Author: serapio
My Movie Career Begins
A Pakastani, an American, a Palestinian, and an Irani, as Evil Soldiers from Nebulous Foreign Country
About two hours east of here is a city with several “film industrial parks”, consisting of permanent film sets, with neighborhoods of replica buildings in various styles. There is a small but steady market for foreign extras, and there are a few agents who specialize in recruiting foreigners for these roles in made-for-TV movies and commercials.
This weekend I began my acting career by appearing in a TV movie, playing the role of an evil soldier from a nebulous foreign country. I appeared in three scenes, mostly seen carrying a rifle, chasing after one of the protagonists. We also kill someone off camera and steal some treasure. It seems the part was made directly from the stereotype of the greedy, dull-witted foreign devil.
For most of the day, I was just having fun hanging out with the other foreigners, and suffering in the cold. But towards the end as it began to sink in what sort of character I was supposed to be, and afterwards as I tried to imagine how someone watching the movie would see it, I feel like I have acted wrongly. And it’s a given that I acted badly. My career can only go up from here, right?
Switching to New Blogger
So I suppose I am switching to the new Blogger system, which means all my fans that are subscribed to my feed should tell their subscription software to look in the new feed location.
Top 10 Reasons For Not Updating Your Blog
10. An earthquake has shut down the internet, and it’s painfully slow to access the blog authoring page. (News saying the internet is back to normal is an evil lie. It is better than a weak ago, but still very slow.)
9. Most of the things you might like to post about involve showing photos, which, due to said internet freeze, cannot be uploaded.
8. End-of-semester crunch time.
7. You’re still looking for a license plate that ends “000”.
6. You’re still working on compiling your New Year’s resolutions.
5. You need to wash your hair.
4. As a white heterosexual male native-English-speaking college graduate of US citizenship and Protestant upbringing, you’re feeling self-conscious about drowning out less privileged voices and contributing to cultural hegemony.
3. Now that Time Magazine has made you, as an internet content producer, the 2006 Person of the Year, you feel you can rest on your laurels and seek self-fulfillment in some other arena, kind of like Yasser Arafat did after he was made 1993 Person of the Year as a peacemaker.
2. You are feeling disillusioned about your blog-posting abilities, comparing your 100 posts in three years to your sister’s 200 posts in one year.
1. You’ve decided there’s no better way to annoy your sister (short of flying back to visit her and tapping her on the shoulder unceasingly.)
October Podcast
Inspired by my favorite podcasters Mano Lopez and the Homemade Show, and by the shortage of music here that I like, I decided I would start doing a podcast. I figured I could do one once a month or every other month, and I put together most of this playlist one week in October. After a short delay, I now present to you my first podcast. You can expect January’s podcast in mid-March.
The Chinese question in the title means “Where is my hometown?” and it’s a quote from Li Qingzhao, a poet who moved from Shangdong province to Zhejiang in the 1100s when the north was engulfed in war.
Playlist:
Solo – Theo Torres
Happy Birthday – ZJNU Student Choir
水云间 (Water Cloud Space (?)) – 童孔 (Tong Kong)
呼吸 (Breathing) – 常静 (Chang Jing)
La Vida es un Carnaval – Issac Delgado
Y Soy Llanero – Grupo Cimarrón
Chicharra – Marta Gomez
Damaquiel – Hector Buitrago et al.
Amortiguador – Andrea Echeverri
Acochado Todo – Almir Rouche
Mindjer Dôce Mel – Eneida Marta
The Easy Way – That Mad Ahab
Stay in New England – Mimi LaValley
Leaves that are Green – Simon and Garfunkel
High-Fashion Underwear
You know that cozy feeling of sitting by a campfire with a hot cup of chocolate in your hands, feeling the warmth on your face and the cold mountain air at your back? Well, take away the fire and the hot chocolate, and imagine instead that you’re teaching a class.
It’s gotten a little colder here recently. And the classrooms, like the student dorms, have no heating. Last weekend in Hangzhou (which I will have to post about later, but I understand now how it could claim to be the prettiest city in China), I bought a new coat, perhaps warmer than anything ever owned before, and I’ve sometimes been wearing it while teaching.
