Hitchcockian Birds and Anchovia Abundance

Last Sunday afternoon, Paul and I decided to shake off our dispirited mood by revisiting Pleasure Point. Moments later we watched Hitchcockian birds re-playing before our eyes: the whole bay was populated with a great variety of birds, most of them are seagulls, perching on bluffs, standing on water, or flapping their white or grey wings on sudden impact. It turns out that there has been another return of anchovies feast recently.

As mysterious as Hitchcockian birds, those birds flew home and disappeared as soon as the darkness set in. On our way back, there was not a single bird in sight. Luckily, Paul caught a glimpse of feasting birds with his movies above.

When a Book Has Multiple Titles

As a selector and reader, I often feel flustered at the fact that a so-called new book turns out to be something so familiar that I seriously suspect either I have had a relapse of memory or writers are guilty of plagiarism. They are two recent instances, namely,

Karin Fossum's Eva's eye (2013 US edition) is the same as In the darkness (2012 UK edition)
Jussi Adler-Olsen's The keeper of lost causes (2011 US edition) is the same as Mercy (2011 UK edition).

The latter especially threw me into a mental torture like Merete Lynggaard, the kidnapped victim, for the last few weeks. Last night before going to bed I decided to end my misery once and for all: I had to confirm that The keeper of lost causes was Mercy. Thanks to Amazon, my confirmation was finally proved positive, and I rewarded myself with M.C. Beaton's Something borrowed, someone dead for a bed reading.

Don't Let Your Dogs Loose

Not the real K9 pair. Illustration only.

This morning around 7:30 am Highway 1 northbound was paralyzed from Soquel on. I looked around and everything seemed normal, CalTran workers were working steadily on the extra lane.

Suddenly all cars stood still and I had to brake hard. Looking ahead I saw two dogs sauntering towards us, one black and white, and the other, light-brown. They were apparently let loose, with collars and short leashes attached. The light-brown dog was standing ahead of my car, refused to leave until the smell of nearby roadkill attracted it. It soon joined its black and white companion.

Thus I escaped and congratulated myself for not harming two lost K9s. Far away the sirens from an ambulance and fire truck could be heard! Don't let your dogs loose, dog owners!

Never Too Late for Halloween in SC

Lee Anne sent her Halloween photos performed by her kids, with an apology attached that they arrived after the Halloween. We thanked her, but all laughed. Too late for Halloween? Go to Pacific Mall, and you will see Halloweeners all year around.

Photo: Courtesy of Lee Anne

Pooh Lesson

Paul sent me a cartoon about Pooh's philosophy towards life. It makes me wonder why I did not think about it sooner in my life. Maybe that's why I felt frustrated most of time.

天下無不散之宴席

On hearing Sue and Jim are retiring at the end of the year, I cannot help recalling the happy working environment at Dianying xinzuo in the mid-eighties and DIALOG in the mid-nineties. Most of Dianying xinzuo fellow editors were dispersed to the four corners of the earth to seek further education and a brighter professional future, whereas DIALOG colleagues were either laid off or quit after the company was bought twice in less than three years, and finally left California. 

The past and present experience has re-confirmed the truth in 天下無不散之宴席, i.e.,  All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything.

Resilence Show Coming Down at Cruzio

14 August 2013 was a busy day for Paul, working, attending his long waited lecture by Hitoshi Murayama. In the late after he took down his 30 art works from Cruzio, and got ready for his China-India show at 2014 PVAC (Pajaro Valley Arts Council) with other 5 local photographers.


The show at Cruzio is a success, getting lots of attention from media and friends. I am glad that our May New York reunion intertwined and inspired the whole event.

Hitoshi Murayama at Rio Theatre

Yesterday 8:00 pm, 14 August 2013, Paul and I went to a lecture entitled Quantum Universe by Yotoshi Murayama at Berkeley and University of . It was quite an adventure for me to experience the community's zest for dark matter and dark energy. The whole theatre was packed; all tickets were sold out before the lecture. After the lectures, the audience were limited to only 10 minutes' Q&A.

Murayama's lecture was focused on a number of questions, with a predominant emphasis on where we came from. His saying that we are from star dust seems to be kindred to religious interpretation of our being from dust to dust.

Murayama is an extremely good presenter of a gigantic topic, familiar with his subject areas and his audience, old and young. He has introduced us to some well-known scientific experiments being conducted in Switzerland and Japan.

