A great contradiction

It seems that Ayn Rand's moral philosophy, which has remained quite popular in the U.S. since the 1940s, doesn't square with the famous John F. Kennedy quote "my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Canadians read a whole lot of books.

Constantly reading.

Vintage music video - 风雨兼程 - 程琳

Lyrics copied from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b26cmL-w9a0 :

【風雨兼程】 3分49秒

今天你又去遠行

正是風雨濃

山高水長路不平

願你多保重

記得那年初相識

也在風雨中

風濃雨濃情更濃

祝你早成功

來也匆匆去也匆匆

就這樣風雨兼程

來也匆匆去也匆匆

就這樣風雨兼程

明天我也要登程

伴你風雨行

山高水長路不平

攜手同攀登

還是常言說得好

風光在險峰

待到雨過天晴時

捷報化彩虹

Introduction copied from http://goo.gl/GjVjf :

风雨兼程

词：王晓岭　 曲：季承、晓藕

...

作曲家季承简介

1965年毕业于中央音乐学院作曲系，师从苏夏先生，原任中国人民解放军军乐团创作室主任，一级作曲家。 主要作品1、 交响诗《秋收起义》（获1977年全军第四届文艺会演优秀创作奖）；序曲《万岁，伟大的祖国》（获1979年全国文艺会演二等奖）；序曲《希望》（获1994年团优秀作品奖）；《骑兵团进行曲》（获1991年全国进行曲比赛二等奖）；管乐小品《苏醒吧，森林》（获1990年全军调演二等奖）；歌曲《风雨兼程》（获1985年“歌曲”晨钟奖）。

作曲家晓藕简介

晓藕，原名严晓藕。王晓岭、季承和晓藕曾经是八十年代流行歌坛的创作“铁三角”，王晓玲负责作曲，季承、晓藕作曲。严晓藕原为中国人民解放军军乐团创作室主任，中国音乐家协会会员，中国电视音乐研究会名誉理事。 1945 年出生，陕西澄城人，大学时学习钢琴专业。 1973 年任军乐团专业创作员，凭自己的聪明和勤奋，把数百首音乐作品推向了社会。并突破了进行曲的程式，充分发挥不同乐器的音色，甚至把声乐与管乐宏大的音响交织在一起，用一种乐曲取得不同的效果。她的执着追求迎得了社会的赞誉，部分作品获全国性大奖。代表作有《万岁，伟大的祖国》 、《 光荣的凯旋》 、《 三个小伙伴》 、《 思乡》 、《 庆丰年》 、《 赞美》 、（欢聚》 、《 前进吧！战友》 等及盒带专辑，还为 10 多部电视片谱写音乐，她的不懈精神，报刊曾详细的在《 音乐家介绍》 栏目里作了报导。

词作者王晓岭简介

王晓岭，词作家、一级编剧。北京军区政治部战友歌舞团团长，中国音乐家协会理事，中国音乐文学学会副主席，全军高级职称评委。 主要歌曲作词有：《当兵的人》、《让我们舞起来》、《阳光路上》、《风雨兼程》、《祖国赞美诗》、《军中姐妹》等。曾获解放军文艺奖多种奖励，三次荣立二等功。

演唱者程琳简介

程琳六岁开始学习拉二胡，八岁登台演出，十二岁考入海政歌舞团任二胡演奏演员。十三岁一曲《小螺号》传遍祖国大江南北，迅速成为中国歌坛年龄最小的新星。

演唱者龚玥简介

...

有爱。

I'm glad that China has reached out its publicity hands to the society of the U.S.

I hope that the 'extra large, extra red beachhead in Times Square' will gradually become a fountainhead of China's assimilation into the Western world.

My ignorance is a mote in my eye.

Is the gradual decline of Microsoft a portentous sign for Intel?

I wonder how well policemen write.

(Image from http://goo.gl/midS4)

Even constables are required to render written reports oftentimes.

Is it always a good thing to make students constantly on their mettle?

Blogger doesn't provide any gadget for sharing to Douban.com , up to now.

Social networking websites help people thresh out significant news and information from noises, in unprecedented ways.

To Microsoft

If you've done with that Bing search engine thing, can you please take a long careful look at the social networking arena and do something significant in there post-haste, for your own good?

Software programs, including web services,

really should regard memory economy. A bad example is Adobe Flash Player.

Some consumers don't understand companies. And some citizens don't understand the government.

Different orientations of the two parties involved in each above case.

Consumers and customers in China have become so subtle.

They can really understand and discriminate products and services.

幽冥处世。

The Chrome browser's image rendering engine seems interesting,

especially when it's rendering favicons.

Tweets on Twitter are just ephemeral.

I don't like that nature quite a lot.

