Lazy Saturday afternoon post-dragging myself out of bed and thinking of going climbing pretty soon, but first a random trawl through my news feeds of stuff that for no apparent reason I’ve ended up reading and getting all contemplative (in the philosophical not religious sense of the word) about. Reading: it might make you a better person.
The Useless Tree, one of my new-found favourites compares the United States prison system unfavourably with Qin Dynasty and Warring State period Legalism and offers some Confucian and Taoist interpretations on the world’s leading jailer.
Every socially responsible blogger and other do-gooder is going mental over Psyphon that will miraculously set free entire nations under the iron fist of internet censorship. Ethan Zuckerman though, of …My Heart’s in Accra is waiting and seeing, while Ann Condi at Danwei says yeah cool, but … wtf, apathy?!?. Personally, I prefer Tor; encryption, talk dirty to me.
Net/computer/new media/whatever it’s called this semester ~Art has been really annoying me lately, like it’s reached a threshold of dumbness where any single-idea conceptualism is received with vacuous, rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights “ohh! cool! art!” uncritical praise. Thankfully “A la recherche du temps perdu” is being performed in machine code, that is to say in binary, like one of those plays that goes on for a week.
Back to the War on Terror: Lenin’s Tomb posts the leaked EU Draft Report on Renditions. Can anyone say “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”? Nah, I didn’t think so.
Around to China, which is really what this blog was all about until I lost my way and purpose and direction and … Making sense of Beijing Propaganda, yeah I used to photograph, translate, read, memorise new characters from all the white on red proclamations around Shaheding. My favourite was one warning against muggers who were targeting single women in the suburb and how this was lowering the tone of the whole neighbourhood. Actually I just discovered Shanghai Journal － 日记 Journal today and straight away it goes onto my news feeds.
Sparrow War! Take that capitalist intellectual running dog avian!!! Turns out that “while sparrows have flaws like intellectuals”, as with a rehabilitated Chairman Mao, they are “70% good, 30% bad”.
Feng37 is now blogging at 在桥下流 Under the Bridge, in Guangzhou.
Sometimes I really think I should have gone off and done Astrophysics or Particle Physics. It’s just so unbelievably sexy, I was really ecstatic when a Bose-Einstein Condensate was first produced and deservedly won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and as for Higgs Bosons … Anyway, the Large Hadron Collider is nearing completion near Geneva, 27 kilometres of particle accelerator hell. Check out the Quicktime VR of it, and more and more.
Normally, like free-to-air Murdoch News, I’d finish with the tranny/shemale/girl equivalent of Cute Kitten Story, allowing you to wash your palette of the not-so-nice real world-195×130. Instead, as I have been having one of those peculiar turns lately, possibly due to changing hormones from injection to pill and thus “finding the right dose”, which is a Metaphor for the tranny equivalent of PMS, and I do mean Mood Swing, or possibly due to being the better part of a long-overdue pregnancy since I made it quite clear which pronoun was inappropriate (hint: using he, him, his, lad, mate, boy, man, sir, mr, might win you a swift poke in the kidney), today there is No Cute Kitten Story.
Instead: Trans Respect/Etiquette/Support 101. Read it. Now.
