February 4, 2024
# 1642

Red lanterns on display during Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown 2004, The Year of the Monkey. Photo by Nancy Wong
Nancy Wong - Own work

Chinese New Year falls on February 10, 2024 ; Chinese zodiac chart

Wikipedia has a great piece on the Chinese New Year so we copied it here.
The pictures are theirs as well.

Traditions

Chinese New Year's Eve's practice is the cluster of this festival's history and tradition for thousands of years, there are many practices in China which are varied as people in different regions have different customs. Most of the practices exists for thousands years and still being used nowadays.

Gathering

Especially in southern China, people celebrate Chinese New Year's Eve with a big family meal with traditional dishes. Everyone, including children, can drink alcohol. Families make sacrifices to their ancestors: they set out seats for the ancestors, lay out food, and pour them drinks, and burn joss sticks and candles. Family members kowtow while the ancestors eat. After dinner, the family members sit together, perhaps talking or playing cards,

Staying up all night

On Chinese New Year's Eve, people stay up late, until midnight or often until dawn. This tradition is called shousui (simplified Chinese: 守岁; traditional Chinese: 守歲; pinyin: shǒusuì; lit. 'guarding the year').

TV gala

The Spring Festival Gala is a TV show which broadcasts live by China's Central Television on Lunar New Year's Eve with singing, dancing, sketch comedy and cross-talk. It usually takes 6 months to do the preparation. Since more and more Chinese families could afford television from 1980s, the spring festival gala has been institutionalized as a crucial practice of Chinese New Year's Eve, every family member sits in front of the TV, watching spring festival gala together. The spring festival gala will broadcast until midnight, everyone in front of the televisions will say "Happy New Year" at midnight with the hosts.

Firecrackers String

Burning of bamboo and use of firecrackers

There's an ancient myth that a devil is living in western mountains, people would fall ill if come across it, but this devil is afraid of the sound of bamboo. So Chinese will burn bamboo to make the sound to keep the devil out of their house on Chinese New Year's Eve. Nowadays, Chinese people still like to light firecrackers instead of bamboo on Chinese New Year's Eve not just for keeping devil out, but also for having fun.

*Firecrackers String*
***Tom Harpel*** ***from Seattle, Washington, United States -***
***Flickr.com*** - ***image description page***
***Firecracker String***

The Kitchen God

Kitchen God

The Chinese Kitchen God is regarded as the ambassador of the Jade Emperor to each Chinese family. It is said that at the midnight of Chinese New Year's Eve, the kitchen god from each family should go to heaven to report the family's deeds during the year. On lunar new year, the kitchen god returns to the earth and each family welcomes him by pasting a new picture of him in the kitchen.

Inviting a Door God

Door God

On Chinese New Year's Eve, each family would invite the door god by pasting its picture on the front door as a talisman to forbid any devil to enter the family. The most popular door gods are Zhong Kui, Qin Shubao and Yuchi Gong in different areas of China.

***Door God***
***User*** ***Tagishsimon*** on ***en.wikipedia**. - Project Gutenberg eText 15250 -*** ***http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15250***.
***Door god - Civil***

Peach wood

On Chinese New Year's Eve, Chinese will make bow of peach wood to exorcise the devil that caused plagues, which dates back to the Qin dynasty. The ghost would do no harm to man, but the ancients were afraid of them, so they asked for help to drive the ghost away. The entrance-guarding god was closely related to festivals and peach wood was regarded as a supernatural force with which ghosts could be driven away.

Traditional foods for Chinese New Year’s Eve

Family reunion dinner is crucial to Chinese. Chinese New Year's Eve feast allows every family members to sit together. It takes days to do the preparation. Every dish on Chinese New Year's Eve have different meanings. Some of the most popular dishes are:

Chinese Vegetable Spring Roll

Spring Rolls

Spring rolls are a traditional dish in parts of China. People make the thin dough wrappers in the cylindrical-shaped rolls and fill them with vegetables, meat, or something sweet, then fried the spring rolls to give them a golden-yellow color.

