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At the first glance it's not the woman, who happened to be the legendary Coco Chanel who caught my eye. What mesmerized me was the impressive collection of books that is the backdrop of this photo. Somehow the books give the photo a lot more depth and a majestic aura around the fashion icon. I really love the photo a lot. What books can do in this photo is something that our e-book can never do. I still haven't been able to read a book on any of my Kindle Fire from start to finish. I however had watched a lot of movies and TV dramas on it:)
Having read the novel, this movie is a huge disappointment. I wonder how much participation does the author have in the making of this movie. From scenery to the plots to the casts, this movie is a far cry from the epic romance it is adapted from. The cattle drive in the movie is so lame and boring. When I read the book, I was seeing the epic cattle drive with lots and lots of cows and over a dozen cowboys riding their horses with Willa and her sisters against a majestic scene. The book gave me an image of the stunning horsemanship of Willa, Ben and other cowboys. But the movie is so watered down with just a small gang of cows mooing in the background and a Willa who looks like she was never on horseback much.
I have a feeling that neither the director nor the main cast members read the novel. It seems as if they only spent some time looking at the screenplay and just shot as they read on.
If I were the author, I would not let them make such a poor adaption of my novel. Willa and Ben totally have no chemistry in the movie, let alone passion. They aren't into the characters and they are so detached and remote emotionally. They are like reading the scripts in a rehearsal. They don't look like Willa and Ben at all, and they certainly don't look like cowboy or cowgirl. They just don't have that rancher vibe.
If it's up to me, I would cast Ben Affleck as Ben:
Jennifer Garner as Willa:
If they can't get the big stars, they should at least try to get actor and actress that have similar vibe. The Willa in the movie is too meaty on the face and build so she doesn't look like the Willa that is described in the book.
According to the Associated Press, a woman walked into a Los Angeles-area Barnes & Nobel looking for books and came out with a baby instead. I wonder what book the mother was intending to get when she visited the bookstore at such late stage of her pregnancy and at such hour of the evening? Anyway, congrats to both the mom and the baby!
I found this video because I was in a really lousy mood after coming back from my errands. I was so annoyed by those trashy and rude people who made my morning miserable. I came home and I started going onto the internet wanting to know why there were so many trashy and cruel people, then I stumbled upon this video about a dog and a seemingly autistic kid with down syndrome. Now I totally have this heart warming feeling, feel at peace, grateful and even inspired. As if, God is somehow showing me a message.
The above painting is called "The Lady With an Ermine", it was painted by one of the world's best painters in history, Leonardo da Vinci in 1490. To me, the title of this painting should be: "The Lady With an Ermine and a Big Ungly Hand".
I had never saw this painting or heard about this painting until I looked up Leonardo da Vinci on the internet. The reason that I looked him up was because I read this very interesting novel a while back from Nora Roberts in which she wrote extensively about his works and developed around them one of the most fascinating romantic suspense I had ever read.
Reading Leonardo da Vinci's works in Nora Roberts' fiction is quite different from actually seeing it in my own eyes. At a glance, this can just be a painting of a woman from long time ago that most of my generation today find boring, weird looking. It's the sort of painting that most of my generation don't care about. But having read Nora Robert's entertaining fiction, the heroine's appreciation for ancient arts has rubbed a little on me and I can't help wondering:
Just who is this woman in the painting? Why is the woman's hand in the painting so big and why does it seem not quite proportional to the body? Was it because the painter at the time had yet to master the skill of projecting proportion on the canvas? Was it the painter's mistake? Or did the painter have some kind of perceptive impairment that caused him to paint this disproportionate big hand on a woman? Why does her hand look so coarse and ugly? Was it because she had to do a lot of heavy duty manual work? Why is the woman looking side way? Under what circumstances was she painted? Why is she holding an Ermine? What is she really thinking about? Most importantly, what's her love life like? What did she think when she looked at herself in this painting?
May be I have watched the TV series Downton Abbey and love it too much, I just don't feel much about this book that I am currently reading after I had finished Part 1, which mainly describes scenes that are familiar to what I had seen in the TV series. The ironing of the Times was amazing to me because it was the first time when I knew of such a practice when I watched the 1st episode of the TV series. Of course this book was published back in 2006 which also talked about the same practice.
Before Downton Abbey, there was the TV show from long time before I was born called "Upstairs Downstairs", which has the same periodic setting, and I believe it's the original that tells the story on the relationships among servants, among masters, between servants and masters, within an aristocratic household in England?
