2009年2月26日 星期四

竹林市

城邦暴力團(上)(下)──十周年紀念版
張大春向中國敘事美學致敬的代表作!倪匡:「好看,非常好看,我準備看第三遍!」


一、看不見的城市

孫小六從五樓窗口一躍而出,一雙腳掌落在紅磚道上;拳抱兩儀、眼環四象、氣吐三分、腰沉七寸,成了個蹲姿。這時節正是初冬破曉,街上悄無人跡,可他總覺得師父那一對漆溜溜的黑眼珠子不定正從哪兒往他這邊兒掃過來;當下打個寒顫,又仔細朝左右前後端詳了一回。

不 錯。這裡是中華路、西藏路口,他窩混了三十四年的地頭。可如今他是待不住了。皮夾子裡揣著他老娘褥子底下攢藏了不知多久的一疊鈔票。腰裡纏著他爹傳下來的 一捲軟鋼刀。夾克是他哥小四打修車場庫房裡削出來的,胸前背後各繡了一組STP字樣。棉鞋黑幫子白底,則是他姊小五親手縫製;針線既綿密,漿料又勻實,乍 穿不擠腳、穿久了也不鬆塌,於是省了襪子,氣味也就特別薰人。至於其他──對不住,一件破汗衫和一條卡其褲簡直算不上其他;其他就什麼都沒有了。

眼 前有的,是四通八達的大馬路。西藏路自東而西,往西上萬華,那裡有新的人馬,去不得。往東上汀州路、三元街,那裡有東南海產小匹婆的眼線,去不得。中華路 自北而南,往北不定會撞見他師父出來溜鳥籠子,那是更加去不得的。孫小六轉念及此,祇好一挫牙關,旋身衝左,沿著中華路往南,直奔竹林市去了。

竹林市是一座看不見的城市。所謂一座,也和尋常可見的城市之有周邊地界、自成單位者不同。打個比方來說:你去找一面二十公尺寬、十層樓高的白漆水泥牆,在 上頭畫一個非常之大的台灣島。再向徐老三借來他那把雙管霰彈槍、外帶一千八百發子彈,站在十五公尺開外之地,朝台灣島地圖開火。待子彈打完了、你的手指頭 也腫了、白漆水泥牆恐怕也垮了。不過這是打比方,所以得假設高牆沒垮,則牆上的巨大台灣島地圖必然滿是密密麻麻,有如星點蜂窩一般的彈孔。這些個彈孔的總 合,便是竹林市;其任何之一的彈孔,也是竹林市。竹林市可大可小,大竹林就是所有彈孔的總稱──不過這祇是個概念,沒有哪個白痴真會去算計彈孔的數量如 何、面積如何、現居人口如何……等等;即使是竹林中人,也未必願意知道大竹林的一切︵那似乎是警察單位和媒體單位所津津樂道的︶。至於小竹林,就是地圖上 個別的彈孔了。小竹林也自有大小可分──大的許有幾座山、百數十甲的檳榔園、綿延數里的魚池、鹽田、產業道路;小的可以只是一座神壇、一家餐館、一個貨攤 乃至一間馬桶不通的公共廁所。

