Great Wall Discovery

Chinese archaeologists have discovered a part of the Great Wall built in the Han Dynasty near the Mongolian border. It's the oldest and northernmost section extant. Story on Yahoo News.

Min Xiao-Fen on MP3

So I wanted to check out Min Xiao-Fen's music after hearing that she collaborated with Bjork. iTunes had Min's album, but it's $11.99 instead of what used to be the standard, $9.99. I decided to shop around, and it ends up eMusic has it. For $9.99 a month (less than the one album on iTunes), you can get 30 DRM-free downloads from eMusic. The selection is pretty limited but I think there's enough to make it worth $9.99 a month--especially if you like indie or other more music. And there's a free trial, so I'm checking it out.
(And the album, Spring, River, Flower, Moon, Night, is very nice. Min is like the Hendrix of the pipa--she really rocks!)

ABC Sets a Date for Lost

Funny that just after I mentioned Lost in a post, an article appears in the New York Times saying that, at the creators' request, the show will end in Spring, 2010.

“We have always envisioned ‘Lost’ as a show with a beginning, middle and end,” Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse said in a statement, which was re leased over the weekend to The Hollywood Reporter and to the rest of the news media on Monday. “By officially announcing exactly when that ending will be, the audience will now have the security of knowing that the story will play out as we’ve intended.”

That will make for six seasons. If they say it was "all a dream" Dallas-style, I will go insane.

"It was all a dream...."

If you watched a TV show for an entire season and then at the beginning of the next season it was revealed that "it was all a dream," how would you feel? Jerked around because it wasn't "real"? Or would you think it was all fictional anyway?
It actually happened with the '70s-'80s show Dallas. An actor whose character had been killed off returned to the show, so they said that season 7 was all a dream.
From a FAQ about the show:

Is it a waste of my time to watch the dream season? Well in many ways yes, it holds no part of the overall plot but there are some wonderful episodes and scenes.

I hope Lost doesn't end up taking some easy way out. (Don't tell me--I'm still watching season three!)

Speaking "Rat"

Printculture's C Bush grew up speaking English with a Rochester/Chicago accent, affectionately called "Rat."

If you aren’t sure what the accent sounds like, you might, the article suggests, recall Detective Sipowicz from NYPD Blue, played by Chicago native Dennis Franz. Or, for a less ethnographically pure, but perhaps easier to recollect example: the beer-toting fans of da Bairs from Saturday Night Live during the 90s.

He talks about the trouble he had adapting once he moved out of "Ratland." He mastered saying "soda" instead of "pop," but he couldn't get "bagel":

Much harder was my mysteriously wrong pronunciation of “bagel,” which I would sometimes have mimicked back at me by friends. It was good-natured fun for them, but genuinely perplexing for me because I just couldn’t hear the difference. Anyone who has studied Chinese knows this experience: “No, silly, it's not not ma. It's ma!” All the difference in the world to those who have ears to hear, but crazy-making to those who don’t. I eventually figured those out too.

"Crazy-making." Love it. I was OK with Mandarin tones, but I don't have the ears for Taiwanese ones at all.

Classics the Easy Way

There are books you want to read, and then there are books you want to have read. For the ones in the latter group, you can now turn to "Compact Editions" published by Orion. TimesOnline has the story of a new line of edited literary classics. Of course, not everyone is happy about the idea of a version of Anna Karenina with 30-40% cut out:

Matthew Crockatt, of the London independent bookshop Crockatt & Powell, poured scorn on the enterprise. “It’s completely ridiculous — a daft idea,” he said.

“How can you edit the classics? I’m afraid reading some of these books is hard work, which is why you have to develop as a reader. If people don’t have time to read Anna Karenina, then fine. But don’t read a shortened version and kid yourself it’s the real thing.”

Interesting. Is there no middle ground between reading the whole thing and "kidding yourself"? What if you are interested in a piece of literature for non-artistic reasons and the gist is enough? Or if you read the version that is not the "real thing," does it spoil forever the prospect of reading the full version? Does that go for every book, or just the ones that are deemed "classics"?

New Bjork Album

Bjork's new album, Volta, comes out Tuesday. It features a collaboration with the Min Xiao-Fen, the pipa player. I haven't heard the album yet, but Min was on Bjork's webcast concert the other night and it was pretty interesting. Check it out here.

(PS That's not a typo--Min spells her name "Xiao-Fen" even though proper Pinyin would be "Xiaofen.")

Four Free OS X Apps for Students

A while back I wrote about how many Princeton students were using Macs now. One great thing about Macs is all the cool little applications that you can get for free. Here are my top four for students:

1. Voodoo Pad Lite. This program is a hassle-free personal wiki maker. I write all my notes in it, and when I type something that already has a page, it automatically makes a link. When I come across something I've covered before in another context, I can just follow the link and review it. You can even export everything to your iPod or, in the full version, to HTML.

2. WriteRoom. When you're writing papers, do you get distracted by your browser, AIM, games, etc.? Turn them all off. WriteRoom is just a blank screen and text--everything else is gone. Concentrate!

3. For a more full-featured word processor, I use NeoOffice. I used to use OpenOffice on my XP machine before I switched, and NeoOffice works just as well. There is an OO port for OS X, but NeoOffice is supposedly more "Mac-like" and easier to install so I went with it instead. Supposedly a native Mac OpenOffice is in the works, but until then NeoOffice is fine. No compatibility issues with MS Office .doc format, and Chinese/Japanese text has been no problem.

4. Quicksilver. What is it? Hard to explain. That's why it took me so long to get on board with it. I heard people say it's an "application launcher," and I thought, "So it will open apps for me? Who cares when you have the dock?" How wrong I was! Quicksilver totally changes the Mac experience. Basically, you can do anything from anywhere. When I need to email a file to classmates, I just call up Quicksilver, type in the first few letters of the file name, tab, type a few letters of "email," tab again, and type the email address. It only takes a few keystrokes--no navigation through folders, no opening applications. It's also great with iTunes while studying. Use the party shuffle, then while you're studying add songs to it with just a few keystrokes. You don't have to leave your word processor while you're writing to go mess around in iTunes when you think of a song you want to hear. You have to play with it to really see how it works. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders describes Quicksilver as having a grammar--you choose a subject (a file, for example), a verb (such as "email"), and, if needed, an object ("yourfriend@email.edu"). Apple really should buy this and incorporate it into the OS.

Got any more? (I'd love to hear about a good flashcard-type thing for memorizing vocabulary words, etc.)