New Year's Eve!

Fireworks at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur

New Year's Dinner

Hasma (or Harsmar) is a Chinese dessert ingredient made from the dried fallopian tubes of the Asiatic Grass Frog ('Oviductus Ranae'). Hasma is often mistakenly described as toad or frog fat, since it is sometimes referred to as "toad oil" (Chinese: 蛤蟆油; pinyin: há mǎ yóu).

Angkor Wat: Airport

No clue what it symbolizes...



Goodbye, Cambodia!

Angkor Wat: Nature Wins

Siem Reap: Late Night Restaurant

Angkor Wat: A Sunset

The best way to travel around Siem Reap

Angkor Wat

Laos

Never again on my dime. One of the most boring places I've ever been to...

Yangoon Again

Strange city with empty skyscrapers...



People on streets..

Bagan: Day 2

A small Myanmar village near the Mount Popá



Mount Popa itself...



On top of the mountain..

Bagan: Day 2

Bagan: Day 1

At the local market




A city pagoda



A highly specialized wishing well :)















A beautiful hotel in Bagan

Myanmar: Yangoon

The Streets of Yangoon







Shwedagon Pagoda... The place where everyone must be barefoot...Where the sensation of being in a very special place is almost palpable even to an atheist...

Bangkok

Reclining Buddha with the feet of mother-of-pearl...








At the pagoda....






The less touristy side of Bangkok....





The corporate face of Bangkok

(c) 2008 Photos by Valera Meylis

LRB: on Arabian Nights

Click the image above or this link to read the article....

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Travelling Text

Marina Warner

• The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons  Buy this book
• ‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum  Buy this book

Like a dance craze or a charismatic cult, The Arabian Nights seized readers’ imaginations as soon as translations first appeared – in French between 1704 and 1717, and in English from 1708. Oriental fever swept through salons and coffee-houses, the offices of broadsheet publishers and theatrical impresarios; the book fired a train of imitations, spoofs, turqueries, Oriental tales, extravaganzas. It changed tastes in dress and furniture – the sofa, the brocade dressing-gown – and even enhanced the taste of coffee. In fact its diaspora almost mimics the triumphant progress of coffee, as it metamorphosed from the thimbles of thick dark syrup drunk in Damascus and Istanbul and Cairo to today’s skinny latte, macchiato et al. Antoine Galland, the French savant and explorer who discovered and translated the earliest manuscript in Syria in the late 17th century, also published a translation of an Arabic treatise in praise of coffee, one of the first if not the first of its kind. It is his bowdlerised version of the stories that dominated their diaspora, from the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’, serialised in 445 instalments over three years in the London News, to the fantasies of the Ballets Russes, to the 1924 Thief of Baghdad, to Disney’s Aladdin and Sinbad.

In the countries of the book’s origin, the stories were considered popular trash, and excluded from the canon. In Europe, a similar sense that they had negligible status as literature came about because so many of their early enthusiasts were women. The Earl of Shaftesbury, writing in 1711, three years after the book’s first appearance in English, denounced the Desdemona tendency, claiming that the tales ‘excite’ in women ‘a passion for a mysterious Race of black Enchanters: such as of old were said to creep into Houses, and lead captive silly Women’. It’s significant, in the history of East-West relations, that Shaftesbury could only understand the alien bogeys in terms of beliefs rather closer to home than Baghdad or Cairo.

Another reason the work wasn’t taken seriously was that it eluded concepts of authorship: the stories were anonymous and composed at different periods in different places. The architecture of the frame story – Scheherazade telling stories to the sultan every night till dawn to save her life – insisted on the oral, collective, immemorial character of the tales, presenting them as a compendium of collective wisdom, or at least as literature with a thousand and one owners and users. Madeleine Dobie, in the opening essay of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context, a collection edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, shows how Galland’s work set the trend. A brilliant linguist, antiquarian and Orientalist, Galland began the process of treating the book as something that could be altered and made to express fantasy. The most popular tales of all, the ones that have become synonymous with The Arabian Nights and have been retold in children’s books and films (‘Aladdin’, ‘Ali Baba’, ‘The Ebony Horse’, ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banou’), are probably Galland’s invention, concocted of pomegranates and ebony, damask and jasmine, in tribute to the style of the original stories.

No early manuscript has been found for these ‘orphan tales’, and the first Arabic version shows clear signs of being back-translated from Galland’s French. The fine Italian translation by Francesco Gabrieli, published in 1948, printed ‘Aladdin’ in an appendix, and Penguin’s new three-volume translation follows suit, allotting ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Ali Baba’ separate quarters, and leaving out Prince Ahmed’s adventures altogether. Indeed the rags-to-riches plot of ‘Aladdin’ isn’t typical of The Arabian Nights, and the success story of Ali Baba and the romance of the young man and the fairy queen echo the extravagant and often sly fairytales – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy did, however, claim that her inspiration came to her from ‘une vieille esclave arabe’.

So the story of The Arabian Nights is a story of complex attention, formed by different historical and social interests, and becoming more complex still with the publication thirty years ago of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said doesn’t discuss The Arabian Nights itself, but he does scathe some of its scholars and translators, notably the English Arabist Edward Lane, whose three-volume edition, illustrated with William Harvey’s fine steel engravings, was published between 1838 and 1841. I have a copy of this translation, which came from my great-grandfather’s library, and it’s one of the few books I owned as a child and have been reading ever since. Despite Said’s strictures, and though it’s pretty fustian, with Lane tranquillising much of the book’s agitated emotion and toning down many of its adventures, his translation is readable in a way that Richard Burton’s lurid and archaisising version, made fifty years later, is not. Lane expurgated, Burton fantasticated. There have been many wilful translations in the book’s history, a history that in its geographical, linguistic and picaresque range echoes some of the vicissitudes in the tales themselves. The Arabian Nights has been treated throughout with a kind of insouciant liberty.

