For most of the planet it is already 2008. Here in California we have only a few minutes of 2007 left. There will, of course, be come people out in the Pacific for whom the old year still lingers, but I don’t suppose that I’ll be reading any of their blogs, so here goes with the end of the year.

My prize for the best New Year post of 2007 goes to John Coulthart who linked to this web site devoted to the unfashionable idea of thinking long term.

Now you may think that this sort of thinking is just the sort of nonsense that rich and foolish people in San Francisco get up to, and to a certain extent you are right. I’m pretty sure that the Long Now folks make a lot of their money through expensive seminars. But if you have a look through their site you’ll also come across this fabulous essay (PDF) by Michael Chabon which puts the case for the long term rather better than any of the futurologists. It also proves, if the question was still open, that Chabon is indeed what fandom likes to call “one of us”.

And now I have just enough time to go and pour a glass of Balvenie before the fireworks start.