In Defence of Aesop's Fox

Aesop's fox is always unkindly associated with the grapes. If the fox is a carnivore or omnivore similar to a dog, grapes may not be its favorite food. When Maggie eats grapes, she does have this sour look on her face which may give the wrong impression to a casual observer. Furthermore, I am almost certain she does not enjoy the grapes because I'd be cleaning up soon after.

Instead of jumping to conclusions that the fox is envious of the inaccessible grapes, there's reason to believe it's a misunderstanding or the fox is crying sour grapes as a public service. Pa enjoys reading a columnist on Chinese newspaper  信懷南, he finds the This article on people with MacMansions funny and wants me to reprint it so he can give it out to people who need that sort of advice. I hope I can stop him by pointing out the author has had a swimming pool for 16 years which he only used 16 times.  In accordance to contemporary etiquette, you can only use the N word if you're a brother yourself.

Janet Reno or Whoopi Goldberg may sincerely pity how Jessica Alba is cursed by her beauty, but who can forget the poor fox and the grapes?

Bilingual Multi-dialect Dirty Joke

Unfortunately, it can be written only in Chinese:

有西洋女子普路西小姐， 愛慕中國文化。十年寒窗，中文學好了九成九，講得一口流利中國話，來到上海國際學校教小學英語。普路西小姐的第一課，馬上讓她知道在中國辦教育的困難，班上原來只有三個學生， 一是超齡美國學生Johnny,  二 是上海妞小吳， 三是北方人小曹，程度都是不高。死馬當活馬醫，普路西小姐也只好敬業地自我介紹，還補充了她是Miss Prussy, 如 pussy cat 的 pussy with an R.

翌日，第二課，普路西小姐發現 Johnny 已經是第三次留級，小吳和小曹是連字毋都不會。問小吳其故，小吳答媽媽只讓學了第一個字毋A, 下一個不是個好字， 不能學，小曹的媽亦如是說云云。普路西小姐聽畢，不禁為之氣結，便對小吳解說：你媽的B不是個好B, 曹他媽的B也是一個見不得人的B. 我的B是一個好的外國B. 一番話把小吳和小曹講的像懂非懂，只恨自己學問太爛， 爛的外國B都不認識。

沒辦法，好歹記著老師的名字吧，問來問去，提示多次，Johnny 終於如夢初醒，舉手叫道：“I know, I know, you're Miss Crunt!”

The Best Tourist Picture Ever Taken

In my post yesterday, I said landscape photography is an exercise of frustration. You can see some of the Grand Canyon pictures are flat because they were taken in the early afternoon. The harshness of the light and the angle of the sun simply couldn't produce a decent picture. The traditional good landscape pictures are invariably taken during the "golden" hours, in photography, that's the hour after sunrise and before sunset when the sun is near the horizon. The only time the dynamic range of the soft reflected light can be captured by the camera (with a relatively narrow dynamic range of about 10 stops, or 2 to the 10th, or 1,000:1 ratio). Sometimes, a good landscape photographer is as much a technician as an an artist.

A few years ago, I bought a book called The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography by Galen Rowell after the famous photographer died in a plane crash with his wife. In the book, he said something like you should say something in your photos, and it is the photographer's duty to convey what he sees. Then he drove home the point by pointing out the very best tourist picture taken, ever.  I had to agree when he said it was the picture of the Earth rising behind the moon taken by an Apollo astronaut (using a fixed focus, point-and-shoot Hasselblad).

Photography is a silly hobby that appeals to technical geeks, buying stuff and over analyzing everything is 99% of the online  photography forums. I'm part of that silliness as well, but I have to admit Galen Rowell is right, the picture has to say something. 文以載道, indeed.

You can find the Earthrise picture from NASA and this is Galen Rowell's Mountain Light website.

Artsy Fartsy

Sometimes I feel we are all running the same programs, not just on our computers, but also in our brains.

A Swiss photographer named Corinne Vionnet superimposed 1,000s of tourist pictures of famous landmarks and the result is that these landmarks are clearly recognizable. We all take our pictures from the same spot!  You can do better just buying a postcard.

