Welcome to The Pig's Sty

What a big deal this [is]: bigger than Christmas, without the presents, the carols, baubles, the tree and the nativity, the focus is unashamedly on food and family.

Not for nothing is it also called Turkey Day, a nod no doubt towards its real origin, Goose Day, the traditional English festival giving thanks for the harvest (and giving a goose to you landlord, which seems sort of the wrong way round).

I've repeatedly seen Thanksgiving called the quintessentially American feast. It is, in more ways than one. The by-word of modern chefs all over the rest of the world is Escoffier's principle "fait simple": keep it simple, let the main ingredients' purity and flavour speak for themselves. In Escoffier's case, through the medium of lots of butter.

In America less is not more, but simply less. Why have one flavour when you can have 50? Every sandwich shop establishes the principle that there's nothing wrong with a chicken sandwich that blue cheese, bacon, mayonnaise, mustard, fried onions and a bit more cheese cannot put right.

Thanksgiving is the ultimate expression of this philosophy. Everywhere I am confronted by a recipes of the wildest, heaviest fantasy - curried creamed onions; glazed sweet potatoes with marshmallow; turkey with oyster gravy (with whole oysters); green beans in mushroom soup sauce; iced cranberry relish with raw onion. Never has a cooking column been so misnamed as the New York Times' "the minimalist" with its suggestion for sliced Brussels sprouts acting as the bread in a sandwich of ham, caramelised onion and mustard - each dish an overwhelming cacophony of flavours that crowd together on a single table of sensory overload.

It is perhaps a fitting paean to bounty, and an immigrant mixture of foods and culinary styles. I am not sure what it does to the digestive system.

What of course Thanksgiving has going for it, just like Christmas, is annual repetition from an early age. Americans feel very emotional about some of these melanges just because of what they evoke. I am sure that if, once a year, for the first 12 impressionable years of life, you get to cuddle up with the dog in front of an open fire, be spoilt by grandparents, watch lots of TV, go to bed late and happy was accompanied by jellied eels in cherry custard then this food too would serve as a Madeleine to rock your heart.

But before you start throwing pumpkin pies, I am not really having a pop at my new home. I just am suspicious of doing it the way it has always been done. As much as the spicy smells of Christmas evoke a very happy childhood for me, I still got so fed up with cooking a traditional Christmas dinner that some years back I revolted. Given that Christmas was the one time that one was excepted to spend time cooking, it seemed (for someone who likes cooking) a bit of a wasted opportunity to spend ages over an essentially boring meal, that no-one else in the family was particularly enthusiastic about either.

So for a couple of years we had Chinese, Thai and Malaysian food and enjoyed it a lot more than turkey and Brussels sprouts.

But I must admit to being rather excited by Thanksgiving. So what to do about my fear of being overwhelmed by all those flavours? It'll be an evening meal as I have to be alert during the day in case Courage the turkey pardoned by the president is revealed by Mr Obama's opponents to be an enemy of the state.

But then I will be offering a bit of not so much deconstruction as simple separation - the first course: curried squash and carrots in coconut pumpkin sauce (I must start experimenting as soon as I have filed this) with James Beard's Sweet Potato Bread followed by turkey stuffed a la Julia Child with cider and vermouth gravy, sweet corn and potatoes - roast or mash, I haven't decided yet - and a British touch to the mix: Yorkshire pudding, followed by another great American tradition: the guests bring desert. A very happy Thanksgiving to you all.

THE PATH  TOWARD PARTNERSHIP: The U.S.-China relationship is shaping up to be one of the most important bilateral relationships of this century. Instead of fear-mongering or putting the America on a confrontational footing toward China, as many neoconservatives suggest, a recent report from the Center for American Progress explains that growing interconnectedness between the two countries means the basis of U.S.-China policy should be on finding areas of cooperation and encouraging China to take on more responsibility on the international stage. The Obama administration has recognized this fact and instead of emphasizing areas of disagreement, Obama "sought at every meeting to focus on common ground, hoping for what he once described as a clearing away of 'old preconceptions or ideological dogmas' so that nations will be more likely 'to cooperate than not cooperate.' This strategy is a conscious rejection of the Bush Administration's approach." Liu Jiangyong, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, concluded that "just by showing that he'll listen, Obama has won credit that will give the U.S. a boost (in the region)." Furthermore, most of the coverage of the trip overlooked the many notable agreements that were reached. On climate change, the U.S. and China surprisingly announced a comprehensive plan for cooperation that was "much more ambitious in scope and depth" than anticipated. The U.S. and China both committed to strengthening the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty at a conference next spring -- a treaty that is critical to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. On North Korea, China supported U.S. efforts to bring them back to the bargaining table. And finally, the trip saw a major expansion of bilateral relations, especially in developing military to military ties. There is much more to do, but as Nina Hacigian, Asia expert at the Center for American Progress, explained, "[N]o one said it would be easy to cooperate with China's leaders -- or thrilling."

