Trying Out Wix.com

I have been doing my HTML coding for for this blog and music pages for many moons. Since Wix.com offers a HTML 5 free web page constructing and hosting, I decided to give it a try tonight.

The Wix HTML 5 GUI is fairly easy to use. I was also able to embed some custom HTML codes for content enhancement. The more complex HTML coding and some common file types (i.e. txt and csv) are currently not supported, however. Strange and unexpected. The system accepts the Microsoft file extensions as that of PDF, MP3 and other media formats as well. More important, the web server access, editor,and page refresh rates are very responsive. I would have liked having a FTP feature to upload my HTML codes and file contents to the web server and be done with it. Given the business objectives of Wix.com, I understand why FTP was not included. I was able to do 70% of my HTML codes fairly quickly by just using the Wix's web building tools provided.

Overall, the Wix web page builder works as advertised. I highly recommend it for users interested in learning and creating web pages for personal and professional goals.

My New Retractable 4 MM HAND Stylus

My collection of styli for my Apple mobile devices and the Kindle Fire
My new retractable green color HAND stylus arrived yesterday. It's a first cabin trip for this stylus. It's the most expensive stylus I've owned to date  (handstylus.com).

At a cost of $29.95 for the stylus, I also ordered a six-pack replacement tips at $9.95. Including a required two-day USPS priority shipping charge for $5.00, toss in a sales tax of $2.89, the total came to $47.79 USD for this gadget.

I liked the sturdy, well-balanced, and all metal construction of this handsome stylus. Its 4 mm retractable tip and the removable pocket clip features are one of its kind in the deep bin of styli. Functionally, the ability to tap this stylus tip iside the confine of any key on the virtual keyboard (in portrait display) on the iPhone is really the best feature of all. No more unintentional fat finger tapping on the wrong keys!

If one has an iPad polyurethane Smart Cover, the stylus's magnetizes to it; the inclusion of the pocket clip will strengthen the hold much more. For this to work, the Smart Cover must be closed over the iPad. My other styli with a metal pocket clip would magnetizes similarly on a Smart Covered iPad, but they don't look as nice as the HAND stylus. This all-purpose Smart Cover magnet even holds my Zaggfolio keyboard.

The HAND stylus writes and draws smoothly on my iPhone 4S Note Taker app; it does equally well on iPad's Note Taker HD and Evernote's Penultimate. My only other stylus which comes close in second place on these two iOS writing/drawing app is the black Targus. For it I paid $20.00 at Best Buy(see the close-up picture of all my styli).

One more thing, Steve. My using this new stylus should reduce the smudge footprints my touch-screens.

Close-up look at the tips of my four styli

An Old Soul's Questions Entertained

George MacDonald was a venerated literary giant and Christian preacher of the Victorian Age. He mentored and influenced later scholars such as Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tokien, and others. Here is a MacDonald journal entry that would fit extrapolatively well as the lead-in quote to the opening chapter of 'The Golden Age'.

"April 2

Some things wilt thou not one day turn to dreams?
Some dreams wilt thou not one day turn to fact?
The thing that painful, more than should be, seems,
Shall not thy sliding years with them retract-
Shall fair realities not counteract?
The thing that was well dreamed of bliss and joy-
Wilt thou not breathe thy life into the toy?

- George MacDonald
A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880)"

This short prose-poem and its four inquiries are prophetically entertained in John C. Wright's 'The Golden Age' trilogy. This reader is deliciously tempted to conclude Wright derives his story line from these seven verses.

Our manor borne/created Phaethon, telepresenting himself across the holodecks of the conquered Solar System, searching for answers. He needs to know why he had voluntarily redacted two-hundred-fify years of his immortal memory. The protagonist is a mere three-thousand-year old engineer. He is the heir to a noble house known for its wonting the Victorian Age mores and social refinements.

