October 21
Simply for future references and anyone who might be interested, this will be a short (hopefully short) log of events regarding this date and any of my comments that may follow.
Information will be partly derived from news, wikipedia and “365 Modern History-From World War Two to the World Wide Web: Great Stories from Modern History” by Gerard Cheshire with John Farndon
Note: These will only include topics of interest to me. It’s personal, after all, in a sense.
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In 2007 news
Iran court jails U.S.-Iranian scholar: report
Protester assails Blair in Palestinian mosque
HEBRON, West Bank (Reuters) – Bodyguards subdued a Palestinian man Tuesday as he approached Middle East envoy Tony Blair, shouting “You are a terrorist.”
The world over-regards the words terrorists and terrorism. We are all terrorists to someone, ad we all practice terrorism daily. Just ask yourself what the pigs in the pen would be calling you if you can understand what they are saying. Ok, so they are pigs, not men.EC Copyright Overhaul Could Spur Google Book Project
Europe’s patchwork of copyright laws may soon get an revision from the European Commission in order to more easily compensate authors and publishers whose books are turned into digital works by companies like Google. If changes are not undertaken, book-scanning projects like Google’s could make digitized European works easier to find in the U.S. than in Europe.
Aphrodisiac attack wife convicted
A woman who fed her husband an aphrodisiac before cutting his throat and going off to meet another man has been convicted of attempted murder.
I wonder what was going on in the head of the woman. Seriously.
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1520 – Ferdinand Magellan discovers a strait now known as Strait of Magellan.
One of my childhood fantasies was to be on that very ship. For some reason, this was the one story I liked the most as a kid. Although, honestly, I can’t recall most of it.
1867 – Manifest Destiny: Medicine Lodge Treaty – Near Medicine Lodge, Kansas a landmark treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders. The treaty requires Native American Plains tribes to relocate a reservation in western Oklahoma.
1895 – The Republic of Formosa collapses as Japanese forces invade.
And hence started what my grandparents considers-the better days of Taiwan. No kidding, for many elders, those were the peaceful days when you needn’t fear your neighbors. Do what you are told and don’t step out of line, everything will be fine. However, what’s life without some rebellion and turmoil?
1945 – Women’s suffrage: Women are allowed to vote in France for the first time.
1945 – Argentine military officer and politician Juan Perón married actress Evita.
1967 – Vietnam War: More than 100,000 war protesters gather in Washington, DC. A peaceful rally at the Lincoln Memorial is followed by a march to The Pentagon and clashes with soldiers and United States Marshals protecting the facility. Similar demonstrations occurred simultaneously in Japan and Western Europe.
I don’t understand the thing about Vietnam War. Actually, I don’t understand the thing about any war, except… drama is always “in”.
1978 – Australian civilian pilot Frederick Valentich vanishes in a Cessna 182 over the Bass Strait south of Melbourne, after reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft.
Seriously, I would prefer it to have been a UFO, but then I don’t believe aliens would fly all that distance (or float all that distance) just to take 1 sample out the air. Unless, of course, there was some mass abduction as in 4400 that we are simply unaware of. How stupid can humans be? Quite stupid, apparently. Personally, I prefer Arthur C. Clarke’s notion of alien rendezvous as suggested in his “Rendezvous with Rama”. We’re tiny specks in the universe, why would the higher intelligence be interested in us anyways? Although it would be interesting to imagine that they might have a group of nerds studying humans like those in our world that studies bacteria.
1994 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea and the United States sign an agreement that requires North Korea to stop its nuclear weaponsprogram and agree to inspections.
2001-Anthrax claims third victim in US
Reading through the book, I’m excited about October 23 a lot more.
Interesting pet post from Health.com
Are Cats or Dogs Better for Your Health?
Dogs are good for …
1. Boosting your mood. More than 80 percent of new owners report feeling happier.
2. Making friends. British researchers found that owners who walk their dogs meet a lot of new people.
3. Losing weight. Dog walkers lose an average of 14 pounds in a year, a University of Missouri study says.
Cats are good for …
1. Helping you chill. Most owners say their cats help them relax.
2. Protecting your heart. A recent study shows that cat owners are 40 percent less likely to die of a heart attack than those without cats.
3. Ditching asthma. Kids with cats may get an immunity boost, Columbia University researchers say.
from Health.com
http://news.health.com/2008/08/19/cats-dogs-for-your-health/
Too Long Ago
That I can’t even remember what was in my last post.
