Hong Kong Snaps - Old Factory Buildings

10 Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

1. Junk food makers spend billions advertising unhealthy foods to kids.

2. The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products.

3. Junk food makers donate large sums of money to professional nutrition associations.

4. More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy.

5. Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts.

6. Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace.

7. A health claim on the label doesn't necessarily make a food healthy.

8. Food industry pressure has made nutritional guidelines confusing.

9. The food industry funds front groups that fight anti-obesity public health initiatives.

10. The food industry works aggressively to discredit its critics.

Source: 10 Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

China Snap Shot- How ducks are being transported....

The Big Talk

Just read a very interesting article. It is an article written by a mother about how difficult she feel to tell about climate change to her children, whcih is no more easier than giving a sex talk to them. To certain extend, it is a bit going to an extreme but i feel it is hailarious to use such way to address the urgency of global warming.

Each Other — Where We Are

The Big Talk

How to tell a six year old where all the birds and bees have gone

by Sandra Steingraber

Published in the September/October 2008 issue of Orion magazine

I WAS GOOGLING MYSELF recently (in an attempt, if you must know, to locate an essay that I had published somewhere), and I managed to misspell my own name. So I was directed to the one source that had mangled my name in the same way. And that is how I was confronted, in an obscure blog, with the question, “Why isn’t Sandra Steingraber [with dyslexic spelling] talking about climate change?”

It was unsettling. As the days went by, I began an imaginary argument.

Look, I first wrote about receding glaciers in 1988. I was assigning Al Gore to college students in 1992. Not long ago, I made climate instability the centerpiece of a commencement address I gave at a rural college in coal-is-king Pennsylvania. And if you think all the trustees were pleased with that theme, I invite you to give it a try. So the question is not “Why is S.S. not talking about climate change?” The question is “Why is S.S. not talking about it AT HOME?”

Okay. Why don’t you talk about it at home?

Because I have young children and because I believe that frightening problems need to be solved by adults who should just shut up and get to work.

So, how long are you going to keep hiding the truth from your kids?

That’s as far as I got before three other notable things happened. First, Elijah asked to be a polar bear for Halloween. As I pinned the chenille fabric, it occurred to me that his costume might well outlast the species. I decided not to tell him that.

A month later, Elijah asked his sister for a weather report. Faith walked out onto the porch, spread out her arms in the manner of Saint Francis, and came back in. “It’s global warmingish,” she said and went back to her cereal. No comment from me.

And then I overheard a conversation on the playground. One child said, “I know why it’s hot. Do you?”

Another said, “It’s because the Earth is sick.” They all nodded. I said nothing.

IT’S TIME TO SIT DOWN with my kids and have the Global Warming Talk. I carried off the Sex Talk—and its many sequels—with grace and good biology. Surely, I can rise to this new occasion.

On the surface, procreation and climate change seem opposite narratives. Sex knits molecules of air, food, and water into living organisms. Climate change unravels all that. The ending of the sex story is the birth of a family. The climate change story ends with what biologist E. O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era—the Era of Loneliness.

But then I realized that the two stories share a common epistemological challenge. Both are counterintuitive. In the former case, you have to accept that your ordinary existence began with an extraordinary, unthinkable act (namely, your parents having intercourse). In the latter case, you have to accept that the collective acts of ordinary objects—cars, planes, dishwashers, iPods—are ushering in things extraordinary and unthinkable (dissolving coral reefs, daffodils in January). So, I reasoned, perhaps the same pedagogical lessons apply: during the Big Talk, keep it simple, leave the door open for further conversation, offer reading material as follow-up.

Of which there is no shortage. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of children’s books on climate change has sprung up almost overnight. These range from the primer, Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? (Let’s Read and Find Out!), in which lessons on the ravaging of ecosystems also offer plenty of opportunities to practice silent e, to the ultra-sophisticated How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, by foremost environmental author Lynne Cherry, in which middle school readers are cast as coprincipal investigators. This new literary subgenre is impressive. Reading its various offerings, I found myself admiring the respectful tones and clear explanations. These books describe global warming as a reality that no longer lingers in the realm of debate. And yet, they are not, for the most part, scary. Indeed, the first sentence in the inside flap of How We Know What We Know is “This is not a scary book.”

And here is where the pediatric versions of the climate change story depart from their adult counterparts. The recent crop of books on global warming intended for grown-ups focuses on the surreal disconnect between the evidence for rapidly approaching, irreversible planetary tipping points (overwhelming) and the political response to that evidence (mostly zilch). The children’s books profile heroic individuals fighting to save the planet—in ways that kids can get involved in. To read the children’s literature is to see the world’s people working ardently and in concert with each other to solve a big problem . . . and enjoying a grand adventure while they’re at it.

Is this the fiction we all should be laboring under? I don’t know. I do know that a fatalistic mindset, which afflicts many adults but almost no children, is a big part of what’s preventing us from derailing the global warming train that has now left the station. On this, I wholly agree with sociologist Eileen Crist, who argues that fatalism, masquerading as realism, is a form of capitulation that strengthens the very trends that generate it. I do know that we grown-ups need visions of effective challenges and radical actions that can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.