Every single country is earnestly looking at the U.S.,

whose economic recovery, which will go potentially faster than expected, will spill over into their own economic growth.

For some top-notch Bollywood flicks, people wouldn't miss them for the world.

Slumdog Millionaire, a 2008 movie, was a good example.

Mr. Hu Jintao must be in the fray on a lot of issues with Mr. Obama right now. Face to face.

Swiss bankers must have become nervous wrecks these days.

I suspect that Russia will quickly become a fountainhead of technological innovations.

(Pic from http://goo.gl/ztdXL)

Americans always do things post-haste, don't they?

The building of the strong hand of a country is consequential.

Consider the case of Somali.

The usage of chemicals in foodstuff should be in accordance with the government regulations.

So the government bears the brunt of being a diligent watchdog.

Firefox has been called 'venerable'. :-)

Chinese descendants are the whole world over.

I like French fries quite done.

McDonald's sometimes doesn't provide that kind of fries. Well, that's for my benefit. :-)

I suspect that without acquiring a foreign language,

monolingual native Americans and Canadians will be done for, in terms of their professional career prospects, in twenty years.

Oh, do I hate the memory leak problem of the Adobe Flash Player on my computer.

Even their current Flash Player 10 consumes a larger and larger chunk of memory and doesn't give it back. Hasn't Adobe learned the art of give and take, yet?

At least two products of Adobe, which are the widely disliked Flash Player and Adobe Reader, have been becoming increasingly outmoded. I wish websites to quickly get rid of the Flash Player by 2013. I pray.

It seems that all in all, Baidu.com's blogging service is not up to par at all.

Every edge cutting takes / wastes time, while it enriches life and sharpens mind.

I enjoy edge cutting, but I don't enjoy the loss of time. What a conundrum.

When, when can I have some time to spend on learning about religions?

I really want to get wind of Christianity and Buddhism.

Trade tit-for-tats among countries are always a considerable cause of concerns.

Montages are so vivid to look upon.

Chilled to the core

Check out this piece of news of Jan. 17th, 2011: Woman’s cries ignored as she freezes to death: Police.

And this: DiManno: Freezing death not a sign we’re cold-hearted.

Quote from the second above article:

In this case, “I’m not saying she should have been let in, but people should have at least phoned 9-1-1.”

Another local resident, George Cheang, had difficulty believing that the victim’s cries would have been ignored. He was awakened about 3 a.m. by “yelling or arguing,” Cheang told the Star. “I thought it was a family argument or perhaps some partying or drinking going on.”

So he went back to sleep.

“They can think what they want to think,” Cheang said of the police claims that the victim’s beseechings fell on deaf ears. “Neighbours always say ‘Hi’ to each other and we often borrow from each other, things like tools.”

Residents of the heavily Asian Rosewood community meet regularly to discuss the importance of reporting suspicious behaviour. Said one neighbour: “We watch over each other.”

I would say people, including myself, are chilled to the core. Oh, that Scarborough neighborhood.

Real-life experience and enlightenment tends to make people have second thoughts.

Bill Clinton has been such a rainmaker.

'Drill, baby, drill'

I just did a double take on Sarah Palin's viral slogan, 'Drill, baby, drill'. How come it seems to have a sexual implication with it? Ah, baby, it's so gelivable.

The home stretch

The home stretch of the democratization of alternative-energy cars seems to be bringing down the costs of building them to an affordable level for consumers. Once that is finished, I am afraid that day will see the beginning of the end of the Mideast's oil countries' prosperity.

Chinese puns have been prospering on the internet.

Music video - Liu Yang River - Composer: Wang Jian-zhong

I like this version more than the one below.

Politicians and statesmen are so busy ratifying international economic treaties here and there.

Well, it's somewhat sad to see that Facebook has entirely vanquished the imagination of the media and that of the investment world.

The Western pop music has branched out so many moieties along the way.

I don't grasp that people wager their hard earned money on lotteries.

The web is seized of benefits and detriments.

For a person without a firm values system in place, doubts tend to him and prick his mind-set.

The first two development stages of my English learning can be considered to be over and done with.

Oh, New York, New York. It houses two slick major print media - The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

(Pic from http://goo.gl/VUt59)

(Image via http://goo.gl/PScxM)

(Pic from http://goo.gl/evnoC)

New York, an indisputable centre of sophistication.

Reading a text leads to reading oneself.

Conservative Party's recent campaign video - Rising to the Challenge

I'm not affiliated with or inclined towards any specific political party of Canada. But this recent campaign video, which is on CPC's YouTube channel, is interesting to watch:

Sarah Palin's accused her critics of libeling her.

You can see people's reactions here: http://goo.gl/uMPa5 .

Homeboy, do what you do.

Getting an appropriate community is consequential.

Classical English literature, as well as the Chinese one, is gnomic and labor-intensive to penetrate.

