Cat and Shanmao's blog

I just realized yesterday that the McDonald's we saw in Bangkok has a Ronald McDonald with his hands together in a Thai greeting!

Speaking of Bach and other classical composes here are some free classical sheet music sites.

http://www.sheetmusicarchive.net/
http://ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/music-scores/freemusic/

I can read sheet music well enough now. The area I would like to concentrate on is ear-training so that ideally I could dispense with sheet music. The method that I like the best is the method that Cat picked up naturally - the solfege system. When you hear a note in a piece you identify it as on of do, re, mi, etc.. Classical relative pitch training involves interval training. The solfege system doesn't explicitly require you to recognize intervals in the sense that you don't have to hear two pitches played in sequence or simultaneously. You simply have to have a fixed notion of do and then the unconscious maps that to a solfege symbol. The Sound of Music introduced most people to the 'white keys': do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti. You can also learn the black keys: di, ri, fi, si, li. You can apply this listening technique to other tone systems that have the concept of a tonic or do but don't map to exactly the same set of 12 tones used in Western music.

Just finished re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring. I first read it many years ago when I started dating shanmao, who highly recommended it. I also listened to a lot of music by Bach during that period, but that is a different story. Anyway, thanks to shanmao is due here, without him I would have missed all these great things! :)

I was not particularly impressed with Fellowship, in fact I found it a bit boring. But I rather liked Two Towers and Return of the King. Then years passed and along came the movie, which really impressed me. And then came the DVD of the extended version, which is truly amazing. Inspired, I dug out Fellowship from the bookshelf and started the journey one more time.

And this time I can appreciate it much more. Maybe it is the movies, maybe age brought more wisdom, but the book no longer seems boring to me. I still skipped over many of the songs, but I was intrigued by the many little twists and turns of the long journey. It is not as dramatic and breath-taking as the movie, but it is much subtler and the charactors are much fuller and more interesting. The book and the movie now seem to me to perfectly compliment each other.

As impressive as I thought the movie was, now I am more amazed at Peter Jackson and his team's skill at telling this story on the big screen. I noticed scenes and dialogues moved from different places of the book and they work so well. And the details I failed to notice from my first reading now stands out, such as the relationship of Aragorn and Arwen (and I just realized that Arwen is actually Galadriel's grand-daughter!).

The movie did a great job with the charactors and there was excellent acting all around. But now I can appreciate the charactors in the book much better. In the book, Aragorn was not as all-powerful as in the movie. He did not always know what to do, and he did not come to fight off Ringwraiths and orcs to save his friends at crucial moments. He is more human and that made him even more heroic in a way. The hobbits also have more charactors than being merely cute as portrayed in the movie: Merry and Pippin actually knew from the start about the ring and planned to follow Frodo wherever he goes.

Now I'm hooked again! Two more books to read! :)

I'm lazy so I'm cutting and pasting my comments Jean's Blog

Regarding the interests of the majority vs. minority, I love this quote by James Madison:

Landholders ought to have a share in the government to support these invaluable interests and check the other many. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority."

And this other quote by James Madison:

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. ... From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

And this quote from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation:

A hundred years later [after the chartering of the Bank of England in 1694] not commercial but industrial property was to be protected, and not against the Crown but against the people. ... The American Constitution, shaped in a farmer-craftsman's environment by a leadership forewarned by the English industrial scene, isolated the economic sphere entirely from the jurisdiction of the Constitution, put private property thereby under the highest conceivable protection, and created the only legally grounded market society in the world. In spite of universal suffrage, American voters were powerless against owners.

This hits home in the debate over outsourcing of computer programming (and other knowledge/service industry work). Owners can invest "offshore" (Canada and Mexico count as offshore) and move jobs and operations to the outsourcee country. Workers in the outsourcer country get angry and try to organize. Their options are some type of worker action, aka a strike, or some sort of political activism. The beauty of the US system is that the government somewhat has its hands tied. Not only is it dubious to restrict the freedom of investors to make sound business decisions, there is the fact that many of the outsourcers are financial backers of politicians.

And is it really so bad if goods and services can be provided more cheaply by a 3rd party? Joe programmer's expenses go down, everything he buys at Costco, Walmart, etc. has just gotten cheaper because the software to power the company has gotten cheaper because the cost of labor has been reduced.

The real solution for Joe programmer is to become an investor. As a salary or wage earner you trade your waking hours and minutes for money. When the clock is not actively running the flow of money from your employer's bank account to yours stops. Your personal stake in the company is limited. As an investor, you benefit from the company's fortunes regardless of the work you do. You can spend the rest of your life in a coma but will still be enriched by the good fortunes of your investments.

So, it's good to be an investor. But what happens when everyone is a successful investor - successful meaning everyone no longer needs to earn a salary or wage and can instead live of their investments...

Unless everything has been completely automated, the system collapses!

Economics is a labyrinth of concepts, arguments, and conclusions. And it rules virtually every aspect of our daily lives. More ranting later ...

This is shanmao's first posting...

Today on the web I read the opening phrase of Beethoven's first letter to his "immortal beloved":

My angel, my all, my very self ...

I was struck by the directness and humanity of these words.

As a fairly faithful believer of the Now Toronto magazine movie reviews, I always check out their opinion before I see a new movie, this is what they said about the new Anthony Minghella saga:

COLD MOUNTAIN is an adaptation of Charles Frazier's novel, setting the improbable beauty of Ada's (Nicole Kidman) and Inman's (Jude Law) chaste love against the gritty background of the American Civil War. The wounded Inman deserts to journey home to a woman with whom he's spoken barely a hundred words. Like The English Patient, Cold Mountain is a story of love and fate during a time of war. Unlike The English Patient, it doesn't have an ostentatiously tricky, time-shifting narrative structure and unlikeable characters. Renée Zellweger's Ruby, Philip Seymour Hoffman's disgraced preacher, Natalie Portman's widowed mother and Brendan Gleeson's vagrant fiddler give context to the nobility and purity of the leads, and without them the stars would be unbearable. Working with his regular crew -- cinematographer John Seale, editor Walter Murch, composer Gabriel Yared and costume designer Ann Roth all worked on The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley -- Minghella does a remarkable job of convincing us that we are indeed in the war-torn American South.

So they approved! I went to see the movie yesterday. It was a good movie, but I left the theatre without feeling overwhelmed, as I had after seeing THE ENGLISH PATIENT. The movie was beautifully made but the main theme, the love story of Inman and Ada, did not speak to me. The actors all did a good job but the charactors, though well portrayed, did not make much of an impression. In the end the message that seemed most striking from the 3 hours is: wars are horrible. Ruby put it best in something like this: (the men) gathered up the clouds and made the rain, and then they cried that it's raining! But I already knew this conceptually, and I do not need the idea to be reinforced graphically.

Interestingly, I found this article by CHARLES FRAZIER , descibing how he found the inspiration of his book ( http://www.salon.com/july97/colddiary970709.html). He was not interested in the war, but in the lifestyle of a past era.

Wow! I cannot believe I'm actually starting a blog! I feel a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and nervousness, as if I'm making a public speech......

Well, it shouldn't be that bad. It's supposed to be just a journal, and no one shall read it unless I want them to. And if someone uninvited reads it, what do I care? I wouldn't know the person.

Anyways, let me start by recounting some recent events...