A lot of people called this book that I am reading a page turner, but so far, I feel the pace is somewhat slow and I am not motivated to turn the pages fast enough. I'm not sure why everything in Part 1 of this book has appeared to be nothing special to me so far. The characters so far aren't too interesting or special. May be I would have felt more intrigued if I had not watched Downton Abby on TV?
I am hoping Part 2 of this book will get better, and may be in Part 2, the characters will begin to reveal something intriguing about themselves... The writing and the use of the English words are great and impressive though. Lots of the contemporary American writers can't write like this. I just hope the story will become more interesting to keep me turning the pages.... Right now I have to put it aside for a while because I am feeling a little bored...and my ADD is beginning to act up....
I really love this poem from this book that I recently read. I just have to share it with all of you who love reading romance novels. All it takes is a memorable melody to make it a great country song. Too bad I don't know how to play the guitar...
***************************************************************************
After the victory and the parade,
After the hometown band has played,
After the cheers and four long years,
Can we, at last, break free of our fears?
After the bombs and cannonade,
After the bravery you displayed,
After the pain and wounds that bled,
Can you face with me what lies ahead?
I stand and I wait and I long for a sign.
The love you once gave, will it sill be mine?
Can we recapture the passion mislaid?
Will you come back to me, after the parade?
Today, I found another of my favorite bookstore closed permanently. I was just there at this Japanese bookstore two weeks ago and I bought a Japanese fashion magazine and a knitting book. I can't believe today when I went there, it was empty with a notice of its permanent close. This bookstore is nestled inside a very popular Japanese supermarket. This Japanese bookstore is either a stop for people after their grocery shopping or people would go there to buy books and then do their grocery shopping after. Location is obviously not the problem.
Anyway, it's another heart break within a week to lose another bookstore. Did you find any bookstore in your neighborhood closing lately? If you did, please email your thoughts to us and we will send you a gift in return when we post it here on this blog.
Address: 3832 W Sepulveda Blvd, Torrance, CA 90505
Phone:(310) 375-3303
Closed Permanently
Address: 3614 E Pacific Coast Hwy, Torrance, CA 90505 Phone: (310) 373-5553 Hours: Forever Closed For Business
It's always discouraging for me to see that small businesses can just disappear in a brink. I bought a few books there back in July 2013 and today when I went back, I found the space completely empty with for rent signs on the window.
Now, there is one less bookstore in Southern California after Borders closed its mega store within less than a mile back in 2011. It's really sad.
What about you, do you feel sad if you see a neighborhood bookstore goes out of business?
My American friends always asked me if I loved the book "Snowflower & The Secret Fan", I said no because it was the same old westernized fiction of the same old boring feet binding story.
I don't know why Westerners always have this fixation about Chinese women or Asian women being weak, suppressed and passive. Examples of strong and ambitious women are numerous throughout the history in Asia. Above is a drama about the first female ruler in Korea over 1500 years ago. The history about the 2 female characters are real, Princess Mishil, an ambitious and influential female politician who obtained her princess title by being the concubine of a series of Kings and Princess Deokman, the daughter of a King whom Princess Mishil put to the throne. Determined to break Princess Mishil's control over the emperor and the royal family, Princess Deomkman later became the first female emperor in Korea, defying the centuries old succession rule and the social status of the kingdom. The TV series is based on the history of these two women and is about their love of their country. It's about the competition of two women who wanted to possess the country for their very different dreams and ambitions. As a Chinese, I learnt a lot about Korea's culture by watching this dramatization of a piece of Korean ancient history. I learnt that there were 3 nations back then and that it was not unusual for women from the royal family and nobility to marry more than 1 husband and to bear children with several husbands... I learnt that China's Tang dynasty later also had its first female emperor about one generation later.. I wonder if the Korean Queen was the inspiration.