At a quantum or personal level, I was reassured that our sun would have a collision in 4 billion years. It has always been a childhood scare of mine ever since my next door friend told me that the world would explode soon. As an extra bonus, we saw the long time-no-see Ling at the entrance and sat together through the lecture.

Resilience Show at Cruzio

Santa Cruz Sentinel Art Editor Kirby Scudder published his article on Paul and his new show in the section of The Guide, entitled Photographer Paul Titangos captures images of courage in new show 'Resilience'.

The exhibit is to opened tomorrow evening 6-9 pm at Cruzio, as part of First Friday Santa Cruz for June 2013. Dedicated to human resilience in general and New Yorkers in particular, it will continue to be on display through months of June-August. The following is an interview by Kirby Scudder on NPR's KUSP.

Reunion at Atlantic

This morning, Paul and I arrived in New York the second time this year. We were soon picked up by Yvonne and her husband. We are going to stay with them in Brooklyn today and leave for Atlantic City tomorrow mid-morning.

It will be a true reunion for all of us. For the first time, Paul will see my college mates of 35 years ago, even though only half of us will gather in New Jersey. Th other half are in China either working or engaged in their projects.

In March 26, 1975, 600 of us were selected to study English, French, Japanese and Russian by three universities in Shanghai. There were two grades before us. Two hundred students went to Congming Island, east of the city. I was one of them. For three and a half years we stayed on the island. Some planted rice, cotton, and wheat. Some grew vegetables, and raised pigs and goats. Still some manned the kitchen to feed us with our home-grown vegetables, rice and pork.

In addition to farming, we studied our selected languages, with the ratio of 1/3 the first year, 1/2 the second yeah, 3/1 the third year and full time the fourth year. Being Class 3, English was our major (Classes 1-4 were English, Class 5, French, and Class 6, Japanese). We never finished the 4th year.

With the fall of Gang of Four, the temporary education system established by the radicals was forever replaced by a more permanent one, i.e., high school graduates take entrance exams and go to universities, instead of having to farm or being factory workers for two years, before they could be eligible to become perspective candidates.

In the new era, our hybrid experiment also failed as a regime change. Some classmates might not understand it then, they felt resentful towards our instructor, who in fact was a victim of time himself. A lot of water has passed under the bridge; we have been scattering along the two sides of the Pacific. Now we are going to meet and time will stop for us for a while.

Before our reunion, we are going to see Hui, Ying & Mama for a dinner in Brooklyn this evening. I am so happy that Hui's plan worked: Ying happens to visit home at the moment.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This coming Sunday will be 2013 St. Patrick's Day. It is reported that on Saturday, March 16 at 11:30 am, San Francisco will hold its annual parade, with 100,000 revelers beginning from the corner of Market and Second Street to Civic Center. One of the paraders will be no other than PennyApple.

Courtesy of Lee Anne, we can see that PennyApple has already started to sip her beer. She cannot wait to observe Saint Patrick's Day, the date when St. Patrick died in AD 460 on March 17. As the patron saint of Ireland, or "Apostle of Ireland," St. Patrick is the primary patron saint of the island.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Reading Grapes of Wrath in the 21st Century

During the 2012 Holiday Season, I listened to, and then read John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in anticipation of the Santa Cruz Big Read, which inspired me with the following book review posted in SCPL Staff Picks.

According to Steinbeck scholars, the Grapes of Wrath is the most thoroughly discussed novel in 20th century American literature. But a reading in the 21st century can enable us to have deeper discussions, such as the practice of bank foreclosures and their aftermath. Lured by the promises on handbills, the foreclosured Joad family took Route 66 to come to California from Oklahoma. Their hope to make a decent living was soon dashed by California farmers’ obsession with finding the cheapest labor to assure maximum profit. As one of the governing rules of the free market, it caused the oversupply of labor when the Dust Bowl swept across the prairie lands in the 1930s, a phenomenon not unlike 1849’s Gold Rush and today’s fragile globalized economy. During the process, much of the established infrastructure has been sold or destroyed, from farming to manufacturing, from banking to information services and technologies.

In addition, the book dissects some weakness in human nature, i.e., self-preservation and self-protection in the face of threatening competition, thus the antagonism between the haves and the have-nots, and the affluent locals and the Okies. The government aid in the form of Weedpatch Camp, a New Deal agency, was simply too little to help numerous displaced and needy migrants. The traditional trust in family as a helping unit became unreliable. Poor migrant families came to the painful realization that they could get help only from their fellow poor migrants. But such a realization is only relative, for there will always exist a new conflict between early settlers and those who arrive later. Even in the case of the Joad family, they enjoyed a temporary superior status on a cotton farm, “The Joads had been lucky. They got in early enough to have a space in the boxcars. Now the tents of the late-comers filled the little flat, and those who had the boxcars were old- timers, and in a way aristocrats.”

