Saturday, October 31, 2015

Work N’ Travel X Getting Better: October

it has been a great month

new achievement(s) unlocked

 

01 – Work

sales of the year with

stable flow of jobs

proper time management

nothing really upsetting

 

02 – Travel

work n’ travel with

better e-mail management

during the previous case

I actually wasn’t prepared that

Gmail is no longer workable in China

 

this time round I was triple-prepared

setting up email forwarding to Hotmail

IMAP or whatever you call it to QQ and

a desktop-based email client Foxmail

 

with different degrees of success

Hotmail worked the best

QQ Mail works.. with delay and

Foxmail didn’t work at all

 

smooth incoming and submission processes

except once incident

 

surprisingly it was in Seoul

the Internet got disconnected at 2 a.m.

I was one step away from submission

 

because the entire floor

in fact the entire residence

was switching to IPTV with individual modem

 

oh come on

I already got those in

my express hotel in China

like quite some times ago

 

you mean my hotel in Seoul

was just about to switch to IPTV

at the time when I really needed the Internet

 

woke up at 7 and still the same

walked down to the lobby

completed the submission and

 

did another project while

listening to conversations at

breakfast tables of

people across countries

 

eavesdropping is a very built-in

ability of mine

probably as I am used to

listening to radio while working

 

the rest were just fine

but at times due to work

like I slept very late and

woke up to continue working

 

I started my city wandering

after 1 in the afternoon

directly skipping to a brunch

 

that’s like almost half of the day gone

thank goodness I travelled with my dad

and he understands and

is perfectly understanding

in terms of my timelines and working hours

 

that would build a good foundation for

my “Work n’ Travel” plan for

a longer period of time

not that I have any now

 

but if I do

I am now better used to the pace of

working anytime anywhere

especially if I am travelling

 

03 – Personal

travelling is the best reward

I can pamper myself with

that’s nothing I can ask for

 

in the mean time

I shall work hard for the winter

until the next island vacay

scheduled for

 

work hard to shed off the

extra pound gained during

the 2 weeks of compulsive eating too

 

till then,

Happy Halloween

P1310513

 

p.s.

I just paid for a set of new Peanuts toy from eBay

soon the movie is hitting the theatre

soon it will be Christmas

soon the year is ending

soon..

Thursday, October 29, 2015

SEOUL Random 01: Direction to Hyundai Residence

To get to Seoul

it’s either via AREX airport train or bus

there are buses to most visitor-concentrated areas

bus fare costs 10,000 won per trip

 

or you may directly grab a T-money card

at 7-11 upon arrival

it costs 2,5000 won

and directly top up like 20,000 won

 

so that you may use it directly on the airport bus

the buses are right outside

at the same ground level

 

the bus will make a few stops along the way

the destination will be pre-announced

and you have to press the bell to

notify the driver

 

before departure

if you have luggage at the compartment

they actually distribute a luggage label to you

Airport bus from Incheon

 

and once you are alighting

just hand it to the driver and

he would help you out with the luggage

 

a more specific guide below is about

how to get to this Hyundai Residence

which  I was staying

 

all I can say is..

it’s highly recommended

details in another post

 

from the airport

take bus 6015

and alight at (Best Western) Kukdo Hostel

a.k.a. Euljiro 4-ga station

 

from there,

Hyundai Residence is within walking distance

Route 01 (Recommended)

1. From Kukdo Hotel, walk straight ahead

2. You will see Euljiro 4-ga station exit 10, 9

3. Cross the road

4. You will see Euljiro 4-ga station exit 8, 7

5. Walk straight along some home-decors shops

6. You will come across an entrance to a market

7. Cross through Chungbu market (it’s clean!!)

8. At the cross-road, walk straight

9. Will see Hyundai Residence after the 1st 7-E

Incheon airport - bus 6015 - Kukdo Hotel - Hyundai Residence 02

 

Route 02

but there are more road-crossing and turns

1. From Kukdo Hotel, walk straight ahead

2. You will see Euljiro 4-ga station exit 10, 9

3. Cross the road

4. You will see Euljiro 4-ga station exit 8

5. Turn right and along some furniture shops

6. At the junction, where Biz Hotel is

7. Cross the road towards Biz Hotel

8. Turn left and walk along some shops

9. At the T-junction, where Chungbu Market is

10. Turn right into the small lane

11. Will see Hyundai Residence after the 1st 7-E

Incheon airport - bus 6015 - Kukdo Hotel - Hyundai Residence

* The #8 box on the left-bottom corner is

Chungmuro Station for line 3 & 4

 

may catch a shuttle bus 02 in front of Popeye’s

i.e. exit 2 of Chungmuro Station to

Namsan Park / N Seoul Tower

 

this is how the junction of Biz Hotel looks like

in case you prefer Route #2

Biz Hotel, Seoul

 

but again

Chungbu / Jungbu market

is really a walkable and much easier route

Chungbu / Jungbu Market

 

the final junction right before

reaching Hyundai Residence

a local restaurant

not sure what does it serve as

there is no menu or whatsoever

but a local favourite

many huge cars were parked nearby

some illegally just to eat here

the junction to Hyundai Residence

 

ideally I should end this post

with a snap of Hyundai Residence

captioned, here you are

but I doubt I even have one

 

no worries

anyway, in short

once you see

Chungbu Market / Jungbu market

and this Granny’s restaurant right oppsite

you are just steps away from Hyundai Residence

 

The Complete Seoul Random Series

01: Direction to Hyundai Residence

02: Duty Free / Tax Refund

03: The Grocery Craze

04: Foodie as a Dummy (Like Me)

05: 11 Reasons to Book Hyundai Residence

06: Constantly Reminded of Siwon-LiuWen 石榴夫婦

07: Ssamziegel, Insa-dong 人人廣場,仁寺洞

08: The Palace 宮

09: Bukchon Hanok Village 北村

10: Final Shopping Tips

Friday, October 23, 2015

It’s a Transition X Instead of a Destination: Vacay Reflection

got home by 10 a.m.

from the airport

after a long shower

 

thought I will have time to

roll around in the good old bed

which I didn’t get to do so

 

as tasks started to come

one is on an urgent basis

which I did all the way until late evening

 

and continued on with the less urgent one

which is not that less-urgent anyway

as I promise to deliver by tomorrow morning

so decided to complete it at one go

 

it feels good to start work at 10 am

on a post-vacation workday

and went all the way until past mid-night

 

basically it feels good to know that

you are still wanted and needed

 

and while working

have “accidentally” been engaged to

book for the spring trip of 2016

 

I have been thinking a lot during the trip

what are the purposes of travelling

 

Experience-wise

to experience how the other live in

a completely different environment?

