J.S.A.

When two North Korean soldiers are found dead in the Joint Security Area -- a border region guarded by both North and South Korea -- the incident sparks a political firestorm that threatens to turn into an all-out war. Based on the Sang-yeon Park novel DMZ, Chan Wook Park directs an engaging and emotionally resonant military drama indicative of the growing maturity of South Korean drama. - Netflix blurb

Joint Security Area, an 800 meter diameter area near Panmunjom, the gateway between North and South Korea. 板門店 means something like "shopping for justice" - maybe at a convenience store, for a midnight snack, when one needs a ramen around 12:30 so one will have strength in the morning to go to work.

In 1996 in Seoul there was a traveler's place near the center of town that had a good reputation, an international meeting place, a decent place to stay, not very boring. It is a few city blocks from the American embassy, near which are always stationed 2 or 3 buses of South Korean soldiers. In SK, there is a universal subscription program for males, of 2 years and 2 months. It is instructional to be walking past, there are often some soldiers next to the bus cooking rice and warming up kimchee for a meal. Universal subscription (or conscription, actually) means that it's not much of a strain to make a movie about the army, that makes a lot of sense.

There exist some useful notes. Soldiers tend to smoke, as one probably has too much energy while one is on duty, cigarette in Korean is "tambae", pronounced "Tom Bay". Sounds like the word "Tom Brady"; the male lead in this movie looks a lot like Tom Brady. In addition, the word for brother is "opa"; the word for tobacco in Asia has long been the same word as the word for "opium", at least as far as the dictionary is concerned. If one noodles on this, one may as well ask, "Is my brother good for a cigarette?"

Another note might be that near the end, one of those red panels with the gold letters that one sees in Asia and Asian movies is damaged; these red boards are made in factories and sold in stores.

There is a huge amount of joy and morality in this film, all so cleanly handled. I think that one can either throw cats at the military or one can pay the military. If one hasn't considered this question before, I think I know what one's answer would be if one were in the military.

This movie falls into the category of "Suitable for people who give a care about our military future." Available at Netflix; made in 2002.

A picture of Pyongyang from the Answers.com, a site that mirrors the Wikipedia. It is always kind of a funny feeling to be looking up something about Lusaka, Zambia, or eflornithine, or Titanium mining in Africa, and to find one's own work at the top of the search results. Content on the Wikipedia is generally completely copyable and distributable, w/o much limit, by its policy.

This picture looks like it was taken at 6 AM on a June or July morning. The subway entrance appears to be on the right.

Wikipedia - I am not talking about the greatest anime encylopedia ever written, I am talking about the pride of the internet

From a discussion page in preparation for Version 0.7 of the Wikipedia on CD-ROM:

I haven't looked at the contents pages of versions .5 or .6. This is "Wars of Africa" being considered here. I would think that articles from the excellent Apartheid and History of Uganda series would be included already. In any event, South African Border War is part of the Apartheid series, which provides infobox links to Sharpeville Massacre, Soweto Uprising and many more military articles which have to do with what was nearly a civil war. As far as South African Border War is concerned, it is listed on this page as "B-Class" and I know from tangential reading that there is a lot that was going on during the years leading up to 1989, which is the end date of the time covered by the article; I think that the change from something of a traditional white society to a very integrated high-tech era white society in RSA is an ongoing event and as such is developing on the Wikipedia as it unfolds; I mention this here because I am sure excellent work will be done on the pre and post 1989-1992 eras as integration continues. And, I am interested in this topic but unfortunately at this time, sitting here in New England, I feel I don't really have the chops to seriously update and write in time for the next release version. --McTrixie/Mr Accountable 19:28, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Born to work....and born to drink beer after work

In thinking about the work puzzle and Transpacifica Incorporated, it occurs to me that zen buddhism is like taking a break from a culture that is based on work, pork and alcohol.

You eat and drink....so that you can work.

You work.....so that you may eat and drink.

And then you eat and drink...so that you may work.

And you also need vacation.

Productivity: It is worth noting that the act of reading is considered to be work.

Sounds good to me.

Gorgeous, 2046, Attack the Gas Station, Daisy, My Yupki Girl, modern Asian cinema, deceptive quality

There are a lot of Asian newspapers and news sites; Mingpao is recognized as a paper that students read; it is nice, and they have papers in New York, Vancouver, San Francisco and Toronto as well.

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In sorting through Asian movies, one needs an appetite and some kind of sense of what is good to watch, because there are a lot of good movies.

On Netflix, Gorgeous and 2046 are both really good movies, both from South China. Gorgeous is a Jackie Chan movie from 1999, and presents a love puzzle that involves a young woman who flies between Taiwan and Hong Kong, hanging out with Jackie is his industrial residential complex. Jackie is soooo good at presenting the kind of Asian one wants to talk to; on his late night talk show appearances in the US, he is so very easy to talk to, and communicates complete self respect, to boot, definitely emulatable. Gorgeous presents fighting in an easy-to-understand format and trends toward political sanguinity and cheerfulness vis a vis cross strait relations. It's like "boba tea", if one has ever gone to Chinatown to try one of these. And, the movie presents a recurring theme in Asian cinema, that of a principal love story that connects strongly to another love story, in this case that of a mysterious man in a purple corduroy jacket from the girl's hometown. One gets the sense that Asian cinemathiques are 100% positive about these loves, and also somewhat unsure about what is the future.

2046 is a lot like Solaris, of which I saw the original a long time a go in DC; George Clooney remade the movie some time later. Solaris was a Polish movie set aboard a space station, and is the type of movie that deals with ennui. Or boredom. 2046 starts with what seemed to me to be a back and fill operation as pertains to "right now" Asia, presenting 60s and 70s people who are the counterparts to today's people, kind of like Willie Loco Alexander and old J Geils are the people one could spend time with if one is into Gang Green, Dropkicks and Mighty Mighty Bosstones - you know, one doesn't have to be uncomfortable to know the past.