This would have been a great historical novel in Asian theme. It depicts the desire of power and love of 2 Asian women, and their dreams and hope. Without one of the women, there wouldn't be the other, and yet with one of them, there can't be another. The nation would be lost without these women and history would be re-written. This piece of Korean history is so fascinating that I just have to share the theme song and the MTV of the dramatized TV series....and I have to say no great historical novel so far, can beat this TV series ...Queen Elizabeth's story became boring, compared to this....These two ladies in ancient Korea exercised tremendous courage, wit, and fought their life long battle for their dreams with great grace. They didn't submit to their destinies, but rather they were determined to make destinies and to make history. Remarkable! On the other hand, "Snowflower & the Secret Fan" is simple minded, one dimensional story that uplifted Snowflower's poor background by mere marriage, which doesn't make sense to me at all. Rich people would never marry poor farm girl in that era. If a poor farm girl were to married into a wealthy family and defy all the rules that banned it, then lots of plotting and scheming had to be done... But only Chinese women would know how to fight and defy such rules and certainly not by sitting there hoping they got the right birthdays...this is why a historical novel written by a westerner normally doesn't convince.
We had a brunch for our book club today. What better way to enjoy our book club meeting by having the same brunch as the characters of this book that we are reading:
"The Bamiyan Buddhas were shockingly dynamited in February of 2001, after inhabiting their niches for almost fifteen hundred years. They had been the largest examples of standing /Buddha carvings in the world and had been designated by UNESCO, the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, as a World Heritage site. Now they lay in a pile of rubble." quoted from page 257 of this book.
Above are photos of one of the Bamiyan Buddhas before and after its destruction by Taliban. I never knew about this until now that I'm reading this book....
I was in Hong Kong on 12/31/2011 celebrating New Year's Eve, and it was much more breath taking in live than watching this on video. This annual countdown makes the drop of the ball in New York kind of lame.
I am recently reading the book "Crash Proof" which really answers a lot of my questions. I'm here in America for college and staying with my cousins, while working part-time for them on this blog and their other websites. I haven't been in the U.S. for too long but I do realize that things here aren't what I imagined them to be before I came. The first thing I noticed is the big chunk of money that was taken out of my first paycheck by the U.S. and California governments. The second thing I noticed was that everything I bought, I paid about 9.75% sales tax. Then when I got my i-phone bill and utilities bills, I saw a lot of taxes added to each one of them also. Even without counting the taxes on everything I buy or consume, everything is just more expensive than Hong Kong. In here, I've learnt that I have less take home cash (after the governments took away their shares), but I have to pay sales tax with the little cash I have, and then everything is more expensive in the U.S. than Hong Kong even before the taxes. My hair cut and coloring today costs me $132. I get the same hair cut and treatment in Hong Kong for more than 50% less money. Also, I found out that holidays and New Year in the USA are pretty boring. This is why I went back to Hong Kong last Christmas to visit my folks and did the New Year count down there instead. After college, I will definitely return to Hong Kong, for Hong Kong is consistently ranked #1 in the world in terms of economic freedom, which means less government control on my income and property and more money in my purse that can support a higher quality of life. In America, every citizen has the privilege to vote for their president and governors, whereas we can't vote directly for our Chief Executive of Hong Kong. But what good does the freedom to vote do to the citizens when the majority of people consistently vote for government officials who keep digging into my wallets? On the other hand, the Chief Executive in Hong Kong was voted by elite citizens of the city, (yes, only the very accomplished citizens can vote for the chief there) who are usually more educated and more sensible. Singapore works in similar way. To me, I will go for freedom to keep my money instead of the freedom to cast a vote in a voting booth. I highly recommend this book "Crash Proof", because it's very educational and informative about what goes wrong with the economy in America. For every $10K one withdraws from the bank in the USA, there are reports to be filed and the bank has to do extra paper work.... We don't have to do that in Hong Kong, anyone can withdraw as much money as they have in their bank accounts and the government won't ask a question. Now, this is the freedom I want. Property taxes are also way much lower there. With so little taxes, one might think that, "well, there must be a lot of "have-nots" in Hong Kong who have no government help...." Well, unemployment rate is 3.4% there and homeless people are very very rare. Crime rate is very low and there is no ghetto in Hong Kong. The strange thing is, without the government obsessing about uplifting the poor through taxing others, the dynamics of a free economy ends up creating more wealth, saving and employment opportunities for everybody who are productive, which in turn reduces poverty and the "poor class" altogether.
I am currently reading the book,"Confessions of a Public Speaker". The author talks about how mistakes happen all the time even with the most experienced public speakers. The good news is the audience in general never cared or noticed any of such mistakes that the public speakers themselves obsessed about. What is considered to be a disastrous mistake during a speech is often the drama in the speakers' own mind. The following is a video of the author showing himself delivering a talk that he considered to have a bad start, a disaster where some slides were missing, where he was making mistakes and he was performing poorly. But just like the author said in the first chapter of his book; I, as an audience, don't care or notice that the talk was disastrous at all.
