text:
Song Hee-suk was a model citizen of North Korea. "I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland," she said not long ago. "I never had a thought otherwise." Her enthusiasm for the regime made her sound like the heroine of a propaganda film, and she looked the part, too. She had a face as plump as a dumpling, which made her appear well fed even when she wasn't, and a bow-shaped mouth, which made her seem happy even when she was sad.
Mrs. Song raised four children while working ten-hour shifts, six days a week, at the day-care center of the Chosun Clothing Factory, in the coastal city of Chongjin, in North Hamgyong Province. An estimated twenty per cent of North Korean men were in the armed services, and women were needed to keep the factories going. Mrs. Song often went to work with a baby strapped to her back and with one or two other children dragging along behind her. The children spent their days in the day-care center. After work, Mrs. Song was required to participate in several hours of ideological training in the factory's auditorium. On Friday nights, she stayed late for self-criticism. In these sessions, members of her work unit would stand up and reveal to their colleagues anything that they had done wrong. Mrs. Song usually said that she feared she wasn't working hard enough. Mrs. Song was the head of her neighborhood group, and, when she wasn't at the factory, she was responsible for assigning communal chores and reporting activity that was inconsistent with North Korean doctrine.
I first met Mrs. Song (whose name has been changed here) in 2004. She was fifty-nine years old and had been living in Seoul, South Korea, for two years. She had been brought out of North Korea by her oldest daughter, Oak-hee, who had for years expressed open dislike for the regime and had, in March, 2002, managed to defect to South Korea. Mrs. Song told me that she had left North Korea only for her daughter and that she remained a true believer until the day she left. Even after three members of her family died of starvation—her husband, her mother-in-law, and her twenty-five-year-old son—Mrs. Song believed that North Korea was the greatest nation on earth. "I thought it was my fault that I couldn't provide for them," she said. "It never occurred to me that the government was at fault." Only later did she realize that it was "the kind and good-hearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.''
Mrs. Song used to go twice a month to a food-distribution center near her apartment. With two plastic shopping bags, she stood in line outside an unmarked storefront until a big metal gate swung open at 10 A.M. Everybody had assigned days—Mrs. Song's were the third and the eighteenth—but there was often a wait of several hours to get to the door. Inside was a small, unheated room with white concrete walls and a cheerless woman sitting behind a table covered with ledger books. Mrs. Song would hand over her ration book, a small sum of money, and tickets from the garment factory certifying that she had fulfilled her work duty. The clerk would calculate her entitlements: seven hundred grams each per day for her and her husband, Chang-bo, a journalist working for the North Hamgyong radio station; three hundred grams for her mother-in-law (retired people got less); and four hundred for each school-age child living at home. If anybody in the family was away from home, Mrs. Song would tell the clerk, and the corresponding amount of rations was deducted. The clerk would then stamp receipts in triplicate, one of which she'd give to Mrs. Song. At the back of the warehouse, where vats of rice, corn, barley, and flour were stored, another clerk weighed out the rations and put them in Mrs. Song's plastic bags.
Cabbage for making kimchi was distributed in the autumn. Kimchi, spicy preserved cabbage, is the Korean national dish, and is made to last all winter. Mrs. Song says that each family got seventy kilograms (a hundred and fifty-four pounds) of cabbage per adult and fifty kilograms (a hundred and ten pounds) per child, which for her family came to four hundred and ten kilos. She would spend up to a week preparing kimchi. The cabbage was pickled with salt, spiced with red pepper, or sometimes with bean paste or baby shrimp, and then stored in tall earthenware jars. Chang-bo helped her carry the jars down to the basement of a warehouse next to their apartment building, where each family had a storage bin. The tradition was to bury kimchi pots in the garden, so that they would stay cold but would not freeze. But in the warehouse basement Mrs. Song and her husband simply packed dirt around the jars and put them in the storage bin, which they padlocked. Kimchi thieves were common in Chongjin.
Mrs. Song had three daughters, who used to boast that her kimchi was the best in the neighborhood. She enjoyed cooking almost as much as her husband enjoyed eating, and both of them fancied themselves gourmets. Her repertoire was naturally limited—North Koreans had no exposure to foreign cuisines—but North Korean cooks are creative. Whatever happens to be fresh and seasonal is mixed with rice, barley, or corn and spiced with red bean paste or chilies. The signature dish is naengmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles served in a broth with myriad regional variations that include hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, or pears. If she was busy, Mrs. Song bought noodles from a shop; if not, she made them herself. During the holidays, using the limited ingredients from the public-distribution system, she would make twigim, batter-fried vegetables that were light and crisp. For her husband's birthday, she turned rice into a sweet glutinous cake called deok. She also made her own corn liquor.
Looking back years later, Mrs. Song couldn't pinpoint when her rations faded away—1989, 1990, 1991. She started waiting in line earlier, sometimes as early as 1 A.M. When the clerks handed her shopping bags back to her, they were lighter than they used to be, and she didn't need to peek inside to confirm her disappointment. Rice disappeared first. Cooking oil had always been only sporadically available, but now it was never in the bag. The state-supplied cabbage was no longer delivered, because there was no fuel for the trucks. Mrs. Song had to walk to a nearby farm, pick the cabbage, and cart it home in a wheelbarrow. She didn't complain. "If I made a fuss, they would have just come and taken me away," she told me later.
Subsidized food was supposed to be a crowning achievement of the North Korean system. Echoing the Republican Party's mantra during Herbert Hoover's 1928 Presidential campaign of "a chicken in every pot," North Korea's founder, Kim Il-sung, promised to feed the North Korean population with rice, coining the slogan "Rice Is Socialism" in the nineteen-fifties. Rice, especially white rice, had always been the favored food of Koreans, but North Korea is too cold and too mountainous to produce enough of it to sustain the population, and it remained a luxury. However, the public-distribution system, which was introduced in the Communist North shortly after the Korean peninsula was divided, in 1945, did supply a mixture of grains in amounts that were carefully allotted in accordance with rank and work status. On national holidays, such as the Kim-family birthdays, pork or dried fish might be distributed.
Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il, who by the nineteen-eighties was increasingly assuming his father's duties, offered "on-the-spot guidance" to address the country's problems. Father and son were experts in everything from geology to farming. One day, Kim Jong-il would decree that the country should switch from rice to potatoes as its primary staple food ("We have started to see the potato revolution as an ideological revolution," Rodong Shinmun, the official newspaper, reported); the next day, he would decide that the country should build ostrich farms.
Despite its rhetoric about self-sufficiency, North Korea was dependent on the generosity of its neighbors. Communist-bloc countries sold goods at preferential prices. The country got subsidized fuel oil, rice, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment, trucks, and cars. Hospital equipment came from Czechoslovakia; subway carriages arrived from East Germany. Kim Il-sung skillfully played the Soviet Union and China against each other, using their rivalry to extract as much aid as possible. Like an old-style emperor, he received tribute from neighboring realms: Stalin sent an armored limousine; Mao sent a train carriage.
But by the early nineteen-nineties the Russians had grown impatient with North Korea's failure to repay its creditors an estimated ten billion dollars in loans. Moscow decided that North Korea would have to pay prevailing world prices for Soviet imports rather than the lower "friendship" prices. In the past, the Chinese, who provided three-quarters of North Korea's fuel and two-thirds of its food imports, used to say that the two countries were as close as "lips and teeth"; now they wanted cash up front.
Soon, a feedback loop of diminishing productivity was set in motion. Without cheap fuel oil and raw materials, North Korea couldn't keep the factories running, which meant that it had nothing to export. With no exports, there was no hard currency, and without hard currency fuel imports fell even further and the electricity supply dwindled. The coal mines couldn't operate, because they required electric pumps to siphon water. The shortage of coal further worsened the electricity shortage.
North Korea is the last place on earth where virtually all staple foods are grown on collective farms. The state confiscates the entire harvest and then gives a portion back to the farmers. It had never been easy to eke out enough from North Korea's hardscrabble terrain to feed a population of up to twenty-four million. The agricultural techniques developed to boost production relied on electrically powered irrigation systems and on chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced at factories that had been closed owing to a lack of fuel and raw materials. North Korea started running out of food, and as people went hungry they didn't have the energy to work.
As harvests withered in the early nineteen-nineties, the farmers, going hungry, began hoarding some of the crops. There were stories from the countryside of roofs that collapsed under the weight of grain hidden in the eaves. The farmers also neglected the collective fields for private "kitchen gardens," next to their houses, or small plots that they carved out of the side of uncultivated mountain slopes. Driving through the North Korean countryside, you could clearly see the contrast between the private gardens, bursting with vegetables—beanpoles soaring skyward, vines drooping with pumpkins—next to the collective fields with haphazard rows of stunted corn that had been planted by so-called "volunteers."
Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day." The North Korean government offered a variety of explanations. People were told that the government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification, or that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea. North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice. In any case, the food shortage was temporary—agricultural officials quoted in the newspapers claimed that bumper crops of rice were expected in the next harvest.
The foreign press began reporting on North Korea's food shortages in the early nineteen-nineties, and in 1992 the country's news service issued an indignant reply:
All people live a happy life without any worries about food in our land. The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price next to nothing so that people do not know how much rice costs. This is the reality of the northern half of Korea.
It has been said that people raised in Communist countries cannot fend for themselves, because they expect the government to take care of them. This was not true of many of the victims of the North Korean famine. When the public-distribution system was cut off, people tapped their deepest wells of creativity to feed themselves. They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in fields, and draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.
Women exchanged recipe tips: When making cornmeal, don't throw out the husk, cob, leaves, and stem of the corn—throw everything into the grinder. Even if it isn't nutritious, it is filling. Boil noodles for at least an hour, to make them appear bigger. Add a few leaves of grass to soup to make it look as if it contained vegetables. Women would strip the sweet inner bark of pine trees to grind into a fine powder that could be used in place of flour.
North Koreans picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. Shipyard workers developed a technique by which they scraped the bottoms of the cargo holds where food had been stored, then spread the foul-smelling gunk on the roof to dry so that they could collect from it tiny grains of uncooked rice and other edibles.
The gathering and production of food was the focus of all enterprise. You woke up early to find your breakfast, and as soon as it was finished you thought about what to find for dinner. You slept during lunchtime because you were exhausted.
By 1990, Mrs. Song's garment factory had run out of fabric. The workers spent their days cleaning, attending lectures, or participating in what their manager called "special projects." One day, they went to the railroad tracks to collect dog excrement to use as fertilizer; another day, they were marched to a beach next to a steel factory to look for bits of scrap metal. Finally, the manager summoned some of the employees.
Using a Korean word for "auntie,'' a common term for middle-aged married women, she said, "You ajummas should think about finding some other way to bring food home for your families.''
Mrs. Song was an unlikely entrepreneur. She was forty-five years old, and had no business skills other than the ability to tally numbers on an abacus. Her family urged her to start a business in the kitchen and told her that the best product would be tofu, a good source of protein in difficult times. Tofu is widely used in Korean cooking, in soups and stews, fried crispy or fermented. In order to raise the money to buy soybeans at the market, the family started selling their possessions. The first to go was their prized television—a Japanese model they'd got thanks to Chang-bo's father, who had served in intelligence during the Korean War.
Making tofu is relatively easy, if labor-intensive. Soybeans are ground, then boiled, and a coagulating agent is added. Then, like cheese, the mixture is squeezed through a cloth. Afterward, you are left with a watery milk and the husks of the soybeans. Mrs. Song thought it might be a good idea to complement her tofu business by raising pigs, which she could feed with the residue from the tofu. Behind the apartment building was a row of sheds used for storage. Mrs. Song bought a litter of piglets at the market and installed them in one of the sheds, securing the door with a padlock.
For a few months, the business plan was a success. Mrs. Song converted her tiny kitchen into a tofu factory, boiling big vats of soybeans on the stove, which was built into the floor, in the traditional Korean style. She sold the tofu at the neighborhood market. The piglets grew fat on the bean husks and soy milk and whatever grass Mrs. Song could clip for them each morning. But it became increasingly difficult to get wood and coal to fuel the stove. The electricity worked only a few hours a week, and even then its use was restricted to a single sixty-watt light bulb, a television, or a radio. Without fuel to cook the soybeans, Mrs. Song couldn't make tofu. Without the tofu, she had nothing to feed the pigs. It took hours for her to pick enough grass to satisfy them.
"Listen, we might as well eat the grass ourselves," she joked to Chang-bo. Then she added, "If it doesn't poison the pigs, it won't poison us." Eventually, they ate all the pigs, and Mrs. Song gave up the business.
The family began a grim new regimen. Every day, Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could find dandelions or other weeds that people ate even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song also collected rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer. She took the day's pickings home and mixed them with whatever food she had enough money to buy. Usually, it was ground cornmeal—the cheap kind, made from the husks and cobs. If she couldn't afford that, she would buy pine-bark powder, sometimes extended with sawdust.
She chopped and pounded the grasses and the bark into a pulp that was soft enough to digest. The mixture didn't have enough substance to be molded into a noodle or a cake. All she could make was a textureless porridge. The only seasoning she had was salt. A little garlic or red pepper might have disguised the terrible taste, but those spices were too expensive. Oils had become unavailable at any price by the mid-nineteen-nineties, and their absence made cooking difficult. Once, while visiting a relative for lunch, Mrs. Song was served a porridge made of bean stalks and corncobs. As hungry as she was, she couldn't swallow it. The bitter, dry stalks stuck in her throat like the twigs of a bird's nest.
One year, the only animal product Mrs. Song consumed was frog. Her brothers had caught some in the countryside. Mrs. Song's sister-in-law stir-fried the frogs in soy sauce, chopped them into small pieces, and served them over noodles. Frog wasn't typically part of Korean cuisine, and Mrs. Song had never tried it before. She pronounced it delicious. She had only a few chances to eat it again, though. Soon afterward, the frog population of North Korea was decimated by overhunting.
By the middle of 1995, Mrs. Song and her husband had sold most of their valuable possessions for food. After the television went the used Japanese bicycle that was their main means of transportation, and then the sewing machine with which Mrs. Song had made their clothes. They sold most of their clothes and then the wooden wardrobe in which they stored them. The two-room apartment was now empty, except for portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, which hung on the wall as they always had. The only thing left to sell was the apartment itself. North Koreans don't own their own homes; they are merely awarded the right to live there. But an illegal real-estate market had cropped up as people quietly swapped homes, paying off bureaucrats to look the other way. The apartment "sold" for ten thousand won—about a hundred dollars at the black-market rate. Mrs. Song, her husband, and her mother-in-law moved to a single room nearby. (The three daughters had married and their son had moved out.) Mrs. Song decided that she would use the money for another business venture: trading rice.
Rice is the preferred staple of the Korean diet; the word bap means rice or "a meal." After 1995, Chongjin residents could get rice only if they had cash to buy it on the black market, and even then it was expensive—about fifty won per kilo, six hundred times what rice had cost through the public-distribution system, when it was available. Almost all the rice consumed in the city arrived by train or by truck, further elevating the price, since the roads and the rail lines had fallen into disrepair. Mrs. Song figured that she could buy rice down the coast, where it was cheaper, and carry it up by train. Trading rice or any staple grain was illegal but widespread, and Mrs. Song decided that it was worth the risk. She'd make a small profit and keep some rice for her family. They hadn't had a proper bowl of rice since 1994.
In November, 1995, Mrs. Song recalls, she set out with ten thousand won hidden in her underwear, disguised by layers of winter clothing. She took a train to South Pyongyang Province and bought two hundred kilos of rice. She put the rice into four large backpacks, which porters helped her load onto the train and stuff under her seat. On the morning of November 25th, she was less than a day's journey away from home. Chang-bo's connections as a journalist had allowed her to get a choice sleeping berth in the third car of the train—the first two being for Workers' Party officials and military officers. The train was long, and each time it rounded a curve the rear cars would come into view just long enough for her to see that people were standing in them. Still more people sat on the roof. The train stopped and started throughout the night and was lurching so violently when Mrs. Song woke up in the morning that she couldn't eat her breakfast. Suddenly, a jolt lifted her out of her seat. The next moment, she was lying on her side, her left cheek pressed against the metal frame of the window. The carriage was on its side.
The train had derailed, and the crowded back carriages had been almost entirely destroyed. Most of their passengers were killed. The front cars had somehow been spared. The death toll from the accident, Mrs. Song heard, was in the hundreds, although, as with most North Korean disasters, it was not reported.
Mrs. Song emerged from the wreckage with a gash in her cheek, the skin ripped off her right leg, and a sprained back. The wooden partition that separated her sleeper compartment from the aisle had fallen on top of her. After three days in an emergency clinic near the scene of the accident, she returned to Chongjin. She was in such pain that she had to be carried off the train, but she felt lucky when she glimpsed Chang-bo on the platform.
