Lunar New Year Edition

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the year of the sheep/ram/goat. (take your pick, since the Chinese character is apparently hard to translate. Apparently, there are people sheepish about saying “sheep” because of the Western connotations about sheep.  I don’t think goats are particularly nice animals or look particularly lucky and prosperous, so I could go with “ram,” since they’re practically bigger, bigger-horned, and more aggressive sheep anyway).

Gothamist’s Jen Chung covered the “8 Auspicious Foods To Eat In the Year of the Sheep.” Her commentary gave nice context. I liked the photos of the food, even if they were stock photos.

Time Out New York has a feature (updated for this year) on the activities and events of Lunar New Year in New York City. Make it what you will. AM New York also has a feature for the Year of the Sheep. The big Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown (Manhattan) is Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015.

Museum of the Chinese in America has a Lunar New Year family event on Feb. 28, 2015, complete with lion dance performance by my alma mater’s lion dance troupe, along with arts and crafts.

I believe I saw this on triscriber YC’s Facebook page: the NBA wishes us all a happy Lunar New Year, complete with Jeremy Lin (always remembered for Lin-sanity for New Yorkers) and NBA All-Stars James Harden, Dwayne Wade, and Stephen Curry, as well as that Chicago Bull mascot (Benny the Bull – I forgot that he had a name). Funny and cute video. The video almost made me like the NBA again.

(not that I’m a real fan; just a casual sports viewer; the All-Star Game turned out to be a no-defense points-a-pollooza at Madison Square Garden that I didn’t watch on tv.  I did watch on tv the pre-All-Star game festivities at Barclay Center in Brooklyn. Well, I liked it at least to the extent that I watched the the Three Point Shot stuff; Stephen Curry was fun to watch).

Sports Illustrated had a post on the NBA Lunar New Year video, and a video of blooper reel for the making of the video (including Houston Rocket cheerleaders trying to speak a few lines of Chinese (well, “Happy New Year,” I think – but I don’t speak Mandarin Chinese, so… I’d probably have as much trouble too).

Just to mention, since I didn’t get to do so earlier: on Jan. 20, 2015 – I had finally checked out the “Chinese America: Exclusion/Inclusion” exhibit at NY Historical Society. I had not previously been to the NY Historical Society (different than the Museum of the City of NY), so that was interesting. I should go again to look at more of the collection, and I’d like to see the exhibit of the Stephen Somerstein photographs of the Selma March of 1965.

I’m glad that the Chinese American exhibit took advantage of the contributions of others (like Museum of Chinese in America and people in the NY community, including federal Judge Denny Chin). Much more legal take than I expected, but hey, Chinese people were the first people excluded by law from emigrating to the US, so American law and the Chinese are tightly bound. I do recommend the exhibit as something worth checking out!

Meanwhile, the northeast USA (and a good part of the rest of the country) was in deep freeze. I propose that since last year was “polar vortex,” this year is “frozen hell.” Kind of catchy, don’t you think?  But, according to the NY Times, it turned out to be the “Siberian Express,” so… go figure.  Maybe that’s a step up from “polar vortex.”

Gothamist has some photos of New York City in ice of the last day or two. Time Out New York had a “It’s too damn cold” photo thing, along with a funny post about the cold.

While the cold in NYC has been ridiculous, at least we don’t have as much snow as last year (although the remnants of the snow from the not-Blizzard of 2015 at the end of January had still not been chiseled off in some places). And, hey, we’re not Boston, where they have a whole winter of snow (or Chicago’s amount of snow) in only a couple of weeks. I think we should be glad of the reminder of (sort of) four seasons while we have the four seasons. But, don’t say that I didn’t warn you of climate instability if we get a ninety degree Fahrenheit temperature in May.

Hopefully spring will be nice…