The funny offer from a funny musician

The music that Kai chose for us this morning was very tenderly fresh, and certainly I gave him my compliment for that. Although the others might feel that it is not something that worth noticing, too tiny, too everyday like, hehe, in our family, I rather treat it as a big thing. To me, a happy mood is gathered from all tiny things, of course including from a piece of joyful music.

Then, after both of us sitting down in front of the computer, he gave me the link of this musician, and I cannot help to copy the funny offers here:

$500 (limited edition of 15)
5 Sold! Only 10 left!
-Signed CD/DVD and digital download.
-T-shirt*
-Signed Cymbal and sticks.
-Meet me in Venice, CA and we go floating in a Sensory Deprivation Tank (filmed and posted on youtube).
-Dinner at Sizzler (get your $8.99 Steak and "all you can eat" Shrimp on)

$2,500 (limited edition 5)
2 Sold! Only 3 left!

- Signed CD/DVD and digital download.
-T-shirt**
-I give you a drum lesson. Or (for all you non-drummers) I'll give you a back and foot massage (couples welcome)

- Pick any 1 member of the Vandals or DEVO (subject to availability) to accompany you and I to either the "Hollywood Wax Museum".
- Or if you're not into that we can do the lunch buffet at the "Spearmint Rhino"
-A signed DW snare drum.
-Take 3 items of your choice out of my closet (first come, first serve).
-Change diapers and make bottles with me for an afternoon (preferably AFTER the lunch buffet at the Strip club).

Anyway, the price packages are issued from $7 to $75,000. If you click the title of this article, you will get to this musician's website and enjoy it by yourself.

The Republic of Wine

I have finished the reading of Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine for several days already, and I always felt like to say something on it.
But what can I say?
I really don't want to say something offensive about Mo Yan, while he is one of not so many Chinese contemporary writers whom I like and respect.
Nevertheless, to be honest, with The Republic of Wine, I was about to drop it right in the very beginning.
It was not because of its style.
Mo Yan is never easy to read. That's true, and that is not the point. With the profound thought flowing in and underneath his works, one would require some courage and patience to bare the rather unpleasant scenarios or sayings, but that is not a problem to me too. Although the style of The Republic of Wine is quite different from his other works, and I do not really appreciate his attempt, however, I can even force myself to accept that. The problem is that the depiction of his character, the main protagonist, is not coherent in this work. How could a PhD candidate in the university speak in the fashion as if he is an uneducated person? Even if it is only a sarcastic hunch pinpointing to the lousy quality of the tertiary education, then the writer should have at least carried on the same design throughout the entire book. Unfortunately, Mo Yan sometimes made the writing ability of this same doctor too maturely good.
This is kind of flaw which should not be happened to an experienced writer. It made me couldn't help to assume that he probably didn't have enough time for checking his old work, which he wrote when he was not famous enough yet, before the publishers grabbed it away for the commercial profitability that his fame nowadays could bring.
That disgusts me.

The very first cake that I baked

Yesterday, I baked my very first cake, with sesame, the favorite cake in our home, and the creation of Kai.
It happened so naturally, the idea came from a sudden impulse, no excitement, no hesitant, no messing up, everything was in order, as if I am already a very experienced baker.
Kai was certainly surprised, because I announced that the baking job is his territory and I would rather not touch it. So you see, to break a promise or to change a decision is as easy as clicking your finger.

wikipedia article about Bibliophile

Bibliophilia is the love of books. Accordingly a bibliophile loves books, but especially "for qualities of format." A bookworm loves books for their content, or otherwise loves reading in general. Bibliophilia is generally considered to be incorrect, but some would say it is a new, recent, usage. The practice of loving or collecting books is dubbed bibliophilism, and the adjective form of the term is bibliophilic. Also, a bibliophile may be a book collector.

The classic bibliophile is one who loves to read, admire and collect books, often nurturing a large and specialised collection. Bibliophiles do not necessarily want to possess the books they love; an alternative would be to admire them in old libraries. However, the bibliophile is usually an avid book collector, sometimes pursuing scholarship in the collection, sometimes putting form above content with an emphasis on old, rare, and expensive books, first editions, books with special or unusual bindings, autographed copies, etc.

Bibliophilia is not to be confused with bibliomania, an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the collecting of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged, and in which the mere fact that an object is a book is sufficient for it to be collected or loved. Most bibliomaniacs, then, are compulsive hoarders, identifiable by the fact that the number of unread books in their possession is continually increasing relative to the total number of books they possess and read. Extreme bibliophilia may amount to a diagnosed psychological condition.

Some use the term "bibliomania" interchangeably with "bibliophily" and in fact, the Library of Congress does not use the term "bibliophily," but rather refers its readers to either book collecting or bibliomania.[1] The New York Public Library follows the same practice.

According to Arthur H. Minters the "private collecting of books was a fashion indulged in by many Romans, including Cicero and Atticus."[3] The British Prime Minister Gladstone was known to have been a bibliophile. The term entered the English language in 1824, according to the Merriam-Webster's reference below. It is to be distinguished from the much older notion of a bookman (which dates back to 1583), which is one who loves books, and especially reading; more generally, a bookman is one who participates in writing, publishing, or selling books.

