Big
storm last night. I had an early morning headache. One too many at a roof top bar in SanLiTun, where they’d
been playing “Scarface” up on the wall. My room was hot. We haven’t set up the air con yet. My wife is convinced that the overhead
fan is “dusty” and gets ornery when it is turned on. So I threw open the window and went to the master bath and
threw open that window as well, creating a plausible draft that ran across the
room and over our bed. The aspirin
jar in the bathroom was empty.
Damn. Couldn’t find the one
downstairs the night before either.
Outside the rain fell dramatically. Enjoying the coolness I looked over at my wife, who wasn’t
phased by the audible downpour outside.
Downstairs, in the quiet aftermath of the storm, I once
again heard my mystery four-note bird, off in the distance. I listened to him call about eight
times in a row and then succumbed and put my iPhone up to the window to record
him. Of course he went silent. But the next time he piped up I caught
him, and although faint, he's now been recorded. Later in the morning I went
to pick up my younger one who’d slept over at a friend’s house. Chatting in their vestibule, who should
I hear but my four-noted friend. I
asked the mother and the ayi, with
perhaps a bit too much excitement, “what’s that bird?” “That? That’s a bugu.
(boo-goo) Definitely a bugu."
I’ve heard that word before in Chinese. OK. Now I “know” my bird’s a
bugu.
I got home and looked it up and a bugu is Cukoo in English.
This had me happy till I went to Youtube to look up Cukoo calls. I listened to the first clip, but it wasn't my bird. The Cukoo, one almost wants to say “duh”
here, makes a two note sound “cu koo.”
Yes, of course the cukoo, says “cu koo.” Hence the name, hence the clock. But perhaps there are other Cukoos, the Beijing Cukoo
perhaps? Remarkably I found an
online repository of cukoo calls, at “soundboard.com” which actually seems to
sell these calls. (I wonder if that’s particularly scalable business?) And, after sampling approximately
twenty-four cukoo calls, I still can not find my bird. Vexing.
I’ve considered a number of different angles on this recent
FBI indictment of Chinese associated with the PLA, for hacking. Discerning what's going on here is also rather vexing. As always, 见仁见智[1]。One cyber security expert, Mr. Jeffery Carr, suggests that accusations
aren’t valid, because most of the alleged “theft” was of information that the
U.S. companies had already exchanged with counterparts through other
means. Many of the firms did not
know about the indictment until after it was made. Interestingly he couldn’t see any of the people he
knew in the FBI ever pushing this case, suggesting it must have been driven
from the top down.
Chinafile posted an article with four or five pundits all
speaking on the topic. Robert Daly lead off with a good summary and made what I
thought was the trenchant reminder that China will, as a result of imperialism, always necessarily default into a victims role that will be almost
impossible to navigate from in the foreseeable future. Rogier Creemers offered the interesting
suggestion that this would have been much more profitably pursued in civil
court rather than in criminal proceedings and with that the cyber security
working group that both sides worked hard to secure, would not have been
sacrificed. Both he and Graham
Webster are left scratching their heads as to where there was any benefit
whatsoever from this effort. Finally
Tai Ming Cheung opinioned that perhaps it was state-to-state signaling about
the role of the PLA:
That Xi (Jinping) became the head of this Internet Security
leading group and has a couple of other civilian leaders as his deputies
appears to show that the civilian authorities want to be in charge of the
country’s cybersecurity system. With the indictment, the U.S. could be
signaling to the Chinese authorities that they need to get the military under
firmer civilian control in the cyber domain, otherwise it could undermine
U.S.-China relations.
The other day I was rediscovering some albums before and
after the majestic “Take Twelve” by Lee Morgan. I of course listened to the anchor
disc itself and tried to place what was so special about that particular
session’s sound. One thing that
came to mind was the tenor player whose name I didn’t recognize. Born in Chicago in 1931, Clifford
Jordan fills out that album with remarkable grace. Looking over his bio, he played with, who’s who of jazz
luminaries, like Eric Dolphy, Max Roach and Horace Silver. Toured with Mingus in Europe and
Randy Westin in Africa, he has a left quite a bit of material to discover. His playing on this 1961 version of
“Don’t You Know I Care?” is to be believed. He passed back in Manhattan in 1993 as I was preparing to
come over to China, for the first time.
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