I also know that I needed something to say to my six year old when we walked home from the library in April—no leaves to offer shade, the bank’s LED sign reading eighty-four degrees—and he turned his ingenuous face to mine to ask, “Mama, is it supposed to be so hot?”

So I am working on my talk. For inspiration, I have arranged on my desk three documents. One is an essay that Rachel Carson published in Popular Science in 1951—eight years before my birth. It’s entitled “Why Our Winters Are Getting Warmer,” and it includes a drawing of Manhattan deluged by seawater. Another is Carson’s essay “Help Your Child to Wonder,” published five years later. The third is a book by poet Audre Lorde that includes the sentence: Your silence will not protect you.

My talk features a story about a boat in which we all live—people, butterflies, polar bears. A storm starts to rock the boat. The waves are chemical pollution, habitat destruction, industrial fishing, and warfare. Now along comes a really big wave. Global warming. The already-rocking boat is in danger of flipping over.

Then what happens? I don’t know. For the first time in my life, I have writer’s block. Somebody help me out here.

Source: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3229

The Dutch Humor

This is a "mobile advertisement" at the baggage claim area of the Amsterdam Airport. The Dutch custom uses a creative way to remind people to declare some restricted items that they are going to take in the Netherlands.

Fire Dragon Dance @ HK (Moon Festival 08)

About the Tai Hung@HK Fire Dragon Dance
(source: http://www.taihangfiredragon.com)

The Tai Hang Fire Dragon has its origin in 1880 . At that time , Tai Hang was only a small Hakka village and the villagers , most of them farmers and fishermen , Led a simple and peaceful life . The tale started when the villagers once killed a serpent in a stormy night , but in the next morning , the dead body of the serpent had disappeared . A few days later , a plague spread out in Tai Hang and many people died of infection . Meanwhile , a village elder saw Buddha one night in his dream and was told to perform a Fire Dragon Dance and to burn fire crackers in the Mid-Autumn Festival. The sulphur in the fire crackers drove away the disease and the villagers were saved. Since then , every year the Tai Hang residents would perform the Fire Dragon Dance for three nights in the Mid-Autumn Festival in memory of the incident. The Fire Dragon is altogether 220 feet long with its body divided into 32 segments , all of which are stuffed with straw and stuck full of incense sticks. So it is known as the “ Fire-Dragon ” .

China Snap: Beijing (Sep 08)

HK Snap Shot

Tapped Out

Found a new book on the market. It talks about how the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste:

Product Description from Amazon.com

An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water. Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.

In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?

A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst.

The topic sounds really interesting to me and will see if i have a chance to get one soon.




IHT Book Review: "Bottlemania"

"Bottlemania" Official Website

First Chapter- "Bottlemania"

China Snap Shots- Guangdong

Lamma Snap Shot - Tin Hau Festival 2008

火，火把，「把火」，「把幾火」

A commentry from a HK newpaper HKEJ (in chinese), it said my view for the Olympic Torch HK relay. I'm really really pissed off by the event at the moment


Hong Kong Economic Journal
P07 | 時事評論 | 香島論叢 | By 練乙錚
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火，火把，「把火」，「把幾火」

　　「同一個世界、同一個夢想」這樣一個飽含着民胞物與、開放與包容的口號，昨天隨着奧運火 炬抵港而具體落實到此地，竟變異為一齣以「親疏有別」、「非友即敵」為主題的政治回佣鬧劇，實在令人嘖嘖稱奇！古希臘城邦在進行你死我活的戰爭之際，人們 尚有雅量每幾年找一些日子停下來，放下武器，在運動場上和平、公平地競技，今天香港的一批權貴，卻沒有這個心胸與小圈子以外的人士分享一點點喜悅，兩相比 較，精神境界高下立見。導演這齣鬧劇的袞袞諸公，並不意識到這種關起門來愛國的荒謬，大多數香港人卻又一次清楚領教所謂「具有廣泛代表性」這句政治口頭禪 的真正意思。不過，山高皇帝遠，北京亦很難通過自己的管道，知道此事在香港搞得如何齷齪。

　　火的文化意義很複雜，有民生方面的，有道德方 面的，更有政治方面的，無論中外，都是如此。《易經》裏頭與火有關的卦有好幾個，其中以「離」卦最為直接：離為火。其象辭為「明兩作，離。大人以繼明照於 四方」。這是十分政治性的說話，簡單解釋一下。「離」的卦畫由兩個相同的符號上下重疊組成，是八卦之一，代表五行中的火；火有光明之意，「明兩作」即光明 又光明；「大人」即統治者，手中握有權力的人；「大人以繼明照於四方」，即治理國家的人，要以連續不斷的光明道德照臨天下。火的政治道德涵義，深植中國文 化之中，掩蓋不了；你舉起一把火，要中國人不作政治聯想、政治解讀，沒有可能。事實說明，火炬傳遞到了香港，由誰來舉着跑，是一個徹頭徹尾的政治決定，十 分符合中國的文化傳統，問題是那些「大人」們的政治搞作，是否「以繼明照於四方」罷了。

