October Podcast

Inspired by my favorite podcasters Mano Lopez and the Homemade Show, 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.

October: 故乡何处是?

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.

Playlist:
Solo - Theo Torres
Happy Birthday - ZJNU Student Choir
水云间 (Water Cloud Space (?)) - 童孔 (Tong Kong)
呼吸 (Breathing) - 常静 (Chang Jing)
La Vida es un Carnaval - Issac Delgado
Y Soy Llanero - Grupo Cimarrón
Chicharra - Marta Gomez
Damaquiel - Hector Buitrago et al.
Amortiguador - Andrea Echeverri
Acochado Todo - Almir Rouche
Mindjer Dôce Mel - Eneida Marta
The Easy Way - That Mad Ahab
Stay in New England - Mimi LaValley
Leaves that are Green - Simon and Garfunkel

play

High-Fashion Underwear

You know that cozy feeling of sitting by a campfire with a hot cup of chocolate in your hands, feeling the warmth on your face and the cold mountain air at your back? Well, take away the fire and the hot chocolate, and imagine instead that you're teaching a class.

It's gotten a little colder here recently. And the classrooms, like the student dorms, have no heating. Last weekend in Hangzhou (which I will have to post about later, but I understand now how it could claim to be the prettiest city in China), I bought a new coat, perhaps warmer than anything ever owned before, and I've sometimes been wearing it while teaching.

Tonight I went out and bought some long underwear. The attendant assured me that the ones I got are very fashionable, and a very nice color. They come in a fancy box, with schmancy tags.* The biggest size they had is one size too small (the same situation as for slippers), but they're larger than the set I left in California, which must have been bought for me when I was shorter, and then have shrunk. So hopefully I will feel more comfortable when I go out now, but the local paparazzi had better keep their cameras ready for me sporting my high-fashion underwear.

*This was a test: Is this usage of the schmefix ungrammatical? Did you go "Huh?" when you read this sentence?

Free Hugs

This video makes me happy.
With the low resolution it looks a lot like Patiunky, and I can totally imagine him doing something like this, even if it is somewhat at odds with his current YouTube persona.

Apparently the Free Hugs Campaign has quickly spread all over the world, though it is having difficulty some places. In China, for example, hugging counts as inappropriate public display of affection, and it's considered a foreign custom, too. Oh well.

Yum

A bit busy here, no time to write much. Which is where you come in. Your job is to: (1) identify what I am eating in this picture, and (2) provide a caption. A hint: it isn't turkey with cranberry sauce. Thanks.



In other news, the Great Firewall has migrated to include blogspot.com and beta.blogger.com among the civilized. It has accordingly been moved down on my enemies list.

Happy Thanksgiving!

万事随转烛

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!")

The Internet Gods Read my Blog

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.

故鄉何處是?

有个学生在她的日志问为什么外国人那么常常那么遥远旅行。
我在乌兹别克看我哥哥的时候，哥哥的朋友表达了差不多一样的意思。现在他也去过别的国家，但是那时侯他也觉得常常遥远旅行很奇怪。我妈妈告诉他，你认识的外国人只是喜欢旅行的外国人。很多的外国人不常去远。
但是还有真的分别。中国也在改变呢，可是家乡概念在这儿还很重要。上个星期学生社会谈论外国文化。那儿有三个外国人：一个索马里的本科学生，一个也门的留学生，和我。对每个外国人问了家乡怎么样，我们差不多不能回答。索马里的人在沙特阿拉伯出生，没看过索马里。也门的人住在英国，不常去也门。我也告诉他们，我没有真的家乡。这样的事对中国人很难懂。人结婚了，常常跟丈夫的父母一起住，如果不跟他们一起住，他们应该在不远的地方。大学生不跟父母一起住，有的学生回家得座五六个小时的车，但是放了寒假,暑假都回家，放了中秋节的假，大部分也回家。大部分没从浙江省出去过。外国人来中国过一年多，不看他们的家，对中国学生的看法真奇怪。
墨西哥人真这样。在墨西哥，大学生回家每天或者每个星期，每天座一个多小时的车或者每个星期座五六个小时的车不奇怪。但是男人常常过半年不看他们家，因为需要去非常远的地方找工作。
国家文化都有自己的习惯，有一点不同，但是心里差不多。虽然我没有家乡，我认识的人都不在叁塔巴巴拉或者哥伦比亚，但是我想我认识的人，我还想我住过的地方。什么国家的大学生，留学生，外教，季节工人都想家。

There was a student who asked in her free-writing journal why foreigners so often travel so far.

When I was in Uzkekistan visiting my older brother, his friend expressed a similar thought. Now that friend has also traveled to other countries, but at that time he also thought frequent distant travels are pretty strange. My mother told him, "The foreigners you know are only those who do like to travel." There are many foreigners who rarely travel far.

But there is also a real difference. China is also changing, but the concept of hometown is still very important here. Last week a student club was discussing foreign cultures. There were three foreigners present: a Somali regularly enrolled student, a Yemeni exchange student, and me. They asked each of us foreigners what our hometown was like, and we were all pretty much unable to answer. The Somali was actually born in Saudi Arabia, and has never seen Somalia. The Yemeni lives in England and only rarely goes to Yemen. I also told them I don't have a hometown. This sort of thing is hard for a Chinese person to understand. When a couple marries, the often go to live together with the husbands parents, and if they don't live with them, they shouldn't live very far away. University students don't live with their parents, and some of them must take a bus for five or six hours to return home, but every summer and winter holiday they all return home, and during the autumn one-week holiday, the majority also return home. The majority have also never left Zhejiang province. For foreigners to come to China for a year or more and not see their families, to the Chinese way of thinking seems quite strange.

Mexicans are really like that too. In Mexico, university students return home every day or every week. Riding a bus for over an hour each way every day or five or six hours every weekend is not unusual. However men often pass half the year without seeing their families, because they must travel extremely far to look for work.

The cultures of different cultures each have their own customs, which are a little different, but their hearts are much alike. Although I don't have a hometown, and none of the people I know live in Santa Barbara or Colombia, I still the miss the places I have lived, in addition to the people I have known. The college students of every country, exchange students, foreign teachers, and migrant workers all get homesick.