I think it’s as simple as the baby New Year engrossed in their phone and not paying attention to the countdown welcoming them in. You know, “those dang kids and their interwebs”
I’ve seen at least one other comic with this theme this year
I think the old year is watching TV and the new year is on his phone, reflecting the viewing habits of young and old. And the two of them don’t meet… perhaps they are being supposed not to notice that the year has changed, the baton has been handed over and all that: instead they are stuck in their own bubbles.
But I don’t see that that is very funny. Anyway, the old year would have been on his own phone at last NY, as these different viewing habits have not materialised in the last 11.97 months.
The old year represents geezers who watch TV because they think the ball drop on Times Square marks the exact moment that the new year begins (oblivious to the inaccuracies of the mechanical linkage attached to the flagpole, as well as the fact that the event has to be recorded and played from tape for all of the other time zones). The young year represents whippersnappers who are so focused on getting the exact moment from a synchronized Internet clock that they forget to make eye contact with other people celebrating in the room.
P.S. The last time I was in the US for New Year’s, I noticed that American TV networks weren’t that good at synchronizing their clocks. Zapping through the major cable news feeds produced time differences ranging from a few seconds to a minute or more. I wonder whether they’ve fixed that yet.
P.P.S. As kids, we used to call Ma Bell’s time service (TI4-1212), which we thought was more “exact” than the clock in the room.
There were quite a few Old Year/New Year comics yesterday (Sunday), but this one struck me as semi-synchronous, if only for the Old vs New aspect:
@ Andréa – What a refreshing surprise! A “Reality Check” that actually produces a smile, instead of making me wish for an industrial sized load of “Mental Floss“. The best detail (by far) is the silence of the squirrel.
It doesn’t make any sense that the old year would have the attitudes of a crotchety old fart and representative of the attitudes aging boomers as …. it’s entire existence and experience only occurred in 2019.
But that won’t stop people making that assumption.
Anyway, I missed the idea that the old year is a geezer watching the TV (which is part of it, I think) but I think the young year absorbed in the phone not interacting is the main joke. Of course, if you replaced the year with 2019 or 2018 or 2012 it’d be equally relevant.
I think the comic Andréa posted has the same theme as Arlo’s, but is both more compact and better stated. IOW, I agree with woozy.
Kilby: “The old year represents geezers who watch TV because they think the ball drop on Times Square marks the exact moment that the new year begins (oblivious to the inaccuracies of the mechanical linkage attached to the flagpole, as well as the fact that the event has to be recorded and played from tape for all of the other time zones).”
This reminds me of the only good idea for a fantasy story that I ever came up with (to the point where I *almost* tried to write it, but sanity prevailed). This was back in the runup days to Y2K, and there were various religious or semi-religious folks out there assuming that the Second Coming would be happening at that historic moment. But of course such folks usually didn’t think about time zones, so the scenario is that, on the stroke of midnight of 31 Dec 1999/1 Jan 2000 the Second Coming really did occur over in Greenwich Mean Time, and of course was covered on live TV beamed worldwide, which meant that sinners in other time zones had from one to 23 hours to repent and be saved before it got around to their area. (Hard cheese for the sinners who lived in Greenwich, of course.)
(And yes, I know that that microsecond wasn’t really exactly two thousand years from anything significant — setting aside the question of why a number like “two thousand, in base ten” would be significant anyway — but again this was playing off popular beliefs and assumptions.)
I was thinking yesterday that ‘non-comics and editorial cartoons’ pop culture has moved this ‘Baby New Year’ thing, meaning any cartoonists who still use this joke should have the geezer alert.
Shrug: better would be the international date line, rather than Greenwich, which is more or less on the opposite side of the world, so only half the time zones would get the pre-warning you talk about.
@ shrug – ““…setting aside the question of why a number … would be significant…”
The fundamentalists who believe in that kind of numerology tend to ignore the fact that there has never been a verifiable origin for the ordinal numbers that we now use to count the years of our “common era” dating system. They also argue that since right thinking people have always started counting with “1”, decades (and centuries) should be required to reflect this “one off” error forever.
P.S. In your fantasy story, it would have been nice to witness the surprise on the faces of the “true believers” when they were called up on 1 Jan 2000, rather than the 1 Jan 2001 dictated by there anachronistic numerology.
P.S. Ooops: “their”.
Meet the new year…same as the old year.
Even quite a long while back, Bible scholars had concluded that the calendar was off by several years.
Discrete intervals start with 1. Points in time start with 0. A point is zero-dimensional and an interval is one-dimensional, like a line segment. That is why midnight (a point in time) is 00:00 but January 1 of the first year is 1/1/1. The Common Era is unusual in that the first year was not designated as such until centuries after the fact, but it was once common practice to start a new era every time there was a new king or emperor. Thus, “In the first year of King Hezekiah the Philistines attacked…”
I’m not sure exactly how it happened that Jesus ended up being born six years before he was born, but I suspect John Silber, Chancellor Emeritus of Boston University, had something to do with it. When I entered BU in 1969, it was just finishing up its centennial celebration, having been founded in 1869. A couple of years later, after Silber was installed, it was founded in 1839.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think it’s as simple as the baby New Year engrossed in their phone and not paying attention to the countdown welcoming them in. You know, “those dang kids and their interwebs”
I’ve seen at least one other comic with this theme this year
I think the old year is watching TV and the new year is on his phone, reflecting the viewing habits of young and old. And the two of them don’t meet… perhaps they are being supposed not to notice that the year has changed, the baton has been handed over and all that: instead they are stuck in their own bubbles.
