And the Fan Band Played On....

I was watching the 2010 World Cup soccer  match between Germany and Australia on television and was terribly distracted by this buzzing noise, like some 10, 000 bees.  I had to mute the set, turn on closed captioning and suffer a time delay in the commentary.  I had begun to think the noise was in my head.  I couldn't see any organized kazoo blowing among the spectators, but turns out I was not looking for vuvuzelas. The vuvuzela , which is made to replicate the call of an elephant, comes across as a drone on television. In real life, though, the noise reaches 144 decibels, equivalent to the sound made by a passenger jet.

Because the vuvuzelas create a wall of sound,  there has been little of the usual chanting, singing and roaring that are a staple of soccer games everywhere else in the world.  TV viewers are getting increasingly annoyed and want them banned.  However,  FIFA President Sepp Blatter refuses to play ball, so to speak.  "I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound," Blatter said in a Twitter post. "I don't see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country."  So that's that.

Fans in South Africa seem to be having a great time! Everybody here has the vuvu.

 

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/6/11/1276279824678/World-Cup-2010-spectators-006.jpg

Today, the street -- tomorrow, the world.

Learned to bicycle three weeks ago, in my 49th year.  Of all my accomplishments (am not telling), that's the one I am proudest of.  I felt cheated somehow, that no one bothered to teach me before.  Before Malini, that is.  She came armed with knee guards, elbow guards and wrist guards.  And I borrowed Mukunda's helmet.  Malini held the bike, ran alongside me, and what did I do?  I ran over her foot a couple of times.  I decided then to learn quickly, to avoid further accidents.  The hardest thing about cycling is not to zig-zag.  I need the entire width of the street to myself.  I still cannot stop wobbling or make turns. I had one major fall a week ago when I took my right hand off the handlebar to scratch my nose.  The bicycle careened to the left and I fell quite comprehensively in an undignified heap in the middle of the street.  This morning I had to share the street with a man walking a dog towards me.  I came to a stop 10 yards away and waited for him to pass by which took about 15 minutes because the dog was curious and stopped to look at my ankles.  The man gave me a strange look, so I had to explain to him that I was a new cyclist.  He understood the entire situation instantly, gave me some advice about the brakes and moved on leaving the street free and clear once more.

Kowloon Walled City

pictures from: http://www.dirjournal.com/info/abandoned-places-in-the-world/

The Kowloon Walled City park  is a beautiful, green, serene park with waterfalls and fountains right at the edge of Hong Kong city, China.  It is difficult to imagine that  the park was once this.

This is an aerial view of the Kowloon Walled City before its demolition in 1993.  A pulsating, vibrant community, in a no-man's land  governed neither by the Chinese nor the British, it grew cancerous and had to be destroyed.  It boasted a chequered history.  Originally, it was a fortress built by the Chinese as a military outpost.  For many years soldiers and their families lived within the walled city and civilians set up businesses to serve them.  The soldiers  abandoned  the fortress when the British occupied Hong Kong, but the civilians continued their life there .  The Japanese conquered the territory in World War II, and they broke down the walls of the fortress to extend their airstrips.  When they left in 1945 at the end of the war, squatters occupied the area and the city grew even more rapidly.

Refugees from the Communist China settled here, so did Hong Kong's organized crime syndicate, the  Triads. ''Driven from mainland China, the Triads set up shop and start living like kings, while Hong Kong’s upper crust comes in for the sex, drugs and gambling.'' says Coilhouse Magazine + Blog  Over time, 500 buildings of uniform height, each 12 to 14 stories high, were built on an area approximately 200m X 150m so close together that no light could penetrate the city. Its nickname was Hak Nam--the City of Darkness and it was home to over 35,000 inhabitants making it one of the most densely populated places in the world.

 "The health authorities kept away. So the City just developed its own legion of ad-hoc clinics and dental surgeons. In the absence of telephone and utilities companies, the City’s inhabitants just by-wired their own electricity and connections. The same nick-it-yourself approach applied to plumbing and water. As a result, a tangled network of pipes and wiring dripped and hissed above the city’s dark, dank walkways. Cheap amenities for the residents, and, considering the extremely limited access, either in or out of the compound — a potentially catastrophic fire-hazard. " (Darran Anderson, FLOTSAM & JETSAM, 5/19/2009)

Before the walled city was demolished, photographers and journalists were allowed to wander in it freely and these pictures taken by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot are the reason for this post. For more  pictures of the daily life in this city visit the website http://www.architonic.com/ntsht/-harmonious-anarchy-revisiting-hak-nam-hong-kong-s-slum-city/7000463

 

Auf wiedersehen to Auschwitz? Hopefully.

Wed May 19, 12:31 pm ET

WARSAW (Reuters) – The former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, with its museum exhibits, was in danger of flooding Wednesday following days of heavy rain that have brought devastation to southern Poland....

The open-air site is divided into two sections covering a combined territory of more than 200 hectares (500 acres) and includes some 155 buildings, the gas chambers, 300 ruined facilities and hundreds of thousands of personal items...

"We are continuing actions aimed at safeguarding the area of ... Auschwitz II-Birkenau," the museum authorities said in a statement.

"Overnight, high water levels on the Vistula ... broke the security barriers," the statement added. "The flood waters neared the western end of the site, threatening to inundate it as well as nearby villages."

I don't see the loss of Auschwitz as a great calamity.  The place has been a symbol of hatred, persecution, of insanity.  It is hardly a Mecca for the families of the victims, but it could be an inspiration to future madmen.  I think a memorial to the victims at that site would be far more appropriate than to keep hatred, anger and bitterness alive by keeping Auschwitz alive.  Maybe God is using nature's fury to tell us to move on.

