English Recordings

J.K. Rowling’s fictional wizard not only created an industry; he has also transformed Hollywood
N A former Rolls-Royce factory north of London, a new kind of industry is churning. Gothic walls are being moulded and costumes sewn. Women stitch hairs onto goblins. A sculptor creates a huge monument to wizarding might. Two men are employed to spackle the roof. This production line at Leavesden Studios, which has been running for almost a decade, will soon be switched off. “People talk about the effect of factories closing,” says David Heyman, who produces the Harry Potter films. “When we stop filming next May, at least 800 people will be looking for work.”
The recession of 2008-09 has been accompanied by bold claims about businesses’ economic importance. As carmakers teetered many people put it about that one in ten American jobs depended on the industry. The figure turned out to include taxi drivers. Similarly adventurous claims have been made for telecoms and road-building. As a single-handed creator of jobs and wealth, though, few can match the writer Joanne Rowling.
Ms Rowling’s chief contribution to the economy consists of seven books about a wizard. Harry Potter is an orphan who has been raised in a stifling suburban house. At the age of 11 he is surprised to get an invitation to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There, he learns about Lord Voldemort, his parents’ killer and a wizard of such wickedness that he is known as “He Who Must Not Be Named”. Potter must confront this menace in between worrying about sport, homework and girls.
It is not great literature. The first three books make for pleasant and occasionally gripping beach reading. From the fourth instalment the series begins to sprawl. It also makes unconvincing forays into teenage psychology. Yet even at their clumsiest the books are well-plotted and full of invention. They also avoid the temptation to sneak ideology into children’s heads by wrapping it in fantasy. C.S. Lewis’s children’s books, to which Ms Rowling’s are often compared, are spoiled by creeping piety. Philip Pullman’s suffer from strident anticlericalism. Although the Harry Potter series endorses traits such as bravery and loyalty, it is intended above all to entertain. It has, hundreds of millions of times.
The story of Harry Potter’s journey from the mind of a single mother living in Edinburgh to a global mass-media franchise is a fairy tale. Precisely, it is Cinderella—a story of greatness overlooked, chance discovery and eventual riches. Harry Potter might never have become known had an employee at Christopher Little’s literary agency in London not taken a liking to the manuscript’s binding and picked it out to read. It went on to be rejected by several publishers. Cinderella’s transformation from kitchen grunt to belle is both delightful and disruptive. So it has proved for the companies involved with Harry Potter.

(July 15,2012)피곤Tired疲劳
I'm really tired right now.
Actually, I'm too tired to write today's journal..
I'm laying on my bed and writing this entry with my phone.
Today I went shopping with a Chinese friend and then I went to Incheon airport with her.
It was raining so we drove on a wet highway.
Ah, yesterday I couldn't write my entry, since I returned home very late.
I would like to sleep as soon..as possible.
This time my eyes are stinging/burning and uncomfortable.
Tomorrow I will continue writing. Good night ~

The lights go out all around me
one last candle to keep out the night
and then the darkness surrounds me
I know I'm alive but I feel like I've died
and all thats lefts is to accept that its over
my dreams ran like sand trough the fists that I made.

I try to keep warm, but I just grow colder, I feel like I'm slipping away.

after all this has passed, I still will remain
after I've cried my last, there'll beauty from pain though it won't be today someday I'll hope again and there'll be beauty from pain, you will bring beauty from my pain.

my whole worl is the pain inside me, the best I can do is just get troungh the day.when life before is only a memory I'll wonder why gold let's me walk throungh this place.

And though I can't understand why happened, Iknow that I will when Ilook back someday and see hhow you've brought beauty from ashes, and made me as gold purified trough the flames.

Here I am, at the end of me, try to hold to what I can't see. I forgot how to hope, this nigh's been so long, I cling to you promise, there will be a dawn.

You've Been Framed – which could more honestly have been called You've Been Carefully Set Up And This Is The Third Take – has a lot to answer for, not least that its bastard spawns have given governments, all of which, always, have the instincts of the Stasi, reason to suspect that the next generation of electors regard privacy as something which, like the Turks, they don't even really need a word for. From the narrowcasting of pre-selected idiots to the webcasting of self-selected dolts, all that the would-be net narcissist was waiting for was the technology. And now we've got it. It's in your phone. It's in your Flip. It's perched at the top of the computer screen, pointing at you, as the Numa Numa guy (type him into YouTube and watch him doing an amusing dance – why not, 35 million other people have observed him) found out and earned himself global fame.
The instinct to make arses of ourselves in public and forever must be strong in the young. Why? Attention at any price? The hope that some tall beautiful sad-eyed girl will think "that dude with the do-rag falling off the beach café roof: he's the one for me"? A sort of personal immortality? A kind of seedling belief that YouTube is almost telly, so that being on YouTube is almost like being a TV star?
"Nobody's looking at you," my mother used to say. Now I could just point her at my stats. "647,031 unique views in the last six weeks? Hardly 'nobody', I think. And that's not taking into account my TwitVid of the rook chasing my radio-controlled racing car or the Vimeo one where I land my Flight Simulator™ Space Shuttle at Biggin Hill or the ones on Facebook of me getting up, shaving, wearing my new hat und so weiter. No, you OLD BAT, I think PLENTY of people are looking at me."
And yet ... yet, I yearn for a Flip MinoHD. Even if I got bored waiting for the page to load, I know I want one. I could film myself writing this piece. I could film my Nespresso machine. I could film my shaving brush. I could film ... everything. And share it. In grainy stuttery 30-second takes. I could document it all. I'd be the star of my own life instead of being (as is the reality) just a walk-on. I'd be famous. And it wouldn't matter a jot that everyone else was famous too.

