The closest bookish thing was actually a magazine with an ad on page 123.
奢白，炫放无暇钻光 "Dior, luxury white, shiny as diamonds."
The second thing was a Japanese comic book.
Third:
The book w/ at least 123 pages on it is: American Legal English. (I'm reading it now). Topic: Manslaughter -_- next 3 sentences are: 1. A homicide that would otherwise be second-degree murder may be reduced to voluntary manslaughter if it was committed in response to adequate provocation, sometimes referred to as killing in the 'heat of passion'. 2. In general, four requirements must be met: 3. (1). The provocation must be reasonable(judged by the standard of the reaction of an objective, reasonable person, not a subjective standard that relates to the actor). Period.
I am clearly not doing a very good job of keeping up with my posting quota, so I am resurrecting the yellow card questions. Yay!
And we need a new theme song! I nominate "我愿意" ("I am willing") originally sung by Wang Fei (王菲, aka Faye Wong), but lots of others have done covers. I recommend you start the video playing, but don't look at it for a minute, just listen. Then listen and watch for a very different experience.
I have a translation posted on my other blog, if you're curious.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for, eagerly anticipating for the past umpteen months, willing to read, wanting to read, waiting to read: the all new 8th yellow card question! (Okay so it's not all new, since it's been there in the virtual deck this whole time, but it's the all new time it is appearing here, on this blog, in special blockquoted yellow on green background, as opposed to the black on yellow background, see. Believe me, it really is kinda all new, so be excited.)
And here it is!
If the whole world were listening, what would you say?
I honestly haven't a clue what I should say, but from the perspective of behavioral observation, I think a highly relevant data set is the corpus of blog posts I have written. Now, we must qualify this by noting that in practice, the whole world is not listening, or even reading, but in principle, any member of the world population on this side of the digital divide could wander through, and in fact a non-negligible portion of site hits come from foreign lands like Tennessee and Canada. They come looking for pictures of chickens or donkey riders, and seeking information about "umlatt" and holey jeans, and we do our best to meet their critical needs. It is for this reason (the benefit of lost internet travellers) that we have devoted so much of our time to wandering, the internet, and the world, alongside the essentials like food and underwear. Always be prepared, as they say. And I do all I can time and weather permitting, to help the whole world out.
My deepest apologies for not keeping up with yellow card questions, or posting in general. I'll not hold it against you if decide to banish me to Hainan. I had a kinda busy end of semester, but that by itself can't excuse or explain my negligence and and general absence from net space. The rumors are true. Or some of them are anyway. I have joined the stereotyped ranks of those foreign white men with Chinese girlfriends. In accordance with the declared Honey Picture Month, I am posting this picture at the 11th hour.
In case you were wondering, my 'do' in this picture only lasted a few days. I may be a child of the 70s, but I don't belong there.
So I suppose I am switching to the new Blogger system, which means all my fans that are subscribed to my feed should tell their subscription software to look in the new feed location.
10. An earthquake has shut down the internet, and it's painfully slow to access the blog authoring page. (News saying the internet is back to normal is an evil lie. It is better than a weak ago, but still very slow.) 9. Most of the things you might like to post about involve showing photos, which, due to said internet freeze, cannot be uploaded. 8. End-of-semester crunch time. 7. You're still looking for a license plate that ends "000". 6. You're still working on compiling your New Year's resolutions. 5. You need to wash your hair. 4. As a white heterosexual male native-English-speaking college graduate of US citizenship and Protestant upbringing, you're feeling self-conscious about drowning out less privileged voices and contributing to cultural hegemony. 3. Now that Time Magazine has made you, as an internet content producer, the 2006 Person of the Year, you feel you can rest on your laurels and seek self-fulfillment in some other arena, kind of like Yasser Arafat did after he was made 1993 Person of the Year as a peacemaker. 2. You are feeling disillusioned about your blog-posting abilities, comparing your 100 posts in three years to your sister's 200 posts in one year. 1. You've decided there's no better way to annoy your sister (short of flying back to visit her and tapping her on the shoulder unceasingly.)
