Bu San

(81 minutes)(2004)(Not rated)

Tonight, taking a break from doing nothing, I decided to take a peek at a new movie I just added to my vast collection of movies. It's a foreign movie and I had no idea what it was about. The English translated name is "Goodbye Dragon Inn." It is always fun to peek into a movie without any prejudged idea of what it could be. Of course, I had my share of unpleasant surprises, and forced to watch movies of dubious quality. Once in a while, it's a good one, but that is rare. This one? I am still trying to decide. You be the judge!

After about 15 minutes into the movie, I thought there was something wrong with my DVD player. It seems like the playing is in slow motion. This can't be. What is this? Time to look it up on the internet. I like a trusted movie site (imdb) that seems to have detailed information about any movie that you would ever need to look up, so I go there to get this:

SYNOPSIS
The subject of cinema, of the mix of loneliness and connection that is part of being in a movie audience, is the concern of this sad, beautiful, minimalist composition by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang (WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?). The action takes place Inside a Taipei movie theater operated by a lonely clubfooted woman (Shiyang Chi-Chen) whose slow steps echo through the empty corridors and aisles, as if measuring out the feet of celluloid that make up the film itself...

MPAA RATING
Not Rated

RELEASE DATES
Theatrical: Sep 17, 2004
Video: Feb 15, 2005

RELEASE COMPANY
Wellspring

GENRE
Foreign Films, Chinese/Mandarin, Action, Theatrical Release, Cinema, Film About Film

So, for a start, this is saying the movie is good! Really? I couldn't tell and I am watching it! So, the next natural question is: What does "Rotten Tomatoes" say about Bu San?

To my big surprise, it got a high rating: 81% as it is rated a rare "Fresh" as in "Not Rotten." Wow! There is something I am missing here!

Fresh 81% by Rotten Tomatoes

So, let me try to convey to you a taste of this strange movie in the hope that you would be incited to look for it and watch it yourself, if you would dare. In this movie, one character is a woman (later it turns out that she is quite attractive looking) with a pronounced impediment in her right leg so she walks very slowly in the manner a person walks with a prosthetic limb.

In one of the scenes, I sat to endure the director showing this woman walking up three flights of stairs, one slow step at a time to end up following a long corridor and finally disappearing behind a door whose shot lingers for more than a minute. Each scene cut must last about 2 to 3 minutes.

But that was not all, in a following scene, the movie shows a wide shot of the inside of the theater which is the main subject of the movie where the woman starts at the X. Step by step, she stumps to A, turns left to B and proceeds to C, all in one LONG static shot.

This first scene starts at 02 minutes 19 seconds...


This scene above ends at 06 minutes 53 seconds so this long static shot lasted a whopping 4 minutes 34 seconds!

Then the frame above is shown another 3 - 4 minutes where NOTHING happens. I thought my player froze!

With infinite patience, I was very curious to see how all this turns out, so I sat through this movie in its entirety. The end, after 81 minutes, was worth it and I was rewarded with a nice song that ended the ordeal. If you listen to the sound track of the song Chong Feng rendered by Ge Lan below, you can get a flavor of the pace of this strange movie by noting that the song began after almost a minute of rain audio.

The words are from the subtitle, and I hope that it does say what the song says...

Chong Feng
by Ge Lan

I remember
Under the moon
I remember
Before the flowers
So much of the past
Lingers in my heart
Half is bitter
Half is sweet
Year after year
I can't let go
Can't let go
Can't let go
Under the moon
Before the flowers
Can't let go
Can't let go
I'll remember with longing forever

I remember
Under the moon...

Amazingly, the first line of dialogue appears 40 minutes into the film. For me, this is a first.

Below is what the page from "Rotten Tomatoes" web in which expert movie critics opined about "Goodbye Dragon Inn:"

A droll gem that celebrates movie love with feeling and deadpan humor.

It certainly stands as Tsai's most skillful work -- he manages to keep viewer attention for a full 81 minutes with a minimum of action and dialogue.

A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
This is one of the most gorgeous and maturely composed movies you'll see this year.

Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still. What really sticks with you is the picture's aura of twilight vibrancy, and the deep pleasure Tsai takes in savoring subtle emotions that other filmmakers might not even register.

Though the film's deliberate pace is sometimes frustrating, it casts a quietly powerful spell and the memory of its images lingers provocatively long after they've flickered into darkness. A masterful meditation on both the singular and collective experience of going to the movies. Tsai's elegy to a now-departed Taipei theater is also a beautiful love poem to the movies.

Ming-liang writes an eloquent billet-doux that has the heart-felt sensibilities and emotions of what loving and living with film are about.

Hypnotic in effect but ultimately rather irritating, Goodbye, Dragon Inn will entice those viewers who like oblique, allusive cinema.

This is a funny, sad, stunningly smart movie about the end of movies, made in Tsai's inimitable, unblinking style.

Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's stunning "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," which takes place in a faded, decrepit Taipei movie palace on the night of its last-ever showing,

"Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is virtually wordless
The theater in which Tsai filmed the movie -- it's called the Fu-Ho
"Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is openly elegiac, and yet it's far from depressing.

Bu San won quite a few awards, so the critics were not alone in their rave:

Special Jury Award
Chicago International Film Festival Gold Plaque
Chlotrudis Award
Golden Horse Award
Golden Tulip
Award of the City of Nantes
Venice Film Festival FIPRESCI Prize

I am quite puzzled and I know what I need to do: watch this movie a few more times. Do you believe me?

What to do? What to do?

Days like these, actually months like these make me want to cry, or better, consult Nostradamus. This guy, who lived in the 16th century, wrote in quatrains, and he may have written to advise me what I ought to do, because I am at my wit's end. I am at a loss, I am in the mist and my compass is not pointing North. For at least three or four weeks, I have been fighting a monumental problem that profoundly affects my life, making me losing sleep, ages me prematurely. Me worry? Since when? Since I learned that there is something in my garage that eats my trash! I hate that!

What to do? What to do?

The first clues I got were when I examined the cherry seeds, from the delicious cherries we had, neatly packed away in the trash bin awaiting to be hauled to the curb for trash collection the next day. These cherry seeds were picked sparkling clean, to the core, and instead of being neatly packed, they were all over the garage floor! Must be a mouse, or heaven forbid, a rat that sneaked into the garage. I hate these animals, especially when I have to go to the garage at nights, alone! I still have goose bumps when I think about the white of the eyes from the giant rat in "Lady and the tramp." Brrrrrrr!!!

Reluctantly, I dug out a rat trap, and shuddered at the unpleasant chore of setting it with apetizing bait. I don't like this, but it's him (or is it her) or me! For a few nights, the yummy peanut butter was eaten clean and the trap triggered with nothing to show. Wow! A smart rat! One time, the trap was dragged a good 10 feet from one location to the next. Must be a BIG rat! After observing the trap being mistreated in this manner, I had second thought, but had no idea what to do next, that is until one fateful night. I had to venture out to the garage in the dead of the night, and heard noise on the top shelf.

Who's there? A possum big as three giant rats combined, that's who! She (yes, it's a she. How do I know? read on,) looked at me with disdain and showed a mood of picking a fight. No problem, I picked up a long and BIG stick and we engaged in a duel for about 10 minutes. The garage door was wide open but she was always retreating in the opposite direction. Run, run, run inside to clear the garage for a more advantageous battle field, I told myself. By the time I got back with two sets of keys and moved the two cars out. She possum was nowhere to be seen. Vanished into thin air!

First puzzle: did she escape out of the garage? Wishful thinking, or was she still ambushing me from the comfort of a warm and dry large rent free palace? Can't tell. So, I called it the night. Next day, second puzzle: did she escape out of the garage? Wishful thinking or was she still ambushing me from the comfort of a warm and dry large rent free palace? Still can't tell. What to do? What to do?

If you read one of my previous blog, you may remember that I mentioned an episode I had to deal with and evict a family of critters living in my roof's crawl space. I still kept as souvenir a possum/racoon trap so now it comes in very handy. Piece of cake, and this is a very humane solution, I like it! According to law, once a critter is trapped, by law you MUST "dispose of" (meaning terminate) him/her and NOT PERMITTED to release him/her to the wild because it is illegal! I don't know about that, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

This is a smart possum! After a few nights of eating my half bananas without triggering the trap, I gave up the battle of wit and let her hibernate for a while. But my savant neighbor told me that the poor critter may die of dehydration! More work for me now that I have to supply free refreshment as well. Oh well! Not the end of the world.

Then I was distracted by other depressing events such as rainy days without end for several days in a row, a pseudo hurricane Ernesto that fizzled and vanished without leaving a trace. Our poor possum was demoted in importance to secondary, and I forgot all about her until this morning, when my son, all excited, woke me up with the earth shattering news that WE GOT THE POSSUM! Sure enough, we got a critter in the trap, very nice! But wait a minute, what is this? Is this possum some kind of a Houdini? It was a lot bigger when we put up the big midnight fight in the garage. It is now much smaller!??? It's a baby, that's why! Arrrggghhhhh.... I am sure I now have a family of possum in my garage! The mother is so darn smart she ate the bait out of the trap every time, and all we managed was to trap a baby. How do they grow so quick? Wow! Take a look at the baby that was trapped:



Needless to say, I did the unthinkable, I realeased, with all its illegality, the baby in my backyard. The poor fellow was fierce and tried to put up a fight, but I ignored his/her provocation. Please get out and go free. Take good care of yourself. I hope he/she does not come back and sneak into my garage to be reunited with his/her family.

