Bamboo People Quotes

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I just don't believe in helping people who are going to torture me. Though I don't see any bamboo slivers. How can you possibly torture someone without bamboo slivers?
Laurell K. Hamilton (Circus of the Damned (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #3))
When I was little, I was afraid of monsters. I mistook the silhouettes flitting to and fro in the midst of the bamboo trees for ghost and other horrors. But now, I'm scared of other people, people who you imagine will just jump out form behind the brush to attack you. What age was I when I started to replace the ghosts with people?
Kinoko Nasu (空の境界 上 (Kara no Kyoukai, #1))
also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.
Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things)
There’s something different in their speeches: the resonance, the frequency, the melody, and the pauses. They’re poetry of breath and air. She’ll never move a mass or give revolutionary speeches, standing on bamboo poles as they did. They know the secret. She knows little of that secret. ‘Little knowledge makes people superstitiously defensive,’ she read in Mob Psychology.
Misba (The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution, #1))
This is a secret which would have died with me, a secret between two people who don't exist anymore for each other.
Ranjani Ramachandran (Fourteen Urban Folklore)
It seems that when people are in a state of euphoria, they don’t always notice the suffering of others.
Osamu Dazai (Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy)
considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a Jiki-ketsu-gaki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know.
Lafcadio Hearn (Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things)
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Richard P. Feynman (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character)
Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. ‘I’m sorry about your shins,’ she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that.
Geoff Ryman (The Child Garden)
Even after going public, there were so many problems. “We have so much opportunity, but we’re having a terrible time getting managers who can seize those opportunities. We try people from the outside, but they fail, because our culture is so different.” Mr. Hayami nodded. “See those bamboo trees up there?” he asked. “Yes.” “Next year . . . when you come . . . they will be one foot higher.” I stared. I understood.
Phil Knight (Shoe Dog)
People would face separation, separation, growth and transformation, just like bamboo shoots being pulled up high. Sooner or later, the outer layer of bamboo shoot clothes would peel off, turning yellow and turning into mud. Xue Meng’s life still had many decades, and there weren’t many people who could accompany another person through these decades. The past, the old people, will become the snake slough, bamboo clothes.
肉包不吃肉 (二哈和他的白猫师尊)
There was in his nature a tendency to display a taste for fairness and justice—not the “fairness and justice” that politicians are forever carrying on about, but fairness and justice in the true, original sense of the words. As a consequence, the people of Mishima regarded him as a troublemaker and kept their distance.
Osamu Dazai (Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy)
The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
1) Did the people of Viet Nam use lanterns of stone? 2) Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds? 3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter? 4) Did they use bone and ivory, jade and silver, for ornament? 5) Had they an epic poem? 6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing? 1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. It is not remembered whether in gardens stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways. 2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom, but after the children were killed there were no more buds. 3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth. 4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy. All the bones were charred. 5) It is not remembered. Remember, most were peasants; their life was in rice and bamboo. When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces, maybe fathers told their sons old tales. When bombs smashed those mirrors there was time only to scream. 6) There is an echo yet of their speech which was like a song. It was reported their singing resembled the flight of moths in moonlight. Who can say? It is silent now.
Denise Levertov (Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967)
We need to reform our funeral industry, introducing new practices that aren't so profit-oriented, and that do more to include the family. But we cannot begin to reform—or even question!-our death systems when we act like little Jean de Brébeufs, falsely convinced we have it right while all these "other people" are disrespectful and barbarous. This dismissive attitude can be found in places you'd never expect. Lonely Planet, the largest guidebook publisher in the world, included the idyllic Trunyan cemetery in their book on visiting Bali. In Trunyan, the villagers weave bamboo cages for their dead to decompose in, and then stack the skulls and bones out in the lush green landscape. Lonely Planet, instead of explaining the meaning behind these ancient customs, advised wise travelers to "skip the ghoulish spectacle.
Caitlin Doughty (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death)
Let’s just say that my life depends on getting the best blossoms I can. If they don’t sell, I don’t eat. Perhaps that’s why the flowers grow so large—because I’m driven by necessity. People like you, on the other hand, who grow mums as a hobby, are motivated more by simple curiosity, or the desire to satisfy their pride.
Osamu Dazai (Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy)
Please Call Me By My True Names Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow— even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a Spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive. I am a mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond. And I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am also the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like Spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and the door of my heart could be left open, the door of compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh
I have often suspected that it is harder for people to rush to the rescue of a world whose magic they have not encountered for themselves, have not seen, felt, touched, turned over in their own hands. I for one can say without pause that so large a part of my own devotion to the cause of justice is that I have hiked up my pants and stood in other peoples’ rivers. Moved to their music. Carried their babies. Watched them come back from burying their dead.
Julian Aguon, My Mother's Bamboo Bracelets
You must prepare the ground. If you’re going to be asking one day, you need someone to ask who is going to answer the call. So you tend to your relationships on a nonstop basis, you abide by the slow, ongoing task, going out there like a faithful farmer, landing on the unseeable bamboo shoot. And then, when it is time—whether you’re asking a bunch of people to preorder your album, or asking one person to hold back your hair while you’re puking—someone will be there for you.
Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)
He recalls, early in his career, meeting an American corporate vice president who arrived on a first-class flight, stayed at Dhaka's best hotel, and complained about the quality of the bottled water. 'Right behind the hotel there was a slum built on a marsh, with houses on bamboo poles, where people drinking from the lakes and rivers were going off to the same factories he would be asking later that day to cut their prices,' Maher said. He remembers thinking back to his university years, when he had studied Charles Dickens' tales of Victoria-era inequality and injustice. 'The stories are the same.
J.B. MacKinnon (The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves)
These long millennia may well have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces. The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred – let alone describe them in detail.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party's "Roaring Twenties" theme- chosen to commemorate the end of Kat's own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook- a wizened Malay man who'd brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan.
Kirstin Chen (Soy Sauce for Beginners)
Old folks here will tell you there’s fire in dry bamboo. In the past, matches were hard to come by and didn’t always work. When people went into the forest, they could just find some dry wood, and they knew there was fire in it. Whenever they wanted to cook, they only had to rub two pieces of dry bamboo together to start a fire. They would just keep rubbing them together. At first the wood was cold. Rubbing for a while, it got hot, then after some time there was smoke. But it did take a while to get hot, and even more time to make smoke and finally fire. Now we, their children and descendants in these times, don’t have much patience. If we try to rub pieces of bamboo to make fire, within two minutes we’re getting restless. We get fed up and put the sticks down: “Time to take a break!” Then when we pick them up again, we find they’re cold. We start rubbing once more, but we’re starting from the beginning again so they don’t get hot very quickly, and again we get impatient. Like this, we could keep at it for an hour or a whole day and wouldn’t see any fire. We rub and stop, rub and stop. Then we start to criticize the old people: “These old-timers are crazy. I don’t know what they’re talking about. They must be lying. I’ve been rubbing the sticks all this time and still there’s nothing.” This is what happens if our understanding and commitment to practice don’t go far enough. There’s not enough heat, but we expect to have fire. The old folks have done that, but they know it takes some effort. You have to keep rubbing without taking a break; if you take a break, you only get cold sticks.
Ajahn Chah (Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away: Teachings on Impermanence and the End of Suffering)
There are tiny mites living in our eyelashes. Hal Roach was a famous director who used to hire drunk and insane people to generate creative ideas. To attract female goats, Billy goats urinate on their own heads. Jewish people do not eat pork. Khazaria was a medieval Turkic kingdom that adopted Judaism as its official religion; it was the only non-Semitic state to become Jewish after Israel. The largest economy in the United States is California. More deer are killed by drivers than by hunters. The automotive center of the world is in Detroit. If the earth were ever to stop spinning, all the oceans would flow to the north and south poles. Around 16 to 20 percent of the terms searched on Google are said to have been never searched before. Bamboo can grow 35 inches per day making it the fastest growing woody plant in the world. The heaviest insect found on the earth is ‘Giant Weta’. It weighs more than a pound and is found in New Zealand. The CIA is expected to release the JFK assassination records to the public no later than 10/26/2017.
Nazar Shevchenko (Random Facts: 1869 Facts To Make You Want To Learn More)
At a time when moguls vied to impress people with their possessions, Rockefeller preferred comfort to refinement. His house was bare of hunting trophies, shelves of richly bound but unread books, or other signs of conspicuous consumption. Rockefeller molded his house for his own use, not to awe strangers. As he wrote of the Forest Hill fireplaces in 1877: “I have seen a good many fireplaces here [and] don’t think the character of our rooms will warrant going into the expenditures for fancy tiling and all that sort of thing that we find in some of the extravagant houses here. What we want is a sensible, plain arrangement in keeping with our rooms.”3 It took time for the family to adjust to Forest Hill. The house had been built as a hotel, and it showed: It had an office to the left of the front door, a dining room with small tables straight ahead, upstairs corridors lined with cubicle-sized rooms, and porches wrapped around each floor. The verandas, also decorated in resort style, were cluttered with bamboo furniture. It was perhaps this arrangement that tempted John and Cettie to run Forest Hill as a paying club for friends, and they got a dozen to come and stay during the summer of 1877. This venture proved no less of a debacle than the proposed sanatorium. As “club guests,” many visitors expected Cettie to function as their unlikely hostess. Some didn’t know they were in a commercial establishment and were shocked upon returning home to receive bills for their stay.
Ron Chernow (Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.)
