Week End

I hear a knock on the door

激しくせまる
失いかけた意識のなかで
おまえがささやく
追いつめられた心溶かす

鈍色の肖像
切り刻まれた記憶を映し出す
咲き乱れたhateful black heart
心にせまる

研ぎ澄まされた transient feeling
人波の中
ヒステリックにざわめく風に
止まらない涙を

胸に抱きしめ 孤独を色どる
I’ve nothing to lose
(Love me till the end)
Except your heart

手首を流れる血をおまえの体に
絡みつけると一瞬のうちに更みがえる記憶に視界を
閉ざされ笑いながら逃げていくおまえの姿を
見つめる傷ついたオレが立ってる

Week End
Week End Week End
Week End I’m at my with end
I’ve nothing to lose

(Love me till the end)

Except your heart
I hear a knock on the door
激しくせまる
失いかけた意識のなかで

おまえがささやく
冷たい指先のばし
傷口に口づけ
赤く染まった凶気を抱きしめる

鏡を見つめながら振るえる体に
流れはじめた澄き通る血を青白いおまえの心に
絡ませ幻覚に消えて行く最後の涙を
拾い集めて血の海にまどろむ

Week End
Week End
I still love you
Week End

But I cannot carry on
手首を流れる血をおまえの体に
絡みつけると一瞬のうちに更みがえる記憶に視界を
閉ざされ笑いながら逃げていくおまえの姿を

見つめる傷ついたオレが立ってる
Week End
Week End Week End
Week End I’m at my with end

Week End

—————————————————–

This is what happens when a time sensitive work project goes wrong on a Sunday and you have to work to fix someone else’s mess.

My weekend holiday was great.  I went to see Wall-E with my girlfriend who later treated me to a surprise dinner at a traditional Japanese tea house near St Mark’s Place. to celebrate my promotion at work.

Wall-E was a cute movie that had a very serious message.  I really enjoyed the short before the movie as well.  The robot, Wall-E, does remind me of a cute Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit” while EVE looks like something Apple designed if they had the spare time and money.

Saturday was a night out at the East Village at a hookah lounge called “Sultana”

Sultana Cafe
128 E 4th St
New York, NY 10003
(212) 228-7678‎

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=Sultana+cafe&near=New+York,+NY&fb=1&cid=14778458480028245273&li=lmd&z=14&iwloc=A

The Cafe has a very cozy atmosphere with freshly prepared Middle Eastern food along with a variety of flavoured tobacco for the hookah. We got there a bit early before it became crowded when it was around 9:00 PM.

We got a bit carried away smoking about 2-3 hours of hookah but it was fun. The owner was very courteous and he knows how to make his customers have a memorable experience.

Sunday was a day out to see “WANTED” starring Brad Pitt’s “Life Partner” and the White guy from the Idi Amin movie.  Parts of the movie where the main character was working at the office really reminded me of my final 6 months at Arbinet before I switched careers. After the movies, it was a random walk down Times Square before heading out.

Glad my first week implementing email campaigns for my client is coming to a close…

NINE INCH NAILS

“Capital G”

I pushed the button and elected elected him to office and a
He pushed the button and he dropped the bomb
You pushed the button and could watch it on the television
Those motherfuckers didn’t last too long

I’m sick of hearing about the “have’s” and “have not’s”
Have some personal accountability
The biggest problem with the way that we’ve been doing things is
The more we let you have the less that I’ll be keeping for me

Well I used to stand for something
Now I’m on my hands and knees
Trading in my god for this one
And he signs his name with a capital G

Don’t give a shit about the temperature in Guatemala
Don’t really see what all the fuss is about
Ain’t gonna worry about no future generations and a
And I’m sure somebody’s gonna figure it out

Don’t try to tell me that some power can corrupt a person
You haven’t had enough to know what its like
You’re only angry ’cause you wish you were in my position
Now nod your head because you know that I’m right… alright!