It's all happened rather fast; the children who have grown up with the phone-vids-on-Facebook culture are about five years old. At the turn of the millennium even rich middle-aged gadget guys were boasting about their massive zooms, not their multi-megapixels. It was 2001 before Sharp introduced the J-SH04, the first mobile phone with a built-in camera, 2005 when three ex-PayPal employees thought up YouTube, and, 18 months later when they sold it to Google for $1.65bn (as of last year, YouTube still hadn't reportedly turned a profit but isn't it fun?) Facebook and Twitter have only been around since 2006. This stuff is new; but, gosh, we're loving it. Or, rather, they're loving it. And they're posting videos.
Videos of themselves drinking. Videos of themselves drunk. Of themselves playing the guitar, playing the harpsichord, playing silly buggers, playing with themselves. Falling over, dressing up, mugging, doing that thing where they put their tongue out which makes me want to really, like, punch them in the face. College boys in beanies. Strangely sombre Japanese people at the seaside, pointing at giant inflatable bananas. Emo schoolkids thwacking themselves in the nadgers as they come off their skateboards. Incompetent free runners leaping from one building smack into the wall of another building. That kind of thing.
It's called "Lifecasting". "Organise and Enjoy!" encourages the webpage – Flash video of course; you'll have gone off the whole idea by the time the page loads – for FlipShare; "Create it Yourself! More than Video! Share Privately! World Premieres! Show-on-the-Go! Home Movie Night!"
What the hell happened to irony? What happened to all those Punch cartoons predicated on the – unarguable, back then – idea that the nadir of human existence was looking at your friends' holiday movies/slides/photographs? How is it that something which was once the marker of a staid and suburban middle-aged lunacy – the quiet sort, as though its practitioners had grown a sort of woolly bobble hat inside their skulls – has become a staple of youth culture?

Just because we can record every drunken moment or schoolboy prank – and post them online – doesn't mean we should. The YouTube generation will regret it, argues Michael Bywater
It would have done for me, for a start. The day I got my hand stuck in a park bench while attempting to talk my girlfriend into coming home with me. Riding my poxy little Mobylette moped from Leckhampton to my college, standing on the seat. Riding it through the college court, naked. God help us. Failed glider aerobatics (don't ask). Amateur dramatics (don't ask). Professional dramatics (don't even think of asking). Dressing up as a clown, wandering about with a silver-topped cane, ditto green nail varnish and eyeshadow, ditto Spanish riding boots. Humping. Almost certainly, humping. Yes. There'd have been humping, and trailing that chap who went mad through the night streets of Bruges, and now I come to think of it what about what happened in Heidelberg and indeed that evil night in the Lake District and, oh yes, that other evil night in the Lake District, not to mention Minnesota and, oh God, Beverly Hills and that damned Cessna 206 Stationair and the Grand Canyon, that was a do, that was. Oh dear.
Oh dear and thank God, because it was all private. It's all over. It's all in the past, and that's the thing about the past: things used to be in the past, but now they're not. They're on YouTube (motto: "Broadcast Yourself") and Vimeo and Facebook and Idiotvids. Everything that happens – the seedy phrase is "life experiences" – is sucked into the voracious eye of the camcorder or the jittery blur of the video phone, uploaded (3G, broadband, Edge, you take your pick but they still get your money), transferred into Flash and made available to the world.
For ever.
The idea of "in the past" is in the past. Impossible to put aside childish things because Google knows where they are; and even if you take them down, the Wayback Machine will cache them for all time. So that's that for the past. You want to know the future? You want to sup full-on horrors? There's a poll for that, done to promote the Flip MinoHD, a thing the size of a packet of cigarettes – remember them? We had cigarettes when we still had privacy; now, we'd film ourselves smoking them behind the bike sheds – that shoots up to an hour of high-quality video. The survey says that a third of 18-24 year olds "see a time when they would post videos on social networks every day".

I inspect the quality of incoming gravel, sand and cement deliveries, and fill out and file the necessary documentation. I carry out specific tests on these materials and document the results. I also have to inspect the quality of the concrete mixture taking a specimen of every 200 cubic meters. I give the operator specifications based on the results of the tests that I carry out (For instance, 'more water', 'less water' etc.) My most important duty is accepting or refusing deliveries based on the quality of incoming components. The worst part of this job is having to refuse deliveries, that always involves arguments with drivers or a remote dispatcher

Hello, my name is mamie. I live in Tokyo.
I have been studying English for more than a decade. but I can actually only speak a little English!
I want to improve my speaking and listening English skills by making friends from other countries.
if you're planning to learn or improve your Japanese, lets be friends!
I also want to help others learn Japanese!
I am into Japanese tea ceremony, the art of flower arrangement, running, movies, arts, music, reading, cooking and occasional drinking sessions.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

FOREWORD

What follows is a rough blueprint of social dynamics as I presently understand it.

It is a sketch of the continually evolving software that exists in my mind, having spent years as a pickup artist.

If you wish to benefit from this knowledge read it continually, and go out and practice every day until you’ve internalized it fully.

Once you’ve done that, put the book down and never read it again.

That way it will become not something that you do, but something that you are.

Good luck on your journey.

But what if instead of changing physical locations you could be in the exact same location, and still be in a different place? What if it was your experience of that place that made it different, instead of the physical location? What if you changed?

This would be a good time to think about it. Because like it or not, that’s what’s about to happen. The place that you’re about to go now is not a place that you’re going to be coming back from. So you’re just going to have to deal with it.