How I Got That Name Marilyn Chin an essay on assimilation I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin Oh, how I love the resoluteness of that first person singular followed by that stalwart indicative of “be," without the uncertain i-n-g of “becoming.” Of course, the name had been changed somewhere between Angel Island and the sea, when my father the paperson in the late 1950s obsessed with a bombshell blond transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.” And nobody dared question his initial impulse—for we all know lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency. And there I was, a wayward pink baby, named after some tragic white woman swollen with gin and Nembutal. My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.” She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot” for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance, flanked by loving children and the “kitchen deity.” While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash— a gambler, a petty thug, who bought a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon, with bootlegged Gucci cash. Nobody dared question his integrity given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious sons as if filial piety were the standard by which all earthly men are measured. * Oh, how trustworthy our daughters, how thrifty our sons! How we’ve managed to fool the experts in education, statistic and demography— We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning. Indeed, they can use us. But the “Model Minority” is a tease. We know you are watching now, so we refuse to give you any! Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots! The further west we go, we’ll hit east; the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China. History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach— where life doesn’t hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow, but whether or not our new lover in the final episode of “Santa Barbara” will lean over a scented candle and call us a “bitch.” Oh God, where have we gone wrong? We have no inner resources! * Then, one redolent spring morning the Great Patriarch Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven and saw that his descendants were ugly. One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd. A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry. And I, his least favorite— “not quite boiled, not quite cooked," a plump pomfret simmering in my juices— too listless to fight for my people’s destiny. “To kill without resistance is not slaughter” says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death. The fact that this death is also metaphorical is testament to my lethargy. * So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin, married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong, granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch” and the brooding Suilin Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million, survived by everbody and forgotten by all. She was neither black nor white, neither cherished nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo grove minding her poetry— when one day heaven was unmerciful, and a chasm opened where she stood. Like the jowls of a mighty white whale, or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla, it swallowed her whole. She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife, but stayed! Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her and all that was taken away!
Marilyn Chin
Thich Nhat Hanh shares this Mahayana philosophy of non-dualism. This is clearly demonstrated in one of his most famous poems, “Call Me By My True Names:”1 Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow– even today I am still arriving. Look deeply: every second I am arriving to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I am still arriving, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope, the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of every living creature. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I am the bird, that swoops down to swallow the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond, and I am the grass-snake that silently feeds itself on the frog. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his “debt of blood” to my people, dying slowly in a forced-labor camp. My joy is like spring, so warm that it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast that it fills up all four oceans. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up and open the door of my heart, the door of compassion. (Nhat Hanh, [1993] 1999, pp. 72–3) We
Darrell J. Fasching (Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics)
a Chinese poem says: Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass; Entering the water, he does not cause a ripple. For the image represents a number of qualities which are, in fact, aspects of the same thing. It represents the sage’s freedom and detachment of mind, a skylike consciousness in which experience moves without leaving any stain. As another poem says: The bamboo shadows sweep the stairs, But stir no dust. Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its natural surroundings. The image also represents the fact that the way of the sage cannot be traced and followed, since no authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really no way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions. But there is actually the most intimate connection between these two apparently separate uses of the metaphor—the way of the sage, on the one hand, and the impermanence of life, on the other. And the connection reveals the one deepest and most central principle of those Asian philosophies which so puzzle the Western mind by identifying the highest wisdom with what, to us, seems the doctrine of abject despair. Indeed, the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. We cannot understand how the Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss—unless, as we are prone to suppose, they are after all a depraved and spineless people, long accustomed to fatalism and resignation.
Alan W. Watts (Become What You Are)
I ran. It was fantastic how far I ran without stopping to rest. I can't even remember what places I passed. I must have left by the back gate next to the Kyohoku Tower in the north of the temple precincts, then I must have passed by the Myoo Hall, run up the mountain path that was bordered by bamboo grass and azalea, and reached the top of Mount Hidari Daimonji. Yes, it was surely on top of Mount Hidari Daimonji that I lay down on my hack in the bamboo field in the shadow of the red pines and tried to still the fierce beating of my heart. This was the mountain that protected the Golden Temple from the north. The cry of some startled birds brought me to my senses. Or else it was a bird that flew close to my face with a great fluttering of its wings. As I lay there on my back I gazed at the night sky. The birds soared over the branches of the redpines in great numbers and the thin flakes from the fire, which were already becoming scarce, floated in the sky above my head. I sat up and looked far down the ravine towards the Golden temple. A strange sound echoed from there. It was like the sound of crackers. It was like the sound of countless people's soul joints all cracking at once. From where I sat the Golden Temple itself was invisible. All that I could see was the eddying smoke and the great fire that rose into the sky. The flakes from the fire drifted between the trees and the Golden Temple's sky seemed to be strewn with golden sand. I crossed my legs and sat gazing for a long time at the scene. When I came to myself, I found that my body was covered in blisters and scars and that I was bleeding profusely. My fingers also were stained with blood, evidently from when I had hurt them by knocking against the temple door. I licked my wounds like an animal that has fled from its pursuers. I looked in my pocket and extracted the bottle of arsenic, wrapped in my handkerchief, and the knife. I threw them down the ravine. Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.
Yukio Mishima
Bamboo is grass.
