Here. Sadly I have lost the note as to which cave it's from, but it's certainly late Northern Wei or Northern Zhou, so kind of mid-sixth century.
Oo now I want to send you all my favorites. I will have to dig up the one where there are a bunch of bodhisattvas in a row and one of them has turned around to talk to the guy next to him, and the artist clearly figured the halo was like a plate stuck to the back of his head so it's seen side-on 😁
So the cool thing about this ox is it is from part of cave 285 which was unfinished - so what you're looking at is the ochre underdrawing, which tends to be more lively than the finished overpainting. I use this image to teach that point when I'm doing Dunhuang.
The genre of TV show in which British people are kind to each other about stuff they made is my favorite. You should watch The Great Pottery Throwdown if you haven’t already.
Actually grammar has become a family topic lately. You would be amused at some of the conversations. All you need to know to imagine how they go is that one twin is taking Latin and the other, Japanese.
My kids, who are nerdy high school freshmen, trot this one out periodically and I have to say that it also helped when I learned, aged 52, that “buffalo” can be a verb. We need a more 文言 approach to parts of speech, honestly. Anything can be a verb if you verb it clearly enough.
As a measure of how not wrong you are here, this is in point of fact the first time I’ve *ever* been able to parse the buffalo sentence correctly.
The other thing I kept thinking about during Rosh Hashanah services, despite my best efforts to keep my mind on the prayers.
Having taught recently about pareidolia and our tendency to see faces in everything, I was nonetheless glad for this Ninja Turtle who kept me company at the dentist today
Four hours in shul today and the thing that sticks with me is a line from Hineni: “Receive this as though it were spoken by someone worthy of the task.” “There is doubtless an ideal person for this, but I’m here now, so…” It’s about prayer, but I recognize the feeling from professional life too 😬