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the invitation, sent out tuesday, december 20: | ||||||||||||||
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A Truly Momentous New Year's Eve at Halflab The events of 2016 suggested so many possibilities for our New Year's Eve party invitation that we at Halflab (the House Around Lisa, (Neil)Fred, Louise, And Brandon) couldn't settle on a theme. Too much happened! Obviously our first thought was to mark the 2016 discovery of the new largest prime number. We wrote a whole message about taking advantage of a prime opportunity to visit Halflab during prime time before realizing we used this theme back in 2003. Avoiding repeats is one of our prime concerns, so we couldn't give this concept primacy. For our next attempt, we harkened back to the optimism we felt in September, when the stolen Van Gogh paintings were recovered. We encouraged everyone to come over ear and watch the starry night, but the idea didn't really Gogh anywhere, especially once we began debating pronunciation. Next we played around with using lots of He- words now that there's a new supply of helium. We got as far as "Hey, Head to our Hearth for Hedonic Helpings of Herring," but it just made us talk funny. Yeah, we get a little stressed over these invitations, but what else is there to stress about this year? Not our potlucks, that's for sure! We always have fun coming up with a list of suggested Low-Stress Potluck(*) contributions that fit the premise, but this time we wound up in an ugly divide. One of us compiled a list with biezpiens, sklandrausis, Riga Black Balsam, and so on to commemorate Latvia joining the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Another crafted a paragraph about bringing split pea soup, dal, and hummus to share with fellow human beans in celebration of the UN's International Year of Pulses. We couldn't find common ground on the question of which better represented 2016, and we were running out of time to finish and send the invitation. Our theme honoring the discovery of the Greenland shark's impressive lifespan didn't work either, and by then the month of December was getting long in the tooth. The longest lived vertebrate reminded us of the longest necked one: the year's groundbreaking revelation that giraffes actually comprise four distinct species. While researching for our giraffe-themed invitation, however, we spotted news about the giraffe population declining, and then writing anything upbeat became a tall order. The reality is that 2016 included many losses and setbacks, from the manufacture of the final VHS recorder to the crash of the Schiaparelli Mars lander. As a result, some of our invitation concepts were just too bleak and joined the long list of rejected ideas. The point is, you're invited to our party. 2016 sure was a year, and we hope you'll join us in celebrating the end of it!
-- Lisa, (Neil)Fred, Louise, Brandon
Citation needed? Read about any of the year's big stories you somehow missed: (*) The term "Low-Stress Potluck" is explained in far too much detail at http://www.halflab.com/party/ |