 

Escapism-wise

to get away from the mundane life

so that you can come back and start afresh

 

Relationship-wise

to simple spend time with the person(s)

you travel with…

 

Training-wise

to train yourself to adapt and adopt

no matter where and how you travel

 

Family-wise

to get away from home

just to come back feeling

how much you love it here

 

Sharpening-wise

to accumulate ideas

and continue to write more

despite being not really good at it

 

or perhaps other skills

such as photography, observation and

even your bargaining skill

which I guess I will never learn

 

Financial-wise

to spend money like flowing water

so that you will come back

a more hard-working person

 

Ambition-wise

to insert a puzzle piece

onto your bigger roadmap

 

Physical-wise

to walk and get exposed

under the sun

 

Mental-wise

to pump in some courage

the more places you travel

the more things you have attempted

the more courage you have

just to go on to try more

 

Spiritual-wise

to explore your inner-feelings

yet to attain the above level

 

I probably should make a travel checklist

to see if the different aspects

have been achieved and

in what ways are they being achieved

through each and every trip

 

no matter what it is..

the journey goes on

to expect the unexpected

 

my eyes hurt badly

yet my mind refuses to

signal my body to go to bed

 

and the story-telling shall go on tomorrow

about the old City of Chao Zhou

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Chao Zhou Old City 潮州古城 0.5: In/Out ChaoZhou 出入潮州

0337 hour, Oct/22/2015

killing time at the airport

after a week away from

Facebook, Intragram, Google, YouTube

 

holy, I even forgot how to

spell Instragram properly

wait a minute it’s Instagram right

okay.. spell it 10x please..

 

was supposed to drop a post before

I left but I didn’t because

was suddenly getting projects

 

I know right

it always happened that way

always such coincidently

 

Chao Zhou / Teo Chew / 潮州

it isn’t in the typical tourist’s map

and the suggested touring day is

usually 1 –2 days and

nothing more

 

previously were simple random thought

my grandpa on my mom’s side is

a Teo Chewist

 

yet understanding of

Teo Chew culture is minimal

they do not even speak the language

 

and at one point of time

I used to have the perception that

Chao Zhou is part of Fu Jian

 

but that misconception is not unfounded

despite being part of

Guang Dong / Canton / 廣東

 

(1) The Teo Chew dialect is similar to

some of the Fu Jian dialects

it is figure-out-able if you know those dialects

sometimes… I mean yeah

if they are not speaking too fast

 

(2) Chao Zhou is near to

some of the Southern Fu Jian cities

such as Zhang Zhou (漳州) and even Xia Men (廈門)

as compared to Guang Zhou and Shen Zhen

 

(2) The earlier Teo Chew folks were

classified into two sects of

those who migrated east-ward from Canton areas

and those migrated south-ward from Fu Jian areas

 

the vague ideas were realized

thanks to this guidebook

I bought at Cheng Du 4 months ago

P1300423

 

I mean if someone can manage to produce

an entire guidebook on this city

it is probably worth-exploring

and the content in there looks good

 

traveled to Chao Zhou via Shen Zhen

similar route can be taken from

Guang Zhou / Xia Men

From To Via
Shen Zhen Bao’An Airport 
深圳寶安
Shen Zhen North
深圳北火車站
  • Bus  + Metro
  • Bus M416 from
    the airport to Hou Rui metro station 后瑞地鐵站
    • direct 1-stop shuttle
    • 2 RMB
    • 5 mins away
  • Metro from Hou Rui to Shen Zhen North
    • 15 stations away
    • transfer at Bao’An Center 寶安中心
    • 7 RMB
    • 45-60 mins
Shen Zhen North 深圳北 Chao Shan
潮汕站
  • High speed rail 高鐵
  • Very frequent
  • 79.50 RMB
  • 2 hours 30 mins approx.
  • watch out for the stop, because it may not be the final stop, but a 3 mins transit station
Chao Shan
潮汕站
Chao Zhou City 潮州市
  • Express bus
  • The terminal is on the right upon exiting the station
  • 20 – 30 mins
  • 8 RMB
  • Goes through major roads
  • Stop by major bus terminals
  • Can hail for a stop along the way

 

This new high speed railway route

started operation back in 2013

runs from Shen Zhen to Xia Men

as one of the stations along

the train is quite frequent

 

yet we waited 3 hours for our train as

tickets were sold out

probably that was a Friday or

most people pre-booked their tickets online

 

reaching Chao Shan station after night fall

was planning to catch a cab

but still went on to try the bus

 

the problem was

language difficulty

I couldn’t really understand

the Teo Chew dialect

it took time to figure out

and the bus was dead packed

standing crowd with luggage and all

 

what the locals do is

just call out to the driver

and he will pull aside for

the person to alight

 

thanks to the reliable

Baidu GPS map with real-time location

it works even without going online

through pre-downloaded city map

 

I managed to track the route of the bus

and how far it is from my hotel

and will alight at the nearest possible

 

while I was deciding when and how to

signal the driver for a pull over

a man shouted for a drop-off

and we just followed him

and the hotel was like 10 steps away

 