2046 goes on with a very cool science fiction hotel/casino environment and a very plastic world-wide train system. The movie is made with Chinese, Japanese, Thai and French money and is technically is in the high-tech French film category, without the heaviness and cultural load that one would suspect a French film of. It is a 2004 movie.

Attack the Gas Station is a movie I have owned for a long time, part of the Korean post-90s cinema development, the dominant force in Asian culture. Gas Station's plot is like, a bunch of Rush fans take over a gas station that is run by an ascot-wearing owner who doesn't manage well. The movie seems to be about new Koreans being very involved in the world outside, taking a positive outlook towards living as a country in the world, as opposed to really looking inward too much. I learned something interesting from this movie; the unscrupulous Chinese restaurant people whom the boys call for food using the money in the station till demonstrate a very uneducated way of existence insofar as they speak very superiorily, spookily and gutterally in the presence of Koreans; I take it that if down through the centuries, a jerk from China tried to walk into Korea, Korean culture is designed so that ill intent is displayed by the intruder's inability to behave properly. One assumes that if one takes politics seriously, this wouldn't happen. It's like a sieve.

Daisy is very great, part of the mainline romantic comedy set of movies that are the center of the new Korean cinema. It is set in Haarlem, Netherlands, and is another example of an action movie that is completely supported by a love story, so much so that the action can attain a level of realistic current-events style unrealism, that wouldn't be possible in the first place if the love story weren't the important thing to begin with.

My Sassy Girl is not to be overlooked because of the title, it is the center of the new Korean cinema, made in the late 90s. It is serious; over and over again I have found the most serious movies, like My Sassy Girl, She's On Duty, Oh Happy Day and Windstruck, with seemingly cheaply happy adwork, and I'm not being a film snob when I say this (you know, the "Jerry Lewis is a genius" kind of approach). These movies are nice. As My Sassy Girl, or My Yupki Girl, as it is also known, is a centerpiece of the new Korean cinema, I the reviewer find it difficult to sell, like it is ridiculous to strain oneself to do so. Physics teachers don't worry about moving Newton's Laws of Motion; chemistry teachers don't worry about selling the conservation of matter; math teachers don't worry about dv/dt, modern English lit teachers don't worry about DeLillo and Vonnegut.

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One theme I have noticed representing itself in new movies is the dual nature of male and female existence, as though William Kennedy's Ironweed and Downtown Julie Brown's Clueless were two parts of the same world.






1 Windstruck
2 She's On Duty
3 Attack the Gas Station!

Easy Listening

The Lost Scrolls of Moses, by Mad Professor.

................................................................................


No one but you and I, say the bells of Prince Far i. Crytuff Dub Encounter by Prince Far i and the Arabs, available at eMusic.

...................................................................................

Lee Perry's Return of Super Ape available at eMusic. Image not available.


1 Dyon Anaswa
2 Return of the Super Ape
3 Tell Me Something
4 Bird in Hand
5 Crab Yars
6 Jah Jah Ah Natty Dread
7 Psyche and Trim
8 The Lion
9 Huzza A Hana
10 High Rankin Sammy

WBRU every Sunday, 360 Degrees of Black Music, 24 hours, 2 AM to 6 AM, all reggae.

Bingo!

Kalt (Sonia Hamza) isn't your average Tunisian woman. After all, as the leader of a small ring of high-tech thieves, she spends most of her time hijacking the frequencies of foreign television channels so that an animated camel named Bedwin Hacker can say his piece in Arabic. Nadia El Fani directs this fresh and critically acclaimed look at a slice of North African life, co-starring Nadia Saiji and Muriel Solvay. - 2003 - from Netflix

Learning to play Brickshooter Egypt and The Rise of Atlantis on AOL Games, learning about the differences between Zambia and Zimbabwe, finding so many nice things to write about the companies there, listening to PiL and dub reggae, wondering what the deal is with Hank Hill's dad, finding it impossible to get past the first 5 minutes of Steve Martin's The Jerk; falling asleep reading the Osaka subway map, and keeping up with my Netflix subscription:

I suppose sitting through many film classes and watching dozens of movies made in the 1930s and 40s gives one a special ability to find movies that aren't boring; one is able to make it through to Page 11 of Netflix' Foreign "Watch Now" category before finding a movie that turns out to be more than pretty good. I think this movie has something to do with raising a child in a wilderness of hackers and current events. It has something to do with Segolene Royal and it's got some positivity, as regards the future. The movie has as much to do with Paris as it does with "Carthage", or Tunis; it is something like what Clintonesque university people are like in France, in the 2000s.

Film class boredom can actually be an interesting thing. One watches every Hitchcock movie, and that guy is freaking interesting. The scene at the end of Vertigo, when Jimmy Stewart climbs down the bellwether of a church, I could go on and on, NYPD Blue has everything to do with it. But there's a lot stuff that goes with it, such as Ernst Lubitsch, the Will and Grace of the 1930s. There sure is a lot of it; is it boring, it's important, and if I don't pay attention I will be bounced out of here. But then again, you think you are bored, and you're kind of bored, and you have a lot of Douglas Sirk to watch, and you start with it, and you realize you aren't exactly bored, you aren't just blown away, you are just blown away, that Douglas Sirk is f***** u*; Imitation of Life has everything to do with Martin Luther King Jr.

- I've got binoculars; on top of box hill...PiL Flowers of Romance
- Dread dread soldiers have come to Mashton Road....King Tubby Great Stone
- ...if you've seen the clumsy movie that was called The Jerk, you have to check out Steve Martin as he started to perk...EPMD Steve Martin

This is the coat of arms of Zambia. The vertical rays of the sun, son. Don't get a sunburn, son. It reminds me of my dad (on the left) sharing his thoughts on the differences and similarities between waves, particles and "wavicles" in the 1970s. And of my mom on the right, helping her hang up laundry on a brisk November day while I obviate the prospect of tea time boredom by asking her respectful advice about what color clothespins I should use and the great philosophical question; what's the deal with wooden clothespins and plastic clothespins.

As far as the eagle is concerned, I saw a documentary a few years ago about birds, this episode was in Africa, and a guy took a rotten porkchop and buried it under a pile of leaves. They had telephoto, and sure enough, a few minutes later, from over the horizon, a vulture came from 15 miles away to eat the food.