Now, the battle will be raging. How many to evict? It ain't going to be easy, and where in the heck do they hide? I emptied my garage twice and made a ruckus twice, looking for tenants to no avail. A true mystery! Invisible critters! That's all I need. I am thinking of consulting Nostradamus to see what he has to say. Although dead, I am sure he can reach beyond the grave to give me a clue as to which of his quatrains I should consult.

Let's see... quatrains, quatrains...

Here's one in Century # 2, Quatrain # 24:

Bêtes farouches de faim fleuves tranner;
Plus part du champ encore Hister sera,
En caige de fer le grand sera treisner,
Quand rien enfant de Germain observa. (II.24)

Translated by some obscur scholar as ...

Beasts ferocious from hunger will swim across rivers:
The greater part of the region will be against the Hister,
The great one will cause it to be dragged in an iron cage,
When the German child will observe nothing.

If you want my honest opinion, his French was not so good, but that's what the internet people believe so I am just going with the flow, with tongue in cheek, I must say.

I din't know that they are Germans, these critters, but nonetheless, the German child is gone because I released him/her earlier today so "the child will observe nothing" True! The great one will no doubt be dragged in an iron cage. Didn't know her name was Hister! I am not sure about the rivers this Hister mother had to swim across to land here in my garage, but it could conceivably be true.

Wow! Nostradamus saw this coming a few hundred years ago. It was written! It was to be done! Like Ramses II would say!

I know I have bought a dozen surveillant cameras that I never bother to deploy. This is a golden occasion to use that money spent. OK. I'll do it. I plan to install the motion detector and a couple of low light video cameras in my garage to find out where they are hiding. With some luck, I can record the invaders' activities and will post the clips here.

Watch out! Here I come, ready or not!

Ernesto is coming...

I am speechless...


so... let the symphony begin...




Are butterflies free?

Spring Rain

Instead of getting all worked up with the frenzy of another hurricane heading our way: Ernesto, yes, again, I decided to meditate and let you join in watching my Spring Rain. You should right click your mouse, zoom in to see the droplets splashing on the surface of the water. You may want to use the hand icon to pan around different parts of the river. It's therapeutic! But... you may have to click your left mouse button first to activate the rain. Do you know why? That was because Microsoft got sued, and they had to make changes to their web browser, resulting in havoc and more work for all of us. Click here, click there, patch now, patch later... It's fun.

What do I use? Opera 9, it's a neat free browser that has very nice features. Try it, you'll like it.

Eeew! That's gross!

Yesterday, I came across a news item that got my attention! "FDA approves viruses as food additive bacteriophages meant to kill harmful bacteria on lunch meats." Now, if that does not get your attention, it certainly did mine! Since I am a meat eater, and for lunch too, I must come to the bottom of this to understand what this is all about.

Virus additive in my food? Over my dead body! Well, come to think seriously, it may very well come to that. If I remember correctly my Latin lessons, "virus" means "poison!" The news goes on to say that "A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in granting the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive. The combination of six viruses is designed to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, including sliced ham and turkey."

In addition, "The special viruses, called bacteriophages, are meant to kill strains of the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, the Food and Drug Administration said in declaring it safe to use on ready-to-eat meats prior to their packaging. The viruses are the first to win FDA approval for use as a food additive."

So, if I understood this correctly, these people will spray the ready to eat food with a cocktail of six viruses, no less, then package the food to sell in super markets! And they say this is safe, and good for the consumer. Wow! How does this work? Let's see...

First of all, these things are really tiny, so you can't see any of them but you can be sure if this is true, there are billions of them inside the package, and following is how it works, pretty much like what you saw in the original movie Alien.

The targets are bacteria, and the bacteriophages are like the terminators. They also look like teminators:



The bacteriophages have legs specially designed to hook onto the taget bacteria they are supposed to hunt, inject their own genetic material inside the host cell, multiply and simply burst and kill the host. Don't you think it sounds familiar to the Alien creature? And we are going to eat these guys? Eeew!

What these people selling this product do not say is after they have done their deed of exploding the bacteria to bits, what do bacteriophages do? Do they just float around inside our body in a dormant state? I want to know how long these guys are expected to live, if they do live. It is no comfort to also know that these virions can remain in this dormant state for extended periods of time, waiting patiently to come into contact with the appropriate host. Tracing the history of bacteriophages, their early discovery had origin in the former Soviet republic of Georgia! I am not sure I would trust this technology. Greek root word phagein, meaning "to eat" and I sure do not want to have billions of potential "eaters" floating around dormant inside my body.

To make money using these terminators, commercial biotech companies manufacture or harvest the bacteriophages all over the world, including countries of Europe and harvesting sites from Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

What won't they invent next? Safe to eat billions of needle wielding terminators ready to inject and burst? Will they mutate or go berzerk like Hal? Who knows?

Joe photo remembered!

I was making my way into my office early today to discover a nasty surprise that lurked overnight. It was like stepping into an oven. What happened? No air is what happened! This must be a sympathy gesture from "hot and humid right smack in the middle of the hurricane season with tropical storm Chris gathering strength out in the Caribbean moving West/NorthWest threatening to become a baby cane" Miami sharing the grief with the rest of the US in the steaming heat wave that overtakes the country at this moment. With the war raging in the Middle East, many people say this is Armageddon, and it sure feels like it right now in my office.

What a great way to start a day, an ordinary day. OK. You can handle this. Pray for the A/C to come back on fast.... Done! Turn on your laptop, go check your email, make yourself a hot cocoa. Hot cocoa??? No way! Get a cold diet soda instead! OK! Settle down. Calm down, this is NOT Armageddon, OK?

What's this? An e-card from somebody? Must be from my secret female admiror from the past. Let's see... "Click here to pick up your birthday eCard!" Oy my God! It's my BD! I forgot about it all together. Last night, I received ONE eCard from a cyber anonymous. It was so moving and touching I was at a loss for words. I must be a very popular guy to have received so much lavish attention on my banal BD! Just one eCard! Not that it wasn't a great one, actually, I love it! Of course, I had received another symbolic and reliable year in and year out gift in the mail, but that was expected. In all honesty, I forgot all about it this morning, the fateful morning of it all, my BD. And this unexpected eCard is right here, personally hand delivered to my in box.

I am not too concerned this eCard is a cheap trick from some virus wielding, Trojan horse trading, back door sneaking hacker in the cyber space trying to trick me to click on their link, because this seems to come from an old friendly company who
remembers me and is trying to lure me back for business. But that's OK. I like that.

OK. Do not click on it yet! Check it out first... what's this thing's URL? Hmmm... looks OK to me. Let's see what they have to say...

It's from Joe photo! So, dear old Joe photo still got me in his database and their business is smart enough to pull it out just in time. Good PR stunt. If you wondered what I got, here it is...



It comes with a full orchestration of "Today is your BD, happy BD to you ..." etc song in full live blasting sound. My office next door must think we are the partying type! Naturally, I grab the HiFi sound that accompanied my gift. After all, it's mine now and I converted it to MP3. Thank you Joe photo! If I can figure out how to place that MP3 here, I will so you can hear it too.

And here it is:

Happy BD To Me!

Unexpectedly, a telephone call came to say that I am getting one more year's worth of wrinkle uniformly distributed over my body and soul! Hmmm... Where did that come from? I am happy to hear it!

That made my day. Now, if the A/C would hurry up and send in some cool air, I can start working. May be I should go to buy something from Joe photo??? Nah! Next year!

Looking back at the date of my last blog, it has been so long ago. where did the time go?

Memory...

I would love to understand how the short term memory works in a human person, me, for instance. I am not so ambituous as to want solving the complete mystery of how the memory works. The problem is too large and may become intractable in a flash. I can count using the fingers of my two hands the different kinds of memory: short term, long term, conscious, unconscious (unconscious memory??? really???) implicit, explicit, procedural, semantic, episodic... and other types I can't remember their names... So, how does the short term, my short term memory work? I need to understand this in a hurry because I think it is failing! Because of this failing, I paid a heavy price this morning.

These days, I have to get in and out of an eight story parking garage several times a day for reason I would rather not dwell into now. Of course, mere mortals always get the treatment given to mushrooms. The first two floors are reserved for very important persons. The next two floors are reserved for valet parking persons to park the cars belonging to the second type of very important persons, but not high enough in the importance scale so they cannot park in the first two floors. Any unseasoned drivers who do not respect this rule run a huge risk of wandering for hours in search of their cars on exit, not knowing that they have been "towed at owners' expense." Not me, I am smart enough to skip the first four floors and fight for an invisible empty spot to park at higher up levels, five, six, seven and eight floor.

