"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully with hobbies and luxuries, avoid all entanglements and keep it safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in the casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable".

C.S Lewis

Goofiest looking dog I've ever seen. HAHA.

The story is a tad goofy as well

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
- Franz Kafka

need to stop eating pad thai.

:\

"Lin Zhao is the pen name of Peng Lingzhao. In 1957, while studying at Peking University, she was branded a "rightist" and a "class enemy" after criticizing Mao’s Anti-rightist Movement.

In 1960, Lin Zhao drafted a petition regarding the case against Peng Dehuai, the Red Army commander and onetime defense minister who incurred Mao’s wrath for his criticism of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. In October of that year, Lin Zhao was arrested on charges of "active counter-revolution" for publishing an underground magazine.... In 1962, Lin Zhao was sentenced to 20 years in prison. While there, she continued her writings. After the authorities confiscated her pen and paper in September 1964, she used a hairpin dipped in her own blood to write poems and essays on her cell walls, clothes, and bed sheets.

On April 29, 1968, Lin Zhao’s 20-year sentence was changed to death by immediate execution. Gagged and handcuffed, Lin Zhao was shot dead at Longhua Airport in Shanghai. She was 36. Her mother and sister learned of the execution two days later when the police showed up at their doorstep demanding payment for the bullets used to kill her." link

Hu Jie, the film maker.

The entire movie is on youtube, but without English subtitles.

Word of the day

slugabed: one who stays in bed until a late hour

I doubt this will ever show up on a standardized test..

So I spend a lot of my time on wikipedia, browsing random articles, often ended up at completely unrelated topics. Sometimes I am able to recall the details weeks or months later in conversation but more often than not they slip out of my brain, so it'd be fun to type out some interesting facts I stumble upon from time to time.

- The QWERTY typewriter was invented by Christopher Sholes from Milwakee, where he formulated the system over the course of 6 years. After his backer and he sold the rights to Remington, the company made some minor changes, most notably placing the R where the period sign used to be, so that salesmen can type out TYPEWRITER only using the keys from the top row.

- Supposedly Henry VIII was quite attractive as a young man but a jousting accident left him the corpulent beast we all know of today. So therefore, Hollywood portrays of him as a Eric Bana lookalike aren't entirely outside the scope of actuality.

- Blues legend has it that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest guitarist of all time, which he arguably is, if not only influencing great musicians after him.

"Different languages use words to refer to different sets of concepts. How do we come to understand the meaning of words? When we learn a second language, what happens when the two languages differ in relating words to concepts? For example, how do we interpret the discovery that so many of us have made in anthropology courses that Arctic people have lots of different words for snow? (Pullum [1991] points out that the number has fluctuated wildly with the imagination, to as many as four hundred, and all this in the absence of evidence.) Or that some languages in New Guinea distinguish between only two colors, light and dark? Or that counting in Japanese involves adding to the number system the obligatory classifiers that indicate the shape and animacy of what is being counted? Or that the French have no generic words for nuts? Do we conclude that Arctic children should build better snowmen, that New Guineans would not be able to tell the difference between a Chardonnay and a Beaujolais, or that Japanese kids have an unfair advantage in math contests? (We leave the interpretation of the French example to the imagination of the reader.)"

(Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994, p. 7-8)

It's sort of ironic that I'm in the field of literacy, since I grossly abuse its fundamentals.

Sample assignment: "Write a short 1,000 word essay on the French Revolution".
My assignment = 5,000 words at 40% finished

If I wrote War and Peace, it'd be an encyclopedia set, volumes 1-40.

Best part of Harvard?

The squirrels.

No joke.