You need to show you care about the details of life. Don't be an oaf. Or a cad. Or a lout. Or an idiot who cares about clothespins. It turns women off.



Zimbabwe! Same name as Tianjin, the big city next to Beijing. This yellow word looks like the word for "LAW" and "LAWYER" in green down at the right, but it isn't, it is more like the law of playing with water, which is the three lines on the left, what one learns while playing down by the stream in the woods.

When I talk to people, words like this come into play, as they are part of my self-being, and I have noticed that there is some confusion between these two words. They are not really different enough to tell the difference between, in casual conversation levels, and people always get confused about Asian concepts of law and vacation time activities, when the subject starts to come around. On Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law, there is some expression of the nature of the serious actual law, and of the plastic fantastic world that always exists in the backyard, or in a box of Lego blocks.

- Zimbabwe brothers are go! - sung by The Adicts, the most hilarious band in punk rock who try to be like the nice side of A Clockwork Orange....

Here comes the summer!

As I went out one morning
to breathe the air around Tom Paine...

I dreamt I saw Saint Augustine
Alive as you or me...

Well Frankie Lee and Judas Priest
They were the best of friends...

Dear Landlord,
Please don't put a price on my soul...

There's too much confusion,
said the joker to the thief...





1 John Wesley Harding
2 Lee Scratch Perry
3 Horace Andy, reggae superstar and dub pioneer
4 Summer Panel, including 6/8 of the 8 Centrist Men. Wikilink
5 Summer Panel 2, the other 2/8.

This seems like a good company...

CBZ Holdings

CBZ Holdings is a financial services company of Zimbabwe. The company is based in Harare and its name is abbreviated to CBZH. As of May 2007, CBZ Holdings is comprised of several main business units:

CBZ Bank
CBZ Asset Management (Datvest)
Optimal Insurance

The bank recorded a before-tax-profit of Z$ 27 billion in 2006. According to its website, CBZ is known as "The Jewel Bank".


CBZ Holdings official website

Category:Companies of Zimbabwe
Category:Banks of Zimbabwe
Category:Harare

Here's an idea

ESPN Africa...because National Public Radio just isn't getting the job done.

Cashier du Cinema

女人化活 - the woman and man change their life
用腦用貝 - using their minds and using their money
上作上乎 - Work is important, personal space is important
飮的字影 - Asian printed matter is presented in a refreshing way
假兵人凌他 - The fakey abusive army guy is a movie villain;
書人好; - The book guy is good;
亞飛飛机飛謎. - The issue of flying to Asia is presented as a mystery.

Netflix' Last Life in the Universe is pretty good. The story is as follows:

There is a Japanese man working at the Japanese Cultural Center in a beach city in Thailand. There is a Thai woman who loses here sister in a car accident that peripherally involves the man. The Japanese man is so incredibly fastidious about his books, his huge apartment has so many 1000s of books; yet he does not evince a "librarian" look; he is not a male version of the librarian from Seinfeld, the episode with the Dragnet guy working in "returns". This guy is very bored at his job, but isn't bored with the job. Go figure.

The incredibly fastidious Japanese guy runs into trouble of his own when some people he knows have a lethal fight in his apartment. He looks slightly moopy at first when he goes over to visit the woman who is mourning at her beach house, and he doesn't mind in the least that he seems moopy - a character strength.

This movie is very good when it comes to communicating the slack Asian corporate attitude in its slackness; compare to an American movie like Diner or a TV show like Cheers, which are very pro-corporate in an American way. A little marijuana, her ease with popularity, her normal attitudes towards jerks she knows (which jerks give us to realize what a great guy the librarian is), and her solid commitment to being a productive member of society all contribute to understanding the life behind the Asian corporate logo; for his part, the guy knows he is the most literate person that could be, and is very serious about the history of literacy in this world, it seems to me. They commune in reading, at any rate.

The Thai woman and the Japanese guy spend a lot of time with each other. His fault is that he is a little shy, her fault is that she has to watch it when she is mildly impolite in a cross cultural context. This character basis is used in the movie; she is learning Japanese and he has no problem w/living in Thailand; he prefers it to Japan.

Anyway, she is moving to Osaka to work at a restaurant and it is unclear at the end of the movie whether or not he is going to fly north to live with her for a time; he has a big problem back at his apartment in Thailand anyway.

The woman's beach house is shown as a pretty good place to be; its pleasing nature antithetically offsets the plot element of leaving Thailand.

6ixtynin9 is another movie by the same director, also on Netflix and also set in Thailand. 69 is a murder mystery that doesn't end too badly.

Red White and Aqua

I was going through all the Major Leage team site articles on Chinese Wikipedia, updating each team's list of minor league affiliates. The listings are in English and Chinese; they are all most of them up to date; I think I have to disambiguate in regards to the San Bernardino 66er's, as their double affiliation didn't seem easy for me to make a note of in Chinese. I checked every team's page and had the opportunity to take a look at a lot of lists and sites of minor league teams, on the English Wikipedia, in doing this work. There are some interesting teams in the land. The Burlington Royals, in North Carolina, not to be confused with the Burlington Bees, I believe it is, in Iowa, have the most supernally serene baseball website. There is a minor league team that has always sold fishing licenses instead of tickets, to the games, at the "ticket window". And this team looks good for some reason, in the Northwest League, it is a San Francisco Giants farm team, in Class A.

So, it seems there are two AAA leagues, the International League in the East and the Pacific Coast League in the West. The Pacific Coast League includes the New Orleans team, the farm team of the NY Mets; it is difficult to figure even accounting for the fact that once when leaves the Northeast the country has a lot to do with looking westward.

