January & February

Harry Potter book burning

A New Mexico church has vowed to carry out a mass burning of Harry Potter books because they are "an abomination to God". It just shows how special the stories are that they get up people's noses that much. After all, there have always been children's stories about witches and wizards. How many of them were good enough to qualify for a mass book burning?

Last month: Ban Harry Potter?
May: Harry Potter DVD

Star ignorance

Jan. 16th. The TV Times billing for tonight's Star Trek TNG episode reads:

6.45 Star Trek: The Next Generation

The Arsenal of Freedom: The Enterprise lands on a planet inhabited by arms merchants.

Lands?? The Enterprise never lands: it remains in orbit while an away team beams down. The TV Times staff ought to know that.

Falun Gong (1)

Jan. 20th. Started doing Falun Gong exercises, a.k.a. Falun Dafa exercises. The first exercise is called "Buddha Showing a Thousand Hands" and several of the individual movements have names based on Buddhist figures, e.g. "Maitreya Stretching His Back". The system's Buddhist associations have aroused the ire of the Communist government in China, which has banned Falun Gong, deeming it to be religious and therefore subversive. Perhaps it would have been more prudent to use good Communist names like "Red Army Showing a Thousand Hands" and "Karl Marx Stretching His Back". As Lo Kuan Chang in "The Confession of Kai Lung" (from The Wallet of Kai Lung) might have written, "A chrysanthemum by any other name would be as fragrant."

Olivia Newton John and time travel

Bought the album The Best of Olivia Newton John on CD. The song I particularly wanted to have was "If Not for You". I heard it on the radio once and immediately liked it. It was originally a hit for Bob Dylan in 1970.

Another track I especially like is "Take Me Home Country Roads". As well as vividly evoking the natural beauty of West Virginia, I think this song taps into a feeling many people have that things used to be better in their lives and that they might be able to regain that happier state by going back to a particular place—"the place I belong". There are other songs expressing the same idea; "Do You Know the Way to San José?" is a good example.

I suspect that in practice merely going back to a place would not be sufficient for most people to find their lost happiness: rather they would need to get in a time machine and travel back in time to find the situation in which they were happy. Actually quantum theory and the physics of curved spacetime suggest that time travel would require not a machine but a special path through a region of warped spacetime such that an object traversing the path would arrive back at its starting point before the time at which it set out. So it's more a case of

Colours

The first time I viewed my pages on the monitor of my new computer I got a shock: the colours were quite different from the way they looked on my laptop. The background of my Home page #CCFFFF looked green on the laptop but on the monitor it looked more blue than green. The background of the Kai Lung page #FFFF55 was a pleasant yellow on the laptop but came out as an unpleasant, painful-to-look-at yellow on the monitor. I've changed the colours now to #D8F8D8 (except for WebTV users) and #FFE060 which look the way they're supposed to on the monitor. I just hope the monitor is showing the colours correctly.

Feb. 12th. Chinese New Year. The saying for this year, the Year of the Horse, is "Horse arrive, success come."

Falun Gong (2)

Feb. 19th. Decided to stop doing the Falun Gong exercises. I enjoyed them at first, but once I'd got the hang of the basics and started paying more attention to the details—such as the exact way you're supposed to hold your fingers—it all became tedious and unenjoyable. Also one of the movements has been hurting my back.

Diary on line

Feb. 20th. Put the diary (comprising the Diary index and the June 2001 page) on line. It's been a bit odd typing up in February the notes that I made in June about the growing plants, the young birds and the heat. But it's also been pleasant to be reminded of the summer. The corrected page colours also take effect from today and the site's main navigation bar is now partly generated by a script, which makes it easier to add new top-level pages.

Japanese art exhibition

I've made three visits recently to the local art gallery to look at the various works in an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art. I was afraid it was all going to be "modern" and uninteresting except to artistic types. Some of it was indeed of such a nature. One exhibit, for instance, was a collection of small objects such as empty boxes, instruction leaflets, torn pages from books, a discarded spark plug etc. In another context these objects would have been "litter", but when neatly arranged on a plinth in an art gallery they were "art".

Fortunately another of the exhibits was much easier to appreciate: a set of five very large paintings depicting mountain and woodland scenes in photographic detail. While artists may draw some deeper meaning from these paintings, non-artists like myself can appreciate them as scenery and marvel at the painstaking work required to create such large, detailed images from thousands of individual patches of oil paint.

Next month: Another visit to the Japanese art exhibition

Feb. 27th. Good hail just now. The car park and street are white with hailstones as if covered with a layer of snow.
DVD video recorder delivered. I find it won't work with my 15-year-old TV set, so I'm going to have to buy a new TV.