Well I used to stand for something
But forgot what that could be
There’s a lot of me inside you
Maybe you’re afraid to see

Well I used to stand for something
Now I’m on my hands and knees
Trading in my god for this one
And he signs his name with a capital G

For those of you in the NY area, I would like to invite you to “Rebuilding The Bridge”, a charity fundraising event to benefit the China Earthquake relief efforts.

The event will take place on Saturday, July 12, and will feature a ground breaking coalition of Asian American performers and not-for-profit organizations as we raise awareness and dollars to help rebuild China’s Sichuan region after one the most devastating natural disasters in recent memory.

Feature performers include:
RYAN LESLIE
BEAU SIA
ANDREW CHOI
…with more performers to be announced soon.

The event will be hosted by MISS INFO of HOT 97FM.

For more details (with frequent updates), please see the event’s website:

http://www.rebuildingthebridge.com

Saturday July 12th 7:30PM
Pace University
Michael Schimmel Center of the Arts
3 Spruce Street
New York, NY 10038
RSVP 212-619-4785 ext 106

Funds raised by this event will be donated to the China Earthquake Fund at Mercy Corps:
http://www.mercycorps.org/chinaearthquake/

Hope you can come for a great evening of entertainment and support the cause. And please spread the word!

Tensions rise between Tibetans, Chinese Muslims
Long-standing enmity is a factor in recent clashes in Lhasa and other areas.
By Barbara Demick
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 23, 2008

GUOJIA, CHINA — The riot began with a customer’s complaint about her dinner.

“Waitress, there’s a tooth in my soup,” a Tibetan woman said indignantly.

Before long, a curious crowd of Tibetans gathered around the soup bowl. Restaurant owner Yun Sha came out of the kitchen and insisted that the offending item was just a chip off a lamb bone. “Let’s trash this restaurant,” Yun heard somebody scream, and the crowd proceeded to do just that.

Tables, chairs, a television flew through the air. Kitchen equipment was smashed with bricks. Soon the crowd had moved on to other Muslim restaurants on the same strip as terrified waiters and cooks scurried outside for safety.

Disputes such as that one last summer are common in western China, where a volatile ethnic stew is increasingly erupting into violence. Among China’s dozens of minorities, few get along as badly as Tibetans and Muslims. Animosities have played a major — and largely unreported — role in the clashes that have taken place since mid-March. During the March 14 riots in the Tibetan region’s capital, Lhasa, many of the shops and restaurants attacked were Muslim-owned. A mob tried to storm the city’s main mosque and succeeded in setting fire to the front gate. Shops and restaurants in the Muslim quarter were destroyed.

Over the last five years, there have been dozens of clashes between Tibetans and Muslims in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces, as well as in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Most of the incidents go unreported. The state-controlled news media are not eager to publicize anything that belies Communist Party claims that minorities live together in a “harmonious society.”

Andrew M. Fischer, a London-based Tibet scholar who is one of the few who has written on the subject, said the Tibetan exile community also was reluctant to publicize incidents that might harm the international image of Tibetans.

“It is the dark side of Tibetan nationalism,” Fischer said. “It is almost as though the Tibetans are diverting their anger over their own situation towards another vulnerable minority.”

Most of the incidents involve the Hui, who ethnically are Han Chinese but practice Islam. China’s 9.8 million Hui and 5.4 million Tibetans historically have lived in proximity, at various times fighting, competing or intermarrying and collaborating.

As Buddhists, the Tibetans don’t like to kill animals, but they do eat meat and wear furs, so they leave it to Muslim butchers and tanners to do the slaughtering. The Muslims also own many restaurants, and they don’t shy away from remote Tibetan areas where other Han Chinese are loath to tread. They often buy products from Tibetan nomads, who have difficulty selling because of their illiteracy.

“To be honest, the Tibetans don’t have the business savvy of the Hui. The Tibetans have to sell their products to Hui. The Hui have to buy from the Tibetans,” said Genga Jatsi, a Tibetan doctor from Qinghai. “I suppose because we are interdependent we resent each other.”

