User Comments - tageimugei

Posted on: 禅的故事

In the supplementary section of the vocab, the pinyin for 坐禅 is erroneously written as "dǎzuò". Fortunately, the recording gets it right as "zuo4 chan2".

Posted on: 土葬和火化

Apparently it is possible to die from holding in your pee too long:

"On January 12, 2007, Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman and a mother of 3, from Rancho Cordova, California, was found dead in her home by her mother, hours after trying to win one of Nintendo's Wii game consoles. KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating. A nurse actually called the radio station to warn them about the danger in which they were putting people, but the disc jockeys were less than impressed. Lucy Davidson, the winner of the contest, was severely sickened while picking up her prize. Civil charges against the radio station were filed by Jennifer's family,[22] and the family was eventually awarded $16.5 million in the ensuing wrongful death lawsuit.[23] The FCC has launched its own investigation to determine if the station violated the terms of its operating license."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication#Notable_cases

Posted on: 日本核危机

Southern Comfort is a fruit, spice and whiskey flavoured liqueur from New Orleans. I'm not all that fond of it myself. I'd much prefer an Irish whiskey, scotch or some cold nigorizake from Kyoto.

Posted on: 日本核危机

I could be mistaken, but from his/her profile and comments made in this thread, it would seem that Southern Chinese Comfort is not Chinese, but rather an American whose family originally came from Ukraine.

What I found most bizarre about the comments made by Southern Chinese Comfort was the statement about how abortions were destroying both Japanese and Ukranian society, and that the nuclear disasters were merely hastening the process... As such,, I didn't really detect a racist tone in the remarks, but rather a disquieting religious undercurrent.

Ironically, my guess is that abortions and infanticide are much more common in China than in Japan.

Perhaps Southern Chinese Comfort had been imbibing a little too much Southern Comfort at the time those comments were written? ;-)

Posted on: 日本核危机

"One of the most interesting things to note that there was virtually no outrage against Japan in China until the 1980s - prior to that, the Chinese govt endorsed the Japanese govt's myth that aggression in WWII was caused by a small military clique, a falsehood that both fit communist ideology (evil capitalists fooling the innocent mass of workers) and helped gain diplomatic recognition from Japan."

Thanks for posting the link. Very interesting that. Unfortunately, those that would most benefit from such information are unlikely to avail themselves of the opportunity.

But cheers for trying.

Posted on: 日本核危机

"we really don't need links to those wiki articles. You're not telling us anything new. "

I would agree with you that the links probably aren't appropriate here.

However, I would disagree with you when you say that they don't tell many of us anything new.

I rather suspect that most people are probably unaware that MacArthur, while stating that "stern justice" would be meted out to those responsible for war crimes, secretly granted immunity from prosecution to the monsters who perpetrated the crimes of Unit 731. Seems the Americans were more interested in obtaining the details of the experiments than they were in meting out "stern justice"...

But such issues are perhaps best saved for a more relevant thread.

Posted on: Love Tangle 3: One Night Stand

@Paul,

I suspect that the illegal US economic blockade of Cuba has much to do with the state of Cuba's economic situation reflected in it's crumbling infrastructure.

In this regard, it is instructive to contrast the standard of living in Cuba with that in Haiti which was once the richest and most productive part of the New World. Haiti is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has seen food rioting quite recently.

Cuba certainly has its problems. However, I suspect that the average Cuban is probably much better off than the average Haitian.

But here is probably not the best place to engage in this kind of discussion.

My apologies to others for the threadjacking.

Posted on: Seeing off an Old Friend 渭城曲

Bababardwan,

The text in the painting is complete with seven characters in each line. The poem should be read from top to bottom, right to left. The first line, which is three characters, is the title of the poem. The next line, which is two characters, is the name of the poet, Wang Wei. The following four lines are the poem proper.

Probably what gave you some trouble is that in the second line of the poem proper there is a character with the meaning of repeat for a repeated character. This is used so that the character does not have not be written out a second time.

Also, in the third line of the poem, the character for "one" does not take up as much space as the other characters.