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SifuAbel
01-16-2004, 12:31 AM
The web link has the year of the monkey starting on Feb 4. The new moon is on Jan 22.

Taomonkey
01-16-2004, 08:27 AM
Fellow Furry Mamals, its our year...

Sound off if your a Monkey

Jai Hanuman

MasterKiller
01-16-2004, 09:17 AM
I'm a rat, which is a furry mammal. Can I at least drink from the keg?

GeneChing
01-16-2004, 10:26 AM
...so by strict Feng Shui reading, the actual starting date is actually Feb 4, but it's observation begins at the new moon. At least, that's what I'm told. What can you say about the the Chinese Lunar Calendar? Our Gregorian has a leap day, but the CLC has a leap month.

David Jamieson
01-16-2004, 10:49 AM
It' all wrong actually. :D

The new moon is Jan 24. Check your calendars.

cheers

SifuAbel
01-16-2004, 11:37 AM
According to the actual lunal tables the new moon will begin jan 21 at 9:06 p.m. (pac. time) exactly.

And, all of the other sources I have for chinese new year have it also at jan 22 as the first day.

Also, its a 15 day festival not a 7 day festival ending with the full moon's lantern festival.

SifuAbel
01-16-2004, 03:07 PM
Originally posted by Taomonkey
Fellow Furry Mamals, its our year...

Sound off if your a Monkey

Jai Hanuman

Ahhhhhhhhhhh Yo!

SifuAbel
01-16-2004, 03:12 PM
Originally posted by SifuAbel
According to the actual lunal tables the new moon will begin jan 21 at 9:06 p.m. (pac. time) exactly.

And, all of the other sources I have for chinese new year have it also at jan 22 as the first day.

Also, its a 15 day festival not a 7 day festival ending with the full moon's lantern festival.

Here are a few examples. :

http://www.new-year.co.uk/chinese/calendar.htm

http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/438/CHINA/chinese_new_year.html

David Jamieson
01-16-2004, 04:24 PM
sa- you have taken the correct, sent it to the moon and built a base while at the same time stretching it's arse all the way to mars!

lunar new moon starts jan 21, end jan 24.

3 days just like full moon.

I'm gonna eat stuff, watch kungfu demonstrations, lion dance, dragon dance and listen to the lilting melodies of erwu and flute!

I like how Chinese New years is compared to the western big drunk and casual sex party. :D

Dunno how I got that mixed up, but there ya go. lol

cheers

SifuAbel
01-16-2004, 05:48 PM
Originally posted by Kung Lek
sa- you have taken the correct, sent it to the moon and built a base while at the same time stretching it's arse all the way to mars!

cheers

ouch!!

SifuAbel
01-18-2004, 07:28 PM
ttt

joedoe
01-18-2004, 08:08 PM
Originally posted by MasterKiller
I'm a rat, which is a furry mammal. Can I at least drink from the keg?

Hi from a fellow rat :D

GeneChing
01-19-2004, 11:13 AM
OK OK, we had to go back to the original Chinese on this one, dig up all that Feng Shui stuff, which I hate doing but I will just for you all on the forum here. If you've only celebrated Chinese New Year, then you really no nothing of the intricacies of the Chinese calendar - that's like saying you know kung fu because you've seen the TV show. The chinese calendar, like so many things Chinese, is sooooo esoteric, and this is a perfect case-and-point. Let this be a lesson to all of you that question the absurdities of Feng Shui. As we often say, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" both in Feng Shui and Kung Fu, so this will stand as a good lesson, or at least an exercise in Chinese research.

Ready? Here we go.