~thinkprogress.org

I finally got around to finishing this gritty little novel by the author of the acclaimed “Raise the Red Lantern," Nanjing resident Su Tong. The novel will probably stick with me for some time, albeit perhaps for the wrong reasons. Here is how it begins:

The main character in the novel, Five Dragons, is an orphaned vagabond from semi-rural provincial life, and he becomes a clerk in the Feng family's urban rice shop and marries widower Feng's loose daughter, Cloud Weave, who is pregnant by a thug. Things go steadily downhill from this point forward. In the words of Publisher’s Weekly, “Su Tong employs rice, symbol of Chinese civilization and heaven's bounty, to daring, iconoclastic effect throughout the novel: a dead baby tumbles out of a new rice shipment; Five Dragons, who becomes the Feng clan's domineering patriarch, uses rice to sexually disfigure prostitutes whom he murders in revenge for the venereal disease he has contracted; a boy suffocates his baby sister in rice because she squeals on him. Spinning a plot featuring blackmail, adultery, incest and scandal, Su Tong creates visceral drama that moves rapidly in Goldblatt's fluid translation. The dialogue is raw, the sex is related with violent candor. There's nothing pretty in Su Tong's picture of poisoned family and social life, but there's much that's beautiful in the way he portrays it-with seething energy and anger.”

This is not happy reading, and I certainly would not recommend it to anyone with an even moderately weak stomach. The ugly realities of families in decline that are depicted are relentless, gut wrenching, and sometimes of dubious literary value, at least to this reader. On the whole, however, one can only admire the consistency of tone and imagery that Su Tong employs throughout the work.

Obama is spending weeks trying to decide what is best for American policy in Afghanistan. In a way, I am happy to see this foot dragging, and I would like it to continue. In fact, I would like the decision to go away, and see all of those troops come home where they belong. Soldiers were sent to Afghanistan immediately after 9/11, for good reason. They were looking for Al Qaeda, and trying to destroy their supporters in Afghanistan, the Taliban. To a great extent they had considerable success in the mission. Unfortunately, Dick Cheney and George Bush decided to be the reckless cowboys their Texas upbringing instilled in them, so they created fake reasons to lie themselves into another belligerent war front, in Iraq. It was the mistake of the century, and they have never yet paid the price for their crimes. More than 4000 dutiful soldiers have paid the ultimate price, not to mention the tens of thousands who were permanently injured, and the families who were left in pain and sorrow.

Meanwhile, Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, and the country has now become an ungovernable mess of poppy crops and corruption. We do not belong there, and can gain nothing from our presence there.

Yet, the warmongers of this country, mostly the Republican Party, are intent on seeing Pres. Obama commit another 40,000 American troops to Afghanistan, in a war that has no purpose, no rationale, and no possible end in sight. As for Al Qaeda, it is well known that fewer than 100 Al Qaeda members remain in Afghanistan. The remainder are mostly in Pakistan, and scattered around the globe in their own secret planning cells, perhaps even in a neighborhood near you. I have a feeling from the delay in Obama’s making the decision to commit these troops that he has privately concluded that it is the wrong decision to make. However, to call for an end to the war means he will face the outrage of the war-mongering Republicans, under the leadership of Dick Cheney, Fox news, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the nut cases who dominate the so-called minority party. Did I forget to mention Sarah Palen? These are people whose mouths drip daily with blood like insatiable vampires. Their idea of supporting the troops is to commit as many soldiers as possible into harm’s way. After all, here at home in their comfy mansions, they have nothing to lose.