***Chinese Vegetable Spring Roll***
***Mrudit161187*** ***- Own work***
***Chinese Vegetable Spring Roll***

Dumplings

Dumplings

The dumpling is a traditional food to eat in north China on Chinese New Year's Eve while in southern China very few people serve dumplings as Lunar New Year's Eve dinner. Minced meat (pork, shrimp, chicken, beef.etc.) and vegetables are wrapped in the elastic dough skin. Boiling, steaming, frying are the most common ways to cook dumplings in China.

Glutinous Rice Cake

Glutinous Rice Cake

Glutinous Rice Cake is called "niangao" in Mandarin. The sound of Nian Gao has a good meaning: getting higher year by year. Glutinous Rice Cake is made of sticky rice, sugar, chestnuts, lotus leaves. It is a common dish which appeared in the southern Chinese families' Lunar New Year Eve reunion dinner.

Good Fortune Fruit

Tangerines

Tangerines, oranges and pomelos are certain fruits that been eaten on Lunar New Year's Eve. Chinese believe that eating these fruits on Chinese New Year's Eve can bring fortune as these fruits have round shape, golden color, lucky sounds when spoken which symbolize fullness and wealth.

Longevity Noodles

Longevity noodles represents Chinese' wish for longevity. The length and preparation of longevity noodles are the symbolic of eater's life. Longevity noodles are longer than normal noodles, usually fried or boiled and served in the bowl.

Money gift and Money tree

Chinese will give children money gifts as lunar new year gift on Chinese New Year's Eve. They usually put money in red pockets and hide under their children's pillows. In ancient times, Chinese money was the round copper coin with a square hole in the middle. adults will thread the coins with colourful thread to make a shape of dragon and then they will put the money beside their children's beds while their children are asleep. this customs, which is very similar to Christmas gifts in west.

A money tree is a legendary tree which will shed coins when shaken. On Chinese New Year's Eve, Chinese will cut some pine branches and put the branches in vase. Then they will tie copper coins, shoe-shaped gold or silver and pomegranate flowers to the tree, which is very similar to Christmas tree in western countries.

______________________________________
Commentary
If you ask ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, to tell you something about ‘Questo North End!’, this will be their answer:

1. The website was established in 2024 to pay homage to the last 120 years of predominant Italian influence in the neighborhood

2. If you are interested in learning more about the North End, Questo North End! is a great resource to check out.

https://www.questonorthend.org/

I’m in India

Looking to advance my yoga-teaching creds.

_____________________________________
Kat’s Gen Z Corner

On every seventh day, we get a day off. This week, we went to the city of Mysore and in a locality called Gokukam. I haven’t had this much fun with a group of women in a long time. Here are some photos from the trip.

Kat is on left, 4th one down

______________________________________
Tucker’s Corner
I cook for my wife and daughter just about every night. Not only is eating a necessity but for me it’s a terrific way to decompress at the end of a day. In a world where so many things are completely out of our control I find it a lovely way to exercise some command over my life. It isn’t a major thing but being able to focus on a very specific task and use instinct and training to achieve an outcome you can taste and enjoy inside of an hour is a form of meditation for me. My love of food preparation has extended into my love of visual media. I devour (horrible pun) movies and tv shows about food and so when I got a rare chance to see this week’s film I was overjoyed. And even better it was as lovely as I could have imagined. This is The Taste of Things.

The opening scene of Tran Anh Hung's The Taste of Things is 38 minutes long. It shows two people, and their two young assistants, preparing a meal in a big country kitchen. The meal is intricate, and multiple courses are being prepared simultaneously. The camera glides through the kitchen, following the characters as they bring a handful of vegetables to an already hot pan on the stove, circling back to the chopping on a nearby table. The camera never stops moving. What we are doing, for 38 minutes, is watching these people cook, and, naturally, drooling over the meal being prepared before our eyes. This scene is an amazing feat, so much so that there's satisfaction when you watch the guests in the dining room taste the food, savoring every bite, not even needing to say a word. The pleasure is palpable.