  

Lanscape photography is futile to begin with, there's no way to capture the grandeur in 2D even if you're in some place spectacular, everything just turns into snapshots. Go to any tourist trap, you'll find people with cameras practically standing in line for the "good" spot. As Chris' wedding is getting near, here's some tourist pictures from Grand Canyon taken by another robot: 

無厘頭♂ and 他媽的♀

Starting in the 80s, 無厘頭 became commonly used in Cantonese to describe something bizarre and silly. A new genre of movie is now called 無厘頭, Shaolin Football falls into that category and so would Itchy& Scratchy and most cartoons. Because of its general acceptance, the correct meaning of these words is becoming obscure and most people think the expression is just another recently invented idiom. Actually, in grammatically correct Cantonese, it should be 無厘頭尻. If one fill in the omitted vulgar word for penis, 尻, these four words clearly means something that is so silly you can't tell its head from penis. The whole expression is a little bit like "head in ass" in English.  (無 is "no", 無厘 is a "lacking certain amount of", for example, you can say this post is 無厘正經, not very serious.)

of course Cantonese is not alone in being so reserved by omitting the foul words, The official national curse in Mandarin 他媽的 is also politely truncated and ended up as the famous 三字經, three word classic. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the missing 4th word is. 他媽的, or "his mother's", is unmistakably missing the word 屄, or vagina. Actually the same curse in its entirely is still in daily use in the form of 娘那個屄 in the Shanghai dialect. (The first person pronoun and the verb are also omitted, I'm not going to insult your intelligence by spelling them out here.)

Similar in strength to the English word cunt, 屄 is pronounced bi (1st or 2nd sound) in Mandarin and hai (4th sound) in Cantonese (colloquially written as 西inside門 in Hong Kong)。This is not a a word you want to use in mixed company even your female friends are accustomed to F bombs or its Chinese counterpart, nothing makes women feel more inferior or self-conscious than genitalia and the C word is where they draw the line (it could be some sort of deep rooted Freudian penis envy if you want to get analytical about it). Most incredible, the usage of this extremely vulgar word has also been gentrified and seen a major revival recently. It's quite common to see people use the letter B in its place on the Internet and in verbal conversations. It is socially acceptable to say "我真傻B!" to exclaim how stupid one feels about himself. Literally, saying "I am a real stupid cunt!" for something minor like paying too much for a rice cooker.  Although this statement is implicitly correct by demonstrating the speaker's low intelligence, it's somewhat over-the-top and redundant in my opinion.

Cantonese is usually rich in this respect, I hope I don't come across as a Cantonese snob, but I do welcome the revival of these forbidden words. It's pretty cool to tell someone publicly he's dumb as a vagina or 傻B. Believe me, you can get away with it by keeping a straight face and looking innocent as a penis 戇居居(i.e. 戇尻尻).

No News Is New News?

I hope everything works out in Egypt, I do not understand what percipitated the revolution so unexpectedly there, but I do share the joy of the people and fear that it could get out of control and all come to naught. Doesn't Tahrir Sqaure resemble Tian An Men Square 20 years ago?  George Orwell's Animal Farm, published in 1945,  ought to be requird reading for every revolutionary, perhaps? Or the ancient civilizations from that region really know better than the newfangle cultures of Asian and Europe?

Maybe the Indians are right, we are merely reapeating what happened in the past. This is just another avatar of something happened a thousand times before. There were uprisings and tyrants for as long as we can remember, and there is no signs that it is going to stop in the future.  Worse, what you discuss so passionately with your philosopher friends was likely better covered by Socrates and Plato 2,000  years ago for the Nth times in human history. 100,000 years from now, nobody will remember Hitler or Obama, the only thing our decendents will remeber us by is our technology! Our existence is distilled to our technologies, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, etc.

What is our epoch is going to be known for? Written language is a big deal, maybe the numbers and similar abstractions? Changing ourselves via DNA manipulation? Escape from the Solar System? I'm sure it'll be something totally surprising, let's hope it's not going to be the Age We Got Stuck.

WWII Harley Davidson in China

Of all his pictures, Pa is probably proudest of the one taken on a Harley Davidson motorcycle shortly after WWII.
The bike seems to be a military model converted for civilian use with a funky backseat. The airplanes in the background could be  C47 (Douglas DC3)?

Cantonese Battle Cry

I started writing about Cantonese profanity and realized it'll take too much time to finish.

Here's a little stand-alone piece:

This bilingual monument is in 东莞, home town of  one of the greatest heros in Chinese history 袁崇焕.  To me, this battle cry is the most moving tribute paid to the great commander who wounded (and eventually killed) the founder of Manchu Qing Dynasty 努尔哈赤. 

