20060926

Listitis

Work was alright today, followed by a less than excellent Chinese class. I know I've been up to it as well, but today, literally everybody was chatting away about no matter what, regardless of the good intentions of Wan Lao Shi and the difficulty level of the class. I've always had problems listening through noise (as a man, I'm supposed to have a one track mind, but on the subject of hearing, that track is often mist-clad), this was not fun. If it continues this way, I think I'm going to speak up next lesson or so. Maybe I'll prepare a speech in Chinese. I wonder if I would be able to have enough humor in Chinese to get my message through without sounding like a man with a 500€ bill stuck between the buttocks.

Ah well: fortunately Han Se and I had a nice little chat about AS400s and other machinery - seems he's quite into this stuff, so besides being a very funny man that I would always enjoy having over, he's now also a source of knowledge.
In fact: I had nice chats with some more of my colleagues (during the xiu xi -that means break- of course), and I even met some new people (having their second lesson in Russian!!!) that I managed to already forget the names of =)

But enough of that: I decided that my blog is missing some lists, so I'll add some this time around:

    Favorite Songs (no way that I rate these)
  • Lilac Wine - Jeff Buckley (Grace is everything)
  • Go - Pearl Jam (Just passing it on: suppose I abused you? Flippen)
  • No Shuffle - Front 242 (Emptiness endlessness senselessness)
  • I'm Deranged - David Bowie (Lost Highway-ender with the best tansition ever)
  • Schism - Tool (If Stephen Hawkings were to write a love song)
  • Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead (The spine, everytime)
  • Small Change - Tom Waits (Well-Spoken Word)
  • Piano Concerto in A Minor - Grieg (The most poppy classic composer around)
  • Orly - Jacques Brel (La tristesse de l'aéroport)
  • Goin' Home - Dinosaur Jr. (That little riff brings me home)


    Favorite Albums (not counting best offs)
  • Grace - Jeff Buckley
  • Kid A - Radiohead (well, any album ,really)
  • Whatever and Ever, Amen - Ben Folds Five
  • The Juliet Letters - Elvis Costello & Brodsky Quartet
  • Ten - Pearl Jam
  • Here, There and Everywhere - Göran Sölscher
  • La Double Vie de Véronique - ???
  • Blood Sugar Sex Magic - RHCP
  • Blue Lines - Massive Attack
  • Small Change - Tom Waits


    Favorite Books
  • Koning van Katoren - Jan Terlouw
  • Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco
  • The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
  • Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
  • The Saga of Pliocene Exile - Julian May
  • The Galactic Milieu Series - Julian May
  • De 13 1/2 Levens van Kap'tein Blauwbeer - Walter Moers
  • Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
  • Imprimatur/Secretum/... - Monaldi & Sorti
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


    Favorite Movies
  • The Game
  • Crash
  • Lost Highway
  • Batman Begins
  • Star Wars (original trilogy)
  • l' Histoire d'O
  • La Double Vie de Véronique
  • Se7en
  • Memento
  • Dead Poets' Society
  • Fight Club


Is this making any sense? I tried to be as honest as I could on short notice. Maybe next time I'll take the time to evaluate my choices. Maybe I'll correct them as well. to my surprise, I find it much harder to name favorite songs and albums than movies ! Guess I'm more harsh on musicians?

1 opmerking:

deef zei

Oh Nick, Dead Poet's Society!

That movie is so childproducing good, it is one of the movies that made me spontaneously cry because I was moved. Not because someone just succeeded in playing the right kind of music from the right jar of honey. This movie actually made me realize that being a good teacher is not (all) about educational skills, but about passion for what you're trying to pass to other people. And yes, naive is my middle name. That is essentially the reason why, erhm... take the correct inspiring teacher from our non-empty intersection of mutual inspiring teaching friends and make a sentence with falling in love.

Next time I'll send you one of my lists, that will be somehow more difficult than calculating half the sum of the positive roots of the classical simple Lie algebras...