New Year's glosses: how do we start the new year?

On foot or on wheels? With a chiffchaff or meadow pipit? With humility or chutzpah? With a good or bad conscience? Preferably with confidence: Some thoughts from the FAZ features section on how we are approaching the new year.

There are many ways to get from A to B, it works by walking or staggering, stumbling, hopping - at the end of the year also sliding.

Some seek contact with the ground for inspiration, others do not want to step on even the smallest ant while walking.

The legendary Silly Walk gets its crazy funny effect from the combination of stuffy, stiff Englishness with the effort for cool agility.

John Cleese makes the silly walk world famous.

The fact that the 83-year-old Brit, who certainly drilled him more often than anyone else, is still doing so well today should be an incentive for us.

The reason for its fitness could lie in the medical effect that the Silly Walk has recently been attested to: It's supposed to be healthy to contort yourself like Mr. Teabags aka John Cleese,

yes even healthier than a normal irony-free walk.

Anyone who progresses in this way uses a good two and a half times as much energy and also prevents heart and circulatory diseases, as the study, which is admittedly not meant to be taken seriously, states.

We should therefore definitely make silly gaits for the New Year: for the sake of health and for fun.

Because he who laughs tears does not need to weep them.

Sandra Kegel

Small buns

The new year will be better than 2022 because the following sentences will not be heard: We can become European champions (Hansi Flick).

We will build 400,000 new homes (Klara Geywitz).

We want to fill the role of the leading military power in Europe (Christine Lambrecht).

The disillusionment is too great in view of the early departure in Qatar, the completion figures from the real estate market and the Puma tank disaster.

In other respects, too, the year that was drawing to a close had enough setbacks to offer for the country's self-confidence.

Politicians (but not only politicians) have so far reacted to such developments like a lazy schoolboy who consoles himself for his own poor performance by setting even more promising goals for the future.

Still in fashion:

unrealistic announcements by when a company/city/the whole country will be carbon neutral.

But if the signs are not deceptive, the insight grows that a problem is not already banned when a solution is named.

At least that's a start.

Matthew Alexander

other shores

It was the year of the motionless, shiny bodies of fish that told of more than the misfortune that caused them to die.

Hundreds of dead fish in a hotel lobby in Berlin recently forced the thought that it might be crazy to simulate a tropical sea in a glass tank in the big city while the oceans are getting emptier.

In the summer, hundreds of thousands of suffocated fish in the Oder served as a reminder that rivers are not primarily waterways, provided by nature for the removal of goods and liquid waste, but increasingly unbalanced ecosystems.

Dealing with the environmental catastrophe was initially not very encouraging: Poland, which has big plans for the Oder and is in the process of making it navigable for freighters, remained vague when naming the cause, referring to poisonous golden algae, the heat,

the low tide.

There has long been evidence that without the introduction of pollutants in the upper reaches of the Oder in Poland, the algae that killed the fish would not have multiplied explosively.

Then, two weeks ago, surprising news: a Polish court temporarily stopped the expansion of the Oder.

Irreversible environmental damage could not be ruled out, it said.