' But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button. I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! It must be a tusk there, a ghost column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is. Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small. Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate. I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield, A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so. I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle, No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air. But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide. Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----- Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece purple, Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me. It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it. Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.

Months later… I try my best to enjoy summer vacation, knowing that in a few weeks I’ll be heading into the last semester of my senior year. I should’ve graduated in June, but because Robbie and I moved around during my freshman year, I fell behind a semester. Even though I won’t graduate and walk across the stage until December, my eighteenth birthday is only a few weeks away. That’s when I’ll be forced to leave the house. After the fallout with Cain back in January, I haven’t heard from him other than the few times he came by with gifts and tried to see me.

She went around reading everything- the directions on the grits bag, Tate's notes, and the stories from her fairy-tale books she had pretended to read for years. Then one night she made a little oh sound, and took the old Bible from the shelf. Sitting at the table, she turned the thin pages carefully to the one with the family names. She found her own at the very bottom: There it was, her birthday: Miss Catherine Danielle Clark, October 10, 1945. Then, going back up the list, she read the real names of her brothers and sisters: Master Jeremy Andrew Clark, January 2, 1939. "Jeremy," she said out loud. "Jodie, I sure never thought a' you as Master Jeremy." Miss Amanda Margaret Clark, May 17, 1937. Kya touched the name with her fingers. Repeated it several times. She read on. Master Napier Murphy Clark, April 14, 1936. Kya spoke softly, "Murph, ya name was Napier." At the top, the oldest, Miss Mary Helen Clark, September 19, 1934. She rubbed her fingers over the names again, which brought faces before her eyes. They blurred, but she could see them all squeezed around the table eating stew, passing cornbread, even laughing some. She was ashamed that she had forgotten their names, but now that she'd found them, she would never let them go again. Above the list of children she read: Mister Jackson Henry Clark married Miss Julienne Maria Jacques, June 12, 1933. Not until that moment had she known her parents' proper names. She sat there for a few minutes with the Bible open on the table. Her family before her. Time ensures children never know their parents young. Kya would never see the handsome Jake swagger into an Asheville soda fountain in early 1930, where he spotted Maria Jacques, a beauty with black curls and red lips, visiting from New Orleans.

Mom?” Then again, louder. “Mom?” She turned around so quickly, she knocked the pan off the stove and nearly dropped the gray paper into the open flame there. I saw her reach back and slap her hand against the knobs, twisting a dial until the smell of gas disappeared. “I don’t feel good. Can I stay home today?” No response, not even a blink. Her jaw was working, grinding, but it took me walking over to the table and sitting down for her to find her voice. “How—how did you get in here?” “I have a bad headache and my stomach hurts,” I told her, putting my elbows up on the table. I knew she hated when I whined, but I didn’t think she hated it enough to come over and grab me by the arm again. “I asked you how you got in here, young lady. What’s your name?” Her voice sounded strange. “Where do you live?” Her grip on my skin only tightened the longer I waited to answer. It had to have been a joke, right? Was she sick, too? Sometimes cold medicine did funny things to her. Funny things, though. Not scary things. “Can you tell me your name?” she repeated. “Ouch!” I yelped, trying to pull my arm away. “Mom, what’s wrong?” She yanked me up from the table, forcing me onto my feet. “Where are your parents? How did you get in this house?” Something tightened in my chest to the point of snapping. “Mom, Mommy, why—” “Stop it,” she hissed, “stop calling me that!” “What are you—?” I think I must have tried to say something else, but she dragged me over to the door that led out into the garage. My feet slid against the wood, skin burning. “Wh-what’s wrong with you?” I cried. I tried twisting out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t even look at me. Not until we were at the door to the garage and she pushed my back up against it. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I know you’re confused, but I promise that I’m not your mother. I don’t know how you got into this house, and, frankly, I’m not sure I want to know—” “I live here!” I told her. “I live here! I’m Ruby!” When she looked at me again, I saw none of the things that made Mom my mother. The lines that formed around her eyes when she smiled were smoothed out, and her jaw was clenched around whatever she wanted to say next. When she looked at me, she didn’t see me. I wasn’t invisible, but I wasn’t Ruby. “Mom.” I started to cry. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be bad. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry! Please, I promise I’ll be good—I’ll go to school today and won’t be sick, and I’ll pick up my room. I’m sorry. Please remember. Please!” She put one hand on my shoulder and the other on the door handle. “My husband is a police officer. He’ll be able to help you get home. Wait in here—and don’t touch anything.” The door opened and I was pushed into a wall of freezing January air. I stumbled down onto the dirty, oil-stained concrete, just managing to catch myself before I slammed into the side of her car. I heard the door shut behind me, and the lock click into place; heard her call Dad’s name as clearly as I heard the birds in the bushes outside the dark garage. She hadn’t even turned on the light for me. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, ignoring the bite of the frosty air on my bare skin. I launched myself in the direction of the door, fumbling around until I found it. I tried shaking the handle, jiggling it, still thinking, hoping, praying that this was some big birthday surprise, and that by the time I got back inside, there would be a plate of pancakes at the table and Dad would bring in the presents, and we could—we could—we could pretend like the night before had never happened, even with the evidence in the next room over. The door was locked. “I’m sorry!” I was screaming. Pounding my fists against it. “Mommy, I’m sorry! Please!” Dad appeared a moment later, his stocky shape outlined by the light from inside of the house. I saw Mom’s bright-red face over his shoulder; he turned to wave her off and then reached over to flip on the overhead lights.

