[Think Il Postino, The Postman, Ardiente Paciencia, El Cartero De Neruda]
Years ago I read an English translation of a little novel called "Burning Patience" by a Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta. It's about Mario, a young man in a small fishing village in Chile, who took up the job of the postman for the village, and through his mail deliveries, befriended the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda from whom he learned metaphors and poetry to woo Beatriz, the beautiful daughter of the local innkeeper.
Despite obstacles put in the way by Beatriz's mother (which give rise to many hilarious scenes), Mario succeeded in winning the heart of Beatriz, while Neruda got caught up in the politics of the times ...
It's a touching story. Although the political upheavals of the day form part of the backdrop of the story, politics remain largely unspoken, and however one's political sympathies are placed in the complex situation that was Chile, it's difficult not to be touched by the main themes of the story: love, friendship and the power of poetry.
Antonio Skármeta has also written a play based on the novel, and made a film from it.
Last Christmas I decided to re-read the book. I have to say, I was not moved as much as I was the first time around. What the passing of time can do to you. Still, it remains one of my favourite books.
Before I wrote this post, I looked up the internet to see if the book was still available. While doing the search, I discovered, for the first time, that the Italian film The Postman was based on this novel. I had wanted to see the film but never made it. I'm sure I'd heard or read about the story-line (but never that Pablo Neruda was featured in the film), and even vaguely remembers telling a friend about a Chilean novel I'd read with a similar story-line. I think it must have been the Italian setting of the film which put me off the scent.
And all these years I thought nobody knew about this book. Silly me!
Whether you listen to classical music or not, you will have heard Vivaldi's set of violin concertos The Four Seasons, or at least the Spring, with its well-known theme.
Recently, while converting my old CD collection to digital format (a process which has taken forever), I came across this old CD of mine, which is a recording of highlights from a Vivaldi opera called "L'Olimpiade" by the Hungarian State Orchestra, conducted by Ferenc Szekeres.
Years ago I heard one of the tracks on this CD played by Robin Ray on BBC World Service. It was a choral version of the famous Spring tune which Vivaldi "shamelessly" borrowed from his own Four Seasons. I thought that was fun.
So I ordered the CD from overseas (it was a fairly obscure recording for a place like Hong Kong). I must confess I bought it simply for its "novelty" value. Listening to it again now, I find the music is actually delightful, and the recording is bright and crisp.
When I searched for the album cover to embed into the mp3's, I was glad to see that it's still available, albeit with a slightly album cover. You can hear the "Spring" chorus on Track 3 on Amazon:
Or, here's a shorter clip that I've made:
There was a textiles factory in Yangzhou in China. One day, a recently born baby girl was abandoned outside the gates of the factory. Lucky for her, she was picked up by an orphange.
One week later, outside the same factory, another baby girl was left there. She was picked up by the same orphanage. A familiar story in poorer parts of China.
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In due course, Baby Girl 1 was adopted by an American couple, Mr and Mrs Funk, from Florida.
In due course, Baby Girl 2 was also adopted, by another American couple, Mr and Mrs Ramirez, from around Chicago.
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The Funks decided to call Baby Girl 1 Mya.
The Ramirezes coincidentally also decided to call Baby Girl 2 Mya.
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The Funks joined a Yahoo Support Group for adopting parents.
The Ramirez joined the same Support Group.
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One day, Holly Funk started corresponding with Diana Ramirez. The exchange went like this:
- Diana: My Mya will be 3 this summer.
- Holly: I have a Mya also, she'll be 3 on June 13
- Diana: Oh my Mya's birthday is June 12! Where was your Mya found?
- Holly: Outside a textiles factory in Yangzhou.
- Diana: So was mine! Send me a picture, right away!
The two mothers exchanged photos. Do the girls look alike? Are they twins, or do they just share parallel stories? Either way, it's a remarkable story. To find out how the story goes, listen to this excerpt of a BBC World Select Today podcast on 24 August 2006:
Have you ever wondered why so many places in the world are called "Happy Valley"? Even limiting oneself to places whose names are of Anglo-American origin, there are at least 3 in Canada, 2 in Australia, 1 in Kenya, 1 in Hong Kong, and 3 in the States. I'm sure there are more. I don't know if there's any common origin for the name. Probably none, and I haven't found any. Samuel Johnson did write a novel called "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia" in 1759, in which there was a fictional place in Abyssinia called Happy Valley, and the editors of the Wikipedia page for Happy Valley, Utah suggest that the name may have come from that novel.
In Hong Kong, where I live, Happy Valley is better known for its horse-racing course. These days, racing over the weekends takes place at another race-course in Shatin, and Happy Valley is used during the week on Wednesday nights in the racing season.