尋常人對竹林市是毫無知覺的,他們也不會把竹林市三字連成一氣,當作是指稱某一地區的詞彙。我們倒是可以用一個事例來說明尋常人與竹林市之間的關係。此事 發生於一九九七年八月二十五日夜間十時許。八位早年曾在美國伊利諾大學深造的物理學、電機學和生物化學博士在一處名曰「大四喜」的酒樓餐敘,席開兩桌,連 同家屬在內共計二十二人參加。酒過三巡,一位電機博士提議唱歌助興,眾人均表贊同。於是召來服務人員,將伴唱機、伴唱影帶裝置停當。物理學博士楊某搶先獻 技,唱了一首〈恰想嘛是你一個〉。生化博士林某、許某接著合唱一曲〈舊情綿綿〉。電機博士簡某偕其妻子二人輪唱〈台北的天空〉未畢,忽然有大漢五名衝進包 廂,直指眾人說笑談唱之聲太過吵鬧。電機博士何某立刻起身,代表眾人道歉再三,並聲明,在座皆學院中人,不知江湖規矩,冒犯之處,懇請原諒。來人首微笑片 刻,道:「讀書人?有幾個博士啊?」八位博士紛紛陪笑舉手。卻在此際,問話者猛可拔出手槍一枝,依座次近遠,連發十槍,將眾博士全數畢命。並宣言道:「博 士安怎?博士就囂掰噢?幹你娘!」這一起兇殺案被稱作「八博士事件」,乃是尋常人誤闖竹林市的典型範例。之所以稱之為「誤闖」,乃是因為沒有任何人能在一 宗兇案發生之前指出兇案即將發生之地,換言之:它可能是任何所在。一個絕大的亂數。瞻之在前、忽焉在後,倏而滅、倏而生,看不見的一座城市。非由人誤闖不 可。



2009年2月21日 星期六

Cape Town

Bagging Bargains in Cape Town, South Africa

Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times

From a beach by Cape Town, a view of Table Mountain.


Published: February 22, 2009

The inhabited world seems to peter out at Noordhoek Beach, a five-mile strip of white sand bordered by verdant cliffs, on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula 15 miles southwest of Cape Town. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, with a pale sun shining weakly through an overcast sky, a friend and I followed a trail on horseback through dunes and wetlands leading to the coast. A long-billed Hadeda ibis and a pair of Egyptian geese waded in a freshwater stream swollen with recent rains.

The horses broke into a trot, then a canter, as we hit the beach speckled with gnarled driftwood and great, squiggly strands of kelp. In the distance, a near-perpendicular cliff face soared high above the sea, its striated green flank cut by the fabled Chapman’s Peak Drive, one of the world’s most heart-stopping stretches of asphalt. The air was thick with seagulls, cormorants and black oystercatchers. We watched a huge seagull soar high in the air, a clam in its beak, and drop its prize on the sand; two dozen attempts later, it succeeded in breaking open the shell, and ripped into the clam’s flesh.

Farther on, I caught sight of a dark form moving in the sand; it was an injured seal in its death throes. “They wash up all the time,” our guide, Hope Flex, told us. “Nothing can be done for them.” The creature wagged its flippers, lay still, then lifted its head and flopped down again. I turned my horse away and continued down the beach.

There’s wildness to Cape Town — the big skies, the rugged canyons, the jagged outcroppings of sandstone and granite that rise over the icy South Atlantic at the tip of Africa. Penguins waddle across white-sand beaches, elands roam the dunes, hungry baboons swoop down from their shrinking forest habitat on unsuspecting suburbanites, ripping apart their cupboards and closets in a desperate search for sustenance.

Part Alaska, part Big Sur, but always African, Cape Town can overwhelm a visitor with its grand-scale landscapes and its feeling of remoteness. It’s an agoraphobic’s nightmare, this patch of wind-whipped scrubland and mountain at the bottom of the world, and a naturalist’s dream.

But there’s another side of Cape Town as well: the Dutch colonists who settled in the Constantia Valley 350 years ago were determined to tame nature, and they covered the fertile, sun-drenched basin with vineyards that still produce some of the world’s finest wines.

Beach communities like Kalk Bay, reminiscent of Massachusetts — a funky mix of tidy Edgartown and rough-edged New Bedford — hug the coast. Then there’s the urban poverty that most tourists, and most white Capetonians, seldom see, except when they pass by it on the way to and from Cape Town International Airport: the squatter camps of the Cape Flats, where tens of thousands of immigrants from impoverished rural areas dwell in shacks beside canals overflowing with raw sewage, and makeshift bars, or shabeens, fill with the alcoholic and the unemployed.