The tensions are palpable in Golog, a mountainous prefecture in Qinghai. Along a four-lane boulevard called Tuanjie, or “Solidarity,” Street, a large archway separates the Tibetan town of Dawu from the smaller Muslim town of Guojia.

Muslim taxi drivers are nervous about crossing into the Tibetan side at night. And since last summer’s restaurant incident, Tibetans have refused to go to the strip of Muslim eateries specializing in lamb and noodles.

“We’re afraid that there will be more trouble,” said Yun, who sold his restaurant after the incident but still lives in Golog, doing construction work. He sat in an otherwise empty restaurant around the corner from his old place, he and the restaurant owner, Ma Zhongyang, slumped over the linoleum tables, watching a small television in the corner.

The men said about 800 of Guojia’s 3,000 Muslims had left in recent months, frightened by what had happened in Lhasa. During the mid-March riots, Muslim shopkeepers and their families were badly hurt and some were killed when fires set in their shops spread to upstairs apartments.

“We saw what happened on television. After that, I sent away my children from here. I fear for their safety,” Ma said.

Many Muslims have stopped wearing the traditional white caps that identify their religion. Many women now wear a hairnet instead of a scarf. Since the nearest mosque was burned down in August, the Muslims pray at home — “in secret,” Ma said.

Twenty Tibetans, many of them monks, were arrested in the incident and a senior monk, accused of being the ringleader, was sentenced to death, Fischer said.

The animosity dates to at least the 1930s, when Muslim warlord Ma Bufeng tried to establish an Islamic enclave in Qinghai. Tibetans were pushed off their lands, some executed or forced to convert. After the communists took over in 1949, tensions were repressed.

Tsering Shayka, a Tibetan historian, said ethnic conflicts had resurfaced in recent years with the gradual liberalization of China, in particular the relaxation of travel restrictions.

“What is happening now is that you have all this transient population. People are migrating here and there and coming into more and more day-to-day contact. In the past, they weren’t allowed to trespass into each other’s territory and you had no ethnic conflict,” Shayka said.

Tibetans complain frequently about their culture being diluted when non-Tibetans, in particular Muslims, move into their areas and buy Tibetan businesses. That has been especially true in Lhasa, where Muslims now own many of the souvenir shops.

In the mid-1990s, Tibetans started boycotting Muslim restaurants in Lhasa after it was claimed that somebody had found a finger in a bowl of soup, setting off a rumor that Muslims were cannibals. Another rumor had it that Muslim cooks were urinating on food or adding their bathwater to soup, which, it was said, would function as a charm to make Tibetans convert to Islam.

“You hear all these stories about Muslims putting stuff in the soup. But I think it is all about business competition and economics,” said Tsering, 37, a Tibetan businessman from Lhasa who did not want his last name to be published.

Making matters worse, the Hui usually support the Chinese government in its repression of Tibetan separatism.

“They think the Dalai Lama is their leader. But how is independence possible?” whispers Han Rugubai, a 26-year-old Muslim who sells clothing at Dawu’s main market. “With the country developing so fast, life is good. People have enough to eat. They have clothes.”

Han said she believed that the Tibetans’ real quarrel was with the Han Chinese who dominate this country’s population and politics.

“They use us as a scapegoat for their grievances against the country,” she said.

In the last few years, clashes have broken out over the most trivial grievances. In February, a Tibetan child’s complaint about what a Hui merchant was charging for balloons triggered a brawl that involved thousands of people.

Chinese troops intervened in a 2003 dispute that started over a game of billiards. A Tibetan and a Muslim died in tit-for-tat killings, the Muslim stabbed to death with a barbecue skewer.

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Jia Han of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-muslims23-2008jun23,0,6188244,full.story

Free Tibet.  One has to wonder if the riots earlier this year were really about fighting the CCP’s rule or just an economically and racially motivated attack against non-Buddhist, non-Tibetan people in “Tibet”.