Please Mr. Obama, forget the 2010 and 2012 elections for now. Make the right decision -- bring all the troops home, spend the hundreds of billions of dollars you will save by rebuilding our broken nation, and thereby earn the Nobel Peace Prize you were so surprised to receive. You will make the warmongers angry, but you will make peace loving citizens around the world, not to mention decent rational humans, regain their confidence in you and the country you represent. If it costs you an election, at least you will go down in history as the most heroic loser ever.   ~Richard

None of Vladimir Nabokov’s earlier novels quite prepared the world for the one that opens: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Originally brought out in Paris by a publisher who specialized in erotica, Nabokov's "Lolita" (1955) is now considered by many readers to be the most beautifully composed novel of the mid-20th century.

The story of Humbert Humbert and poor Dolores Haze was followed, a few years later, by "Pale Fire" (1962), the most formally intricate and playful of Nabokov's books. It consists of John Shade's long, rather traditional poem of that title, edited with extensive annotation by his erstwhile colleague Prof. Charles Kinbote. Its opening couplet is another of Nabokov's striking first lines: "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the windowpane." 

In a posthumously (unfinished) now published work by Nabokov’s son, "The Original of Laura" was never intended to be shuffled into any sequence whatsoever. As we have it, the novel revolves around two characters: The promiscuous Flora and her obese husband, Dr. Philip Wild, "a brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer [and] a gentleman of independent means." One of Flora's lovers, we discover, has written a roman a clef about her entitled "Laura." He is described as " a neurotic and hesitant man of letters, who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her." We also learn that in her girlhood the young Flora was pursued by her stepfather, a Mr. Hubert H. Hubert:

"She was often alone in the house with Mr. Hubert, who constantly 'prowled' (rodait) around her, humming a monotonous tune and sort of mesmerizing her, enveloping her, so to speak in some sticky invisible substance and coming closer and closer no matter what way she turned. For instance she did not dare to let her arms hang aimlessly lest her knuckles came into contact with some horrible part of that kindly but smelly and 'pushing' old male." In the sections dealing with Wild, the scientist tells us that he has taken to playing a game in which he imagines various parts of his body dying and dropping away. According to Wild, such "auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man." Hence this novel's subtitle: "Dying Is Fun."

In many of Nabokov's late works, he seems to be reflecting on his own life and earlier fiction. For instance, in his last completed novel, "Look at the Harlequins!," he focused on a writer whose bibliography closely resembled his own. Nabokov appears to be playing a similar game here, offering riffs on "Lolita" and his somewhat underappreciated novel about literary biography, "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." One passage even recalls the wistful, haunted tone of the famous short story "Spring in Fialta":

"Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interrupted by heartrending sounds -- a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversations that seemed to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be 'you really ought to lose some weight' or 'I hope you transferred that money as I indicated' -- and all doors closed again."

Makes me want to go back to Nabokov and rediscover his writing genius. ~Richard

Beijing - President Obama and his entourage visited the Forbidden City in splendid isolation Tuesday, admiring the centuries-old palace complex that was off limits to Chinese visitors for the day.

"Special foreign affairs" explained the closure to the public, in a curt notice taped to a window of the police car that blocked the entrance to the symbol of China's splendid past. Disappointed would-be visitors were left to guess that the president of the United States was coming.

The vague wording of the notice was in keeping with the official tone that the Chinese authorities have adopted for Mr. Obama's first visit here. Tuesday's People's Daily, the official organ of the ruling Communist party, for example, relegated coverage of the president's activities in Shanghai to the bottom left-hand corner of the front page.

It splashed coverage of the funeral of a former deputy prime minister across the top of the page.

"They don't want this trip to be about Obama," says Russell Leigh Moses, a political analyst here. "They want it to be about China's rise."

On a day that mixed high affairs of state with simpler tourism, the president got his only chance to speak directly to the mass of the Chinese people. Alongside Chinese President Hu Jintao, he made televised comments at the end of the two leaders' three hour meeting.

No displays of charm allowed

On his three-day trip to China, Obama will not be afforded the opportunity he has enjoyed on other foreign tours – such as when he addressed a rapturous crowd of 200,000 in Berlin – to project his personable charm.

This is not altogether unsurprising. Chinese political protocol and tradition leave little room for rock stars, or even for much direct contact between leaders and their people. Chinese citizens do not expect to get close to their top leaders.

The current crop of Chinese rulers seems especially attached to the pomp of major speeches and parades in preference to the give-and-take of debate with the citizenry.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, sometimes known popularly as "Grandpa Wen," has been known to display the common touch; it was he who waded into earthquake stricken villages in Sichuan last year to comfort grieving families and reassure them that their government cared.

