Summer News Reads July

I am just using this post as a reading note.

Currently I am preparing for the SIA, and need to do a lot of reading and listening in various topics. To acquaint myself with all the topics concerned is the only effective way I can think of. So for me, it's simple - read. And I also believe if I can recite the material it means I pretty much have understood it, and if not, I need the help of the more background information or a dictionary.

Below I am just using the space to keep track of the news articles that fall under my schedule of intensive reading, just for future reference.

July 28

BBC, David Cameron, Anglo-Indian relationship, Turkey, Ankara, Business, Private Sector, Public sector, Gaza, Israel, Militant Islamic group Hamas
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10784317
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10783485
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10768105
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10778110

Alcohol, drinking culture, crack down, better community, alcohol-related health
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10784060
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10776758

July 29

Facebook, privacy issues, SNS, Bebo, Myspace
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10796584
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10713199

China, Nanjing blast, chemical plant, press control, industrial accident
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10785568
(In Pictures)http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10787548

China, Death Penalty
(graph) http://www.economist.com/node/16690097

★US, justice system, ratchet effect, legal system
http://www.economist.com/node/16640389

Some parts of America have long taken a tough, frontier attitude to justice. That tendency sharpened around four decades ago as rising crime became an emotive political issue and voters took to backing politicians who promised to stamp on it. This created a ratchet effect: lawmakers who wish to sound tough must propose laws tougher than the ones that the last chap who wanted to sound tough proposed. When the crime rate falls, tough sentences are hailed as the cause, even when demography or other factors may matter more; when the rate rises tough sentences are demanded to solve the problem. As a result, America’s incarceration rate has quadrupled since 1970.

Still, they have plenty of other weapons. By counting each e-mail sent by a white-collar wrongdoer as a separate case of wire fraud, prosecutors can threaten him with a gargantuan sentence unless he confesses, or informs on his boss. The potential for injustice is obvious.

America needs fewer and clearer laws, so that citizens do not need a law degree to stay out of jail.

 July 30

★North and South Korea, China, US, Six-Party Talk, geo-politics
http://www.economist.com/node/16646244
http://www.economist.com/node/16706997?story_id=16706997&fsrc=rss

In China the strength of the American response has sparked a debate over whether the country is pushing too far with its expanded list of “core interests”. On July 27th even the Global Times, a usually reliable critic of American behaviour, argued that China should avoid “arbitrarily expanding” the definition of its core interests. Sometimes even big powers, it said, can make territorial concessions without sacrifice. Outlook Weekly, part of the state news agency, quoted a military academic warning that to misuse the term “core interests” might undermine its deterrent value or even lead to armed conflict.


Just now, Chinese diplomats, for all the talk of China’s “peaceful rise”, have weakened their case by upping the ante. In the South China Sea, say Western diplomats, China has in effect declared as its territory not merely the contested Paracel and Spratly Islands and waters close to them, but a vast swathe of ocean stretching deep into South-East Asia. Neighbours wonder whether claims will one day be backed with force. “Does the expression of one’s legitimate concerns count as coercion?”, asked Mr Yang, the foreign minister. When it’s a colossus talking, China’s neighbours might understandably think so.

Entertainment, Ellen, American Idol
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-10813959

Marijuana, drug, cartel, Mexico, California, plantations, police raid
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10811870

July 31

Crime, rape victims, health, BMA, forensic medicine, Acpo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10820667

Job, Internship, payment, law, employment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10822784

★America's Royal Wedding, Chelsea Clinton, America's girl
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10820649

... Americans are interested in Chelsea's wedding because she is part of the national narrative.
"It's a reflection of ourselves I think. It's this sense of a public event and these public people that we have sense of familiarity with," Mr Anthony says.
Moreover, the Clintons are icons of a different, seemingly more youthful time in America's history - a pre 9/11 era when the country wasn't weighed down with wars, bulging deficits and billowing oil leaks.
Chelsea is a reminder of that time, and people feel invested in the life of that young girl who held her parents hands through their darkest personal days.