I think, if things settle down around here, in terms of games like today's, the 6-5 win over Baltimore featuring the 6-run 9th inning, I will have the freedom and opportunity to take a look at updating all the rosters over at Chinese Wikipedia. At this point every MLB team has a page, most of them are kind of long; not very many minor league teams have pages. Most of the teams I looked at had schedules from after the end of last season, so there are some changes to be made; I added "J.D. Drew to the Boston page before realizing the scope of the work to do; it is one of those typical wikiprojects that one accomplishes over a short period of 3 or 4 days of work, working a couple of hours a day, when one is in the right mood to get it done; this kind of work goes fast when one sets one's own pace. Of course it's not like jotting down the names on a piece of notebook paper; the work should be of encyclopedic quality, and there is a lot of Chinese involved; and if one has a question about unfamiliar teams and names, as definitely happens a lot, one must double check it, as that is the responsibility level one works at when doing encylopedia work.

Unlike in Japan, and on the Japanese Wikipedia, the Chinese seem to use "3A" and "2A" insteaad of AAA and AA. I was wondering why; there is probably some obvious answer, like perhaps the idea that AA looks like Chinese words that don't provide a proptius vocabulary environment for the baseball teams, or something like that. Maybe if someone named "Heidi Blankenship" was on the short list to become the first female NFL commissioner or assistant commissioner; some kind of name confusion. AA does look like a word, anyway. I was thinking about this repeatedly as I went from site to site, going through all 30 major league teams on zh wikipedia. It's like, one might hear the question: "Why is it 3A and 2A?", which is a question that is a lot like "Why is it "Texas League" and "Florida State League"?, in the minor league list. I guess "Florida League" sounds like the phrase "Florid, dull [and] eager", while "Florida State League" sounds more like "Flora Dust 8 League" or "Flora Dust Tull", which makes me think of my mom spritzing the plants in the house during the dry winter season; Jethro Tull himself was an agronomist and agricultural goods inventor; it is kind of a cool name. This situation is similar to AA and 2A in China.

Boredom

井井井井井井井.........田田田田田田田

井 The Well. So boring and strict to consider. Are you watching Tic Tac Dough to support the economy?; insert rock or rap cd now; consider going out this evening.

丼What the heck is this? Did someone drop a gum wrapper into the well? Perhaps it is a pinecone.

---------------------------------

與 On "Married With Children", Al made a big deal out of getting a jet power-toilet - the Thompson 3500, or something like that.

島 This is a similar word. It is an important geopolitical word - island - and its bathroom humor nature is not very obvious. At times like this it helps to draw the word oneself on Paint or GIMP, emphasizing what one wants the reader to notice.

---------------------------------

鳥 and 烏 These are two similar words - Bird and Crow. Birds prefer uninhabited islands, and I usually think of President John F. Kennedy and his crew arriving at Bird Island in the South Pacific after PT-109 was destroyed, when I look at this. "Crow" is used in the words "Uruguay", "the Ukraine" and "Uganda".

---------------------------------

壘 The "Stick" was originally used to describe the game of baseball - it was called stickball. This word was developed after many seasons of baseball experience across the big pond. Of course, there are books called "Word Oceans" that were written between in the past 2000 years that are compendia of most every possible combination of word elements. Most of them fit on a bookcase; one of them is a book with 22,000 volumes!

Seriously, when something good like baseball is invented then a new word comes into being. "Electricity" is a concept that gave a different life to the word "lightning" and the word "beautiful" is much more than it originally was, after it was decided to be the word for "America".

In thinking about the "土" under the 3 "田", it seems that it is an incredibly small particle, of dust or smoke perhaps suspended in the air. It puts one in the mind of "baseball is a game of inches" - the smallest deviation in the nature of the contact of bat and ball is the difference between a hit and an out, and most putouts at 1st base are decided by inches or less. How many home runs clear the fence by only a few feet, and how many high fly balls are caught on the warning track?

The 田 is used in a lot of ballplayers' names. Also in "Honda" and "Toyota". "Tanaka", uses it as the first word and "Nakata" as the second word - the Ta and Naka are simply reversed for the two names.

田 has to do with using work as an excuse to get out of spending time with the family. In fact, Japanese are so used to this that a man arriving home at 7:00 pm might be questioned as to why he wasn't out drinking beer and eating at the Tsubohachi. "Why aren't you out earning money for me and the children?"

In so, and in the way it looks, it also has to do with euphemisms, white lies, excuses and alibis - like a fake computer screen for when one is at work, usually in the form of a group of graphs. Graph paper can hide a lot, and it usually directs one (back) to the work one was doing in the first place. It's a great invention; don't get caught off base!

On a more serious note, the "畾" sign, without the "土", is sometimes used to describe situations like the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, where people stockpile food and build bow or gun turrets (on roofs of supermarkets) using sacks of rice; 田 is ricefield and is sometimes synonymous with rice, as in the word "paddy" which describes both. I am sure the particles of 土 were dusted off and the sacks of rice returned to the supermarket after the fighting was over.

As particles of 土 are the basis of physics, the word baseball could be seen as a model of modern society, in which some people are scientists and the rest are producing goods in factories and on farms, goods that are the result of science work.

_________________________

Football is normally described as "American Mode Foot Ball", to differentiate with "soccer", which is just "foot" "ball".

Basketball is "basket" "ball" and ice hockey is "ice" "hockey", using the word for ice and the word for field hockey.

__________________________

In baseball, "hits" are describedas "peace" hits, because "peace" means "safe on base". It's funny, like home plate is "home", and the word "peace" here 安 looks like women in a house. I'm listening to Elvis Costello now; "Secondary modern, won't be a problem, til the girls get home..".

It's kind of a funny usage because the male version of "peace" looks like 平 looks sort of like a pissed-off manager; so, it isn't used for "hit" because the manager would never be pissed off in this situation of getting safe on base.

For whom the bell tolls; time marches on.....and on...towards 7:10 PM

女人化活
用腦用貝
上作上乎
飮的字影
假兵人凌他
書人好;
亞飛飛机飛謎.

Netflix' Last Life in the Universe

trans: This Thai/Japanese movie is pretty good. It's got a good precis of the "law in society" side of things, and presents a healthy, slack lifestyle experience. "Don't go to extremes" and "Money is important."

------------------------------------

I always wondered why "Thai" and "baseball" are so similar.