In lieu of regular exercise I do not do because I found a water tight excuse: I am way too busy, I made a solemn promise to myself to use stairs and never to set foot in elevators. That is my exercise regime and I always find reasons to climb stairs in both directions, up and down. Let me tell you another secret right here: count the steps when you climb stairs. It's great for memory. This of course leads me back to why I started this blog in the first place, my short term memory is waning... and I need to do something about it.

I am usually very absent minded. When I go to a certain place and park my car, upon return, I would have a terrible time to remember the place I parked it. I can affirm to you that that is a most perplexing thing that can happen to you. You can stand in this huge parking garage, or this boundless parking place, and God forbid, if you went to a big event like a football game, in this sea of cars, scratching your head wondering where your car may be. It is a hopeless problem to untangle. So, experienced as I am, I invented and patented a most ingenious way to solve this embarrasing misadventure. When I leave my car, I spend at least a few minutes to mentally mark the surroundings and write them in, you got it, my short term memory. For instance, I will note that my car is at a location where I can see the highway with the water fountain to the left of the Holiday Inn sign, and definitely not on the side of the beautiful scantily clad lady selling Victoria Secret wares. But the most important piece of information is THE FLOOR NUMBER if it happens to be in a multi story parking garage. However, it is never so simple. If you only remember the floor number, you will be pleasantly surprised that, surprise, they may have different colors! Yellow, red, blue and green are the most popular colors, so you'd better remember them too. If you do not write in your short term memory location 6 YELLOW, and only write 6, you'd spend at least an extra 30 minutes before you can get out of the garage.

OK. So what was the problem this morning? Did the patented method to remember parking location fail? No, it did not. What failed was my short term memory. I am sure I wrote it in there, but by the time I retrieved the information, my car wasn't there! Where the heck was it? Hmmm... Let's not panic and try to figure this out logically. It says here 5, and there are only two 5s. One going up, and one going down. Piece of cake, let's walk up first. Nope. Let's now walk down. Nope! What? This is seriously bad. I now realize it is a good thing this garage reserved the first 4 floors to important people. By process of elimination, I need not worry about 1, 2 and 3 and 4. So, my car must be at 5, 6, 7 or 8. But it is not at 5 as my short term memory is reading. I really hope I did not park it in 4. But it is very unlikely it's there.

For some reason, the city of Miami makes stair steps that are not uniform. You'd think since all the floors are of the same height, the number of stair steps would be the same, but they are not. Some floors have 8, some have 9, some have 10, but rarely more than 10 steps. Also, to give the climbers a break, or to give them the illusion of "you are almost there, buddy, keep it up," the stairs between floors are broken up into two stages so while climbing the stairs, you would have to step up or down an average of 17 steps or so for each floor. Eight floors will tax you with about more than a hundred steps. That's a lot when you work against gravity in the up direction.

After a lot of systematic steps, I found my car on the seventh floor! Seven! I was exhausted and determined to have my head examined. How could my memory miss the mark by so much? OK. Where is the short term memory center's at? Time to look up the map. So I asked a radiologist's friend of mine and he obliged. He gave me an off hour free CT scan of the appropriate part of my body and the answer is clear as day:



There is no screw loose, but the dual fans are clearly in a "stop" position. Overheat! No wonder it's faulty! A quick short research detour reveals that short term memory works just like RAM memory in computers. Scientists widely believe it is 7 chunks in length and is vulnerable to interruption and interference. Lo and behold, this memory decays as time goes by. Let me be realistic and assume that I am only average, capable of using 4 chunks. So, floor 7, down, overlooking sexy model only use 3 chunks with room to spare... but somehow it didn't work today. May be I only have the capacity of one chunk! I know what I'll do next. I'll go on line and look for a homing device... Let's see... Let's Google "car homing device." A mere 163,000 pages came back in 0.17 seconds.

Let's forget about the short term memory problem. Life is too short! I'll get myself one of those WAPs!

Fibonacci

I cannot resist talking to my blog after reading during the last few days story of a clever British judge who got entangled in a law suit involving a mega hit book by Dan Brown. Incredulously, the respected judge, while rendering his written opinion, could not resist himself to embed his own coded message inside the text of the court document. Of course, I got a hold of this PDF file from where else but the internet to see it with my own eyes. Seeing is believing, as the wise men said.

The plainly readeable clue "Smithy code" is embedded mostly in the Introduction section, on page 5 of the 71 page PDF file. The coded message started with the letter J in paragraph 8 of section 2 entitled "The Claimants."

All in all, the court opinion is a good and compelling read so I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it was not easy to concentrate on the entire content while searching for his embedded codes, one hidden letter at a time.

The supposedly last letters are found in paragraph 43 - 44 on page 13 of 71 pages.The last z was not found, instead, I found an "i" in paragraph 46.

After getting some serious eye strains, this is what I found:

JAEIEXTO TGPSACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVI

I could not find a missing supposedly "S" that must come between the "O" and the "T" lest the entire message is but a jumble. Applying the Fibonacci key sequence, the message should be decoded to read:

JAFKIEFISTHRWHOAREBOUDREADQOUGHC

What is going on here? Who is the sloppy party in all this? The media reports that the solution is suppposed to read:

JACKIE FISHER WHO ARE YOU DREADNOUGHT

London lawyer Dan Tench and The Times newspaper on Friday this week both claimed to have solved the riddle hidden in the ruling in "The Da Vinci Code" copyright lawsuit.

It reads: "Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought."

The judge himself issued a statement that made to print, affirming that "there is a deliberate typo to create further confusion." I am not sure about that. It may be just this coding business is too high tech for a judge. Or perhaps his clerk, when asked to insert weird bold and italicized characters in a haphazard manner into a solemn court opinion, freaked out and did not do a good job.

Judge, your honor, if you really want to encode the foregoing message using the Fibonacci sequence 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21, the embedded text should have been, exactly:

JABIEXTOSHDPSACGREXMQWFKADMMQZVZ

I am sure this is the right sequence because I did not trust myself, so I cheated and get my computer to do the encoding for me. Trust me, it's correct as above and not as it is widely reported on the internet as the incorrect version seen higher. For those of you who are history buffs...

It was Admiral John (Jackie) Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who was the driving-force behind the development of the Dreadnought that was built at Portsmouth Dockyard between October 1905 and December 1906. The Dreadnought was the most heavily-armed ship in history. She had ten 12-inch guns (305 mm), whereas the previous record was four 12-inch guns. The gun turrets were situated higher than usual and so facilitated more accurate long-distance fire. In addition to her 12-inch guns, the Dreadnought also had twenty-four 3-inch guns (76 mm) and five torpedo tubes below water. In the waterline section of her hull, the Dreadnought was armoured by plates 28 cm thick.



The Dreadnought was the first major warship driven solely by steam turbines.

Now, back to the origin of this royal battle for the mighty greenbacks... the book by Dan Brown himself: The Da Vinci Code. I bought an ebook version of it several years ago, and it is langushing somewhere in my laptop and in another PC in my house. Since I am still waiting to get a decent ebook reader (supposed to be released in April this year) but still nowhere to be found, I need to read it in my laptop, which, incidentally is a pain in the neck. You see, this book is protected so it conspires with my Adobe reader to make things very interesting before I am allowed to peruse it. My favorite ebook reader that I love is the WONDERFUL "Adobe eBook Reader."

Unfortunately, all I get is a cryptic message reporting to me that "an error has occured" when The Da Vinci Code is handed to it. Every time I upgrade my PDF reader to a new version, the alliance between my protected eBooks and my reader is lost, and I would have to do something very traumatic like going to some invisible web site to download some invisible patch to do something "God knows what" to my poor laptop. Then I would have to hunt for my .NET passport account and Oh My God! what was the associated password to reforge the lost alliance. Needless to say, I can never finish reading my protected eBooks because it usually takes me years to finish one book due to these lost alliances. But I managed to finish The Da Vinci Code, and I can tell you that Dan Brown has his shares of making written statements that may not be so easy to substantiate. If you do not believe me, reread (if you have the eBook and know how to open it again) page 138-139 where you can find a discussion about a Leonard da Vinci's painting, the famous "Virgin of the Rocks."



Dan Brown does not agree with most scholars in interpreting the individuals in this painting and their intentions as expressed by their gesture.

Now, you may find it interesting that in our modern "digital everything" days, "we," meaning all of us who can, routinely falsify images, pictures, photographs to satisfy our fun loving free spirit; looking back at these museum paintings, one can also realize that the same practice was carried on hundreds of years ago. While the supposedly "original" painting "Virgin of the Rocks." by the master himself hangs in the Louvres, a copycat version is found in London, with a few additions to the painting such as a cross to identify John the Baptist and a halo over the head of Jesus Christ himself while a hand belonging to angel Uriel has magically disappeared.



Makes one wonder about the "Mona Lisa." Is this all hype? Who really painted the mystic lady with the half smile? Does that painting have any hidden "stegano" text to be discovered some day? Of course, I sometime embed hidden text in my digital photos but they can never be decoded because I do not keep a good record of my keys. Too many passwords and too little time to encode them in a safe place...