 Brazil, Sex tourism, prostitution
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-10764371

"Our parents don't worry about us too much. We tell them when we are leaving and when we're coming back. And then we give the money to them to buy food. They know how we get the money, we just don't discuss it"

Environment, UNESCO, everglades, wetlands, wildlife sanctuary, world heritage sites at risk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10825472

【I want to call this the BBC period, when I mainly focus on one single source, BBC, to continue with my project. First of all this is not very hard for me to recite; secondly, news gave me a good and varied expansion of vocabulary on all kinds of things, though its tone might be a little limited during its occupational characteristics. The next step still remains to be find out. The Economist is definitely in my plan but right now it still seems quite a rise from BBC news online directly to The Economist. But so far, so good. I am seeing substantial results coming from the reading of news of the last three days. When I try to listen to radios and TV (Ashes to Ashes Season 1) lately, I am better able to focus on what they are saying instead of being just carried away by the picture. I am going to carry on. Until I exhaust the news on BBC online as reading and learning materials. The next step with BBC, however, should be focused on choosing those stories I am not familiar with and would usually skip – they make up my major cognitive loopholes and weaknesses.】

Britain, Pakistan, protest, comment, David Cameron
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10826082
 

A Week into the Summer Vacation

"It feels so good to be able to sleep whenever you feel sleepy," I wrote on my Twitter, and went to bed for a little nap. Yesterday I took a nap of only half and hour and yet felt very refreshed. A siesta thus sounded a very nice idea to me.

But when I when woke up today it was already three hours later. It was a nightmare.

I was probably thinking too much lately. Thinking, I meant, instead of doing. When you're planning many things but not actually setting out to do anything substantial your dreams are very likely to intervene.

And I did realize that after more than a week's leisure at home, it was time for me do something now. I have a paper to work on, a big exam to prepare for, and some important internships to seek. The week's leisure was actually some extended luxury that I allowed myself in the excuse of the painful semester that had just passed. But now, it was time for me to get back on the horse.

I think I will tackle my paper first. It needs extensive reading but it was not in conflict with my daily life. I always wanted to read intensively about one same subject. And this one, is about Hemingway, and pragmatism, and "moment of truth". I will learn a lot in the process of writing this paper. And I keep my fingers crossed for my future.

Before this blog was named "有幸生于斯"(Lucky to be Here) I also considered the possibility of naming it "越写越具体" (To the more Concrete - don't know how to translate it anyway), for this was the initial idea behind my re-starting blogging here on blogspot.

As I go back to Hemingway I think I will continue to be influenced by him. So, I am starting to read Hemingway.

Sorting GR

I decided that I have done enough of the expansion.

Earlier tonight I was reading this book review in the Economist - Spoiled by Choice, the Perils and Politics of Prosperity - and I made a decision to collect unite all my recent efforts to enter into a simplistic and intensive way of life. Not much about it, it meant an idea as simple as to stick to the useful things at hand, stop expanding and the hunt for new or more exciting stuff.


I spent almost a whole afternoon sorting my Google Reader items - deleting more than a hundred subscriptions - 2/3 of the original - and putting them under Essentials I/II, Big Fish, Culture, IT, China Blogs, Law, English Reading and My Stuff nine categories. After a good part of a year, my GR is finally readable again!

I will not go out hunting for new stuff. I am just not much of a multi-tasker. I will have to focus on a few immutable content to yield anything desirable. The same is to be applied to Douban. It will remain my sketch book and place for self-talk. No "new neighbors" will be added during the course of the next several months.

Other things vary, but the basic idea will not change. Keep it simple and stupid. For as a comment goes under the article:

As JS Bach noted: a warm fire, a comfortable chair, a cup of coffee and a tobacco pipe."

A Bruise on my Left Knee

Time Flies in your Negligence

About a month ago I felt to the ground while running on a little lane to a small event held in the stadium hall, and bumped my left knee black and blue.

I knew it hurt, and it was a sore to the eye, but I just refused to look at it or even think about it. My reasoning was that, as there was nothing I could do about it, I might as well leave it alone. Let time fly in my negligence, and before I realized it, it would be healed.

And it worked. It worked perfectly.

This morning I got up and found blood veins pumped up around my left eye. Since it was not itchy, I guessed it was not caused by bacteria, but more likely harmful chemicals like toilet water. I really should have been more careful with all the things I used daily, and led a more healthy life.