春"Springtime; breeding season; degeneration; the opposite of 'Autumn'"

棒"Stick; Baseball"

奉"To receive with respect, to offer, to admire, to serve", including "fake sincerity" and "boring tea party".

泰"Freedom, glory, Thai"

暴"Disastrous sunburn experience"

Music

One thing baseball and Thailand have in common is the complimentary nature of Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and dub reggae like King Tubby and the Mad Professor.

Vocabulary

"Springtime" looks like the sun under the trellis. Perhaps the sun has melted away the snow from the rack of ribs one left outside in January - old tyme refrigeration.

"Stick", "baseball" - poke it with a stick; get bored; play baseball.

"To receive with respect" looks like a shorthand word for "city" under the trellis. Perhaps some suburbanites are getting baked.

"Thai" looks like water, under the trellis. Perhaps a frog has invaded the tea party.

"Disastrous sunburn experience" A frog has invaded the tea party, that is so funny. Add the sun. Nothing stops the laughter like some housewives taking off their shirts to get a big suntan. You will turn into a rack-conscious housewife if you don't head out to the field. "Are you going to join us?"

Vocabulary notes

It seems like the trellis looks like an Asian ladder, which are more or less shaped like tall trapezoids, the two sides are not parallel. It makes a better ladder, as the weight of the person on the ladder is directed toward the centerline of the ladder.

Anecdotal seminar

When I was young I never thought twice about climbing a ladder or a tree or even a fire escape; I had a job on a movie in New York that involved lots of climbing of fire escapes while carrying movie lights. I am 44 now and I take it seriously when I have to change the light bulb in my kitchen. I respect the ladder. I respect water, I respect the city. As one grows older one's capacity for worry and concern, which can be quite well developed while young, grows ever more comprehensive and well-practiced; one worries and figures out difficult stuff, like Darfur, Nigerian oil country problems, urban affairs, et cetera. It is a lot less obvious and a lot more distracting to give a care about the big world; one doesn't want to go to the emergency room because one was thinking of something else while using a ladder to change a light.

If baseball were simple, it would be a lot less of a thing to spend time with. As involved as it is in society, and in its rules and money, it creates healthy thought patterns and discipline for one's worktime hours.

Similarly, all these Asian words are kind of difficult, and spending time just looking around creates discipline, much like playing catch, run-down and baseball creates discipline.

棒 - 木 = 奉
Translation: Without a-holes, baseball would just be a tea party.

True Sounds of Liberty

"I'm all tsol in the supermarket"



Thinking about Gang Green out of Boston, thinking about True Sounds of Liberty out of the Southland - California, that is.

Okies - original and culturally adapted - black, white, asian, mexican, south asian, mideastern, whatever - seem to comprise 80% of the population of SoCal; it has become the method of the place. A lot of integration has taken place; a lot more is to come. It's great.

As an "American-Asian" (as compared to an Asian-American) both in trade and by relationships, it is always quite apparent. Oh, "I am so sure." The thing of it is, down through the ages, it hasn't always been perfectly easy. Viz Gang Green; that is such a concise, cheerful, serious picture of the cultural politics of Boston and the Irish Diaspora. Wikilink: Irish diaspora. It is a more or less mind-boggling amount of people (80 million) whose country has done a mind-boggling amount of change in the past 100 - 200 years. I'm definitely part of it; Ireland has become a very big, integration-minded place. As far as statistics are concerned, in the US, Massachusetts has the greatest gross percentage of Irish-heritaged people, while California has the greatest gross number.

I got the feeling of the Southland when I arrived; my friend and I went to a get-together out in the Inland Empire, Low Desert, somewhere away from San Bernardino. This guy was living in a very big water vat, big as a house, and quite comfortable, a temporary lodging for someone in their 20s, near an orange grove. Hanging out by the orange groves is like being at the beach all the time back east in the summer; it is cool. Orange and green with a grey sky; Mass and Vermont are more Blue and green and snowy white in the winter. There aren't a lot of trees, beside the orange trees. When one goes to altitude (which isn't difficult; there are several ski areas within the city limits of Los Angeles), as on Big Bear Mountain, it is like the Sierra Nevadas, which get rain like Maine. We decided to drive up on an 80 degree day down in the San Bernardino valley, in April, we were stopped halfway up by the California Highway Patrol; there was a foot of snow already only 1/2 hour up; the road was closed by a blizzard. We drove back down and got some cappucino smoothies and went to visit some friends.

So it takes punk rock to make the Okie case. True Sounds of Liberty has all that emotion, the traditions, the feel of it, and makes it so reasonable; so perfectly easy to deal with. Gang Green is just the best at working the opposite side of the center in this case; their "cover versions" of Crocodile Rock and Sweet Home Alabama make it so easy to get away from the boring sounds of happiness that have the power to occasionally soothe the soul, but lack problem solving ability.

Why would a Back East man get info from Steely Dan, the Beach Boys, Queens of the Stone Age, Linda Ronstadt the Eagles? NASCAR and MIT, that's a marriage we need to see. Take the challenge and jump up in time to 2007, because it's a futuristic modern world, we got problems, we don't need the provincialism.

What does China have to do with Africa, anyway?

Asia is actually more of an influence in East Africa than we here are generally aware of. At any rate...

非洲 Fei Zhou; "Don't look fey, Joe."

非 This word has puzzled me. It's pronounced "fei"; are fey people African? Conan? They Might Be Giants? Is Tina Fey African? Sometimes in a big case like this, the English language can only go so far. It's kind of like "UEFA" spelled backwards.

If one looks at the word, it seems like:

Simple and plain, give me the lane...a line from Public Enemy

Clear Channel Communications - a company

A transcendence of the number "3", because 3 looks like: 三

A transcendence of the word "Lan", as appears in the words Scotland, Ireland, Poland, Holland, New England, Swaziland, which used to look a person with a bunch of orchids at the door, like in the song "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie: 兰. Lan is also the word for basketball.