I spent my entire day yesterday in Borders looking for closing deals. I will go back again because I just found a couple $5 coupons in my closet drawers that are going to expire on 11/31/2011. I don't think there will be anymore Borders store by then so I better use them now. As Borders' premium club member, I can't express in words how sad I feel about the closing of this bookstore chain. Every time I visited Borders, I ended up spending more than 2 hours there. I was never just browsing. Most of the books in my bookshelf are bought from this store. Yesterday when I was walking past the vacated cafe in Borders, I was flooded with memories of my first dates, my bookclub discussions, my knitting workshops with my friends, etc, that took place in various Borders locations. Because of Borders, I had discovered and fallen in love with books and magazines I never knew existed, that I would never have sought them out if I never went to Borders.
I remember when I first came to America, the only place I knew how to get there independently was Borders. It's not just a bookstore to me, it's a place which introduced me to the American way of life and a place in a foreign country where I felt comfortable, where I felt I belonged. It's a place where I met some of my American friends. Borders helped me relieve my homesickness because the books and the environment there just distracted me. It offered me a place to hang out when I had nobody and knew nowhere to go to. Whenever I felt bored, I unconsciously drove to Borders. I tried the public libraries but it just never felt the same, the library shelves are always musky and eerie compared to Borders's book aisles. The vibe in the library made me feel even more depressed and lonely when I was alone. Borders made me feel upbeat and cheerful even when I was alone.
It's just sad beyond words that this bookstore chain is going to disappear completely. This is another example where bad management can destroy a good company and flush shareholder value down into the toilet. I don't think the business model of a brick and mortar bookstore is the problem, I think it's the fault of their management's inability to control cost and capitalize on Borders' inherent value to consumers. I still believe no website or e-reader (and I have 3, my ipad, iphone, netbook pc) can really replace the physical presence of a bookstore. I think brick and mortar bookstore can still be run as a profitable business. It just takes a capable management to do so. May be I am just a delusional bookstore fanatic who is in denial with the ever expanding world wide web that is going to bind my life closer and closer to an LED screen.
So, how do you feel about a world without bookstores? Email us your exclusive opinion, fill-in your email address in the following signup form and receive a 10% discount coupon from Old Navy when we publish your opinion on this blog. (good for use until 12/31/11 and is perfect for your winter shopping.)
When I was a kid, whenever my mom needed to work in the kitchen for our dinners, she put on Karaoke to keep me busy. The following sing-along is the Chinese people's rendition of Janet Jackson's "Love Will Never Do Without You". It was one of my favorite Karaoke songs from my childhood. Today, to end our bookclub meeting this month, I put this on our TV and we sang this together to conclude our meeting... This is a good way to learn to speak Cantonese, just watch the screen and mimmic the sound, it's fun:) Translation of the lyric is underneath the video.
I believe the world will become more beautiful，I believe all wars will end one day. I believe there is justice from sea to sea, I believe all these timeless philosophies of love.
It's like me strongly believing that love is the best, it's like you truly believing in me. Do you know that I believe in you also? Yeah, I'll always believe in you, yeah.
I believe one day I will see, everybody in the world holding hands and dancing together. I believe there will be love from sea to sea, I believe tomorrow will be better. It's like me strongly believing that there is nothing comparable to love, it's like believing that no one can isolate freedom. Woo Woo.
Do Do Do Do Do Do Do， It's like me believing in myself，strongly believing in you. It's like me believing in myself, strongly believing in the truth of love. The truth of love，is just like you, dancing excitingly around me. The truth of love.
I believe the world will become more beautiful，I believe all wars will end one day. I believe there is justice from sea to sea, I believe all these timeless philosophies of love.
It's like me strongly believing that love is the best, it's like you truly believing in me. Do you know that I believe in you also? Yeah, I'll always believe in you, yeah.