But I knew full well it was wrong to regret - regrets are deeply related to a perfectionist outlook of life, where you want to raze down what have been established as a whole and build from scratch. But this is will only bring about more and more new beginnings and unfinished projects. What I need is a 'piecemeal approach'(Reading Open Society and Its Enemies recently).

I did some remedies within my ability, and started to do other things. I knew things are in control. I smiled to myself.

Abandoning iTunes

This is part of my effort of "piecemeal engineering" where I try to adjust myself little by little to a more efficient lifestyle.

First of all there is music. The addiction to iTunes turned out to be a major efficiency killer. I liked it because it gave me a sense of elitism, but when you're not really some music addict it turned out to be snobbery. I really can be that stupid. And stupidity is recurring and reversible. You catch it like you do cold in obscure moments and can't seem to expel it as quickly as you wish.

I only realized that when I wanted to re-install windows and was trying to back-up disk C. Turned out, the copy of the music took up more than an hour.

I made a decision never to download music again. Why do I have to care about the play count of each song? I will remember the music that truly strike my heart even if I only catch it while passing a shop window. And for those I don't have much feeling, 100 times will not make me remember them. Whatever can be measured by numbers are not as important as they appear to be, I suppose.

The website I am currently using is http://www.saylikes.com/ I use it to search for music, single songs in most cases, and then it can allow me to listen to it over and over again. One of the drawbacks is that the collection is not very complete. I will leave it whenever I find a better one, but since I no longer store music, I have nothing to lose.

That is also, how you travel light, only in the virtual world, from one website to another.

Lookign at the Photos in NG

"I Want to Be There," I told myself.

When I was looking at the photos on NG, it suddenly came to me, for the first time, that I actually wanted to be there. Much as I hated the notion of "traveling", or as I thought myself to be, at that moment and many a moment since that one, I was dying to be there.

I want to touch the stone railings with my fingertips and let them take away some heat from there; I want to stand on the balcony of an ancient castle and look down on the green villages and woods down below like a king used to do.

Some childhood memories came back to me. How much did I want to occupy a mound for my own, and have my own view there, to feel as if I was the king of the world.

It will not bother me if the place I went is not beautiful or exciting, I just want it to be different from mine, so that I will learn something from it. I want to see it as it is. I want to be steeped in its total facts and truth, and that is the essence of traveling. Not for pleasure, otherwise a computer game will do, but for expansion of the heart and the clarification of the mind.

It Takes a Computer Crash

It takes a computer crash, or something to that effect, for one to look back on all his activities surrounding the computer and and to start to recognize the real important aspect of his life.

I realized how silly I used to be, and how inefficient I was with my computer and anything connected to it.

Downloading music to listen made me feel elitist, but not any more. In today's world efficiency is everything. So take advantage of all the net service and try to put all the things online if possible.

Don't download E-books that you will not immediately read. You will never go find them again.

It's all about high efficiency and competence. Throw away all the trash, don't ever try to store all the photos, and travel light. It reminds me of Up in the Air.

Also, I lost all interest in fictions. I don't know how that one came about though.

Heart Carrying the Legs

A Determined Heart Will Always Manage.

When I left my dorm room there was only two minutes left before it reached 7. I wanted badly to arrive our meeting place on time, as I always did. After all, I didn't want that bunch of lovely post-90s wait for me, for no other reasons but my laziness.

So out I went. And I went so fast I surprised myself.
It was not my legs that were carrying me, but my heart, exerting a strong force pulling me forward and forward, unrelentingly. I was drunken by my speed, and the fast moving and evolving human and natural scenes.

重拾Blogspot

昨晚，借等人的间隙把这个博客上的将近一百篇文章重新看了一遍，删掉一些没有价值的，把剩余的一部分字体过大的改成了正常大小。

一年前我开始写这个博客，把自己平时写在Word文档里面的东西归类整理了上来。暑假结束之后想继续写，结果就墙就介入了。我于是放弃了这里，还曾经一度想改个名字叫“亚特兰蒂斯”然后永久封存起来。

最近之所以又回到这里，是觉得又想写一些很个人的东西，而墙在这时提供给我的是一种安全感。因为我知道我身边的人要找到这里，几乎是不可能的。很多90后还是对网络持有一种精英主义的排斥心理，这点是我没有预料到的。可能对正版音乐和电影的支持——坚持去电影院看电影，用CD听音乐，去商场“淘碟”——给他们打来的优越感使他们不屑于其他人在网络上所做的任何事情。