City buses in Chao Zhou

It’s quite accessible

at least from where I was staying

a 7 Days Inn along Chao Feng road (潮楓路)

as mentioned above

the bus from railway station drops by

 

despite its name

7 Days Bus Terminal branch (七天汽車總站點)

 

just to mention

the bus terminal 潮州汽車總站

is actually for inter-city express buses

to nearby cities such as

Shan Tou 汕頭, Rao Ping 饒平, Jie Yang 揭陽

as well as other long-distance buses to

 

look out.. despite being on the same road

the bus terminal is a few kilometers away

on the other end… 4 bus stops away

and agoda actually labeled the wrong location

 

buses 1/2/8/12 goes to the Old City

where most of the attractions

are concentrated at

 

a huge Lotus hypermarket opposite the hotel

an ideal landmark to identify

and somewhere to kill time

after night fall

卜蜂蓮花超市 / 潮州  Lotus hypermarket / Chao Zhou

 

besides loitering at hypermarket

there’s really nothing much you can do

besides couching with

the 100+ (local) channels cable tv

but first let me go Lotus and

grab some chips and drinks and yogurt

 

the same clue-less situation

applies to their city buses

there’s no auto reminder or LED display

like the other cities do

you just have to get ready and

tell the driver you want to get off soon

 

The more local method

would be their trishaw

similar to Tuk-tuk in Thailand

some are electric-powered

some are manual cycling

Chao Zhou trishaw 潮州三輪車

 

on our way to the bus terminal

in order to catch a bus to train station

OMG.. going on reversed direction

lorries were coming and

there was another trishaw too

Chao Zhou trishaw 潮州

 

previously when the new Shen Zhen airport

came into operation

saw threads on Weibo about

how it is being a threat for people with

Trypophobia 密集恐懼症

can’t agree more

I guess the whole concept is about

eco-friendly, bee-hive-like for

both exterior and interior design

Shen Zhen Bao ' An Airport 深圳寶安機場

 

Chao Shan high speed rail station

Chao Shan being

Chao Zhou and Shan Tou 汕頭

a coastal city 1 hour away from Chao Zhou

潮汕站 高鐵 Chao Shan high speed rail station 

 

looks like the security at

high speed rail station has been

furthered strengthened

 

(i) Buying ticket with valid identity proof

(ii) Ticket and identity verification (NEW)

(iii) Bag scanning security-check

(iv) Auto-gate ticket check-in (15 mins b4 departure)

(v) Boarding ……… Alighting

(vi) Auto-gate ticket check-out upon arrival

 

but no worries

everything is conducted under perfect orders

even while waiting at the platforms

it has been labeled on the floor

with the specific coach number

 

so that you don’t have to run panic

looking for the right coach to enter

when the train pulls in

3 minutes later

it’s off accelerating at full speed again 

 

0600 hour

time to freshen up and walk around

before heading home at 7

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Hot Choc X Victorian? Cakes: Eat at 18 Café

café hopping isn’t really my kind of things

simply because

 

1st, an anti-socialist doesn’t have

that much friends to hang out anyway

 

2nd, being caffeine intolerant

always ended up ordering tea (from teabags)

or honey lemonade / iced lemon tea

which doesn’t make much difference anywhere

 

3rd, my very own house is vintage enough

can be blasting vinyl record all day all night

if you want to..

 

4th, I am really really non-expert

when it comes to food

as long as it doesn’t taste bad

it’s good enough for me

 

therefore the frequency is like

quarterly perhaps?

when there’s someone to meet

 

but I found an urge to blog about this

because it’s kinda good

among the flourishing café business

 

after all

in such a small place

competition must be kinda tough

 

of talks, cakes and hot chocolate

Hot Chocolate @ Eat at 18, MelakaCookies Skillet @ Eat at 18, MelakaVictoria Sponge Splendor, Cookies Skillet @ Eat at 18, Melaka

 

okay I didn’t even get to find out

what’s the name of the café is

obviously.. old folks like us

don’t really do real-time check-in

we just walked in

after some walking around

 

I started googling actually by typing in

the name of their competitor opposite

which was particularly (more) eye-catching

 

thank goodness

they have a pretty neat

website and Facebook page

indispensible tools these days

for a café business?

 

and found the 3 items I ordered

presentation-wise..

yup they live up to what’s being captured

in words and photos 

taste-wise..

yeah I would say it’s above average

what you eat is what you pay for

Eat at 18 at Melaka - Drink Menu 01Eat at 18 at Melaka - Dessert Menu 02Eat at 18 at Melaka - Dessert Menu

 

would definitely come back.. I guess

the Nutella crunch right above looks good

but too bad..

on top of being caffeine intolerant

I suffers from nuts allergy too

cheersssss

Monday, October 12, 2015

Peanuts X Bata Tennis: White Kicks!!

probably there are loads of

Peanuts’ collaboration this season

in conjunction with Peanuts 65th anniversary

not forgetting the Peanuts Movie

in less than a month

 

but these are the one

I will really scream for!!

Peanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 01Peanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & Charlie BrownPeanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & LucyPeanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & Woodstock & FriendsPeanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & Charlie Brown 02Peanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & Lucy 02Peanuts X Bata Tennis 2015 Snoopy & Woodstock & Friends 02

Saturday, October 10, 2015

[Repost]: The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy

written by SARAH BOXER

NOVEMBER 2015 ISSUE

The Atlantic

 

Some of Charles Schulz’s fans blame

the cartoon dog for ruining Peanuts.

Here’s why they’re wrong.

 

It really was a dark and stormy night.

 

On February 12, 2000,

Charles Schulz—who had single-handedly

drawn some 18,000 Peanuts comic strips,

who refused to use assistants to

ink or letter his comics,

who vowed that after he quit,

no new Peanuts strips would be made—

died, taking to the grave, it seemed,

any further adventures of the gang.

 

Hours later,

his last Sunday strip came out

with a farewell:

“Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy …

How can I ever forget them.”

 

By then, Peanuts was carried by

more than 2,600 newspapers in

75 countries and read by

some 300 million people.

 

It had been going for five decades.

Robert Thompson,

a scholar of popular culture,

called it “arguably the longest story told by

a single artist in human history.”

 

The arrival of The Peanuts Movie this fall

breathes new life into the phrase

over my dead body

starting with the movie’s title.

Schulz hated and resented the name Peanuts,

which was foisted on him by

United Feature Syndicate.