Hu doesn't warm to spontaneity

Mr. Hu, however, generally seems highly uncomfortable on the rare occasions on which he is shown talking to ordinary people. So uneasy is he with unscripted public events that he has reversed the policy of predecessors such as Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping, and does not give press conferences. Tuesday's "joint press conference" with Obama was in fact simply an opportunity for the two leaders to read prepared comments. No questions from the assembled journalists were permitted under rules the Chinese hosts imposed.

White House officials say they did not push to give their boss the kind of opportunities for public interaction in China that he has relished elsewhere.

"Once we had internally settled on wanting to do a town hall [meeting], that is the only outreach event we discussed and worked out with the Chinese hosts," said a senior administration official.

A carefully screened 'town hall'

Asked whether the Chinese side had deliberately curtailed Obama's chances of showing how popular he is here, deputy Foreign Minister He Yafei insisted that "Obama's agenda was agreed by both sides," and that the town-hall event in Shanghai on Monday offered the US leader an opportunity for "exchange with the Chinese public."

That meeting, with about 400 students, was televised only on local TV, however, and only around 7,000 people in China managed to log on to the live streamed version carried on the Internet, according to ConnectSolutions, the firm that helped the State Department organize the webcast.

The US president has one more chance to make his views known to a wider audience than the senior officials with whom he has scheduled meetings on Wednesday. He will be giving an interview to Southern Weekly, one of the bolder Chinese newspapers that has regularly clashed with the authorities, in what is clearly a sign of US support for a freer flow of information in China.

OK is without doubt the best-known and widest-travelled Americanism, used and recognised even by people who hardly know another word of English. Running in parallel with its popularity have been many attempts to explain where it came from — amateur etymologists have been obsessed with OK and theories have bred unchecked for the past 150 years.

Suggestions abound of introductions from another language, including the one you mention. Others include: from the Choctaw-Chickasaw okah meaning “it is indeed”; from a mishearing of the Scots och aye! (or perhaps Ulster Scots Ough aye!), “yes, indeed!”; from West African languages like Mandingo (O ke, “certainly”) or Wolof (waw kay, “yes indeed”); from Finnish oikea, “correct, exact”; from French au quais, “at the quay” (supposedly stencilled on Puerto Rican rum specially selected for export, or a place of assignation for French sailors in the Caribbean); or from French Aux Cayes (a port in Haiti famous for its superior rum). Such accidentally coincidental forms across languages are surprisingly common and all of these are certainly false. Many African-Americans would be delighted to have it proved that OK is actually from an African language brought to America by slaves, but the evidence is against them, as we shall shortly learn.

more........
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-oka1…

I am experimenting again. This time with High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. The photo of my home’s back deck above is my first attempt. For those unfamiliar with the process, here is how it works (from Wikipedia):

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or just HDR) is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

The two main sources of HDR imagery are computer renderings and merging of multiple photographs, which in turn are known as low dynamic range (LDR) or standard dynamic range (SDR) images. Tone mapping techniques, which reduce overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range, can be applied to produce images with preserved or exaggerated local contrast for artistic effect.

To produce the photo above, using a tripod I took three shots with my cheapo camera (Canon PowerShot A570IS, 7.1 megapixels) and varied the exposure compression by –2 and +2.  Then with the Photomatix (or get the free Qtpfsgui 1.9.3) program, I combined the three shots into a single HDR image, and then tone mapped it, saved it as a JPEG, and here it is.  To compare this image to the same photo with normal standard dynamic range, see below.  Any perceivable difference?  hehehe.  Amazing, right?  When the rain stops, I will try to find more interesting subjects under better lighting conditions and continue my fun. So stay tuned.

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

~Pablo Neruda

By C.H. Tung
Saturday, October 31, 2009

Chinese people around the globe passionately celebrated the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China this month. Maybe this is hard for others to understand. But for the Chinese people, such emotions are rooted in memories of a vastly different China, one whose destiny was not always as promising as it is today.

When the republic was founded on Oct. 1, 1949, political institutions were just starting to be formed. People were hungry. The average life expectancy was 35 years. Infant mortality reached a high of 20 percent. The overall illiteracy rate was 80 percent. There was little organized education, no health care and no means of social security. The national treasury was empty, the economy bankrupt. There was no industry to speak of and little basic infrastructure. Indeed, the Chinese people had endured a century of government mismanagement, political instability, constant civil war and warfare imposed by other countries.