After the accident, Mrs. Song was no longer able to hike into the mountains to forage for food She picked whatever grasses and weeds she could find near her house, and threw them into a porridge made from the cheapest grain. It was difficult for the elderly to digest. In May, 1996, her mother-in-law fell ill with dysentery. Within a few days, she was dead.
Chang-bo's health was also deteriorating. In his prime, he had been uncommonly large for a North Korean, weighing nearly two hundred pounds. He was so heavy that in the early nineteen-eighties his doctor advised him to take up smoking as a way to lose weight. But now the protuberant belly of which he had been so proud—fat being a status symbol in North Korea—had turned into a hollow pouch. His skin was flaky, as though he were suffering from eczema. His jowls sagged, and his speech was slurred. He had suffered a mild stroke in 1995; by 1997, he had become too weak to work and took to his bed. His legs swelled up like balloons, the effect of what Mrs. Song had come to recognize as edema—fluid retention brought on by starvation. He talked incessantly about food. He spoke of the tofu soups his mother had made him as a child and a delicious meal of fish porridge that Mrs. Song had cooked for him when they were newlyweds.
"Come, darling. Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice meal," he told his wife one morning in 1997. They hadn't eaten in three days.
Mrs. Song ran to the market, forgetting all about the pain in her back. She spotted her older sister, selling noodles. Her sister's skin was flaked like Chang-bo's from malnutrition, and Mrs. Song had resisted asking her for help, but now she was desperate.
"I'll pay you back," Mrs. Song promised as she ran home with a container of noodles.
Chang-bo was curled up on his side under the blanket. Mrs. Song called his name. When he didn't respond, she went to turn him over—it wasn't difficult now that he had lost so much weight, but his legs and arms were stiff and got in the way. Mrs. Song pounded on his chest, screaming for help even though she knew it was too late.
Between six hundred thousand and 2.5 million North Koreans died as a result of the famine—up to about ten per cent of the population. In Chongjin, where food supplies disappeared earlier and more precipitately than in other parts of North Korea, the death rates were likely much greater. Exact figures are impossible to tally, since North Korean hospitals were prohibited from reporting starvation as a cause of death.
Kim Jong-il, who assumed control of the government after his father's death, in 1994, took a much harder line against individual enterprise than his father had. "In a socialist society, even the food problem should be solved in a socialist way," he said in a December, 1996, speech, one of the few in which he is known to have acknowledged the food crisis. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own . . . creates egoism among people." Any private endeavor could be classified as an "economic crime," and the penalties included deportation to a labor camp and, if corruption was alleged, execution. But death was a virtual certainty for people who didn't show some private initiative.
Most business took place at the old farmers' markets. Even in the glory days of Communism, Kim Il-sung had grudgingly tolerated some markets, with the restriction that they could sell only supplementary foods that people raised in their kitchen gardens. Almost all the venders were women. This remained the case in the nineteen-nineties. Joo Sung-ha, a North Korean defector from North Hamgyong Province who became a journalist in Seoul, told me he believed that Kim Jong-il had tacitly agreed to let women work privately, to relieve the pressure on families. "If the ajummas hadn't been allowed to work, there would have been a revolution," he said. Some of the ajummas would whisper among themselves, "Men aren't worth as much as the dog that guards the house."
During this period, even as the famine worsened in Chongjin, more food appeared at the markets. Cabbages, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, scallions, and potatoes were for sale. There was suddenly white rice, in forty-kilo burlap sacks imprinted with the interlocking olive branches of the United Nations symbol or with the U.S. flag, which every North Korean recognized from propaganda posters, where it was often shown dripping with blood or pierced with bayonets.
One day, Mrs. Song spotted a convoy of trucks driving from the port with similar burlap sacks stacked in the back. Although the trucks had civilian license plates, she figured that they belonged to the military—nobody else had gasoline, as far as she knew—and that this was humanitarian aid that somebody in the Army was selling for profit at the market. No matter where it was from, people in Chongjin were happy to see white rice, which hadn't been available at the public-distribution center for years, although few could afford to buy it.
Every time she went to the market, Mrs. Song saw something that astonished her. Peaches. Grapes. Bananas. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen bananas—maybe twenty years ago, when Chang-bo brought some home as a treat for the children. One day, she saw oranges. Mrs. Song had never tasted an orange, but she recognized it from pictures. Another day, she saw a mottled yellow-brown fruit with green spikes growing from the top. It was only years later, when she had moved to Seoul and saw the fruit again, that she learned it was a pineapple.
After Chang-bo's death, Mrs. Song decided that her future lay in cookies. They needed only ten minutes in the oven; a modest amount of charcoal, which was growing ever more scarce, could bake four or five batches. They were easier to bake than bread, and they made a quick meal for hungry people on the move.
Mrs. Song was joined in the cookie business by her youngest daughter, Yong-hee, who was twenty-nine. Yong-hee borrowed four hundred won to buy scrap metal and found an unemployed welder from a local steel mill to make it into an oven. It was a square box, divided in two, so that charcoal could burn in the lower compartment while cookies baked in the upper one. He also made a cookie sheet. Many women had come up with the same idea, and for a while Mrs. Song took a job with one of them, to watch and learn. She bought samples from other venders to taste and compare. When she found one she liked, she tried to replicate the recipe out of flour, sugar, water, and yeast.
The first trial batches were not suitable to sell to the public. Mrs. Song and her daughter ate their failures rather than waste the precious ingredients. Eventually, Mrs. Song figured out that she had to use more sugar and leavening. She added milk to the recipe and cut the dough into different shapes.
Mrs. Song got up at 5 A.M. to do the baking. The competition was stiff, and her cookies needed to be fresh. She didn't have a cart or even a crate from which to sell her product, so she packed the cookies into a basin, which she carried in a homemade backpack until she got to a main street near the market with many pedestrians and few competitors. With her back aching, she'd sit cross-legged on the ground and put the basin of cookies on her knees.
Mrs. Song sold about a thousand cookies every day to people who had no time or money for a proper meal. At the end of a fourteen-hour workday, she had about a hundred won in her pocket, and a few bags of other goods, sometimes red peppers or a few lumps of coal, that she took in exchange for cookies. It was just enough for her to buy food for dinner and the ingredients for the next batch of cookies.
Mrs. Song often stumbled across the dead and the dying. Late one afternoon, on her way home from the market, she took a detour to the train station, hoping to find customers to buy some unsold cookies. Workers were sweeping the station's plaza. A couple of men walked by, pulling a heavy wooden cart. It was filled with half a dozen bodies, people who had died at the station overnight. A head lolled as the cart jostled over the pavement. It belonged to a man about forty years old. His eyes blinked faintly. Not quite dead yet, but close enough to be carted away.
From the outside, Chongjin looked unchanged. The same gray façades of the Stalinist office buildings stared out at empty stretches of asphalt. The roads were still marked by the faded red propaganda signs extolling the achievements of the regime. The place looked as if the clocks of world history had stopped in 1970. But Mrs. Song knew that she was living in a topsy-turvy world. The men were stuck in unpaying state jobs; women were making the money. The markets were stocked with food—more food than most North Koreans had seen in their lifetime—yet people were dying from hunger. Workers' Party members had starved to death; those who never gave a damn about the fatherland were making money. The future belonged to those who broke the rules.
Every six months or so after our first meeting, Mrs. Song and I got together for a meal in Seoul. She enjoyed eating out. Although she never developed a taste for pizza or hamburgers, she came to love the South Korean style of barbecuing beef and pork at the table. Whenever I saw her, she was wearing a new outfit. Everything from the cheery pastels of her clothing to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life.
Mrs. Song had adapted quickly to South Korea. She got a job as a housekeeper, and by living frugally she was able to travel. She joined tour groups of older women and explored South Korea. She even indulged in cosmetic surgery to add an extra fold to her upper eyelid—a popular procedure. After so many years of sacrificing for others, she took care of herself. When she developed a paunch—to her astonishment, after so many years of deprivation—she started watching her weight.
Mrs. Song was by no means an apologist for the North Korean regime—"That rotten bastard!" she once said of Kim Jong-il, the only time I ever heard her use profanity—but she was not as embittered as most defectors I had met. She even professed a certain nostalgia for the idealism that used to propel her out of bed early to dust the portrait of Kim Il-sung.
One evening, we were sitting around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in a broth and dipped in sesame sauce. "When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry," Mrs. Song said, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. "I can't helping thinking of Chang-bo's last words, 'Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice meal.' " ♦