This first book of the trilogy is not only a novel par excellence, it also serves to reawaken thematic questions on perfecting civilizations. Questions such as: If utopia is desired or to be attained, who should decide and by what means? How does one know when utopia is attained, and for whom? Could utopia encourage, tolerate, or accomodate individual pursuits?

After reading 'The Golden Age', one will want to hitch a ride on 'The Phoenix Exultant'. More kaleidoscopic realities lie doggo in book two of this utopian quest saga.

A Single Combat Fame Speaks Clear

I surprised myself to have written two book reviews in as many months.

The review is titled: "A Single Combat Fame Speaks Clear"
My nom de plume is: Gussie Fink-Nottle.

You may also read the review on the Amazon link:

A Single Combat Fame Speaks Clear
If you like, you may comment here on this blog or at the Amazon site.

“Dim is the rumour of a common fight,
When host meets host, and many names are sunk;
But of a single combat Fame speaks clear.”

— Matthew Arnold "Sohrab and Rustum" (1853)

The ski resort town Cortina d'Ampezzo is nestled in the Ampezzo valley of northeastern Italy, bordering Austria. The region's scenic Dolomite alps and valley have played host to a number of motion pictures. Classic adventure films such as The Pink Panther (1963), For Your Eyes Only (1981), and the Cliffhanger (1993) were filmed in the area. Cortina was also the site for the 1956 Winter Olympics.

During World War II, Cortina was a vital German army headquarter in northern Italy. It served as the communications and transportation synapse between Italy and Germany. To the west of this alpine village, the Brenner Pass had been the principal artery linking Italy and Austria during the conflict. Even to this day, it is still the lowest and easiest of the alpine routes to travel between the two countries. Its strategic importance dates back to the Roman empire.

One month before the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the objective of The Brenner Assignment was for small teams of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) operatives, with the aid of local partisans, to disrupt and destroy the road network in the Cortina area feeding into the Brenner Pass. The principals of this true story centered about the Captains Stephen Hall and Howard Chappell.

Hall parachuted into northern Italy in August 1943, a month after the invasion of Sicily. Chappell's charge was to linked up with Hall and provided the latter with a radio operator. Chappell arrived at the Dolomites, the day after Christmas in 1943. By then, it had been three months since the Allied had successfully invaded and secured southern Italy. Consequently, the Allied and Italy declared armistice on 8 September, 1943. With Italy out of the war, the Germans fought on but slowly retreated northward to the Brenner Pass. And the SS were closing in on Hall and Chappell.

Yet, the fate of war barred the meeting of these two brothers-in-arms. Each relied on their skills and endurance to complete the objective charged. An excerpt from the book illustrates what these OSS operatives endured while fighting behind enemy line. In this narrative, the determination of an already ill and frostbitten Captain Hall heads toward the Cortina railroad station:

"An hour after dawn on January 26, Hall pushed off from his safe house in the tiny Dolomite town of Andrich...Hall's journey took him through seventeen miles of some of the most formidable terrain on earth. The miles are not a true measure of the journey, which only takes more than half an hour by car. On skis, the trip moves over mountains, down gullies, and into canyons. Hall's journey would take at least two days."

It's been said the world knows nothing of its greatest men. Books like The Brenner Assignment are answering such challenge and disproving its proposition. Wartime heroic exploits of men like Hall and Chappell are being revealed. There are those like Sartre, however, in their own state of existential existence, reason that wartime heroism is "a false experience". A Kant philodoxer, Sartre is in this instance. Heroism feels and never reasons, says Emerson, and therefore is always right. He further makes the point the things the hero does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines.

Odd and quaint as it may seem, there is an old legal document which brings to bear on the illustrious character and splendid achievements of Captains Hall and Chappell:

"The difference between the difficult and the impossible is as follows: the difficult is troublesome to procure, but though troublesome it is still procured; whereas the impossible is a thing which it is impossible for a person to procure, because it is not natural for anybody to get it at all."
-- Ancient Laws of Ireland: Uraicect becc and Certain Other Selected Law Tract, Vol.5, 1901, page 223.

