Promo video - Mr. D - CBC TV series

Mr. D is an ultimately efficient teacher. And he plays by the rules, that is, by his own rules.

Wanting to do important things conscientiously is a first-rate trait, I think.

If one doesn't have it, well, the top tier probably isn't for him.

Some Chinese elderly regard themselves to be omniscient about life and so they become hardheaded. No, myriad of things in life are beyond their imagination.

I hope I won't become like that when I grow old.

Time is everyone's gyve. Successful are those who make the most splendid dance with it.

Are there too many oblique remarks in the world?

Now my life is emblematic of what a struggling entrepreneur has to go through.

The conjunctive metro station of Berri UQAM is a good place.

After several scattered rounds of controversy between G and me, the realization finally dawned on G that the give and take of obligations between her and her employer company is the annual working hours she must fulfill for the company, even if her job is an annually salaried one and not a part-time one.

Eventually Julian Assange, the founder of Wiki Leaks, will get his acquittance from the British court.

Otherwise people's trust of the British legal system will be shaken.

The keypad, integrated into a whole keyboard, on a desktop computer is much easier to be found and used by your fingers than the one on a laptop computer.

Interestingly, I've found that while schools in China are apt to be quite authoritarian and exam-oriented, their counterparts in Canada also are much exam-oriented, although not authoritarian.

Sometime I feel like my thoughts and enjoyment are intruded by the noises on the road when I take a walk outside or anything.

In the future, if I get relatively rich and everything, I'd like to buy a house in the woods or something, then I'll go and spend some time over there now and then.

One should celebrate food. And one should celebrate sports.

A great many things in life aren't black or white.

For instance, I'm not very satisfied with some aspects of Montreal. However, Montreal has done me quite a good turn.

學歷不代表貢獻，更不代表經濟貢獻。

Everyone will encounter his or her own fair share of jerks and bitches in life.

Sorry for the offensive "b..." word. I don't know yet if there's a good substitute word for that meaning.

J wants to keep clear of unpromising companies when he considers which one to work for.

Clearly, if a company employs lots of middle-class people in Canada, then it will receive subvention from the government when time is very difficult for it.

Politics always intervene with business somehow.

Should Canada make the hearse and coffin for its dead soldiers look more stately?

E is in his fifties. He looks like a businessman or something. Actually he's a veteran software dev.

It seems he doesn't know about sales. He doesn't know the life cycle of a biz deal, so to speak.

In terms of sales, he's just an order taker. Well, maybe that's what the employees of big companies are like.

It seems that many Western countries have wariness of China, more than ever.

If one asks himself at dusk, "what have I done in today's work to benefit the society, however tiny?", then he won't turn to speculation in the financial market.

But it seems that my above logic isn't sound. Anyways, you get what I meant.

I still don't quite understand this commonplace arrangement in Canada. Public hospitals are run by their angels of mercy, and the doctors just work there like medical consultants or something, hired from outside, if my impression isn't too far from the truth.

So essentially, nurses are civil servants, but doctors are not. Doctors are much more of private practitioners of medicine.

Think about that.

Typically, significantly more courtesy can be expected in the city life in Canada than in its Chinese counterpart.

That's one sort of social capital which differentiates.

Shanghai, the mega city in Asia, maybe always tends to have a thread of ostentation.

Are those students who're apt in the classroom actually deep?

Forbidding and deterring has been the coldness of these two days.

I always think that China should hold more rites for veterans of its wars.

Ancient hatchments look beautiful.

See http://www.google.ca/search?q=hatchment&hl=en&safe=off&qscrl=1&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=zZoCT_K5M8fu0gGtrayxBQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CA8Q_AUoAQ&biw=1280&bih=675
.

Is it the right balance for a good life?

In life, it happens that a certain thing is encouraged at an earlier stage yet is sort of discouraged at a later stage.

Take the example of artistic endeavors.

When one is a child, his artistic activities are generally encouraged. For one thing, you can sense the positive tone in the words "artistic" and "art" in the merchandise names "artistic smock" and "art smock" which are actually painting smocks hanging in stores for children.