You now can clearly see where I am heading...This blog cannot end without my own coded parting words, so here they are...

THDPABGGFIQCXNFTINFGJFMNEAQR
ANCRDXDARPKCSTHKRKDCLLFANNHLCNDZHEGGHE

Same scheme, same key so they are practially given away already... as good as open text. Finally, below is a bonus, a well known ancient coding method wrapped inside Fibonacci, hiding the magic words from a master movie maker:

ASZLELWSASZ

Absolutely one of my most favorite!

Mulholland Drive

My system is a bit worn out. A treatment that would do me good is: 300 ml of holy water, 3 doses to be taken at 15 minutes intervals on an empty stomach. Mud bath every other day, after the mud bath, 10 minutes in the mineral water as prescribed. In case you do not know, the above is stolen straight out of a movie script, but I think it does apply to me for the moment. Like the character in the movie, I am more than a bit worn out, so I need to have some regenerative mechanism that can help me rebuilding my normal self. So, instead of working hard, which I think is a bad idea right now contrary to doctor's advice, I took time off to revisit my huge backlog of movies that I relentlessly collect.

I was told about a movie by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, that picked my curiosity. With so much brouhaha I've discovered on the internet discussing the "mysteries" of this movie, even on salon.com, I read these forums, and was intrigued enough to pull out that movie from the pile, watched it and came up with my own interpretation... The best, of course!



Nothing complicated at all.... a simple story told by David Lynch... in a rather clever way...

1. Diane Selwyn, who suffers an indeterminate mental illness, hallucinates and sets up an elaborate story....

about a mysterious beautiful brunette who was about to be killed by two hit men when she was miraculously saved by a freak car accident. The scheme is elaborate to the point that it leaves enough clue to establish that someone vanished from the scene of the accident (one of her pearl earing is left at the accident site, just to confuse the audience and make the mystery believable.)

This brunette, suffereing from amnesia caused by the accident, made her way to a vacant luxurious apartment to later be occupied by Diane Selwyn, imagined to be perky and always in control Betty. Betty helps amnesic "Rita" to learn who she really is. The scheme is again elaborated with twists and turns to introduce a large sum of cash, a mysterious blue triangular key, a menacing cowboy and a mysterious clairvoyant man in a coffee shop. There is even a scene of a savage killing of three persons related to a black book... supposedly containing information regarding the whereabout of Rita, just to throw the audience off on a wild goose chase. To me a most deceptive trick thrown by David Lynch is the scene in which the real Diane Selwyn/Betty came to her "real" apartment #12 to see her "real" one time lover, a woman who, in the movie is not shown to know Diane Selwyn. That is a real cheap trick setting up the scene showing the dead and decaying body of Diane Selwyn.

While helping Rita and in total control, Betty fantasized to have a lesbian relationship with her and inserted her real name Diane Selwyn into the scenario. In this scenario, "Betty" sees vision of Diane's death. This is clue that Diane is suicidal.

The real story is told at almost the end, at 2 hours 12 minutes into the movie... by Betty/Diane...

2. Diane Selwyn won a dance contest and came to Hollywood trying to make it in the movie business. She lost an audition to Camille/Rita, a stunning brunette and told the story of her life during a party given by the movie director who is about to marry Camille. The reason Diane Selwyn is invited to this high society party is obviously because she has a relationship with Camille. In this scene, it is evident Camillle clearly enjoys lesbian relationships. In reality, Diane Selwyn lives in a run down apartment inherited from her aunt where she does have a lesbian relationship with Camille. This relationship is terminated by Camille and confirmed to Diane Selwyn during the fateful party at the director's home on Mulholland drive.

This is the reason that Diane Selwyn descends to the deep end, hires a hit man to kill Camille. It is obvious that the contract did come to a successful conclusion because a blue key was delivered to Diane Selwyn as the hit man's confirmation of the kill. This confirmation of Camille's death pushes Diane Selwyn to commit suicide, just as she had vision and finally carried it out.

David Lynch threw in all kinds of side shows to glue the various plots imagined (or invented) by Diane Selwyn to tell the story, which is quite simple which is:

An aspiring movie actress has a lesbian relationship with a mvoie star and was dumped. She gets revenge by hiring a hit man to kill her ex lover and committed suicide after her deed was carried out. Simple story, nothing complicated.

Every forum I read talks about "dream." This is no dream, just a psychotic woman who goes berzerk, transcribes all her realities and beautifies them into an elaborate story as told by David Lynch. There is no car accident, no clairvoyant man, no amnesic woman, and no blue box. David Lynch is a clever story teller telling a simple story in a mysterious and intriguing way that got his fans all worked up. But that is what movies are all about: story telling. The best directors tell the best stories that make the best movies.

The moral of this short story of mine? Do not believe what you read on the internet, especially worked up forums discussing famous movies... and do not believe what you read on this page either. This is but one interpretation... yours may be quite different. I am still trying to figure out how many days elapsed during the entire story of Pulp Fiction as it was told by Tarantino.

I can't believe June 1st is around the corner. Hurricane season again! Bring it on!

The ubiquitous "F" word...

I am forcing myself to revisit my long neglected blog. The poor thing has been languishing for months while I am busy courting newer and more exciting horizons, which is a poetic fashion to say that I am struggling to keep all the alligators in the swamp that I am in at bay. Also, because I cannot leave alone any new trend making waves in the cyber world, I have finally forced myself to learn a bit more about the current rage that has for name the dreaded "F" word: Flash! In case you have been living under a rock, Flash is the long existing internet technology that
people use to deliver information, mostly seductive messages to lure your money away from your bank accounts, just like the US' Internal Revenue Service, but in a more erotic way.

Every time I move about during my daily chores and have to restart my laptop, I have to endure countless minutes waiting for all these Flash beauties to parade across my computer screen before I can really get to where I can start doing something serious, which is surfing the web all day. But, in case you miss the point, I keep a keen eye on the "information" that is being delivered directly to my eyes, my ears, my senses and my brain. I know for certain it won't be long before they will deliver their message to my taste buds and my nose as well, and I hope that day will come before I leave this earth. I can give you one prediction: the guy/gal that can find a way to do that, deliver smell and taste to your computer at his/her command will make
trillion of the currency of his/her choice, and trust me, they will find a way.

In any case, I always try to read the messages being conveyed by for example "AIM today," and you guessed it, they are delivered in "Flash." The content changes every morning and they are all beautifully done. If you are one of those persons who sit all day scratching your head to come up with ideas for your work, listen to me and go watch these ads, you can get great ideas from them, all free of charge, and if clever, you can get these contents all gratis too.

These ads come with beautiful people's images and professionally constructed art works with messages in velvet. These people are indeed very talented and I am sure they are well paid for their work. So, I did my own Flash too, some bad and some not so bad, but I really do not want to place them on this blog because the blog landlord may not like blogger tenants to consume too much of their real estate.

OK. Enough rambling around. You must be starting to ask the question: where am I going with all this? Well, I am trying to figure that out myself, but there is so much to say, and I really need to get this blog over before my chocolate cup gets cold.

I am an ardent fan of all sorts of movies, and I am quite upset at the newest release of a favorite film of mine: The Virgin Spring. I will let you look it up for yourself in case you want to know what this movie is about. I saw this movie many years ago when I lived in Europe where things were much simpler than they are now where I live, in the United States of America. In the US, I got a VHS copy of this movie, then a laser disc copy. To my chagrin, these American versions are about 3 - 4 minutes shorter than what I remembered seeing in the original version the first time on the TV in Europe. Of course, I am not the only person who knows this, and there is quite a bit of discussion about the segments that have been "censored" out of this movie. Talking about hipocrisy and prudishness. The rumor among us cinemaphiles was that the newest year 2006 release will have the misssing scenes restored so I was eager to finally see that the Americans finally come to their senses and relax their grip on the prudish "censorship" that takes away many a great essence from great movies of talented directors.

Well, my latest copy of this movie on DVD is still 3 - 4 minutes short! Aaarrrggghhh... So, I need to vent my frustration, and thus the reason I am talking to you about the "F" word. Did you really think all this time that I am talking about "Flash?" Nooooooo waaaayyyyyy..... And you all know what I am talking about. If you are reading this and are not sure what I mean, look me up, send me an email...

Now, here we are: I am making a Flash movie and know exactly what I want to do. Since I am not going to place it here, I am giving you a text version of what it is about. Its title is of course "The ubiquitous "F" word:" Here we go...

Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today is the word "Flash." Out of all of the English words that begin with the letter "F," flash is the only one that is referred to as the "F" word. It's the one magical word, just by its sound can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love.

Flash, as most words in the English language is derived from German the word "freakken," which means to strike. In English, flash falls into many grammatical categories:

As a transitive verb for instance: John flashes Shirley.
As an intransitive verb: Shirley flashes.

Its meaning is not always sexual. It can be used as an adjective such as: John is doing all the flashing work!

