Archive for September, 2008

Childhood Favourites

September 30, 2008 at 9:45 pm · Filed under Music Movie TV

The whole idea about this post started from an old movie that I had been looking for on the Internet for ages. It was a year 1990 movie called “Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming” starred by Jason Connery and Kristin Scott Thomas. I remember I watched on CCTV 6 channel where the “Zheng Da Zong Yi” program had a movie show every Saturday night. At that time I was in the second year of high school. I found it extremely dazzling (not quite sure it was because of the actor’s appearance or the story itself). I loved it so much so I asked my Dad to tape it for me when the movie was repeated the next day.

Guess what? I didn’t’ get to watch it more than 2 times. No that I lost the interest, it was just those days with old tools to record things, not convenient at all. Nearly 20 years later, I started to fancy to keep a DVD version for this movie, but I just couldn’t find it anywhere, until yesterday I saw it available on one of Internet Online Video websites.

Then I was brave enough to search all the childhood favourites that I can think of, from animation series “Hua Xian Zi” to ” Garrison’s Gorillas” (1967), to “Remington Steele” (where you can see young Pierce Brosnan) to “Ren Zai Bian Yuan” (Hong Kong TV show)……I can find most of them.

The only movie that I couldn’t find (but I have been really wanting to watch it again) is actually a Chinese movie which should be produced by mainland China. It is a story about a group of soldiers with their different specialties on their missions in the China-Vietnam war in 1980s. The movie was so cooooooooool that I couldn’t believe it was a war movie, and directed by Chinese directors.

Unfortunately I didn’t get the name of the movie as I watched on CCTV 6 and started half way. But I reckon it was kind of mid of 1990s production. I can remember people in the movie used a lot of hand gestures to determin the locations for explosions and attack spots, which was so cool that I nearly died.

Does anyone have a hint of what the movie’s name is? And have you ever been like me, looking for some childhood favourite movie or TV show but hasn’t had any success?

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Going Grey

September 29, 2008 at 9:50 pm · Filed under Me Time

I always believed that I won’t get any grey hair until late 40s, just like how my mom and dad did, but the life has its own mystery way. There is always variations for different individuals. You don’t need to expect the worst, but sometimes you should be prepared for the worst.

Technically speaking, my recent finding about grey hair is not something totally new. My very first one was found in 1999 when I was having my hair cut in China. The hair dresser found one and pull it out to show me, and that was proved a very much an one-off thing for the following 9 years. It didn’t bother me at the moment and because the colour of my hair is quite light anyway, so it was actually hard to tell it was grey or more close to light ginger.

However, I started to believe that now I have something serious coming up in the last 3 months. What happened was I tried to part the hair in different ways, so I saw a lot of new grey hair shoots coming up from where I parted the hair.

Now I can no longer deceive myself saying that is just one-off thing and I would be free of grey hair at a relative young age. They are coming and once they had begun to come, there will be no way back. There will be only more, and not becoming less.

I don’t know how you would feel about seeing the first grey hair on the top of your head, I was really shocked. Some people might get used to this, like my husband. I wouldn’t get him start to think about at what age he saw the first grey hair. For others, like me, probably would never feel completely okay with the situation that he had gone through.

There is only one thing that might make me feel better to accept the fact of going grey, which is silly but very true. Guess what, with going grey, I might finally be able to try out colouring my hair with different sort of colours :-)

Well, by the way, if I had grey hair like this woman in the photo above, I wouldn’t even bother trying to change it at all.

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David’s Version of Floriade

September 28, 2008 at 2:20 pm · Filed under Out & About

Floriade 2008 from David Tao on Vimeo.

Different from what I have done with still pictures, David had been working on the motion version of Floriade with his new Canon HF100 HD video camera. He had posted the video on his blog, and to support all his efforts that had been made in the past two days, I decided to post it again in my blog.

I actually pinched a few clips from his work for my SmileBox creation. Well, there is no shame about it. I do like some of them a lot. However, seeing him making it, probably is where I got most of fun on this event :-)

Hope you enjoy it!

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No. 5 Floriade

September 26, 2008 at 7:31 pm · Filed under Out & About

2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008……

When it comes to Floriade, there is nothing to hide about experiencing colours, lightings and the every moves from the natural. You just can’t avoid to see, to smell and to feel…….