Historical stuff, too. Just in a different way. It requires different background knowledge, that is.

Do you like British puns?

How much work a reader puts in is usually proportional to how much thought an author put in his work.

Monty Python is quirky and innovative.

I did double takes on their pieces of work.

Why do some young people like psychedelic clothes?

It is said that John Lennon had written trippy lyrics during one period of his life.

('Lennon playing with The Beatles in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania'; Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lennon)

I for one like the music in his song "Imagine".

Some topics have been focused on in movies and songs ad nauseam.

And they tend to turn me off in the first place.

I don't quite understand how the troupe of The Black Eyed Peas have come to such a huge stardom.

Music video - Coldplay - Yellow

(Lyrics are already embedded in the video.)

In the core spirit of the law must be that an individual's right to justice cannot be forfeited.

James Patterson's fictions are not high culture.

But he, or his surrogate authors, can output some fine sentences. For one thing, "Chairs scraped as everyone scrambled.", as in his work The 6th Target. Love that snug assembly of the 5 words.

So many occupations are being long gone. Blacksmith, tailor, shipwright, and so on.

Those work looks quaint.

Heraldry looks intriguing.

Below is an example, the coat of arms of Canada:

(An image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada , which is copyrighted by Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada)

The historical compacts between the English Canadians and the French Canadians seem interesting.

Let's "smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge", in this 21st century economy.

Human beings have combated poverty for so long.

Then we know poverty is a relative thing instead of an absolute one.

I would say the Gmail app on my Android phone is a primitive yet very trustworthy Blogger client, in a certain way.

台湾艺人徐若瑄貌似日文会话能力很好的样子

台湾艺人徐若瑄（Vivian），出生于 1975 年，于 1995 年至 2003 年间在日本发展其个人演艺事业。2010 年在东京影展亮相，貌似日文会话能力很好的样子。

东亚各地区，包括日本、韩国、台湾、中国、香港，的文化产业的互相融合已经比较深入了。


P.S. 我蛮喜欢日文的。但是不可能有时间深入学习。想念日本饮料ing。

Sunshine fills my heart with natural joy.

Time unfolds one's wisdom.

Abundant splendid congenial sunshine.

Perhaps Facebook will be finished in ten years?

I was finished with Twitter about a year ago.

The hoopla around it may have been blown out of proportion.

Taken literally, the surname 'Kidman' is an oxymoron, isn't it? :-)

组织英文倒装句，有时候有点难。

Interesting is the half joking adoption of the pseudo French pronunciation of 'Targét', as in Target discount stores, by some customers.

Is Nicole Kidman comparable with Marylin Monroe in some ways?

(Image from http://goo.gl/8Sazi)

The recent change in Tunisia is very surprising.

Many other governments must have been studying it very closely. 你懂的。

Lesson: The problem of high unemployment among young people is too important to be ignored by a government.

Now Arizona seems to have earned a reputation of a "bigotry" state.

The potential overload of Facebooking will become a liability.

Windows actually is a time-tested consumer OS.

Don't just trash it.

When we learn the English language, we are concomitantly absorbing the cultures and values it embeds and conveys.

Subliminal advertising is everywhere.

Should we like that or hate that?

Wow. Italian even sounds more beautiful than French does, I feel.

Freedom sometimes can be surreally terrifying.

That boils down to that we human beings are afraid of making bad and consequential choices. So, freedom demands capability from a person. Someone else has put it in another way: "freedom means responsibility".

There must be a lot of geo-military pacts in existence among countries.

An interesting example would be between India and Russia.

Who wouldn't like impromptu Heineken lagers once in a while?

Young people love with their eyes.

The forms of human beings are made by god. Even youngsters, male and female, can naturally appreciate them with human eyes.

On the other hand, everything man-made, tangible and intangible, needs a person to appreciate with his mind's eye. That is where sophistication comes in. Gee. I think the name PhD, "Doctor of Philosophy", can be replaced by Doctor of Sophistication. SoD that is. That would be a better name. :-)

Just some jibber-jabber of mine. :-)

Some films, and texts, which look truthful harrows me significantly.

For one thing, the 2010 Taiwanese flick Monga. Below is its official trailer:




From time to time, truth unsettles human beings enormously.

In this hectic life, an activity is hard to be picked up again once it is broken off.

It's very apparent that the once red hot MySpace has been dying.

Adieu, MySpace. Peace.

Facebook still has a way to go to acceptable handling of its users' privacy issues.

I for one am surprised that Sarah Palin, of all American politicians, has gathered a national clout.

I had begun to read the Newsweek around three years ago.

Then I was finished about a year later. I felt it sort of too political for me.

Humans' organization is sublime.

Now it's been moving towards online, in an understated and sublime way.