It would be the height of injustice for me not to note this remarkable story:

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

We often say that we’re waiting for Muslims to actually act out the peaceful sentiments they proclaim for the media. Well, here’s some who seem to be doing it. This counts more than a million press releases from CAIR, and I will give praise where praise is due.

(Tip: First Things.)

According to this article, scientists have discovered a tribal group in the Black Sea area who appear to speak a living (though endangered) dialect more closely related than any we’ve seen before to the language of the ancient Greeks.

The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus, a Greek colony that Jason and the Argonauts are supposed to have visited on their epic journey from Thessaly to recover the Golden Fleece from the land of Colchis (present-day Georgia). Pontus was also supposed to be the kingdom of the mythical Amazons, a fierce tribe of women who cut off their right breasts in order to handle their bows better in battle.

Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka’s vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language.

(Tip: Archaeology in Europe)

And finally, just so you won’t have to go cold turkey on Sissel, here’s my favorite song of her entire repertoire, a Faeroese hymn called Tidin Rennur. I don’t read Faeroese, but I can figure out the lyrics well enough to know it compares life to being on a small boat on the sea. Only Jesus, it says, can bring the boat safe to harbor.

Christmas/New Year’s went just fine. The family gathered, made merry, and departed without incident. I can’t think of any rational reason to think I messed up in any major way as a host. Which doesn’t, of course, stop me believing I did.

We got enough snow today to justify my going out and blowing it out of the driveway after work. Interesting snow. It was in no way sticky (it’s far too cold for that), and yet it tended to clump up in the chute anyway, having to be cleared out. Which could generally be done by jerking the front up and down, because the dry snow fell right out again.

A Facebook friend alerted me to this video of Sissel doing “Auld Lang Syne” (mostly in Norwegian). The version I first saw was somebody’s creative mash-up, incorporating a rather banal poem and pictures of cuddly forest creatures. Fortunately I was able to find a clean version:

I don’t like the androgynous look on Sissel at all, but I think I’ve never heard her in finer voice.

Happy New Year.