Month: August 2007

  • Where have all the flowers gone?

    [mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] The tale goes like this. During the Cultural Revolution, when intellectuals were sent to the countryside for a little re-education, Yunnan Province was regarded as the ultimate boondock, the place for the most incorrigible of intellectuals. Then the old guy died, and things began to relax, and […]

  • Sea Dragons

    [mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] You probably associate the Gulf of Tonkin with the first phoney pretext for a president’s taking America into undeclared war on a foreign country. (Perhaps I’m too young to know of earlier ones. Mexico? For those even younger than I, know that honest-faced Colin Powell’s glossy Power-Point […]

  • War Reparations

    [mouse click on a photo to enlarge it] Back at the keyboard after a three-week vacation in China’s Yunnan Province and Vietnam. Which border to step across was open to taste: Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar all abut. But, naturally, I chose Vietnam. I have a long relationship to Vietnam. I had earlier taken pains — […]