It’s an astonishing fact, but the first scholarly rather than popular Arabic edition wasn’t published until 1984; Muhsin Mahdi based his text on a manuscript dated from the 14th or 15th century and tackled only a handful of stories. The ambitious new Penguin edition, translated by the veteran Arabist Malcolm Lyons, can claim to be the first ‘complete’ English version rendered from the original without recourse to Galland. But the inverted commas are needed, because there can never really be a definitive edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it even be attempted. The Lyons translation, as Robert Irwin explains in his introduction, returns to the Arabic version that Burton used, restores the interjected outbursts of song and bawdy that Galland skipped, and sternly avoids the free and easy habits of some of his successors. It clearly aims to supersede the many Galland-influenced versions of the last three hundred years, yet the manuscript used by Burton and Lyons, known as ‘Calcutta II’, is itself a compilation of material from different periods and places, from Cairo to India: it would have been good to have a much fuller account of why it should be favoured, other than for its comprehensiveness. I found that reading the Penguin edition was like going to a new production of Hamlet or Lear: memory stumbles, because bits are missing, dialogue is transposed, and scenes turn up in different places. Leaving out the story of ‘Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banou’, for example, without a word of explanation, means that we lose the flying carpet, the image that has come to represent The Arabian Nights more than any other. It is in this tale – possibly written by Galland or taken down from an oral source – that the flying carpet figures as a magic gift at the disposal of an ordinary princeling, rather than as the heavenly vehicle of Solomon and his djinns.

The new Penguin looks sumptuous, a boxed set with metallic blue tooled cloth bindings, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, which reinterpret Oriental motifs. But it hovers uneasily between a scholarly attempt at a definitive edition and a popular (and canny) piece of publishing intended for a wide market. Every translator, Borges said, must work with the orchestration of his predecessors sounding in his ear: Lyons has paid both too much and too little attention to past versions. The phrasing subdues 19th-century excess and fancy to an extent, yet it’s still packed with words and phrases like ‘lest’ and ‘know then’. Some charming antiquated formulas have been kept, but they are isolated, stripped of surrounding texture, and literal fidelity is overdone: ‘extraordinary sea creatures that looked like humans’ replace ‘mermaids’ in the closing scene of the elegiac ‘The City of Brass’, where they are presented to the sultan as special gifts and given basins of water to live in, only to die of the heat.

Burton added voluminous apparatus, trying to justify the importance of the book through a literary Euhemerism: following Lane, he believed that the stories communicated historical facts – customs, beliefs, manners – transfigured in the imagination’s crystal palaces. The new tendency, by contrast, is to see the stories as fantasy literature. Here, too, the Penguin edition hasn’t altogether made up its mind: there are historical maps – ninth-century Baghdad, 14th-century Cairo – but little help with many retained Arabic terms, words and names. Irwin points out that readers might need to look up puzzling elements in the invaluable Arabian Nights Encyclopedia edited by Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen. But compared to the Pléiade edition, immaculately edited, annotated and translated by André Miquel and Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, the Penguin shows up to its disadvantage the character of Anglo-American publishing.

The Arabian Nights gave readers different ways of interpreting their experience. On the one hand, it seemed to open vistas of new freedoms – freedoms of form and of fantasy – with consequent effects on the political and social imagination. On the other hand, as Shaftesbury’s comment makes clear, it allowed magic, lust and cruelty to be portrayed as unknown, foreign and inimical. This double dynamic, sometimes contained within a single individual’s response, both attracts readers to the stories and repels them. Anthony Hamilton, an urbane Jacobite aristocrat and soldier, living in Paris in exile at the court of James II, and a much petted cavaliere servente of the court ladies, read Galland’s translation straight off the press before writing a parody, ‘Fleur d’Epine’ (‘Mayblossom’), to put an end – he hoped – to the insane passion for this tripe. In his version, Dinarzade, Scheherazade’s younger sister, begs her sister to stop – she can’t bear another night of her endless storytelling – and wants to trick Schahriar, the sultan, into calling a halt to the whole business. Yet, in spite of his impatience with the form, Hamilton couldn’t stop himself Orientalising, and wrote several more absurdist parodies so mischievously and adroitly that Voltaire acknowledged his influence on his own stories. The genre of the Oriental tale gave many writers’ footsteps a particular spring.

Voltaire began producing contes like ‘Micromégas’ and ‘Zadig’ when he realised that rather than write learned philosophical essays he could reach an audience and change their values by entertaining them. He gave spoof Oriental provenances to some of his satires on politics and prejudice, and in Candide and The White Bull attacked tyranny with methods borrowed from Scheherazade, who tried, by telling stories about irrational tyrants and flagrant injustice, to make Schahriar see his own face in the mirror. In London, spectacular Oriental pantos depicted the abuses of these societies – their treatment of women, the way they tormented their slaves, their excesses of despotism. At the same time even a light-hearted impresario like John Rich was aiming at targets closer to home, as Bridget Orr explains in an essay on the Oriental theatre. But it was the example of Scheherazade that the writers who flocked to ventriloquise Oriental tale-tellers took to heart. The most obvious lesson absorbed from the tales derives from the overarching narrative: Scheherazade is talking herself out of her fate. The heroes and heroines may live according to thrilling, ineluctable destinies, but Scheherazade is resisting death through the tales she tells, and if she succeeds will redeem her sex.

In France, The Arabian Nights influenced libertine fiction: the young Diderot imagined speaking jewels hidden in the private parts of a series of Scheherazade storytellers, and Crébillon fils wrote in the first person of a sofa, formerly a young rake, transformed as punishment for his misdeeds. Like a genie in a lamp, he’s sentient but captive. He eavesdrops on many gallant conversations, but will be changed back into human shape only when and if a couple make true love when sitting on him. In 1786, William Beckford took inspiration from Anthony Hamilton, the fables of Voltaire and the tradition of the galant when he wrote (in French) his hallucinatory fiction Vathek; the Faustian figure it centres on is drawn with comic-book virulence. He composed the story – he claimed – over three days and two nights after attending a phantasmagoric party designed as an Oriental spectacular by Philippe de Loutherbourg, a master of special effects on the London stage. But Beckford was also a scholar and translator: he worked on the manuscript of The Arabian Nights that Edward Wortley Montagu had brought back from his embassy to Turkey. Vathek was published with copious learned annotations, compiled by the Rev. Samuel Henley, but reflecting Beckford’s concerns and vast knowledge.