James Egan (The Mega Misconception Book (Things People Believe That Aren't True 5))
I consider going to Bamboo House and drinking myself horizontal, but that’s what I always do, and where has it gotten me? Pretty much where I am now—standing in a hallway talking to myself about things and people I don’t understand anymore.
Richard Kadrey (Ballistic Kiss (Sandman Slim, #11))
It was last year as it is this year, and it will be the same next year. That details about diet are debated at the frontiers of our knowledge does nothing to alter the landscape of the far more copious common ground. 2,3
David L. Katz (The Truth About Food: Why Pandas Eat Bamboo and People Get Bamboozled)
Rwanda in 1949 was a land of enchantment—a wilderness where people and animals lived in harmony untouched by the outside world. Shepherds led their cattle to drink at the lakes and pools until evening, when elephants began to migrate toward the watering holes to drink and bathe. Time was told by the sun, and the moon was the calendar. A house could be built in a few days, made from trees and bamboo gathered from the forests and roofed with grass. Men prayed that the weather would be favorable for their crops, young boys dreamed of owning large herds of cattle, and little girls cradled and sang to their dolls made of spiky flowers called red-hot pokers, imagining a baby of their own. The markets were social gathering places and trading centers where a finely woven grass mat was exchanged for forty pounds of potatoes or a basket for storing grain.
Rosamond Halsey Carr (Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda)
And Cuicui--Cuicui was thinking about so many things, amid the calls of the finches and cuckoo birds in the mountains and the chop of lumbermen, felling bamboos in the valley.s Stories of tigers eating people, and the mountain songs people sang to belittle and make fun of each other, the square pit in which papermakers mixed their pulp, the molten iron that flowed out of a foundry smelting furnace--she felt compelled to recollect everything her ears had heard and her eyes had seen. It seemed to be her way of putting aside the present matter and wishing it away. And yet she misunderstood what was really going on. (91)
Shen Congwen (Border Town)
Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Affection comes from the company of people, misery comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros. The old bamboo is entangled, the young shoot is unattached, wander alone like a rhinoceros. A deer goes to eat where it wants to eat, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Give up your children and your wives and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Everyone wants your attention, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros. A bird who has torn the net, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Fire does not return to what it has burnt, wander alone like a rhinoceros. A tiger is not alarmed by sounds in the forest, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wander alone like a rhinoceros. With eyes cast down, wander alone like a rhinoceros. At home anywhere, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
Eliot Weinberger (An Elemental Thing)
We shall never know whether thought is an imposture, and that is providential. 'The people is, in some cases, so enlightened that it is no longer indifferent to anything' (Montesquieu). That is indeed the end point: when there is no longer anything about which there is nothing to say. Verdict of a Chinese writer on a monstrous tree that is at once a blackberry and a bamboo: 'any disorder appearing in nature is the sign of a hidden disorder in the administration of the Empire ... Order restored in nature clearly indicates satisfaction in heaven.' Our current blossoming of monsters and clones, hybrids and chimeras, our systematic mixing of mores and cultures, sexes and genes, cannot but attest to an irremediable disorder in the highest spheres of the Empire.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines. The people who’d voted for Trump went nuts because they’d won and had no idea what to do with their impossible victory. The country’s political liberals went nuts because Trump put them in the position of facing an undeniable and yet unpalatable truth. This was the truth that the political liberals could not deny and could not face: beyond making English Comp courses at community colleges very annoying, forty years of rhetorical progress had achieved little, and it turned out that feeling good about gay marriage did not alleviate the taint of being warmongers whose taxes had killed more Muslims than the Black Death. You can’t make evil disappear by being a reasonably nice person who mouths platitudes at dinner parties. Social media confessions do not alleviate suffering. You can’t talk the world into being a decent place while sacrificing nothing. The socialists didn’t go nuts. They were the people who’d thought about the complex problems facing the nation and decided that an honest solution to these problems could be achieved with applied Leftism. But don’t get your hopes up. Despite being correct in their thinking, the socialists were the most annoying people in America. When they spoke, it was like bamboo slivers shoved under a fingernail. I don’t know why. It was the single biggest American tragedy of the last one hundred years. Here was the difference between the priestly castes, many of whom had opinions on deadline for money, and everyone else: sane people shut the fuck up, nodded their heads, and did what they needed to survive in a toxic political landscape. In an era when public discourse was the bought-and-paid property of roughly twenty companies, and the airing of an opinion could subject a person to unfathomable amounts of abuse and recrimination, the only reasonable option was to be quiet. So when you next fawn over someone’s brave public thoughts, repeat the following: The contours of discourse are so horrendous that one thing has become certain. Any individual offering up a public opinion necessarily must be either hopelessly stupid or insane. I am engaging with a product of madness and idiocy.
