1. HAPPY NEW YEAR
2019 Year of the Pig
2. Visalgia. A Little Science Behind The Hangover You May Suffer From New Year’s Day. Visalgia the medical medical name for a hangover. Visalgia comes from a Norwegian word for uneasiness following debauchery, chervice, and a Greek word for pain, algia.
Vasopressin. Yes, when you drink booze, it enters your blood stream, and the pituitary gland blocks the creation of vasopressin, and without this, your kidneys start sending water straight to your bladder, basically to the tune of four times more than you actually drink. So you drink 250 milliliters of alcohol, you can pee out up to 1,000 milliliters or a liter. This leads directly to dehydration, which is one of the signature results of the hangover.
When you have a hangover, your brain actually shrinks. The next day, the other organs in your body are craving water. So a lot of the water is shuffled from your brain to other organs, causing your brain to actually shrink in size, which pulls on the membranes that connect it to the skull, the meninges.
When you’re peeing a lot, your expelling salt, potassium, and magnesium. These all affect how your cells function, and you’re getting rid of these without putting them back in. So you’re going feel lousy. You also loose glycogen which goes to the liver and is turned in glucose
You’ve lost electrolytes. Right? And the electrolyte imbalance is really important. If you have too much salt and your electrolyte imbalance is too high, you die. If you have too little, you get the shakes.
A study was conducted between consuming bourbon and vodka. 33 percent of the people who drank an amount of bourbon relative to their body weight had a severe hangover, and only 3 percent had a hangover when they drank vodka. That’s a big drop.
It takes longer to become intoxicated consuming lightly colored or clear alcohol like vodka, gin white wine, that kind of thing, light rum. Conversely, dark rum and other dark alcohols will result getting intoxicated quickly due in part from the increased number of contaminants in the drink. Actually – there’s a byproduct produced when the liver metabolizes alcohol called acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is actually more toxic to the body than alcohol itself, which is crazy. But we have a natural mechanism for neutralizing acetaldehyde, called appropriately enough acetaldehyde dehydrogenase.
We also have this other stuff that is called glutathione. Right? And it contains high levels of a substance called sistine. And sistine actually is attracted to acetaldehyde. So the two things combine. Acetaldehyde and dehydrogenase, and the sistine and the glutathione combine to neutralize the acetaldehyde. Women have even less than men.
Exactly, which accounts for why women tend to have more harsh hangovers or harsher hangovers than men? Not just body weight, although that does matter. So you use up your glutathione stores, and once you do that, your blood is just basically circulating this toxin, acetaldehyde, while the liver generates more glutathione, hence you’ve got this horrible hangover. And why ultimately, time is the only remedy for it.
Coffee will actually alleviate your headache a little bit because it’s caffeine, and that’s a vasoconstrictor. So it reduces your blood vessels.
But what works better is if you eat a banana, eggs or some guacamole. They contain potassium, which is an electrolyte, so if you can restore the balance, and sistine. which is something that’s attracted to acetaldehyde?
If you drink water, put a little fruit juice in the glass. Fruit juice is the kind of sugar you want. Fructose! And studies have shown that it increases the rate at which your body gets rid of the toxins, and that’s a good idea. It also gives you vitamins, of course.
Aspirin also helps a little. It’s shown that prostaglandin actually wreaks havoc on your body during hangovers. So if you take a prostaglandin inhibitor, you’re going to feel a lot better, and apparently, there have been studies that show, yes, Aspirin helps.
When starting to party, drink a full 12-ounce glass of water before you start drinking and then after your second or third drink, drink another glass or two of water. Before you go to bed, drink a glass of water with a vitamin pill, and then, when you wake up, drink a glass of water with another vitamin pill. Source: How Stuff Works.com
3. Water Resources Research Center Early Bird Registration For February 1st Conference. How will Arizona communities ensure that they have sufficient water to meet their future needs? This is the critical question being addressed at the upcoming UA Water Resources Research Center’s annual conference to be held on Friday, February 1st at the Black Canyon Conference Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Registration is open now and is available at the early bird rate of $100 until 5 pm on December 21, 2018. To register and to see the agenda, go to https://wrrc.arizona.edu/wrrc-conference-2019-arizona-runs-water-scarcity-challenges-and-community-based-solutions?utm_source=WRRC+Weekly+Wave%2C+ Vol.+6%2C +Issue+34+%2812%2F7%2F18%29+&utm_campaign=WW-12-7-18&utm_medium=email
We will spend much of the day looking at place-based ideas and solutions and addressing questions, including: Are there common barriers faced by communities or across water sectors? How do we build on accomplishments to create strong successes?, and What changes in state laws and governing policies would be helpful? One size does not fit all!
4. Only A Few More Days Left To Make A Charitable Donation. Before the New Year is upon us, evaluate your finances and determine how much you’re going to have to give Uncle Sam (taxes paid).