As part of an adverb: Shirley talks too flashing much!
As an adverb enhancing an adjective: Shirley is flashing beautiful!
As a noun: I don't give a flash!
As part of a word: abso-flashing-lutely or in-flashing-credible; and as almost every word in a sentence: Flash the flashing flashers!

You must realize that there are not too many words with the versatility of "flash" as in these examples describing situations such as:

Fraud: I got flashed at the used car lot!
Dismay: Arrgghhh! Flash it!
Trouble: I guess I' m flashed now!
Agression: Don't flash with me, buddy!
Difficulty: I don't understand this flashing question!
Inquiry: Who the flash was that?
Dissatisfaction: I don't like what the flash is going on here!
Incompetence: He's a flash off!
Dismissal: Why don't you go outside and play hide and go flash yourself!

I' m sure you can think of many more examples with all these multi purpose applications. How can anyone be offended when you use the word. I say: Use this word in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly: "Flash you!"



You must hunt for to hear and see my Flash rendition of the above. It's a "Flashing" beauty! In contrast, the prudished version in print that you saw above lost all of its intended punch, I regret to say!

Wilma or Wilma Not? That's the question.

The sky is gray and I need a blue sky with white clouds to function properly, so this looks like a BAD day for me!



With tons of things I need to do and way behind in all fronts, this does not look so good. What's worse is what is looming. And what is looming is Wilma. She, and I think she is a girl, looks menacing. Unbelievably, this gray sky is a part of Wilma while she is still enjoying stirring up the waters off Cozumel and Cancun all the way down in Mexico. Lat night, all weather persons were busy displaying their expertise in interpreting the news coming from the National Hurricane Center, who is in the know, but is more mum. However uncertain, everyone is in agreement: it does not look good for Florida, and Florida is my favorite corner of the earth under the heaven where blue sky and white cumulus clouds are the norm. Do I miss these puffy cotton balls floating in the sky today. Last night, we had a precursor of things to come when an uproaring episode of thunder rolling in the distant night told me that bad days are knocking at the door. The supercells must have developed from cumulonimbus clouds to generate the loud series of thunderclaps. Good bye cumulus, and welcome Wilma.



Before getting into a panic mode, I know that all this hysteria must be cooly confirmed by scientific analysis, so I called on Google Earth for help. Help! Following the model predictions of where Wilma will venture in the next few days, it does look grim! If you fly North-East originating from Cozumel-Cancun, do you know where you will end up? You end up in the South Florida peninsula! OK. That is what everyone and his cousin are saying, that is where Wilma is heading and there is no doubt. She will head NorthEast after flirting with the fashionable Mexican resorts. The writing's on the wall. Stay calm! This is not the end of the world! It's only a cane, for crying out loud! OK, OK. Be rational, they say she is BIG, and DANGEROUS, but you know better. Put this thing in a proper perspective, she is tiny when compared to the entire earth. See? It's nothing. OK. Worry about it tomorrow or in a couple of days and keep your fingers crossed. Not that it will help! And please stop biting your finger nails!

There are good reasons, many good reasons I should panic because this scenario with the word disaster written all over it that is about to unfold has the potential to engender countless chores that are best left undisturbed. My house has hurricane shutters that costed several arms and several legs, and that was years ago. These shutters were deployed perhaps once in their lifetime, and I still shudder thinking about repeating that feat. The shutters I have are the top of the line and in principle, it requires no effort to deploy them. But that is not true. The last and only time I deployed them for no less than the notorious "Andrew" cane of years gone by, I had to scrape away several wasp nests and evict a family of tree frogs that made one of the window sills their home. And let me tell you, if you plan to scrape off wasp nests from your shutter rails, that is not a job for the faint of heart. You need goggles (no, not google, you nitwit,) heavy gloves, sharp and strong tools and a LOT of time on your hand. I have none of these tools nor the time so when Sunday rolls around, it will be very interesting. Now, I still remember vividly the struggle I had to evict that tree frog family from the shutter. I could just try to ignore their sad eyes and lock them in, but I have a heart, and cruelty is not a part of it. So with a small wooden stick, I tried to gently incite what looked like the head of the household to please move forward and out. Instead, the head of household remained flat as a green pancake, clinging with dear life to the rails deep in the most recessed corner and refused to budge. Giving up is not my nature either so I finally got all three members, the breadwinner, the house keeper and the baby green tree frog family to reluctantly jump out of the window and left. It was not easy, but not as hard as when I had to evict a family of coons living in my roof's crawl space. But that story is for another day less traumatic than this moment in my life.



You are now going to read something more pleasant. One day last month when I was going through my chaotic filing system (non system is more descriptive of what it is) I stumbled on the invoice of my now deceased Dell 15 GB jukebox. You may remember a former traumatic blog in which I recounted the encounter with the service person that felt my service call. The record I found clearly indicated that contrary to what I was told, my MP3 player was still under warranty! I would not let such an opportunity go unnoticed, so I contacted Dell again. One week later, they sent me a replacement unit as it was called for in the original invoice. Great. Now I have two MP3 players and I am trying to figure out what to do with the newly refurbished 20 GB jukebox. The moral of this happy tidbit of news? You begin to see the light if you rumble through your chaotic desk once in a while because you never can tell what you will find at the bottom of the pile.

OK. Battery? Checked! One here. Water? Checked! 2 bottles here! Candles? Checked! Half a dozen here! BBQ? Checked! Arrgghhh. need to scrub all the grease from Katrina times! Charcoal? Charcoal? Oh no!

When Hell freezes over!

Inescapably, famous composers such as Monteverdi, Telemann, Krenek , Stravinsky, Pergolesi and many other authors wrote music about Orpheus who was love stricken and heart broken when he lost his love Euridice. Determined to look for her .... who was, of course, in hell; and armed with his lyre, he went there trying to rescue her ... according to the well known fable.

Now, to me, that was very odd: Why Euridice did not qualify to go to heaven istead of being sent to hell? She must have been a BAD girl! But that is not the subject I want to fuss over today. Today's is the fulfilment of a promise I made to myself for a long time: the subject of predicting when hell will freeze over.

You can easily find that this subject is not new by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, there are numerous discussions about the temperature of hell, whether it is hotter or cooler than heaven, whether hell is endo or exo thermic, etc... To me, these discussions lack rigorous scientific support and that prompted me to throw down the gauntlet and enter the ring. Of course, please do not get me wrong, and please do not think for a minute what you read here cannot be but a complete fabrication on my part.

But first thing first! When I was in school, I had an old and wise professor of applied mathematics, who taught me a lot of odd things, including this: before you want to find the solution to a problem or a question, such as the attempt to calculate this proverbial time when hell freezes over, you may want to make sure that the solution does exist, and if you find that the solution does exist, investigate to see if it is unique. Worse, to me, being an overly cautious person, I think we need to step back even further, adding another level of complexity to this problem: does hell exist? This must be answered even before finding out when it will freeze over, and then whether it will freeze over only once.

So, there we are. Does hell exist? Once we find the answer, we may be able to proceed further. Do you know that there exists a list of Entrance to Hell in and around the UK? It is at:


http://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/

[The link above is not active for some unknown reason. You will need to manually copy the URL address to your browser. Check it out.]

and this list is updated constantly. So, to these folks, they are certain that hell does exist, and according to this list, it is evident that hell is a manifold structure according to their view. If I had peaked your curiosity, and you can't stand the suspense any longer, here is a photo of one such entrance, aptly named Badadada tatatata.



The Bible says hell does exist, and if you do not carefully follow instructions given to you, you will get to go there where you will be tormented and burned by the flames in this furnace. This furnace is said to be in the heart of the earth as it is underground. Now, I think that is going too far and too deep! Physically, that is not possible! Because Satan is believed to live there, it cannot be as deep as all the way to the inner core of the earth because the temperature there is about 10,000 degrees Farenheit! At that depth, even Satan must exist in liquid or vapor form and according to popular belief, he looks like this:



so that cannot be!

But I am digressing! None of this provides any shred of evidence that hell does exist. So, how does one proceed? Let's be scientific about it, tongue in cheekly! Although it is believed that most statistics are invented spontaneously, let me assert to you that 76% of Americans believe in heaven and 71% believe in hell. I am not sure I trust these two figures as I think they should be the same, but the discrepancy may be in the error in sampling of about 3%. To this crowd, it is perfectly coherent to discuss the time that hell will freeze over as they may be interested to know if that time may coincide with the time they will be sent there because the chance of them getting burned may be lessened. For the remaining other population of the world, I have no idea how many believe hell exists. One of these days, I may find time to learn about that spontaneous statistics, but not today.

It is now apparent that the foregoing mumbling was not totally useless. It has established the fact that the subject of interest here: "When hell freezes over" only has limited appeal if it is kept strictly to the literal meaning of hell as it is usually understood: the bad place where bad boys and bad girls are sent when they don't follow instructions well. To broaden the appeal of this blog, let's make a leap of faith, suspend disbelief and declare that hell is nothing but the places on earth that are really hot and smell of sulfur. Eruptions of volcanoes immediately come to mind when lava is spewed from the vast reservoir underneath. Now you have it, hell is now the place one finds the hot liquid iron lying just under the earth's rocky mantle. So hell is now well defined. It affects everyone in the world equally because molten lava is under all of us. Now that hell is well established, it is conceivable that the specter of it one day "freezing over" is quite real. OK. When will that day arrive? You can be assured that it will not be tomorrow, or Sunday. Let's see how one can proceed from here.