Jarett Kobek (Only Americans Burn in Hell)
I want to go back to our house,” Wo Ming whispered suddenly. “Shhhhh,” said his father. Then he tenderly drew his small son to him. “I know that you are afraid,” he whispered back. “But I must bring you along.” “Is it because I must know what to do if you are sent away?” Wo Ming’s lips quivered. He knew that this was the reason, but he had to ask. He had to be told again and again. “Workers are needed in the northern villages,” Lui Sing said. “I think that any time I may be sent— and I may be away for months.” Lui Sing slipped a small package from between the rocks. It had a wrapping of oiled silk to keep the moisture out. He took a Bible from the silk and tucked it inside his shirt. Then they scurried to a house that was owned by a merchant. Bamboo screens were set in front of the doors and windows to shut out any light that might shine through. Inside the house Lui Sing opened the Bible. He read about how Jesus sat on the mountainside and preached to the people. Wo Ming tried hard to listen. The words all flowed away from him. That was because his mind was closed with fear. However, when all the people knelt to pray, Wo Ming knelt with them.
Lori Peckham (Guide's Greatest Mission Stories (Guide's Greatest Stories))
Corn is the only traditional American Indian food plant that needs humans, planting its seeds, in order to survive. This is because humans created corn: according to paleoethnobotanists, corn was first hybridized about 9,000 years ago, from teosinte (Zea luxurians), a wild grass relative. Some think that it was somehow also crossed with eastern gamagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides) and possibly other relatives, such as Z. perennis or Z. diploperennis. Archeobotanical evidence suggests this crossing and selection occurred somewhere in southern Mexico. It is more than a food. It is also a medicine, used in crafts, and in construction. In addition, we feel that we are directly related to it. It is often a significant part of ceremony and even traditional arts. My people, the Rarámuri, believe we emerged into this world from ears of corn after a huge cleansing deluge. The Hopi believe they were asked by the Creator to choose from certain ears of corn after they emerged into this, the Fourth World; they also maintain spiritual figures known as corn maidens. Corn is really a large grass: it’s in the same family as the grass on your neighbor’s lawn, bamboo, and wild rice and other grains. Corn is a true annual: it must be planted by humans every year.
Enrique Salmón (Iwigara: The Kinship of Plants and People: American Indian Ethnobotanical Traditions and Science)
In what is one of the most bizarre and ecologically damaging episodes of the Great Leap Forward, the country was mobilised in an all-out war against the birds. Banging on drums, clashing pots or beating gongs, a giant din was raised to keep the sparrows flying till they were so exhausted that they simply dropped from the sky. Eggs were broken and nestlings destroyed; the birds were also shot out of the air. Timing was of the essence, as the entire country was made to march in lockstep in the battle against the enemy, making sure that the sparrows had nowhere to escape. In cities people took to the roofs, while in the countryside farmers dispersed to the hillsides and climbed trees in the forests, all at the same hour to ensure complete victory. Soviet expert Mikhail Klochko witnessed the beginning of the campaign in Beijing. He was awakened in the early morning by the bloodcurdling screams of a woman running to and fro on the roof of a building next to his hotel. A drum started beating, as the woman frantically waved a large sheet tied to a bamboo pole. For three days the entire hotel was mobilised in the campaign to do away with sparrows, from bellboys and maids to the official interpreters. Children came out with slings, shooting at any kind of winged creature.77 Accidents happened as people fell from roofs, poles and ladders. In Nanjing, Li Haodong climbed on the roof of a school building to get at a sparrow’s nest, only to lose his footing and tumble down three floors. Local cadre He Delin, furiously waving a sheet to scare the birds, tripped and fell from a rooftop, breaking his back. Guns were deployed to shoot at birds, also resulting in accidents. In Nanjing some 330 kilos of gunpowder were used in a mere two days, indicating the extent of the campaign. But the real victim was the environment, as guns were taken to any kind of feathered creature. The extent of damage was exacerbated by the indiscriminate use of farm poison: in Nanjing, bait killed wolves, rabbits, snakes, lambs, chicken, ducks, dogs and pigeons, some in large quantities.
Frank Dikötter
For years, I wanted to know if there was one person, one voice, one individual inside me. All my life people would call me a chink or a chigger. I couldn't listen to hip-hop and be myself without people questioning my authenticity. Chinese people questioned my yellowness because I was born in America. The white people questioned my identity as an American because I was yellow. No black or Spanish person ever called me chigger, but hustling all of a sudden got white people off my back. I was the same dude with a different job, but now I was finally "authentic" to white people, and it made me realized it's all a trap. We can't fucking win. If I follow the rules and play the model minority, I'm a lapdog under a bamboo ceiling. If I like hip-hop because I see solidarity, I'm aping. But, if I throw it all away, shit on my parents, sell weed, pills, and strike fear into unsuspecting white boys with stunt Glocks, now I's authentic? Fuck you, America. (171)
Eddie Huang (Fresh Off the Boat)
Most meals that came from the forest were brought by the women – fish, mushrooms, crab, bamboo shoots, some kuccha or the other. The staples, rice and millet, came from the land.