Through this scene, where nobody says anything beyond "Put the veal in the oven", we piece together the relationships. It's so gratifying to get to know characters by watching what they do (as opposed to listening to them talk about themselves). An amazing amount of information is conveyed without dialogue. There's Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), overseeing the meal, and cooking himself, splitting time by visiting with his guests. His partner in the kitchen is Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who tends to her work with obvious pleasure, her face lit up, pleased at the success of a long day's toil. She's not just a good cook. She's an artist. The two assistants are teenage girls, Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), who work silently and obediently. Pauline is new to the kitchen, and still a child, but she is a gastronomic prodigy, able to name all of a broth's ingredients merely from the taste. Dodin and Eugénie recognize and cultivate her gift.

Based on the popular French novel The Passionate Epicure (1920), written by Marcel Rouff, The Taste of Things features many such scenes, lengthy delectable cooking scenes, but it is the first which establishes the film's rhythm. One doesn't even notice the length of the scene, because what is happening is so soothing and pleasurable. The history of "food movies" is a long one, but there's never been food as delicious looking as the meals created by Dodin and Eugénie. You can almost smell the aroma of those broths, pastries, and chickens.

But The Taste of Things has deeper layers connected to all this food preparation. Dodin and Eugénie have been working side by side for twenty years. How Eugénie came to live with him is not really expressed, although he is such a famous epicure that perhaps she traveled there to offer herself as an apprentice. The soft encouraging manner in which she treats Pauline suggests a personal identification with the child. Dodin and Eugénie share occasional nights together, where he walks through the dark halls of the manor house and knocks on her door. This, too, has probably been going on for 20 years. Dodin has proposed to Eugénie a number of times. She always turns him down. Their relationship is one of mutual respect, not just as people, but as fellow obsessives. Cooking together, for them, is an act of creation.

Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) allows the story to unfold in its own time, in its own way. Nothing is pushed. Nothing is heightened artificially. The devotion to food is both real and metaphor: how we prepare food, the care we take, indicates how we feel for each other. But it's also the thrill of the preparation in and of itself, all of which the director captures, with essential help from Jonathan Ricquebourg’s cinematography, the camera floating through that kitchen, literally peering into pots to watch the vegetables sizzle. Toma Baqueni’s production design is also crucial, particularly in a film with only one location. The kitchen feels like a place you know, or at least a place you'd like to be. The detail of cooking without electricity, without plugged-in appliances, is attended to in great detail. You believe Magimel and Binoche are doing all that cooking.

This is a love story between grown-ups. There's no neurotic anxiety or uncertainty about feelings. They are adults and they speak about it frankly in their rare moments of leisure. Dodin loves Eugénie, and treats her with a heart-aching tenderness, particularly when he is concerned about her occasional fainting spells. Eugénie's hesitance to take the relationship to the next step is understandable, particularly for a 19th-century woman. She talks about it with him openly in a beautiful late-night scene, where they relax after a tiring day in the kitchen. She loves their relationship as it is. She loves cooking with him, she loves it when he visits her room. Would this all change if they made it official?

The Taste of Things is about the "how," not the "what". You get to know people best by understanding what obsesses them, the activities that interest them. Acting teacher Stella Adler once said, "It's not that important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then do it like Hercules." Dodin and Eugénie cook together like Hercules. They are a partnership in every sense of the word. It's deeply moving, and I'm still not sure how Tran Anh Hung achieves this delicate balance. It feels like a magic trick, but of course it isn't. Every choice is carefully considered. By staying in the kitchen and following these two people around as they cook together, Tran shows a silent and tender partnership, deeper than most marriages, because so much doesn't need to be said.

Famous American food writer M.F.K. Fisher was once asked why she chose this particularly subject matter as her focus. She replied, "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot think clearly of one without the others. So it happens that when I write about hunger I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one." In The Taste of Things, no distinction is made between cooking for someone and loving them. It's "all one".