About five billion years ago, earth was just a ball of molten rock. It was just a ball of hell, and hell was everywhere. Slowly, by cooling, the upper 35 - 70 kilometer layer of earth became the crust that eventually supports the homo sapiens for their homes and the highways for their cars. The mantle occupies the next 3,000 kilometer or so, intermingling the crust with hell below, which includes the 10,000 degree Farenheit core, the ultimate hell. You may be surprised to learn that hell is also highly radioactive which is really the reason for the intense heat used to burn souls "eternally." This eternal notion can easily be explained by disclosing that most of the heat comes from Uranium-238 that can burn for 4.47 billion years before losing half of its activity. Now you know where the 5 billion year comes from.



It may take another 5 billion years before the half life decay law turns off this radioactivity allowing hell to cool down for good. Then eventually, it will freeze over. Who knows when so I am venturing a lower bound guess: hell will freeze over at least 5 billion years from today, in the year 5,000,002,005 AC or sometime after that date. That will be a cold day in hell. So the solution does exist and I think it is unique as it is not clear how hell will be awaken again to freeze over a second or more times.

May be we should not underestimate Satan as he may know how to do that!

Katrina Euphoria

It was inevitable. I have blogger's block! This is my third attempt to blog something not trashy, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will see the end of day. Let's hope it will make it, and if you are reading this, it made it! For weeks in August, I was dreaded of an annual ritual that I must endure: harvesting the fruits off my fruit trees to get the highly sought after longana euphoria. If you are one of those whose tropical fruit tree horizon does not extend beyond the bananas, longana euphoria is the fancy name for longans. Phonetically, it conveys the exotic name of "long nhan" literally meaning "dragon's eye!" You must remember your disgusting reaction when watching one Indiana Jones movie in which Dr. Jones was offered the eyeball soup. Well, these longana euphoria look the same disgusting way, but it turns out that this exotic fruit is highly sought after, and it commands exorbitant prices in New York and other American cities harboring a China town where reportedly male Chinese elderly would kill for these fruits that they eat by the kilos. Come to think, their counterparts, the female Chinese elderly also love them. Recollecting from the childhood tales I heard, these fruits deliver doses of aphrodisiac like there is no tomorrow. This was confirmed by my savant friends living in France years ago. These dragon's eye balls are not labeled "euphoria" for nothing.

A quick astute research will tell you that there is not always agreement upon what foods or fruits are actually aphrodisiacs or anaphrodisiacs. The ancient list includes anise, basil, carrot, salvia, gladiolus root, orchid bulbs, pistachio nuts, rocket (arugula), sage, sea fennel, turnips, skunk flesh (a type of lizard) and river snails... The ancients suggested you steer clear of dill, lentil, lettuce, watercress, rue, and water lily... Of course, it is because the latter belong to the "ana" group. And who would want that? I can tell you that if you get a hold of two handfuls of these longana euphoria and eat them, you may feel the same way I usually do: falling asleep. So this fruit may belong to the "ana" group, but it is sought after because it is believed otherwise. You pick!

Now that is the long story. The short story is that my annual job is to get these fruits off the trees, box some of them and ship them to the best friends of my wife and their families. I also can tell you that is a chore I abhor. So, in this year as in many previous ones, I procrastinate to the last minutes of the last days to harvest them. Then Katrina came our way. Out of the blue. By now, all of you must have heard of Katrina, the killer hurricane that devastated my favorite Jazzland, the city of New Orleans in the US of A. However, by this time, at this latitude and longitude where we live, she was only a budding baby storm and was ignored by most of us hard like nail habitant of tropical paradise. Eventually it became painfully clear to me that I must take action NOW before these valuable fruits are blown to be lost forever by potential hurricane force wind of Katrina. As a trained person with learned skills to predict hurricane behavior during my graduate school days (I am kidding, of course. It is more accurate to say that as graduate students at our world renowned oceanographic institute, we used to attend brown bag seminars to discuss modeled tracks of threatening hurricanes and if memory serves me well, I remember that none of any of the digital tracks would agree with any of the others,) I was certain Katrina will go North of us and would not arrive until tomorrow in the afternoon. So I gave myself until tomorrow morning to carry out the forced labor. Unfortunately, by the time the ladder was deployed at 9am of the fateful day, Katrina's rain bands were already HERE! So soon? Hey, this is a good omen, because after revising my calculations, there may be no need to climb up the trees after all. Not with all this wind around. There will be carpets of longana euphoria to collect leisurely, at fingertips' reach. Piece of cake. Thank you Katrina!

After a furious night of hurricane force wind in my yards, front and back and all around, I learned days later when the power returned that Katrina went right through US, and not North of us. So much for acquired skills in forecasting cane's routes. Sure enough, there were carpets of longana euphoria all right, huge carpets. These aphrodisiac eye balls were everywhere. The net result was that I still have lower back pain from picking them up one by one. But I did finish the chore asked of me and sent out a few of these boxes.



The subsequent obligatory clean up job was no fun either. Fractal branches were everywhere, and they really were fractal so the number of snips to cut them down to manageable sizes increased not quite exponentially, but enough to give me nightmares for a few nights. Also, I can tell you that every night, the humid air temperature peaked to its highest marks between 1:30 and 2:00 am. If you ever sleep in a house without any electricity in the midst of summer nights after a hurricane passes through your area, I can guarantee you will wake up starting precisely at 1:30 am. It was HOT. So, as a corollary to my yet to do future blog: hell can never freeze over between 1:30 and 2:00 am. That's good information to have.



Was there any silver lining from such an odyssey? Look what I found blooming in my yard the day after: my precious ten thousand mile vine. And she was blooming! Actually, this sentimental vine is not that long, but that is its name: ten thousand mile flowering vine. I will leave you the task of finding out what this vine is. It is fragrant and its leaves are perfectly heart shaped.




Nobody knows the trouble I've seen! Nobody knows but Jesus!
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen! Glory, Hallelujah!

Lizard Walk and fractal furniture...

I am happy I am not a lizard, or should I not be?

On the way to my office, everytime I have to get there, and thankfully, it is not a ritual I need to do every day, I walk along what I name the "Lizard Walk." This is where I witness the kamikaze dashes of the lizards that live around my office surroundings, from the grassy lawn to the planter bushes. I must be mindful so I do not accidentally step on one of them, especially the younger and thus tiny ones. These creatures can run fast, and by sheer randomness, I am fearful that one of these mornings, our paths will collide and will prove to be fatal for one unfortunate lizard. Since they dash as fast as the Dash boy in the Incredibles (have you seen that movie? Incredible!) it is unlikely that I can step on one by pure coincidence, but you never know, the probability is there.



Common lizards can have a number of different colors, ranging from brown or yellow-brown to almost green, with a pattern of darker spots, flecks or stripes. Males have an orange belly flecked with black spots, while females usually have a plain yellowish belly. Adults generally grow to around 14 cm long and have a long slender tail. Common lizards can be mistaken for newts but are more alert and move quickly if disturbed. Well, I do not know how these lizard scholars learned about all these facts, but I can tell you that at the speed with which they move, it will be a cold day down there that I can tell the gender or the color of any of them ( when hell freezes over will be a good subject that I may blog sometime in the future, not too distant, I hope.)

The food habits of the lizard species are not well studied, but scientists do know that they are omnivorous. Studies document the lizards feed on small insects, such as ants and bees, along with leaves, buds, or seeds from native plants. Most lizards can run, climb, and cling. A few can swim. I am sure the ones living around my office can do all these chores very well.

People often see lizards dart over logs and rocks. They run quickly across the ground. However, some lizards have small, weak legs so they move slowly. Yeah right, I got to see that to believe. Knowing that birds do include lizards in their diet, I am sure that the colony of very vocal blue parrots loitering around my office buildings is very interested in catching these sprinting lizards.

So, who would want to be a lizard? I thought that I may not want to be one, but I was wrong. Today, I need to do household chores, and let me tell you, that is not a task lizards need to do, so I am rethinking that philosophy. I, once in a blue moon, to help out, participate in cleaning the house. I use this opportunity to catch up on listening to my music. This morning, my plan is to tend to my maid duty for about 90 minutes. I have not listened to Beethoven for quite a while so his Emperor concerto and his 1806 violin concerto that he wrote for his buddy violinist Clement add up nicely to about the time I need. Dusting around, I muse to myself that this is a losing battle that one must constantly fight, once in a while in my case. All dust has to do is nonchalently gathering around, helped by its friend gravity, depositing layers after layers of itself everywhere. Once a layer is wiped away, more will come the next microsecond. This futile battle is identical to that of trimming down tree branches and bushes, which I do not particularly like to do no matter what for the simple reason that the minute a limb is cut, an invisible message is sent to the root structure that rouses up the army of tentacles deep down in the earth that furiously fuels the relentless marching of photosynthesis they do so well into new growth that would defeat the most hardy human spirit of trimming bushes or tree branches.