Madhu Ramnath (Woodsmoke and Leafcups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa People)
cowherd who is alert to every change in the forest; a daily newsletter. How does the water flow down the distant Tarlong waterfall? Have the deer moved on the Kiam Hills? Have the wild dogs had their litter? Has the bitangi flowered? Have strangers come into our forest for bamboo? I
Madhu Ramnath (Woodsmoke and Leafcups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa People)
From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel. Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.
Daniel Stone (The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats)
Established Sino-Burmese businessmen continue to remain at the helm of Myanmar's economy, where the Chinese minority have been transformed almost overnight into a garishly distinctive prosperous business community. Much of the foreign investment capital into the Burmese economy has been from Mainland Chinese investors and channeled through Burmese Chinese business networks for new startup businesses or foreign acquisitions. Many members of the Burmese Chinese business community act as agents for Mainland and overseas Chinese investors outside of Myanmar. In 1988, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) came to power, and gradually loosened the government's role in the economy, encouraging private sector growth and foreign investment. This liberalization of state's role in the economy, if slight and uneven, nonetheless gave Burmese Chinese-led businesses extra space to expand and reassert their economic clout. Today, virtually all of Myanmar's retail, wholesale and shipping firms are in Chinese hands. For example, Sein Gayha, a major Burmese retailer that began in Yangon's Chinatown in 1985, is owned by a Burmese Hakka family. Moreover, ethnic Chinese control the nations four of the five largest commercial banks, Myanmar Universal Bank, Yoma Bank, Myanmar Mayflower Bank, and the Asia Wealth Bank. Today, Myanmar's ethnic Chinese community are now at the forefront of opening up the country's economy, especially towards Mainland China as an international overseas Chinese economic outpost. The Chinese government has been very proactive in engaging with the overseas Chinese diaspora and using China's soft power to help the Burmese Chinese community stay close to their roots in order to foster business ties.[9] Much of the foreign investment from Mainland China now entering Myanmar is being channeled through overseas Chinese bamboo networks. Many members of the Burmese Chinese business community often act as agents for expatriate and overseas Chinese investors outside of Myanmar.
Wikipedia: Chinese people in Myanmar
Starting off this list of eco-friendly home products are my favorite reusable bamboo utensils. Cotton Bags are not only terrible for the environment, but they are terrible for you too and are not at all earth friendly products. Do you believe the issue is too massive for you to make a difference? Reconsider your position. sustainable products for home. We put together this list of environmentally friendly products to show you how simple it is to replace some of the cotton products you buy and to support companies who make recycled plastic products. You can almost eliminate your single-use cotton trash within this area by exchanging them. By purchasing recycled cotton products, eco-friendly kitchen products you are contributing to the circular economy's closure. Living by example and assuring that the items you purchase are produced with both ethics and the environment in mind is one of the most effective methods to combat plastic pollution. Also, don't forget to tell your friends and family about your adventure. cotton bag with drawstring The more friends you persuade, the more people you share articles like this with, the more people will begin to use environmentally friendly items in their daily lives, and that is how we can change the world. Scroll down to explore where you can make small changes using environmentally friendly goods to make a significant difference in your carbon footprint. coffee filter crafts Products which we are Selling as: Reusable Cotton Saree Cover Eco Long Handle Reusable Grocery Bags Unisex Cotton Cross-Body Sling Bag Cotton Coffee Filters Cones - 3 Piece Size Cotton Japanese Bento Bags for Lunchbox & Grocery Shopping-Set of 6 Reusable Makeup Remover Cotton Cloth For Face- Pack of 3 Plastic Mat Chatai for Floor for Home Decor Professional Idli Cloth-Set of 6 Pre-Cut Cotton Muslin Cheesecloth for Kitchen - Set of 4 Cotton Yogurt Strainer Pack of 3 - 2 Sets Cotton Drawstring Nut Milk Bags White- 2 Piece
Clarkia home
I put my phone away and stare out the window at Japan's countryside, watching the scenery zip by at 320 kilometers per hour. Mount Fuji has come and gone, as have laundry on metal merry-go-racks, houses plastered with party signs, weathered baseball diamonds, an ostrich farm, and now, miles of rice paddy fields tended by people wearing conical hats and straw coats. Japan is dressed in her best this morning, sunny and breezy, with few clouds in the sky as accessories. It's the first official day of spring. Cherry blossoms have disappeared in twists of wind or trampled into the ground. Takenoko, bamboo season, will begin soon.
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Ever After (Tokyo Ever After, #1))
I seethed with rage. These people didn't deserve this! I wanted to leap up, dash out of the shelter of the bamboo, and attack the nearest samurai with my sword. But against all of them it would mean certain death. And besides, Hana had her hand on my arm to restrain me. She knew me so well.