______________________________
MONTHLY HEALTH REPORT CARD: of an 81-year-old male.

January, 2024

Natural Physiological Change
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Grade: A

Weight-lifting
I missed too many days in January due to writing needs.
Grade: B, down from an A

Walking
January was not a good walking month. The cold makes it very unpleasant for me.

Grade: C, down from an B-

Illness
All well. Got another treatment for a common and not worrisome skin cancer. Had a biopsy that came back as benign.

Grade: B, down from A

Symptoms
Saturday night had the worst muscle cramping in my life.
My hamstrings seized up on me late in the evening and i had to slide to the floor to stretch them out.
Past seizures were over in five minutes.
Not this night. Fifteen minutes, the seizure.
At 11.15pm, alone, my body in a profuse sweat, the pain a severe 7 of 10.
I sent the details of the event to my caregivers and will wait my next step.

Injury
None.

Grade A+

Weight
(Using only weight as a measure of health is simplistic. I know. Health care specialists consider an entire range of metrics. Two commonly used indicators are the Body Mass Index that takes into account a person's weight and height. And Body composition, considering the distribution of body fat and muscle mass rather than solely focusing on weight. But this analysis of the state of our health is meant to be doable in our regular day’s living. We’ll use simple body weight and take other steps when we feel things going really poorly.)

My weight is pretty good.

Grade B

Oral Health
I have no teeth or gum issues.
I brush and floss regularly.
Get a cleaning twice a year.
Grade A+

Substance Abuse
My morning coffee is now 10oz of a half-caffeine free and half regular. I am drinking two glasses of wine at dinner time and never other.
This grade is based on the total absence of stimulants and mind-bending substances. My grade stays unchanged.

Grade: B+, no change

Stress Management
Being retired and living alone I am deprived of the joys of gainful employment and daily social intercourse. But, on the other hand, I have the pleasure of a multitude of happy relationships.

Grade: B+, no change

Sleep
My sleep is excellent compared to my past life. Am taking no sleep aids whatever, and I always get between 5 and 6 hours sleep.

Grade: A-

Regularity
I maintain a decently balanced diet which is not only good for my weight-control, but also for my regularity.

Grade: B+

Memory
I do a lot to stay mentally active. One of my primary activities is writing. I recently published a book I edited, I work on this magazine, a website I am constructing for the North End is in its alpha testing phase, and I have completed my novel.
My other major memory activity is meal preparation, from the planning of the menu, the shopping, and the preparation which sometimes involves me in writing recipes.
Yet, despite all I do, memory loss is real and a nuisance: I am the subject of those 1,000 jokes about walking into a room and wondering what I’m doing here.

Grade: B+.

______________________________________
Chuckles and Thoughts
You must strive to find your own voice because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.
Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society

______________________________________
Six Word Stories
"Unseen paths, brave hearts, destined journey."

_____________________________________
Mail and other Conversation

This from friend and partner, Victor P:

Dom,

Kat is an amazing young lady. We knew no such women among our contemporaries.

Tucker, can’t wait to see ‘Boys In The Boat’ after reading your review.

Victor

And this from Ralph I, a good friend and sometime contributor:

Dom,

I am honored you share your accomplishment with me. You have eaten up poverty prejudice abuse and metabolized it into an ever deeper expression of your humanity. I accept nothing less from you.

I Love You

Ralph Indrisano

We love getting mail, email, or texts, including links.

Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
text to 617.852.7192

____________________________________
Travel
AI reminded me to pack a wide-brimmed hat against too much sun in my face.
Good idea.

__________________________________
Last Thought
Nikki has established her running game: pair the old timers as a matched set: over the hill and otherwise flawed.
It’s a good ploy.
And repeating $83,000,000 is another effective taunt.
And Trump’s deteriorating health is another reason for her to continue her campaign.
And she has the cash.
And she doesn’t have a thousand charges against her that will distract her.
She will continue to make her presence felt.
Run, Nikki, run.

Restaurants that support the North End website we edit and publish: questonorthend.org

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jan 31 February 4 2024