Year S Day

As holidays go, New Year's Day is a poor stepchild. About all it's good for is nursing a hangover or watching football -- or at least that's how we treat it. Not this year. Let's resolve to make Jan. 1 more than just an addendum to the celebration of the night before. Here are 10 great (or at least fun and useful) things to plan for the day that starts the rest of 2005. 1. Hit the new year running. The Baltimore Road Runners Club is holding its annual five-mile Father Time Frolic at Loch Raven Reservoir on Jan. 1, meeting at the Peerce's Plantation parking lot, 12460 Dulaney Valley Road, at 9 a.m. Runners predict their time before the race, and those who finish closest to their actual time will get a runner's watch.

At the end of December 1944, a war-weary world looked toward the coming new year and an end to the hostilities that had gripped it since 1939. After a month that saw the furious fighting in the Ardennes and the bloody Battle of the Bulge, the war news from Europe was slowly becoming slightly more encouraging -- albeit no less threatening. "Three German divisions have been hurled by Field Marshal von Rundstedt at both sides of the Bastogne corridor held by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton's United States 3d Army, a field dispatch reported last night, as American troops hammered heavily all along the shrinking perimeter of the German bulge," reported The Sun on New Year's Eve. "The hard-won corridor supplying Bastogne was hit by two of von Rundstedt's divisions from the west and by a third from the east, while in Bastogne itself American artillerymen poured withering shellfire into the 16-mile-wide escape gap of the Germans' hourglass-shaped front and blasted areas where the Germans have been gathering for new thrusts."

FOR SOME it was the last chance to make good on resolutions to exercise more in 2002; for others, an opportunity to start the new year off on the right foot. On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, hundreds of people walked the paths of east Columbia as part of a volksmarching event sponsored by the Freestate Happy Wanderers Volks- march Club. "We have families doing it, retirees, single people and married couples," said Bill Hassell, the club president. "Our thing is that we try to create fun, fitness and fellowship through walking.

MEMBERS OF the Chinese Language School of Columbia brought in the Chinese New Year with a bang at the central branch of the Howard County Public Library on Saturday. The celebration began with the sounds of a ceremonial drum and a performance of the traditional Lion Dance. Yesterday marked the year 4699 on the Chinese calendar, the year of the horse. In China, the New Year's celebration is also called the Spring Festival. "A person born in this year will be very outgoing, active, faithful and energetic," said Emily Lee, executive director of extracurricular activities for the Columbia school.

Millions celebrate arrival of the New Year with bells and whistles, songs and sirens, bursting fireworks and even blasting firearms. But on Navy and Coast Guard ships and at onshore stations around the world, seamen standing the lonely midnight to 4 o'clock mid-watch will mark the arrival of 2002 with ... poetry. On New Year's morning, the Officer of the Deck - or of the Day if he or she is ashore - traditionally writes the mid-watch log entry in verse. "But some are verse than others," observed a seaman aboard the USS Rainier off Vietnam on Jan. 1, 1969.

Martin B. King strode into Wells Discount Liquors on a mission yesterday. "Two cases of Charles de Fere," King told a clerk. "Coming right up," replied the clerk, who used the intercom to relay the order of French sparkling wine that sells for $10 a bottle. King said he and his wife expect to host 20 to 40 friends and relatives for brunch on New Year's Day. They've done it for the past few years, and it's becoming a tradition, he said. Wells, at 6310 York Road, was prepared for the day before New Year's Eve - a Sunday spurned by procrastinators and embraced by many in search of celebratory alcohol who are working part or all of today.

So another year is almost over and a new one is about to begin with its still unknown cache of joys, disappointments and victories. If there was some way to control these happenings -- to tip the scales in the balance of only the good -- who wouldn't leap at the chance? In fact, societies have been trying to do just that for centuries. Their technique?Eating beans. (As well as herring, sardines, sauerkraut, pork and other so-called "good luck" foods.)The notion of eating foods to change one's fortune dates to ancient Babylonia and the world's first known recipes, according to Nan Rothschild, professor of anthropology at Barnard College.

Hail the holiday that pays little respect, honors nary a soul, lacks an inspiration, provides no solace, produces mild discomfort and encourages vertiginous upchucking! New Year's Day -- words so self-referential they presume the day belongs exclusively to itself. A day without memorial, saint, war, statesman, suffragist, liberation, birth, discovery or heroic hallmark will, once again, be turned over to an idea so thin and soulless that its peculiar deficiencies will enhance the mystery for yet another year.

Baltimore police Officer John Dolly, a four-year veteran assigned to the Eastern District, was listed in serious condition yesterday at Maryland Shock Trauma Center a day after being shot in the hip while trying to stop a New Year's Eve reveler from firing a handgun. Early Thursday morning, Dolly came upon the reveler in the 900 block of Montford Ave. while responding to another call in the Milton-Montford neighborhood. Dolly and other officers tried to get the man to stop firing his handgun, but he refused, police said.

Jeff Plaine has been writing a true story about meeting up with his high school sweetheart after 10 years, a love story script long in search of an ending. What to do? Plaine sat in a Parkville diner awaiting his breakfast yesterday, New Year's Day. A day, perhaps, for a resolution. "Usually I think about it, but I didn't this year," said Plaine, 41. But as he got to thinking, his courage grew as he sat at the counter of the Bel-Loc Diner. "I've been working on a script for a year and a half," he said.