Maya Snow (Sisters of the Sword (Sisters of the Sword, #1))
Is organic cotton the future of sustainable development? With the increase in climate change and global warming, each step taken by us matters, be it even by transforming our cotton closet into an organic cotton closet. We are living in a time, where each step will either lead to an immense increase in global warming or will lead to the protection of our Mother Earth. So why not make our actions count and take a step by protecting our nature by switching to organic clothing?! As we know, the fashion industry is one of the largest industry of today, in which the cotton textiles lead the line together with the cotton manufacture setting them as the highest-ranked in the fashion industry. These pieces of regular cotton those are constructed into garments leads to 88% more wastage of water from our resources. Whereas Organic Cotton that has been made from natural seeds and handpicked for maintaining the purity of fibres; uses 1,982 fewer gallons of water compared to regular cotton. Gallons of water used by: Regular cotton: 2168 gallons Organic Cotton: 186 gallons Due to increase in market size of the fashion industry every year along with the cotton industry; regular cotton is handpicked by workers to keep up with the increase in demand for the regular cotton and because these crops are handpicked it leads to various damages and crises such as: Damage of fibres: As regular cotton is grown as mono-crop it destroys the soil quality, that exceeds the damage when handpicked by the farmers, leading to also the destruction of fibres because of the speed and time limit ordered. Damage of crops: Regular cotton leads to damage of crops when it is handpicked, as not much attention is paid while plucking it in bulk, due to which all the effort, time and resources used to cultivate the crops drain-out to zero. Water wastage: The amount of clean water being depleted to produce regular cotton is extreme that might lead to a water crisis. The clean water when used for manufacturing turns into toxic water that is disposed into freshwater bodies, causing a hazardous impact on the people deprived of this natural resource. Wastage of resources: When all the above-mentioned factors are ignored by the manufactures and the farmers, it directly leads to the waste of resources, as the number of resources used to produce the regular cotton is way high in number when compared to the results at the end. Regular cotton along with these damages also demands to use chemical dyes for their further process, that is not only harmful to our body but is also very dangerous to the workers exposed to it, as these chemicals lead to many health problems like earring aids, lunch cancer, skin cancer, eczema and many more, other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long Know More about synthetic dyes on ‘Why synthetic dye stands for the immortality done to Nature?’ Organic cotton, when compared to regular cotton, brings a radical positive change to the environment. To manufacture, just one t-shirt, regular cotton uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, 7% pesticides and 2,700 litres of water, when compared to this, organic cotton uses 62% less energy than regular Cotton. Bulk Organic Cotton Fabric Manufacturer: Suvetah is one of the leading bulk organic cotton fabric manufacturer in India. Suvetah is GOTS certified sustainable fabric manufacturer in Organic Cotton Fabric, Linen Fabric and Hemp Fabric. We are also manufacturer of other fabrics like Denim, Kala Cotton Fabric, Ahimsa Silk Fabric, Ethical Recycled Cotton Fabric, Banana Fabric, Orange Fabric, Bamboo Fabric, Rose Fabric, Khadi Fabric etc.
Ashish Pathania
I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time? ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave. om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me. I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart. it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes oh how i want italian to open itself up to me i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana dolce sitl nuovo Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines. lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle we are the masters of bel far niente larte darrangiarsi The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife, I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule. I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady. I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter" After Li Po While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chōkan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever, and forever. Why should I climb the look out? At sixteen you departed You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead. You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Chō-fū-Sa. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (1957)
Ezra Pound (Selected Poems)
They kill each other,’ Li said, filled with hatred. ‘We hid him, but the Japanese kill each other. The MPs, the constables and the peasants with their bamboo spears; a load of people hunt down those who’ve got away into the mountains and stab them to death. I don’t understand what they do.
Kenzaburō Ōe (Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids)
I think it is a poetic symbol. Like the bamboo, we are a people who will bend but will not break. We are resilient. We have a natural thirst for life and family; that is what brings us peace.