The city’s collisions of culture, class and geography can be both exhilarating and unsettling, as I discovered while I lived in Cape Town as a Newsweek correspondent between 2005 and 2007. What’s more, it’s all become very cheap to experience. The ouster of President Thabo Mbeki last September, along with continuing trouble in neighboring Zimbabwe and the worldwide economic crisis have pushed the South African rand to its lowest level in five years. The rate of exchange was 7 rand to the dollar when I left in March 2007; these days it’s around 10.

Even though high South African inflation has pushed up prices in rand, they have declined in dollars. A night in a double superior room in the summer high season at the Constantia, a boutique hotel in the Constantia Valley, for example, has risen in the past year from 3,100 rand to 3,400 rand, but in dollars it has declined from about $400 to $345.

It’s now possible to stay in a cheaper but still very good hotel room, rent a car, eat a couple of excellent meals and hike or mountain bike in the world’s most magnificent wilderness reserves, all for a total of $300 a day. For the budget-conscious outdoor-loving American traveler looking for a bargain in the recessionary era, Cape Town is hard to beat.

I arrived in Cape Town in mid-November, at the start of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, and decided to splurge for the first two nights of my stay at the Constantia, on Cape Town’s historic wine route. Elegantly furnished suites laid out around lawns and bamboo gardens, breakfast on a patio facing the rugged Steenberg Mountains, a private mini-swimming pool in the tiled courtyard outside every room — it was easy to feel guilty about such shameless self indulgence, but I was paying only the equivalent of $250 a night at a temporary discounted rate, so I didn’t dwell on it. The Constantia was a luxurious and well-situated base from which to rediscover the city.

Early on my first afternoon in Cape Town, I set out for the Foodbarn in Noordhoek, a prominent example, I had been told, of the culinary revolution that Cape Town has undergone in recent years. I drove from the Constantia over Ou Kaapse Weg — Old Cape Road in Afrikaans — a two-lane ribbon that winds steeply through the Steenbergs. Like much of the Cape Peninsula, this treeless range of hills is blanketed with fynbos — the hard-leafed heathlike vegetation that evolved in isolation in this windswept, arid and fire-prone corner of the world.

After climbing through the rolling terrain to about 2,000 feet above False Bay, the road dipped toward Noordhoek, a rural beachside community that feels Californian — a bit like Topanga Canyon, a bit like Malibu.

The Foodbarn, which occupies a thatched-roof A-frame that was originally a farm store, was created two and a half years ago by Franck Dangereux, the Cannes-born former head chef of Constantia’s La Colombe, which was named the best restaurant in South Africa several times by the Business Day newspaper. Mr. Dangereux has turned the Foodbarn into the most talked-about bistro in the city, mixing Provençal, Moroccan, Middle Eastern and pan-Asian elements, but following the worldwide food trend of going local: he almost never shops for ingredients more than 30 miles beyond his Noordhoek home.

“I want to boost the Cape Town growers,” the bald, animated Mr. Dangereux told me when he joined me and my dining companion, Peter Bouckaert, a South Africa-based Human Rights Watch investigator, at our table in the sun-splashed cafe. (Mr. Dangereux breaks the rules during the summer oyster season, when he imports what he describes as “fat, greasy” mollusks from neighboring Namibia.) The Foodbarn’s prix-fixe menu that afternoon consisted of a crispy prawn and avocado salad garnished with minted baba ghanouj salsa, followed by grilled salmon on a bed of crushed Nicola potato, with cream of garlic and cinnamon oil, and an iced café au lait for dessert. Peter and I washed the meal down with a local sauvignon blanc. The total cost of a superb lunch for two: less than $50.

After two nights of self-indulgence at the Constantia, I moved a couple of miles north to the Bishops’ Court, a bed-and-breakfast on a quiet road in the exclusive southern suburb of Bishopscourt. Here, both the climate and the landscape change dramatically from the dry, Mediterranean-like Constantia Valley and the adjacent Steenberg Mountains.

The heavily forested eastern facade of Table Mountain attracts more rainfall than any other part of the Cape Peninsula, and the suburbs along the monolith’s lower flanks — Bishopscourt, Newlands, Claremont — are deep green and bursting with bougainvillea, frangipani, eucalyptus, date palms and other semitropical and tropical vegetation. The French doors of my room looked toward Kirstenbosch, the national botanical gardens, and, just beyond, the iconic massif of Table Mountain itself — its striated folds of sandstone turning purple, then gold, as they caught the first rays of the sun.