Our date is correct. The actual start of the year of the Monkey by strict reading of Feng Shui/I Ching calendar is Feb 4th. This is because, strictly speaking, the year of the monkey must begin on a Feng Shui date called Li Chun, literally the beginning of spring. However, remember what I said about leap months? Like our own gregorian calendar, which as to adjust a day (feb 29th) every four years, the Chinese Lunar Calendar needs to adjust every once in a while, but it adjusts a whole month (don't even ask me when, it changes all the time of course.) Well, this year that leap month lands in our gregorian month of February, or so I'm told. 2004 has two Chinese Februarys - February 20th to March 20th (a big one with 30 days), then March 20th to April 18 (a small February). Our publisher, Gigi Oh, tells me her brother gets to celebrate his 1st birthday because it's the first time it has landed in February in his lifetime, and he's over 50! Now, because of the leap month, the lunar calendar is off slightly, which means that the new moon does not occur on the new year this year. Nevertheless, few people observe the actual calendar like Feng Shui people, so almost everyone sets it on the new moon anyway, even though that is not completely accurate in this case. So there's an observed Chinese New Year, the new moon, for people who don't really know their Feng Shui and the real turn of the year of the monkey for those who really study this stuff.

Don't beleive me? I barely understand it myself. It's waaaaay too astorlogical for me. But check your Chinese almanac calendars (I don't think Homeland security is persecuting people with Chinese almanacs yet so don't worry). You'll find the leap year as I've said and that Li Chun is on Feb 4. If you want to be a smart ass, you can spout all of this off during you Chinese New Year celebrations and hope that someone else has some inkling about what you're talking about. But it's probably wiser to just know it and be quiet.

SifuAbel
01-19-2004, 03:26 PM
Ok dude, so while the rest of the ENTIRE world is celebrating you can hold out with the three or four dozen people that're holding out for feb 4.

Cheers. :D

GeneChing
01-19-2004, 04:43 PM
...if your casting Feng Shui Horoscopes (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/info/horoscope/index.php) , which is what our Feng Shui Master Wilson Sun does for us. Clearly, it's a lesson in the complexity of Chinese culture - things are seldom what they seem. I'm told that the Chinese calendar is more accurate in some ways, but leap months always seemed extreme to me. On the other hand, our own gregorian use of months (originally form "moon" as in moonths) makes no sense at all either anymore - otherwise the full moon would be at the same time every month. But check your Chinese calendar if you don't beleive me - do some research beyond just looking at stuff in English. :p

And xin nian kuai le :cool:

SifuAbel
01-19-2004, 05:55 PM
Originally posted by GeneChing
do some research beyond just looking at stuff in English. :p

And xin nian kuai le :cool:

Ok lets start with few off yahoo:

http://www.chinapage.com/newyear.html

http://123chinesenewyear.dgreetings.com/

http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/2004.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/chinese_new_year.shtml

http://chineseculture.about.com/b/a/056313.htm

http://www.hkfastfacts.com/Festivals-in-Hong-Kong.html


there are to many to list

GeneChing
01-20-2004, 10:41 AM
Here's the link for Feb 2004 - http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/2004-02-L.gif - if you look at FEb 4th, you'll see the characters in the upper corner for Li Chun. Chun is the same character as in Wing Chun, which means "spring." Technically, if you use Feng Shui, new years starts on Li Chun. Now if you look at Feb 20th, you'll see four characters, the first two are er yue, or "2 moon." Look at March 21 - http://www.chinapage.com/astronomy/2004-03-L.gif - and you see five characters, the second two are er yue again, preceded by the character ren which means "leap". Well, sort of. So that's the leap year.

Now before we beat this into the ground too much, we need to establish what we are discussing. You're saying the date is wrong. I'm saying that there are two dates - a celebrated CNY and an actual CNY. It's sort of like how we move some holidays to Mondays to make a 3-day weekend. In this case, the Chinese have moved the holiday to follow the moon to make up for the leap month, which is actually to make up for the inaccuracies of their calendar, just like our leap day. Actually our date is more accurate despite being more obscure, but it's just not the celebrated date. It's kind of like comparing David Carradine's Kung Fu with the Kung Fu everyone claims to know here on this forum. :rolleyes:

Personally, I wish our Feng Shui Master Wilson Sun had been more clear about this distinction, so I wouldn't have had to research all this trivia. Despite my skepticism on astorlogy and Feng Shui, he's been quite accurate, and his prediction of the beginning of the war was within hours, so I'll support his research. Actually, what I find most interesting here is the revelation of the intricacies of Chinese culture - something I'm always grappling with as a translator. Had Master Sun been more clear, we would have explained this all in the initial introduction, but how we were to know all this leap month stuff. Did you even know that the Chinese calendar had leap months? Since the last one to land in February was some 50 years ago, few people have ever seen this new year displacement effect. But again, like so many things Chinese, few people try to plumb it's depths - they only scratch the surface - the Chinese included. Sometimes our research goes too deep and we lose people, but for me, I'd rahter get the deep stuff.

SifuAbel
01-20-2004, 02:34 PM
Sounds like Confucian bureaucracy to me. :D

A lunar year that doesn't go by the lunar cycle? The old pagan in me is :rolleyes: .

Its saying, Your calanders don't fit, too bad. LOL!

GeneChing
01-20-2004, 05:51 PM
Our western months don't correspond to the moon - months/moonths - so why should we expect the eastern lunar years to do so either? When you think about it, calendars must have been pretty tough to create back in the day.

All I can say is that Feng Shui is funky. Crazy superstitious babble, if you ask me. Of course, right when I'm ready to completely disregard it, Wilson will make an accurate prediction. **** eerie. He predicted a shoulder injury I had quite precisely. I work on translating his horoscopres, then promptly forget them. But after I had this injury, I was re-reading some of his stuff and he called it. The day I realized his prediction was correct, he appeared somewhat magically and did some work on it for me (he does really good dit da). I just wish he could have predicted this monkey date debacle so I didn't have to think so hard about it in answering the queries it raised. It's just that funky feng shui messing with my head again. :rolleyes:

GeneChing
01-21-2004, 10:11 AM
Remember when I said you should do your research? That means a little more than just a yahoo search. You gotta read what you find too. Check out this quote from the 3rd link posted above (http://www.chinesefortunecalendar.com/2004.htm)


The Chinese New Year day is on January 22nd, 2004. Because this is a new moon day, it is the first day of the first Chinese lunar month in the Chinese Lunar Calendar system. The new moon time is at 05:05 on 22-Jan-04 in China time zone. However, the new moon time is at 13:05 of 21-Jan-04 in the US Pacific Standard Time and also at 10:05 of 21-Jan-04 in the US Eastern Standard Time, so the Chinese New Year day is on January 21st, 2004 for USA time zones. In the Chinese Fortune-Telling calendar, the first day of the first month, Tiger month, is called "Start of Spring", which is when the sun enters the 315th degree on the tropical zodiac. In the China time zone, the time of Start of Spring is at 02-04 19:56. So the first day of the Green Monkey year 2004 is on 04-Feb-03. For USA, the time of Start of Spring is on 02-03 at 03:56 PST, therefore the first day of 2004 Chinese astrology calendar in USA is same to China time zone. If a baby was born on or after the Start of Spring, then she or he is a Green Monkey in the family. :cool:

SifuAbel
01-21-2004, 03:23 PM
Thankfully, I'm not a fortune teller.

So GONG HEY FAT CHOI!!!!!!!!

anton
01-21-2004, 11:55 PM
Originally posted by GeneChing
...It's kind of like comparing David Carradine's Kung Fu with the Kung Fu everyone claims to know here on this forum. :rolleyes:


BWAHAHHAH! gold!!

norther practitioner
01-22-2004, 01:54 PM
GONG HEY FAT CHOI

Bluesman
01-22-2004, 11:45 PM
I was watching the news before work and saw where the Chinese stood in line for over two hours at a temple just to rub a stone monkey for good luck. I walked over to my wife and asked if she wanted to rub the monkey for good luck before I left. Women just don't have a sense of humor.:rolleyes:

SifuAbel
01-23-2004, 01:17 AM
LMAO!!