 

He avoided using it:

“If someone asks me what I do,

I always say,

‘I draw that comic strip with

Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog.’ ”

 

And unlike the classic Peanuts television specials,

which were done in a style

Schulz approvingly called “semi-animation,”

where the characters flip around

rather than turning smoothly in space,

The Peanuts Movie

(written by Schulz’s son Craig and

grandson Bryan, along with

Bryan’s writing partner, Cornelius Uliano)

is a computer-generated 3-D-animated feature.

 

What’s more,

the Little Red-Haired Girl,

Charlie Brown’s unrequited crush,

whom Schulz promised never to draw,

is supposed to make a grand appearance.

AAUGH!!!

 

The characters could stir up

shockingly heated arguments over

how to be a decent human being

in a bitter world.

 

Before all that happens,

before the next generation gets

a warped view of what Peanuts is and was,

let’s go back in time.

 

Why was this comic strip so

wildly popular for half a century?

 

How did Schulz’s cute and lovable characters

(they’re almost always referred to that way)

hold sway over so many people—

everyone from

Ronald Reagan to Whoopi Goldberg?

Peanuts was deceptive.

It looked like kid stuff, but it wasn’t.

The strip’s cozy suburban conviviality,

its warm fuzziness, actually

conveyed some uncomfortable truths

about the loneliness of social existence.

 

The characters, though funny,

could stir up shockingly heated arguments over

how to survive and still be a

decent human being in a bitter world.

Who was better at it—

Charlie Brown or Snoopy?

 

The time is ripe to see what was

really happening on the pages of Peanuts

during all those years.

 

Since 2004,

the comics publisher Fantagraphics

has been issuing The Complete Peanuts,

both Sunday and daily strips,

in books that each cover two years and

include an appreciation from a notable fan.

(The 25-volume series will be

completed next year.)

 

To read them straight through,

alongside David Michaelis’s

trenchant 2007 biography,

Schulz and Peanuts,

is to watch the characters evolve from

undifferentiated little cusses into

great social types.

 

In the stone age of Peanuts

when only seven newspapers carried the strip,

when Snoopy was still an

itinerant four-legged creature with

no owner or doghouse,

when Lucy and Linus had yet to be born—

Peanuts was surprisingly dark.

 

The first strip,

published on October 2, 1950,

shows two children, a boy and a girl,

sitting on the sidewalk.

 

 

The boy, Shermy, says,

“Well! Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown!

Good ol’ Charlie Brown …

Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown.”

 

When Charlie Brown is out of sight,

Shermy adds, “How I hate him!”

 

In the second Peanuts strip

the girl, Patty, walks alone, chanting,

“Little girls are made of sugar and spice …

and everything nice.”

As Charlie Brown comes into view,

she slugs him and says,

“That’s what little girls are made of!”

 

Although key characters were missing or

quite different from what they came to be,

the Hobbesian ideas about society that

made Peanuts were already evident:

 

People, especially children,

are selfish and cruel to one another;

social life is perpetual conflict;

solitude is the only peaceful harbor;

one’s deepest wishes will

invariably be derailed and

one’s comforts whisked away;

and an unbridgeable gulf yawns between

one’s fantasies about oneself and

what others see.

 

These bleak themes, which

went against the tide of the go-go 1950s,

floated freely on the pages of Peanuts at first,

landing lightly on one kid or another until

slowly each theme came to be embedded in

a certain individual—

particularly Lucy, Schroeder, Charlie Brown,

Linus, and Snoopy.

 

In other words, in the beginning

all the Peanuts kids were,

as Al Capp,

the creator of Li’l Abner, observed,

“good mean little bastards

eager to hurt each other.”

 

What came to be Lucy’s inimitable

brand of bullying was suffused throughout

the Peanuts population.

Even Charlie Brown was a bit of a heel.

 

In 1951, for example,

after watching Patty fall off

a curb into some mud,

he smirks: “Right in the mud, eh?

It’s a good thing I was carrying the ice cream!”

 

Many early Peanuts fans—

and this may come as a shock to

later fans raised on the sweet milk of

Happiness Is a Warm Puppy

were attracted to the strip’s

decidedly unsweet view of society.

 

Matt Groening, the creator of the strip

Life in Hell and The Simpsons, remembers,

“I was excited by the casual cruelty and

offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip.”

 

Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame,

saw Peanuts as “the first Beat strip” because

it “vibrated with ’50s alienation.”

 

And the editors of Charlie Mensuel,

a raunchy precursor to

the even raunchier Charlie Hebdo,

so admired the existential angst

of the strip that

they named both publications after

its lead character.

 

At the center of this world was

Charlie Brown,

a new kind of epic hero—

a loser who would lie in the dark

recalling his defeats,

charting his worries,

planning his comebacks.

 

One of his best-known lines was

“My anxieties have anxieties.”

Although he was the glue holding together

the Peanuts crew (and its baseball team),

he was also the undisputed butt of the strip.

 

His mailbox was almost always empty.

His dog often snubbed him,

at least until suppertime,

and the football was always

yanked away from him.

 

The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow

calls him a Sisyphus.

Frustration was his lot.

 

When Schulz was asked whether

for his final strip he would let

Charlie Brown make contact with the football,

he reportedly replied,

“Oh, no! Definitely not! …

That would be a terrible disservice to him

after nearly half a century.”

 

For many fans,

there was something fundamentally rotten

about the new Snoopy.

 

Although Schulz denied any

strict identification with Charlie Brown

(who was actually named for one of

Schulz’s friends at the

correspondence school in Minneapolis where

Schulz learned and taught drawing),

many readers assumed they were

one and the same.

 

More important for the strip’s success,

readers saw themselves in Charlie Brown,

even if they didn’t want to.

 

“I aspired to Linus-ness;

to be wise and kind and highly skilled at

making gigantic structures out of playing cards,”

the children’s-book author Mo Willems

notes in one of the essays in

the Fantagraphics series.

 

But, he continues,

“I knew, deep down, that

I was Charlie Brown.

I suspect we all did.”

 

Well, I didn’t.

 

And luckily, beginning in 1952

(after Schulz moved from his hometown,

St. Paul, Minnesota,

to Colorado Springs for a year with

his first wife, Joyce, and her daughter, Meredith),

there were plenty more

alter egos to choose from.