When you pay your taxes, you have no say in how your money is being spent. A percent of the money paid in taxes goes to the Federal government. A much smaller percentage of your tax bill goes to your state, and finally, a very small percentage of your tax bill goes to your community. And you have little to no say in how it is spent.
Please consider donating to local watershed charities, local community charities and national/international charities.
It is usually easy to donate by either sending a check to the non-profit organization or going online to the organization’s web page and click on the “Donate” button located on the web page. See example below
Have a very Happy New Year!
5. History of New Year’s Celebration. Civilizations around the world have been celebrating the start of each new year for at least four millennia. Today, most New Year’s festivities begin on December 31 (New Year’s Eve), the last day of the Gregorian calendar, and continue into the early hours of January 1 (New Year’s Day). Common traditions include attending parties, eating special New Year’s foods, making resolutions for the new year and watching fireworks displays.
Early New Year’s Celebrations
The earliest recorded festivities in honor of a new year’s arrival date back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. For the Babylonians, the first new moon following the vernal equinox—the day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness—heralded the start of a new year. They marked the occasion with a massive religious festival called Akitu (derived from the Sumerian word for barley, which was cut in the spring) that involved a different ritual on each of its 11 days. In addition to the new year, Atiku celebrated the mythical victory of the Babylonian sky god Marduk over the evil sea goddess Tiamat and served an important political purpose: It was during this time that a new king was crowned or that the current ruler’s divine mandate was symbolically renewed.
Throughout antiquity, civilizations around the world developed increasingly sophisticated calendars, typically pinning the first day of the year to an agricultural or astronomical event. In Egypt, for instance, the year began with the annual flooding of the Nile, which coincided with the rising of the star Sirius. The first day of the Chinese new year, meanwhile, occurred with the second new moon after the winter solstice.
January 1 Becomes New Year’s Day
The early Roman calendar consisted of 10 months and 304 days, with each new year beginning at the vernal equinox; according to tradition, it was created by Romulus, the founder of Rome, in the eighth century B.C. A later king, Numa Pompilius, is credited with adding the months of Januarius and Februarius. Over the centuries, the calendar fell out of sync with the sun, and in 46 B.C. the emperor Julius Caesar decided to solve the problem by consulting with the most prominent astronomers and mathematicians of his time. He introduced the Julian calendar, which closely resembles the more modern Gregorian calendar that most countries around the world use today.
As part of his reform, Caesar instituted January 1 as the first day of the year, partly to honor the month’s namesake: Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, whose two faces allowed him to look back into the past and forward into the future. Romans celebrated by offering sacrifices to Janus, exchanging gifts with one another, decorating their homes with laurel branches and attending raucous parties. In medieval Europe, Christian leaders
temporarily replaced January 1 as the first of the year with days carrying more religious significance, such as December 25 (the anniversary of Jesus’ birth) and March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation); Pope Gregory XIII reestablished January 1 as New Year’s Day in 1582.
New Year’s Traditions
In many countries, New Year’s celebrations begin on the evening of December 31—New Year’s Eve—and continue into the early hours of January 1. Revelers often enjoy meals and snacks thought to bestow good luck for the coming year. In Spain and several other Spanish-speaking countries, people bolt down a dozen grapes-symbolizing their hopes for the months ahead-right before midnight. In many parts of the world, traditional New Year’s dishes feature legumes, which are thought to resemble coins and herald future financial success; examples include lentils in Italy and black-eyed peas in the southern United States. Because pigs represent progress and prosperity in some cultures, pork appears on the New Year’s Eve table in Cuba, Austria, Hungary, Portugal and other countries. Ring-shaped cakes and pastries, a sign that the year has come full circle, round out the feast in the Netherlands, Mexico, Greece and elsewhere. In Sweden and Norway, meanwhile, rice pudding with an almond hidden inside is served on New Year’s Eve; it is said that whoever finds the nut can expect 12 months of good fortune.
Other customs that are common worldwide include watching fireworks and singing songs to welcome the new year, including the ever-popular “Auld Lang Syne” in many Englishspeaking countries. The practice of making resolutions for the new year is thought to have first caught on among the ancient Babylonians, who made promises in order to earn the favor of the gods and start the year off on the right foot
In the United States, the most iconic New Year’s tradition is the dropping of a giant ball in New York City’s Times Square at the stroke of midnight. Millions of people around the world watch the event, which has taken place almost every year since 1907. Over time, the ball itself has ballooned from a 700-pound iron-and-wood orb to a brightly patterned sphere 12 feet in diameter and weighing in at nearly 12,000 pounds. Various towns and cities across America have developed their own versions of the Times Square ritual, organizing public drops of items ranging from pickles (Dillsburg, Pennsylvania) to possums (Tallapoosa, Georgia) at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