A slam dunk

A ball that finds the gap

A running back that finds the gap

-- English words that sound like "fei" include:

Failure - not an option
Fake - something to do with online poker
Fair - the Town Fair
Fare - subway fare
Fade - West LA Fadeaway; a fadeaway jumper; a fade
Fate - up against your will
Phase - What phase are we in?
Cafe - au lait
Face - a word which in Asian has something to do with ramen, as in "If you have enough money for ramen, it might be a good idea to eat spicy, powerful Kimchi ramen, in order to save face over people eating baked potatoes w/sour cream at the Sizzlers."
Favorite - this is my favorite word.

Pearl Jam sings of "all 5 directions, like the earth to the sun.."

北非 North Africa, like Beijing
南非 South Africa, like Nanjing or South Africa
东非 East Africa, like Tokyo - "Dongjing" in Chinese
西非 West Africa; what city is the "West Capital"? Seattle? Boston?
中非 Central Africa, like the Middle Kingdom

Since North Africa looks like a baby asking for juice, we might as well open a new container.

Since South Africa looks like a letter, we might as well file it in the circular file.

Since East Africa looks like the word for "car", we have to pass this truck.

Since West Africa looks like a bottle, it is time to open a crisp clean budweiser.

Central Africa looks like stepping over something on the sidewalk; a branch, a soda can, a sleeping person.

It always seems to me that when one explains some place name in Chinese, the person who is from there is always expecting the coolest most awesome answer. "It says here that your dad is Humphrey Bogart and your son is Brady Quinn." "No, actually it says that you come from Clown City USA." It is just impossible to keep the conversation going, as Chinese place names are generally like kimchi ramen, kind of funny, kind of spicy. There are always at least two ways to go; cloying or realistically mildly abusive.

New York - Ah, we are finally going to put it all together --- in Clown City.

Los Angeles - The awesomeness of being aware of the world - I think your picnic table is broken.

Chicago - The continent dreams ..... don't wake your big brother.

San Francisco - "Old Gold Mountain" - geriatric misers

Minneapolis - A bright young man....The Music Man

Toronto - That makes so much sense.. .... and the porticullis is closed.

Montreal - The most awesome city of all ..... A band of squalls

Boston - a Tsunami of the new..... No Littering

Atlanta - a very special place ...kind of confusing, actually.

Philadelphia - the Buddhist City ....... of cheapskates

Houston - A resting place in the south ..... snoring through church.

Buffalo - Cow town

The thing of it is, without evidence of the scholarship involved, viz actually reading the names themselves, it becomes an exercise in being happy, like Wordsworth or James Joyce. In the case of reeling off translations like this, it might be nice for a conversation with your ma, but it might get boring like macadamia nuts in a normal setting.

Accountable Finance

Progress continues apace, a stock index of the Colombo Stock Exchange in Sri Lanka now has a short article and list of its stocks: The Milanka Price Index. I also put up a list at the Bahrain Stock Exchange and continue to add information to the list at "Companies listed on the JSE". The JSE has the most puzzling names of all stock exchanges; what do the Matodzi Group, Mvelaphanda Group, the Messina Group do? It is a simple matter to look up the companies or their listings at the Wright Report and fill in some information, such as "holding company; agriculture, automotive, financial services" to give a solid look at what the company is. Other stock exchanges have names like "Cairo Amman Bank" and "Bahrain National Insurance Company".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milanka_Price_Index

In thinking about choices in African stock markets, the obviously risky choice, the squeaky wheel, is represented by Sudatel, which is "Sudan Telecommunications" and is listed at the Bahrain Stock Exchange. "I can't believe you gave them money! Do you know what is happening there?" All I know if I was a telecom executive building optics cables to Ethiopia and across the Red Sea to Mecca, I would need money to hurry up and get the job done.

No matter how nice democrats and their voters are, this is a spot where they always fail first, in getting money to the people who are building the country out of trouble. It's the same thing as with the UK and Myanmar. It's like the Family Feud with those two.

So Sudatel looks nice, and I should marshall some figures to give some body to the conversation, and to obviate the concept of Unaccountability here at Accountable Finance. If your heart can stand it; there are plenty of other companies that look nice and have less impact on one's son or daughter getting into Berkeley or Bennington.

It is quite a dicey game of public relations. If one wanted to support executives who are struggling against apartheid in the 1980s, one had to know when to go with the stock ownership embargo that actually helped to dislodge the "Naked Power" that existed before Nelson Mandela took office. It was difficult, and if one is sitting there doing one's job one has to know when to move it along.

Zimbabwe seems like an incredibly difficult place to be a middle manager, but of course like all other places in Africa, the more I read about it at company sites, the more I love it. All the companies in blue at the Wikipedia's "Zimbabwe Industrial Index", a page I more or less have authored and am familiar with, all those companies exude a healthy glow when one reads the material; a positive vibration, a solid sense of confidence, an exciting investment future. Zimbabwe has CNN problems which seem mildly intractable; one looks beyond the impolite foreign correspondence and finds a lot of value. I have the habit of playing to people's fortes; Africa's fortes are not always apparent on BBC, NPR or CNN. From watching Euro-American news, one is thinking that one is about to meet a Bob Marley on the internet; it is always a Deval Patrick, a Condoleeza Rice, a Doctor Huxtable, a Steve Harris from The Practice and an Earvin "Magic" Johnson that one sees instead.

Well, Sudatel in Sudan looks like a great company, building fiber networks, talking on the phone with France Telecom every day, winning the Mauritanian "second carrier" cell phone franchise. With so much hell breaking loose 600 kilometers to the Southwest of the capital, one asks oneself "What would I do?", and "Keep working" is usually the answer. Politics can definitely be so tragic.

The well-established brokers in Bahrain, who manage Europe and America desks, are on the other end of the phone, in case one isn't really feeling timid.

I think it's time to start using the on-line accounting textbooks and start analyzing some of these companies. It's the least I could do as a financial advisor and my math skills are starting to go to seed at Poker Room and Full Tilt.


It is some riddle to figure what the designers of this logo were creating.