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Beset by the world covered by the couch surfer and idle wild. The people, hoi polloi, have gotten lazy.
I should know. I'm one of them.
Praytell, fellow thee, when did the world of programmers turn their collective keyboard crunches on Stack Overflow instead of the overlords o' Google?
'Twere it the lack of Google's ability to return a single answer?
Or mayhap the answer finds itself in the reliability of Stack Overflow?


text:
The Easiest-to-Use Smartphone in Asia? Apple, Meet Smartisan
First Steve Jobs captured the pocketbooks of Chinese with the iPhone. Then local entrepreneur Lei Jun did the same with his low-priced Xiaomi phone.
Now a former English teacher most famous for once smashing a refrigerator with a hammer hopes to join their ranks.
Luo Yonghao this week unveiled his entry, the Smartisan T1 smartphone. The phone offered by Smartisan Technology Co., where he is chief executive, comes in the form of a familiar-looking black slab running on a variant of Android, the Google Inc. mobile operating system found on most phones in China.
That leaves Mr. Luo with the task of differentiating his phone, which he attempted with gusto during during a more than two-and-a-half-hour presentation on Tuesday in Beijing. He described it as "the easiest-to-use smartphone in the Eastern Hemisphere" with "the best screen" and "the fastest mass-produced mobile CPU." In an appeal to a very small part of the Chinese market, he also said the phone could be tweaked to be better for lefties.
Mr. Luo has also invested in packaging for the phone, known as the Hammer among many online after for the Chinese name of his company. Its design was by Ammunition Group, which includes former Apple designer Robert Brunner, while the packaging includes material from paper supplier James Cropper.
The Tuesday presentation itself looked to be modeled after one of Apple's famous product launches. Mr. Luo nodded to the perception that he is copying Apple which a perhaps less than tasteful joke. "If I ever die from work, I hope it won't be pancreatic cancer, since people are always saying we copy from Jobs," he said.
More In smartphones
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- How Chinese Smartphone Maker Xiaomi Is Betting on India's E-Commerce Boom
- Apple Pay to Launch in China This Week
The phone, which will go on sale in July, runs on a 2.5 gigahertz Snapdragon processor, measures 141 millimeters tall by nearly 68 millimeters wide and has a thickness of 8.23 millimeters. By the standards of Chinese phones, it is also on the high end, at about 3,000 yuan (about $480) for the basic version. By comparison, Xiaomi Inc.'s Mi 3 – which has a slower processor – starts at about 1,700 yuan. Mr. Luo said the price had originally been 4,000 yuan but the company lowered it when people complained.
Mr. Luo, himself a celebrity blogger in China, praised Xiaomi's Mr. Lei – who had no presence in smartphones until three years ago -- as a guide in the industry. "I should thank Lei Jun," he said. "Suppliers are less doubtful and alarmed when dealing with a guy who knows little about making mobile phone because of him."
Hong Bo, an independent IT analyst and consultant, said the phone still has to prove itself. "According to all the parameters shown to us, it's just a mainstream product in on today's Chinese market," he said. "It would only cost more than 1,000 yuan or something for other brands. So if he triples the price, then he'd better make us feel super good when using his product."
--Yang Jie
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|Fishless Cycling: The who's, what's, when's and why's
In the limited time that I have been involved as an aquarist, I have heard literally hundreds of opinions, philosophies and preferences for every aspect of the hobby. Why the differences though? Much of what our hobby is based on is science, but as we all know, the number of variables is unnumbered. In know what can each of us control each variable in the same way, hence, different experiences. What I am going to talk about, is the science of fishless cycling, and in turn the experiences that I have had using it.
Just as an introduction, my name is Curt Lemrick, I have a B.S. in Environmental Science and I am a second year student at Iowa State College of Veterinary Medicine. I am interested in small animal private practice and fish. In no way am I a fish doctor, although that is my goal, and maybe in 3 more years that is where I'll be. So take this article with a grain of salt. I am in no way an expert, merely an enthusiast that has done much research.
Before I get into the nitty gritty details and how to's, we need to understand why anyone would want to use fishless cycling. If you have found this article you probably know what fishless cycling is. If not, very briefly put, it is the addition of fish waste products to a new aquarium to stimulate the nitrogen cycle before the actual addition of fish. I'll explain in more detail later.
Respiratory cycle
photo from Rolf C Hagen Inc.
If your goal is faster cycling or larger bioloads, I'm afraid you may be disappointed. Fishless cycling is not designed for this, and rarely can either of these be realistically achieved any better than traditional cycling. Both require a certain amount of time. However, there is one main difference. Here is where I get into my philosophy, so bear with me, but I really think you need to understand this to justify your use of this method. Fish have rights. Just like any living animal which is in our care, that animal was at one point, whether domesticated or not, taken from its natural environment. At that point, we took on the responsibility as aquarists to provide a suitable and favorable environment for our fish. One way to do this is by utilizing fishless cycling.
Have you ever gotten a new tank, set it up, put some fish in, and battled dangerously high levels of ammonia or nitrite for a month? Well it happens and its frustrating. But think about the fish that are in there. That is there home. What if we pumped carbon monoxide into your home for a month. You probably would not fair well. Same concept. So as well as helping the fish, this will help you in the long run as far as keeping healthy fish for life. Large public and private aquariums use this process to minimize health risks to their fish.
A major opinion that I have run into is that fishless cycling is unnatural. These people say that adding "chemicals" to your aquarium is wrong. Well, certainly subjecting your fish to high levels of ammonia and nitrite is not natural. Do a little environmental research and test any fish bearing pond. See if you ever find levels as high as in a cycling tank, or even any at all. Well, you won't. So do not let anyone discourage you with this argument, it is invalid.
;Now enough about the philosophy and why to use fishless cycling. Let's discuss how to use it. First of all, allow yourself at least as much time to cycle your tank as you normally would. In fact, if this is your first time, you might want to plan on more time, because mistakes are almost inevitable and can slow the process down. But don't worry, it just takes a little practice. Secondly, you need an aquarium that is ready to cycle. This means completely ready to go. An appropriate biological filter, all water parameters where you want them and stable etc. Once this is established you are ready to go.
Now, you have two choices as the ammonia source. You can use ammonium chloride(NH4Cl) or ammonium hydroxide(NH4OH). I will refer to these as A-Cl and
A-OH respectively to simplify things. The method I use is for a pure ammonia source only. So don't go down to the hardware store and buy a bottle of ammonia. This kind of ammonia is usually A-OH, and is usually very dilute, making it hard to judge the amount to add. On top of this, these are sold as cleaning solutions and often contain scents, dyes and surfactants, all of which are detrimental to your aquarium. Therefore, use ACS or reagent grade granular A-OH or A-Cl. I say use granular because when using a liquid, it is harder to measure because as it ages, the concentration changes much more than granular ammonia. You can buy either of these at any lab supply store such as ScienceLab.com, Inc. or a similar site.
The main ingredient we are interested in is ammonia. Unfortunately we cannot get this without the hydroxide or chloride attached. My advice for most freshwater aquariums is to use A-Cl. This is because A-OH is a base. When added to water, it disassociates and OH binds alkaline metals, that are naturally in your aquarium as alkalinity (ie calcium and magnesium carbonate). Carbon dioxide will ultimately be produced and acidify your water.
I received this from a reader, as I am not a chemist or the original author I will post it here with his links to read for yourself. "This, the underlined section, is incorrect. Hydroxyl ions (OH, that is) don't 'bind' to carbonate compounds when they dissociate (not 'disassociate', BTW). They stay in solution, at least ideally, as when we add them (as in CaOH) to reef aquaria for just this purpose -- to raise the pH. Nor is it clear how CO2 could possibly be produced here. Perhaps (probably) you have OH confused with H (hydrogen ions) which are liberated upon the addition of acids (not bases) to certain aqueous solutions. Consider reading here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid#Chemical_characteristics "
A-Cl will disassociate to form and chloride will readily bind to other ions in the water such as sodium etc., and rarely will bind to OH-. Therefore you can expect your pH to remain stable, or at most slightly acidify. I am not a chemist, but this is in a nutshell what happens. The process is not important, just the effect.
Now you know what to use, so here is my "recipe". This is the general guideline that I use, and works for me. I originally adopted this protocol from an associate who is a chemist at the Tennessee Aquarium.
1. Use ammonium chloride, not ammonium hydroxide. Ammonia hydroxide
will bring your pH too low and cause you to lose alkalinity and likewise
your bacteria population. NH4Cl is available from pretty much every
chemical company at a reasonable price.
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How to Write a Conclusion for a Presentation
In the old cartoons, you knew that the show was over because the words "The End" came up on the screen. To utter such phrases as "The end," "I'm done," or "That's it" is not really a conclusion to a formal presentation. These phrases say nothing and stop your presentation rather than finish it. A good conclusion brings closure to a presentation and also seeks a lasting impact. Because the conclusion is the last part of the talk, it is often the part the audience remembers best. So you want to leave them with a bang. Here are six techniques that can help you bring positive closure to a presentation:
Recap: A recap is a summary of the main points covered in your talk. You want it brief, generally covering no more than three or four points. If you cover more than that, you're probably going to get too detailed, lose your audience, and sound like you're repeating yourself.
Repeat core message: This technique ends your presentation by briefly emphasizing the theme that you have carried throughout the talk. It works really well when your introduction raised this theme and you want to wrap it up in the end.
Call to action: With this closing technique, you finish by requesting that the audience take some kind of action. That action can be implementing an idea that they have gained from your talk or doing something to support a cause.
Quote: This technique works best when you can come up with a witty or interesting line that wraps up your presentation nicely. As you do in an introduction, you want to identify the source of the quote and tie it to your main point.
Rhetorical question: In this technique, you leave the audience with a thought-provoking question. Most often, you don't answer it for them like you would in an introduction; instead, you leave them to ponder the question for themselves. As with an introduction, make sure that the question is relevant to what you've said so that people walk away from the presentation thinking, especially about possibilities or opportunities.
Story: A story often makes for a nice close to a presentation. To make a story work in a conclusion, you want it to be relatively brief and to illustrate a point that ties to what the whole presentation was about.Credit: Photo © iStockphoto.com/kristian sekulic