Horse-racing in Hong Kong began in the 1840's when the British colonised Hong Kong. Happy Valley then was a marshy area but it was one of the few flatlands on Hong Kong Island, and the British promptly converted it to a race-course. The Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club was set up in 1884 (the word "Royal" was dropped from its name after Hong Kong reverted to China in 1997). For many years now the Jockey Club, with pickings taken from bets on the immensely popular sport, has been a major source of income for charities.
I went racing on Wednesday night with a few friends. The last time I did it was with my friend Lulu, quite a few years ago. There are so many ways of betting, called pools, that every time I go, I have to re-learn them afresh. Here are some pools:
- Win - the most obvious one - you place a bet on the horse who you hope will win a particular race
- Place - the horse you bet on has to finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the particular race
- Quinella - the 2 horses you bet on have to finish 1st and 2nd, in either order
- Quinella Place - the 2 horses you bet on have to finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd
- Trio - the 3 horses you bet on have to finish 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, in any order
- Tierce - the 3 horses you bet on have to take the first 3 places, in the correct order
These are single-race bets, or pools. And then there are multiple-race bets, which are too complicated for me.
With years of experience, the Jockey Club is one of the best-run horse-racing clubs in the world. The staff are well-trained, friendly and helpful. I'd actually forgotten how smooth the whole operation was. What's more, for a rookie like me, you don't get snubbed, sneered at, or get that incredulous look from anyone just because you have to ask what a quinella bet is, or if you place a minimum bet of HK$10. Altogether it was a jolly evening at the races. At the end of the evening, I found myself having made a small net contribution to the charities in Hong Kong. Not too bad at all.
The more recent iMacs, MacBooks & MacBook Pros all come with a built-in iSight webcam. They also come with a program called PhotoBooth which takes snapshots with iSight with different effects, and many people find this one of the coolest things on the new Macs.
I had to buy my own iSight camera. It worked fine out of the box. It also works seamlessly with the new Skype Video Beta for Mac. Unfortunately, it didn't come with any image capture software. PhotoBooth is shareware. I was getting rather envious of the new Mac owners, started searching for a free program that would do a similar job, and found one. It's called Funny Photographer. It captures snapshots for you using iSight, and it comes with different effects.
You turn on your iSight, open Funny Photographer, and you'll see the image on the program window. You select an effect from the drop-down list, and you get a preview of the image. If you're happy with what you see, just click the "camera" button, and the image will be captured for you. You'll then see a thumbnail of the picture at the bottom of the window. You can save it, delete it, or if you prefer, just leave it there for the time being.
Of course you can take just a "normal shot", which is called the "simple effect". As with a lot of these effects and filters, they're just there for the sake of it, but there are a few which are pretty cool. My favourites are Cube, Reflection and Replicate. With the latter two, you can drag the preview image around and create a different perspective or effect.
... and the Rákóczy March
23 October marked the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, an uprising which started as a student demonstration and which was brutally crushed by the Soviet forces.
The Rákóczy March is a well-known tune world-wide, but especially in Hungary where its original version was written back in the 18th Century and later popularised by composers such as Berlioz and Liszt in some of their music.
Angie Conrad was 5 years old when she and her family had to flee Hungary during the Revolution. The Rákóczy March is a tune which is familiar to any Hungarian, but for Angie Conrad, she had a particular reason to remember it.
On the podcast by BBC's World Select Today for 23 October 2006, she speaks of the poignant memory she has of the train journeys on her escape out of Hungary. Listen to an excerpt of the podcast, or listen to the BBC World Select Today podcast on their own website.
I bought a pocket camera for a friend for her birthday in May earlier this year. Let's call her Lulu. I got her the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FX01. She promptly lost it on her recent trip to Europe. She was sitting on the steps outside the Sacré Coeur, musing, as one does, about life. Her handbag was lying next to her and crying out, "Grab me!". A kind passerby obligingly did. Lulu was freed of her wallet, cash, credit cards, and the FX-01. Talk about travelling light.
Fortuitously, Lulu had the lucidity to get travel insurance (the first time in many years) before the trip. She's hoping to get some compensation from the insurance. Amen.
So Lulu's in the market for a camera replacement. What should she get?
Back in May 2006
In recent years, I've been rather partial to Canon cameras. When I bought the FX-01 for Lulu, I was looking for a small compact, sort of pocket size, camera for her. Something you can put into a handbag without weighing a ton, but not one of those ultra-thin ones which would get lost in her handbag. She already had a Sony but that was a few years old and she could do with a new one.
