Happy Next Year

It's New Year's Day. You wake up to find it's 2016. What happened to 2015? Try to piece together 2015 using pictures from your phone or Facebook. (From reddit.)

Resolution war

Calvin and Hobbes

List 5 New Year's resolutions of the bad guy in your current or favorite story you've done.

List 5 New Year's resolutions of the good guy in your current or favorite story you've done.

Now have them critique each other's list.

Year 3000

Year 3000

What's a warm up?

"I think in terms ..."

Bartolutions

Create 12 resolutions, or lessons learned this year, that leave the reader to fill in the rest of the story. For example:

1. I will remember: chocolate sauce is for ice cream.

2. I will stop bothering the goat.

3. My boss has enough suggestions on where to shove it.

4. There is a reason they are called permanent.

5. "Do not tap on glass" is not a suggestion.

To take it a bit further, come up with clean back stories for each. :-)

Happy New Years!

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Lists of Bart's chalkboard opening lines. They should all be the same, but the internet can be ephemeral.

Simpson's Archive: Blackboard Openings
Bart's Blackboard (Screen caps.)
List of Chalkboard Gag - Wikisimpsons

Purfectly resolved

What are your pet's 10 New Year's resolutions for you? What failings does your pet see in your abilities to meet his needs and how does he want you to change? Your worst failings (according to you) may be of no concern to your pet or may be pluses. What's fat but a softer, warmer lap?

It can be a present or past pet or an imaginary pet. However you do it, get into the pet's head and see the world through his eyes. As always, you needn't be you and the world need not be ours.

Road work ahead

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New Year's Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

-- Mark Twain

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Okay, it's now a week after the New Year's resolutions and they lay discarded like the streamers and empty champagne bottles.

We all supply our own material that paves our way to hell, whether that be "good intentions" or evil works. But we don't do the paving. There's a devil who's job it is to do the actual work. (Or is it a different devil each year?)

He or she has had the yearly week of rest while everyone tries to maintain their resolutions but now the bricks of our foibles and weaknesses are being delivered and he or she places them as paving bricks on the Road to Hell.

So, who is the devil? How and why did he or she get the job? What would happen if we all became good?

"Finish each day ..."

Writer's New Year's resolution quote

You must remember this ...

Rather than project forward, have a favorite character (yours or someone else's, good guy or bad guy) reflect back on what they did right last year.

The year of the pig

According to the Chinese zodiac, Sunday began the Year of the Pig. Down below are the Chinese words for the 12 animals of the zodiac. Write a 12 line poem that tells what each animal is doing right this moment. You can begin each line with "At this moment ..." which can give it a chanting rhythm or just the first line. (Or, of course, whatever inspires you.)

Unless you know Chinese you won't know which animals are which, of course! It's an opportunity to let the sounds (or your best guess at the sounds) inspire you. You can tie them to real world animals or make up your own.

gou
hou
hu
ji
long
ma
niu
she
shu
tu
yang
zhu

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More:

New Year's for the Chinese is a time, similar to American Thanksgiving, when scattered families gather together. Traditionally the celebration is 15 days long but officially people only get a week off.

Families traditionally decorate their entryways with New Year's poems written on red paper called duilian (spring couplets). A traditional duilian "expresses a person's spiritual aspirations, feelings and thoughts of hope, faith, and respect towards the divine."

The requirements for a duilian are two lines, containing the same number of characters, usually ranging between five to ten characters in length. The rhythm and the meaning of the two lines must match up."

There's a very interesting article Writing Chinese New Year Poetry: Recalling childhood memories of an ancient tradition by Jason Liu:

Here's an excerpt:

Below is an example of a duilian , loosely translated into English:

May the shining stars bless our generations.
May our great virtue always bring success.

When I was little, during the Cultural Revolution, my father, who was a professor, was labeled as an "intellectual," and as punishment we were sent to live in the countryside in the northeast of China.

We lived in a small village by the name of Taihe, meaning "very quiet and peaceful village." The place was indeed very isolated, surrounded by mountains and rivers, and a long distance from Changchun, the state capital of Jilin Province. Winters were very cold with temperatures dropping down to an average of minus 20 degrees Celsius.

The villagers did not have much education, so it was hard for everyone to get help creating their New Year duilian . After entering the twelfth month of the lunar calendar, people would flock to our house, bringing their red paper, to request my father to write their duilian for them. There were over a hundred families in the village, and every family's duilian had to be different.

From the time I was seven years old, I would assist my father in creating duilian . I remember gradually learning from him how to write a poem and practice my calligraphy. Sometimes my father would say the first line, and I would create the second.

Duilian are said to have originated about three thousand years ago. When working on our calligraphy together, my father would tell me the ancient myth that was recorded almost 2,000 years ago during the Eastern Han Dynasty.

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If you want to know which Chinese word goes with which animal, click on the Comments.

I will cut back on my killing ...

Your favorite villain has made New Year's Resolutions. Will he put more effort into his evil plans? Will he turn around and try to start anew?

Make a list. :-)