Ming Ni - Revision

I tried to write about the word "Hideki Okajima" but I wasn't pleased with the results. Maybe some other time. Bad luck - I erased the blog entry and Papelbon lost the save. Feh. It's tied and I hope we can get it back. Oakland is a weird place. They have a great Chinatown, with big supermarkets on 9th Street or whichever one it is. My impression of the town is of walking around at lunchtime; I was looking to see the corporate area and to get a passport photo. It's a pretty nice place to work, like Sacramento or the Avenue of the Americas in NY.

A lot of megaCalifornia energy has shifted place, w/JaMarcus Russell arriving in town and Randy Moss leaving for here. The Okies are stoked.....Pap and JaM are both Louisiana men,

It is said that baseball is an ephemeral game.

The Minnesota Twins are on the Sox' schedule for next weekend. In the interests of ephemerality, the word Minnesota is sort of interesting. The added hue increases the ephemerality while providing some competition for Minnesota's storied color:

明 MING As in Ming vase (pictured, from H-Mart), Ming the merciless, the Ming Dynasty, which occurred in the 1300s to 1600s. Ming is the sun and the moon, the moon has legs because it travels astronomically in the sky compared to the sun, as far as this word is concerned. Sorry to be giving astrophysics pointers....Sheryl Crow sings about the sun and the moon - another Louisianan in the mix here.

尼 NI is the person who leaves their home in the village to travel to a Buddhist mountain to become a monk. Or to make some jam with the Franciscans. Or to write a Concordance of Shakespeare. Or, a concordance of Anime characters in the pages of the Wikipedia. It looks like a baby asking for some juice, underneath a coonskin cap. Picture growing up in a "Tumbledown shack in Bigfoot County, it snowed so hard the roof caved in..." etc, from the Grateful Dead.

苏/蘇 SU Is a good word, if you like various forms of imagery. It's got the older version and the newer version. The old one on the left may or may not look like someone on their hands and knees; the one on the right is the fish radical on its left w/ a thong radical on its right. There is a similar word w/ a fish and a sheep, indicating perhaps a sheepish groom and a salacious wife. This indicates a salacious wife waving a thong around. In my day women hit men w/their pocketbooks, not their thongs. More imagery, the barbells indicate that these women aren't going to be building any guns to try out for the soccer team or the golf team. Bricks are heavy, thongs are not heavy.

达 DA It's the word "big" inside the ripped shopping bag, like an 8-liter container of generic restaurant mayonnaise from the Price Club.

双 SHUANG The twins, this word is used in the great Korean oil exploration and distribution company Ssangyong; Koreans pronounce it "ssang".

城 CHANG The city. The complete name of the team is the "Minnesota Twin Cities".

It seems to me that some thong-swinging Phemale Phish is looking for a twin in the form of a young man on his way to the monastery. Perhaps he will stop in the city to quench his thirst before continuing on. It's all on the up and up; MING, especially, is a word with good reputation. This is a charming Asian/American love story going on here; it's not a sordid tale! Still, the young man might be surprised to be detoured by a thong swingin' woman looking for a long-term relationship. No druggies or fatties. RU N2 the Replacements?

I have seen and heard some amazing stuff regarding thong-swingin' females coming out of the state of Minnesota, namely the two bands "Boss Hog" and "The Cows". Well, I associate Boss Hog with The Cows, so to me, the fan, it is as though they are from Minnesota. They and more like it are on Amphetamine Reptile, a featured label at eMusic. And may I add, if anyone ever wants to get disabused of charming powerful females, these two bands are strong like the NFL, carrying on the MLB-levels of energy the SUB HUM ANS put into their recorded work.

It's funny how if one is more or less literate about names like "Ming Ni Su Da", then the loads and layers of punk rock are both necessary and superflous, if you can dig my zen.

"Min" is also a syllable used in the official name "PRC"; "Zhong Guo Ren Min Gong He Guo"; the "Ren Min" are "the People".

------------------

Continuing on with the schedule, we have:

Toronto, or "Many/Porticullis logic/Many" - 多伦多 - sounds like fun if you're a blue jay.

Baltimore, which features the happy guy radical: 巴

and 4 at Detroit, "Low/Special/Law".

Minneapolis, Toronto, Baltimore and Detroit - in ZH, it seems like a road to perdition. As TSOL sings on "Road to Gold" on their "Change Today?"

Well I don't know but I've been told the street to heaven is made of gold; I don't know and time will tell, but I think this road is the same to hell. Cadillac woman won't show no way, You've got love by night and money by day; don't ask why or where I've been; when the lights go round in this world of sin.

For some reason it seems to me that the TSOL guys grew up with the Los Angeles Dodgers and California Angels.

Surreal Tranquility

The Burlington Royals' site has a nature that seems interesting; the team is in North Carolina, and I think that the culture of North Carolina has a lot to do with Michael Jordan. It is so freaking supernally serene.

The Burlington Royals are a rookie league affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, and I found this site while filling in minor league information on MLB teams in the Chinese wikipedia. At least this isn't one of those minor league teams that sells fishing licenses, instead of tickets, for the games.

Wikipedia article

Burlington Royals

城島 健司,

Johjima Kenji, or Kenji Johjima. Kenji is "exercise phrase" so one thinks Martina Hingis or Venus Williams. The Johjima is "City Island"; perhaps Manhattan or the "city planet" Isaac Asimov wrote of in the Foundation Trilogy.

Suga UEFA Cooky

Spain v Spain and Spain v Germany 2:45 Boston time, two semifinals.

Club Atlético Osasuna in Pamplona vs Seville

Espanyol vs Werder Bremen

ESPN 360

It is said that there are fewer African Americans in MLB the past few years -- not to care, European soccer is the center stage of sports integration now. Eyes on the prize, dude.

-- SORRY, today's UEFA Cup semifinal(s) are not on ESPN 360 today.

一 Ichi

鈴木 一朗 Suzuki Ichiro. 3 consecutive NPB MVPs; several mega records in MLB.