These past weeks have been interesting.  I am no longer living the single life, I received a promotion, and I am now apartment hunting for a nice place in Alderney City and around Dukes.  So far, I am still being processed before I can start working in the East Island City office so I am now working in Algonquin in the interim, which is fine.

Craigslist.org is a helpful tool.

Yesterday, I went to one of my old classmate’s housewarming party and it was good to see them and the gang after 2 years from graduating from the business school.

In terms of online drama, I think that most of that nonsense is naturally working itself out and the actions of one person can have a great deal of repercussions to his peers and to himself.

The Final Four Cylons are outed and they find Earth. It turns out the show does indeed take place in the distant future with the humans being descendants of humans who went off-world after Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war.

Near the end of the episode, the area the landing party arrives at appears to be the Brooklyn side of New York City. The landing party is next to a broad river and across that river to the left is a wide bay. The other shore appears to be the edge of Lower Manhattan with a destroyed skyline of buildings.

The camera pans to the right over what is ostensibly the East River until the last two seconds of the episode, where at the far right edge of the screen stands a wrecked structure with a heavily abbreviated roadway. It appears to be the East Tower (Brooklyn side) of the Brooklyn Bridge. However, it should be noted that the information on this is incomplete.

So it looks like our heroes with the Cylons landed on an area that looked like an atomised Manhattan…

I am now in the process of transitioning to my new position working at the LC24 Tower at East Island City in Dukes, Liberty City.

This is a change from my previous job working in an office building nearby the Triangle Building in Algonquin

Liberty City has been good to me…

Now I need to find an apartment nearby Alderney City.

Seven dead in Tokyo knife attack

A man armed with a knife has killed seven people and injured 10 others in central Tokyo, Japanese media say.

The incident occurred in the Akihabara district, a busy shopping area known as Electric Town that is popular with young people and tourists.

A suspect, said to be 25-year-old Tomohiro Kato, has been arrested.

Police spokesman Jiro Akaogi told reporters: “The suspect said he came to Akihabara to kill people. He said he was tired of life”.

The dead include six men, ranging in age from 19 to 74, and a 21-year-old woman, Kyodo News said.

Reports say the suspect drove a rented truck into a crowd in the early afternoon and then began stabbing people at random.

The moments after the stabbings in Tokyo

James Slaymaker, a British man working in Japan, got to the area shortly after the stabbings. He described the scene to BBC News:

“As I walked down the street, I noticed there were a lot of police cars. I noticed there was a guy literally just lying there with tape on his eyes and blood pouring out of the side of him. I was appalled.

When I walked round the corner I saw a woman lying on the floor
Kamran Zaffar, eyewitness

“I could see carnage - bodies everywhere. Some were conscious, some were not, lying by the side of the road and on the road. There were people everywhere, a lot of onlookers.”

Another eyewitness told Kyodo News: ”The man jumped on top of a man he had hit with his vehicle and stabbed him with a knife many times. Walking toward Akihabara station, he slashed nearby people at random.”

Crime increase

The Akihabara district specialises in electronic gadgets and video games and is especially popular with people interested in comic books and distinctive fashion.

It is also home to one of the first shops to sell personal robots and robotics. The area is often crowded on weekends.

Once rare in Japan, there has been an increase in knife crime in recent years.

In January, a 16-year-old school boy armed with two kitchen knives injured several people on a crowded shopping street in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Ward.

The Akihabara attack occurred on the same date that a man with a history of mental illness went through a primary school in 2001, stabbing children at random.

Eight children died and 15 pupils and teachers were injured in that attack, in a school in Ikeda, in the city of Osaka.

Early reports suggested Mr Kato could have been a gangster, though these were later played down.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7442327.stm

Some people are just crazy enough to play “Grand Theft Auto” in real life.  I remembered playing “San Andreas” in college where I randomly drove a car into a crowd people and kept whacking them with a baseball bat…I am more disturbed by the fact this guy was around my age range…

It seems like there are underlying tensions in Japanese society at this time.  The government of Japan really needs to fix their economy or else moral decay and crime will worsen in Japan.

This is going to be interesting…