Because I send out a photo of the day, I write the date every day. So today we start writing 2025. Today - January 1st - is also one of the rarest birthdays of the year. Supposedly an estimated 371,504 babies will be born on New Year's Day. That'w a pretty precise "estimate."
Of course, the actual rarest birthday is February 29th. The next rarest is December 25th, and then comes January 1st. December 24th is next, July 4th follows, and January 2nd is after that.
January 1 is a common birthday in Pakistan and Afghanistan because 1/1 is an easy date for people to remember in cultures that don't follow Western standards of time.
Most curious of the birthday facts is an entry for the richest birthday - what could that mean? Nineteen out of 500 top billionaires worldwide have the same birthday - November 30th.
As I start a new folder in my Photo of the Day library, I can see that September 2008 was the first folder, the first entry is the image below. That was taken in the Toronto Airport. The Canadian flag is behind a water wall.
There's BBC photo coverage of the New Year around the world HERE. They had updates every time another country, province, state rang in the new year. What a lot of work they go to.
What comes with the new year? Artworks, books and films enter the public domain. So music from 1924 and other works from 1929 will enter the public domain - the original comic strip iteration of Popeye, Mickey Mouse animations, William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, and the song Singin' in the Rain. That goes for U.S. copyright. I wonder what strange horror versions we will see of Popeye and Mickey Mouse.
We started with the first image in the photo archive, and below is the last image in 2024. While it was taken a few years ago, it seems to be appropriate for 2025 - We look forward to the dawn of a new year, but see a lot of withering decay in our social order.
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