However, once the child grows up to become an adult, his artistic endeavors are no longer encouraged in general, if he pursues them wholeheartedly, because everyone knows that most full-time artists starve or are very poor. It's not the right balance for a good life.

You see, the same activity, different attitudes by one's surrounding, just because he's at different life stages.

No more whistling in the dark. Please admit failure, RIM's two infamous Co-CEOs.

Without people communing with each other, a group is not a community.

We're all familiar with Facebook and Twitter. Now the emergence of Path seems to be the dawn of sensible social networking.

In addition, some people say Path provides very good user experience.

See https://path.com/
and
http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/257552-why-can-i-only-share-with-150-people .

The shoulder pads which football (I don't mean "soccer" here) players wear make them appear very strong and good-looking.

Our toddler daughter governs the rhythm of our life authoritatively. We just hope that the young governor gradually grows wiser. :-)

Some companies had started out with benevolent intent. Then they got listed in the stock market. Then their initial intent got smirched under the high pressure of earnings growth of year by year.

There are two sorts of kisses: the chaste ones, and the sexual ones.

Even 40 years ago, the Mainland Chinese still thought all kisses, between a man and a woman, in the whole world belong to the latter.

It seems that the NYC remains to be a hearth of economic vigor in the U.S despite its high costs.

If you look up the synonyms of "prostitute" in a dictionary, you'll find there are so many. "Hooker", "hustler", "harlot", "courtesan", "whore", and so on.

Well, the above example may not be a very decent one. Anyways, my point is that the great number of synonyms of many words is one of the difficulties we have to overcome when we read material in English from different eras.

Some Montrealers say that Torontonians aren't as courteous as people in Montreal.

I use my old feature cell phone sheerly as a reliable alarm clock. But I do it warily.

I put it into the Airplane Mode each time when I turn it on. A mobile phone in the Airplane Mode is supposed to emit no radiation at all.

The updating of software developers' skills is constant and perennial.

On every single day, from dusk to almost midnight, the time of my wife and me is completely occupied by taking care of our toddler daughter. Yes, having a demanding baby is that tough, if you are reasonably enough careful with her.

When a woman cuckolds her husband before they get divorced, that speaks something about her.

December 27th. The day following the Boxing Day. Still in the Boxing Week.

The downtown part of the St-Catherine street. A great many people are proceeding through the street and the malls on it.

This area delivers a great amount of business value in the Boxing Week period.

Wintry breezes at -2 degrees Celsius

This winter isn't too cold
-2 degrees Celsius is the best winter temperature
It doesn't freeze you a great deal
While it can give you the Northern flair

White snow, dark road, small hours in the night,
The yellow light from a height in the 4th floor apartment,
And the pink and blue drapes covering its windows,
In the high-rise building standing at the intersection of two thoroughfares

I think that arts are the form and container which captures human experience the best.

Maybe from around a decade ago, in terms of career prospect, a higher education had become to be no longer a ticket to good jobs and to be just a way to avoid and escape vile employments, for newly minted university graduates in Canada, whether they recognize that or not.

The counter side of polluted food is not organic food. It is clean food.

Freezing coldness and crushing loneliness are two biggest enemies for some people in Montreal

Just now, around the midnight, I went to a nearby Tim Horton's outlet to grab a coffee. A guy around 19 years old appeared to be drunk and was talking to everyone, one by one, over there, all of whom were strangers to him. He's a student who went to Dawson College, and he'd been from Hungary. "I'm alone. I can only hug trees," he said, "morning after morning".

He's crushed by loneliness. And he burst on Christmas Eve.

Who didn't see trees or plant leaves with one sort of canker or another?

Diseases do exist in nature. Nature isn't all good.

There are always some jerks in retail stores. They can't be liked after they offended you one way or another.

Do the rabbles in the Arab Spring realize that they probably won't see prosperity in their own lifetime?

The procedure of democracy leading to prosperity mostly takes a very long time to complete.