I get emotional whenever I learn more about him, 袁崇焕 was a great military commander and a scholar. He was a 進士, that means he went from local to provincial, then to the (once every three years) national level exam in the capitol. Out of this elite group of scholar, he made the final cut to the Imperial Exam held in the palace.   

His stature in history is comparable to another famous Manchu fighting general fome Sung Dynasty 岳飛。 Unfortunately, like 岳飛, he was also tortured to death, 袁崇焕 suffered over 3,000 slow and painful fingernail sized cuts and the little guy refused to die till they started cutting his internal organs. What a fucking warrior!  When I hear the Cantonese opera 帝女花, instead of feeling sorry for the princess, I curse Emperor 崇貞 for doing that to my hero.  

金庸wrote a short biography of  袁崇焕  who also appeared in his fiction if I remember correctly.

General George Patton's "Blood and Guts" speech is also full of filthy words, Patton said it's the swear words that made the soldiers remember the points he's trying to make. The movie version does not capture the spirit of the speech, you may want to find the speech on the web.

Old color phtographers

I was about to put up some old color family photographs and noticed the quality of these pictures were rather poor. Not only because the technology wasn't mature in the 60s and 70s, we also switched to 35mm format exclusively due to the cost of color film. Black and white family pictures prior to the color era were taken with the much bigger 6x6 Rolliecord Pa bought around 1959 (according to camera serial number).

Then I remember seeing a set of old pictures several years ago, this is one example:

From the same collection, a Chinese man in Chakva, Georgia, on the eastern coast of Black Sea.
Black Sea was warm and humid enough to grow tea, this proud looking guy was in charge of the tea farm.

I had to google for it, would you believe Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took these truly beautiful pictures between 1909-1915 on a project financed by Tsar Nicholas II?  


Below is one of our better color photographs taken around 1970, at that time only Robin and Cate were in America and the Golden Gate Bridge was as exotic to us (in Hong Kong) as Sergei's Russian Empire.  After some photoshop, it is still nowhere as good as the 100 year old pictures.

Then it got much worse, instead of expensive color labs we started to get mini-labs in the drugstores. 

Lifelogging

I usually do my blogging on my laptop in the bathroom. Instead of reading about the weather, looking for deals on the Net or whatnot, I'd try to write a few lines of 廁所文章. The cool thing about blogging is written for public consumption, so it doesn't go very deep on a personal level. The other extreme is Lifelogging where nothing is personal.

Vannevar Bush, in my opinion, is one of the greatest American thinkers, not only he envisioned a microfilm based World Wide Web and a Wiki like repository of knowledge in the 40s before there were computers, he also predicted that every respect of a person's life could be automatically documented someday. In the 90s, a girl named Jenni put a 24 hour webcam in her room and attracted millions of (paid) viewers hoping to catch her in person moments on JenniCam.

Gordon Bell, a Von Neumann Medal winner, has been involved in a "Lifelogging" project. Below is a series of short videos from his Total Recall website, watch at least the introduction to get an idea of of the project.  For example, not only it's taking pictures and videos continuously, it also captures every keystroke you type on your computer.


I think the greatest advance in computer is the availability of computer processing power, storage, and bandwidth. The most intelligent design is often trumped by brute force and "good enough" design just as in Darwinian evolution. 

Frozen river

Saw an igloo on the river yesterday, Maggie and I were up at dawn to go take some pictures.

Some hardy soul was already running on what appeared to be a sheet of ice.

The river is tidal, sometimes the river is several feet lower than the frozen shore.
The ladder on the right of Maggie allows people to climb back up on low tide.

Inside the igloo. No wonder there's an "Enter at own risk" sign posted on the igloo. Maggie's no fool.

Ice fishing in any culture is synonymous with  binge drinking. This thoughtful owner has equipped his shed with a barf station.    

The igloo came with a small skating rink for recreation

Maggie wanted to have her picture taken with the mooring in the middle of the river.

I told Maggie it's safe to walk on the creaky ice. The structure in the background was the Academy's boat house.

Aiya! It is getting too cold, let's get out of here.

It's not hard to find a house in Exeter older than the country. You can see the "circa 1750" sign on this one. I guess it must have seen worse storms than these in its 260 years.
1750 was 清乾隆十五年. Some of the well known Qing Dynasty palaces were yet to be built.

Jack Kerouac

Lowell was the home of Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road which is deemed one of the most important American novels.