Henley published the novel in Beckford’s absence, and pretended it had been translated from a genuine Arabic manuscript. This assertion, combined with the extensive glosses, created a very strong reality effect and encouraged the reading of The Arabian Nights and other Oriental fictions as if they were documentary accounts of events in the past and customs in the present. However, as Donna Landry points out in her perceptive and original account, Vathek’s blasphemies and salaciousness are directed principally against England and English conventions. She sees the prodigious camel Alboufaki as a steed conjured to belittle the hunting horses of the landed gentry to which Beckford belonged. Alboufaki is the mount of Carathis, Vathek’s malignant enchantress mother, and a kind of self-portrait of Beckford himself, Landry suggests, with his ‘desire for solitude, and his nose for the pestilential and the ghastly’. Beckford, she says, gives us a ‘monstrous camel as also a type of the self . . . as Romantic solitary’.

For a long time, Orientalising was either ignored or disparaged, seen as a low taste or a childish interest. Today, relations with Islam both at home and abroad have drawn a more sober attention to such works. The society that created and read The Arabian Nights has become an object of interest, and Makdisi and Nussbaum are able to make the heady claim that the book ‘changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text’.

Always hanging over this kind of discussion is Orientalism, a cult bible itself, as well as being seen, in some quarters, as a candidate for burning. The contributors to the volume don’t deal directly with Said’s analysis – this is not another instalment in that quarrel – but allude to him throughout and by implication reorientate his arguments. Reading The Arabian Nights as a case-study of history’s contact zones helps us to change preconceptions about Arabs, Islam and the history and civilisation of the Middle and Near East. A book of multiple transformations, putting on different guises and exciting different effects, it reveals the degree to which translations between cultures can affect and even mitigate protracted and entrenched hostilities. The writers here are trying to see beyond an antithetical model of East-West relations to one in which, as Amit Chaudhuri has written, ‘the Orient, in modernity, is not only a European invention but also an Oriental one.’ Srinivas Aravamudan brings in Said’s later concept of the ‘travelling’ text, from his 1983 study The World, the Text and the Critic (which will be published in its first official Arabic translation by the Kalima Foundation next year). The Arabian Nights is a pre-eminent example of the travelling text, an extraordinary case of cross-fertilisation, retelling, grafting and borrowing, imitation and dissemination back and forth between Persia, India, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt and Europe over several centuries. Narrative sequences of this sort – interlaced within the frame of a ransom tale – became nomadic, camping and settling until they were indigenous throughout the world.

Said also demanded, three decades ago, that the ‘Orient’ be allowed to speak. An eye-opening essay by Nabil Matar explores the presence of Christians and other religious believers in The Arabian Nights, and tracks a growing intolerance in the stories. In the earlier romances, medieval in origin, the characters observe Islamic precepts (interfaith marriage is allowed; hospitality is a great good as well as a duty), though conversion only takes place in one direction. In the later urban adventure stories, which often show evidence of contact between East and West (pirates from Genoa, for example), hostility towards Christians has hardened.

In a closely argued meditation on the role of Dinarzade, who is entrusted by Scheherazade to ask for a story every night and so help forestall the fall of the axe, Ros Ballaster focuses on women writers’ uses of Oriental plots and characters to draw attention to their own concerns, and argues strongly that the Oriental tale, as practised by women writers such as Clara Reeve and Frances Sheridan, was employed to convey an ideal of nation and to forge a new community, open to female independence and opposed to domestic and political tyranny. In the fiction of the long 18th century, from the work of the radicals Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft to the novels of the conservative Jane Austen, Ballaster finds many pairs of sisters who manage to impress their alternative views on their fellow characters and their readers. New forms were used to stage the storytelling scene: letters, confessions, ‘memoirs’ and ‘true reports’, even travellers’ tales and captivity yarns, adopt women’s voices to communicate unknown or concealed truths. At the level of plot, this process mimicks the foiling of evil designs in The Arabian Nights, with enchanters’ secret machinations successfully resisted. At a deeper, metaphorical or even metaphysical level, it assumes a world where hidden djinns and peris lurk in old bottles or padlocked boxes or swarm invisibly in the air; these are spirits who can strike malignly but can also be controlled and exploited. Unexplained spirit presences soon began to infuse Gothic writing: Horace Walpole argued for The Arabian Nights against the insipid fiction of his contemporaries, and The Castle of Otranto shows its influence.

Somewhere between the supernatural, which presumed a belief in God, and the uncanny, which saw inexplicable, dreadful or wonderful things as the dream products of the mind and, often, of personal disturbance, the spirits of The Arabian Nights opened a space in which heterodox fantasy could be indulged without danger – believed in without having to believe it true, to adapt a phrase of Wallace Stevens. The Victorians dismissed genies as belonging to the most primitive stratum of spiritual development, animism, but had no explanation for their stubborn appeal. Tim Fulford perceptively comments on Coleridge’s enraptured response to the capricious motions of fate in the tales beyond logic, beyond ethics. Pre-1817 versions of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, published ‘before Coleridge added the moralising marginal gloss’, produces the same cold thrill in us because it too conveys ‘the inadequacy of human morality to comprehend the world in which we live’.

The fatalism of the tales, combined with their exaggerated luxuries and treasures, penalties and rewards, has meant that European readers have always connected them with irrationality, supernaturalism and transgressive self-pleasuring. But the very terms of that condemnation opened up another horizon. Khalid Bekkaoui writes about the attractions of ‘turning Turk’ and discusses several ‘captivity narratives’ (Linda Colley’s recent study of Elizabeth Marsh is a good example). In these, the flickering lamps of the seraglio throw shadows over historical events until it becomes impossible to see their original outline: fiction giving fact its form.