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This experience may account for some of Filo's enthusiasm about her new project, Palo Alto Forest. Fortunately, Palo Alto's trees seem to have a more evergreen spirit.
Filo is spearheading the project, in which members of the public are invited to submit their photographs of trees they find meaningful. They're also sending in six-word stories about what the trees mean to them. The people don't have to live in Palo Alto, as long as their leafy subjects do.
In October, when the Palo Alto Art Center on Newell Road is scheduled to reopen after more than a year of extensive renovations, the tree photos and stories will go up there as part of a new display.
"The exhibition will be called 'Community Creates' and will feature approximately eight Bay Area contemporary artists working with key community groups to create installations," center director Karen Kienzle said. So far, Palo Alto artist Mel Day has also signed on to do a new-media piece with Lytton Gardens.
Filo said she hasn't decided exactly what shape Palo Alto Forest will take. It could be a straightforward two-dimensional piece, with people's photos and stories, or perhaps something three-dimensional, "with the sense of walking among the trees," she said.
Meanwhile, she's gathering and enjoying the pictures and stories as they come in. As of last week, she had received about 50 submissions.
"It's not a photo contest," Filo said. "Some people hesitate to participate because they don't see themselves as photographers, but we want anyone to take part. It's not about creating a precious photo so much as choosing a precious tree."
Photos taken on any kind of equipment, from phones to professional cameras, are welcome, with one entry per person.
As for the stories, entries may be descriptive, or funny, or even enigmatic in the tradition of the famous six-word story attributed to Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
One entry, submitted by a person who gave his or her name as simply "ER," depicts a towering redwood tree, with the story "The silent guardian of our house." Mimi Lyons wrote, "My three kids, my three trees," and Carolyn Held looked into a cluster of blossoms and penned, "Pink playfulness superimposed on azure calm." Susan P. Meade gave her photo's sky a fanciful background of pink, orange and yellow, writing, "A New Look At Gamble Garden,"
Filo herself contributed a contemplative image of an oak gently stretching its branches over a fence into a neighboring yard. It was one of five oaks that once grew along the side of her house, but it went into decline. The tree had to be cut down right around the time that Filo, Kienzle and others at the art center were coming up with the idea for Palo Alto Forest.
"I wanted to have a little tribute to that tree," Filo said. Her story: "Looking out my window, missing you."
Info: Palo Alto Forest entries must be submitted to firstname.lastname@example.com by June 15. For more information, go to http://paloaltoforest.org .
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CLAYTON — Authorities on Sunday ordered dozens of residents near the growing wildfire burning outside Mt. Diablo State Park to leave their homes immediately and take only essential items and pets.
At least 800 acres of vegetation had burned on Morgan Territory Road, and the Contra Costa County sheriff's officers ordered all residents and people on Oak Hill Lane, Curry Canyon Road and the Curry Point area to leave immediately as the fire continued to burn with 10 percent containment by about 7:30 Sunday evening.
"Leave now by car. Go by way of Morgan Territory Road. Take only those essential items you have ready and can carry with you. Pets must be in a carrier or on a leash. Lock your windows and doors as you leave. Stay off the phone unless you need to report a life-threatening emergency at your location," said Sheriff's Office spokesman Jimmy Lee.
As many as 75 homes were in danger and possibly more as the fire shifts to the south away from the Clayton area. The fire area is thick with brush on rugged mountain terrain. The blaze's cause is unknown.
Just after 11:45 p.m. Sunday, Lee said residents of the following areas were evacuated as well: Trail Ride Road, Russelmann Park Road, East Trail Road, Upper Trail Road and Lower Trail Road.
He said there were about 24 homes in those areas and most of the residents had already been evacuated by emergency personnel.
People who evacuated were told to go to the Clayton Community Library, 6125 Clayton Road in Clayton, and those with disabilities who cannot leave their homes on their own were to call 911 immediately, Lee said.
More residents could face evacuations.
Bill Chase, who lives on Whispering Pines Road, was collecting his valuables and spraying down his roof and fence with water even before the evacuations were ordered.
"Its been pretty wild out here," he said.
Fueled by temperatures in the 90s and only a slight breeze, the fire Sunday evening was moving in a southerly direction along the Mt. Diablo State Park boundary, said CalFire Battalion Chief Mike Martin.
Clayton Mayor Julie Pierce said, "Everyone is flashing back to the fire of '77. We're hoping it's not as bad as that."
On Aug. 2, 1977, after two years of drought and two lightning strikes that day, a fire charred 6,000 acres on the entire north side of Mount Diablo.
On Sunday night, more than 250 firefighters were battling the fire.
The fire began shortly after 1:45 p.m. and was reported at Morgan Territory and Marsh Creek roads, sending massive plumes of white and dark smoke over most of Contra Costa County.
People on social media sites reported seeing smoke in Vacaville, Richmond, Tracy and even at Candlestick Park, where the San Francisco 49ers were playing their opening game.
"This thing grew pretty quickly," said Dave Miller, who left the Oakland A's game early Sunday to check on his Morgan Territory Road home. "Now the wind is picking up; it could get ugly."
At 6:30 p.m., the fire was moving uphill away from his home, but everyone was on edge. Miller's next-door neighbor, Lisa Keenan, said the fire grew quickly after she first saw the smoke. "It just broke into flames," she said.
Karen Cooper, who works at a dog kennel on Morgan Territory Road, safely evacuated 20 dogs. But two of her horses, Butter and Pineapple, were missing Sunday evening, she said. "It's been intense."
Firefighters from CalFire, the San Ramon Valley Fire District, the Contra Costa Fire District and the East Bay Regional Park District are battling the blaze, the largest fire near Mount Diablo in recent history.
Contact David Debolt at email@example.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/ddebolt. Reach Kristin J. Bender at email@example.com. Follow her at Twitter.com/kjbender. Reach Rick Hurd at firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/3rderh.