I have been deeply enjoying with every single festival, no matter the day we went was sunny, cloudy day or windy, neither does it matter it was crowdy, at AM, PM or in the evening twilight.

Having said that, each year does have different themes, but all of them are just some unimportant stunts. If you are focusing on those tulips, you find yourself actually steping on the same footpath every year but experiencing the difference from the previous.

It had taken me 5 times trying to memory their beauty in some still pictures, but I feel that I probably would never gain any success.

Have I ever gotten sick of it? Don’t know…but I am pretty sure that I would be there every year untill the day I leave Canberra.

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Magpie Attack

September 25, 2008 at 4:52 pm · Filed under Daily Living

Okay, to make my experience dealing with animals more colourful, now I can finally add this morning’s episode into my history of harassment, or say the history of being harassed by animals.

This morning when I was on the way to work, I confronted a very badly-behaviour magpie on the pedestrian sidewalk. This horrible black and white bird attacked me at least 3 times. The first round of his attack happened at the time when I wasn’t so prepared, so I only felt a strong breeze above my head when he was hovering and passing by. Part of my hair got lifted a bit as I can feel it.

Then the second round was even worse. I can feel this magpie was very aggressive and tried to knock me down with his sharp pointing mouth, which made me start to get really cranky. I began to look for a “weapon” but couldn’t see a more appropriate one than a slender falling tree branch. I picked up and prepared myself for further attack.

There he came…the third attack. I madly waved my arms holding my poor weapon to fight back and all my body got engaged with awareness of self-defence. He ran away, left me cold-sweated all over. Gee, what this sort of attack was about? I just walked my way and he should have his own. Why did he do this to me? I just couldn’t believe what had just happened.

It only lasted no more than 30 seconds. Mind you the scientists say that magpies are very intelligent animals and can even imitate the human voice like parrots. But the experience of confront them really put me off liking them. They behave badly and I have made up my mind, if they are coming to attack me again next time, I am going to do whatever it takes to destroy them, believe it or not!

But I couldn’t go back to imagine how I did today. To other people who might have seen me on the street this morning, my image that had been passed on was pretty much no different than a loony who waved her arms in the air and shaking her head crazily with all hair going like a jungle. My God, that was me going crazy…fighting with a bird :-)

But you might be interested in knowing the following facts about kind of bird who’s been seen everywhere in Canberra and Queanbeyan, even across Australia.

  • Many of us have childhood memories of aggressive magpies, and indeed, a national survey has found that 90 per cent of males and 72 per cent of females have been attacked by a magpie at some time in their life! My husband had this sort of experience before.
  • Magpies are only aggressive for six weeks of the year, around August/September, when they have chicks in the nest. Oh too bad, now is right the time.
  • Most magpies attack the same few individuals again and again, possibly because they remind the bird of someone who once hurt them. My God, why did they pick me? I didn’t do anything to them in the past! My concern is “would this happen again on me?”
  • Only the males attack (the females are too busy sitting on the eggs). And the data shows that of 59 magpie attacks, the eye was the birds’ most common target. So I am lucky that I still have my eyes in place.
  • Magpies seem to get particularly infuriated by bicycles: nearly half of those attacked were riding a bike at the time. But delving further into the ISIS data, they find that almost two thirds of the magpie victims were male, and half of all those attacked were aged between 10-30. Obviously magpies are selective! Look, magpie, you have mistakenly calculated about me. I am female and I am over 30 years old. I am walking and I am not the one you were looking for.
  • Magpies are excellent mimics and can even imitate the human voice. I heard that they can even recognise the same person even if they are dressed in another colour of clothes. I think I really need to disguise myself well next time :-)

Have you ever been attacked by magpies before? More information about magpie attact, maybe you want to check this one out.

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Precious Look

September 22, 2008 at 9:54 pm · Filed under Home Sweet Home

Can you believe that this succulent actually is flowering? Such a pretty and precious thing!

It takes so long to get to see real colour of another aspect of the life in this world, doesn’t it? Sometimes when it is all coming together (though it’s very short), you just couldn’t help being so excited that you forgot all the effort that you have made while waiting :-)

So take a mental picture of this. It’s not going to be there forever or anything like eternal…..IT IS HAPPENING NOW ~

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