oyceter?

Was the Taiping Rebellion one of the things you were looking for info on at some point in the recent past? I can't remember. At any rate, I've run across a book that might be of interest, if so: Asian Millenarianism: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Taiping and Tonghak Rebellions in a Global Context by Hong Beom Rhee. ISBN13: 9781934043424, published 28-Aug-07.

(I've just started exploring CAMBER E-Books, a database of ebooks published by Cambria Press that we have access to, and there's several interesting-sounding books here: Alternative Theater in Taiwan: Feminist and Intercultural Approaches, Allegory of Survival: The Theater of Kang-baek Lee (an anthology of modern South Korean plays by Kang-baek Lee translated into English), Asian American Identities: Racial and Ethnic Identity Issues in the Twenty-First Century, The Chinese Émigrés of Thailand in the Twentieth Century, Christianity Online: Response to The Da Vinci Code as Impression Management, Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation, Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Authors, and so on. (The heavy emphasis on Chinese and other Asian cultures in my list is partly a function of alphabetization and partly a function of personal interests - there's a wide focus in the collection, which seems to cover literature and social sciences.)

Slightly unsettled...

I'm a little off-kilter anyway, from being slightly ill (the exhaustion has gone, but the congestion is arriving), not being at work on Friday and being at work on Saturday. I'm reading a book that was recommended to me, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, which was recommended to me although I can't remember the circumstances. It's good, but it makes me read about 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and stuff like that.

And then I end up watching (and taping) a documentary on sharks in Mauritius who hang out in these undersea pits where the water is turblent* which unsettles me even more because I have this deep-seated COMPLETELY irrational fear of the undersea abyss, so shots of divers under the sea have the potential to freak me out in certain cases.** (I taped it because some of the shots of the undersea pits were absolutely gorgeous and I wanted to have screenshots for potential future painting purposes.)

And the show on after it was a show about a guy who takes various dangerous journeys, and this time he was driving down one of the ice highways in northern Canada, 100 miles on a frozen river and 18 miles on a frozen sea, and OF COURSE he was banging on about how there was nothing but a sheet of ice between his truck and the bottom of the sea, and how quickly he'd die if it broke and he fell in, which freaked me out even more, so I started flipping through channels to find something more soothing.

And hey, there's an episode of Ghostly Encounters on and ghost stories? Not freaky at all. I can deal with ghost stories.*** I turn to that channel, and I see a woman's head against a black background and she's talking about her experience. And I know that this show tends to interview people against a black background, so I'm not expecting anything odd until she says "And then he stabbed me, and he stabbed me, and he stabbed me..." and I finally figure out it's an ad for a true-crime show, not the ghost-stories show. *headdesk* Yeah, I like watching shows about forensics, but ones that tend to feature survivors talking about their attacks kinda give me the willies. :D

So I resorted to a stupid SciFi Channel show that's about hunting for the Malaysian orang pendek**** to calm down. :/


Ooh, I forgot I have Boston cream pie in the fridge! I think this calls for that!



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* Protection from larger sharks, and the turbulence oxygenates the water.

** Such as when they're testing out the turbulence in areas of the pits and the narrator is banging on about how dangerous it is, and you see the currents sucking them around.

*** I HAVE MY PRIORITIES.

**** Exept they insist on calling it "Bigfoot." No! Malaysians have a PERFECTLY GOOD NAME for their own supernatural bipedal hairy creature! Don't call it Bigfoot! And, ya know, when you're attempting to do field biology type things and have night-vision cameras set up? Don't walk around and FREAK EACH OTHER OUT and disturb all the night creatures! STAY IN ONE PLACE, DIPSHITS!