After Constantine engineered the merger of Christ worshipers with sun worshipers in the fourth century, the creeds solidified and finalized the view of faith we hold today. Not only was this politically expedient, but it gave the church many elements of Mithraism that survive to this day. Christ is depicted in early paintings as the Sun (with rays bursting from his head), Sun-Day is the day of rest, and Christmas was moved from January 6 (still the date for Eastern Orthodox churches) to December 25, the birthday of Mithra. The ornaments of Christian orthodoxy today are nearly identical to those of the Mithraic version: miters, wafers, water baptism, altar, and doxology. Mithra was a traveling teacher with twelve companions who was called the “good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” and “redeemer,” “savior,” and “messiah.” He was buried in a tomb, and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year.

Frane Selak (born 1929) is a Croatian man who has allegedly escaped death seven times, and afterward won the lottery in 2003, prompting journalists to dub him “the world’s luckiest man”. Encounters with death started in January 1962 when the train he was on crashed into a river, drowning 17 passengers. The next year, he survived an airplane accident that killed 19 people. In 1966, a bus that he was riding in fell into a river, drowning 4 passengers. In 1970 his car caught fire as he was driving, but he managed to escape before the fuel tank blew up. Three years later, in another driving incident, the engine of his car burst into flames. In 1995, he was struck by a bus in Zagreb. In 1996 he eluded a head-on collision on a mountain curve and his car fell 90 metres (300 ft) into a gorge; he was ejected from the car and managed to hold onto a tree. In 2003, two days after his 73rd birthday, Selak won €900,000 (US$1.1 million) in the lottery.

The problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself. Anything can be used. Télémaque. Or a prayer or a song that the child or the ignorant one knows by heart. There is always something the ignorant one knows that can be used as a point of comparison, something to which a new thing to be learned can be related. The locksmith who opens his eyes wide when told he can read bears witness to this. He doesn’t even know the alphabet. Let him take the time to glance at the calendar. Doesn’t he know the order of the months and can’t he thus figure out January, February, March. He knows how to count a little. And what’s to prevent him from counting softly while following the lines in order to recognize in written form what he already knows? He knows he is called William and that his birthday is January 16th. He will soon know how to find the word. He knows that February has only twenty-eight days. He sees that one column is shorter than the others and he will recognize “28.” And so on. There is always something that the master can ask him to find, something about which he can question him and thus verify the work of his intelligence.

I’m sorry Mr Lichtenstein, but your January birthday means only one thing and that's you're probably conceived on April Fools Day.

When is Tawny’s birthday?” Cooper asked. “In November.” “And yours was in January?” Frowning at him, I didn’t answer. Cooper finally grinned at my irritation. “I did my homework on you. Hoped your birthday was coming up so I could do something big and romantic. You chicks love that crap.” “Oh, we really do,” I said, smiling now as I ate my salad. “When’s your birthday?” “Beginning of December. I’m a Sag,” he said, as if I should be impressed. “What will you give me for my birthday?” “Probably something with me naked. Well, assuming I haven’t grown bored of you by then.” Leaning back in his chair, Cooper smiled. “I like the way you say naked. Makes me think of you naked.” “Big shock.” “I really want to see that.” “Well, let’s see how dinner goes first.

