COMPLETELY RANDOM THOUGHTS

Warning: nudity below!

Forgive me for writing a post that's all over the place.  I just haven't had the time to write. Just rambling now, I thought I'd mention that I've been fooling around with imovie 08 and 06, the two amateur mac editing programs.  Holy Mackeral! The critics of 08 were right! 06 is a whole lot easier to use! Now at long last I've experienced the simplicity that mac is famous for and it's wonderful to behold! I was able to do almost everything quickly without resorting to a help menu. o6 is amazingly intuitive!  Of course 08 has the ability to send everything to YouTube with a couple of clicks.

I'm reading a book on the famous Chinese 36 strategems. My book implies that these traditional strategems were taught to every Chinese child for a long, long time, but Wikipedia says the book has only been available since 1961. 

 
Every strategy has a romantic title and a story that goes with it.  "Loot the house when it's burning" is another way of saying, "Take advantage of your enemy's misfortunes". Somehow expressing the idea with the metaphor of the burning house makes it more memorable. "Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul" is a romantic way of saying "Re-interpret the past in order to influence events in the present." It's amazing that this is taught to young children.  It's a very practical way of looking at the world, very far removed from the Christian ethic that prevailed here until recently. 

Since I'm rambling I'll mention that I just visited the Domai site and found the peculiar pictures shown here (above and below).  At first I couldn't figure out what made these girls seem so unusual, but after thinking about it I realized that they're all look a little bit crazy.  The girl on the top looks like she's way, way over the edge, the third one, one on the bottom (way below) is almost normal...almost, but not quite.  Her eyes seem like powerful instruments of understated manipulation.  Of course these are guesses. Maybe all these girls are much more normal than I am. 

In real life mildly crazy girls are kind of sexy.  Probably girls find crazy guys to be sexy too, if the craziness is mixed with charm. Isn't it odd that we're all attracted a bit by craziness? No wonder every generation has so many half-cocked people! 

I also find it interesting that the allure of craziness doesn't translate into photography.  These pictures are fascinating to look at but they're not exactly erotic. My guess is that in real life these girls would be very sexy, but in photography not so much so. Why is that? Maybe a lot of eroticism is in the eyes, and that's hard to capture in pictures. 

BTW, None, absolutely NONE of what I said about crazy people applies to anyone I know, thank heaven! I have to say that because every time I write about human oddities, half the people I know look at me strange the next day, as if they'd been insulted. 

Also, if one of the paragraphs is blue that's because I hit a wrong button and am too tired to do anything about it.