 

That was the year the Van Pelts were born.

Lucy, the fussbudget, who was based

at first on young Meredith,

came in March.

 

Lucy’s blanket-carrying little brother,

Linus, Schulz’s favorite character to draw

(he would start with his pen

at the back of the neck),

arrived only months later.

 

And then, of course,

there was Snoopy,

who had been around from the outset

(Schulz had intended to name him Sniffy) and

was fast evolving into an articulate being.

 

His first detailed expression of consciousness,

recorded in a thought balloon,

came in response to Charlie Brown

making fun of his ears:

“Kind of warm out today for

ear muffs, isn’t it?”

 

Snoopy sniffs:

“Why do I have to suffer such indignities!?”

 

I like to think that Peanuts and identity politics

grew up together in America.

By 1960, the main characters—

Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroeder, Snoopy—

had their roles and their acolytes.

Even Lucy had her fans.

 

The filmmaker John Waters,

writing an introduction to

one of the Fantagraphics volumes, gushes:

 

I like Lucy’s politics (“I know everything!” …),

her manners (“Get out of my way!” …),

her narcissism …

and especially her verbal abuse rants …

Lucy’s “total warfare frown” …

is just as iconic to me as

Mona Lisa’s smirk.

 

Finding one’s identity in the strip was like

finding one’s political party or

ethnic group or niche in the family.

It was a big part of the appeal of Peanuts.

 

Every character was a powerful personality with

quirky attractions and profound faults,

and every character, like some saint or hero,

had at least one key prop or attribute.

 

Charlie Brown had his tangled kite,

Schroeder his toy piano,

Linus his flannel blanket,

Lucy her “Psychiatric Help” booth,

and Snoopy his doghouse.

 

In this blessedly solid world,

each character came to be linked

not only to certain objects but

to certain kinds of interactions, too,

 

much like the main players in Krazy Kat,

one of the strips that Schulz admired and

hoped to match.

 

But unlike Krazy Kat, which was built upon

a tragically repetitive love triangle that

involved animals hurling bricks,

Peanuts was a drama of social coping,

outwardly simple but

actually quite complex.

 

Charlie Brown,

whose very character depended on

his wishes being stymied, developed

what the actor Alec Baldwin,

in one of the Fantagraphics introductions,

calls a kind of

“trudging, Jimmy Stewart–like

decency and predictability.”

 

The Charlie Brown way was to

keep on keeping on,

standing with a tangled kite or

a losing baseball team day after day.

 

Michaelis, Schulz’s biographer,

locates the essence of

Charlie Brown—and Peanuts itself—

in a 1954 strip in which

 

Charlie Brown visits Shermy and watches as

he “plays with a model train set whose

tracks and junctions and crossings spread …

elaborately far and wide in

Shermy’s family’s living room.”

 

After a while,

Charlie Brown pulls on his coat

and walks home … [and]

sits down at his railroad:

a single, closed circle of track …

Here was the moment when

Charlie Brown became a national symbol,

the Everyman who survives life’s

slings and arrows simply by

surviving himself.

 

In fact, all of the characters were survivors.

They just had different strategies for survival,

none of which was exactly pro-social.

 

Linus knew that he could

take his blows philosophically—

he was often seen, elbows on the wall,

calmly chatting with Charlie Brown—

as long as he had his security blanket nearby.

 

He also knew that if he didn’t have his blanket,

he would freak out.

 

(In 1955 the child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott

asked for permission to use

Linus’s blanket as an illustration of

a “transitional object.”)

 

Lucy, dishing out

bad and unsympathetic advice

fromher “Psychiatric Help” booth,

was the picture of bluster.

 

On March 27, 1959,

Charlie Brown, the first patient to

visit her booth, says to Lucy,

“I have deep feelings of depression …

What can I do about this?”

 

Lucy replies:

“Snap out of it! Five cents, please.”

That pretty much sums up the Lucy way.

 

Schroeder at his piano

represented artistic retreat—

ignoring the world to pursue one’s dream.

 

And Snoopy’s coping philosophy was,

in a sense, even

more antisocial than Schroeder’s.

 

Snoopy figured that since no one will

ever see you the way you see yourself,

you might as well

build your world around fantasy,

create the person you want to be,

and live it out, live it up.

 

Part of Snoopy’s Walter Mitty–esque charm

lay in his implicit rejection of

society’s view of him.

 

Most of the kids saw him as just a dog,

but he knew he was way more than that.

 

Those characters who could not

be summed up with both

a social strategy and a recognizable attribute

(Pig-Pen, for instance,

had an attribute—dirt—

but no social strategy)

became bit players or fell by the wayside.

 

Shermy, the character who uttered the

bitter opening lines of Peanuts in 1950,

became just another bland boy by the 1960s.

 

Violet, the character who

made endless mud pies,

withheld countless invitations,

and had the distinction of being

the first person to

pull the football away from Charlie Brown,

was mercilessly demoted to

just another snobby mean girl.

 

Patty, one of the early stars,

had her name recycled for another,

more complicated character,

Peppermint Patty,

the narcoleptic tomboy who

made her first appearance in 1966 and

became a regular in the 1970s.

(Her social gambit was to fall asleep,

usually at her school desk.)

 

One of Charlie Brown’s best-known lines was

“My anxieties have anxieties.”

 

Once the main cast was set,

the iterations of their daily interplay were

almost unlimited.

 

“A cartoonist,” Schulz once said,

“is someone who has to

draw the same thing every day without

repeating himself.”

 

It was this

“infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns,”

Umberto Eco wrote in

The New York Review of Books in 1985,

that gave the strip its epic quality.

 

Watching the permutations of

every character working out

how to get along with

every other character demanded

“from the reader a continuous act of empathy.”

 

For a strip that depended on

the reader’s empathy,

Peanuts often involved dramas that

displayed a shocking lack of empathy.

 

And in many of those dramas,

the pivotal figure was

Lucy, the fussbudget who

couldn’t exist without others to fuss at.

 

She was so strident, Michaelis reports,

that Schulz relied on certain pen nibs for her.