Inspired by my favorite podcasters Mano Lopez and the HomemadeShow, and by the shortage of music here that I like, I decided I would start doing a podcast. I figured I could do one once a month or every other month, and I put together most of this playlist one week in October. After a short delay, I now present to you my first podcast. You can expect January's podcast in mid-March.
The Chinese question in the title means "Where is my hometown?" and it's a quote from Li Qingzhao, a poet who moved from Shangdong province to Zhejiang in the 1100s when the north was engulfed in war.
Which is to say, "The myriad matters [of the world] are as the wavering of a candle flame."
I feel obligated to inform the world of the annoyingness of the Great Firewall. The firewall doesn't fully block anything, but it makes a lot of things troublesome. It's more like something out of a Monty Python sketch than a serious defense against toxic memes. Instead of building a wall, they have built an obstacle course, and instead of lying between civilization and the barbarians, it winds through the whole world, and changes course every weekend.
For example, to post a comment on MySpace (admittedly deep in barbarian territory), you first attempt to load some MySpace page, and MySpace will prompt you to log in. So you login, and are taken to your "Home" page. If you can remember which links you have to follow to get where you were headed, you can do such things as read new messages, read friends' bulletins, and view your long list of MySpaceFriends. If you try to look at any person's profile, however, (including your own), something is triggered in the firewall, and the connection is dropped. So, you try your favorite proxy service. That one might have MySpace's kind of web magic reserved for paying users, so you use another service. It can load the profile page fine. But then you click the 'post comment' link, and you get MySpace's "You must be logged in to do that!" page (which I have in the past gotten when I tried to log in: apparently at times you have to be logged in to log in.) So you have to log in again, which will take you back to your "Home" page, from which you again have to navigate back through the link maze to post a comment.
Or again, suppose you want read your sister's blog. She, like you, uses Blogspot to host her blog. She writes a pretty funny blog that you read pretty often, so you have her blog bookmarked, and you load that bookmark. ... After several seconds of waiting for your computer to contact the server you remember that this week Blogspot is officially a hive of barbarians. Nice barbarians, maybe, but barbarians none the less. So you might go to your favorite proxy service, or since you are subscribed via Bloglines, you can read her posts there. And what if you want to post a comment? Well, if you are using the gladder Firefox extension, when you click on the post link, you are automatically redirected to a proxified page. Then you can click on the "comment" link, and type in your comment. Then you scroll down and find... the word verification magic doesn't work with the proxification. (That is a real word. There are 452 Google hits as of this writing. 453 once Google finds this one.) Ah! But you know that the Great Firewall has no problem with Blogger.com. Blogspot is a hive of barbarians, but Blogger, from which the barbarians produce the Blogspot drivel, is safely within civilization. So you cut and paste the web location into a new tab, and edit out the proxifying part, load the page again, paste in your comment, and fill out the word verification. 哎呀，这么麻烦！ (which is to say, "Aiya! So irritating!")
A week or two ago I discovered that I can now access the English Wikipedia (though not the Chinese version) without going through a proxy or using the secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia service. This morning I discovered I can access the Stanford application page. Just now I discovered I cannot read my own blog without going through a proxy. The verdict is clear. The internet gods have read my blog and took some hints from it. Just not all the right ones. I checked Youtube just now. It's fully accessible, and I was sucked into watching the Llama Song. Beware.
It seems the thing to do these days is to have multiply blogs. Pinkerton has at leasttwo, kirinqueen and hober have a few a piece, and some people out there are mass producing them. So I have decided to get with the program, and I have a new blog. There, I will tell the world everything it needs to know about itself. Here, I will continue to wander among gardens and fields.
Caedmonstia, slowlane, and all the other masses of people reading this blog, I just think you should know that blogging may not, in fact, be your ticket to fame and fortune. And patiunky especially, since you are no longer even making any new entries!!! Apparently, after much investigation, AP network news has determined that blogging isn't as much of a money maker as you have expected. Terribly disappointing, I know.
