My wife and I attended the Bad Homburg city government "Neujahrsempfang" (new year's reception). 10:30 on a Saturday always strikes me as an odd time for these, but it was full house I'd estimate to have been around 400 of the great and the good in attendance, so 1% of our 50,000-person town. It's interesting to see some people I only ever see in field clothing (fellow hunters, the head of the hunting and fishing authority, the 90-something guy who picks up a trailer load of horse manure from us each year) all scrubbed up.

It's a bit of a charmingly old-world event; the city council chairman gives a long speech thanking the fire department, police, and other public servants, one of the local high school orchestrae kaiserin-friedrich.de/g… plays a few classical pieces, and then there's a guest speaker on some future-focused topic.

This year, Dr. Stefan Gröner linkedin.com/in/dr-stef… talked on "Artificial intelligence in the medicine of tomorrow: Opportunities and challenges." Previous speakers have included historian Andreas Rödder de.wikipedia.org/wiki/A… year bad-homburg.de/de/stadt… , and the head of the BaFin Felix Hufeld in 2020 facebook.com/share/1DLG… .

Then the orchestra played a few more pieces, and then the Stadtverordnetenvorsteher came back out for a reprise.

I like Stanley Kubrick a lot 1drv.ms/a/c/5ed4c22a9f7… , but he clearly deserves some blame for "Eyes Wide Shut" making Shostakovich's Second Walz a bit hackneyed youtu.be/5wjnzGwmbqs . Saint-Saëns' "Samson and Delilah” was a hit youtu.be/vjRiLKSPbqc .

I had to cram my usual Saturday five-Ds (dog walk, dump run, dry cleaning, drink run, and diesel) into a one-hour window beforehand. At the Rewe, I saw an enormous e-bike, and wondered at what point these things just become electric motorcycles.