Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Mid Week In Review
Wendi Murdoch stole the spot light in the phone hacking hearing not only by her long black hair and fitted jacket but by her quick tiger claw too. She leaped to her husband's defense by swinging a tiger claw at an assailant who tried to throw a shaving cream pie to the seemingly senile Murdoch senior. Most other people at the hearing were so shell shocked by the sudden cream pie attack that they could utter only What or WTF, including James Murdoch who is forever seen flinchingly dumb-founded mouth ajar in repeat slo mo on TV. Only Wendi Murdoch had the good sense and reflex to give the best defense she knew how: striking back head on at the assailant. Ang Lee was quoted saying he would have cast Wendi Murdoch to star in the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was she not too busy home wrecking and gold digging.
While China press was given carte blanche to report, in glee, the News Corporation phone hacking scandal, showcasing how corrupted the English press, law enforcement and politics and by extension Western civilization is, disaster struck home. Whenever there is disaster there is scandal, or so it seems in China particularly. A high speed train collision this past Saturday resulted in 39 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and plenty of questions unanswered. The official explanation was lightning. But nobody believed that or that was the whole truth. Immediately after the crash, people started to question the rescue effort given way to the priority to resume service, corruption leading to shoddy design and construction and the cover-up of the true cause of the train crash. Three rail officials were fired while news conference scheduled was cancelled without explanation. High speed train technology is generally considered safe as in Europe and Japan; there has been no fatality reported in Japan since its inception in the 1960s. The billions dollar high speed rail is a pet project of the government and a source of national pride, at least for some, has now turned into a disaster and an embarrassment.
Talking about train crash, Amy Winehouse lived a life alternating between brilliance and of a train wreck, but mostly train wreck, died at the age of 27. The cause of death is as yet unexplained but many people would have attributed it to ill health due to years of drug and alcohol abuse. Her second and last album "Back to Black" released in 2006 gained critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Her death I would say eclipsed the passing of her fellow country man, a man with certain last name and pedigree, Lucian Freud, arguably one of the greatest modern portrait painters. I almost couldn't believe his death as there has been scantily coverage of the painter's passing. At some point I just thought I read it wrong. But yes, he was dead at 88.
More deaths and terror happened in one of the world's greenest and most livable cities, Oslo Norway. Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik bombed and shot people to death. In all, 8 people died in the bombing in Oslo and 68 people were shot dead in Utoeya, an island about 25 miles from Oslo by car. Breivik admitted the killings but pleaded not guilty, essentially claiming what he did was necessary ("imperfect necessity") to save Norway and Europe from "Islamification." Breivik is probably a secret admirer of Ted Kaczynski, aka the unabomber, or his work or both as he copied the latter's work without giving proper credit in his own 1500-page manifesto "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence." This makes him a plagiarist in addition to being a mass murderer. Bad very bad.
While China press was given carte blanche to report, in glee, the News Corporation phone hacking scandal, showcasing how corrupted the English press, law enforcement and politics and by extension Western civilization is, disaster struck home. Whenever there is disaster there is scandal, or so it seems in China particularly. A high speed train collision this past Saturday resulted in 39 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and plenty of questions unanswered. The official explanation was lightning. But nobody believed that or that was the whole truth. Immediately after the crash, people started to question the rescue effort given way to the priority to resume service, corruption leading to shoddy design and construction and the cover-up of the true cause of the train crash. Three rail officials were fired while news conference scheduled was cancelled without explanation. High speed train technology is generally considered safe as in Europe and Japan; there has been no fatality reported in Japan since its inception in the 1960s. The billions dollar high speed rail is a pet project of the government and a source of national pride, at least for some, has now turned into a disaster and an embarrassment.
Talking about train crash, Amy Winehouse lived a life alternating between brilliance and of a train wreck, but mostly train wreck, died at the age of 27. The cause of death is as yet unexplained but many people would have attributed it to ill health due to years of drug and alcohol abuse. Her second and last album "Back to Black" released in 2006 gained critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Her death I would say eclipsed the passing of her fellow country man, a man with certain last name and pedigree, Lucian Freud, arguably one of the greatest modern portrait painters. I almost couldn't believe his death as there has been scantily coverage of the painter's passing. At some point I just thought I read it wrong. But yes, he was dead at 88.
