Word: lunar
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...Thai Lunar New Year is usually a time when guns line the streets of Bangkok. Water guns, that is, manned by revelers who spray passersby to summon plenty of rain for the coming year's harvest. But today, as this Thai New Year began, the usual neon-hued water guns were supplanted by submachine guns held by soldiers who were trying to disperse the agitated antigovernment protesters who have blockaded part of central Bangkok for days...
...proved to be a bit of a joke because the calendar change was actually gradual and no one was quite caught off guard. Various other festivals have been cited as inspirations, including the east Asian festival of the burning of the scholars on the new moon of the fourth lunar month (the equivalent of April 1 in the western calendar). The holiday began to evolve (or devolve) 2,200 years ago after Qin Shihuangdi, the unifier of China, infamously set fire to books and gazettes that he disagreed with; today it is celebrated by "sacrificing" jokey messages to the gods...
...analysis, he identified 165 separate points on the monument, and linked them to astrological phenomenon like the two solstices and equinoxes and lunar and solar eclipses. It's a difficult theory to disprove completely and some evidence is persuasive - at dawn on the summer solstice, for example, the center of the Stonehenge ring, two nearby stones (The Slaughter and Heel Stones) and the sun all seem to align. Still, critics of Hawkins' theory say he gives the ancient builders too much credit, arguing they wouldn't have had the sophistication or precision necessary to predict all the astrological events Hawkins...
...continue down Oxford Street, you will see two of Harvard’s most famous landmarks. Farthest away, you will find Northwest Labs, the inspiration for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” On the first Tuesday after the second Monday after the lunar equinox, the massive basement becomes an underground roller derby arena and home of human sacrifice...
...monastery's walls, Dorje enumerated the wrongs visited on ordinary Tibetans by the Chinese authorities: beatings, arbitrary arrests and lengthy jail sentences, extortion, forced attendance at public vilifications of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. The list went on, culminating in attempts to make Tibetans celebrate the Lunar New Year, something Dorje and others told me they had refused to do out of respect for Tibetans killed in Lhasa last March when anti-Chinese protests turned violent. (See pictures of the Dalai Lama...