Face-to-face(book), and Dinner for One

Today the sun is shining – last night, the big blue (most impressive) moon.

We ushered in the new year without the playbills but with the poems, taking seats on the floor at a pilaf party with doggerel recited to shots of vodka. Glad to be over the 00-s/ooze, the oughts/naughts, on to the teens (in time) and what they may bring. My friend Marie penned a poem while seated on the couch, something like: "20 of us here, but we all have lots more friends – 2009 was the year of facebook: the friendship never ends." A brilliant take on facebook and the face-to-face.

Meanwhile, my brother sent me this riff on the ritual of toasting: Dinner for One, a black-and-white British slapstick sketch, mostly unknown in the English-speaking world, but now a New Year's Eve ritual as the highest-rated TV show in German history. 

The video, shown for the past 45 years on German television, is described as "a silly moment of merriment that has become enshrined in the nation's psyche." Who knew?