In the final essay in the collection, Maher Jarrar examines the return of The Arabian Nights to the Middle East and its impact on the modern Arabic novel. The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany, published too recently to be included in Jarrar’s discussion, continues the process: an enthralling piece of storytelling as well as a brave and straight-dealing account of Cairo, al-Aswany’s novel adapts the urban labyrinth of The Arabian Nights while containing its cast of intricately connected characters within a single, many-chambered building.

The difficulty of reading the tales themselves has proved a persistent topic, and not just because of the prophecy that anyone who finishes the book will die – an interesting extension of Scheherazade’s deferral of her own death. The tales made the leap into the world by word of mouth: the book became a genre, a style, an image-language before it was grasped as a text. The title alone summoned a mood, an atmosphere, a sphere of the imagination, dominated by enchantments and prodigies, terrifying metamorphoses (into animals, stone, things), flagrant coincidences and cruel horrors, voluptuous pleasures and despotic injustice, with fountains, rubies, sherbet, genies swarming out of caskets like smoking chimneys. Reading the stories is hard because they disobey so many rules about character, motive, verisimilitude, plot structure; they do not fit with theories about fiction, history or psychology, and their excesses of emotion, their desultory and extreme violence, twists of fate and improbable outcomes seem to flout the order of things. This makes them exciting, alarming and compelling. Why is one young woman, with every sign of reluctance and remorse, beating two bitches every evening till the blood runs? Why have three wandering holy men lost an eye? The inventions in the tales remain utterly fantastic and have an eerie compulsion: the magnetic mountain that will draw every nail from a ship if it falls within its sphere of attraction and reduce it to splinters; the giant bird that breakfasts daily on two Bactrian camels; the frozen cities of past glorious civilisations, where everyone is turned to stone and heaped in riches; the dead queen with wide open eyes of mercury lying on a bier guarded by automata which slice off the head of anyone who tries to steal the jewels that cover her body.

But once one starts reading, as Coleridge discovered, the way Scheherazade sets one story inside another, starting new ones before the first, or the second, has come to a conclusion, acts like metre and rhyme in poetry: your mind rushes ahead before you can put up resistance (just like the sultan). The prose is fiendishly patterned, more terza rima than heroic couplets. Although the book forms a collage of so many different materials and forms of literature, it does work itself out in the end – like a very long and complicated puzzle – as Scheherazade’s tales gradually move from the complacent misogyny of the frame story and many of the earlier tales, into a politics of love and justice that opens the cruel sultan’s eyes to a new understanding of humanity and of his responsibilities as a ruler.

Marina Warner’s new book will be a study of enchantment and The Arabian Nights, to be called Stranger Magic. She teaches at the University of Essex.

Other articles by this contributor:

Into Thin Air · Science at the Séances

Pick the small ones · Girls Are Rubbish

Doubly Damned · literary riddles

Listening To: The Enemy

A goodbye kiss to Bush

George Bush s’apprête à esquiver les chaussures lancées par un journaliste irakien en colère, dimanche 14 décembre, au cours d’une conférence de presse avec le premier ministre Nouri Al-Maliki. Le président des Etats-Unis effectuait une visite imprévue en Irak, sans doute la dernière avant son départ de la Maison Blanche, le 20 janvier 2009. Le journaliste, Mountazer Al-Zaïdi, de la chaîne de télévision Al-Bagdadia, a conspué M. Bush. « C’est le baiser de l’adieu, espèce de chien ! », a-t-il crié avant de l’accuser d’avoir provoqué la mort « de milliers d’Irakiens ». Le journaliste a alors été maîtrisé puis arrêté par des agents de sécurité. La chaîne Al-Bagdadia, créée en 2005 et financée par un homme d’affaires irakien, a appelé, lundi matin, les autorités irakiennes à libérer immédiatement son journaliste. En Irak, à la sortie d’un entretien avec le président Jalal Talabani, M. Bush est revenu sur l’invasion américaine de 2003 qui avait précipité la chute du régime de Saddam Hussein en estimant que « la tâche n’a pas été facile mais elle était nécessaire pour la sécurité américaine, l’espoir des Irakiens et la paix dans le monde ». Le président des Etats-Unis a poursuivi, lundi, son voyage en Afghanistan. – (AFP.)

NYT: Sexy Scandinavia??

OSLO — Despite its irresistible title, the show here called “Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?” turns out to be not quite as advertised. It’s as erotic as pickled herring. It’s a good question, though. What did happen to the image of Scandinavia as the frigid tundra of hot sex? The show is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art. Call it a virtuous mess, really an essay masquerading as an exhibition, unearthing a wealth of historic information. It tracks the roots of sexual liberation in Scandinavia to longstanding state-sponsored socialmovements, like women’s rights, sex education, health care and freedom of expression. Naturally, when the cold war arrived, the United States began casting an increasingly wary eye on this calm, liberal, peace-loving region of saunas, socialism and smorgasbord, neighboring the Soviet Union. In some countries just the idea of showing naked sculptures in public would invite a scandal. Here, Gustav Vigeland filled a park in the middle of Oslo during the early decades of the last century with hundreds of his sculptures of naked men and women, young and old. A “lack of moderation discernible on all fronts” is how Dwight D. Eisenhower assessed Sweden in 1960, seeing Scandinavia in general as a cautionary tale about extended social welfare. “We don’t sin any more than other people, but we probably sin more openly,” responded an irate Swedish baker, when approached by a journalist. Other Swedes noted that the Kinsey Reports, studies of sexual behavior done in the 1940s and 1950s, exposed an America no less fixated on sex than Scandinavia, only more furtive and hypocritical about it. But calling out American criticism of Scandinavia for its hypocrisy missed one point: to many Americans, procreation aside, sex was supposed to be naughty. Making it wholesome spoiled the fun. While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.” Too bad the show doesn’t deign to examine sexploitation films like “The Seduction of Inga,” “Maid in Sweden” and “My Swedish Cousins,” which flooded the American marketplace. Now dimly recalled for the American censorship battle over its full-frontal male nudity, “I Am Curious (Yellow),” released in 1967, became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings were punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law. How did Scandinavia turn from “Maid in Sweden” to Ikea, from the purveyor of earnest free love into the purveyor of affordable love seats? Berge Ragnar Furre, a Norwegian historian, theologian and a politician in the Socialist Left Party, now on the Nobel Committee, offered this thought: “You have toremember that here in Norway we have also had a strong tradition of liberal democracy that is against sexuality, so we are historically divided as a liberal society.” In other words, Norwegians have long split between being sexually liberated and puritanical, while remaining politically liberal in both cases. Havard Nilsen, a fellow historian specializing in Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and sexologist, nodded. “There has always been a moral high-mindedness here about sexuality, connected, like the labor movement and teetotaling, with issues of reform and salvation,” he said. But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Mühleisen, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out, “feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity.” Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that “while it was normal to see women here in the ’70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom,” Ms. Mühleisen added. “The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body.” At the same time the role of the blueeyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism. Which is to say that Scandinavia has becomemore like everywhere else.

