| February 5, 2007 | | Posted Wednesday, February 07, 2007 3:13:22 PM by Blog57 Team | | I should apologize for my silence on this blog for the past -- can it be? -- two weeks. Or maybe not. I'd have preferred to post, but (to bring up an issue more important than music, both for myself and others) I realized this fall that I'd been very stressed. My paying work, traveling, my teaching, this blog, meetings on future projects, composing, my online book...I've had a lot of balls in the air at once, and I noticed a lot of classic symptoms of stress. My mind racing at night, back pain, irritable bowels; and throughout it all, a feeling that I wasn't having much fun. I read a book on stress, and was struck by many things, including this: Studies show that people, queried after they've made decisions, don't regret choosing pleasure over work. So I've been trying to change. I had a long Christmas holiday, and then launched the series I've interrupted on this blog, about what I think the classical music crisis really is about.... | |
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| | | China : Rabbit-warm brand launches fashion show in Beijing city | | Posted Tuesday, January 09, 2007 1:31:49 PM by Blog57 Team | | On December 20, 2006, Rabbit-warm brand launched a fashion show in association with Chinese Clothes Newspaper and Chinese General Merchandise Business Association in Beijing city. About 80 sets of fashion dresses made from rabbit hair were centre of attraction at the show. Rabbit-warm is one of the famous brands from Guangdong Haotian Clothes Industry Co. Many officials of local enterprises and related Government leaders participate in fashion show. Rabbit-warm brand also offered 50 percent discount on sales. Rabbit-brand uses computer jacquard and bright colors in men's rabbit hair clothes. .... | |
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| | | Capsule movie reviews | | Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 3:31:56 PM by Blog57 Team | | "Babel" (R) A collaboration of director Alejándro Gonzalez Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, "Babel" is a Debbie Downer illustration of the butterfly effect -- you know, the theory that the flutter of monarch wings in San Francisco may result in a lethal weather system in New Delhi. In this case, a hunting rifle given to a Berber tour guide has fallout for families in Morocco, Mexico, the United States and Japan. This film about how grief occludes empathy is a study in unintended consequences. With Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael García Bernal. îîå "A Good Year" (PG-13) "A Good Year" is a male version of "Under the Tuscan Sun." That's not necessarily a bad thing, even if it catches fans of star Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott off-balance. Indeed, one of the reasons it's good is precisely because it does catch those folks off-balance.... | |
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| | | Getting smart with advertising | | Posted Sunday, November 05, 2006 1:09:35 PM by Blog57 Team | | AN internationally awarded advertising consultant is bringing all the "smarts" of advertising to the Border. Paul Dent has climbed the ranks of creative advertising in Sydney and has now set up his own business, Paul Dent’s AdSmarts, in his home town of Albury. He will help businesses find their key strengths, build a creative advertising campaign and market it across television, radio and newspapers. Mr Dent has been in the advertising industry for 20 years and has worked on multinational companies such as Citizen Watches and Akai. At 26 he was appointed associate creative director with Sydney agency McMurtry Sherbon Vartan & Partners, where he promoted Canon Systems on a yearly budget of $5 million. He then became one of Sydney’s best-known freelance writers, working on such brands as Contiki, Southcorp Wines, Bundaberg Rum and Mastercard.... | |
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| | | Latest movie releases | | Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 7:51:37 AM by Blog57 Team | | Ratings as appeared in Beacon Journal film critic and wire-service reviews: *=Weak **=Mediocre ***=Worth Seeing ****=Shouldn't Be Missed Opening Friday BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN -- **** (R -- pervasive strong crude and sexual content, including graphic nudity and language) -- A leading television personality (Sacha Baron Cohen) of the glorious but socially backward nation of Kazakhstan travels to America and discovers it's almost like Kazakhstan. 1 hour, 22 minutes. Huntington Street Cinema 16, Kent Plaza Theatre, Macedonia Cinemark 15, Tinseltown USA, Valley View 24, West Market Plaza 7 FLUSHED AWAY -- *** (PG -- crude humor and some language) -- The story of a pampered pet mouse out of his element in the sewers of London.... | |
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| | | A tree dies in Cambridge | | Posted Monday, October 30, 2006 7:30:53 AM by Blog57 Team | | It took 110 years to go up but it came down in a day, 10 tons of hardwood and leaves yanked to earth by a team of workers and their chainsaws. The death sentence had been issued by Cambridge's top tree expert, who feared the 75-foot white ash, old and deeply damaged, might collapse on the densely packed neighborhood. But some of the neighbors saw the tree's Oct. 11 felling as something else: arborcide. They erected a shrine on the foot-high stump, reminiscent of memorials to human lives on meaner streets. They convinced the City Council to order an autopsy of the ash's roots, still curling beneath the asphalt street, to determine whether the tree was cut in vain. As Kerry Corner mourns its lost tree, similar scenes of bereavement play out across other neighborhoods.... | |
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| | | Castro's Cuba is Riding the Crest of a Tourist Wave | | Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 7:11:40 AM by Blog57 Team | | VARADERO/BERLIN - The volleyball players on Varadero beach -- young tourists from Germany, Spain and Canada -- are perspiring heavily and in the best of spirits. Their impromtu "International Squad" has just thrashed the favorites "Cuba," a side comprising young holiday camp hosts from the "Sandals Royal Hicacos" complex. Edanny Gomez Fernandez watches the action briefly before turning to her guest and pronouncing: "Well, 2006 has been a good year for us too." Her job is to analyze the number of bookings and monitor capacity levels in Cuba's hotels. A Cuban citizen, she studied languages in Havana and later gained a masters degree in marketing. The hotel is run by the state-run chain "Cubanacan" organization (51 percent) and a holding (49 percent) comprising investors from Spain, Britain and the Netherlands.... | |
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| | | Countrymen, get reacquainted | | Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 7:14:51 PM by Blog57 Team | | THE private organization that runs Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, will soon open an opulent and dramatic visitors complex that will try to fill a need spawned by the growing ignorance of Americans about their own history. There was a time when most visitors came to the 18th century estate and lovely grounds in northern Virginia already full of facts and insights into the life and times of the first president of the United States. But this is no longer so — a lack of knowledge that first attracted notice in the 1990s. .... | |
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| | | [Opinion] The Second Government | | Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 11:16:41 AM by Blog57 Team | | If the people are to become the master of the nation in the actual sense, they should act as the guard who thoroughly watches over, day by day, the steps taken to put into action the national power. This sentence is quoted from the establishment manifesto of the People`s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) born in 1994. Twelve years later, Yoo Seok-chun, a professor at Yonsei University, said, What motivates the government to move now is the PSPD. Professor Yu found out that out of 417 executives of the PSPD 150 have occupied 313 vocations in the government body and its subsidiary committees. Among them, 158 seats, which is about half, were created by the Roh Moo-hyun administration. When the executives of the PSPD raise opinions the government invites them to various committees.... | |
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| | | SA police unleash violence on foreigners' businesses | | Posted Monday, October 16, 2006 1:15:34 PM by Blog57 Team | | Johannesburg (AND) IN what reflected some worst forms of xenophobia and descrimination against foreigners, the South African Police Service (SAPS) and some Metropolitan Police pounced on unsuspecting patrons drinking beer in public bars owned by foreigners, mainly Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Congolese and Ghananians before brutally assaulting the patrons on unsubstantiated and unfounded claims of drug abuse as well as searching for some illegal immigrants. .... | |
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