Taomeow

The year corresponding to 1966 in the 60-year cycle will be 2026. That's your years of the Yang Fire Horse, which are far more dangerous in terms of plane crashes (as well as many other things.) I'm pretty sure Raymond Lo will be predicting that when he's writing up 2026. In general, he's a mixed bag far as accuracy of his forecasts is concerned. This often happens when an authentic enough master is also an ambitious and successful public speaker, writer, and teacher of large groups. He serves two gods, so to speak -- the god of authenticity and the god of popularity, and those two seldom get along. I haven't read his 2025 forecast beyond the first couple of paragraphs (due to the unfortunate white letters on black background presentation, something I normally refuse to strain my eyes to deal with), but already noticed that clash. However, he's got better stuff than most online diviners, although his habitual obsession with Fire as the decisive phase (which he considers auspicious, always offering grimmer forecasts for Fire-deficient years and brighter ones for Fire-excessive ones) makes me think that his own chart is Fire-excessive. (Did enough bazi readings over the years to know the signs. )

Yeah, we're badass here.

I don't know any Cantonese, alas, but I know this system, and should perhaps mention that in the sexagenary cycle the coming year is No. 42. Which evokes a peculiar Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy association. (For those who haven't read it or forgot this bit -- the great supercomputer, Deep Thought, took seven and a half million years figuring out the answer to "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." The answer was 42.

It's different, but there's many versions around the same idea. Pelmeni are valued by their connoisseurs when they are the smallest one can make by hand, but in West Asia and Caucasus region there's also hinkali which are bigger, manti which can be humongous, and so on. Another similar Russian and Ukrainian staple, vareniki, are bigger than pelmeni and have other kinds of fillings. My favorite are made with sour cherries, but they can also be stuffed with cottage cheese, potatoes and fried onions, cabbage, or cooked meat (which is not used in pelmeni.)

I'm jealous! In my gluten-free home they practically went extinct... I managed to modify many recipes so I can make many traditional comfort foods with rice flour etc., but pelmeni won't yield... all my experiments trying to create a GF version were an epic fail. Back in the day, we would sometimes organize pelmeni parties -- a bunch of friends would arrange to socialize on a weekend by sitting around the table and making a million of them, a fancy version with a mix of two or even three different kinds of freshly ground meat for the filling. Then cook our creations in a humongous pot and then the party proper would start. That version was particularly delicious. Good old traditions... Sour cream is a must (one of the improvements on the Chinese original -- China missed that particular train), as is black pepper (and/or very hot mustard which some prefer), but going back to Asia whence they hail -- have you tried them with ponzu or yuzu sauce instead of vinegar?

My winter comfort food is oxtail soup or stew. This was the first ever taoist recipe I learned. Been making it whenever oxtail is available, although modified it many times, from the original Chinese version to Japanese, Ukrainian, or proprietary.

I'll look into that. Before I do, chapatis and dahl are not off the table. Not after I found out that pelmeni, as Russian a dish as it gets, were invented by the Chinese. (The Russian version, which originally came from China via Manchuria to Siberia, tastes better though... so whoever invents whatever, there's always room for improving on it by someone else.)

I dunno... Every time I look deeper into something this or that people is supposed to have invented ("it is known..."), I discover that everything has been invented by the Chinese. Of course Australian aboriginal things you mentioned earlier may be an exception. Now that the member who belongs altogether elsewhere has been dis-membered and there's no risk of getting more of the same filth (at least from this particular source), I would like to mention in passing that "sources" are falsifiable. With utmost ease in our time -- but they have always been falsifiable. Some of them -- fakery made to look as coming from this or that group, usually to divert any and all grievances toward them -- have cost people lives, millions of lives. (Did you know that the Black Plague, at the time it happened, was believed to be caused, not by the yersinia pestis which was to be discovered only centuries later, but by Jews "poisoning the wells?" A number of mass massacres all across Europe promptly followed. Just one example, out of too many.) So, just wanted to mention something I found peculiar back in the day. While that text attributed here to Marx is fake as fuck, I did read Marx's real letters to Engels and discovered that Marx was blatantly antisemitic. Yes, it happens -- self-hating Jews are a phenomenon perhaps related to the Stockholm syndrome, or a misguided desire to be accepted by the majority on the basis of sharing what is perceived as the majority's sentiment... whatever the reason, they exist, and Marx was one of them. His letters are interspersed with many antisemitic slurs and attacks. If he posted here some of what he wrote to Engels, he'd be banned too. (And good riddance it would be if you ask me.)

All these years I have spent at the service of mankind brought me nothing but insult and humiliation. -- Nikola Tesla

Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, daß ich so traurig bin...

Trump is unlikely to be reading TDB so if he does get this idea I'm not the one responsible!!! -- I just can't help thinking... you guys down under don't have any guns anymore, do you?..

Thank you. Looks horrible.

I lost my Swiss Army knife.

We have a similar derivation -- from a medieval turkic city of Taman-Tarkan we got "tmutarakan'" meaning lands far away/god knows where. Which, while being nonsensical, is also funny since its components evoke associations with "darkness" and "cockroaches." That's how lands far away that are "not ours" and "not us" are imagined.

Cultural appropriation is a made-up problem in all cases except when you're stealing someone else's thunder and claiming it for your own. Japan is a country that historically has fully "appropriated" Chinese culture, acknowledging and accepting the fact, and then working all things Chinese into their own cultural expression the Japanese way. Russia, since the 18th century, was a product of "cultural appropriation" by the tzar Peter the Great of the European ways -- he studied them personally (even working as a carpenter at Dutch shipbuilding yards -- in order to learn how to build a modern fleet) and enforced them relentlessly, from beard-shaving and fashion to social structure, education, architecture, the calendar, you name it. (Some Russians still haven't forgiven him for that though -- while some Americans still aren't buying that Russia is a European country. The former pine for the "unique" and "native" ways which they idealize the hell out of, while the latter simply aren't that great at either history or geography due to educational peculiarities.)