Just seen: Gran Torino

Dirty Harry in the suburbs. Quite formulaic, but with a director, producer, actor and the co-author of the credit song like Clint Eastwood - it is a solid flick. Not to be missed.

Шутка du jour

Побережье Австралии... Дитёнок большой белой акулы пристаёт к мамке:
- Мааам!... Я кушать хочу сильно-сильно!...-
- Ну, какие проблемы, сынок?... Плыви к пляжу, найди пляжника, который заплыл подальше... Затем, покажи из воды плавник, сделай вокруг пловца три круга, и кушай на здоровье!...
- Мааам!... Я так сильно-сильно кушать хочу, что можно я сразу съем?... Без трёх кругов?...
- Как хочешь ,сына!... Нравится с какашками - ешь.

Just seen: Frost/Nixon

What a fantastic movie, a definite Oscar contender with magnificent Frank Langella, who assuredly drives the movie onward even without being in the frame - such a dramatic power of his presence and impact.
A must see...

от Глории

Календурь.
1. Пьянварь
2. Фигвраль
3. Кошмарт
4. Сопрель
5. Сымай
6. Теплюнь
7. ЖарьЮль
8. Авгрусть
9. Свистябрь (Слюнтябрь)
10. Моктябрь
11. Гноябрь
12. Дубабрь

Пни недели: поневольник, вздорник, череда, чертверх, потница, своббота, раскисенье
(два последних - буходные, остальные - трудни). (с)

http://julia-jj.livejournal.com/219272.html

BBC: Beehive

Delicate Japanese ceremony of tea-drinking....



South African airlines, Sex and the City, Art and the Kid.



South African airlines, Madonna



South African airlines

New Russian Chinese Dictionary

Страницы из "Нового русско-китайского словаря сленга" группы авторов под редакцией товарища Дин Синя (丁昕) Шанхайского издательства переводной литературы (上海译文出版社). Кликните на картинки, чтобы их увеличить

Просмотрено: "Бумажный солдат"

Фильм, действие которого происходит за шесть недель до запуска в космос Юрия Гагарина, обходится без фамилий и принадлежит по существу к фильмам 60-х годов, но был сделан недавно. Эта недавность ощущается во всем - меланхолии, депрессивности, эксцентричности и порой просто безумства его героев. Но, к счастью, это произведение художника, и потому смотреть его надо, даже возможно не соглашаясь со многими элементами.

Если надо скачать фильм, обращайтесь ко мне.