When viewed in totality of the separately pledged labor of Hall and Chappell, they had, indeed, procured the difficult and the impossible in the Brenner assignment.

With diagrams and pictures, this is an easy and captivating book to read. Notwithstanding, the author should have included a discussion on the Allied invasion of Italy in the prologue. The Baby Boomers and the generations which follow could stand to learn more about World War II. In addition, a brief mentioned of dates and events of the invasion for each chapter heading would have helped. Having this information, the reader would have a better grasp of the dates mentioned the Hall and Chappell narratives, relative to the overall chronology of the invasion.

The Cat Who Looks Like A Pirate

I have not written a book review in years. Below is my review on J.A. Jance's "Edge of Evil", submitted to Amazon today.

The review is titled: "The Cat Who Looks like a Pirate."
My nom de plume is: Gussie Fink-Nottle.

Click this link to see the review at Amazon:

The Cat Who Looks Like a Pirate
If you like, you may comment here on this blog or at the Amazon site.

"la vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman
qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie"*
-- George Sand (1833)
A far cry from the societal and family norms once treasured and embodied in Wilder's Our Town, the stage atmosphere of the Edge of Evil is the social fabric of today's America. The life mobile once reverently held and symmetrically balanced with the three strands of daily living, love-marriage, and death-eternity, are slowly being severed. Our lopsided national character is now steeped in anxieties and breakups. The ties holding normalcy together are fraying and weakening. It is in this backdrop we find Ali Reynolds' life center teeters on the verge of collapsing.

Already feeling raw from a wrongful termination as a Los Angeles television news personality, Ali Reynolds receives nary a solaced embrace nor soothing lips from network executive and husband. Wilting under his accusing and narcissistic rants, emptiness drowns her. When hearing her long time friend is missing, it's the clarion call for Ali to return to the succor of her childhood home for a respite, and learn the where about of Reenee Bernard. So the forty-something Reynolds and her heart, accompanying by college senior son, jettisons the hubris of a cast television persona and leaves southern California behind.

Sedona, Arizona, named after the wife of settler and postmaster Carl Schnebly. The hub of the Red Rock Country, Sedona radiates majestic red buttes, lush greenery, and wilderness expanse. Fused in with purported healing cosmic vortices, the intrinsic enticement of this landscape is certified. The aura of these natural phenomena propagates along the rugged serpentine Schnebly Hill Road as well.

Liken to the horizontal stroke of the letter "H", Schnebly Hill Road had once been a vital road for ferrying goods between Sedona on the west, and Flagstaff east. This eleven-mile stretch of road hugs and slithers out the Mogollon Rim above Sedona; it is an old, rugged, and narrow cattle trail which accommodates all mortal motives with marked indifference. Whether it is he who wants to channel the healing energy vortex whirling at the Bear Wallow Canyon, or that she intends on doing a dead-on Thelma and Louise stunt six thousand feet above the town, the road asks no questions and gives no answers. It is what it is.

Upon the searchers finding Renee's mangled body down in a canyon below Schnebly Hill Road, on this deed of dreadful note, the tale begins. Ali Reynolds, the now ex-investigative reporter, sets about to learn the reasons to the "it is what it is" cause of death to her friend: suicide.

Although this novel is tagged as a Mystery-Thriller, the whodunit theme elicits a far more stronger and deeper antiphonal pathos than other works in the genre. We attribute this verisimilar characterization to the author's own life journey. In her formative years as a writer, Ms. Jance was subjected to much academic chastisements and life's vicissitudes. These rebukes later served to discipline and anchor her resolve to become the author she is today; in her works, we find the quality of mercy is not strained. We see, for example, the tender pity Jance ascribes to Sam and her humans.

