Posts Tagged ‘Blogs’
North Korea vs. South Korea: Who Wins If They Go to War Once More?
I’ve been gunning through the final pages of Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Heavenly Father: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, blowing through the sections about potential wartime scenarios between the two rival Koreas.
Martin’s chats with North Korean defectors have been extremely revealing. His several interviewees, the majority of them former staff members of the DPRK’s million-man army, offer up their experience on why North Korea might have the decisive edge over the more affluent south if push comes to shove and the guns suddenly start to rumble.
North Korea: China’s First “Official” Bona Fide, Fully-Fledged, Full-Service Colony. That’s Right, I Said It: A Colony, Folks!
Pictured above is North Korea’s Rajin (Rason) Port which borders the Tumen (Duman) River, a key crossing point between Russia and North Korea for refugees from the Hermit Kingdom.
A Chinese company recently gained a 10-year lease on the port’s full-time use (kudos and nice catch NKeconWatch!) which now enables manufacturers in the PRC’s Jilin Province – a strongly ethnic Korean part of the country — direct access to the Pacific Ocean. Yay! Incidentally, Russia also gained a 50-year lease on the same facility, but that didn’t score as much fanfare. Wonder why…
Revisiting the Resplendent, Wind-Bending, Mighty Sword Clanging, and Colorful Cinematic Glory and Mastery of Zhang Yimou’s “Hero/Ying xiong” (circa 2004)
Okay, so now that we’ve got that windbag blog title out of the way (how did I do, folks?), let’s get down to the brass tacks of the matter: the iconic and often-imitated-rarely-duplicated cinematographic marvel which was once Zhang Yimou’s Hero/Ying xiong, the 2004 swashbuckling flicker picture that dazzled and titillated, yet somehow didn’t intellectually connect.
To All You "China Bloggers” Out There: There Is *No Such Thing* As An “America Blogger”
Most of my regular readers here at ADM.com are well-aware of colleague Damjan DeNoble’s Sino-following pedigree and of our strong China-centric collaborations. For those others of you who are relatively fresh to this piece of online real estate, you might want to click on through to Asia Health Care Blog, its sister China Health Care Blog, or Damjan’s LinkedIn profile to acquaint yourself a wee bit better with the man behind the lexical magic and a hint of an explanation why I am honored to call myself Damjan’s friend and fellow China traveler.
Warning: don’t shoot the messenger (read: me) if you end up spending more than a couple of hours at any of his sites. On offer: a hot heap of snappy content like news, videos, opinion pieces, and a collection of comments of general interest to the blogging professional.
With Cheekbones That Can Slice Turnips…
Yet another evening of Hong Kong classic cinema, this time with King Hu’s Shaw Brothers classic from 1966 Come Drink With Me/Da zui xia/Big Drunken Hero, starring drop-dead gorgeous (and Shanghai-born!) Cheng Pei-Pei/Zheng Peipei, as Golden Swallow, prancing around the screen like a prima ballerina and applying a major bad-ass hurt-on to all the baddies.
Are You Indispensable?
If you haven’t picked up your copy of Seth Godin’s latest primer, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable yet, you might want to have a run on over to your local bookstore.
With strong recommendations from both Chris Brogan and Todd Sattersten, my hardcover arrived in the mail on Friday, and by Saturday evening I’d polished it off.
So here’s the nutshell: The world’s changed forever. Social media networks and the deepening financial crisis have destroyed the former secure economic foundations of the corporate world and remaining a mere silent cog in the big wheel, biding your time behind the scenes isn’t cutting it anymore.
Twitter and Facebook | Nothing But “A Place To Pick Each Other’s Fur”
I crossposted a James Cameron Vanity Fair interview to my Posterous feed yesterday because something he’d mentioned to interviewer Krista Smith about Facebook, Twitter, and social media – more generally — intrigued me. So much so, in fact, that I needed to stretch my thinking about it here (boldface by me):
A Korean Case Study | How Well You Speak A Language Determines Your Status in Society
Today we’re trying something a little different. This email came through yesterday from a reader I highly respect and there were several additions I wanted to make, so I post them here in-line for all to enjoy.
If you are white and you make any effort at all in Korean, you will be treated as a hero. Whenever I say Bang-Gap-Samida (pleased to meet you), the Koreans go crazy.
I’ve noticed this as well in my various dealings with Chinese folk.
If you make any effort to speak Mandarin (or a local dialect of the Chinese where you’re located), the natives go, um…ape. The more sordid and unmentioned aspect of this reaction – perhaps more important to note, especially for those who haven’t traveled to the PRC before – is that what it’s really saying is how Chinese people perceive foreigners and their intellectual capacities. A general Chinese rule-of-thumb – the urban legend, as it were — is that Chinese believe a white Westerner (not to mention a black person) can’t ever match a Chinese citizen’s brainpower and therefore couldn’t learn to speak Putonghua (Mandarin) even if their lives depended on it. The further out one fans out from Tier One burgs (egs. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen), the more strongly would this sentiment be expressed.
A Career Where Stability and Standing Still is Actually Harmful to Success
The good people over at 800-CEO-READ just RSSed their 67th issue of Change This, an initiative which is all about the “big hairy business idea.” According to the editors of the program, the objective of Change This is to disseminate potential “game changing” ideas which don’t necessarily have a commercial bent to them, but which may have at some certain stage once the idea gains a considerable amount of traction. The various ideas promulgated by Change This – and there are dozens of them at this stage — are intended to get you zooming about your current best business practices and about some inspirational new mantras that have the capacity to fundamentally alter the way you do business or interact with your colleagues. The idea is to jettison the heavy, useless old, and warmly welcome the new.
Kirk Douglas | Several Not-So-Keen Observations About His Approach to Screen Acting
Yet another weekend of classic films, this time with a pair from the ‘60s (I’m just in that sort of mood) enjoyed over some beers and dry snacks. This was a Kirk Douglas fest, with two of his pictures from back in the day: John Frankenheimer’s black and white masterpiece Seven Days In May and the coming-of-age post-WWII war Middle Eastern 1966 drama, Cast A Giant Shadow.
Huang Hung Goes On An Anti-Foreigner Chinese Tirade in China Daily http://post.ly/RSXf4 days ago from Posterous
Why Western Journalists Have All the Wrong Answers About China http://post.ly/RRt04 days ago from Posterous
And Of Course There's Cristoph Waltz's Acceptance Speech Too... http://post.ly/RREq4 days ago from Posterous
Kathryn Bigelow's Acceptance Speech for Best Director at the 82nd Oscars... http://post.ly/RRBT4 days ago from Posterous