KIRSTENBOSCH, established in 1913 for the protection and study of southern Africa’s indigenous flora, exemplifies Cape Town’s juxtapositions of wildness and cultivation. Its Table Mountain backdrop, with a tangle of forest clinging to the rough sandstone face, exudes the raw power of nature, while its meticulously landscaped grounds reflect the hand of man.

I paid the entry fee — about $3 — and followed gravel and cobblestone paths, lined with occasional benches for contemplation, that wound past manicured lawns; ponds; gardens of protea, ericas, restios and other hard-leafed shrubs and plants unique to the Cape Peninsula; and lush groves of trees from across southern Africa, including yellow woods, common cabbages, wild almonds, wild cottons, and quinines. In the tranquillity of an early Sunday morning, the only sounds I heard were the calls of whippoorwills and the trickle of a natural spring. (The layers of porous sandstone that form the bedrock of the Cape Peninsula are perfect vessels for trapping groundwater.)

The paths through Kirstenbosch merge with hiking trails that climb steeply to the top of Table Mountain. But I had done the challenging daylong hike three years earlier while living in Cape Town, and I decided to pass. Instead, I devoted my energy to dining out. Lunch was at an old favorite: the River Café at Constantia Uitsig, a centuries-old vineyard in the heart of the valley. For dinner, I followed Frank Dangereux’s recommendation and headed to Bizerca, opened last year by Laurent and Cyrillia Deslandes, a Loire Valley-born chef, and his South African wife. It is one of many new high-end restaurants that are animating once-desolate corners of the city.

A friend and I arrived on Jetty Street near the waterfront after dark, driving past a sea of high-rise office complexes to a brightly lighted bistro that shone like a beacon amid sterile surroundings. A Johannesburg designer had remodeled the space, a former Bible-study center, as a kind of funky factory, with chocolate-and-vanilla-swirl concrete floors, steel-frame windows and a tangle of exposed aluminum ducts and pipes. The place was packed: the energy was palpable. We started the meal by sharing a delicate beet-root, goat cheese and beet-root sorbet salad followed by king prawns and pork bellies on a bed of sweet potato purée and chili jam. My main course was free-range chicken and spiced garbanzo beans, and dessert was a raspberry sorbet. With a bottle of local chenin blanc, the price of a dinner for two was $62.

I spent the next several days rediscovering familiar pleasures — a climb up Lion’s Head peak before sunset, the chili prawns at Toni’s, a Mozambican restaurant on Kloof Street in the city center — and discovering new ones. I hiked along deserted trails through meadows and pine forests at Silvermine, a part of Table Mountain National Park, watching as a dense mist rolled in from False Bay then making my way back to the parking lot on a cliffside path in a warm drizzle. I drank Castle beers and watched South African cricket with a friend at his local pub, the Foresters Arms in Newlands, a way station for travelers and their horses during the early days of the British-run Cape Colony.

On my last full day in Cape Town, I met Peter Bouckaert at his home in Simon’s Town, the southernmost town on the Cape Peninsula and home to a colony of African penguins (formerly known as jackass penguins because of their braying, mule-like call), for a day of lobster diving at the bottom of the world. I rented a wet suit, gloves and boots from a local dive shop for the equivalent of about $15, to insulate myself against the 60-degree South Atlantic. I paid another $7 or so for a fishing permit, which would allow me to take home four lobsters. Then we set out for the Cape of Good Hope.

Half an hour later we parked our Land Rover on the shoulder of a road overlooking the ocean. With gear-laden duffel bags balanced on our shoulders, Peter and I splashed through tidal pools, climbed over dunes, and dodged boulders strewn across sandy trails. A pale green blanket of beach grass and spiny shrubbery, speckled by purple irises, sloped gently upward to our right. To our left, the surf crashed against a curving, rocky beach.