Brandon’s birthday party is on Friday, January 31, and I can hardly wait!

Ten Things to Do In January • Read a good book • Get a Library Card • Walk 30 minutes a day • Send a Birthday card to a friend • Invest in a Fitness Tracker • Buy a Coin jar and save those quarters and nickels • Donate to a Charity • Volunteer 45 minutes of your time to an Organization • Take a Yoga Class • Volunteer at Bingo night at a Nursing Home

In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria from Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake. But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world. In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.

Fibber’s statement of “If I ever get to be 91…” is prophetic for that is the age Jim Jordan was when he died in 1988. The Old Timer celebrates his birthday on January 1st and claims to be 89 years old. Judging by the cost of the dinner, an evening of food and film for three adults in 1954 was about $6.00, less than the price of admission for one at a cineplex today.

On January 21, 1793, more grisly events forced a reappraisal of the notion that the French Revolution was a romantic Gallic variant of the American Revolution. Louis XVI—who had aided the American Revolution and whose birthday had long been celebrated by American patriots—was guillotined for plotting against the Revolution. The death of Louis Capet—he had lost his royal title—was drenched in gore: schoolboys cheered, threw their hats aloft, and licked the king’s blood, while one executioner did a thriving business selling snippets of royal hair and clothing. The king’s decapitated head was wedged between his lifeless legs, then stowed in a basket. The remains were buried in an unvarnished box. England reeled from the news, William Pitt the Younger branding it “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.” On February 1, France declared war against England, Holland, and Spain, and soon the whole continent was engulfed in fighting, ushering in more than twenty years of combat.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

Since I started these letters, I've been a million different things, some good and some ugly. But today, on your twenty-eighth birthday, I feel like the same man I was all those years ago. Staring at you. Counting your fingers. Wondering what it is that makes you so different from the rest of the world. I don't know when it happened, but I'm happy again. I think, even if things don't stay like this, I will always carry this moment in me. How could I ever be sad, having watched my baby grow into the woman she is? January, you are twenty-eight, and today I am your father.

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

On the twenty-sixth of January in 1988, Australia was celebrating two hundred years since colonization. I was eight years old at the time and could not begin to comprehend the complexity of the day and what it meant to the long-suffering indigenous people of our country. Back then, it was a day viewed as celebratory; the one narrative pushed by the government and media of the time, parroted by our teachers gushing: What a special day it was! A birthday, they said. That, my eight-year-old self could understand.

Dr. Stamler said as much about the Mediterranean diet on the occasion of his hundredth birthday.2483 The centenarian remained committed to his pioneering research2484 even after turning one hundred. We lost him on January 26, 2022, at the age of 102.2485

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

…statistics experts later proved that the first [1969 nationally televised Vietnam Draft] lottery had a bias in favor of January and February birthdays, whose pellets had been put in the drum first and ended up at the bottom.

Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. In it, he notes a well-documented Canadian study that shows kids born in January tend to make better grades and score more goals in sports than those born later in the year. The reason, he deduces, is that grade-school kids who were born just after the cut-off date for the school year (January) are always a year older than the kids who were born just before it (December), thus having a full year of mental and physical advantages.   The January kids aren’t naturally brighter and more physically capable than kids born in November and December. They’re just a year older. In elementary school, one year is a lot.   The school system doesn’t see that, so the January kids get labeled as gifted, while the December kids are called slow. Once established, those categories are hard to break out of. The gifted kids get enrolled in advanced classes, increasing the pace of their education and making the gap between them and the December kids bigger.   The physically larger January kids are recruited by better PeeWee teams, then better High Schools and colleges. That’s why, as shown in Gladwell’s book, professional sports leagues – and hockey leagues in particular – have an inordinately high percentage of athletes that were born in the first three months of the year and a much lower percentage of December birthdays.

group) because when the ages were checked on January 1, you were still fourteen years old. An extra year of play against players younger than you is a huge advantage. Your body becomes bigger, stronger, and faster every day, giving you an opportunity to truly stand out from your birthday-handicapped peers. This extra developmental time predisposes you for selection onto more elite teams, which in turn leads to more ice time and better coaching, which advances your abilities even further.

The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.

Her birthday was yesterday, August twentieth. Why had Laura said that she was born in January? 6 Andy drove up and down what seemed like the city of Carrollton’s main drag.