Don’t ask. Still nasty. “Hazardous” to be precise and at ‘AQI 538’,
literally off the charts.
But hey, who’s complaining.
You can put a mask on and consider the long-term health affects with
particulate matter. A leopard will rip
your larynx out. Every city as
issues. At least mine doesn’t have
jungle cats on the loose. That would be
visually more inspiring but I’d worry more about my kid’s safety were I to live
in Meerut:
I should handle these matters like Ambassador Gary
Locke. There’s a diplomat for you. Pressed on the matter of air quality the departing
U.S. Ambassador to China had this to say:
“Everyone already understands this problem, and
the Chinese government and people are now earnestly facing this problem,”
Smooth. Ahh, but then
he’s on the stagecoach, back to Seattle, about whose weather he also
complained. But lets face it, rain off
the Olympic Peninsula and hazardous AQI above 500, or wandering leopards for
that matter, are different manner of drag.
Gary, looking fit at 64, on the cover of China’s “Men’s Health” magazine
suggested he could hold a plank position for 51 minutes. Sounding much more human, like me-self, the
interviewer, who is an Olympic badminton champ Lin Dan, said he couldn’t hold
one for more than three-minutes. I hold
one for 30 seconds every morning and its agony.
Three minutes is the outer realm of what might conceivably be
possible. But I’ve got some years to
practice to catch up to Gary.
I put some old twenties female blues on in the morning at the
breakfast table for when my little one comes down the stairs. I choreograph the Cheerios consumption this
way, with a different lady each morning.
Naïve perhaps, I imagine the familiar melodies will subliminally work
there way into the texture of her consciousness. It sounds and always sounded “old fashioned”
to me, in a way that, over the years, has become familiar, evocative,
welcoming. But I can’t but hear “black
and white” footage reels rolling, and imagine people walking in a choppy 1920’s
film like manner. What on earth does it
sound like for my nine year-old? Perhaps
like the medieval Grunewald paintings I referenced yesterday.
A woman who appeared in some of those choppy, evocative
films, was the vaudeville performer from Cincinnati Ohio, Ms. Mamie Smith. Born back in 1883, the picture they have of
her on her Wiki page makes her look awfully cute, though I’m sure
turn-of-the-century vaudeville blues was fairly bare-knuckle as the tune we
have on now, “Jazzbo Ball” suggests:
If you see me in here, you walk along side
If you break them rules, they will cut your hide
Good yoghurt-eating, leopard fighting music. To survive in that world you had to be tough,
savvy and be 能歌善舞[1], just like you do in
Beijing or Meerut.
Anyone who has ever heard a “this is going to be really big”
pitch from a fatuous blowhard, or worse, anyone whose ever had to endure that
person asking you to work for free towards a shared future of glory will enjoy
a chortle or two at this little exchange that gets progressively more uproarious. The final pie graph is a fork full of
icing. Thanks to my chum down in
Shenzhen for sending it along.
Inspirational on how to artfully shed unwanted, self-serving clients: http://www.tickld.com/x/i-wish-i-worked-with-this-manhes-hilarious
We never had those sort of snide,
multimedia possibilities when I was young.
But sometimes new innovations were introduced into classroom. Everyone my age who grew up in the New York
area can remember the too-good-to-be-true add on TV for the Evelyn Wood (or as
Cheech and Chong punned: “The Evelyn
Woodhead”) speed reading course, that taught you how to use your finger to
trace over the pages with a sweep, thereby capturing more information in
seconds than would other wise be possible, by, say, reading. The TV ads had college kids swearing by it,
saying it allowed them to keep up with a heavy reading load, etc. I remember in fifth grade, I moved to
Pleasantville, New York and our teacher was Mr. Mondello (a.k.a. “Monzie”) taught
us the technique. I don’t know if he had
that all cleared all this with the administration beforehand, but I can
actually recall swinging my fingers around, trying to scoop up more words faster. Monzie swore by it.
Monzie, if you’re out there, you’re
gonna love this claim from “Spritz: http://www.spritzinc.com/ who have developed a new technology that allows
one to: “Read 500 words per minute without any training” The technology makes the text reading area
smaller, and focuses text on Optimal Recognition Points so that the eye spends
less time physical moving over text and more time is available for comprehending. Have a look at the video of comparative
eyeball movements under the “Science” tab, which I found helpful in understanding
what they meant: http://www.spritzinc.com/the-science/
Reading’s nice, but not essential if you know how to sing
and dance. Mammie Smith may have read
fast, or she may never have read at all.
Nothing I’ve read can confirm.
But I do know she never had a military career. Neither did Michelle Obama. But had these ladies come up through the
vaudevillian ranks or assumed the lofty roll of first lady in China, military
show business may have been their launch pad, as it was for China’s first lady,
Peng Liyuan.
I don’t know, off the cuff, how far back the antecedents
trace for song and dance numbers in the Chinese military. Did late Qing banner men have inspirational entertainment
squads under command? How about the
Guomindang troops, did they have troupes?
Certainly, after liberation, thoughts turn to that starlet, turned first
lady Jiang Qing and her revolutionary operas.
With the politicization of all life matters during the Cultural
Revolution, entertainment was a way to communicate a revolutionary agenda to
the masses, and inspire the troops. And
to this day, as evidenced every year on the Spring Festival broadcast,
divisions of Chinese service men and women, serve the motherland, by
performing. As the New York Times Austin
Ramzy wryly observed:
“If combat were simply a matter of showmanship,
then the PLA would be near invincible. But military officials are acknowledging
that such displays have few practical applications, and are reconsidering the
amount of time that troops spend on such training.”
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/military-brick-breaking-demonstrations-face-the-chop/
Less kitschy, less colorful, more capable, more calculating,
these showbiz units are now under the microscope. People will one day look back
to these song and dance routines with nostalgia and perhaps find them evocative
of a time long gone. And similarly
they’ll need to peel back the wrapper to uncover the rough edged meaning, lying
behind the camera pan across the high kicks and high register croons.
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