NYT: on Machu Picchu

Debate Rages in Peru: Was a Lost City Ever Lost?
By SIMON ROMERO
CUSCO, Peru — From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.
But in recent months, a confluence of contrary events has threatened to upend the legacy of Mr. Bingham, the ostensible model for the fictional Indiana Jones. Peru has threatened legal action against Yale to recover thousands of artifacts Mr. Bingham removed. Evidence has emerged suggesting that a German adventurer may have arrived there first. And a dispute has been grinding on over who owned the site when Mr. Bingham supposedly discovered it.
Scholarly circles in Peru have been abuzz with revisionist debate. Not only may Mr. Bingham not be quite the heroic pioneer that he has been portrayed as, but it may well be that the Lost City of the Incas was never really lost after all.
The disputes over who discovered or rediscovered the sacred site have become so contentious they have been living up to the phrase “the fights of Machu Picchu,” coined by the American writer Daniel Buck in an allusion to a Pablo Neruda ode, “Heights of Machu Picchu.”
No one in the field of Machu Picchu studies seriously challenges the fact that Mr. Bingham arrived at the jungle-shrouded ruins in 1911, excavated and photographed them, and largely introduced them to the world.
But his claims have been challenged over time.
“Hiram Bingham never thought someone would doggedly investigate his path,” said Mariana Mould de Pease, a Peruvian historian.
Soon after Mr. Bingham led his expeditions to Machu Picchu, claims surfaced that a British missionary, Thomas Payne, and a German engineer, J. M. von Hassel, had beaten him there. And maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.
The latest challenge comes from recently publicized claims raising the possibility that a German adventurer arrived at Machu Picchu and looted it decades before Mr. Bingham even set foot in Peru. Records show that the German, Augusto R. Berns, purchased land in the 1860s opposite the Machu Picchu mountain, built a sawmill on his property and then tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins, all with the blessing of Peru’s government.
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“The Berns information is a matter that has to be investigated further,” said Jorge Flores Ochoa, a prominent Peruvian anthropologist. “Hiram Bingham painted himself as a great explorer who ventured to the ends of the Earth, but that was a fantasy. The truth is that others, perhaps many others, arrived at Machu Picchu long before he did.”
Mr. Berns, an engineer, went to Peru to work on the Southern Peruvian Railway. An article this year in the magazine South American Explorer by Paolo Greer, an Alaska-based cartographer, offered additional detail on Mr. Berns, showing how he stopped cutting railroad ties on his property in the 1880s and started trying to lure investors into ventures for prospecting the area for gold and silver.
“Berns’s mining claims proved worthless,” Mr. Greer said in an e-mail message. “However, he spent years purposely searching for Inca sites, employing local guides who were intimate with the area.”
Moreover, some scholars say, Mr. Bingham may have known about Mr. Berns’s activities. Ms. Mould de Pease said she found in Yale’s own archives an 1887 Peruvian government document authorizing Mr. Berns to remove treasure from areas that may have included Machu Picchu. She reported the find in a 2003 book.
“If this document was in Bingham’s own papers, then he knew that Berns could have arrived there first,” she said.
Others scoff at the possibility that Mr. Berns set foot on Machu Picchu, pointing to discrepancies in the richly worded prospectuses that he sent out to investors. In one document Mr. Berns referred to an “ancient gold-washing apparatus” called “llamajcansha,” which “in the ancient Indian languages, means ‘gold yard.’ ”
“It is unlikely that readers of his prospectus in the United States spoke Quechua,” Mr. Buck wrote in an essay published in the Lima newspaper La República, referring to the indigenous language spoken in this part of Peru. “Otherwise they would have figured out that llamajcansha meant ‘llama yard.’ ”
Mr. Buck added, “Berns was selling a load of llama dung.”
Skeptics also say that no substantive proof has emerged that Mr. Berns ever spirited away artifacts from Machu Picchu.
Meanwhile, in an effort to assert greater control over its cultural heritage, Peru’s government said last month that it would take legal action against Yale in an effort to secure the return of thousands of artifacts Mr. Bingham took to the university. Peru claims the artifacts had been lent to Yale and therefore should have been returned. The threat of legal action is an abrupt turnaround from a recent preliminary understanding between Yale and Peru that appeared to put the parties on the road to resolving the dispute.
Both sides in the case have seized on the revelations about Mr. Berns as supporting evidence.
An aide to Cecilia Bákula, director of the National Institute of Culture in Lima, which manages the Machu Picchu site, said she was unavailable for comment. But in the view of Ms. Mould de Pease, the historian, the authorization given to Mr. Berns shows that Peru had sovereignty over Machu Picchu before Mr. Bingham arrived there.
For Yale, revelations that an earlier adventurer had designs on Incan ruins may reinforce its view that the items removed by Mr. Bingham are neither unique treasures nor critically important artifacts. “It is quite possible that all the treasures were removed by the German, Augusto Berns, many years before Bingham arrived,” said R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer representing Yale.
Complicating matters further, property records indicate that tracts of land including Machu Picchu were repeatedly bought and sold by families in the Cusco area before Mr. Bingham arrived.
“My great-grandfather, Mariano Ignacio Ferro, owned Machu Picchu when Hiram Bingham claimed to have discovered it, and even helped the American find his way there,” said Roxana Abrill Nuñez, a museum curator in Cusco who is waging a high-profile legal battle to be compensated for her family’s loss of Machu Picchu. She claims that the state expropriated the site from her family without payment.
For others here in Cusco, the actions of a German once forgotten to history offer insight into a city that may have been lost and found repeatedly since the Incas abandoned it, even if it took Mr. Bingham’s work to lodge it in the public imagination.
“All I know is that anything was possible in the turbulent years before Bingham made it to Machu Picchu, with others probably arriving even before this German,” said David Ugarte Vega, an anthropologist at the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco.
“What is certain is that the image of Bingham is at last being challenged,” Mr. Ugarte Vega said, “while the descendants of those great builders who assembled Machu Picchu are working as porters for the newest wave of travelers who come to see the site from afar.”

Шутки du jour

После первой брачной ночи...
Он:
- Дорогая, я понял, что я у тебя не первый...
Она (закуривая):
- Да... А я поняла, что и не последний!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Сидит разнополая компания. Выпивают, всем весело, всем хорощо. Тут один
замечает:
- Блин, водка закончилась!
Девушки тревожно переглянулись...

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

США - Сокращение Штатов Америки

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Из SMS сообщений:
- Ты где?
- Здеся.
- Здеся большая! Ты где?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Цитата дня: Экономическая ситуация в настоящее время настолько тяжелая,
что женщины теперь выходят замуж по любви.

NYT: The Dark ages at the Met

Art Review | 'Choir of Angels'
Illuminating the Dark Ages
By ROBERTA SMITH
Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries, and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast, the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase.
These days, if you stand in the right spot in the Great Hall and look down the broad corridor gallery on the right of the stairs, the unmistakable blaze of a tall, slim stained-glass window from 13th-century France glows like a beacon from about a half a football field away. With wattage like that, who can resist medieval art?
The window is one of many new displays in the Met’s deliriously dense, newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300. A fairly extreme makeover, this renovation began with a boldly geometric floor of red slate and black and white marble that duplicates the one that was in place when the Met opened its first building in 1895. The walls are lined with spare new cherry wood vitrines based on ones used by J. P. Morgan, one of the Met’s chief medieval-art patrons. His name appears frequently among the labels for the works inside: the enamels, ivories, bejeweled book covers and metalwork from all over Europe. And above and beyond the vitrines, carved stone sculptures, capitals, reliefs, crucifixes and stained-glass windows continue almost to the ceiling.
This renovation has been accompanied by smaller adjustments and changes in adjacent galleries. The displays in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, which opened in 2000 beside and behind the stairs, have been refined to improve the chronological flow. The Medieval Sculpture Hall, which lies just beyond the new medieval space — where the Met’s popular Christmas tree resides at this time of year — has been startlingly improved with nothing more than new lighting and fresh paint. At the moment the sculpture hall also contains “Choirs of Angels: Italian Painting and Choir Books 1300-1500,” a sumptuous little holiday show that will last into the spring.
In all this spiffing up, little-seen works have emerged from storage; others have come from galleries elsewhere in the museum. A few have arrived from the Cloisters, the Met’s magnificent medieval assemblage in Washington Heights.
These include a relief of the Nativity and Annunciation that was never uncrated after its arrival in the 1940s, and the 12th-century Italian ciborium, or altar canopy, that the Met has owned since 1909. Made from limestone with hardstone and glass inlay, it has spent the last 60 years at the Cloisters. Now it stands at the center of the new medieval gallery like a walk-through crown.
New gifts and loans add substance and delight. Mr. and Mrs. Jaharis are the chief donors of an early-12th-century Byzantine Lectionary, a rare liturgical manuscript believed to have been made for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary is lending a monumental Hebrew prayer book with outsize calligraphy that has a Persian snap.