It could have been Maine or Newfoundland were it not for the occasional reminder that this was Africa. A pair of blessboks, or antelopes, plodded across the dunes, gazing at us with doleful eyes. Three ostriches nibbled at tufts of beach grass.

Two miles up the deserted beach, Peter gestured toward clumps of olive-colored kelp bobbing just off shore. “This is the spot,” he said. I dumped my bag on a pile of rocks, squeezed into my hooded wet suit and slid off a barnacle-covered boulder, wincing as the frigid water seeped between my body and the neoprene. I dived beneath the surface, and combed through the tangle of seaweed where the crustaceans usually lurk. Though my body warmed up quickly, the water numbed my hands and seeped into my boots; more water gushed into my ill-fitting mask. I cleared my snorkel and dived again, peering into the murky depths.

Minutes later I surfaced and saw Peter swimming toward the rocks; he climbed out of the water and ripped off his mask in frustration. “I can’t see a thing,” he said. Nor could I. Swirling sediments stirred up by recent storms, had left us groping like blind men for our evening’s anticipated supper. We clung to the rocks, battered by the waves, and watched a pair of surfers ride a breaker a hundred yards off shore.

The African sun dipped low, glinting off the Atlantic with blinding intensity. I lay back on the beach and basked in the warmth of the fading day as a pair of cormorants dived and weaved. Then we hoisted our duffel bags, and empty-handed but content, we began the long hike back to our car.

GOOD HOPE, GOOD MEALS

HOW TO GET THERE

Cape Town International Airport is served by several international carriers. A recent online search found round-trip fares from $1,135 between Kennedy Airport and Cape Town, involving at least one stop. Rental cars are available at the airport. The lowest daily rate from Hertz, for a small economy car, is currently about 270 rand, about $27 at 9.85 rand to the dollar.

WHERE TO STAY

The Constantia (Spaanschemat River Road, Constantia; 27-21-794-6561; www.theconstantia.com), a luxury boutique hotel, is in the heart of Constantia’s historic wine route. Its huge suites, with a private dipping pool, and a double room start at 3,400 rand in the high season, October through April, and 2,200 rand in the low season, May through September.

The Bishops’ Court (18 Upper Hillwood Avenue, Bishopscourt; 27-21-794-6561; www.thebishopscourt.com), which is owned by the same company, the Last Word, has smaller rooms starting at 2,800 rand in the high season and 2,000 rand in the low season. Each room looks out on one of the best views in Cape Town, the verdant east face of Table Mountain.

La Villa Belle Ombre (16 Belle Ombre Road; 27-21-424-2727; www.villabelleombre.com) is a charming bed-and-breakfast in a Victorian mansion in the Tamboerskloof neighborhood of Cape Town. In high season, rooms for two are 580 rand to 1,020 rand.

WHERE TO EAT

The Foodbarn (Noordhoek Farm Village, Village Lane, Noordhoek; 27-21-789-1390; www.thefoodbarn.co.za) is Franck Dangereux’s wildly popular bistro just down the road from one of Cape Town’s most beautiful beaches. The converted farm store has an airy, bright interior and perhaps the best French-Asian cooking in the area; lunch for two costs about 450 rand. A three-course prix-fixe lunch with a carafe of wine is 195 rand.

Bizerca Bistro (Jetty Street, Foreshore; 27-21-418-0001; www.bizerca.com), a hip French-Asian bistro set in a former Bible study center near Cape Town Harbor, is sparking a revival of an area that had been a ghost town at night; dinner for two, with drinks, costs about 550 rand.

Jardine Restaurant (185 Bree Street, Cape Town; 27-21-424-5640; www.jardineonbree.co.za) is the other French bistro that’s got people talking in Cape Town. Near Long Street in the city’s liveliest night-life district, it has a drab interior but good cuisine. Dinner for two, with drinks and a bottle of wine, costs about 800 rand.