The bad of having too many different blogging systems, and then too much curiosity leading to actually attempting to use all of them at once. That, and the bad of wanting to retain privacy while wanting the world to see. So there ends up being a private hideout for the self, and the public show off of the self. The pity is that, it is always in the private that beauty truly is spoken, in the public… often forgotten. Pity.
Maybe that’s why so many blogs are about contextual things, critics of literature, geeks posting about their new coding technics, artsy people talking about art…
Right… all too long ago.
080723 Starting to date
And as the understanding of present being mother/father of past and future, the sense of the importance of “dates” becomes me.
And looking upon the present of myself, which I feel discontent with, the senese “to change” strikes.
Perhaps with these thoughts in mind, another alteration is again in call, this time far more distant to previous than any in the past. The heart is perhaps settling down and the person stablizing.
Song stuck in my head
Today, it is… Bittersweet Symphony, the “The Verve” version… including the whole MV.
Quality song, really tells the reality of life, eh? Walk our ways…
成為凡人需要勇氣
It takes tremendous courage and power to become just a normal, average person. Maybe that is why we always hear stories of how gods and goddesses in heaven comes to earth to become just people, to experience the life as just people. To drop from the height of our dreams to the simple plains of normality.
How often do we think and dream of greatness? Recalling when we were kids, our teachers would always ask for us to provide (yearly) a list of our ambitions, our desired future career or dream. How many kids would put down president, actress, rock star, etc.? How many kids would say that they prefer to sell ice creams?
It is so much easier to dream of greatness than to face the fact that compared to the world, we are so tiny. That is perhaps why in Douglas Adam’s “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” he mentioned a Total Perspective Vortex which will explode the universe in front of a man so that he would feel just how inadequate he was and hence, annihilate the brain of the victim through the understanding of just how not important a man is compared to the whole of the universe. It does take a lot of courage to admit our tininess. Our egos being in the test tube for this present processing experiment.
Looking back
Looking back at things I have written in the past. Some old posts made new, some unfinished work re-established. Looking back, I always feel the lack of improvement in the present. The words used, the manners emotions were expressed, how much more precise I was in the past than I was now, how much more touching, creative I was then than now.
Wasn’t there a time when words just flew from the very interior of my head to the exterior without needs of even a thought. Those were the days when it felt as if I was gifted by nature, gifted by nature to write. Every waking moment, there was a thought to be written; every sleeping moment, there was a thought waiting to be written; every breathing moment, words were accumulating, forming themselves into beautiful paragraphs, tracing the curves of the elegance which I had one prided myself in, a uniqueness in style that made me utter unbelief many times at my own writings. And now, pride and inferiority, two most conflicting points, have rotted my soul, taken away the spring of inspiration, washed me dry of passion.
Ah passion. How I want to feel alive again. Not merely trapped in this forgotten world where we are boxed in like chickens. “Chickens are decent people” I always recall Carlin saying. And I had thought that decent people deserved more than just egg laying for the rest of their lives. The hens have been laying eggs so long that the forgot the passion they felt when they met their first chicken.
To be alive. To feel the heart pound, without fear, without a care in the world, with nothing but a powerful force pushing itself forward, propelling it towards a direction that no one else dares to go (or at least we believe that no one else dares to go). To be rid of this horrible doubt that endlessly plagues me, this sense of helplessness, of worthilessness, of not being able to spread my unfortunately clipped wings. To feel.
Yes, that is the thing, to feel. We are born to feel, to live, not to lock ourselves up in our own limited world. To be boundariless, to cover our lives with emotional moments, rollercoasters going up and down. To feel.
Maybe that’s what’s missing. I’m out of words. My heart is cold, and my soul, lost somewhere in the sea of past burdens and future burdens.
What I want and what you are… (from 2007)
For periods of time I wondered at what I want and whether or not I can find that person to provide me with these things I desire.
In a man, I desire mutual understanding, stability, harmony, tranquility, and more than anything a strong shoulder to lean on. I am not into sentimental man, but then, I am not into a man who doesn’t have the sentiments required to be touched, to be moved, and to be passionately altered through art, literature and those so called “high class” leisure. I hate this “high class” leisure idea though, however prominent it seems to be in Taiwan.
What I want, in the very end, it seems, is artsy. Perhaps that’s what all women wants, artsy! Designs, tastes, fashion, understanding of a beautiful painting, analysis of a marvelous movie. Yet, not lacking the intelligence required of the modern world in science, not lacking the fierocity built into a political debat, and more than anything, not lacking the depth necessary in a philosophical conversation…. okay, I want a lot… @@ I admit.
Maybe, that’s just the problem. In the present day, we all want a lot (I am sure that my list of desires still are short compared to that of my other friends’).
What people say