"My Life and Hard Times" by James Thurber

It's really difficult to finish James Thurber's books.  Almost impossible to read even one chapter at a single sitting.  By the end of the first paragraph, I am laughing so hard I just cannot continue.  "My Life and Hard Times" was my Mothers Day gift and it is such a treasure. 

The book was written by a middle-aged Thurber but of events that  took place before he was 25.  "The sharp edges of old reticences are softened in the autobiographer by the passing of time--a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago, but the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment", he explains. Thurber had the unique ability to bring out the humor in what must have been the most painful situations in his young life. The years at Ohio State University seem to be tinged with disappointment because that was when he was made painfully aware of his handicap--he just did not have great eyesight. At age 7, he had lost one eye while playing "William Tell" with arrows and the other through "sympathetic opthalmia". He couldn't look through microscopes, he could not participate in gym and he could not enlist in the army.  Although he recalls with amusement his weekly visits to the draft board medical examiners, the reader can detect a growing disappointment  in him as he kept getting rejected and a subsequent relief when the armistice was called.

Thurber's early life was a revolving door to bewildering eccentrics.  I wonder how much he laughed reminiscing about the Get-Ready Man "a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. 'Get ready! Get read-y!' he would bellow, 'The Worllld is coming to an End!'"  Somehow the man got mixed up with a production of "King Lear" and while the protagonist wandered blindly through a storm with Edgar, the Get Ready man added to the mayhem..King Lear would have lent a helping hand to fulfil GRM's dire predictions.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!  (King Lear, Act III, scene ii)

I think the play would have lost its appeal once the old gentleman was ejected.


Thurber was surrounded by relatives--aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who cared for him and were an important part of his childhood. He recalls their eccentricities with affection and the laughter he evokes is never unkind.  There was this cousin Briggs who was afraid he would stop breathing if he went to sleep, and so he wanted to set his alarm clock to ring every hour.  Aunt Melissa Beall who was born on South High Street and was married on South High Street had a premonition she would die there as well.  Aunt Sarah Shoaf had a fear of burglars blowing chloroform under her door.  She would stack up her valuables every night outside her bedroom with a note telling the prospective burglar not to use chloroform.  His grandfather lived with Thurber; his not so lucid moments kept the family on its toes. The manner in which he was protected endears the readers to this lovely family. Nobody was ill-tempered or stubborn--they were willing to be led, to listen to reason.  To look on the brighter side of things was a lesson well learnt by Thurber and in a way, that is what he implores (in his chatty, casual style) his readers to do. Thurber wrote as though he were absent-minded. He took these little detours (cameos of his family)  in the middle of a story and rejoined it with an apology for straying.  It is all this 'straying' that gives us a wide-angled view of his world and his comic genius.

Iron Man 2

I saw Iron Man 2 this weekend.  I give it a 3 star rating out of 5.  Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) was cute, as usual, but the rest of the movie was hopeless.  Villain Ivan whatsit (Mickey Rourke)--a big disappointment.  Why do the bad guys have to look so ugly?  Granted he was in hiding but this guy is building something complicated that is sure to destroy the world and he must have shopped for the ingredients.  He cannot find a comb? How did he get the gold to put between his teeth anyway?  He didn't have gold teeth--his regular teeth had a sort of gold border to them.  I looked carefully.

What was wrong with the movie was that the pièce de résistance was introduced too early --the main gadget, the electrical whips that Tony Stark had to battle against made its appearance in the second scene.  The movie could have started with minor inventions that fail, and then

voilà

bring this up after a lot of tinkering MacGyver style.  But no, we saw them on the Monaco race track and then it was ho-hum when they were brought back at the end of the movie.

The Iron Man 2's take off (for flight) was a curious exercise.  He would keep his arms straight and stiff by the side with the palms horizontal and do an utterly fairy dance before the boosters whatever launched him into space.  What was that about? And Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), can the name be more spy-like, is quite comical with her choreographed fight scenes.  After punching out each guy she would pause to give a Charlie's Angels kind of pose.

This movie is a lesson in you cannot have too much of a good thing. Hundreds and thousands of these Iron Men invade the screen towards the end only to die in the Unisphere Globe in Flushing, Queens NY. Built for a World Fair, the globe remains a symbol of creativity.

Why are superheroes such lonely, misunderstood people?  Tony Stark was no exception.  He felt his dad denied him his love and thank goodness Stark Sr. always had his video camera focused on him--we could prove junior wrong right away and in this movie without having to drag on this theme to the sequel.  Anyway, at least this movie had its brilliant flashes of humor which is why I gave it 3 out of 5.

Who the heck was this Nick (Samuel Jackson)  guy? Turns out, there was a scene at the end of the credits of the first movie where they introduced him?  I wish someone had told me that.  I was smarter this time.  I sat till the end of the movie and sure enough there was this little extra scene which was clear as mud. But that is for Iron Man 3.

Math Help-- ICoachMath

For parents of kids in K-12 grades who need (extra) coaching in Math, help is at hand.  Click on this link http://www.icoachmath.com/home.aspx

Icoachmath is a product of High Points Learning, Inc. and this is what they have to say for themselves:

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HPL focuses on each state's curriculum standard and helps students achieve high score in state exams (CRCT, PACT, HSAP, PSSA, CSAP, KCCP etc.), to help schools meet and exceed Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Requirements.
HPL suite of programs including HighPoints Math, HighPoints Score, iCoachMath, and HighPoints SAT, provide an Online platform to empower K-12 schools, teachers, learners and parents to proactively prevent low test scores through immediate intervention and prescriptions for success in Math education.

I found that repetitive exercises are the best way to learn Math. Icoachmath has an exhaustive store of challenges for children.