One of my absolute favourites of all time for street food is 肉夹馍. Had it this Tuesday on the way home from work. A very close second is 煎饼. Last time I had that, though, was over a month ago.

Yes. That’s exactly what I said.

🙄

I guess this is what happens when people grow up with video games instead of people.

I honestly can’t stand eating packaged dried so-called “ramen” made the way the instructions say. I can only bear eating them … like crackers. So I’m with you on that.

My own weird thing?

I like eating plain steamed buns (“mantou”) by using a dip made of peanut oil, a few drops of sesame oil, and some decent rice vinegar.

That’s one HELL of a can of worms to be opening. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush isn’t about birds, nor hands, for example.

Perhaps people should just learn?

What he said.

I’m not seeing the bullets in your solution here. Did I overlook them?

Yeah, that whole separate school board thing is ludicrous, especially given how the proportion of people identifying as Catholic in Canada has been on a steady decline since the 1950s. (I vaguely recall that being a drop from over 50% to under 30%, with 15% dropping in just the 2000s alone.)

It may be time to dismantle that wasteful system.

The point of ACAB isn’t to take it literally. It’s a reminder that a whole fucking lot of cops, particularly in the USA, are bad. And the problem is that when you’re dealing with an individual cop at an individual interaction, you don’t know which you’re dealing with. And you won’t until it’s too late.

So the smartest thing to do is, with any interaction with police, clam up and lawyer up. No matter what. Because you don’t know if they’re asking questions because they’re investigating someone else or investigating you. And when the latter, the bad cops (and remember, you don’t know which kind you’ve got!) will cheerfully lie and cheat and distort and generally railroad you to fit their theory.

I finally acquired both of the albums of the band OU.

Some samplers:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoKL23zNg7w
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y25jmEVCwOQ

(Warning: the music is what is often politely termed “challenging”.)

Rich people are badly out of touch. When I was in university there were some EXTREMELY wealthy young Indian women who couldn’t fathom that not everybody (indeed not most people) had maids. “So do your maids have maids?” <blank, uncomprehending stare>.

Being wealthy is legit, I think, a disease and sadly it’s not an infectious one. It operates in reverse from most destructive diseases.

I’m Canadian. I went to public school. My school gave me trips to, among other places, Verdun, Marseilles, Paris, Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Berlin. Also my school gave us winter break ski events in Switzerland and Austria.

This was a public school, I remind you again.

But hey, I guess your trip to New York is pretty great too and well worth the obscene prices most private schools charge.

You seem nice.

This would be the most recent board game I purchased. The most recent I discovered might be Splendor/Splendor Duel.

If I nap, I tend to wake up feeling more sluggish and tired than before I slept.

with the earliest recorded year being rooted in archaeology

Wait, THAT’s your source of “4241BC is the beginning of history”!?!?!?!? A 19th-early-20th century preacher!?

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

He didn’t use any kind of evidence-based system to establish that date. He did, for all practical purposes, numerology! That claim is as valid as the various pre-Xia mythical dynasties of China or the claim of the Australian Aborigines that they were “always” in Australia and didn’t come from anywhere else!

Hoo boy, somebody needs to do a little bit more reading before redesigning time!

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Can you point, please, to a (preferably Chinese) source that supports your claim of eight-day weeks? I have precisely zero sources for eight day weeks, but have quite a few for 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12.

But lunar cycles are 29.5 days, not 28.

We don’t.

Writing was invented in the range of 3300-3400BCE and the earliest coherent texts of any kind we have are from 2600BCE at the earliest. We only have archaeological evidence of anything that happened before that, and there’s nothing special about 4241BCE in that record. (The nature of archaeology makes dating prehistoric things with that level of precision risible anyway.)

There’s a small problem in that blog: it has some grotesque inaccuracies.

The part that stood out for me, though, was this:

The fourth part of my system is the seven-day work week. Different cultures around the world have had a different number of days of a week. The ancient Chinese had eight for example. The Aztecs had weeks defined as having five days. I technically go by six. It’s just easier. You will find it easier too, I guarantee that. Whose idea was it to have a prime number as the number of week days?

The ancient Chinese had a bewildering number of calendar systems with highly variable lengths of week-equivalents. They had 10-day weeks, 12-day weeks, 7-day weeks, 9-day weeks, indeed practically every number you can conceive of has been a week length in ancient Chinese calendar systems except—ironically enough—8-day weeks.

Incidentally, time systems in China are also horrifically complicated with divisions of the day into 15 “hours” (but only divided such during daytime hours) in very ancient times. Later a bizarre system that had daytime divisions of 10(更), 12(时), 60(点), 100(刻), 6000(!)(分), and even 600,000(!!)(秒) all being used at once was in play. (There’s a few more but i can’t be arsed to pull out my reference books; they’re used in marginal cases.)

Why so many units of time? Isn’t it irrational? Not really, no. Because differing activities had more useful divisions of the day for units. It turns out that consistency is very much the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s like how we use different speed measurements today internationally: km/h mostly, but also “nautical miles per hour” in the aircraft industry (alongside Mach numbers), and a few others.

And that is in the end the point here. You use divisions that are useful, not that match someone’s sense of aesthetics. The same applies to time zones (though those get a bit obnoxious when politics interferes: all of China is a single time zone, for example, which is utterly ludicrous). Months are easy to keep track of when they match the moon’s phases. In pre-industrial times in specific that is very valuable for timing key things like planting and harvests. Only 29.5 days is the approximate length of the moon’s cycle, and the year is approximately 365.25 days long. So systems had to become entrenched that either used intercalary features (e.g. the Chinese solilunar calendar), that ignored the issue (e.g. various Arab calendars), or that disconnected the moon from timings (the Western approach). What is obviously not going to work, however, is to just pick arbitrary numbers like “six day weeks” from thin air (hint: 365.25 ÷ 6 = ?), or, even worse, “14 months of 26 days with one or two intercalary days” (what’s 26 ÷ 6 again, and what’s the impact of intercalary days on sliding across months?).

And to tie this back into your selection of 4241BC as the first year of recorded history … recorded how!? Writing was itself only only invented in 3300-3400BCE and the first coherent texts we have stem from about 2600BCE. So how are you picking 4241BC as the first year of recorded history when the absolute earliest actual records we have come from over 1500 years after that point?

Which highlights the danger of using “scientific” and “rational” starting points: they are neither. The BCE/CE system was based on the purported year of Christ’s birth which has two problems: 1. The historicity of Jesus Christ is very much in doubt, and 2. even if he did exist, that year is wrong according to later scholarship: if Christ were actually real, the reported fact that Herod was alive at his birth and that the Romans were doing a census puts his date of birth at 4BCE at the latest. (It could be as early as 7BCE.) Picking some arbitrary starting point based on purported scientific/historic “facts” will (not may, will) fall apart when (and not if) scholarship finds that the date given is wrong. It’s just better to pick a date, imperfect as the choice may be, and standardize on it than try to be “objective” and fuck it up completely like the BCE/CE system did.

If we counted years from the reign of the Yellow Emperor using Sun Yat-sen’s approach, this year would be 4722.