Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the Year of the Ox. Nice one, China. All the lucky children born this year will be forced to identify with a large bovine. Well, I suppose it’s better than my own luck: Year of the Rat. Some people get Year of the Dragon. I’m stuck with rat. Let me tell you, there is no inspiration in dreaming that you share common traits with a rodent. But maybe it’s all in the presentation. Maybe the rat needs some re-branding. Maybe Hollywood can somehow convince us the rat is the most badass of all creatures. Or maybe at least up there with the horse. But what have they given us? Ratatouille. Verdict: No. You cannot rebrand the rat. At least not to anything cooler than, say, Alton Brown. But now that I think about it, that’s probably cooler than a horse.
I often wonder about the guy who originally came up with these names: some old guy in China a few thousand years ago, who probably all his life had this thing for dragons. I can just imagine him as a child in school, sitting there working away at his parchment, finely detailing the scales on his Trogdor, when he’s supposed to be learning to write the 28 stroke character for fertility or something. Later on in life, he’d take on the profession of calendar-maker, and to spice things up a bit, he’d come up with this year naming scheme, where his year, of course, would be Year of the Dragon. But of course he despised his annoying neighbor who always came over to borrow his plow and always forgot to give it back. That guy, he got Year of the Rat. And Year of the Pig? Probably his mother-in-law.