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Telsta will set up a global applications and platforms business to ward off challenges by over-the-top players, the telco said.
"Our industry is changing rapidly," said Kate McKenzie, group managing director of Telstra products and marketing.
"The future is in the software layer and there is an application for absolutely everything.
"With successful over the top players growing exponentially, we need to continue to find ways to take challenger positions in this space."
A recent report by Ovum said over-the-top providers represent a major threat to telcos in Australia. BuddeComm analyst Paul Budde said last week that the same threat may have spurred Telstra's agreement last week to buy directory service TrueLocal.
"Telstra is moving from providing mobile and internet services to encompassing applications and integrated services," McKenzie said. "This new software defined world presents many opportunities, not least the ability to move faster."
McKenzie said the new business would operate as "a startup company drawing on the considerable assets of the broader organisation". The business opens 1 February and will be built over the next three years, she said.
The business will be led by Charlotte Yarkoni, who previously held senior positions at EMC and VMWare, and has also worked at AT&T in the US. The team will include a mix of new and existing Telstra employees, McKenzie said.
Follow Adam Bender on Twitter: @WatchAdam
Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU, or take part in the Computerworld conversation on LinkedIn: Computerworld Australia


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Wayne Weiten is the author of 'Study Guide for Weiten/Dunn/Hammer's Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century, 10th', published 2011 under ISBN 9781111344962 and ISBN 1111344965.[read more]
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The Capacity for Tolerance
Following the events of September 11, 2001, Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Sheikh Jamal Rahman became colleagues and friends, brought together by a desire to confront fear and hatred with earnest interfaith dialogue. Known collectively as the "Interfaith Amigos," they blog weekly for YES! Magazine.
September 2010 has seen the ninth anniversary of 9/11, the widespread anger and fear concerning the building of an Islamic cultural center in the neighborhood of Ground Zero in New York, and Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement—all coinciding with one another. In Seattle, where I live, a synagogue and a Jewish school were defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti the night before Yom Kippur. At my church the following Sunday, we read at the top of our worship bulletin, "All pretense gone, naked heart revealed to the hiding self, we stand on holy ground between the day that was and the one that must be." This is a quote from the Jewish New Union Prayer Book for the Days of Awe. The choir sang two anthems with words written by children in concentration camps, marking the depth and anguish of the moment.
It is extremely important for Christian people to be aware of the harm done over and over again to non-Christians in the name of the gospel of Jesus. The idea that adherents to other religions are wrong is given many different names; but always, the result is that people who are "not like us" are marginalized and harmed. What could be further from the gospel of Jesus, in which compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love define the basic message?
It is not just intolerance, which would be bad enough. It extends to violent abuse, physical harm, and death. This is not what religion and spirituality are about.
At a gathering the evening before 9/11, Ted and Jamal and I said that we are glad that the intolerance in this country has surfaced—because it is present and needs to be addressed. At least one person wrote to us saying he didn't think Americans were intolerant. Would that that were so.
There is a systemic intolerance in the world. It is in all cultures and all places; the potential for it lives in every human heart. When I say "systemic" I mean it is a possibility in the same way that evil is a possibility. It is held by cultures and can enter individuals living in those cultures.
Intolerance is alive and well. But religion, and the spirituality it bears within it, brings a message of hope—that with spiritual practices, the space in the human heart that might be filled with evil things can, instead, be filled with good things. Tolerance is definitely not enough; it is just the first step. We can actually learn to appreciate and give thanks for the differences that we bring to our communities, which help us to see our differences as well as our similarities. The differences give us deep insights into the nature of who we are and what we can do.
Susan Dominus, describing the future possibilities for an interfaith cultural center in New York, imagines:New York Times columnist
Inside a spacious, spare chapel on that floor, there is no sign of the Roman Catholic Mass held the previous Sunday; instead a rabbi from Brooklyn is leading in prayer some congregants who have joined her for a special service at Park51, a community center founded by Muslims, where her sermon will focus on the tradition of hospitality common to all Abrahamic religions…Park51, a lightning rod for anger and discord, seems to be the least likely place right now for this idyll to bloom. Then again, as Hillel might have wondered: if not there, where?
There are probably 50 variations of the admonition "Do not be afraid" in the gospels and the epistles in the Bible; even more are in the Old Testament, in Jewish scripture. This is clearly one of the strongest messages of our traditions.
We need not fear each other. We should be afraid, though, of what the world will look like if we do not learn to live together peacefully and imaginatively, honoring the essential dignity of every person.
If not now, when? If not there, where?
- : The current flap over the proposed Islamic center-cum-mosque in New York City offers a good opportunity to reflect on the nature and purpose of places of worship.
- : The Interfaith Amigos reflect on what it will take to reach the other side of hatred.
- : How relinquishing our innate pursuit of power and embracing compassion can lead to a more peaceful world.


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American school would like penpals from all over the world!
Posted: Fri May 04, 2007 3:22 pm
Hi! My name is Kristi Williams and I teach at Blue Springs South High School in Blue Springs, MO USA. This year I have started a penpal program with a teacher in South Korea, and the other teachers in my department and school are jealous of my project. Many of the other teachers in my department have expressed an interest in getting penpals for their students starting in the fall. We then all got together and thought it would be fun if we got classes from all around the world and then had a "cultural fair" at the end of the year to showcase everything we have learned from our penpals. The American students LOVE hearing about foreign students. The students that would be participating in the exchange program would be 15-18, sophomores through seniors in high school. Things we have exchanged this year include videos of our schools, projects (art, music, etc.), letters, coins, pictures, food, emails, etc. The only thing we cannot do is chatboards, because our district does not allow access to those sites. Please contact me if you are interested in being a "pal" class with one of our classes here at BSSHS, and one of our teachers will get back to you.
Thank you,
Thank you,


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Using Collaborate
Using Collaborate Ultra in Web-based Classes at GHC
Are you a little worried about taking a web-based class that uses Collaborate Ultra? Don't be.
Collaborate Ultra is a great tool for online learning that creates an interactive environment, so online students don't feel like they are alone in the eLearning universe. There are other life forms out there (students, instructors, librarians, etc.), and Collaborate can be your connection between worlds.
Cost? Nothing.
GHC has already paid for the use of Collaborate, so it is FREE for student use when set-up by your instructor.
Special Devices Needed? None.
Collaborate runs on a variety of PC and MAC devices, so chances are very strong that you already own a device that will support the program. To fully use the program, you need a device with speakers, a mic, and a webcam, though video is used less often than sound capabilities. Most laptops, smartphones, and many tablets already have these features built-in; however, the mobile app for Collaborate doesn't have video capabilities. You can maximize sound quality with the use of a headset or bluetooth device, but these are not required.
How do I "attend" class? You will receive a link to click on which will open a new tab in your browser.
GHC instructors use Collaborate Ultra in a variety of ways, and use in web-based courses is different than courses that use Collaborate to expand a traditional course across multiple campuses with a single instructor. For my web-based courses, Collaborate can be a great way to receive specialized assistance when it's needed. I also use Collaborate sessions for real-time group discussions that are comparable to discussions that take place in "brick and mortar" classrooms every day. Students can attend these meetings from any location that has an internet connect, so it is very flexible for those with busy schedules.
What if I can't get it to work on my device? Tech support and your instructor are available to help.
The first Collaborate session I hold each semester is an open house session where I am available via Collaborate and by phone, so students can practice logging in and using the program when they do not have to be concerned about being "late" for class and when they know help is available if they get stuck or confused. If you can use the internet, you can use Collaborate!
For more user-friendly guidance, visit GHC's Collaborate Participant Guide.


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Frank Ocean
Channel Orange - DEF JAM
FILTER Grade: 95%
By Kyle MacKinnel on July 27, 2012
"If I listen closely, I can hear the sky falling," muses Frank Ocean at the poetic wrap of his already-legendary Tumblr open letter. With all due respect, Frank, you've got it backwards: the sky is getting closer, but instead it's you approaching it, drip-drying as you rise farther into the vast cerulean away from anonymity.
To the listener: Ignore whatever purist backlash you may encounter. In Channel Orange, we have been granted a truly classic document, perhaps the very first that feels synchronized with the present decade. "Thinkin Bout You" may be the track of 2012, but Ocean goes much deeper than this on his transcendent debut. "Sweet Life" is a citrus slice of Wonder, "Pyramids" is a hypnotic meditation and "Bad Religion" stuns in its naked candor. With the stubborn fog finally broken and Ocean in clear view, the tangerine horizon now appears as endless as it does rightly gorgeous.


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We have an amazing and vibrant community of respectful, civil, supportive, intelligent, inquisitive and helpful contributors. This is a tremendously valuable asset to us all as we attempt to get beyond the flawed conventional wisdom of health and fitness and find what works for each of us. As such, to ensure this forum will continue to thrive and won't devolve into a place of spam, name calling, ad hominem attacks, and nasty and hurtful language that is so prevalent in comment and forum boards around the net we now have official forum rules. The Grok abides and so should you.
The short of it:
Be nice, be civil, and don't call people names
Don't post spam and advertisements of products or other websites
If you break either of these rules you will receive an infraction or be banned from the forum.
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While debating and discussion is fine, we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks,
purposeless inflammatory posts, or inappropriate language. Our decision is final in these matters.
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Please wait a reasonable amount of time before bumping posts. For style changes and general 'how-to' questions this should be 24 hours. For specific troubleshooting issues, use 12 hours as a guideline.
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While these rules cover most common situations, they cannot anticipate everything. Consequently we reserve the right to take any actions we deem appropriate to ensure these forums are not disrupted or abused in any way.
We also reserve the right to ban anyone who willfully violates the forum rules, as access to our forums are a privilege and not a right.
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Saturday is July 27, the 208th day of 2013. There are 157 days left in the year.
1789: President George Washington signed a measure establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs, forerunner of the Department of State.
1861: Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.
1866: Cyrus W. Field finished laying out the first successful underwater telegraph cable between North America and Europe. A previous cable in 1858 burned out after only a few weeks' use.
1909: During the first official test of the U.S. Army's first airplane, Orville Wright flew himself and a passenger, Lt. Frank Lahm, above Fort Myer, Va., for one hour and 12 minutes.
1921: Canadian researcher Frederick Banting and his assistant, Charles Best, succeeded in isolating the hormone insulin at the University of Toronto.
1940: Bugs Bunny made his "official" debut in the Warner Bros. animated cartoon "A Wild Hare."
1942: During World War II, the First Battle of El Alamein in Egypt ended in a draw as Allied forces stalled the progress of Axis invaders. The Allies went on to win a clear victory over the Axis in the Second Battle of El Alamein later that year.
1953: The Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting.
1960: Vice President Richard M. Nixon was nominated for president on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to assess the causes of urban rioting, the same day black militant H. Rap Brown said in Washington that violence was "as American as cherry pie."
1974: The House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to adopt the first of three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, charging he had personally engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct justice in the Watergate case.
1980: On day 267 of the Iranian hostage crisis, the deposed Shah of Iran died at a military hospital outside Cairo, Egypt, at age 60.
1996: Terror struck the Atlanta Olympics as a pipe bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park, directly killing one person and injuring 111. Anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph later pleaded guilty to the bombing.
2003: Comedian Bob Hope died in Toluca Lake, Calif. at age 100. Lance Armstrong won a record-tying fifth straight title in the Tour de France. However, Amstrong was stripped of all seven of his Tour de France titles in 2012 by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
2008: A gunman went on a rampage at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, killing two people and wounding six others. (Jim D. Adkisson later pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.) Two bombs targeting civilians at a packed square in Istanbul, Turkey, killed 17 people. Iran hanged 29 people convicted of murder, drug trafficking and other crimes. Carlos Sastre of Spain won the Tour de France in one of the closest finishes in the 105-year-old race.
2012: Britain opened its Olympic Games in a celebration of Old England and new, even cheekily featuring a stunt double for Queen Elizabeth II parachuting with James Bond into Olympic Stadium. The International AIDS Conference closed in Washington, D.C. Tony Martin, 98, the romantic singer who appeared in movie musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s, died in Los Angeles.
TV producer Norman Lear (91), actor Jerry Van Dyke (82), sportscaster Irv Cross (74), singer Bobbie Gentry (69), actress-director Betty Thomas (65), Olympic gold medal figure skater Peggy Fleming (65), singer Maureen McGovern (64), rock singer Juliana Hatfield (46), comedian Maya Rudolph (41), singer-songwriter Pete Yorn (39), MLB player Alex Rodriguez (38), actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers (36).
Associated Press