Samantha the cat could never be considered as the feline partner to Qwilleran in a Lilian Jackson Braun's caper. A cat with a ragged torn ear and a missing eye, at best, might be thought of as a veteran of some territorial altercation. Or she could be the recipient of the affliction owing to someone's cruel pleasure. Whatever the history behind Sam's disfigurement, she now has a home. The deceased's surviving children love her, and she them. A mutual solace. A testimony to resiliency and hopes rekindled. This tabby would later become a new strand in Ali Reynold's yet to be reconstituted mobile, the healing vortices notwithstanding.

To find answers to her life's persistent questions à la devise de Guy Noir, Ali forays into the Internet. It is here in this vast digital-age nebula, we see the transforming of an aloof, coiffured hair, and manicured reporter, into a softer heart and more susceptible spirit. Yet paradoxically, she is holding on to what is becoming an anachronism. Handwritten letters. She doubts the veracity of Reenee's typewritten suicide note. To Ali, it counters the victim's penchant for pen and ink.

By cleverly juxtaposing the two art forms of the printed word, the former English teacher Ms. Jance conveys a subtext within the story. That is, writing, however rendered, is an intrinsic and indispensable portion of being human. We all subscribe to the philosopher-dustman Alfred P. Doolittle's uttering, 'I'm willing to tell you. I'm wanting to tell you. I'm waiting to tell you.' Except in writing, once the 'Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.'

One final thought. I have a question to which Guy Noir might not have an answer. Perhaps Ms. Jance would tell us. Why would anyone wants to drive a Lexus on Schnebly Hill Road, and on a blistery snowy day?

*"life resembles more often to a novel than a novel is to life"

Eat Drink Man Woman

My penchant for old movies has had me watched many a commercial-free Turner Classic Movie (TMC) features on television. And now, Comcast cable also offers its subscribers free full-length movies on the On Demand channel. Like TMC, many of these free On Demand flicks are from yesteryears. But as Peter Bogdanovich once said, there are no old movies, just movies I haven't seen. Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)" was a movie I had not seen until a few evenings ago.

This movie title "Eat Drink Man Woman" reads like a line from Neil Simon's comedy Murder by Death (1974). In this parody of the British cozy mysteries, the character Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) castigated Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) for the mangling of the English tongue. Wang was scorned for speaking English without articles, pronouns, and prepositions. The tongue-in-cheek subtext of Twain's irritation with Wang, of course, was Capote himself, an accomplished writer in real life.

Many from non-English speaking countries are learning to speak (and write) the lingua franca trippingly or haltingly the language of Shakespeare. Modern English words such as "hi" and "bye" have already grafted comfortably into the everyday Taiwan-Chinese vocabulary, as evinced in Eat Drink Man Woman . Yet, it is the eloquence of this four-word vernacular which speaks volumes to the immense richness of the Chinese language.

The original movie title comprised of four traditional Chinese calligraphic characters: 飲食男女. The literal and sequential translation of which reads: Drink_Eat_Male_ Female. These elemental word-characters and their meanings are known to every grade schoolers where traditional Chinese calligraphic scripting are taught.

There are no grammatical equivalents for gerunds, transitive, intransitive verbs, or tenses in Chinese. Thus the word-character Drink(ing) or Eat(ing) can be either a noun or a verb, depending on the syntax and context where they are placed along other words in a sentence. When Drink and Eat are paired in tandem (not Eat before Drink as in the subtitle), it became a couplet with further amplification in meaning. With the sum greater than the parts, the two-word phrase transformed to connotate "sustenance" or "to maintain life".

Vis-à-vis the ubiquitous scripting of today's Chinese, as examplified in the screen version of the words, Drink and Eat, the latter two words of the movie title Male and Female were shown as very old calligraphic variants. The significance of this change in scripting was interesting, if intriguing to note. This hieroglphic-like couplet of the "male and female" characters could lend to mean the biological imperatives of mating is as old as time. It is as necessary as eating and drinking.

