Merry Christmas, everybody! I thought I’d pass on some news about the Cranach blog and tell you about what’s coming up next week.
- Patheos has been bought by the even bigger religious site BeliefNet. Patheos will have its own identity, the editors will be the same, and it will, as they say, remain its own brand. But BeliefNet has resources that will make possible some technical improvements, new features, and, eventually, a new look. I’m not sure what they have in mind, but be on the lookout for changes in the year ahead.
- You may have noticed that I have started putting pictures with my posts. I was asked to do that–if not as an early phase of BeliefNet upgrades, because pictures make posts more sharable on social media–and I have enjoyed this new tasks of illustrating what I have to say. The challenge is to not violate copyright laws! I have found an easy way to find images that are in the public domain or are usable through Creative Commons, a process by which photographers and other artists make their work freely available, as long as credit is given. (Go to Google Images, then hit “tools,” then hit “usage rights,” then hit “licensed for reuse.”) Images with no attribution are from a horde that Patheos/BeliefNet owns or from my own collection.
- Longtime readers might remember two annual customs that we have here at Cranach. The week before the turn of the New Year we look back at the year that is finishing up. That culminates in our check of the predictions that readers made at the beginning of the year. I’ll go through those and we’ll see who had the most impressive prophetic voice. We will then proclaim a winner who gets no prize beyond accolades and bragging rights. (I will say this: If anyone predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president, that person will win.) The results of this contest are usually announced on New Year’s Eve.
- On New Year’s Day, we predict what will happen for the year to come. Those predictions will be checked on New Year’s Eve of that coming year and will be the basis for the 2017 contest. So be thinking of what you think will happen in 2017. There are certainly lots of unknowns and lots of room for speculation: What will Trump do as president? What unexpected crises will he have to deal with and what does he do? Will America become great again? Will the European Union come apart? Will Brexit be followed by a Frexit, a Spexit, or a Gexit? Will some other once-lowly team like the Cubs win the World Series? Will the Golden State Warriors team of supermen meet their kryptonite? Winning predictions are generally detailed and the most amazing, as in “how could he have possibly known that would happen?” (As in tODD’s prediction a few years ago that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il would die and that his third son Kim Jong Un would replace him, something that was not on anyone’s radar, including probably the North Koreans.)
New Year’s Eve is on a Saturday and New Year’s Day is on a Sunday, days we usually don’t blog. Therefore, let’s have the 2016 Predictions Awards on Thursday and the Predictions for 2017 on Friday. Be ready!
Image: The Seal of Lucas Cranach the Elder [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