自由給予浮躁之人的，是絕望。

What can the gigantic mat of workers of China achieve in the future?

It's interesting that so many Americans and Canadians worship the late Steve Jobs, who seems to be authoritarian without traces of being democratic in his management of virtually everything.

It seems that there's no much difference at all among the three adjectives -- 'green', 'greeny', and 'greenish'.

It seems that the number of people without long-term vision overbears that of people with it.

You want to strike a fine balance of paid attention between parochial concerns and global ones.

When our toddler daughter will be wearing a painting smock and painting, she'll be happy.

It's said that people who don't exercise and eat healthy food are more likely to become cancerous sooner or later.

Being a family man doesn't equal to being mostly for hearth and home.

The French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been described as "impetuous, disloyal, and un-French".

See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/impetuous-disloyal-and-unfrench-chirac-attempts-coup-de-grace-on-sarkozy-2294940.html .

Well, that doesn't make the leadership of Sarkozy and Merkel, which is supposed to drag Europe out of the mess it's currently in, look hopeful.

Among the Christmas wreaths on the market, there's one kind which have a Christmas bow attached inside the ring. That's a selling point.

For the time being, I'm chary of having a second child.

Music video - Alexander Borodin - Prince Igor - Polovtsian Dances

About the author (composer) Alexander Borodin:
He's a Russian. His main vocation was a professor of Chemistry at the Academy of Medicine in Russia. "Between 1859 and 1862 Borodin held a postdoctorate in (University of) Heidelberg", which is a world renowned university in Germany. Borodin "suffered poor health, having overcome cholera and several minor heart attacks. He died suddenly during a ball at the Academy, and was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in Saint Petersburg." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Borodin )

The dentist gave me an extra shot for freezing. Then my lips and chin began to go numb and tingling in a brief while.

On another note, usually the dentist smiles quite courteously, which impresses me. I'm not sure if that kind of smile is a Waspy thing.

Will Alberta's oil sand industry be arraigned for its environmental impact by future generations?

I always prefer coffee or anything over tea.

Gee. The name of the movie "Rice Rhapsody" (海南鸡饭) is so subtle and so good.

For the introduction of the flick, see http://movie.douban.com/subject/1309013/ .

'Rhapsodies' normally are big concert music pieces which are developed upon folk music pieces in a certain country, if my take isn't too far from the truth.

And I guess that the word 'rice' refers to 'sticky rice', which means "a homosexual Asian male who is sexually attracted exclusively to other homosexual Asian males". (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sticky%20rice )

In terms of the degree of people's abilities, this world can be so diverse and bipolar.

Some people are so formidably and deeply smart and capable, while some others are so incredibly incompetent on many aspects to the degree which beggars belief.

Well.

People who tend to be browbeaten by economic crises aren't fit to stay in a Capitalist country.

Just now, I've been doing the thing called "Display Color Calibration", which can be accessed from Control Panel --> Display, on my Windows 7 laptop.

And I have slightly disappointedly found out that there's no way to change the "Contrast" setting at all for laptop screens.

A DVD drive is not a fitting to be let go in the computer. Probably we'll need it for some occasions.

Words open a sphere of experiencing

My wife and I have been having more and more interactions with our toddler daughter as her cognitive capacity grows by week. I can see that while interacting, which obviously makes a large portion of human activities, one's words bring another into a sphere of experiencing, imagining, and conveying knowledge.

Cancers are pestilent and fearsome.

Once caught by one of them, one loses life and hope.

The list of monetary dealings is humanity.

It seems that in Canada, more and more young people, both male and female, have been stuck in obsessive and unwholesome passions for social media such as Facebook, and computer gaming.

Some of them have dropped out of school because of spending too much time on Facebooking and so on.

Facebook has been becoming a canker. Alack.

Demanding is to take care of a two-year-old. EXTRA demanding is to take GOOD care of a two-year-old who's having constant nightly teething pains for her last four teeth to grow out.

Maybe for people in this era, to have two or more children and raise them well is superfluously overloading.

Maybe there's always a thread of authoritarianism in the French mentality.