text:
Davey Johnson: Miguel Cabrera mirrors Hank Aaron
Davey Johnson played with Hank Aaron in Atlanta in 1973-74, when Aaron was making his charge past Babe Ruth for the all-time home-run record.
Now, in 2013, Johnson manages the Washington Nationals and has to confront Miguel Cabrera.
He said Cabrera reminds him of Aaron in two ways.
"Early in his career, Aaron used the whole field," Johnson said. "Later in his career, all he did was pull everything.
HOF CEREMONY:Subdued year in Cooperstown
PAPI SMASH!Ortiz obliterates a dugout phone
"A lot of what Cabrera does reminds me a lot of Aaron in his younger days. Aaron would go to the opposite field."
Johnson told me this just before batting practice at the recent All-Star Game, where he served as a coach for the National League. That night, with the game scoreless in the fourth inning, Cabrera showed again what a terrific opposite-field hitter he is. He unleashed his big right-handed swing and drove a double up the right-center gap off a pitcher he had never faced, Arizona left-hander Patrick Corbin. He came around with the first run in the American League's 3-0 win.
Tigers manager Jim Leyland has said that Cabrera has the best opposite-field power of any hitter he has seen in his 50 years in baseball.
PETE ROSE:A block away, but impossibly far from Hall
MORE ON ROSE:Hit king's advice to steroid cheaters
Cleveland second baseman Jason Kipnis spoke recently about how hard Cabrera hits the ball.
"He's not looking to pull," Kipnis said. "It's the weirdest thing: How short his swing is, and how long it stays through the zone. You'll see a 500-foot home run to left, and then you'll see three line drives over the second baseman. His pitch recognition is unbelievable."
Aaron could astound Johnson just by telling him his approach at the plate: He looked for the breaking ball, not the fastball. "They can't throw the fastball by me," Aaron told Johnson.
And now Johnson says, "I think Cabrera is the same way."
John Lowe covers Major League Baseball for the Detroit Free Press, a Gannett affiliate.


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text:
How to Install Your Wireless Access Point
After you've purchased your wireless access point (WAP), it's time to install and set it up! Begin by unpacking your wireless access point. In the box, you should find the wireless access point, a power adapter, and an Ethernet network cable.
An Ethernet network cable is simply a short cable (often about 3 feet in length) with a small connector that looks similar to, but slightly larger than, the connector you use to plug your phone into a wall jack.
To install a wireless access point, turn off your computer and modem and follow these steps:
1Connect the Ethernet port of your cable modem or router to your wireless access point's Internet (or WAN) port using an Ethernet network cable.
If your modem is already connected to your computer with an Ethernet cable, disconnect the cable end that is plugged into your computer and plug it into the Internet (or WAN) port of your wireless access point.
2Connect your wireless access point to your computer using an Ethernet network cable.
Plug one end of the cable into one of the LAN ports of your wireless access point and the other end to the Ethernet port on your computer.
3Turn on your DSL or cable modem and wait about two minutes.
This gives your modem enough time to boot up and establish a connection to the Internet.
4Connect the power adapter to your wireless access point, plug it into an electrical outlet, and wait about one minute.
This gives your wireless access point enough time to boot up, establish a connection to your modem, and begin broadcasting a wireless signal.
5Turn on your computer.
At this point, you may need to configure your wireless access point. Refer to the CD or instructions provided with your wireless access point for details.


text:
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Tea Pillows, Hobs & More
Here are some interesting items I've run across lately. Nothing to gain by plugging them. Just thought they were nifty.
If you can't get enough tea during the day, get your mitts on a Tea Pillow. Yes, it is what it sounds like. Tea Pillows are filled with tea instead of feathers and, according to the people over at Tea GW, they "have been used in Asia and in particular China for hundreds of years, and now are growing in popularity" in the West. All manner of wonderful benefits are said to result from using them.
What's a HOB? Well, it's most certainly not your grandmother's tea cosy. Designed, as the manufacturer says, "to appeal to the growing number of male tea drinkers."
Next time you're shopping for a chair and a tea chest, you might as well kill two birds with one stone and pick up a Tea Chest Chair.
Last up, a rather eye-catching Japanese Tea Serving Set.
Canadian Tea Gifts
RedUmbrella Tea, Canada's Loose Leaf Tea Co.
2 comments:
- Margaret Studer said...
I've heard of sleeping on tea pillows before. It supposedly heals whatever ails you while you sleep.
- Our Porch in Hillsborough said...
The tea pillow is very interesting - I'd love to talk to someone who's tried it . ..
Love your blog!
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
Art, Design & Fashion Market: This market has a vibrant atmosphere with great live music and international food. The Burton street tunnel exclusively features Artisan made products with the Green and Gravel areas featuring Fashion stalls and much much more.
Back to All Events
Earlier Event: 25 AugustGeneral Market.
Later Event: 22 SeptemberGeneral Market.


text:
Add Another Windows 8 User to Your Computer
Administrator account holders in Windows 8 can add another User Account through the Start screen's simple PC Settings screen. To add another user, follow these steps:
Summon the Charms bar, click the Settings icon, and then click the words Change PC Settings.
You can fetch the new Charms bar by pointing your mouse cursor at the screen's top- or bottom-right corner, sliding a finger inward from a touchscreen's right edge, or pressing Windows+C with a keyboard.
From the PC Settings screen, click the Users category.
The Your Account screen appears, showing ways to change your own account, as well as how to add another person.
While you're here, you can tweak your own account, changing your password or even switching from a Microsoft account to a Local account.
To add a new user account, click the words Add a User and then, in the Add a User window that appears, choose which type of account to create.
Microsoft complicates matters, as shown in the Add a User window, by forcing you to choose which type of account to create for the new person. You have two choices:
Local account: Select this option for casual guests, family members, or people not interested in Microsoft accounts and their privileges. It lets the person use your computer with a generic account. To create a Local account, click the words Don't Want this Person to Sign In With a Microsoft Account? and then jump to Step 5.
Microsoft account: Select this option when somebody specifically asks for it. A Microsoft account is an e-mail address that links to Microsoft, its computers, and its billing department. The account holder can then buy apps using his own credit card, for example, fetch personal files he has stored on an Internet storage space called "SkyDrive," and access other perks offered by a Microsoft account.
To create a Microsoft account, go to the next step.
Can't decide which type of account to create? Then create a Local account. The person can always turn it into a Microsoft account later, if he wants.
To create a Microsoft account, enter the account's e-mail address in the Email Address text box, click Next, and then click Finish.
The account will be waiting on the Start screen.
When the person wants to use the computer, he chooses the account bearing his e-mail address and then types in his Microsoft account password. Windows visits the Internet, and if e-mail address and password match, the account is ready for action. You've finished.
Click the words Sign in without a Microsoft Account.
Alarmed that you'd consider choosing a lowly Local account over the wondrous Microsoft account, Microsoft displays a confirmation page with two buttons: Microsoft Account and Local Account.
Click the Local Account button.
This tells Microsoft that yes, you really do want a Local account. (After all, you can always convert a Local account into a Microsoft account later on.)
A new screen appears, asking for a name for the account (username), the account's password, and a password hint in case you forget the password.
Enter a username, password, and password hint and then click Next.
Use the person's first name or nickname for the username. Then choose a simple password and hint; the user can change them after he signs in.
Click Finish.
Tell the person his new username and password. His username will be waiting at the Sign In screen for him to begin using the computer.
Unlike earlier Windows versions, Windows 8 creates Standard accounts for all new users. You can upgrade that later to an Administrator account if you want, by changing the account.
For more information about Windows 8 and its features, explore Windows 8 For Dummies, available online.