The Grapes of Wrath is a powerful reading, especially in its portrayals of hardy but resourceful characters like Tom and Ma, so as to provide us with glimpses of hope. Confronted with a penniless future, the Joads and Wainwrights celebrated a new union for their son and daughter. After the mourning of her stillborn baby, Rosasharn lost no time nursing back another human life.

Centennial Celebration of Grand Central

This Friday, 22 February 2013, marks the centennial anniversary of Grand Central.

Grand Central is not an unfamiliar place to our family, since both my sister's and brother's families reside outside NYC, with several family members working and studying at Cornell.

Right after Sandy, we rode the train to have a 38-year reunion with two of my former classmates at East Japanese Restaurant. Paul shot many memorable photos before and after. Later we visited our big niece in her lab at Rockefeller University. As we had to go home, our niece accompanied us all the way to Grand Central, by using all side streets and alleys. We did not have wait for long for our express train the way normally passengers had to. With our niece's precise calculations, we only had two minutes before the train was leaving for Croton-Harmon Station.

The permanent scene of people waiting and boarding at Grand Central and other stations is best described by NPR's photo show.

Finding Momoe Yamaguchi (山口 百恵)

Momoe Yamaguchi swept Japan and China in the 1970's, just as Adela has conquered the States today. Despite many melodramatic scenes of death, illness and betrayals in her films, audience were rapt with attention. The climax came in 1980 when she decided to retire at the peak of her short career, a rare quality everyone admires. She was married to her co-star Tomokazu Miura (三浦 友和) with a fierce determination to raise a young family in privacy. The phenomenon of Momoe Yamaguchi is that of Cinderella in the east, with her illegimate birth, humble childhood but true musical/acting talent.

I was looking for her albums every time a Japanese song was heard. With the availability of a premium membership with Spotify, I found my old longing revived again. Google helped me to locate her name in English, Spotify provided me with her instrumentals, but it is YouTube that gathered a collection of films and songs by Momoe Yamaguchi.

25 Luxury Items in Life

This afternoon, Leon, my former language training classmate, sent us a list of luxuries in life. To me, the timing cannot be better. In a time of uncertainty and neglect, it makes us think what is the most valuable item in life, coveting a lucrative position or doing something meaningful?

The following is my translation.
=============================================

Here are 25 luxuries life can provide. How many do you have?

1 Good health which allows you to backpack traveling around the world
2 A job which gives you satisfaction.
3 Someone who always reminds you to wear more clothes on windy days
4 Someone who covers you when you are asleep 
5 A beautiful healthy body even in cheap T-shirt
6 Beautiful handwriting
7 Whenever you plan to take a trip, there is always a good friend who is willing to take time off to accompany you
8 A good and sound night's sleep every day
9 Appreciate a beautiful heart and mind
10 Live a meaningful and happy life every moment of your life
11 Someone who teaches you how to love and be loved
12 A child you are willing to sacrifice everything for
13 Personal freedom
14 Inspire others
15 Learn to give
16 Learn to endure
17 Accept and cherish everything life has to offer
18 Reap what you sow
19 Safe-keep an item which embodies emotions and feeling
20 Retain childlike quality
21 Keep you mind open
22 Keep your promise
23 Enjoy delicious food
24 Be naughty occasionally
25 Turn your romance into reality


下面是一生人可以拥有的25件奢侈品，你拥有了多少？

1 能背着包包走天下的健康
2 舒心的工作
3 起风的天总有人提醒你加衣
4 睡着的时候总有人为你盖被
5 穿上便宜T恤也很美丽的健康身材
6 写得一手好字
7 想旅行时，总有谈得来的朋友愿意请假陪伴
8 每天都能踏实地睡个好觉
9 会欣赏美丽的心和能欣赏美丽的心情
10 每时每刻都过得有意义和幸福
11 一个教会你爱和被爱的人
12 你为之甘心付出的宝宝
13 心中永远的自由
14 带给他人向上的精神特质
15 学会放弃
16 学会承受
17 接受并珍惜生活赐予你的一切
18 亲自播种，收穫
19 珍藏一件凝聚情感的物品
20 寻找失落的童心
21 心境开阔
22 信守一个诺言
23 尝尽美食
24 偶尔使个小小坏
25 把你所能想到的一件浪漫的事变为现实