(When Lucy was “doing some loud shouting,”

as Schulz put it, he would ink up a B-5 pen,

which made heavy, flat, rough lines.

For “maximum screams,”

he would get out the B-3.)

 

Lucy was, in essence, society itself,

or at least society as Schulz saw it.

 

“Her aggressiveness

threw the others off balance,”

Michaelis writes, prompting each character to

cope or withdraw in his or her own way.

 

Charlie Brown, for instance,

responded to her with incredible credulity,

coming to her time and again for

pointless advice or for football kicking.

 

Linus always seemed to approach her with

a combination of terror and equanimity.

In one of my favorite strips,

he takes refuge from

his sister in the kitchen and,

when Lucy tracks him down,

addresses her pointedly:

“Am I buttering too loud for you?”

 

It was Lucy’s dealings with Schroeder that

struck closest to home for Schulz,

whose first marriage, to Joyce,

began to fall apart in the 1960s while

they were building up their

huge estate in Sebastopol, California.

 

Just as Schulz’s retreat into his comic-strip world

antagonized Joyce, Michaelis observes,

so Schroeder’s devotion to his piano was

“an affront to Lucy.”

 

At one point,

Lucy becomes so fed up at her inability to

distract Schroeder from his music that

she hurls his piano into the sewer:

“It’s woman against piano!

Woman is winning!!

Woman is winning!!!”

 

When Schroeder shouts at her in disbelief,

“You threw my piano down the sewer!!,”

Lucy corrects him:

“Not your piano, Sweetie …

My competition!”

Now, that’s a relationship!

 

In this deeply dystopic strip,

there was only one character who could—

and some say finally did—

tear the highly entertaining, disturbed

social world to shreds.

 

And that happens to be

my favorite character,

Snoopy.

 

Before Snoopy had his signature doghouse,

he was an emotional creature.

Although he didn’t speak

(he expressed himself in thought balloons),

he was very connected to

all the other characters.

 

In one 1958 strip, for instance,

Linus and Charlie Brown are

talking in the background,

and Snoopy comes dancing by.

 

Linus says to Charlie Brown,

“My gramma says that

we live in a veil of tears.”

 

Charlie Brown answers:

“She’s right … This is a sad world.”

Snoopy still goes on dancing.

 

By the third frame, though,

when Charlie Brown says,

“This is a world filled with sorrow,”

Snoopy’s dance slows and

his face begins to fall.

 

By the last frame,

he is down on the ground—

far more devastated than

Linus or Charlie Brown, who are

shown chatting off in the distance,

“Sorrow, sadness and despair …

grief, agony and woe …”

 

But by the late 1960s,

Snoopy had begun to change.

 

For example,

in a strip dated May 1, 1969,

he’s dancing by himself:

“This is my ‘First Day of May’ dance.

 

It differs only slightly from

my ‘First Day of Fall’ dance,

which differs also only slightly from

my ‘First Day of Spring’ dance.”

 

Snoopy continues dancing and ends with:

“Actually, even I have a hard time

telling them apart.”

 

Snoopy was still hilarious,

but something fundamental had shifted.

He didn’t need any of the other characters

in order to be what he was.

 

He needed only his imagination.

More and more often

he appeared alone on his doghouse,

sleeping or typing a novel or a love letter.

 

Indeed, his doghouse—

which was hardly taller than

a beagle yet big enough inside to

hold an Andrew Wyeth painting

as well as a pool table—

came to be the objective correlative of

Snoopy’s rich inner life,

a place that no human ever got to see.

 

Some thought

this new Snoopy was an excellent thing,

indeed the key to the strip’s greatness.

 

Schulz was among them:

“I don’t know how he got to walking,

and I don’t know how he first began to think,

but that was probably one of the

best things that I ever did.”

 

The novelist Jonathan Franzen

is another Snoopy fan.

Snoopy, as Franzen has noted, is

 

the protean trickster whose freedom is

founded on his confidence that

he’s lovable at heart,

the quick-change artist who,

for the sheer joy of it,

can become a helicopter or

a hockey player or Head Beagle and

 

then again, in a flash,

before his virtuosity has a chance to

alienate you or diminish you,

be the eager little dog who

just wants dinner.

 

But some people detested the new Snoopy and

blamed him for what they viewed as

the decline of Peanuts

in the second half of its 50-year run.

 

“It’s tough to fix the exact date when

Snoopy went from being the strip’s

besetting artistic weakness to

ruining it altogether,”

the journalist and critic

Christopher Caldwell wrote in 2000,

a month before Schulz died, in an essay

in New York Press titled “Against Snoopy.”

 

But certainly by the 1970s, Caldwell wrote,

Snoopy had begun wrecking

the delicate world that Schulz had built.

The problem, as Caldwell saw it, was that

 

Snoopy was never a full participant in

the tangle of relationships that

drove Peanuts in its Golden Age.

He couldn’t be:

he doesn’t talk … and

therefore he doesn’t interact.

He’s there to be looked at.

 

Snoopy unquestionably took the strip to

a new realm beginning in the late 1960s.

The turning point, I think,

was the airing of

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

in 1966.

 

In this Halloween television special,

Snoopy is shown sitting atop his doghouse

living out his extended fantasy of

being a World War I flying ace

shot down by the Red Baron and then

crawling alone behind enemy lines in France.

 

Snoopy is front and center for six minutes,

about one-quarter of the whole program,

and he steals the show,

proving that he doesn’t need the

complicated world of Peanuts to thrive.

He can go it alone.

And after that he often did.

 

In 1968, Snoopy became NASA’s mascot.

The next year, Snoopy had a

lunar module named after him for

the Apollo 10 mission

(the command module was called Charlie Brown).

 

In 1968 and 1972,

Snoopy was a write-in candidate for

president of the United States.

Plush stuffed Snoopys became popular.

(I had one.)

 

By 1975,

Snoopy had replaced Charlie Brown as

the center of the strip.

He cut a swath through the world.

 

For instance,

in parts of Europe Peanuts came

to be licensed as Snoopy.

And in Tokyo,

the floor of the vast toy store Kiddy Land that is

devoted to Peanuts is called Snoopy Town.