text:
Got Mine
(feat. Trae, Archie Lee, Jay'Ton, Pimp Skinny, Big Bee, T)
S.L.A.B., yeah..
[Hook x2]
Why they wanna hate a G, and steady talking down
It don't matter, cause I'm still gon get mine
Now I'm on top of my game, and so I gotta shine
For the hood, cause I got out and got mine
[Archie Lee]
That nigga Archie Lee, gon get his cash regardless
You can hate on a playa, but you still the fraudest
Nigga I paid dues, to get this cash
It ain't fall out the sky, in no Giftwrap bag
Shit, I use to have them Ziplock bags
Full of O.Z.'s from whole ki's, I flipped that fast
I hit the block with that hard balling, pitch that crack
Now I'm in it straight winning, don't forget that black
Ask my nigga Knock-Knock, he can vouch for that
We move bricks on ships, for you nonbelievers
At the end of the day, we stay focused homie
Better hating from a distance, I got my toaster on me come on
It's the Jay'Ton, I steady be dropping bombs
On niggaz that be hating me, cause I'm setting off alarms
Through the lot, working the block until it's hot
Then I burn off to that next spot, with the trunk popped
On a hater who ain't heard of a G, S-L-A-B
Across my glass, so they know who I be
I tell these nothing-ass hoes, I'm a P-I-M-P
And I got the magic stick, and it ain't for free bitch
[Pimp Skinny]
Bust for mine, represent it everytime
And bump a nigga off, if he get out of line
Drop it on a dime, it's my reason for a rhyme
Nothing but the G shit, till I'm laying in the ground
Me and my click gon show spine, stuck on the grind
Pimp Skinny that's fa sho, you niggaz already know
1-9-7-4, break a bitch break a hoe
Do it like it G-O, so quit hating on S.L.A.B. hoe
[Big Bee]
It's the Woss Ness representer, they gotta check these broads
They knock me, cause I'm a ghetto star
I'm talking bout these bullshit niggaz, smile in your face
Talk behind your back niggaz, I'ma keep mashing niggaz
It give you hoes, something to talk about
Like how Big Bee, staying with S.L.A.B
And stay hot with Lil Head, that stand 4'3
With connections with Trae and Dougie D, to collect the currency
[Hook x2]
When I was broke in the game, I know these haters would diss me
Now I'm pulling up in a bumper slab, that make boppers wanna kiss me
These niggaz ain't got no love for a G, when I was showing it back
Now I'm on a mission in a Buick, and ain't got no time to look back
They really don't wanna see me doing good, but now I be representing for the hood
Stepping out like Trae a superstar, and these niggaz be wishing that they could
Be like a Southside, Slow Loud And Bangin' underground
Flipping seven figgas out of the Maab, ready for any contender
[Lil C]
Pay close attention to me, I'll tell you what you need to know
From extracts to snow, I'll show you how to get this do'
First thang, it takes money to make money
I trick off of myself, and give these broads my fake money
Don't be a dummy, trying to buy it when you can't afford it
Cause you got lil' ones coming up, that need to be supported
I'm just saying man, shit I'ma get mine regardless
I came up broke, eventually it made me heartless
See I'm a Mob Figga, and I be known to get mine
Boppers claiming they love me, cause they know I speak rhymes
I'm getting dimes, me and my hoes get round
You say I'm your homie, but girl you need to quit lying
We in the mix now, it ain't no stopping our tape
You wanna knock a nigga hustle, I got the glock and I'll spray
I know you hate to see me in the Bentley, chopping up weight
The first hater finna fall, but shit he dropping today
And you might catch me in a 6-4, hitting switches with Trae
And we ain't worried bout niggaz yapping, cause he strapped with a K
I'm bout my money now nigga, motherfuck what you say
Guerilla Maab and Mob Figgas, we be in it to stay
[Lil Sha]
I'm a Southern gangbanger, with one up in the chamber
Niggaz can't see me, on the first set of swangas
Bitch nigga mangler, stupid bitch strangler
The only thing to hang you, the 4-4 will shame ya
When a nigga says danger, all on my route
I'ma try to put the whole glock, all in your mouth
I'm easy to locate, I'm all on the South
At the club at the mall, plus I'm all by your house
When I catch you ladies good, it's going all in they mouth
He's weaker than weak bricks, so he softer than soft
Send his family a message, buy off in your boss
I know what your problem is, the bang got you lost
[Dougie D]
These haters they flock around me, and they come dime of the dozen
All shapes sizes and colors, them dirty motherfuckers
They ain't never stopping my shine, never gon see me slip
Never gon take me off of my game, cause I'm too thoed to get
You go hard or you go home, you can't handle it leave it alone
This some grown man shit, S.L.A.B. bitch we on our own
Got no time for you bustas, you bitches boppers or wankstas
This your nigga Dougie D, swanging off on all haters
[Lil B]
Now tell me why you wanna hate Lil B, bitch ass nigga
I'm still that hustler on the grind, trying to stack six figgas
But when I turn around, this nigga be all in my face
Fuck being your friend, I'ma fuck around and catch me a case
Talking down on my name, fake playa ass nigga
Sha grab the K, I'ma fuck around and spray this nigga
It ain't no love, a nigga still will push and will shove
You ain't no gangsta you a wanna-be, old fake ass thug
My name ain't got no love, so now I'm riding alone
Swanging on chrome, late night when alone
I'm a playa old school, and on the block
Every single day, I love school
I know the game done got shife, but I'm living life for
Now I'm running up the twins, like Michelle Phifer
In a Viper with the slab, you know I gotta keep it gangsta
2K3, ain't got no time for no wankstas
Autor(es): Bangin / S.L.A.B. Slow Loud


text:
subject(redirected from Academic subject)
Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Financial, Encyclopedia.
subject(Conditional), adjective contingent, dependent on circumstances, depending upon, inciient to, incidental, provisional, relying upon, subiectus, subordinate, uncertain
Associated concepts: subject to approval, subject to defeaaance, subject to review
subject(Exposed), adjective accountable, at the mercy of, chargeable, liable, open, prone, unexempt from, vulnerable
subject(Object), noun case, experimentee, liegeman, recipient, testee, victim
Associated concepts: subject of an investigation
subject(Topic), noun affair, argumentum, content, course, gist, issue, material, matter, motif, pith, point, point at issue, quaestio, study, text, theme, thesis
Associated concepts: interest in subject matter, subject of agreement, subject of bailment, subject of commerce, subbect of statute, subject of tax
subjectverb bring under domination, bring under rule, cause to undergo, conquer, control, crush, defeat, dominate, enslave, enthrall, expose, get the better of, govern, hold down, hold in bondage, hold in subbection, humble, keep down, make liable, make submissive, make subordinate, make subservient, master, obnoxium reddere, oppress, overcome, overmaster, overthrow, quell, repress, rule, subdue, subicere, subjugate, subordinate, suppress, tame, triumph over, vanquish, worst
See also: article, captive, compel, constrain, content, contents, dependent, dominate, inferior, issue, meaning, object, passive, question, require, servile, subdue, subjugate, subordinate, subservient, thesis
SUBJECT, contracts. The thing which is the object of an agreement. This term is used in the laws of Scotland.
SUBJECT, persons, government. An individual member of a nation, who is
subject to the laws; this term is used in contradistinction to citizen,
which is applied to the same individual when considering his political
2. In monarchical governments, by subject is meant one who owes permanent allegiance to the monarch. Vide Body politic; Greenl. Ev. Sec. 286; Phil. & Am. on Ev. 732, n. 1.


text:
The Rancho Valencia Tennis Membership is perfect for tennis enthusiasts seeking to join a premier tennis resort community while elevating their game.
Tennis is more than just a pastime at Rancho Valencia, it's a passion. Our tennis program and facilities are among the best of the best; Rancho Valencia has been selected by Tennis Magazine as their #1 US Tennis Resort consistently since 2008.
Our tennis pavilion features 18 beautiful plexi-pave hard courts in a magnificent garden setting - the perfect scenery for a rousing game of tennis. Instructional clinics are offered daily for tennis devotees of all levels, from beginners to advanced players, and are focused on several aspects of tennis including net play, groundstrokes and serves. Private, semi-private or video lessons and tournaments are also available from a staff of USPTA and USPTR certified tennis professionals. Members enjoy special pricing on lessons and clinics, as well as complimentary match arranging, leagues and socials.
Benefits include:
- 10% off all regularly priced retail items in all retail, Tennis ProShop and Spa
- 10% off all guest rooms
- 10% off Food & Beverage at Rancho Valencia
- Member discounts for clinics and lessons
- Iced water and fresh towels
- Member pricing on lessons and clinics
- Match arranging
- Calendar of tennis socials
- League involvement
- Weekly activities: Coffee Club, Men's Weekend Drop in Doubles, Men's A Level Workouts
- Complimentary use of ball machines
- Access to the resort pool, croquet and bocce ball lawn
- Newsletter
- Charging privileges at the resort