More deaths and terror happened in one of the world's greenest and most livable cities, Oslo Norway. Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik bombed and shot people to death. In all, 8 people died in the bombing in Oslo and 68 people were shot dead in Utoeya, an island about 25 miles from Oslo by car. Breivik admitted the killings but pleaded not guilty, essentially claiming what he did was necessary ("imperfect necessity") to save Norway and Europe from "Islamification." Breivik is probably a secret admirer of Ted Kaczynski, aka the unabomber, or his work or both as he copied the latter's work without giving proper credit in his own 1500-page manifesto "2083 - A European Declaration of Independence." This makes him a plagiarist in addition to being a mass murderer. Bad very bad.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Saturday, July 09, 2011
Friday, July 08, 2011
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Monday, July 04, 2011
The Pale King
What surprises me is The Pale King actually is intended to have a plot as enumerated in the end notes that are included in the unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace. From my reading, which sadly was mostly done on my commute, I couldn't find a plot, something remotely resembles a plot maybe but not in the traditional sense that I understand it. In fact it's more like a collection of short stories, those that have no beginning or end at all. I find it difficult if not impossible to make any sense out of the characters, who come from and go nowhere, in the grand scheme of things such as the story of the novel. But once I accepted the novel was probably written by a mad man who happened to be smart, articulate, pedantic and very good at moving words around then I kind of came to the conclusion that I could enjoy or even admire it, all these were of course done without me realizing it--the novel is so hypnotic that it either puts me to sleep or totally engrosses me during my daily commute to and from work. His use of footnote is somewhat annoying to say the least. I am in the opinion that if you cannot incorporate your thoughts in the body of a sentence or a paragraph then you should leave it out otherwise just write it in, that is, unless you are writing a research paper or you are DFW who tends to write extensive footnotes whenever he feels like it (of course being a wordsmith he can absolutely write anything in a sentence or paragraph, it's just that he makes a conscious literary choice not to and instead happily writes footnotes in the length of a chapter or a section). There are a few chapters or rather pages (out of more than 500 pages) that I particularly enjoy and am duly impressed. One being how an agent got an epiphany and turns himself from being a wastoid at college to an accountant; the other being how a father got killed in a busy subway platform. I personally think the detail and the psychological landscape presented are pretty out of this world. And above anything else (and despite his fixation on footnotes or rather my own fixation and displeasure on his writing footnotes), I find his writing touching and deeply sincere, which turns out to be the real surprise for me.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
山口百惠 - 秋桜 (Live)
update 7/4/2011 (I am going to ruin the post my writing something)
This is what happened when you stripped away the ridiculously gaudy costume, fancy stage design and cutesy dance moves. An almost stoic yet oddly evocative performance from the one and only Momoe Yamaguchi san.
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Super 8
Super 8 is one of the very few summer movies that aren't a sequel or a prequel or based on a comic book character or worse a sequel or prequel based on a comic book character. But don't let that fool you to believe that it's an original movie. Far from it. It's indeed a movie with hardly an iota of original idea. Super 8 is J.J. Abrams endless tribute to his forebears, mainly and namely Steven Spielberg, the producer of Super 8, who himself has a hard time making any movie that is better than Jaws or E.T. Except for the spectacular and gratuitous train wreck in the beginning, and that charming little movie within a movie in the end credit, there isn't really anything new, exciting or charming about Super 8. The children actors do a good job in injecting some light and tear jerking moments that supposedly to show humanity but since the story and direction are so lame that it all feels forced and wasted. Perhaps in movie, there is no plagiarism, only tribute, and in Super 8, it's a sanctioned one from its producer Spielberg. Watching Super 8 is like reading some cool tumblr blog with endless re-blogs from other cool tumblr blogs which re-blog from yet other cool tumblr blogs which re-blog the blogs that re-blog them. It's kind of cool, meta and somewhat interesting in the beginning but after a while, you just got tired of this whole endless re-blog thing no matter how cool it looks and especially and (un)fortunately you have experienced the original blog first hand. Just like if you had watched E.T back in 1982.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Canoeing
