Perhaps it's because he is such a public figure, but Nicholas Kristof seems to be doing cool stuff all the time. As perhaps the least controversial—and most recently appointed—of the NY Times' editorial staff, he is talking to interesting people and coming up with, if not deep, at least non-isolationist and well-informed ideas. Also, I saw him participate in a show on PBS a few weeks ago called Asian America, where he talked about South Korea's new president.
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Leylop travelled to Beijing and was there during the university cafeteria bombings. She posted some pictures of the site.
I like my Lei Feng T-shirt.
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From the Asian Age website, through Brand Recon's collection of Moreover newsfeeds:
Beijing, March 6: China on Thursday said North Korea has expressed its readiness to accept US inspections on its alleged nuclear programme so as to end the worsening Pyongyang-Washington standoff.
This is intriguing, I wonder why the New York Times hasn't picked up on it yet.
I harbor a slight fanship for Zhu Rongji, China's top economic policy-maker under Jiang Zemin. It makes me happy when he gets a positive review in the New York Times. In his weblog, TS Chang tells us that many delegates at the National Peoples' Congress speak fondly of him too.
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Today I went out for lunch with one of my old high school friends, Andy Ahn. He did his undergrad work at Georgetown and now he's out here in California working for a tech company. We met at The Hat over by the Brea Mall and chatted for an hour or so over lunch. Apparently he plans to be in the area for a few more months at least, hopefully he'll be around when we have outr next Brea get-together.
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This afternoon my mom, dad and I drove down the coast to San Francisco to visit a person from the past, Sergio, our friend from Spain. When he was starting college in Seville he made friends with my family and used to crash at our house on weekends, so we got to know him very well. From my parents I have it that he used to party a lot and spend all night at the discoteca. But his English was pretty good, and he ended up travelling all over the globe and now lives near San Diego with his wife—an excellent cook—and two girls.
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Sometimes I feel sorry for the kids I substitute teach, when they ask me "how did you get so smart?" Really, it's a combination of parents who stimulate you and feeding yourself a wealth of information through reading. Reading anything, really. In the 12th grade Mrs Sweet gaves us an essay to read that argued the same thing, and I disagreed. But now I see kids reading comic books, and it makes me glad that at least they're reading something. Reading doesn't just teach facts, but also analysis, concentration and discipline.
All of this just to point to a similarly-themed post by Sam Buchanan, on parents reading to children, and compulsive reading habits. You can be pretty sure that Owen Buchanan will grow up to be a bright kid.
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NPR has a webpage for All Songs Considered, a very unique show.
We started All Songs Considered after receiving countless letters from listeners who wanted to know more about the music played between stories on NPR's evening news program, All Things Considered.
On the page today is a CD by Gary Lucas called Edge of Heaven. According to the page, guitarist Gary Lucas hears rhythm and blues in traditional Chinese pop tunes from the '20s and '30s
. It has a very good—albeit single—review on Amazon, and a mention on the Rolling Stone website. I'll have to see if I can order this through Borders.
Speaking of Borders, I read on a book-related blog that Borders head Greg Josefowicz spoke out in a recent interview against the publishing industry's practice of buying back unsold books, a practice that arose during the Great Depression when publishers needed a way to reduce the risk of buying books
. He must know something that I don't, because I thought that selling remainders was very profitable for Borders.
On China, Chinese Cuising Miniatures.
What happens when put on your sleek wrap-around sunglasses, strap a (fake) bomb under your black leather jacket, and walk into the offices of Reuters in Beijing? You get a sweet portrait of your handsome self in the paper.
Wang Jianshuo reposted some pictures of his trip to Daocheng in response to a comment on another blog. This is the second time I've seen these, and in my estimation they are truly the most beautiful travel pictures I have every seen.
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We haven't yet studied property rights in my Economics classes at Fullerton College (or should that be Law?); nevertheless the New York Times' Capitalists in Chinese Legislature Speak Out for Property Rights caught my attention as an application of fundamental theories of sound economics being implemented in China. It's a very exciting thing, because the Chinese government has a chance to do this stuff right the first time, and I know that there are some very intelligent people leading the crusade for economic reform over there.