In the six decades since the republic was formed, China's economy has become the world's third-largest. Life expectancy has reached 73 years; infant mortality is down to 1.5 percent. The illiteracy rate has fallen to 5 percent. A nine-year education has become available to all children. Health care and social security are improving. Modern industries are being developed. Roads, railways, airports and ports blanket the country. In the areas of democracy, the rule of law and human rights -- including the rights of 55 minorities -- China has made enormous progress. At no other point in history has so much improvement been made for so many people in such a short period.

How did this happen?

A chief factor was a strong determination to find our own way forward. Even before the downfall of the Qing Dynasty a century ago, China has searched for a way forward. We have tried to learn from the Japanese, the Germans, the Americans and even the Soviet Union, but none of these development models was right. China was too chaotic and too poverty-stricken; it had too large a population and insufficient natural resources. Our nation was too weak to respond to foreign interference. China's challenges required a development model consistent with its culture, history and stage of development.

In China's long history, prosperous times were always associated with a strong and enlightened central government, which has led the Chinese people generally to believe in strong government. Today we have such a government, with clear vision and enlightened policies. While ideological and principled, the government in Beijing has also proved pragmatic and flexible when necessary. Rather than pursuing short-term politics, Beijing has been able to formulate sound long-term and holistic macroeconomic and geopolitical policies.

China's emergence is also the result of putting people at the center of governance. The government believes that eradicating poverty is fundamental and is the first priority of all development policies. Accordingly, 1.3 billion people have been moved from abject poverty to a much-improved livelihood.

China strongly promotes harmony in diversity as a way forward by emphasizing commonality among different interests to defuse social tension associated with reform and development. China also recognizes the need to better share the fruits of success between the rich and the poor, and among its 56 ethnicities.

As China has opened up to the outside world, its people have realized how increasingly intertwined their destiny is with the rest of the world. China shares the anxiety posed by challenges such as combating global warming, protecting the environment, creating energy security, achieving global financial stability, countering terrorism, preventing nuclear weapons proliferation and stopping the spread of infectious diseases.

Some worry that as China's economic development continues, it will become a hegemonic power. It is noteworthy that at the height of China's economic power some 500 years ago, when it controlled about 30 percent of the world's economy, instead of expanding its might overseas, China sent missions to neighboring countries only for trade and good will. China's tradition of yiheweigui, peace and harmony above all, will ensure that its development objective is for its interest and in the interest of the world.

Also noteworthy is that government efforts have received enormous support from the Chinese people, as demonstrated by the 86 percent satisfaction rating on the direction the country is heading, in the 2008 Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes survey.

China's historic journey continues to shape its future. It is a developing nation of 1.3 billion people, nearly 60 percent of whom live in vast rural areas. It will take decades for China to realize comprehensive modernization. But our 60 years of progress should give the Chinese people confidence in the next 60 years and assure other nations that China will become a greater force for a better world.

The writer, a former chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is chairman of the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to fostering dialogue and openness.

Moment in Peking is a historical novel originally written in English by the Chinese American author Lin Yutang. The novel covers the turbulent events in China from 1900 to 1938, including the Boxer Rebellion, the Republican Revolution of 1911, the Warlord Era, the rise of nationalism and communism, and the origins of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.

The author tries not to be overly judgmental of the characters because he recognizes that too many issues were involved in the chaotic years of the early twentieth century China. There was no absolutely right or wrong character. Each character held a piece of truth and reality and a piece of irrationalism. In the preface, Lin writes that,this novel is merely a story of how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed and how, above all, men and women adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but gods rule.

Lin Yutang was nominated the Nobel Prize for Literature with this book in 1975.

Lin Yutang had originally wanted romantic poet Yu Dafu to do the translation to Chinese, but he had only completed the first section when he was killed in the Japanese invasion. His son Yu Fei finished the translation in 1991, but his version, while capturing the flavor of old Beijing, is not too widely read.

The novel has been adapted twice into television dramas, including the most recent version in 2004, starring Vicki Zhao Wei.

Moment in Peking is quite a rarity – it is a novel about Chinese social-history by a well-known Chinese author, but written originally in English and published first in 1939 in the US (where it sold over 50,000 copies in less than 6 months). Soon after, the book was released in China (in Chinese translation) where it was received with just as much interest.