River Café (Spanschemat River Road, Constantia; 27-21-794-3010), at the Constantia Uitsig vineyard in the heart the valley, is a picturesque lunch spot with lots of outdoor seating and a laid-back atmosphere; lunch for two, with a bottle of the vineyard’s excellent wine, is about 450 rand.

WHAT TO DO

Imhoff Equestrian Center (27-82-774-1191; www.horseriding.co.za) in Kommetjie, just down the coast from Noordhoek, offers horseback rides three times a day through wetlands and along Noordhoek Beach, with an experienced guide. The rides, which last two hours, cost 300 rand. The best time to go is at 5 p.m. in summer (4 p.m. in winter), when these rides are 350 rand, so that you can catch sunset on the Atlantic.

The Cape of Good Hope, the best area on the Cape Peninsula for lobster diving, is at the southern end of Table Mountain National Park (www.sanparks.org/parks/table_mountain), an extensive wilderness area that encompasses the Table Mountain range and extends from Cape Town’s Signal Hill to the southernmost tip of Africa. The Cape of Good Hope entrance to the park offers the best access to the lobster-rich kelp beds of the cold Atlantic; it’s a short drive south from Simon’s Town on the M4 highway. This part of the park is open from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. in the summer season, October to March.

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, (Rhodes Drive, Newlands; 27-21-799-8783; www.sanbi.org/frames/kirstfram.htm) is also part of the Table Mountain National Park network. Founded in 1913, the garden spreads across 1,300 acres on the eastern slope of Table Mountain. It’s open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. September through March and to 6 p.m. otherwise. The entrance fee is 32 rand; 10 rand for children 6 to 17.

JOSHUA HAMMER is a former Newsweek bureau chief and correspondent at large in Africa and the Middle East. His next book, the story of a colonial-era uprising in German southwest Africa, will be published in 2010.

2009年2月18日 星期三

Lashi Lake

Living Planet | 19.02.2009 | 04:30

China’s White Collar Workers Go Green at Lashi Lake

In China there is often a vast cultural divide between the country’s urban population and their rural counterparts.

Yet, a new generation of Chinese are trying to bridge the gap through the act of volunteering. Last year an estimated 6 million Chinese volunteered their time to assist with the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake, and in staging the Beijing Olympics. Yet, it is not just the big events. In this second visit to the Lashi Lake area in the Yunnan province,

Living Planet follows a group of environmental volunteers. They have come from China’s big cities to Lashi Lake to learn more about the environmental challenges locals face.

(Report: Elise Potaka)


China, Yunnan Provence, View of Lashi Lake Valley

clark james mishler 拍攝的 China, Yunnan Provence, View of Lashi Lake Valley。
China, Yunnan Provence, View of Lashi Lake Valley argriculture and yellow safflower fields. Small family plots give this lush valley a mosaic of color and texture.
safflower
n. (名詞 noun)
  1. 【植】紅花
  2. 紅花染料
safflower, Eurasian thistlelike herb (Carthamus tinctorius) of the family Asteraceae (aster family). Safflower, or false saffron, has long been cultivated in S Asia and Egypt for food and medicine and as a costly but inferior substitute for the true saffron dye.

2009年2月17日 星期二

Shrewsbury

Wikipedia article "Shrewsbury".


Spectrum | 17.02.2009 | 04:30

The Darwin Trail

2009 sees the 200th birthday of the “father of evolution”, Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the appearance of his revolutionary work “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection”.

The first place that comes to mind in connection with Darwin may well be the Galapagos Islands, where he made the observations that led to the development of his theory. But long before he left the English port of Plymouth on the “Beagle”, the seeds of his theories had already been implanted in young Darwin – in his home town, Shrewsbury, where Charles Darwin was born on the 12 th of February, 1809. Irene Quaile has been on the Darwin trail.


2009年2月13日 星期五

Provins in France

http://www.answers.com/topic/provins

Insight | 14.02.2009 | 04:30

Unesco World Heritage Sites: The Medieval town of Provins in France

In 2001, UNESCO added Provins to its list of World Heritage Sites in view of the fact the city has retained the its medieval urban layout and the fact several buildings dating back to this period remain.