I quickly limited my choices to Canon and Panasonic. Panasonic was the first to introduce image stabilisation into this class of cameras, which really comes in handy for small light-weight cameras, as camera shake, in less than ideal lighting conditions, is a common problem. Panasonic also introduced a 28-mm wide angle lens in some of these cameras. Personally I've always found the 28-mm wide angle far more useful than a long zoom (the latter being much easier to get in digital cameras).
The FX-01 had a range of 28-102mm, image stabilisation, and looked nice enough. Image quality had apparently improved from a previous 28-mm model - the wide-aspect 16:9 LUMIX DMC LX-1, although there was still complaint about noise control in anything higher than ISO 100 in certain reviews. By the way, although the LX-1 had a 28-mm wide angle, you would only get that if you took shots in the 16:9 aspect ratio. If you chose the standard 4:3 for most digital cameras, you would get effectively a 35-mm angle.
The alternative was the Canon IXUS series. They had a good design, looked cool, were easy to handle and operate, and had pretty good image quality for cameras of this size, especially the more recent models. In May 2006, Canon had just started introducing image stabilisation to one of their models, the IXUS 800 IS, but none of them had a 28-mm wide angle. That was the big reservation I had.
The only other camera of this class I could think of which had a 28-mm lens was a Ricoh, which actually had a super range (28-200mm). Possibly because it's not available in the States, I had never been able to find any reliable review of that camera, and so couldn't really take the risk with it.
Canon of course also had the PowerShot S80, 8 megapixel and a lens range of 28-100mm. Although still compact, it's a much bigger and heavier camera and was really outside the class of cameras I was looking for.
In the end, I went for the FX-01 for its 28-mm lens. It was a very popular camera in Hong Kong, and despite professional reviews that it had noise problems, I hadn't heard of any reports of major image quality complaints about it in Hong Kong. I preferred it to the Canon IXUS 800 IS. Sometimes you have to take these camera reviews with a pinch of salt. Professional reviewers set a standard which is perhaps much higher than that of the average user. Anyway, I gave Lulu the FX-01 and she seemed pretty happy with it.
Recent Models
Since then, the models have been updated. These days it happens about every 6 months. Panasonic has come up with 2 replacements, actually. The FX-07 and the FX-50. The lens range remains the same, but the pixel count has been increased from 6 megapixel to 7 megapixel. A newer version of the Venus image processor is used. The FX-07 has a 2.5in LCD, whereas the FX-50 has a 3 in LCD. That, as far as I'm aware, is the only difference between the 2 new models.
But Canon has also come up with something new. Again 2 new models worth looking at. There is the IXUS 850 IS, an increase of 1 megapixel from the 6 megapixel of the 800 IS. Image stabilisation is retained, the new DIGIC III processor is used, but the big plus for me is the new lens range of the camera. The 800 IS was 35-140mm, while the 850 IS is now 28-105mm. Much shorter at the telephoto end, but I much prefer the 28-mm angle at the wide end.
There is also the IXUS 900 Ti. The epithet stands for Titanium, the alloy used for making the camera body. Looks really smart. It's got a whopping 10 megapixel count, but strangely image stabilisation is not included. I would have thought that with a bigger pixel count, any camera shake would be more noticeable. It does have a few other features which are better than the 850 IS, such as a higher frame rate in continuous mode and an LCD with a higher resolution. But its lens range is a disappointing 37-111 mm. The pros and cons average out, so that the 900 Ti is only slightly more expensive than the 850 IS, about HK$200.
If I have to choose between the 2 Canons, it's a no-brainer for me. The 28mm wide angle and image stabilisation of the 850 IS are way too important to be missed. To me, the 900 Ti is a silly model, especially when the 850 IS is released at the same time.
What about the FX-07 and the 850 IS? Same pixel count, almost identical range. Although I haven't seen Canon's implementation of a 28mm wide angle in a camera of this size, I would bet that the image quality of the 850 IS would at least be on a par with the FX-07, and most probably better.
So, if Lulu gets paid by her insurance, I'll be suggesting the Canon IXUS 850 IS for her.
Recent Comments
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intertextus said:
Absolutely, and of all the names, they should both be called Mya! read more
on Twins Reunited, or just Parallel Stories? -
Nabi said:
I've read about this. Amazing isn't it. read more
on Twins Reunited, or just Parallel Stories? -
Lightchaser said:
I visited Hong Kong sometime in the 1990s, and I liked it an awful lot -- nice place to live!... read more
on Happy Valleys of the World
i have always wondered why the place is called 'Happy Valley' in Hong Kong? If you know please let me... read more
on Happy Valleys of the World