Tonight I went out and bought some long underwear. The attendant assured me that the ones I got are very fashionable, and a very nice color. They come in a fancy box, with schmancy tags.* The biggest size they had is one size too small (the same situation as for slippers), but they’re larger than the set I left in California, which must have been bought for me when I was shorter, and then have shrunk. So hopefully I will feel more comfortable when I go out now, but the local paparazzi had better keep their cameras ready for me sporting my high-fashion underwear.
*This was a test: Is this usage of the schmefix ungrammatical? Did you go “Huh?” when you read this sentence?
Free Hugs
This video makes me happy.
With the low resolution it looks a lot like Patiunky, and I can totally imagine him doing something like this, even if it is somewhat at odds with his current YouTube persona.
Apparently the Free Hugs Campaign has quickly spread all over the world, though it is having difficulty some places. In China, for example, hugging counts as inappropriate public display of affection, and it’s considered a foreign custom, too. Oh well.
Yum
A bit busy here, no time to write much. Which is where you come in. Your job is to: (1) identify what I am eating in this picture, and (2) provide a caption. A hint: it isn’t turkey with cranberry sauce. Thanks.
In other news, the Great Firewall has migrated to include blogspot.com and beta.blogger.com among the civilized. It has accordingly been moved down on my enemies list.
Happy Thanksgiving!
万事随转烛
Which is to say, “The myriad matters [of the world] are as the wavering of a candle flame.”
I feel obligated to inform the world of the annoyingness of the Great Firewall. The firewall doesn’t fully block anything, but it makes a lot of things troublesome. It’s more like something out of a Monty Python sketch than a serious defense against toxic memes. Instead of building a wall, they have built an obstacle course, and instead of lying between civilization and the barbarians, it winds through the whole world, and changes course every weekend.
For example, to post a comment on MySpace (admittedly deep in barbarian territory), you first attempt to load some MySpace page, and MySpace will prompt you to log in. So you login, and are taken to your “Home” page. If you can remember which links you have to follow to get where you were headed, you can do such things as read new messages, read friends’ bulletins, and view your long list of MySpaceFriends. If you try to look at any person’s profile, however, (including your own), something is triggered in the firewall, and the connection is dropped. So, you try your favorite proxy service. That one might have MySpace’s kind of web magic reserved for paying users, so you use another service. It can load the profile page fine. But then you click the ‘post comment’ link, and you get MySpace’s “You must be logged in to do that!” page (which I have in the past gotten when I tried to log in: apparently at times you have to be logged in to log in.) So you have to log in again, which will take you back to your “Home” page, from which you again have to navigate back through the link maze to post a comment.
Or again, suppose you want read your sister’s blog. She, like you, uses Blogspot to host her blog. She writes a pretty funny blog that you read pretty often, so you have her blog bookmarked, and you load that bookmark. … After several seconds of waiting for your computer to contact the server you remember that this week Blogspot is officially a hive of barbarians. Nice barbarians, maybe, but barbarians none the less. So you might go to your favorite proxy service, or since you are subscribed via Bloglines, you can read her posts there. And what if you want to post a comment? Well, if you are using the gladder Firefox extension, when you click on the post link, you are automatically redirected to a proxified page. Then you can click on the “comment” link, and type in your comment. Then you scroll down and find… the word verification magic doesn’t work with the proxification. (That is a real word. There are 452 Google hits as of this writing. 453 once Google finds this one.) Ah! But you know that the Great Firewall has no problem with Blogger.com. Blogspot is a hive of barbarians, but Blogger, from which the barbarians produce the Blogspot drivel, is safely within civilization. So you cut and paste the web location into a new tab, and edit out the proxifying part, load the page again, paste in your comment, and fill out the word verification. 哎呀，这么麻烦！ (which is to say, “Aiya! So irritating!”)
The Internet Gods Read my Blog
A week or two ago I discovered that I can now access the English Wikipedia (though not the Chinese version) without going through a proxy or using the secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
service. This morning I discovered I can access the Stanford application page. Just now I discovered I cannot read my own blog without going through a proxy. The verdict is clear. The internet gods have read my blog and took some hints from it. Just not all the right ones. I checked Youtube just now. It’s fully accessible, and I was sucked into watching the Llama Song. Beware.