The medieval town of Provins, located about an hour East of Paris is perfectly charming. The city of about 11,000 residents is a little out of the way, but it’s a nice place to spend the day. However, during the middle ages, it was one of the most important cities in France. A gathering place for merchants from all over Europe and even beyond. The city is extraordinarily well preserved, bearing witness to the international trade fairs that used to take place here.

Report: Genevieve Oger

2009年2月12日 星期四

Batman

Wikipedia article "Batman, Turkey".

From the Fringe | 11.02.2009

Holy Lawsuits, Batman! Turkish City to Sue 'Dark Knight' Producer

The mayor of Batman, Turkey is going up against Hollywood's big guns, saying he wasn't told about the use of his city's name in the film "The Dark Knight," featuring the arguably more famous superhero of the same name.

"There can only be one Batman in the world," declared Mayor Hueseyin Kalkan. And lest there be any doubt, he was not referring to the iconic comic book figure who's also been the subject of a television series and several feature films.

No, he means Batman, the city in Turkey which serves as the capital of Batman province and is situated on the banks of the Batman river.

According to the German news Web site Tagesschau, Kalkan is indignant that he was not consulted over the use of his city's name during the filming of the latest Batman blockbuster, "The Dark Knight." He is reportedly directing his ire at the film's producer, Christopher Nolan.

But wait a second. The Caped Crusader has been on movie screens since 1943. So why is the good mayor of Batman only taking legal steps against the Hollywood machinery now? He didn't disclose that information to a Turkish news agency. But it likely doesn't matter, as Turkish copyright experts say his case wouldn't stand a chance.

Kalkan says he's just looking out for the interests of Batman's citizens. After all, the (superhero) Batman brand has made life difficult for some of them. Kalkan cited an example of a resident who moved to Germany and opened two restaurants named after his home town, only to be hassled by Warner film studios.

Two restaurants, mind you. And we thought there could only be one Batman in the world.

DW staff (dc)

Religious Traditions are Disappearing in Lombok, Indonesia

Dialogue | 13.02.2009 | 05:30

Religious Traditions are Disappearing in Lombok, Indonesia

Ceremonies such as "Watu Telu" have become rare events in the village of Bayan

Only the most ambitious of trekkers come to hike up Indonesia’s second highest volcanic peak - the majestic Mount Rinjani, declared a National Park since 1997. The natural isolation of the volcano’s steep slopes has also preserved an ancient way of life for Lombok’s oldest village of Bayan. The villagers still practice ancient ceremonies such as the rare “Watu Telu” ceremony. This form of ancestor worship is however disappearing.

(Report: Maria Bakkalapulo)


2009年2月10日 星期二

the Tzenan Temple in Nantou

南投縣竹山鎮紫南宮體驗萬人吃丁酒、求發財金的節慶活動

Taiwan temple loans fund million-dollar toilets


TAIPEI, Taiwan: A Taoist temple in southern Taiwan has put profits from a successful foray into the banking business toward an unusual building project — a public bathroom shaped like a trio of bamboo shoots.

Last year, the Tzenan Temple in Nantou county lent 600 New Taiwan dollars ($18) to 450,000 people without registering a single default — apparently because borrowers feared offending the temple's deity.

It put the interest on the loans toward construction of an elaborate restroom complex to serve worshippers.

The NT$40 million ($1.2 million) complex — described by temple staff as "five-star" — is in the shape of three bamboo shoots, Nantou's most important agricultural product. Their golden hue emulates the color of mature bamboo when it's sold in local markets.

Abbot Chuang Chiu-an said the project was made possible by the reluctance of borrowers to offend the temple's deity — the spirit of an ancient Chinese governor who rewarded subjects in line with the fealty they demonstrated to traditional virtues.

"No one would dare make a default to the deity and risk bad fortune," Chuang said.

He did not comment on the wave of failures undermining larger financial institutions, but did regret that the size of his temple's loan packages was limited by the current economic slowdown.

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