　　還有兩個與火直接有關的卦，一個是「晉」卦，卦 畫是，上面的是火，下面的是五行中的土；火在土上，即光明出現在大地上；這是一個吉卦。與「晉」卦剛好相反的，是「明夷」卦，卦畫是，即土在火上；光明進 入地下，這是一個凶卦，嚴重起來，可以亡國滅種；「夷」是受傷的意思，「明夷」是光明受了傷，世界一片黑暗。明朝末年大思想家黃宗羲的《明夷待訪錄》一 書，便是以此卦命名的大痛之作。傳遞這好好一把奧運火炬，你不是光明正大，而是在進入大陸之前搞黑箱運作、地下作業，真是不吉祥之舉。此卦勸人在極不吉利的情況下怎麼辦呢？「君子以蒞眾用晦而明」，即統治者此時面對群眾應自隱其總慧，集思廣益，要有容人之見的雅量。話說到點子上了！

　 　在西方文化中，火也象徵文明，與野蠻相反的文明。文學諾獎得主威廉．弋以定的小說《蒼蠅王》（Lord of The Flies），裏頭就有象徵文明的那麼一把長明的火。當那群流落荒島上的孩子們殘殺成性的時候，火就幾乎熄滅；當他們中間一些記起自己是文明人、還希望回 到文明世界之時，火又熊熊重燃；最終，森林失火，整個小島變成一個大火炬，引起一艘經過的軍艦注意，孩子們於是得救，回到文明。在這部小說裏，還看得出作 者有意識地用火象徵人類社會中的光明、文明一面；在一些民間傳說或神話中，火的象徵意義來得更自然。希臘神話中的普羅米修斯盜取天火、造福人類的經典故 事，其實在很多其他民族當中，都有類似的版本。美國印第安人神話裏，常有一隻與人為善的野兔，在阿爾干昆族（Algonquin）的傳說中，這隻兔子從壟 斷了火的神那裏盜取火種，造福全人類。不過，內容最豐富、寓意最深刻的盜火神話，大概還是希臘那個。這個希臘神話，最少有兩個版本，較古老的一個源於史詩 作家希士奧突（Hysiod，元前八至七世紀人）；在此版本中，普羅米修斯只不過是因為一次惡作劇，把本來是眾神之王宙斯應得的美食給了人類，激怒了宙 斯，把火收起，讓人類不得熟食；但普羅米修斯硬要和他作對，偷得火種還給人類，結果招來宙斯重罰。這個版本的人文意義不強。我們現時熟知的版本，是二百年 之後的希臘悲劇作家埃斯庫盧斯（Aeschylus）筆下傑作。在這個版本裏，普羅米修斯的形象，起碼有三重崇高意義：一、敢於對不義的權威作道義的挑 戰；二、無懼壓迫與自由之間的永恒鬥爭；三、勇於打破利益的壟斷，以造福廣大人群。其後二千多年裏，人類政治歷史從專制到民主開放，其意義正好反映在埃斯 庫盧斯的作品之中，這大概是作者意想不到的。

　　火與政治的文化關係深刻而且久遠，非奧委會一句說話可以剔除乾淨；把「運動不涉政治」這句話推到極端，反而變成虛偽，今天發生在香港的事便是明證。這個火把，牽涉一點政治，本來無傷大雅，問題是什麼樣的政治。搞得太過難看，火把就難免令人「把火」或「把幾火」了。

Beijing snap shots - Apr 2008

Olympic Venue - Bird Nest & the cop

The Confucius Temple

Old house with new energy

China Snap Shot

Lonesome George

Just watched a very interesting documentary about the loneliest animal on the planet - Lonesome George. Lonesome George is the name given to the last remaining Pinta Island Giant Tortoise in existence; when he dies, his race will be completely extinct.

Due to his extremely rarity, Lonesome become a conservation icon, celibate pensioner and officially the rarest living creature on Earth of his native Galapagos Islands. Behind the conservation icon, he is also showing the crudeness and irresponsible of human activities that done to our own mother nature. Many wildlife is still in the hardship of preserving their unique life with threats from illegal fishing, the demands of a booming population and an ever-expanding tourism or so-called eco-tourism industry.

The documentary I watched called “Lonesome George and the battle for Galapagos” from BBC, and just showd in the Peral. It is very well filmed. It not only talks about the personal story of Lonesome but also brings out the social and environmental implications behind the tortoise.

The documentary made me a bit sad as it shows clearly how selfish and greedy of human being who extracts and squeezes the last sort of environmental resources for money (which is only papers attached with a vague value). For instance, the documentary mentioned that fishermen in Galapagos over fish the sea cucumbers and tortoises for their customers from far east ( I bet the majority of “far east customers: are Chinese….); national parks has to give out some land as residential or hotel areas for the influx immigrants due to the booming eco- tourism industry; fishermen got angry and attacked the conservation officials when the government imposed policy to prevent over-fishing…..it really sucks!!

Now what I can only grumble here... but i do hope that i can be more sensitive to reduce my personal footprint on our nature.

Story of Lonesome George