So, our Autumn Moon festival was a bit of a dud this year, waylaid by cold germs and dismal, tropical rain. In other places, there were other observances, though. There were bigger Autumn Moon festivals for adoptive families in Pittsford, New York, and Bayside, California, separated by the continent but linked by similar situations - families eager to create a sense of "Chineseness" for their kids. These things always seem paradoxical to me (but the descriptions of food make me hungry - some things are universal).

At around the same time, Dan Washburn, Shanghaiist, was quite likely observing the festival by listening to Bishop Allen's "Chinatown Bus," if his blog is anything to go by. That link goes to a video of a kind of shoddily recorded live performance of the song. Seek you out the studio version, o reader, and prepare to be delighted, for it is a song about traveling to China and it is good and real and catchy and real catchy.

The Chinese government appears to be marking the festival by taking a positive step to protect the environment, which is great! Except the step involves moving over 100,000 Tibetans to protect the environment. "Go elsewhere, people," the government says. "Stay off the grass." No, really. This is China's largest resettlement project (which, after the Three Gorges Dam flooding the Three Gorges, is saying something), and it's aimed at preserving the grasslands in Qinghai, which is where the water that makes up the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers comes from.

At the same time, researchers have found the remains of 7,700-year-old rice farms around Kuahuqiao, south of Shanghai along the east coast. They suddenly left because sea levels rose. No one's sure why that is, but (and I'm not making this up) climate change has been mentioned. Global cooling in the Stone Age? Maybe it was just the moon coming a little too close to Earth on that one special day of the year way back when....