This Chinese new year is the year of the Ox. The BBC has lunar new year preparations in pictures. Jan 26th marks the start of the year, and people born under the Ox are said to be “Born leaders who will work hard to achieve their aims”, and are said to inspire confidence in others. Apparently new President Barrack Obama was born in an Ox year.

So Happy New Year!

To follow up this entry about the Chinese newspaper covering an Onion story, they’ve now come clean about it in a printed reaction [latimes.com]. Worth a chuckle.

Happy New Year readers!

It being the start of the year of the Horse, so I hope folk have sorted out all the things that needed doing before new year. News online has some pictures here.

Some things being suggested over here are languages for primary school kids which can only be a good thing given our lack of linguistic ability compared to Scandenavian contries. This seems to contradict other plans to move to more vocational subjects later on, meaning that languages can be dropped completely at 14. I’m sure these two ideas don’t really gel together.

So, there we go. Today’s rain project produced no rain to speak of. Less than 1ml in fact. I guess all the rain happened yesterday.