Typically, cheap teacup mats are less shoddier than cheap place mats, I think.

I always want to soup up my Windows computers experience with keyboard shortcuts. Sigh.

D had greenly and selfishly handled his people, most of whom just came and went. So his entrepreneurial initiative deceased helplessly, it appeared.

The index of Particulate Matter 2.5 in Beijing has reached a critical level from time to time. A lot of people have been risking their lungs and health in that modern mega city.

See 网友申请公开PM2.5数据_网易微博.

All in all, this era is an opportune one for information junkies like me.

"Sorrowful" and Jack Ruby

I consider the following piece good writing:

"Mrs. Kennedy walked beside it, her face was sorrowful. She looked steadily at the floor. … Her hand rested lightly on her husband’s coffin as it was taken to a waiting hearse."

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/nov-22-1963-president-kennedy-is-assassinated/

There's only one adjective in the piece -- "sorrowful".

By the way, Jack Ruby, who killed JFK's assassin, appears mysterious and suspicious.

Dead people's bodies used to be interred into the ground. Nowadys oftentimes it's the ashes of them which get kept.

What will be the form by which human corpses are kept in the future? Stem cells?

The MOST important battle in Canadian history is the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (a.k.a. the Battle of Quebec) which took place in the siege of the Quebec City in 1759, during the Seven Years' War.

As the French commander General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm lay dying due to a bullet which had hit him on the Plains of Abraham, he said (probably with much regret which he should have expected that the British would scale the very steep cliffs on the riverbank outside Quebec via the Anse au Foulon route), "I am glad I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec." On the other hand, the British commander General James Wolfe also lay dying on that battlefield, and he said, "I die happy", after he heard that the French army had just collapsed and been escaping.

What a bitter and tragic battle.

My subtle thoughts only can emerge drizzlingly in quiet settings.

Are there a higher percentage of people who catch some sort of cancer nowadays than before?

Personally I think the noun 'bow' (pronunciation: /bou/) is a fine word.

An arrow flies from a bow, a violin is sounded by a bow, a gift box wears a bow on its top, and a house door presents a red pretty Christmas bow in this holiday season.

Maybe I'm escaped by the hugger-mugger of how modern countries' economic and financial system works.

As the mess in Europe has been keeping unfolding, I for one has gotten to know the differences of economy and society between the group of Germany and U.K. and that of Greece and Italy.

And I guess I've become wary of the latter.

Simmons and Simons

I used to be ignorant about the difference between the Simons (pronunciation: /'saimons/), which is a Quebec fashion retailor, and the Simmons (pronunciation: /'simons/), which is the American flagship mattress company.

By the way, Simmons was translated to Chinese as "席夢思". What a fine translation!

Not everything new is an opportunity. One shouldn't get muddied over that.

In terms of measurement, a cup is different than a cap.

How much has the phenomenon of information overload been bedeviling average Joes and Janes?

1756 - 1763 年，英、法两大欧洲强权在北美洲这个 new world 为了争夺国土和经济利益，Seven Years' War 打得白热化。

英国从本土动用超过 5 万的陆军、超过 160 艘 warships 的海军，参与这远隔大洋的 Seven Years' War，和法国陆军、海军在北美洲艰苦对决。

同一时段，中国为大清帝乾隆统治，闭关锁国、“禁海、毁船、禁船、迁界”，完全扼杀航海（见 http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/no05/1/161560.shtml ），真的是不知今夕何夕。明、清二朝，没能与时俱进，框定中国几百年的衰弱落后格局。

It seems that every mass migration of an ethnic group which is forced by another government causes tremendous misery and poverty for that group. For instance, the Acadians were forced by arms to leave their homes in Acadia for other British colonies in North America in 1755.

See The Acadian Odyssey. I read the section "A Day of Great Fatigue" in it.

And this poem Evangeline seems to be powerful and gripping.

When we compare two countries' military forces, maybe there's not much difference on the individual level, say, country A's best sharpshooter isn't that different from country B's best sharpshooter, but it's the organization level and technology level which make all the differences.