But I don’t see that that is very funny. Anyway, the old year would have been on his own phone at last NY, as these different viewing habits have not materialised in the last 11.97 months.
The old year represents geezers who watch TV because they think the ball drop on Times Square marks the exact moment that the new year begins (oblivious to the inaccuracies of the mechanical linkage attached to the flagpole, as well as the fact that the event has to be recorded and played from tape for all of the other time zones). The young year represents whippersnappers who are so focused on getting the exact moment from a synchronized Internet clock that they forget to make eye contact with other people celebrating in the room.
P.S. The last time I was in the US for New Year’s, I noticed that American TV networks weren’t that good at synchronizing their clocks. Zapping through the major cable news feeds produced time differences ranging from a few seconds to a minute or more. I wonder whether they’ve fixed that yet.
P.P.S. As kids, we used to call Ma Bell’s time service (TI4-1212), which we thought was more “exact” than the clock in the room.
There were quite a few Old Year/New Year comics yesterday (Sunday), but this one struck me as semi-synchronous, if only for the Old vs New aspect:
@ Andréa – What a refreshing surprise! A “Reality Check” that actually produces a smile, instead of making me wish for an industrial sized load of “Mental Floss“. The best detail (by far) is the silence of the squirrel.
It doesn’t make any sense that the old year would have the attitudes of a crotchety old fart and representative of the attitudes aging boomers as …. it’s entire existence and experience only occurred in 2019.
But that won’t stop people making that assumption.
Anyway, I missed the idea that the old year is a geezer watching the TV (which is part of it, I think) but I think the young year absorbed in the phone not interacting is the main joke. Of course, if you replaced the year with 2019 or 2018 or 2012 it’d be equally relevant.
I think the comic Andréa posted has the same theme as Arlo’s, but is both more compact and better stated. IOW, I agree with woozy.
Kilby: “The old year represents geezers who watch TV because they think the ball drop on Times Square marks the exact moment that the new year begins (oblivious to the inaccuracies of the mechanical linkage attached to the flagpole, as well as the fact that the event has to be recorded and played from tape for all of the other time zones).”
This reminds me of the only good idea for a fantasy story that I ever came up with (to the point where I *almost* tried to write it, but sanity prevailed). This was back in the runup days to Y2K, and there were various religious or semi-religious folks out there assuming that the Second Coming would be happening at that historic moment. But of course such folks usually didn’t think about time zones, so the scenario is that, on the stroke of midnight of 31 Dec 1999/1 Jan 2000 the Second Coming really did occur over in Greenwich Mean Time, and of course was covered on live TV beamed worldwide, which meant that sinners in other time zones had from one to 23 hours to repent and be saved before it got around to their area. (Hard cheese for the sinners who lived in Greenwich, of course.)
(And yes, I know that that microsecond wasn’t really exactly two thousand years from anything significant — setting aside the question of why a number like “two thousand, in base ten” would be significant anyway — but again this was playing off popular beliefs and assumptions.)
I was thinking yesterday that ‘non-comics and editorial cartoons’ pop culture has moved this ‘Baby New Year’ thing, meaning any cartoonists who still use this joke should have the geezer alert.
Shrug: better would be the international date line, rather than Greenwich, which is more or less on the opposite side of the world, so only half the time zones would get the pre-warning you talk about.
@ shrug – ““…setting aside the question of why a number … would be significant…”
The fundamentalists who believe in that kind of numerology tend to ignore the fact that there has never been a verifiable origin for the ordinal numbers that we now use to count the years of our “common era” dating system. They also argue that since right thinking people have always started counting with “1”, decades (and centuries) should be required to reflect this “one off” error forever.
P.S. In your fantasy story, it would have been nice to witness the surprise on the faces of the “true believers” when they were called up on 1 Jan 2000, rather than the 1 Jan 2001 dictated by there anachronistic numerology.
P.S. Ooops: “their”.
Meet the new year…same as the old year.
Even quite a long while back, Bible scholars had concluded that the calendar was off by several years.
Discrete intervals start with 1. Points in time start with 0. A point is zero-dimensional and an interval is one-dimensional, like a line segment. That is why midnight (a point in time) is 00:00 but January 1 of the first year is 1/1/1. The Common Era is unusual in that the first year was not designated as such until centuries after the fact, but it was once common practice to start a new era every time there was a new king or emperor. Thus, “In the first year of King Hezekiah the Philistines attacked…”
I’m not sure exactly how it happened that Jesus ended up being born six years before he was born, but I suspect John Silber, Chancellor Emeritus of Boston University, had something to do with it. When I entered BU in 1969, it was just finishing up its centennial celebration, having been founded in 1869. A couple of years later, after Silber was installed, it was founded in 1839.