Why is this book so popular in and outside of China? It is gives a comprehensive insight into an interesting period of 20th century Chinese history and social change. The novel spans almost 40 years – from the Boxer Uprising in the 1900s to the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s. The story is seen largely through the eyes of Mulan Yao, the daughter of a prosperous upper-middle class family who lose their wealth as a result of the wars.

But can this account for its success in the US? One (tenuous) reason could be that when it was published, Moment in Peking was billed by some American critics as a “Chinese Gone with the wind” – which had been released just few years earlier and was eagerly awaiting its transformation to the big screen. Could this popular hook be a reason why people bought this book in droves?   --Wenjun Shi

There’s something special about having a little sister. But when we are lucky enough to have two little sisters, the good fortune is multiplied many times over. I am one of the lucky guys… I have two sisters, and I was happy to have had the chance to be with them a couple of weeks ago in South Carolina. The magic of sitting with family and just talking into the night is really precious. So strange… no matter how many miles or years separate us, we can return to the same wavelength immediately.  Anyway, my two little sisters are here on the left, in a very old photo I managed to find recently.  I love you both, Debbie and Penny, and I am sure you know that.

I finally finished reading this fascinating book outlining the history of the Taiping Rebellion and its very strange leader, Hong Xiuquan. I learned a lot about this unusual decade-long bump along China’s 19th Century road of unfolding dynastic events, but more importantly, the book put China into some new perspectives that had never even occurred to me before.  Actually, it was a quirk of nature that finally did the Taipings in… as they planned their final assault on Shanghai, the region was hit with a massive 76 cm. snowfall followed by weeks of bitter cold, it proved to be much more than the Taipings could tolerate, and their movement came to a rapid end not long after this abortive military campaign was stopped cold.

I received this book a couple weeks back from my sister-in-law.  It was in my brother’s library when he passed away, and she thought I might enjoy it. The book is by Jonathan Spence, an ex-student of one of my brother’s Asian history professorial colleagues at Cornell.  The colleague is Sherman Cochran, who is Cornell University’s Hu Shih Professor of Chinese History.  The Taiping Rebellion had its 1850s roots in Canton (Guangzhou), and its final chapters in Nanjing, the two Chinese cities where I have spent most of my time teaching English during the past six years. In upcoming visits to both those cities, I will try to see as many historical remnants concerning this movement that might be available or on display.

Jonathan D. Spence, the Yale University historian, has with his rapidly accumulating books emerged as the preeminent Western literary historian of China. . . . His new book, in which he recreates the spiritual world that nurtured one of China's most remarkable megalomaniacs, continues and enlarges on this wonderful body of work. Hong Xiuquan was the founder of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the rebel movement that seized a power base in southern China in the mid-1850s and provoked the ruling Qing Dynasty into a terrible, decade-long struggle. . . . The Taiping Rebellion, as Mr. Spence puts it, was an event "as strange as any to be found in Chinese history"--or, for that matter, in global history--and God's Chinese Son is to a great extent about that strangeness. . . . Mr. Spence's account . . . is not merely about an odd moment in history, a strange man and a strange movement.  -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Bernstein

Next book on the pile…

CCTV's broadcast of the new Moment in Peking adaptation starring Vicki Zhao has put Lin Yutang's original novel at #2 some 65 years after it was first published. Lin wrote in English for a US audience; he didn't particularly care for the first Chinese translation done in 1941. The current translation was done in 1977 by Zhang Zhenyu, a translator from Taiwan, but it did not come out on the mainland until a sanitized version was published in 1987 by a publisher in Jilin. Today's political climate has allowed Shaanxi Normal University Press to issue Zhang's full translation of Lin's original text.

According to some, this is not the best Chinese translation. Lin had originally wanted romantic poet Yu Dafu to do the translation, but he had only completed the first section when he was killed in the Japanese invasion. His son Yu Fei finished the translation in 1991, but his version, while capturing the flavor of old Beijing, is not too widely read.

I, of course, will read Lin’s original English version, which I purchased a few years ago but never got around to reading.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/05/well-liked-countries-lifestyle-real-estate-tourism-america_slide_2.html?thisspeed=25000

Kodachrome is the trademarked brand name of a type of color reversal film that was manufactured by Eastman Kodak from 1935 to 2009. Kodachrome was the first successfully mass-marketed color still film using a subtractive method, in contrast to earlier additive "screenplate" methods such as Autochrome and Dufaycolor, and remained the oldest brand of color film.

