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Sunday, January 01, 2017

Celebrating New Year's Eve Early

Last night, the hostess at our New Year's Eve party suggested we celebrate New Year's Eve when New York did -- at 11 p.m. Central Standard Time (UTC -6).  She'd had a cold and was still feeling a bit weak.

This seemed like a good idea. All of us are in our late 60s / early 70s and not much used to staying up until midnight, anyway.  But we're not getting any younger.

If we're celebrating on New York time this year (UTC -5, 11 p.m.), why not Halifax or Caracas next year? (UTC-4, 10 p.m.) In fact, why not keep moving it up as we get older?

There are 39 world time zones.  I know, one would think there would be only 24. But there's those half hour time zones (India at +5:30, rather than two zones of +5 and +6). See https://www.timeanddate.com/time/current-number-time-zones.html  for a list.

There are 7 after us (MST, PST, and so forth) but 31 ahead of us, so we can celebrate successively early as we get older.  Maybe we can celebrate with the appropriate cuisine? Venezuelan next year (UTC -4), some nice Atlantic cod for Newfoundland the year after (UTC -3:30), Argentinian food would follow (UTC -3), then Carnival from Rio (UTC -2) and so forth.

We're unlikely to get through all those 31 time zones, because we'd be nearing 100, so we may want to skip some.  North Korea is at UTC +8:30, Eucla, Australia is at UTC + 8:45 but  I think we'd skip that for South Korea and Japan at UTC +9.


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