My dusting chore is vastly more complicated than necessary because in her infinite wisdom, my wife always collects fractal furniture. We do not have flat uncomplicated furniture in the vein of the run of the mill that you find in furniture stores in America's malls where everything is flat and smooth. Instead, I must dust around all the fractal surfaces that are everywhere... In case your mathematical brain cells have forgotten, fractal surface areas hide the nasty fact that the area that dust covers your furniture is A LOT wider than meet the eyes. So my dust feather has to travel to distances far larger and cover areas far more extended than what it appears to be. Trust me. I have made a rough calculation using fractal geometry, and the area increase may be as much as 6.31.



Well, I am coming to the second movement of the violin concerto, and it is time to turn on the vacuum cleaner. I need to find my noise canceling head phones. Boy, life sure is complicated. May be being a lizard is not too bad after all. The pluses are: I can jump higher than 10 times my height, I can dash as fast as Dash boy and I can detach my tail in case of danger lurking. On the other hand, the minus are: being omnivorous. Yuk!

Dear padirsenis WinFixer...

I am in a foul mood today, and someone has to pay the price! Sure enough, Murphy was kind as usual and he sent me the dream target: a shameless internet marketer: The WinFixer guys, whoever they are! Actually, these guys seem to be pretty good and it shows! You see, I am somehow targeted and they think I should buy their ware. So, on a beautiful Sunday morning, while I was struggling with browser caches, the new offering installed itself on my laptop. This must have been a third time this month, so it gets to be quite boring. The novelty about WinFixer (that's what these guys call themselves) is that it always finds its way into my laptop. The interface is quite nice so I do not mind to bear the short time needed uninstalling it. Except that before it goes away, as parting gift, WInFixer imposes a "feedback" screen that must be sent to their, I hope, headquarter. This is a new height in shameless solicitation and that ticked my funny bones. So, they got some mild but well placed and subtle profanities the first time. The second time was a bit more spicy. This morning, I hope they love my "feedback" because it came from my beloved "Alternative Dictionaries" that is reserved just for such occasion. I think these guys are smart, and they should have no problem to decipher every word that was sent.

Warning! The academy of motion picture has rated the following wordings "NC17" which is a notch above the rating "R." Please use caution when you attempt to decipher my message to WinFixer. You may be offended in which case, I am happy because it may have served its purpose to the intended targets.

... fok jou; jou ma se poes; Sit jou kop is die koei se kont en wag tot die bul jou kom holnaai; anavy sikim; da"ma"k; ganjykh; it balasy / ku"chu"k; emagaldu; kabroi; блядзь; Ves a parir mones; gama stavros sou; verdammter Schweinehund; Inahl Rabak Ars Ya Choosharmuta; Ya khatikhat khara; Lekh teda; az isten bassza meg a bu"do"s ru"csko"s kurva anya'dat; caccati in mano e prenditi a schiaffi; padirsenis; padirsenis; padirsenis!

Oh! That feels so good!

You talking to me?

Today is your lucky day, because I feel great. So here we go...

Since prevaricating can be minacious to some, they may feel gybed so when you prevaricate, be sure you are not diaphanous. Your reaction after being yourself prevaricated may be "Balderdash!" However puerile you may wish it were, you can't just hope to inspissate away such offense you may consider odoriferous. It will be pure fossicking on your part. You may gainsay all you want, this phantasmagoria cannot easily be dismissed. An effective antidote is to lilt, even to expiate and reduce it to a synecdoche. Be warned, it may metamorphose itself into an effluvium! By preponing, you may gain needed perspicacity and may even consider eleemosynary intervention. If you practice hard to become prescient, you may be able to mollycoddle yourself but avoid the danger of becoming rubefacient.



OK, your luck has run out, and I really need to go get a new pair of sneakers because the rain has not abated. Where is all this water coming from?

Losing battle? Not a chance!

On a soaking wet fourth day in a row, ordinary people may feel depressed. But not me! The rain and the deluge will stop, eventually. They cannot last forever, except now, I have an urgent incentive to get myself a new pair of comfortable sneakers because mine is, to my amazement, not water proof. This great pair of sneakers had the great inovative design that sports numerous tiny "breathing" holes to let my feet breath. Clearly the guys or gals who designed it only had dry weather in mind. Need to find time to get a new pair, but who knows, the weather may improve and get dry again. OK, deal with this later.

The Russians are getting more and more vocal and their incomprehensible messages keep coming everyday, comingled with the usual Viagra and Cialis calls, and the Nigerian barristers trying to get inventive. I do not know why other people get annoyed receiving these because they are very amusing and constitute a source of free distraction. But, yesterday, I had an intense time of anxiety when my one month old (and may no longer under warranty) 30 GB MP3 player locked up. What? Only a few drops of water on the side of it? This cannot be! The specter of spending another 3 days to refill another player with about 25GB of MP3 was daunting. Luckily, level head prevailed. I figured out that this is the behavior of the player when its battery comes to an unacceptably low level. Instead of just shutting itself off when exhausted, this one refuses to be turned off, locks itself up and stubbornly keeps playing the tracks under its grip. Great design, don't you think? Nothing a good recharge won't fix. That was a close call.

The longer one deals with modern life, the more one learns. I was reminded again this morning when I was trying to track a missing shipment from Amazon.com. Of the three separate shipments they sent me on June 2nd, two arrived the first week of June while the third one went AWOL, and now, the first day of Summer is arriving today. It is now June 21st and my third package is somewhere in neverland. After a few patient tracking inquiries, the package seemed to be stuck at the FedEx cyber place. To be in the know, FedEx now has a great voice service to solve all the problems their customers may encounter. This one seems to be a problem so it came to the rescue. Everything went great until it came to communicating the tracking number to this great lady robot with quite a limited vocabulary and restricted sentences. Obviously, FedEx is trying to impress the world's population with their monopoly of delivering every and all packages, so it uses tracking numbers that contain as many digits as the US' national deficit. Now, there is a slight glitch in their system because the ever so patient robot lady at FedEx keeps interrupting my reading of the digits when it came to about 4 or 5 more digits to go. But I know what to do! Overriding a lady robot is my specialty as I was trained for many years, so I tried: Help! Stop it, please! Help! Help! Help! Oh, please stop repeating your menu. Help! Help! Let me speak to a human being, please! Help! Help! Eventually, she understood and connected me to a real person, who was not as nice as the robot lady who left abruptly without saying good bye. But this new lady person was able to comprehend all the digits, and told me that my problem is with Amazon. Now, that's typical, don't you think? According to this lady, Amazon.com now has the "damaged" package.

Did you ever try to contact Amazon for a missing package? Try to see if you can handle that stressful situation. They have all options, except one that you can use to report that "Help! My package was never delivered. Help!" I managed to send an email message and an electronic promise was given (in writing) that somehow an answer will be given within 24 hours. I can wait, no problems.

OK. May be Amazon.com has water proof sneakers. OK. Let's go see.

The Russians are coming...

I do not know about yours, but my email is getting more and more hits from messages that look mightily like MOCKBA type of characters. Since I have no idea what they say, I cannot even guess what they are about. No problems, I save all of them in a separate folder and will go back to study them after I learn the Russian language. Why Russian? Because I think that is what they are, in Russian. I may be wrong, but I will find out after I master the language, at which time, if I am wrong, I will try a different language. Eventually, I will learn what they are trying to tell me. Just because they have the courtesy to spend the time writing me these seemingly elaborate emails, that's the least I can do for them. It's too bad that they do not at this time have any beautiful graphics that I can use for my own needs, but I guess they will learn how to do that in due time.

You see, I am desperate to find the solution to my current seemingly insurmountable problem: there is something not flowing, or if it flows, it does not flow right. So I am hoping that some reliefs may come from these miraculous emails, because all my friends told me that may be so.

My neighbor, an expert astrologer has given me stern warnings over a year ago that I must watch out for my own well being, since I no doubt am suffering from a "Saturn return," and that is a three year affair! She's got to be kidding! Right? At first, I am skeptical about what she told me, so I went away to perform an arduous and lengthy calculation about the relative positions of the planets, using Newton's laws of physics. I figured that she may be wrong, because according to my calculations, carried out to 12 decimal places, there is not a chance in the universe that Saturn ever will return close enough to me to cause measurable discomfort or harm. But you never know, so I am taking her advice in stride.

To start out, I sought advice from another expert, a woman friend who knows all about flowing things. The trouble is that now, I must also learn Chinese, because what she told me sounds wonderfully strange. Something sounding like the sharp teeth of wild beasts.

This expert asked me: where do you work? I told her that I work everywhere, at home, in my office, in my car, during my sleep etc... At her insistance, although this is diametrically opposite to my instinct, I took a digital picture of one of my work places and gave it to her, having no idea what she wants to do with it.