Read this. My eyes were open but I couldn't see a thing. It was akin to the darkroom experience I had at home. When I got nothing better to do, which was quite often--though my significant other definitely disagreed on this one, after I'd done washing dishes, taking out the garbage, recycles and doing the laundry, sometimes, I would get some black garbage bag and taped it up against a closet in the bathroom or down in the basement at night to make it light proof so I could get my film loaded into the developing tank. I lined up my material and made sure I knew exactly where they were, film, scissors, reel, tank before I turned off the light. But spooling the film onto the reel always got tricky when done in total darkness. I didn't do this often enough so I remained pretty much a beginner all these years. But overall, I didn't think I had any major screwed-up, even if I had I wouldn't tell you. As much as I consider myself anal, somewhat and somewhat selectively perhaps, I didn't think I was anal or scientific enough when it came to the developing process. Everything from dilution to shake (or inversion) to temperature to developing time was just "in the ballpark." I never tried hard to control the variables, kind of "let it go." It was the second night on our canoeing trip. I was awake. Acutely aware I was lying, essentially in the mud though inside a tent, somewhere along the Delaware Water Gap, breathing in and out the air that was heavy with moisture and smelled river, grass, mud and decays. It wasn't pleasant like the romanticized nature people always made it to me. It was just filth, though not the kind of filth like nuclear or chemical pollution that could actually kill you, slowly but surely. This kind of nature dirt only disgusted and annoyed you and caused inconvenience, at least when you weren't in the "I just love nature" mood, which to me was almost all the time. The ambient noise at night was just unbelievable as it was unbearable. I could hear the river making all kinds of noise as it meandered interminably along; the wind stirring up the tree branches, the ruffling leaves and everything else in the air. And all the nameless bugs were just merrily chirping all night long. If only I had a mirror I would have seen in my own eyes how terrible I looked, unkempt hair, a stubbled face covered with oil that sure if scrapped off could fire an egg or two. (Actually I looked like this all the time even on non-camping days.) It was pitch dark even if I had a mirror I wouldn't be able to see myself. I was just groping for my headlamp. I was just excited to field test the headlamp so I could review it. The whole point of buying stuff now was so I could review them, online.
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Insert Your Media
I was at Duane Reade and I found this machine while holding a roll of Kodak 135 VC 160. I tried CVS moments ago, and their "computer" broke and I was told it wouldn't be ready the following day. Last time I had my roll processed there, it was scratched and I got a picture that didn't belong to me, I guess they just gave it to me as bonus, I don't know. I suspect all the machines can actually do a very decent job in developing, scanning and printing, it's just that the folks who man the machines don't care at all. I mean at all. I used DOI Camera a couple of times for none other than it's just there, the staff was rude and they just gave you the negative cut at whatever way they want unsleeved. The pricing seems arbitrary, one time the guy told me one price and the woman told me another when I picked up and they made it as if it was my mistake. It's just unbelievable.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Monday, June 06, 2011
iCloud And Other Crap That Nobody Really Understands
The future looks cloudy.
For the most part I'm just flummoxed by all these clouds. What I can understand is I could, at some point, get Lady Gaga's latest album Born This Way for 99 cents. Yeah, 99 cents for the entire album not just one song but the entire album. That's what I understand. I heard iCloud is ahead of Amazon and Google. Apple shall have a death grip on your devices and by extension your life if you let her.
Apple's stock down more than $5.
For the most part I'm just flummoxed by all these clouds. What I can understand is I could, at some point, get Lady Gaga's latest album Born This Way for 99 cents. Yeah, 99 cents for the entire album not just one song but the entire album. That's what I understand. I heard iCloud is ahead of Amazon and Google. Apple shall have a death grip on your devices and by extension your life if you let her.
Apple's stock down more than $5.
AT 55 Pack, Large
picture from llbean.com
Hard to pack stuff
When did you purchase this item? Within 1 Month
Now I admit I am not an outdoor kind of person and with almost no experience in choosing backpack. I find this backpack lightweight and good looking which are the most important factors. Other than that I find it very hard to pack anything inside. There is one opening at the top and that is it baby. If you never need to unpack or access anything during a trip that's you plan excellent and you don't need to access something in the middle of a hike AT ALL. Otherwise good luck finding some stuff inside. It's minor annoyance. Otherwise, with all the belts and clips, it looks fancy enough on the trail.
I would describe myself as: absolute know nothing about backpack
This item is: Performing as Expected
Paddling Jacket
picture from llbean.com
4 / 5
May 31, 2011
Fashion Statement On The River
When did you purchase this item? Within 1 Month
Thanks to this jacket, I looked absolutely good paddling badly on the river. This thing keeps me dry from the outside and somewhat toasty on the inside. The only pocket is on the left arm and I wish there are more pockets to hold all my junk. But on second thought when you are wearing a PFD, what a fancy name, then you can't access any pocket on the body anyway unless you aren't wearing a PFD like some lawless dudes.
I would describe myself as: very bad paddler
This item is: Performing as Expected
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
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