Also, Ron Gluckman made a showing on the Oriental mailing list this morning. Ron Gluckman! He is a roving reporter who covers Asia, and his website is a compendium of articles he was written in the past. Very good stuff.
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On the book front, I just finished All The President's Men by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two men who developed and exposed the Watergate scandal. It's a good piece of history come alive, and gives a good sense of just how corrupt some people can be behind facades of honesty. It makes me scared of our current administration. I rented the movie from Blockbuster and watched half of it tonight; it stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, won several Academy Awards, and was nominated for Best Picture.
Also, I should mention other books I'm reading like Principles of Global Security by John Steinbruner (informative but a real snoozer), the Chinese classic Monkey, also known as Journey to the West, translated by by Arthur Waley. I've been reading this one on my breaks at Borders, and from the beginning knew that this was a book I would want to bring home. It's the story of a magical monkey with amazing powers that must accompany a priest and friends to India to retreive the Bhuddist scriptures, and how he beats up people along the way. Horribly amusing, I can see how it's a favorite of Chinese kids. The other book that I brought home from Border but haven't started yet is Haruki Murakami & the Music of Words, by frequent Murakami translator Jay Rubin. One Amazon reviewer says it's part biography, part literary criticism
, maybe it will explain the weirdness of Murakami's books. I'm looking forward to diving into this one.
Speaking of Murakami, he had a short story entitled The Ice Man in a recent issue of the New Yorker. It was nice and cryptic, about a lady who meets the ice man, marries him and how they move to Antarctica.
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I'll have to post sometime at the Border Group employees' LiveJournal.
I've got very little to back this up beyond a few anecdotes and a forgotten newspaper reference, but I would like to toss out an idea that has been forming in my mind. Would it be possible for the United States to experience a brain drain? Brain drain is the phenomenon defined by Dictionary.com as the loss of skilled intellectual and technical labor through the movement of such labor to more favorable geographic, economic, or professional environments
. It is typically associated with developing countries, whose young people go abroad to be educated and choose not to return to their homeland. As the economy worsens, companies and universities cut down on hiring, and government exerts more control on research through Homeland Security, it may be possible that the brightest Americans would choose to take their talents to more rewarding and free environments, both in industry and academia. It's just a thought.
Update: I first saw this written at Jason Kottke's website, as I recall.
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A browse through the Lonely Planet message board today turned up this gem:
Q: In LP's Russia, Belarus & Ukraine the map shows an area in the vicinity of Vladivostok called "the Jewish Autonomous Region" (or something close to that. Does anyone know what that is?
A: I noticed the Jewish Autonomous Region on a world map in 1999. I asked a friend if she knew anything about it, and she asked another friend who turned up some information. It was apparently some aborted attempt to give Russian Jews some kind of homeland, but surprisingly enough they all wanted to go to Israel instead. He reckoned there would be very few if any traces of Jewish culture. let me know if you get there, I'd be interested to hear about it.
I got another idea: they didn't want to freeze their bums off!
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This year while I'm waiting to hear back from grad schools, I've been working a few jobs. One of those jobs is to tutor for the school district at the high school library on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The Brea Olinda High School library is not a big place to begin with, and it has about as much space dedicated to computers as it does to bookshelves. Consequently, most students don't go there to read or check out books—rather, they go to chat quietly, read magazines, or instant message their friends in between periods.
On Tuesday nights, we usually have between ten and thirty students show up for tutoring. Most of them come for math help, a smattering for chemistry or physics, and there is an occasional Spanish or history assignment to be looked at. This is usually how it goes: I walk in ten or fifteen minutes late, Ms Cook is sitting at a table helping some girls with their math, the chatty crowd says "hey Mr Sittig!" and I wave back; I walk over to Ms Cook's table and say hi, then set my bookbag down on the table. In my bookbag I carry a TI-85 graphing calculator, an old wooden ruler, a couple of scratch notebooks and a bunch of sign-in sheets. I pull out a sheet, and take it over to the girls' table and drop it off with Ms Cook, who is busy helping out some students. Ms Cook teaches Integrated Math 1 and Math B; I've subbed for her a few times, and that's all it took to feel sorry for her, the kids are pretty rowdy!