一 ICHI = 1. There's a complicated way to write the numeral "1", because some of the numbers are easy to forge on checks; one may as well say that ICHI looks a lot like Taiwan. Taiwan's tai is a word for a radio station or a television station, or a stage, kind of being up at bat or in the on-deck circle. "Tai" is also used in "Typhoon". One thinks of broadcast stations producing an 'electronic typhoon'. It's a little different from the "Tai" of "Thailand", a word which means "free" or "super great". The Tai of Thailand also looks a lot like a word for "total disaster", like getting a massive sunburn on a 3-day boating weekend. Of course, in English, we have words like "mouse" which look like "house", so don't think it's too confusing, because it's not.

朗 RO = Bright spot; silvery and sonorous. (Chinese people use it as the second word in "Iran". Iran and Iraq have the same first word and are easily distinguished by their second syllables. The R/L comes into play; in Japanese this is "RO" and in Chinese it is "LANG", these are normal levels of transliteration.)

鈴 SUZU = Bright, cute, tintinnabulation, the sound of a bell, like at Christmas.

木 KI There's only one way to analyze this word....maybe Ted Williams could have used this in his name. It has an all-American feel to it, like a clean prarie wind, like a California sunshine day, like Flash Thompson, Spiderman's high school nemesis.

As far as the word "Suzuki" is concerned, maybe "cuteness has intrinsic limits."

The word "Ichiro Suzuki" reminds me of leaving the main part of San Francisco and taking a long bus ride out to the (relatively empty) beaches; in traveling through this in-city suburban zone, one passes through several low key surf towns which create the culture of the area. There are family neighborhood restaurants and Japanese book stores, and endless vistas of those identical northern California houses with no cars in front during the day, like a West Coast New Rochelle. It has an amazing feel of lots of new arrivals to North America, an epic feeling, like the days of Sun Yat Sen or of science fiction, or of (Little House on the Prarie x Star Trek). The place has a clean, pleasing zephryistic atmosphere, kites and surfboards and ramen for breakfast. Like Jack Kerouac and cheap Aiwa imports. It's great.

I've listened to a lot of J Church, a band which takes its name from one of the buses or trams which travel from Market Street to the coast, I feel as though I know it; it's more or less exactly like Cape Cod or Narragansett/Greenwich.

"Ventura Highway in the sunshine....the Iranian reindeer vs the giant Yokohaman"

Aichi Prefecture symbol (Ichiro) (black), Yokohama City symbol (Daisuke) (red)

Meditations on a mountain

山 This word "mountain" has something to do with hillbillies; you know, the type of person Liza Minnelli has never met, the type of person who is such a prefeminist neanderthal, Jamie Lee Curtis would be bothered.

It is something of a ridiculous mountain; is one supposed to climb the outer retaining wall and then shimmy up the "pole shaped mountain" in the middle? And to what avail? This word is an argument against climbing mountains, and is a very popular word; it ridicules the gung ho attitude. And if you want words about mountains that are complementary, well, there are plenty of nice things to say about mountain climbing if you only care to look.

Semifinal

Coach Ancelotti

Jim Rome used to hate NASCAR, too. Jim can be a very strange influence on one's viewing habits.

Bad advice is a commodity, to be bought and sold, like rock and roll.

There isn't much of a jungle, or a forest, in Southern California.

AC Milano hosts Manchester United later this afternoon Boston time, free on ESPN 360, for the right to face Liverpool, who beat Chelsea, yesterday, in the final; the prospect of an all-Northern/all-England final is very boggling for the Mediterranean soccer forces that be and Man Utd leads the aggregate 1-0.

Following the 5-6-7-8 Rule of Thumb, Milano must be 6 hours difference, so an 8 PM start there is a 2 PM start here.

Strange Brew; that's what's inside of me

BREWERS
Wisconsin's Milwaukee Brewers are supposably "the Cream Ale of the NL Central". Of course, Wisconsin has a lot to do with Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois, states which have a lot to do with the American League.


威 WEI = Fear

斯 SI = Storage?

康 KANG = Connecticut, kind of like lead, which grows warm when it is worked; the scenes in "Pootie Tang" where the hooker woman assaults Pooty in the supermarket, and then Wanda Sykes explains "You can't hit hos, as they have the ability to gain energy from it; especially when they are assaulting you in the supermarket with a shopping cart! You made the right decision!"; anything to do with "Naked Raygun".

辛 XIN = A red hot chili pepper.

WEI SI KANG XIN: I think you need a beer, and you need to join a bowling league.


密 MI = Density; as in the density of a hooker comically assaulting someone in the supermarket with a shopping cart.

尔 ER = A squall.

沃 WA = Intimidatingly fertile; hilariously fertile.

基 KI = Genetics; foundation; "base".

This "MI ER WA KI" is like an inning where walks, errors and gaffes are capped off with a Grand Slam.

Here are some stocks:
*East African Breweries (pictured)
*Guinness Nigeria
*SABMiller
*Zambrew (in Zambia)

$$$$$$$

Hey rap fan,

I am writing in information on the list: "Companies traded on the JSE" that I helped to construct. I am doing this because....because....because I figure people in America want to invest money in Africa and don't really know how what where to do it. Investing in Africa isn't as easy as investing in America, but it should be.

List: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companies_traded_on_the_JSE#/

If you want a broker, go to the (Ghana, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Uganda) stock exchange site itself. To save yourself the fatigue of dealing with mystery and new feelings, start off with something that seems very normal to you. Culture shock exists, but you shouldn't suffer from it. I figure that people are in the rap fan game for life, and that's a long time to contemplate how and why and where to invest in the place.

If you like and/or grew up with construction and construction materials, consider a sheetrock company. If you know cars, consider the automotive sector. If you know real estate, consider a shopping mall or a tea plantation. If you farm you have a lot of choices; fiber, food; specialty food; livestock. Are you of the familias medicalis? There are a lot of healthcare choices; hospital, clinic ownership; pharmaceutical; supplies, et cetera.

Maybe you like beer. Maybe you like Pepsi. Maybe you like chain restaurants steakhouses, fried chicken, Indian food, Chinese food.

I like places that make industrial machinery myself. "Air conditioning solutions for the copper mining industry."

Suit yourself.

Invest in Africa today; it's the common sense money destination.