MemeMachineGo!

Yesterday, January 29, was the Lunar New Year in the traditional Chinese calendar, marking the start of the Year of the Dog.

The Chinese Zodiac begins with Rat and ends with Pig. There are a couple of legends accounting for this order. Here’s one version of one of them:

A long, long time ago the Jade Emperor wanted to find a means of measuring time, and so he organised a race, and invited all the animals to take part. When they had all lined up on the bank of the river the Emperor explained that to win the big prize — a permanent place in the Zodiac — they would have to be one of the first twelve to cross the swiftly flowing river and reach a designated spot on the opposite shore. Their order in the cycle would be decided by the order in which they finished the race. And so the race began. […]

Though such highly reputable sources as Chinese restaurant place mats assert that the animals’ years map evenly to Gregorian years, they don’t. The Chinese years begin at a New Moon in late January or early February by the Gregorian calendar. If you were born around then and you’ve been taking place mats as the source of your Chinese astrological animal, you may have been living a lie. (Chinese astrology predicts that the other animals most compatible with you are four years up or down from you. If you married based on fraudulent information from place mats, and subsequently divorced, you may have the basis for a class action law suit.)

The calendar is lunisolar, very much like the Hebrew calendar. The obvious question, of course, is: is there a correlation between using a lunisolar calendar and knowing where to find good Chinese food?

One of my Lunar New Year’s resolutions¹: new MMG! entries every weekday.

¹ There are many traditions associated with the Lunar New Year. Making resolutions is not one of them.