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Nearby is an enormous cross, probably from 12th-century Armenia and on loan from the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, that country’s capital. Carved in pumicelike basalt, it teems with reliefs suggesting intricate, knotted strap work (or macramé) in at least five patterns. Don’t miss the face of the prophet Matthew peering through a slot beneath the cross as if manning the door at a speakeasy.
The medieval art gallery is the first major renovation of any medieval gallery at the Met in more than half a century — eons, even in the slow-motion time of museums. Even discounting the intoxication of the new, it is hard to think of another gallery in the museum — at least of Western art — where there is more going on historically and aesthetically and on such an even playing field in terms of art mediums.
The brimming, light-flooded presentation has been orchestrated by Peter Barnet, curator in chief of the museum’s medieval art department and the Cloisters, his curators and the museum’s designers. They seem to have wanted to mount a final assault on the notion of the medieval period as backward, antiquated or benighted. This misconception started in the full-of-itself Renaissance, which condescendingly christened the previous era the Dark or Middle Ages. Medieval, as the Enlightenment tagged it, only sharpened the bite.
With an effect that is at once artistic, archaeological and devotional, this gallery recasts medieval art as a mammoth, busy and fast-moving project translating the Holy Scriptures into visual form, making them accessible to largely illiterate populations. It resulted in a free-for-all of constant themes and boundless variations. The stories recur again and again: Jonah and the Whale, Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, the Entombment. (If your knowledge of the Bible is scant, medieval art is an excellent makeup option.)
But there is nothing fixed about the techniques, styles and materials of medieval art. Painting had not yet established its dominance; every medium had its storytelling role. Classicism was not yet the Ideal, but only one of many influences, which included barbaric ornamentation and Persian motifs. And space, not yet locked into one-point perspective, was subject to individual skill and imagination, regardless of medium; ingenious stabs at it abounded.
For an idea of monastic productivity, immerse yourself in the corner devoted to the champlevé enamel crucifixes, reliquaries, candlesticks and much else that issued from the Grandmont monastery near Limoges, France, and set the European standard. For quickness of evolution from the Romanesque to the Gothic phases of medieval art, start with a late-12th-century Spanish-stone capital of Samson fighting the lion, which has the jutting, angular forms of early Modernism. Compare it with “The Betrayal and Arrest of Jesus,” a large relief of strikingly naturalistic struggling figures made in France less than a century later.
In one vitrine a line of small Virgins, mostly with Child, and French, in wood, ivory or gilt and enamel copper, recapitulate the same transition. Some things attract by sheer opulence, like the two gilded-silver Spanish book covers with cabochon jewels and ivory crucifixes, which belong to a bookbinding tradition that, coincidentally, is traced up to the present in an exhibition now on view at the Morgan Library. Other pieces draw you with unexpected resonances. A vitrine devoted entirely to Southern Italian ivories includes a small relief of Christ creating the animals that is surely the DNA strand for Edward Hicks’s many “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings.
In the Medieval Sculpture Hall, the “Choir of Angels” show provides a rare glimpse of gemlike illuminations that were once part of books of religious music and used daily; their ornate initials would adorn a composition’s opening page. Most were cut from these pages long ago, which is why they are often referred to as cuttings. Together they present a thumbnail history of one of the most exciting periods in Italian painting, ranging, for example, from a letter inset with a rendering of the battle of the Maccabees against a nearly vertical pink and red Sienese landscape, to one that contains a suavely detailed, spatially correct scene of Joseph being sold into slavery.
The initials are sometimes a little hard to read. They frequently have an animalist or at least vegetal life of their own and may be further distorted in their roles as proscenium stages. A double-peaked initial containing stacked scenes of Easter is not an M but a stretched A. Sometimes, but not always, the letters relate to the chief characters, as with the elongated P that frames a heart-rending depiction of the martyrdom of St. Peter in rich, dark browns and blues that depart from the generally cheery sunshine palette of these works.
The stories told by the choir book illuminations often echo in the seven large South Netherlandish tapestries that have hung in the sculpture hall since who knows when. The effect of these works under new lighting and against blue-gray walls can be summed up in two words: absolutely spectacular. I could spend a week in front of the early-15th-century Annunciation (first on the left), with its bright, quiltlike tile floor; hallucinatory plant life; finely feathered angel; and, in the foreground, sturdy two-handled blue-and-white jug that most likely came from Italy or Spain.
Mr. Barnet and his team are not quite finished. Over the next month or two they will complete the reinstallation of the two Medieval Treasury galleries that lead from the sculpture hall toward the American Wing. It will be more tweaking than renovation from the floor up, but it will include facing walls inset with stained-glass windows that visitors will pass between, as through a gantlet of color and light.
As part of the Met’s original, central structure, the new Medieval Art gallery has always been a heavily trafficked intersection. It shouldn’t really work as a gallery of sacred art and yet it does. Its many small objects draw you close, away from the bustle, into a realm where craft, faith and narrative were one. The magic of this fusion is alive and well.
“Choir of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300-1500” is on view through April 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine Art and the Gallery for Western European Art from 1050 to 1300 will be open indefinitely.

NYT: Happiness

Strangers May Cheer You Up, Study Says
By PAM BELLUCK
How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all.
And a cheery next-door neighbor has more effect on your happiness than your spouse’s mood.
So says a new study that followed a large group of people for 20 years — happiness is more contagious than previously thought.