About Ironing

My husband always tells me that he likes to do ironing.
This is a typical statement with German way of thinking; isolating things into individual matters out of context.
Actually, I have to admit that his statement is never wrong, when one has got plenty of time and had no specific plan for how to spend it. Under such circumstance, he normally really enjoyed ironing with his numerous pieces of music with eternal wide range of styles whatever one is able to utter or think of, which played with whatever speakers, to which he has got most incredible tolerance, when the dried clothes have been stored in a box and had the obvious 'going to be ironed' appearance. Yes, this appearance is so firmly iron-printed in his mind already from the habitual housework process of his all-competent mother in the early years of his life, so he once even nearly ironed the clothes I put into a box for preparing to get them washed. So from this nearly happened incidence, you could probably have a glance of what did I say about the German way of restricted range of mental units connection.
To be honest, I got this realization only when I have accidentally touched a string of words which are structured as 'raumen' with various prefixes not long ago. Thanks to that, I am a little bit lightened up when confronting people who have different ways of perceptions and reactions toward the physical material world, from my way.
Related to the process of ironing, I told my husband that an university student who is striving for the best marks should wear T-shirts more often, in stead of shirts, because the T-shirts require less effort when doing ironing, especially when one has to do ironing by oneself. For people who have to work in an office or an institute where do not allow one to dress in an informal way and one has to bear the extremely long working hours, then, one can still escape the intensive ironing work by avoiding clothes which are made of pure silk, linen and cotton etc. when their cutting and finishing are elegant enough. By following these principles, the result is not only time-saving, but also energy-saving for oneself and, for the environment. Seriously, think about it.
Anyway, while considering about energy-saving, I don't know if the others have noticed the flying particles caused by ironing as well. I guess the physic guys will be easy to give consent to me on this point, because the invisible or visible particles have been activated by the hot iron, is one of the many too normal physical phenomena. Therefore, one has to take care of these once freed particles on the surrounding furnitures and floor afterward, if one considers housework is a collective term, in which ironing is included. While the action of ironing is aiming to keep one's outlook tidily presentable or even beautiful to the public in a civilized society, then the tidiness and beauty of one's place is certainly not supposed to be ignored as well following the concept of civilization.
Probably the thought on civilization is a heavy enough topic, when one conquers over one's own laziness and is brave enough peeking in its details. The tangled details are always the source of heaviness. That's what do I understand the Turkish word 'huzun', which Pamuk used the whole chapter to discuss it.

The Catcher in the Rye

I know that it looks a bit ridiculous if I say that I have just finished the reading of this book, while I knew that it is worth reading from long long times ago, and I always had the desire for checking it out. I guess this is sort of typical character of my life; for that I have accumulated too many expectations of life, while I have too few energy or capacity for turning them into reality. Actually, this is also the symptom of the little boy who was narrating the story of his messed up thought and messed up life in the book. I believe that there is rally a considerable number of unpractical people, who are seeking for something that the surrounding where they are currently positioned or background couldn't provide, or they think that the surrounding is unfavorable to their pursuit and therefore simply give up, or been sent to the psychiatrists.
It is really not difficult to sense various conflicts between one's ideal world and reality in different levels everyday. This is definitely not an abstract statement that is talking about the mental world only. The continuous process of living is to make constant compromises. It is not a matter of if one wants to or not. The brutal reality is not subject to discussion. No matter if life on the surface is cozy, enjoyable, successful or what, compromise is always what we can find while it is varied in forms.

Once were Warriors

This is a movie which is recommended by my husband Kai. He said that he watched it 12 years ago, and he felt it really good in the sense of the heavy historical and humanity messages it carried. So he watched it again together with me last night and made a remark, something like 'I told you it's heavy', afterward.
Well, to me, it is just heavy in a normal scale, while it is imaginably a story happening unspecific everywhere in human society. What do I rather incline to say is, that people do not have to be warriors once for possessing pride or self-respect. What really interests me is, that in what way the pride of human being would get lost, or what are the blockage for people to develop their self-respect. I guess there must be a series of psychological literature which have explored in depth on this topic already, and I think that this might be the area that the movie failed or forgot to touch.

White Noise

It is always open to question if being sensitive is an advantage for living a happy life, even if when we never doubt the richness that it registers in spiritual world. When one senses things which the others cannot sense, firstly, it would be so easy making the others assume that this person is most probably, MAD. In return, it is to some extent, also possible to cause a paranoiac shadow in this person's subconscious circle. One might therefore develop an urge for searching comrades who share the similar range of perception, for overruling the diagnosis that one is forced to encounter with the over flowing nerve ends. Often enough, I wonder if people rather make more noise when their world is already too noisy, or, if people rather prefer a world totally ruled out of discipline while the vision is already fussed up. I guess it is just like the matter, when a massager is telling you that how well you can bear the sense of pain with their professional judgement. But the question is that why do we have to bear a pain? To our normal understanding, PAIN belongs to the negative group of sensory experience, and I dare to name NOISE and MESS after it.
Now back to the main track of our topic. Who are able to sense the white noise? One has to sharpen the senses seriously in an extreme way, I guess, for enabling doing that. Then the advantage of being sensitive seems starting to stretch its head toward us, if we believe that the white noise is a kind of general term of the noises exist and invade / influence our lives in various dimensions without being officially noticed or justified by scientific statements. To be aware of the existence of the white noise is to remind us the limitation of human ability. To be sensitive enables one to perceive a bigger number of alerts for the human limitation.
In Don Delilo's White Noise, I found the following statement having the compelling power over my understanding; why is the firmest family structure existing in the most underdeveloped societies? Refusing to apprehend, is a weapon for living.

Interesting Movies

过客 Am Ende kommen Touristen (2007)http://www.wofox.com/movie,37305.html
别人的生活 The Lives Of Others (2006)http://www.wofox.com/movie,35908.html
在人生的另一边 The Edge of Heaven 2007http://www.wofox.com/movie,37184.html