Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese New Year design with a cow, "2021", and "新年快乐" [xīn nián kuài lè]. Image source.

Happy Year of the Ox, everyone! Tonight (February 11) is Chinese New Year's Eve. (Chinese New Year is also called Spring Festival.) 2021 is the year of the 牛 [niú] which is a cow/bull/ox/buffalo/etc but seems like everyone's translating it as "ox" in English. *shrug* (I contend that "Year of the Cow" is equally valid.)

This year is weird because the Chinese government strongly encouraged everyone not to travel for the holiday (the biggest holiday of the year). There are rules about "if you travel, you need to have a covid test within 7 days before your trip." So the 春运 [chūn yùn], the largest annual migration of people in the entire world, is way down this year. ("春运 [chūn yùn]" is the Chinese word for "the massive phenomenon that is everyone's Chinese New Year travel", see, there's an actual word for it.)

I am in Shanghai, and usually Shanghai is fairly quiet during new year holiday because a significant proportion of Shanghai residents aren't originally from here, so they all leave. Not this year though. This year we are staying.

However, in China there are tons of migrant workers- which means they come from a poorer area and go to big cities to get better-paying jobs- and it's common that they leave their children back in their hometown to be raised by the grandparents. Typically migrant workers only get to go home and see their families/kids once a year- at Spring Festival. So seems like a lot of them are traveling anyway, even though this year it's much more difficult and they run the risk of getting stuck in a lockdown or quarantine somewhere along the way.

Anyway that's the situation here. Hope the Year of the Cow is better than the Year of the Mouse. 新年快乐！ [xīn nián kuài lè]

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And here's the latest blogaround:

1. Disney Parks To Revamp Jungle Cruise Attraction, Responding To Racism Charges (posted January 25) Okay, yes, that ride is definitely racist.

2. I’m Sorry, What Is Going on With GameStop and AMC? (posted January 27) Yep, I had the exact same question. (About recent happenings with reddittors buying ridiculous amounts of GameStop stock, to screw over the short-sellers.)

3. These Creationists Learned a Weird Lesson from Sloths (posted January 29) LOLOLOL

4. On the Trail of COVID-19 in Shanghai (posted February 4) In January/February there have been something like 21 locally-transmitted COVID cases in Shanghai. This article is about how disease experts did contract tracing in response. At this point it seems like that outbreak has petered out and that's that.

5. Christopher Plummer, Actor From Shakespeare to ‘The Sound of Music,’ Dies at 91 (posted February 5)

6. How Isaiah converted Israelites to secularism (posted February 8) "Prayer, worship, and stomping through the doors of a church are all dismissed here as meaningless, wholly insignificant in comparison with the paramount duties God enumerates and describes — all of which seem to be things that white Christianity perceives and portrays as 'secular.'"