A century ago, Lowell, MA was a model textile city.  Today, it is a struggling town with a population of recent immigrants. Kerouac's grave is tiny and I passed it on my bicycle a couple of times before I noticed the bottles and the Marlboros.

These pictures were taken in the fall of 2009 and I soon went back a second time after a few of us had dinner at a 99 restaurant. I said something about the grave and one of the guys grew up in Lowell got really excited, three of us drove to the cemetery and the Lowell native had no trouble finding the small tombstone in the dark. Somehow a can of beer materialized an we each took a swig and left the rest for Kerouac. My friend turned around and said something memorable to Jack as we walked back to our car. Turned out I was the one only that had read any of Kerouac's books.

Neils Bohr's Coat of Arms with 太極圖

Right after yesterday's blog on 道德经, Robin talked about Neils Bohr in his email.
When Bohr received his Nobel, he didn't have a coat of arms, this is what he made up:






(I copied the image from wikipedia, not exactly what Bohr wore at the ceremony.)


The inscription reads CONTRARI SUNT COMPLEMENTA, meaning opposites are complements.  太極 （Tai Chi）is in the middle surrounded by the elephant medal. I'm sure Bohr put a lot of thoughts into it. 


Sometimes I don't know if we have given the ancient Chinese too much or too little credit. Did they really know something very profound? The complementing opposites of 陰陽 is very much the Taoist view of the world. 


On the other hand, Neils Bohr's genius is never in doubt, giving him the Nobel Prize is like giving Gandhi the Nobel Peace Prize, the prize is dwarfed by their achievements. 


Ironically, Gandhi was nominated multiple times but never won the Nobel Peace Prize. I am glad he didn't, the Nobel committee is not necessarily qualified to judge greatness and it shows.


   

千里之行 始於足下

It bothers me not to know the origin of the Chinese saying "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step".  Like an idiot,  I quoted it in "About Me" of this blog saying it could be attributed to Confucius.

It is actually from 道德经: 

合抱之木，生於毫末；九層之台，起於累土；千里之行，始於足下.

The meaning of this passage is clear enough, but overall 道德经 is such an esoteric book that it is labelled a Taoist classic. My guess is that it was meant to be a serious book and we just don't understand much of it because of the sloppy writing. First, there's no punctuation in classical Chinese, to make matters worse, the entire book was hurriedly written in a single night with very odd wording. (In those days, Chinese characters were chiseled on strips of freshly cut green bamboo.) 

Even I do not understand, and cannot appreciate, much of the book, the first sentence:

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。 

is absolutely stupendous!  It is followed by the explanation of the origin of everything, but before 老子 does that, he states in the very first sentence that First Cause is not comprehensible, and can't be given a name. 老子knows to avoid recursive arguments like "if God created this wonderful world, then who created the more wonderful God?" or, "If the world rests on four huge tortoises, what are the tortoises standing on?"  The Big Bang theory is only slightly better, before Time-space continuum, there was no time while the very word "before" implies time. 老子is right, 道可道，非常道, this will remain forever beyond our comprehension, a world without the t axis is unspeakable.

To me, this is the strongest opening of any book I know.

(Even 道可道，非常道, is not entirely trivial to read, 1st 道 means way or Tao, 2nd 道 means speak, 常 means perpetual and it does not go with 非 as in modern Chinese 非常. Together it says the Tao that can be spoken, is not the perpetual Tao.)

Really Fast lenses

Fast Canon Lenses

2mm of the lens barrel was milled off at a machine shop

Fast lenses are expensive. Canon's EF 50mm F1.2L and 135mm F2.0 are well over $1000 each.  Photographers covet fast lenses for their light gathering ability as well as the shallow dept of field. 

I happen to have some old, inexpensive, Canon manual focus lenses from my film days. Not sure the  paper thin depth of field is a good thing, at least I didn't have to spend much money on these lenses. 

Photography is a funny thing, it appeals to tech geeks like myself and yet almost all real artists (as implied by the price of their work) are not technicians, in fact most "artists" claim to be ignorant of the technical aspect of photography. There's simply no hope for engineers, even supremely technical photographer Ansel Adams started out as a classical pianist.

Here's some shots with the Canon FD135 F2.0:

With the older Canon FL 55mm F1.2:

This is how thin the DoF of the 55/1.2 is, only one eye is in focus.

Apologies to the reluctant models. 

2010 Christmas Pictures

2010 Christmas, Potomac. MD

Lots of drinking and eating.

We carried on the proud tradition of incessant eating till Chinese New Year.