As digital photography progressively reduced the demand for film in the first decade of the 21st century, Kodachrome sales steadily declined. On June 22, 2009 Eastman Kodak Co. announced the end of Kodachrome production, citing declining demand. Many Kodak and independent laboratories once processed Kodachrome, but only one Kodak certified facility remains: Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas.

The final sentence is what totally blows my mind!!!!
(The chart above is not from Lindsay's article. I found it elsewhere.)

The Chinese languages have undergone a lot of reclassification lately (Mair 1991), from one Chinese language a couple of decades ago up to 14 Chinese languages today according to the latest Ethnologue.

However, Jerry Norman, one of the world’s top experts on Chinese, says that based on mutual intelligibility, there are 350-400 separate languages within Chinese alone (Mair 1991). According to Gong Xun, a Sichuan Mandarin speaker in Deyang, China, by my criteria of distinguishing between language and dialect, there would be 300-400 separate languages in Fujian alone.

So far, 2,500 dialects of the Chinese language have been identified, and a number of them are separate languages.

I have been doing research on this issue recently. Based on the criteria of mutual intelligibility, I have expanded the 14 Chinese languages into 339 separate languages.

There are different ways of doing mutual intelligibility. I decided to put it at 90%, with >90% being dialect and <90% being a separate language. Experts in Chinese linguistics concurred that this seems to be a reasonable way to divide dialect from language (Mair 2009). This is based on what appears to be Ethnologue’s criteria for establishing the line between a dialect and a language.

In the cases below where I had intelligibility data available, a number of Chinese languages had no more than 65% intelligibility between them (Cheng 1991).

Intelligibility is hard to determine. I am not interested in typological studies of lects involving either lexicon, phonology or tones, unless this can be quantified in terms of intelligibility in a scientific way (see Cheng 1991). For the most part, what I am interested in is, “Can they understand each other?”

The data below is best regarded as a pilot study.

Reasonable, fair-minded and professional comments, additions, criticisms, elaborations, presentations of evidence, etc. are highly encouraged, as long as politics and emotions are left out of it. The purpose of the classification below is more to stimulate academic interest and sprout new thinking and theory. It is not intended to be an end-all or be-all statement on the subject, in fact, it is quite the opposite.

Interested scholars, observers or speakers of Chinese languages are encouraged to contribute any knowledge that they may have to add to or criticize this data below. So far as I know, this is the first real attempt to split Chinese beyond the 14 languages elucidated by Ethnologue.

There are lapses in the data below. I mean to present this data in outline form to make it more readable.

There are also problems with the data below. In many cases, “separate language” just means that the lect is not intelligible with Putonghua. Unfortunately, I currently lack intelligibility data within the major language groups such as Gan, Xiang, Wu and the branches of Mandarin. There is probably quite a bit of lumping still to be done below. Where lects are mutually intelligible below, I have tried to lump them into one language with various dialects.

It is reasonable to ask what background and expertise I have to write such a post. I have a Masters Degree in Linguistics and have been employed as a salaried linguist for a US Indian tribe.

Once again, this reworking of Chinese dialectology divides Chinese from 14 separate languages into 339 separate languages.

For the remainder of this fascinating study, click here or here.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second-largest city, and my home for 13 years, has just been announced as the host for the 2016 Olympic Games.

It has been a heated race over the last few days, with four top contenders -- Tokyo, Chicago, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro -- all battling to show why they deserve to host the 2016 Olympics.

So it's official: the 2016 Olympic Games will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from August 5 to August 21. It is the first games EVER to be hosted in South America.

As soon as the announcement was made, Rio went completely nuts.

I was quite excited. My daughter was asked to sing back-up for the group Noisettes on Ellen Degeneres’ show last week... so you can imagine my thrill at seeing her on national TV. She really looked great, proud pappa gushes…in the photo here, my Susie is on the left, next to the Noisette’s lead singer, the electric Shingai Shoniwa.  Ellen loves featuring new artists, and that day she welcomed this rising pop band Noisettes. They performed "Never Forget You" from their upcoming CD, "Wild Young Hearts," which you can purchase here.  Go here to learn more about the band.

Read more: http://ellen.warnerbros.com/#ixzz0S3cmFqUN