I believe in Peace, I believe in Kindness, I believe in Peace, I believe in Kindness,
It's like me believing in myself，strongly believing in the one I like. It's like me believing in myself, completely believing in the truth of love. Say Go Sally Go Sally Go Say Al Say Al
It's like me believing in myself，strongly believing in the one I like. It's like me believing in myself, completely believing in the truth of love. It's like me believing in myself，strongly believing in you. It's like me believing in myself, strongly believing in the truth of love
I believe in Peace, I believe in Kindness, I believe in Peace, I believe in Kindness,
When I was a very young kid in elementary school in Hong Kong, I was hooked up with reading Japanese comic Books. I got interested in the Japanese comic books because I was a big fan of watching Japanese cartoons. I learnt about this book after I watched its TV series and became a fan. Besides cartoons from America, kids in Asia (now even in China) watched a lot of cartoons from Japan. The Japanese cartoons surpass the American ones to be the favorites among kids in Asia because they're just so much more creative and compelling in terms of plots and stories. The premise of the story is about a princess from another planet who was sent here to earth by her Queen Mother 1000 years ago to rule an underground empire her predecessors had built deep under the earth. The empire served as a base where her people from her planet conducted studies on the earth and prepared for the earth's ultimate demise (it's like the preparation involved in Noah's Ark, collecting sample of everthing ).
The princess assumed two identities. The Queen of the super high-tech colony underneath the earth that existed in parallell to the human civilizations on the surface of the earth, and a daugther of the owner of a sushi restaurant who worked as a research assistant in a space center in 1997. Her parents at the little sushi restaurant were actually not her parents and their experience of giving birth to her and raising her was all planted on their brains by technology. They called it memory transplant. Those memories were actually created using memories of another Japanese couple who actually had a daugther.... ( I only found this out in later episodes when a series of events that led to the revelation of the true indentity of a beautiful sushi girl who got parents that I always thought were too different from their daughther. At the beginning, I just couldn't understand why the queen's parents on earth didn't seem to know that their daughter was an alien from out of space.)
Anyway, this girl had actually been living on this planet earth for 1000 years. Every 1000 years, her Queen Mother from her home planet would send a different princess to the earth (her other sisters). Throughout the 1000 years term, the princesses took up different cover-up identities, from Egyptian queen to Chinese princess to a modern day sushi girl in Japan. This is because the host families only had a life span of decades, meanwhile each queen had to live on earth for a thousand years until a new queen was sent to take over. All the pains in bidding goodbye to her host families due to death impacted this "1000 years" Queen and gave her a lot of compassion with the humans and ultimately a strong emotional attachment to the earth.... The story and plots are really twisty. Eventually, she had to decide whether she would choose her home planet or the earth, and it's not just a personal preference, her decision would force her to choose either the survival of her home planet or that of the planet earth where she had spent 1000 years living in. Her planet was predicted to be on its course to crash into the earth from thousands and thousands of years ago. It was due to the magnetic force change of the universe that altered the track of her planet. With that knowledge, her queen mother sent her daugthers to the earth, to study it and to document everything there only because she knew that by the time when their planet crashed into the earth, the earth and everything on it would be totally destroyed and burnt to dust. Her mother's goal was to collect as much memorabilia from the earth as possible for their own research interest (from the aspect of culture, language, history, and the earth's smartest scientists, etc etc) and built documenation about their observation of the earth, its civilizations, and the human beings from their very beginning to the very end, before they were completely destoryed by the ultimate collision. Meanwhile, this queen's planet was so much more advanced in techology and science that their planet had this invincible shield that would close around the planet and completely protected it from the impact of collison. This protective shield actually would intensify the collision and therefore magnify the damage to the earth. The naked earth on the other hand would crash and burn and eplode into space dust. There were a few options that were explored during the TV series to minimze destruction of the earth and to save the human beings. But all of them involved her home planet to share certain casualties with the earth...which her Queen Mother would not allow. Her queen mother was headstrong that, "hell with the earth, we will crash with them, but we won't have a dent....and since the primitive humans can't figure out a way to save themselves, it's none of our business."
As the paths of the two planets came closer together, the earth was experiencing lots of natural diasters and climate change. There were a lot of chaos among governments who couldn't come to a consensus of what to do and which people should they let to board the space ships they were building with the help of this alien queen (this is the part where the movie 2012 probably copied from this Japanese cartoon). There are lots of great stories in every episode and it just kept building audience's curosity and also answering their questions from watching the previous episodes. (I think cartoons like this just made us smarter...cause it kept us thinking) The series was so good. It was not predictable at all. The now popular "Twilight" series is totally lame compared to this one. Below is the English version MTV of this all time favorite cartoon TV series in Japan and a lot of countries, (except the U.S.). I first watched it in 1983. I was very young then but I was able to recite all the scripts the next day when I played with my Barbie and dressed her up as the "1000 years queen".
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