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Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
中国 I've been very occasionally looking at the Newbie lessons on ChinesePod for the past couple of months, since A White Bear recommended the site. They seem like good lessons and easy to follow. And with Sylvia's Chinese school in recess for the summer, I thought it would be a good chance for us to practice together. So I jumped in today and bought the subscription -- hopefully I will be able to keep up with the lessons. And hopefully, Sylvia will keep being interested in practicing language with me -- we've had some fun with it over the past couple of days.When I initially checked it out, ChinesePod was not working with Firefox, so I had been using clunky Explorer to load the lessons; but as of right now I can use Firefox, which is way faster and less error-prone.
 (Note: for looking up Chinese words, I have found Pristine Lexicon most useful.)
posted evening of June 18th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Check it out! Firefox 3.0, brand new major version of the preferred READIN browser, is available for download.
 Also there is a new Vimperator, which you will need to download for it to run with Firefox 3.
posted evening of June 17th, 2008: Respond
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Man oh man, look what message they're wearing at the Texas Republican Party Convention. What an awful thing.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2008: Respond
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Last night, the first wedding licenses under California's new law were issued. This morning, the first Modesto couple received their license -- they are members of my parents' church, which has a long record of support for gay marriage -- in the mid-80's, Diane Darling, the first out lesbian in the UCC ministry, was the pastor there, and was married to her wife in a church ceremony.
posted afternoon of June 17th, 2008: Respond
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So far (as I begin reading part 2, about the election of '68), Nixonland seems to divide roughly into: - History of the struggle for racial equality, and how Nixon and his conspirators used the unrest to build their party.
- History of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, and how Nixon used the war as a wedge against Johnson.
- History of and speculation about the internal workings of Nixon's various campaigns and about Nixon's personal take on his opponents.
I'm pretty familiar with the Vietnam stuff and am skimming it a bit. I have (as noted below) only a passing familiarity with the racial unrest stuff and am finding that the most interesting part of the book so far. I didn't know much at all about the internal workings of Nixon's campaigns, but I'm having pretty mixed reactions to Perlstein's speculation -- some of it seems facile, some obviously true (and unnecessary), occasionally it is insightful and useful.
posted morning of June 17th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 16th, 2008
Sylvia did pretty well with watching Monsieur Verdoux last night, paying attention to the plot and the characters, giving indications she understood what was going on. She lost interest about a half hour before the end of the movie though. (It is 2 hours long.) Before the feature there was a preview for Encounters at the End of the World; Sylvia asked if that was what I had seen the other night and said she wanted to see it, but at home, "So we could make it softer."
posted morning of June 16th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Here is something I did not know Charlie Chaplin could do: compose excellent scores for a movie soundtrack. He is credited as writer, director, and composer for Monsieur Verdoux; and the music is great. The writing and direction also! Too bad the idea for the movie (which Chaplin bought from Welles) isn't really up to the quality of Chaplin's talent. It seems insubstantial to me, a trifling comedy of manners that Chaplin tries to turn into a fable about capitalism and morality.
posted evening of June 15th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Monsieur Verdoux
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Woo-hoo! My very own day! (Happy Father's Day to those of you who meet the requirements.)
Our family activity for today was going to be a drive down to the shore and playing on the beach; but alas, the weather is not such as to make that work out well. So instead, we're going to take the train into town this afternoon and watch Monsieur Verdoux at the Flim Forum.
posted morning of June 15th, 2008: Respond
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Saturday, June 14th, 2008
I am being continually surprised, as I read Nixonland, at the extent of the racial violence that occurred in America in the early to mid-60's -- and secondarily surprised at myself for being surprised. I am more ignorant of my country's history than I like to think of myself as being. Take for instance the Watts riots -- I have of course heard of these before and had a notion of their importance; but somehow I had assumed they were a concrete event that took place over a week or something at a particular time and place. Come to find out instead that for a period of at least a few years, a large area of Los Angeles was borrderline anarchic and prone to break out in mass violence. Similarly I had no idea of the frequency with which white mobs assembled in Chicago, and for how long that went on. Thanks for schooling me, Mr. Perlstein.
 (And thanks, Edge of the American West bloggers, for giving me inspiration to do some history reading -- I'm finding your this day in history posts fascinating.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings
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 So it was, to be clear up front, not a great movie, certainly not in a class with Herzog's great works. It had a lot of visual beauty, and occasional arresting moments of clarity; but it felt to me like Herzog stumbled aimlessly into these moments, like his heart was not in this movie. Still I would recommend the movie, just for the visuals, and the cute fluffy seals. (The portions of the soundtrack which were recordings of seal grunts were fantastically good; the music portions were hit or miss.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Werner Herzog
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