When these two couplets were further paired as in the movie title, we have the adage "Drink_Eat_Man_Woman". A terse, quintessential statement that says : The circle of life requires sustenance.

In this Taipei family drama, Ang Lee aptly juxtaposed the varying affects of food and love, as it should be, to impart a verisimilar and sumptuous lesson on life.

Not So Vain Anymore

Among all of the reviews I have done on Amazon.com, most of them have to do with books. There were a few choral CD's thrown in here and there. Now, I am adding Carly Simon's new CD Moonlight Serenade (2005) to my short music CD review list.

This is an exceptionally fine recording of the "standards." The supposed voice of the passionate You-Are-So-Vain Carly was another voice of a distant past. The older and sophisticated Carly now sings with a sensual smokey voice not unlike that of Julie London, Dusty Springfield, or Diana Krall.

The jazzy orchestral arrangements coupled with Simon's phrasing of the songs once again certified the endearing artistry of Parish & Miller, Dubin & Warren, Rodgers & Hart, and etc.

EXPIRED: A sampler of Simon sings Rodgers & Hart - Where or When (1939).

Behind the Oysters is the Landscape

This book review is titled: "Behind the Oysters is the Landscape"
My Amazon nom de plume is: Gussie Fink-Nottle.

This review has been posted to Amazon. The Amazon link to this book is embedded below.

My reveiw of this book is as follows:

The opening line of this book is:
"WHAT YOU NOTICE in the month of May is the tiles, like roof tiles but white, stacked by thousands at one point after another along the shore."

The last line on page 203 is:
"BENEFICIENT Oyster, good to taste, good for the stomach and the soul, grant us the blessing of your further mystery."

In between these 200 pages concerning oysters, Eleanor Clark wrote a definitive classic on the amalgamation of geography, human history, ecology, and commerce. One reads much of the mystery or the character of this mollusk at this Breton coast. It expresses itself through the human being just as it does through its own.

These oysters of Locmariaquer can be appreciated or thought of in two ways. How they are farmed in this northwestern Breton Coast can be thought of as being incidental. The important thing, some argues, this is a place of scenary, good oyster eating, and tourism. Or one can see with an understanding eye, as the author wants the reader to see, at the landscape. This Locmariaquer landscape, with the oysters, is repleted with the rich voice of its ancestors, myths, history, and human foibles.

Equipped with this behind the scene knowledge, the mystery of the Locmariquer mollusk is revealed. Now we can trippingly roll off our tongue why these Breton oysters are dear to the gourmet. Put on a few more dozens of these oysters on the barbie, won't you? No, not on the doll.

*Note: This book was published in 1964. In the 1970s, some if not all of the oyster varieties named in the book had been devastated by parasites. Today, the region is cultivating the hardier Japanese oyster, the Japanese naissain (the Gigas) variety, to sustain the industry and a way of life.

Iris dévoilée (Iris unveiled)

This Iris plants are an important in the myth, art, and cultivation in many societies. The Chinese composer, Qigang Chen (or Chen Qigang), has rendered a musical portrait of the female sex likened to the fragile and beautiful Iris flower.

This 2003 Iris dévoilée (Iris unveiled) recording is a much acclaimed piece of artistry. In his arranged marriage of the East and West musical ware, Chen has exotically woven a tapestry of sensual harmonics and vocalises (Beijing operatic and Western) depicting the eternal feminine mystique.* The musical metaphors of the female personae are intrinsically Chinese. There are five additional tracks on the CD. Each invokes an element of the five core progenitors that which gave rise to the physical world known to the Chinese.

This, however, is not the CD one wishes to complement the delicacies of the conversation, nor when solitude is desired.

* The nine mica panels of female attributes portraited in this tone poem are:

1. Ingenious
2. Chaste
3. Libertine
4. Sensitive
5. Tender
6. Jealous
7. Melancholic
8. Hysterical
9. Voluptuous