 


“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”
In fact, said his co-author, James H. Fowler, an associate professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, their research found that “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”
The researchers analyzed information on the happiness of 4,739 people and their connections with several thousand others — spouses, relatives, close friends, neighbors and co-workers — from 1983 to 2003.
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“It’s extremely important and interesting work,” said Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus psychologist and Nobel laureate at Princeton, who was not involved in the study. Several social scientists and economists praised the data and analysis, but raised possible limitations.
Steven Durlauf, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, questioned whether the study proved that people became happy because of their social contacts or some unrelated reason.
Dr. Kahneman said unless the findings were replicated, he could not accept that a spouse’s happiness had less impact than a next-door neighbor. Dr. Christakis believes that indicates that people take emotional cues from their own gender.
A study also to be published Friday in BMJ, by Ethan Cohen-Cole, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Jason M. Fletcher, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health, criticizes the methodology of the Christakis-Fowler team, saying that it is possible to find what look like social contagion effects with conditions like acne, headaches and height, but that contagion effects go away when researchers factor in environmental factors that friends or neighbors have in common.
“Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects,” the authors say.
An accompanying BMJ editorial about the two studies called the Christakis-Fowler study “groundbreaking,” but said “future work is needed to verify the presence and strength of these associations.”
The team previously published studies concluding that obesity and quitting smoking are socially contagious.
But the happiness study, financed by the National Institute on Aging, is unusual in several ways. Happiness would seem to be “the epitome of an individualistic state,” said John T. Cacioppo, director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, who was not involved in the study.
And what about schadenfreude - pleasure in someone's misery - or good old-fashioned envy when a friend lands a promotion or wins the marathon? “There may be some people who become unhappy when their friends become happy, but we found that more people become happy over all,” Dr. Christakis said.
Professor Cacioppo said that suggested that unconscious signals of well-being packed more zing than conscious feelings of resentment. “I might be jealous of the fact that they won the lottery, but they’re in such a good mood that I walk away feeling happier without even being aware that they were the site for my happiness,” he said.
The subtle transmission of emotion may explain other findings, too. In the obesity and smoking cessation studies, friends were influential even if they lived far away. But the effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby.
A next-door neighbor’s joy increased one’s chance of being happy by 34 percent, but a neighbor down the block had no effect. A friend living half a mile away was good for a 42 percent bounce, but the effect was almost half that for a friend two miles away. A friend in a different community altogether can win an Oscar without making you feel better.
“You have to see them and be in physical and temporal proximity,” Dr. Christakis said.
Body language and emotional signals must matter, said Professor Fowler, adding, “Everybody thought when they came out with videoconferencing that people would stop flying across the country to have meetings, but that didn’t happen. Part of developing trust with another person is being able to take their hand in yours.”
Still, they said, it is not clear if increased communication via e-mail messages and Webcams may eventually lessen the distance effect. In a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling. “That shows that some of our findings are generalizable to the online world,” Dr. Christakis said.
The BMJ study used data from the federal Framingham Heart Study, which began following people in Framingham, Mass., after World War II and ultimately followed their children and grandchildren. Beginning in 1983, participants periodically completed questionnaires on their emotional well-being.
They also listed family members, close friends and workplaces, so researchers could track them over time. Many of those associates were Framingham participants who also completed questionnaires, giving Dr. Christakis and Professor Fowler about 50,000 social ties to analyze. They found that when people changed from unhappy to happy in self-reported responses on a widely used measure of well-being, other people in their social network became happy too.
Sadness was transmitted the same way, but not as reliably as happiness. Professor Cacioppo believes that reflects an evolutionary tendency to “select into circumstances that allow us to stay in a good mood.”
Still, happiness has a shelf life, the researchers found.
“Your happiness affects my happiness only if you’ve become happy in the last year — it’s almost like what have you done for me lately,” Dr. Christakis said. Plus, the bounce you get lasts a year tops. Better if your friends can spread out their happy news, and not, say, all get married the same year.
Another surprising finding was that a joyful coworker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends. Professor Fowler believes inherent competition at work might cancel out a happy colleague’s positive vibes.
The researchers cautioned that social contacts were less important to happiness than someone’s personal circumstances. But the effect of social contacts even three degrees removed — friends of friends of friends — was clear, and also occurred with obesity and quitting smoking. More distant contacts exerted no influence.
And people in the center of social networks were happier than those on the fringes. Being popular was good, especially if friends were popular too.
So should you dump melancholy friends? The authors say no. Better to spread happiness by improving life for people you know.
“This now makes me feel so much more responsible that I know that if I come home in a bad mood I’m not only affecting my wife and son but my son’s best friend or my wife’s mother,” Professor Fowler said. When heading home, “I now intentionally put on my favorite song.”
Still, he said, “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York. That would be dangerous.”

NYT: Thanks, TV!

First Grader in $1 Robbery May Face Expulsion
By YOLANNE ALMANZAR
MIAMI — A first-grade boy who took a table knife to his Pembroke Pines elementary school and used it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money faces possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery, officials said Wednesday.
“We have seen more incidents where students are bringing items that they shouldn’t bring to school,” a Broward County schools spokesman, Keith Bromery, said. “We’re not sure exactly why that’s happening.”
In the last month, an 8-year-old boy took a gun to his elementary school classroom in Fort Lauderdale, and a sophomore at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale was charged in the shooting death of a classmate in a school corridor.
In Pembroke Pines, the 7-year-old first grader approached a 6-year-old in the restroom of Pines Lakes Elementary School last week, threatened him with the knife and took his dollar, the police said. Mr. Bromery described the knife as having a rounded point, the kind that goes with a place setting.
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The 6-year-old suffered a nosebleed during the encounter, but it was not clear whether the knife’s blade drew the blood. His mother reported the incident to school officials on Monday, and they summoned the Pembroke Pines police, who were investigating. They will send their findings to the state attorney’s office for review before any charges are filed.
“There’s some difficulty in this case because you first have to determine if the child knew what he was doing,” a police spokesman, David Golt, said.
If expelled, the boy would be sent to an alternative school where he would receive counseling and treatment, with the possibility of returning to Pines Lakes after an evaluation. Alternative schools, known as educational centers, are part of the Broward County school system and are for children with behavioral problems.
“We don’t expel anyone to the street,” Mr. Bromery said.

Seven conditions for a success

a dream
guts
skills
wits
ties/connections
looks
an ending


from a Korean action movie "An Eye for An Eye" 2008