After that, I've already got a few kids calling me over to their table so I glance around the room and look for Alec, one of the regulars. He is one of the kids who was pretty behind at the beginning of the year, when I taught his Integrated 3 class for six weeks as a long-term sub; but he has really worked hard and improved by leaps and bounds. Just this week, he was taking shortcuts on his chemistry assignment, the good kind of shortcuts that showed he really understood what he was doing. After chatting with Alec for a minute or two, I try to figure out who raised their hand first: it's fairly arbitrary, though I like to help the new people first just to make them feel welcome.
In a minute, Noah will come up and start talking to me. Noah's sister was valedictorian this year (along with my sister, I might add) but he has no such ambitions. Noah wants to be military man, a general if possible. His family is very conservative; he likes to read his parents' Weekly Standard and books about military history. He's very opinionated and will talk your ear off if you give him the chance. But it's OK, because he's a reasonable person and a very logical thinker with a firm grasp of the facts. It's too bad he doesn't apply himself as a student, because he's a very bright kid.
Noah usually doesn't need help, so I walk around and answer questions, give hints, and snatch away peoples' calculators when their calculator-dependency comes out. Seriously, I'm usually a skeptic when people decry the decline of another time-worn institution—I prefer to think of them as transformations—but teaching of the mathematical basics has really gone downhill. The problem is not that the kids can't do math. On the contrary, they are remarkably bright (usually). The problem is that they have been taught that they can't do math without a calculator. Remember back in the day when, if the answer didn't come out to a whole number, you could assume that you hadn't gotten the correct solution? Textbook manufacturers caught onto that, so today virtually every problem in math and physics books has a decimal answer and requires a calculator to solve. So now I get kids who change 1/2 and 2/3 into decimals before multiplying them together. That's why I have a reputation for snatching calculators out of kids' hands and making them do the math on paper or in their heads. It's a reputation I enjoy. (it's 1/3, by the way)
As the two hour tutoring time draws to a close, I seek out the sign-in sheet and write my name at the bottom, leaving it with Ms Cook to drop off in the counselor's box in the morning. The sessions last until eight o'clock, but the library closes and eight thirty so I usually stay a little later and help out the kids who are taking longer. I pull out my keys, walk down the stairs and in front of the office to the parking lot, bundle into the trusty-rusty Volvo DL and head home.
Tomorrow night I plan to take my short band radio to tutoring, and Garret and I are going to play around with it. With luck we'll pick up Saddam Hussain's final "Allah akbar, and death to the infidels."
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From the Radio Free China weblog, a discovery: web proxy by e-mail. Send an e-mail to a certain address with GET <url> in the body, and receive the page by e-mail. Would be an easy function to implement.
The New York Times reports on a project to digitize old Afghan books. A noble venture.
The FSWE will be held on April 12th. An entry ticket is sitting in my day-planner to remind me. On a more specific note, I just ordered a book about what goes on in US Embassies.
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The various Saddam blogs are already passe. More hip is weblog belonging to Kim Jong Il.
Bush43: YOU SHUT UP
Bush43: YOUR DUMBLicense2KimJongill: i thought it was supposed to be "you're" dumb
Bush43: I'M NOT DUMB YOU ARE. YOUR DUMB.
License2KimJongill: no I'm saying I thought "you're" dumb is correct
Bush43: WELL IT'S NOT CORRECT CUZ I'M NOT DUMB. YOU ARE
License2KimJongill: shut up
Bush43: YOU SHUT UP
License2KimJongill: i will turn your house into a sea of flames
License2KimJongill: i hate youBush43: THEN WHY AM I STILL ON YOUR BUDDY LIST
Bush43: ???
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Micah Sittig's Chinese improves and worsens with the phases of the moon. He enjoys non-fiction books, bicycling, foreign languages and ethnic restaurants. He is an inveterate globetrotter, but can always be found at micah@earthling.net
