I knew this one was going to annoy me and I postponed studying it as long as I could but I have to catch up with the current Elementary lesson to graduate myself to Intermediate level.
Well, I am with robsonmic on that one, the snotty tone of Beijingese superiority grates. Maybe I am projecting (as a provincial Frenchman, albeit a long-expatriated one, who deeply resents his Parisian overlords) but I must confess that I snicker each time a Popup podcast tells us how adorable and wonderfully 口語 some variant of Beijing dialect is, and how all examples of Shanghai or NorthEast dialect are "bad Chinese" that should be avoided at all cost. Of course it does not help that I mostly get to speak "zōngwén" in Taiwan or Shanghai :-)
I think you guys should consider toning down a bit the Beijing superiority thing. I mean, *every single time* a podcast mentions anything outside of the second circle, Echo can't help cracking a joke about the silly rubes. Or maybe some time let Gail and 927 give their version of the story.
@Brandon - For me Arkham House's volume "At the Mountains of Madness" contains some of the very best of Lovecraft's work. Some unknowable horror stuff, but also the witch house story and the cycle of Dunsany-inspired Randolph Carter "Dreamland" stories. I really loved those and they had a huge impact on me when I first read them, in French, circa end of high-school. Agree Re. Mieville, "Perdido Street Station" is one of my favorite SF novels of the last... Blast, I went to check the date and it came out more than 10 years ago, and then the other one I was going to mention among best "in last 10 years" (Swanwick's "Iron Dragon's Daughter") is even older. Well, at least Gene Wolfe had the usual bunch of great books in the last 10 years. Thanks for the 韩少功 recommendation. I will definitely try.
Regarding Burton, the tragic thing is, I generally tremendously enjoy good magical realism. I have high respect for Burton's vision and skill. Unfortunately there is something about the aesthetics of his movies that completely creeps me out in a not-enjoyable-at-all way (compared, say, to Burton's big influence, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," which creeps me out in a good way). It's something about color and the arrangement of objects. What I feel is a combination of nausea and the impression of going back home to find it has been burglarred. :-)
@Echo - I thought it was just my sentence that did not get converted but in fact it looks like any text in traditional characters that I enter fails to get converted to simplified by the "script switcher" in the "Chinese Tools" section. I get the same problem with Safari and Firefox on a Mac and iCab (another Webkit browser) on the iPad. Enter an text in trad. characters and it comes out unchanged.
A1-A2: OK, that's what I thought, just wanted to confirm. Thank you.
I have some difficulty with 可是我只能在终点站才下得了车 [and, btw, so does the the Popup trad--> simplified script switcher: the trad characters come out unchanged for me].
1) The role of 才 in this sentence. Does 才 play the same role here as in 我們還有多久才能到啊？ [from the roadtrip lesson of a while back]
2) 下得了车 ... So 下车 is to get down from the car. 下得了 is...? To "get down to completion" or something like that. Cam you also say 下不了?
@trevelyan
I did not say that the movie was bad. I simply was not as impressed as you guys seem to be. In fact, one of the things that really bothered me about Inception I often find enjoyable in other movies: How it skillfully combines elements and ideas from many books, transposing or tweaking them enough that I couldn't quite identify the source anymore, to the point that it really itched. On the other hand, one thing that I never like, and for me was overwhelming in Inception was the impression of being in a third-person-perspective video game with a bunch of generic cardboard NPCs and 2-3 "quest" NPCs. Michael Caine is of course one of these "quest" NPCs. You see him as God; I see him as Quest NPC #1 who just stands there, waiting for you to bring back Item#23 so that he can give you a hint on how to proceed to the next plot point.
@brendan
Yes, Borges is one of the authors that Inception kept nagging me about, but also Lovecraft (his "Randolph Carter" series of novellas), and a number of SF authors (Dick, for sure, authors of the "jack-in" cyberpunk persuasion, etc.). Inception did not specifically push me to reread anything because I watched it abroad, and by the time I was back to my books other stimuli were driving my re-read urges (I re-read a lot, fragments or chapters). I guess our views on Inception are not *that* different. I think it's a pretty good movie that I would not mind seeing again. It's just that *something* that I could not quite put my finger on kept annoying me. Nothing like my strong negative reaction to any Tim Burton movie, but I remember being remember being annoyed throughout the movie, both times I watched it. :-)