Well, I now regret that I did something without knowing its potentially dangerous consequences. The photo almost gave her a heart attack. Of course, I received plenty of admonition and the order of the day was to clean up my work space so that whatever it is she told me that I could not understand can flow more freely. I don't think so! Everything is perfect the way it is, just like that.

After much reflection on my own without any interference from outside experts, it became obvious to me that what does not flow well is my playing of my saxophone. Since I am behind in my practice, way behind, the music I play does not flow well at all. That, I know how to fix. That's easy! May be that is the solution to my insurmountable problem. Yeah! That's it. Blow, Gabriel, blow, like Cole Porter used to say.

How low can you go?

IQ scores reflect one's general capacity for performing intellectual tasks, such as trying to figure out the origin of the universe... To simplify matters, complications such as the "g" factor, chronometric, "Flynn effect" etc... are deliberately left out of this page.

Whether you believe in it or not, the average IQ score is 100. The standard deviation of IQ scores is 15. So, this means:

· 50% of people have IQ scores between 90 and 110
· 2.5% of people are very superior in intelligence (over 130)
· 2.5% of people are deficient (under 70)
· 0.5% of people are near genius or genius (over 140)

Disclaimer: (Do not trust these numbers, do your own calculation or consult with members of one of many of the "High IQ societies.")



As a benchmark of measurement, Einstein was clocked at 160+, but that did not prevent his high school teachers to say that he was a "lazy dog" and did not think highly of him. That may give you a hint on where they themselves ranked on the scale.

Here is a suggested rating... to bust the "bell curve" as it is customarily said...

People with IQs of 1:

Spammers requesting a receipt acknowledgement of their spams.

Nigerians offering multi million dollars windfalls.
Nigerians disguised as English solicitors looking for trusty partners to disburse 40% of their multi million dollars.
Nigerians disguised as rich deposed African dictators' spouses needing help to smuggle multi million dollar fortunes out of their local treasure chests.
Nigerians disguised as Arab sheiks attempting to share their deepest wells...

People believing the ones above.

I often wonder if single digit scores like such for people otherwise classified as "normal" can put them in limbo in life, and please, that is not a reference to a dance...

Can one go lower? One wonders!

My music died today...

As if it were a premonition, I read a few days ago somewhere a column of someone marveling about the new and forever smaller and smaller gadgets that the modern homo heidelbergensis (if you cannot understand this fancy word, here's help: homo sapiens. Feeling better?) cannot live without. He went on to jokingly say that he has all his music in this wonderfully little device. ALL OF HIS MUSIC! Then he jokingly said that when his device crashes... You know what he meant!



I must always have the most modern gadgets that come out first. I cannot live without any of them. Really! I have a 1GB super fast memory card in my first ever 5GB digital camera. I carry all my "must be backed up" codes I write in my spare time in this tiny 1GB USB device that always dangles in my key chain. Of course, I have ALL MY MUSIC converted into MP3 in the first ever "fit in your shirt pocket" digital MP3 player.

Well today is the fateful day of all days. While driving, my favorite public radio station has the infinite wisdom to broadcast the political wrangling of the local school board so I turned to my trusted MP3 player. You know what I am leading to... Read the paragraph at the top that said the dreaded word "premonition."

Below is the confirmation that just came in my email of my most recent on line chat...

**************************************************
'TLMainDB=001-445-653'Dell Chat-Interaction

The session has been accepted.

{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:33:43 PM} My Dell DJ 15 GB hard drive is dead. What can I do?
{Kumar 8:34:04 PM} Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Chat Support. My name is Sushil.
May I have the service tag of the DJ?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:34:30 PM} 9cnbd31
{Kumar 8:34:39 PM} Please give me a minute to pull up the account information. In the mean time, may I have the full name on the account and the initial shipping address please?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:34:52 PM} Lan Nghiem-Phu
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:34:57 PM} ...censored...
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:35:03 PM} Miami, Florida
{Kumar 8:35:54 PM} Thank you
{Kumar 8:36:13 PM} May I call you Lan?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:36:21 PM} Sure.
{Kumar 8:36:31 PM} Thank you
{Kumar 8:37:06 PM} How the harddrive is damaged?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:37:59 PM} It just quits today. It has been working fine. I tried to reboot but cannot. I tried to reformat. It says hard disk is bad and quits.
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:38:33 PM} I tried to reboot many times. The drive makes strange noise.
{Kumar 8:39:00 PM} What error is displayed on the screen?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:39:58 PM} It goes into the 4 choices: Cleanup (does nothing); Reboot (does nothing); Firmware reboot (does nothing); Reformat (It says hard disk is bad.)
{Kumar 8:40:31 PM} ok
{Kumar 8:41:20 PM} Lan, as I see the account details, the warranty of this DJ is expired.
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:42:13 PM} Great. Anything I can do except buy a new one?
{Kumar 8:42:27 PM} Therefore you need to purchase a new DJ.
{Kumar 8:42:55 PM} You may contact Dell sales at 800-915-3355.
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:43:07 PM} Wonderful. Thank you for your help. Can I ask why I had to answer all the questions before you told me I need to buy a new one?
{Kumar 8:44:33 PM} I collected the information for the privacy and security of your account.
{Kumar 8:44:53 PM} Is there any other technical issue I may assist you with, today?
{Lan Nghiem-Phu 8:45:21 PM} Great. No. Thank you for your time. Have a wonderful day. Bye.
{Kumar 8:45:56 PM} Thank you for contacting Dell Technical Chat Support. Have a great day
The visitor has ended the chat session.
*************************************************

There you have it! I am not sure how long I can survive... Well... the 15GB was all filled up anyway... I need more room... iPod or not iPod? That is the question! Nah! Let's help Kumar keep her job and go for the 30GB. Sushil Kumar, here I come!!!!

The Art of War

One wakes up everyday to find pleasant and not so pleasant events greeting at the doorstep. An effective way to greet them cheerfully into one's life is to sort and guide them to two bins. The pleasant bin on one side and the unpleasant one on the opposite side. It goes without saying that the likable bin is one's oasis in the desert, while the dark one has the power to guide one's soul directly into the abyss. If you feel that you must be in a fighting mood, read the following quote from one of the innumerable sites on the internet. Since it is not possible to credit the quote correctly and accurately, reference is not cited. For the curious readers, you all know how to Google... This may not be the words of wisdom for everyone, but a French quotation that appears at the top of this blog is repeated here as a reminder:

IL DEPEND DE CELUI QUI PASSE QUE JE SOIS TOMBE OU TRESOR QUE JE PARLE OU ME TAISE CECI NE TIENT QU'A TOI AMI N'ENTRE PAS SANS DESIR Palais de Chaillot - Paris

A quote from a translation of SUN TZU ON THE ART OF WAR:

“…To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength;
to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight;
to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.

What the ancients called a clever fighter is
one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

Hence his victories bring him neither reputation
for wisdom nor credit for courage.

He wins his battles by making no mistakes.
Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty
of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is
already defeated.

Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into
a position which makes defeat impossible, and does
not miss the moment for defeating the enemy.

Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist
only seeks battle after the victory has been won,
whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights
and afterwards looks for victory.

The consummate leader cultivates the moral law,
and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is
in his power to control success….”

Yes! Indeed!

Gems are hard to find...

If you were to ask turkeys and eagles to participate in a contest to be determined by the contestants, the eagles would suggest a contest on how high one can soar, and the turkeys will immediately agree.
The Meleagris gallopavo species is from the Greek name standing for guinea fowl, meleagris. The species name gallopavo is from the Latin words gallus(cock) and pavo (peacock).

Its classification is:
Phylum: Chordata
Subphylum: Vertebrata
Class: Aves
Order: Galliformes
Family: Phasianidae

Turkeys exist in the millions in population and have a life expectancy of 1.3 to 1.6 years. The longest time a turkey ever lived was 13 years.

In contrast, the Aquila pelagica (Pallas) species, also Haliaeetus Leucocephalus, Aquila Chrysaetos, Haliaeetus pelagicus, Haliaetus pelagicus, Haliaetos pelagica, Faico leucopterus, Faico imperator, Thalassaetus pelagicus, Thalassaetus macrurus, Haliaeetus macrurus, Thallasoaetus pelagicus, Harpia harpyja, Terathopius ecaudatus...

Concentrating on the Haliaeetus leucocephalus, its life span is about 40 years. Recovering from the 500 or so pairs in the 60s, eagle population now numbers only in the tens of thousands.

Indeed, it's much easier to find turkeys in life... Turkeys are no gems!

No copyright, no intellectual property, use at your own risk...

Secrets, Treasure, Trash and Trends...

The title of this could have been "To Blog or not to Blog?" Someone has said that "blogs will be the rage in the near future..." Perhaps the near future is already here. Remember the days that diaries and black books abounded? And that they contained secrets to be guarded by fire breathing dragons? Even Princess Fiona kept her own "Dear Diary" book that was indiscretely read by Shrek. Now, all one has to do is to "Google" the word "blogger" to find in 0.07 second the 9,440,000 web pages where the hearts and souls of bloggers are wide open to the world. Readers, beware! Read and believe at your own perils... Enjoy and have a good day!