 

To accommodate this new Snoopy-centric world,

Schulz began making changes.

He invented a whole new

animal world for Snoopy.

 

First came Woodstock, a

bird who communicates only with Snoopy

(in little tic marks).

 

And then Snoopy acquired a family:

Spike, a droopy-eyed, mustachioed beagle,

followed by Olaf, Andy, Marbles, and Belle.

 

In 1987, Schulz acknowledged that

introducing Snoopy’s relatives had been a blunder,

much as Eugene the Jeep had been

an unwelcome intrusion into

the comic strip Popeye:

 

It’s possible—I think—

to make a mistake in the strip and

without realizing it, destroy it …

I realized it myself a couple of years ago

when I began to introduce

Snoopy’s brothers and sisters …

It destroyed the relationship that

Snoopy has with the kids,

which is a very strange relationship.

 

He was right.

Snoopy’s initial interactions with the kids—

his understanding of humanity,

indeed his deep empathy

(just what they were often missing),

coupled with his

inability to speak—were unique.

 

And that’s why

whenever Snoopy’s relatives showed up,

the air just went out of the strip.

 

But for many fans,

it wasn’t merely Snoopy’s brothers and sisters

dragging him down.

 

There was something fundamentally rotten

about the new Snoopy,

whose charm was based on

his total lack of concern about

what others thought of him.

 

His confidence, his breezy sense that

the world may be falling apart but

one can still dance on,

was worse than irritating.

It was morally bankrupt.

 

As the writer Daniel Mendelsohn

put it in a piece in

The New York Times Book Review,

 

Snoopy “represents the part of ourselves—

the smugness, the avidity, the pomposity,

the rank egotism—

most of us know we have but try to

keep decently hidden away.”

 

While Charlie Brown was made to

be buffeted by other personalities and

cared very much what others thought of him,

Snoopy’s soul is all about self-invention—

which can be seen as delusional self-love.

 

This new Snoopy,

his detractors felt,

had no room for empathy.

 

To his critics, part of

what’s appalling about Snoopy is

the idea that it’s possible to

create any self-image one wants—

in particular, the profile of someone with

tons of friends and accomplishments—

and sell that image to the world.

 

Such self-flattery is

not only shallow but wrong.

Snoopy, viewed this way,

is the very essence of selfie culture,

of Facebook culture.

 

He’s the kind of creature who

would travel the world only in order to

take his own picture and

share it with everyone,

to enhance his social image.

 

He’s a braggart.

Unlike Charlie Brown, who is alienated

(and knows he’s alienated),

Snoopy is alienating

(and totally fails to recognize it).

 

He believes that he is what

he’s been selling to the world.

Snoopy is “so self-involved,”

Mendelsohn writes,

“he doesn’t even realize he’s not human.”

 

Just as some people thought that

Charlie Brown, the insecure loser,

the boy who never won the love of

the Little Red-Haired Girl,

was the alter ego of Schulz himself

near the beginning of his career,

 

so Snoopy could be cast as

the egotistical alter ego of

Schulz the world-famous millionaire,

who finally found a little happiness in

his second marriage and thus

became insufferably cutesy.

 

(In 1973,

Schulz and his wife divorced,

and a month later

Schulz married Jeannie Clyde,

a woman he met at the Warm Puppy Café,

at his skating rink in Santa Rosa, California.)

 

Two-legged Snoopy,

with his airs and fantasies—

peerless Snoopy,

rich Snoopy,

popular Snoopy,

world-famous Snoopy,

contented Snoopy—

spoiled it all.

 

Schulz, who had a lifelong fear of

being seen as ostentatious, believed that t

he main character of a comic strip

should not be too much of a showboat.

 

He also once said

he wished he could use Charlie Brown—

whom he described as

the lead character every good strip needs,

“somebody that you like that

holds things together”—a little more.

 

But he was smitten with Snoopy.

(During one of the Christmas ice shows

in Santa Rosa, while watching Snoopy skate,

Schulz leaned over and remarked to

his friend Lynn Johnston, another cartoonist,

“Just think … there was a time when

there was no Snoopy!”)

 

Schulz, Johnston writes in an introduction to

one of the Fantagraphics volumes,

found his winning self in this dog:

 

Snoopy was the one

through which he soared.

Snoopy allowed him to be

spontaneous, slapstick,

silly, and wild.

Snoopy was rhythm, comedy,

glamour, and style …

As Snoopy,

he had no failures,

no losses, no flaws …

Snoopy had friends and

admirers all over the globe.

 

Snoopy was the polar opposite of

Charlie Brown, who had nothing but

failures, losses, and flaws.

 

But were the two quite so radically far apart?

 

Snoopy’s critics are wrong,

and so are readers who think that

Snoopy actually believes his self-delusions.

Snoopy may be shallow in his way,

but he’s also deep,

and in the end deeply alone,

as deeply alone as Charlie Brown is.

 

Grand though his flights are,

many of them end with his realizing that

he’s tired and cold and lonely and that

it’s suppertime.

 

As Schulz noted on The Today Show

when he announced his retirement,

in December 1999:

 

“Snoopy likes to think that

he’s this independent dog who

does all of these things and

leads his own life,

but he always makes sure that

he never gets too far from

that supper dish.”

 

He has animal needs,

and he knows it,

which makes him, in a word,

human.

 

Even Snoopy’s wildest daydreams

have a touch of pathos.

When he marches alone through

the trenches of World War I,

yes, of course, he is fantasizing,

 

but he also can be seen as

the bereft young Charles Schulz,

shipped off to war only days after

his mother died at the age of 50,

saying to him:

“Good-bye, Sparky.

We’ll probably never see each other again.”

 

The final comic strips,

which came out when

Schulz realized he was dying,

are pretty heartbreaking.

 

All of the characters seem to be

trying to say goodbye,

reaching for the solidarity that

has always eluded them.

 

Peppermint Patty,

standing in the rain

after a football game, says,

“Nobody shook hands and said,

‘Good game.’ ”

 

Sally shouts to her brother, Charlie Brown:

“Don’t you believe in brotherhood?!!”

 

Linus lets out a giant, boldface “SIGH!”