一年里面可以发生很多事情，人的际遇可以因为遇到一个人而发生天差地别的变化，但最最变动不居的还是头脑的思想状态。每个阶段相信并实践的哲学总是在受到所读的书，所经历的事情的影响，尽管一心向善，也不放弃思考的努力，只是只要有所改变，就免不了有越活越糊涂的时候。我想通过这样连续的记录，使得自己不至于那天完全找不着北。

虽然通过SSH，是可以访问wordpress的，但是最近不知道什么原因总是时不时地连接不上，所以决定还是不再浪费时间export什么的了。就暂时在这里写了。再写一年，看着一年里我都想了些什么东西，于我的生活产生了什么样的影响。

June 11, Another Dream

I went in the supermarket and wanted to buy something nice for mum. I always do. But hardly anything lived up to my expectations. I made do with some little snacks and walked out, only to find myself traveling through a ridiculously long escalator down. The more it went the more it seemed to be a child's slide.

Luckily it did not extend forever, I stepped out and found my father waiting. It's 11:30 now in the evening but he still didn't want to go back. He draw some bills out of his pocket and told me to take a taxi home, but it turned out to be just a 5-yuan bill and a 1-jiao. It'll be OK I thought, just I didn't want to go home alone at so late an hour. So I accompanied him, passing small restaurants in a tattered street.

Then we came across two classmates of mine, one of whom invited us to their rented apartment. "It's that penthouse above that celebrity's apartment." They pointed to us a high-rise building with huge and vacuous windows. It seemed unoccupied. But how can it be affordable to my classmates otherwise, I thought. Father was invited too, but he insisted on washing his shoes first.

I was curious to see what the interior of the apartment was like, and yet I was afraid that back home mom would be already asleep in hunger - for the food was still in my hands.

....

Then my roommate's phone rang and a girl's voice went off from the other end like that of an alarm clock, disproportionately loud and anxious. I doubted there was anything so urgent in this school that worth so much anxiety any more. I searched my mind dimly and found nothing. Then I decided whatever it was she was just making a fuss and a fool of herself. My roommate answered with the drowsiness and hoarseness of voice I expected. I was soothed by her indifference.

七月九日梦

节奏性很强，又不断重复的音乐让人犯困，合上电脑，爬到床上，睡梦里却还是在继续看推。一字一字地读去，我切实地看到了一个一直想知道的答案，但醒来之后终究还是忘了。

看电视，看到老师十岁的女儿在舞台上，我想召唤室友们都来看，看看我教的孩子是多么优秀，但又终又没有——我想炫耀什么呢，她又不是我的。于是我一个人长久地站在电视前面，我嫉妒她。

J说听了我的话像被掏空了一样，我很内疚。我看到一头内脏被掏空的驴，躺在壁炉旁边的长凳上，有人过来掰去了它上半个身体，它突然开口，问“吃得还满意吧？”

我蓦地睁开了眼睛。

独唱团及其它

版本一：话说七月六日晴，我揣着钱去食堂吃饭，顺道路过报亭，不抱什么希望地问了一下有没有《独唱团》……

版本二：我揣着钱去报亭，顺便路过食堂，解决了晚饭。边吃边想，这里近水楼台，搞不好就有呢；而且上次南周开所谓天窗，到处卖得脱销的时候，我去报亭问还有没有南周，阿姨很诧异地看着我说，有。

……

阿姨说没有《独唱团》。

“那过几天会有吗？”

“不知道。进书的地方没有看到这个。”

晚上Chara问我知不知道《独唱团》的事情。“那个阿姨看都没看我一眼就说没有。”她很无辜地说。

作为学姐我笑得很慈爱……告诉她这阿姨说话从来不看人，可能是因为不自信吧。（我怎么会不知道，我曾在这里买过若干21st Century，一本读者，无数参考消息，以及两份南周；充过七八次话费；买过一张永远显示“系统错误”的50块钱闪讯充值卡；给湖南的闺蜜寄过一封长达七页的信。）

而我每次都眨巴眨巴大眼睛看着她，直到她终于忍不住瞄我一眼，又继续她的事情——给各种手机号码充值。杂志会有的，但重要的不是这个。