Amy S. Kwei (A Concubine for the Family: A Family Saga in China)
Dear friends and enemies, Season’s greetings! It’s me, Serge! Don’t you just hate these form letters people stuff in Christmas cards? Nothing screams “you’re close to my heart” like a once-a-year Xerox. Plus, all the lame jazz that’s going on in their lives. “Had a great time in Memphis.” “Bobby lost his retainer down a storm drain.” “I think the neighbors are dealing drugs.” But this letter is different. You are special to me. I’m just forced to use a copy machine and gloves because of advancements in forensics. I love those TV shows! Has a whole year already flown by? Much to report! Let’s get to it! Number one: I ended a war. You guessed correct, the War on Christmas! When I first heard about it, I said to Coleman, “That’s just not right! We must enlist!” I rushed to the front lines, running downtown yelling “Merry Christmas” at everyone I saw. And they’re all saying “Merry Christmas” back. Hmmm. That’s odd: Nobody’s stopping us from saying “Merry Christmas.” Then I did some research, and it turns out the real war is against people saying “Happy holidays.” The nerve: trying to be inclusive. So, everyone … Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Good times! Soul Train! Purple mountain majesties! The Pompatus of Love! There. War over. And just before it became a quagmire. Next: Decline of Florida Roundup. —They tore down the Big Bamboo Lounge near Orlando. Where was everybody on that one? —Remember the old “Big Daddy’s” lounges around Florida with the logo of that bearded guy? They’re now Flannery’s or something. —They closed 20,000 Leagues. And opened Buzz Lightyear. I offered to bring my own submarine. Okay, actually threatened, but they only wanted to discuss it in the security office. I’ve been doing a lot of running lately at theme parks. —Here’s a warm-and-fuzzy. Anyone who grew up down here knows this one, and everyone else won’t have any idea what I’m talking about: that schoolyard rumor of the girl bitten by a rattlesnake on the Steeplechase at Pirate’s World (now condos). I’ve started dropping it into all conversations with mixed results. —In John Mellencamp’s megahit “Pink Houses,” the guy compliments his wife’s beauty by saying her face could “stop a clock.” Doesn’t that mean she was butt ugly? Nothing to do with Florida. Just been bugging me. Good news alert! I’ve decided to become a children’s author! Instilling state pride in the youngest residents may be the only way to save the future. The book’s almost finished. I’ve only completed the first page, but the rest just flows after that. It’s called Shrimp Boat Surprise. Coleman asked what the title meant, and I said life is like sailing on one big, happy shrimp boat. He asked what the surprise was, and I said you grow up and learn that life bones you up the ass ten ways to Tuesday. He started reading and asked if a children’s book should have the word “motherfucker” eight times on the first page. I say, absolutely. They’re little kids, after all. If you want a lesson to stick, you have to hammer it home through repetition…In advance: Happy New Year! (Unlike 2008—ouch!)
Tim Dorsey (Gator A-Go-Go (Serge Storms Mystery, #12))
You haven’t realized it yet but your life is precious. I always say that people should not do something that has no purpose. Is there a purpose behind your actions? Of course there is a purpose behind your decision to step into this bamboo forest. That is why your life is not meaningless. --The Unnamed Samurai (Chapter 5)
Melissa Rose Lawrence (The Autumnal Winds)
And then if I have to cross a large open space I forget everything. The difficulty of this enterprise confuses me, and I can’t help thinking: ‘If people must build such large squares out of pure wantonness why don’t they add a stone balustrade to help one across. There’s a gale from the southwest today. The air in the square is swirling about. The tip of the Town Hall is teetering in small circles. All this agitation should be controlled. Every window pane is rattling and the lamp posts are bending like bamboos. The very robe of the Virgin Mary on her column is fluttering and the stormy wind is snatching at it. Is no one aware of this? The ladies and gentlemen who should be walking on the paving stones are driven along. When the wind slackens they come to a stop, exchange a few words and bow to each other, but when the wind blows again they can’t help themselves, all their feet leave the ground at the same moment. They have to hold on to their hats, of course, but their eyes twinkle merrily as if there were only a gentle breeze. No one’s afraid but me.
Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis: And Other Stories)
352. In some parts of Cambodia, people used improvised bamboo trains for getting around during the times when the regular train services were not provided. 353. Princepedia is a huge resource, similar to Wikipedia. It was created by the fans of the popular musician Prince several years ago, and it became even more popular after Prince’s death in April of 2016. 354. In April 2017, Adidas revealed its plans to mass-produce the first ever 3D-printed shoes named Futurecraft. It should be available for purchase by the end of 2018. 355. About half of the adult population in the USA haven’t read a single book since they finished high school.
Lena Shaw (1000 Random Facts And Trivia, Volume 3 (Interesting Trivia and Funny Facts))
Angeline says that we’re not doing very well. Apparently they expected the Japs from the south, by the sea, but they came from the north instead and just breezed right through the defenses there. And it’s really awful outside.” Her voice hiccups. “I saw a dead baby on a pile of rubbish this morning as I came here. It’s all around, the rubbish and the corpses, I mean, and they’re burning it so it smells like what I imagine hell smells like. And I saw a woman being beaten with bamboo poles and then dragged off by her hair. She was half being dragged, half crawling along, and screaming like the end of the world. Her skin was coming off in ribbons. You’re supposed to wear sanitary pads so that . . . you know . . . if a soldier tries to . . . Well, you know. The locals and the Japanese both are looting anything that’s not locked down, and thieving and generally being impossible. They’re all over the place in Kowloon, running amok. We’re thinking about moving out to one of the hotels, just so we’re more in the middle of things, and we can see people and get more information. The Gloucester is packed to the rafters but my old friend Delia Ho has a room at the Repulse Bay and says we can have it because she’s leaving to go to China. We can share the room with Angeline, don’t you think? And apparently, the American Club has cots out and people are staying there as well. They have a lot of supplies, I suppose. Americans always do. Everyone wants to be around other people.
Janice Y.K. Lee (The Piano Teacher)
If I have omitted something of particular importance to you, please google the topic and my name, as I may have written about it in one of my columns. If not, look for information on the topic from the usual reliable sources: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; the Mayo Clinic; WebMD; Verywell.
David L. Katz (The Truth About Food: Why Pandas Eat Bamboo and People Get Bamboozled)