 

Lucy, leaning as ever on Schroeder’s piano,

says to him,

“Aren’t you going to thank me?”

 

But it’s Snoopy who is

grappling with the big questions,

the existential ones.

Indeed, by his thought balloons alone,

you might mistake him for Charlie Brown.

 

The strip dated January 15, 2000,

shows Snoopy on his doghouse.

“I’ve been very tense lately,”

Snoopy thinks,

rising up stiffly from his horizontal position.

 

“I find myself worrying about everything …

Take the Earth, for instance.”

He lies back down,

this time on his belly,

clutching his doghouse:

“Here we all are clinging helplessly to

this globe that is hurtling through space …”

Then he turns over onto his back:

“What if the wings fall off?”

 

Snoopy may have been delusional,

but in the end he knew very well that

everything could come tumbling down.

His very existence seems to be

a way of saying that no matter what

a person builds up for himself

inside or outside society,

everyone is basically alone

in it together.

 

By the way,

in the end Snoopy did admit to

at least one shortcoming, though

he claimed he wasn’t really to blame.

 

In the strip that ran on January 1, 2000,

drawn in shaky lines,

the kids are having a great snowball fight.

Snoopy sits on the sidelines,

struggling to get his paws around a snowball:

“Suddenly the dog realized that

his dad had never taught him

how to throw snowballs.”

 

written by SARAH BOXER

NOVEMBER 2015 ISSUE

The Atlantic

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Lucy X baseball X La croc

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Thursday, October 8, 2015

Voice of China X Finale Night: Fixed Winner? I Think He’s Just Fine

this is actually my first season of

watching Voice of China

from head to toe

 

the winner, Zhang Lei 張磊

on Facebook

at least from some posts I saw

some were really think

he doesn’t deserve it

and speculation whether

this is a “fixed” winner

 

including my dad who left half way

when his favourite girl QueenT

didn’t get as much votes as Zhang Lei

but still she is the runner-up

 

but that’s a pretty common case isn’t it

conspiracy theory..

bleah

 

everyone who makes it to

the top 5 are undeniable good in

their own ways

 

well

if you would have followed the show

it was pretty obvious

he will be winning, isn’t it

 

as he has been wildly popular

especially with the media votes

leading votes by big percentage

during the semi-final

 

as for myself

I don’t really have a really personal favourite

right from the beginning

despite having some not-so-favourites

everyone is just too good

 

yet I have absolutely no issue with

Zhang Lei as the winner

perhaps his performance is relatively flat

yet…

 

at least the kind of songs he sings

are something I will loop on earphones

for some times to come

 

these days

winning a reality show

will not make one go popular overnight

 

looking forward to

his own songs

or even better a complete album

if he ever goes that far

 

some of the best performances

I think

were during the duet-session

during the internal battles

 

including his

which really sends shiver and

really felt cold after listening to this

 

Che Zhan / Zhang Lei + Zhu Qiang / Voice of China

車站 / 張磊 + 朱強 / 中國好聲音

 

I guess that his voice really has

this ability to spark

a certain temperature

 

whether it is really warm or cold

a bit sad, lonely

but every single word is just so clear

 

even if he looks rather emotion-less

all the time

that’s his real charm

 

and Voice of China

does not only in terms of the vocal but

he is well-positioned as

 

just the quiet guy next door

(this one here owns a Zippo store)

who enjoys singing his own song

with his guitar

having dreams

but not something big

 

plain and simple but pretty real and

has lots and lots of stories underneath

(he drifted from East side of China

to the West at the age of 21 and

settled there for that special someone)

 

it’s a temperament / sentiment of

the generation of “old folks” like us

 

and the choice of songs

the something-we-all-share-in-common

travel / away from home /

coming a long long way

 

I guess that pretty much explain

why he is killing them all

without much gimmick

 

and…

“old folks” are just too tired

to get excited over spectacular performance

 

in one of the semi-final

the guest mentor compared his voice to

some pure cotton shirt

yeah.. warm and practical

 

you can’t be wearing

cropped top and sneakers

huge hats and oversized poncho

rocker’s leather jacket

bow tie and suits

all the time

 

but cotton shirt.. yeah

rain or shine

 

speaking of that

his looks through out the entire shows

sticking to one single colour scheme

which happened to my fav too

張磊 - 南山南張磊 - 車站張磊 - 虎口脫險張磊 - 思念誰張磊 - 夢一場張磊 - 異鄉人張磊 - 旅行

 

and if you realize

his selection of songs

not those we are really familiar with

or perhaps hearing it for the first time

or haven’t heard it since a long time ago

 

the impact is there..

like he has revived/reintroduced these songs

instead of singing those we are

already familiar with

 

but yeah you can be singing very well

but the original singer / composer is

sitting right in front of you

it just felt weird or even awkward

even if you can sing a better version

 

I think I have managed to

convert myself into a fan of Zhang Lei

after this post

already looping the playlist

 

Nan Shan Nan / Zhang Lei / Voice of China Blind Audtion

南山南 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 

Hu Kou Tuo Xian / Zhang Lei / Voice of China

虎口脫險 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 

Chuan / Zhang Lei / Voice of China

船 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 

Si Nian Shui / Zhang Lei / Voice of China

(寂寞是因為)思念誰 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 


Meng Yi Chang X Nan Shan Nan/

Zhang Lei X Na Ying / Voice of China Finale

夢一場 X 南山南 / 張磊 X 那英 / 中國好聲音

 

Yi Xiang Ren / Zhang Lei / Voice of China Finale

異鄉人 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 

Lv Xing / Zhang Lei / Voice of China Finale

旅行 / 張磊 / 中國好聲音

 


I found it on YouTube

he actually has his very own single

alright great

looking forward to more

 

Xian Nv Shan de Yue Liang / Zhang Lei / First Single

仙女山的月亮 / 張磊

 

p.s.

I will still have written this post

if he doesn’t win?

everyone would have told you

winning is not that important

there’s no winner or loser in music

 

but if he didn’t win in the first place

he wouldn’t have came so far

and gain all the exposure and

the opportunity to present these songs

so…?