English Recordings

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.
Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
I learned of the federal poisoning program while researching my new book, The Poisoner's Handbook, which is set in jazz-age New York. My first reaction was that I must have gotten it wrong. "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues.

ある日、母さん豚がいいました。
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs. One day the Mother Pig said to the little pigs,

「皆も大きくなったから、自分で家を建てなさい。」

"Now that you've grown up, you should go and build your own houses".

１匹目の子豚は藁で家を建てました。
The first little pig built his house of straw.

そこへオオカミがやって来ました。
And then, along came the wolf.

「やい！子豚、中に入れろ！」
"Little Pig, Little Pig, let me come in."

「いやだよー。」
"Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin" said the first little pig.

「そんならこんな家吹き飛ばしてやる！ぷうー」
"Then, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!", said the wolf. So he huffed and he puffed and blew the house down.

２匹目の子豚は木で家を建てました。そこへ一匹目の子豚が逃げてきました。
The first little pig ran to the second little pig's house which was made of sticks.

その後から、オオカミが追いかけてきました。
The wolf soon came running after him.

「やい！子豚、中に入れろ！」
"Little Pig, Little Pig, let me come in."
「いやだよー。」

「いやだよー。」
"Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin" said the second little pig.

「そんならこんな家吹き飛ばしてやる！ぷうー」
"Then, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!", said the wolf. So he huffed and he puffed and blew the house down.

３匹目の子豚は煉瓦で家を建てました。そこへ一匹目と２匹目の子豚が逃げてきました。
The first and the second little pig ran to the third little pig's house which was made of bricks.

その後から、オオカミが追いかけてきました。
The wolf soon came running after them.

「やい！子豚、中に入れろ！」
"Little Pig, Little Pig, let me come in."

「いやだよー。」

「いやだよー。」

「いやだよー。」
"Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin" said the third little pig.

「そんならこんな家吹き飛ばしてやる！ぷーぷー」
「そんならこんな家吹き飛ばしてやる！ぷうー」
"Then, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!", said the wolf. So he huffed and he puffed

でも煉瓦の家はびくともしません。
but he couldn't blow the house down.

怒ったオオカミは「えい！こうなったら煙突から入ってやるぞ！」
"OK," said the wolf, who was now angry, "if that's the case, I'm going come down the chimney"

３匹の子豚は急いでお鍋にお湯をわかしました。
So the three little pigs quickly put a pot of water on to boil and -

バシャーン！！
splash! -

オオカミはぐらぐら煮えたお鍋の中に落ちて死んでしまいました。
the wolf fell into the boiling hot water and was killed.

The End.

I've never talked about it, but I've been thinking about it (a lot) since it happened to me.

I was 18, which prompted me to behave differently than usual that day. Our eyes met for just a moment, but I felt an unknown mechanism click inside me, making my heart beat faster.

"May I go by?" she asked.

Who the hell was keeping her from going by? That was only part of her plan. Women always lie. Even when they're not lying-they're lying. I realized that much later

"Where are you from?"
"I'm from ... It's not far from Moscow" she answered. "I came here with a couple of my friends."

I tried to appear serious and indifferent as usual. At that moment, I never could have imagined myself running down the streets of her town, sticking stupid notes on all the buildings.

(note the spacing changes with the punctuation)

TopHits FM

I am teaching Business and Legal English at the University. In October, I am launching a new project with my students.

(July 16,2012)I'm zonked.
Actually, I'm too pooped to write today's journal.
I'm kicked back on my bed and tapping out this entry with my phone.
Today I went to shopping with a Chinese friend then I went to 'Incheon airport' for her.
It has been pouring so we floated down the rainy highway.
Ah, yesterday I couldn't write my entry, sine I returned home in the wee hours of the morning.
I want to crash.
This time my eyes are burning and uncomfortable.
Tomorrow I will continue writing. Good night ~

Great media products start trends. “Star Wars” showed studios there was money in toys. Harry Potter has educated publishers about appealing both to children and adults. It has taught studios how to make and sustain blockbuster franchises and how to deal with fans. Perhaps no children’s book series will match Ms Rowling’s for many years. Given the rise of digital media and piracy, Harry Potter may be seen as a high-water mark in the industry.
Yet there will be fresh surprises. Indeed, there has already been one. The books now being devoured on buses and trains concern a romance between a young woman and a vampire. Like the Harry Potter books, Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” first became popular in a place on the fringes of Hollywood’s consciousness: not Britain this time but America’s own “flyover states”. The four-book series by Ms Meyer has sold half as many copies in America as the Harry Potter series, according to Nielsen BookScan. Summit Entertainment has released two films, the second of which, “New Moon”, broke the American record for box-office sales in a single day. Harry Potter will not be easy to follow. But the boy wizard has lit the path.

Fans get up to much more. As the books and films took off, the hunger for Harry Potter news and content quickly became so much greater than Warner Bros or the increasingly press-shy Ms Rowling were able to supply that alternative sources began to spring up. The emerging internet fuelled their growth. The most obvious of them are fan websites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, which mix official announcements with rumours. But the most intriguing is the strange world of fan fiction.
Re-telling the Harry Potter story is a popular pastime. One website dedicated to it, Fiction Alley, added 14 book chapters in November 2009 alone, together with many shorter works. Would-be Rowlings push the Harry Potter story in new directions by focusing on different characters or writing about years not covered in the books. Many plunge into the characters’ romantic lives—perhaps the weakest point of “the canon”, as the original series of books is reverentially known. These amateur stories, which are often subjected to rigorous criticism from other fans, are for the most part competent. The students in them often talk the way teenagers actually talk. “I can’t just be an arse to him for no reason,” splutters Harry at one point in the third book in the “Lily’s Charm” series, by a writer called ObsidianEmbrace. That carries a convincing whiff of the playground.
As Harry Potter’s commercial footprint grew and fans’ activities became more commercial (some websites sell advertising), a clash became inevitable. By early 2001 Warner Bros’ lawyers were sending cease-and-desist letters to people running websites, many of them teenagers. The bigger websites fought back, writing ominously that forces “darker than He Who Must Not Be Named” were trying to spoil their fun. So began the Potter wars. Led by Heather Lawver, a 16-year-old from Virginia who showed a gift for media management, the insurgents forced the studio to back down. It continues to pursue some people who seek to profit from Potter. In October a London supper club had to cancel Harry Potter-themed events. The club held “Generic Wizard” nights instead.
Hollywood studios now understand that fans are not content to sit and passively absorb stories, and that they can wreck a film’s prospects if affronted. Led by a producer, George Lucas, enlightened talents have encouraged fans to play with characters and even provided bandwidth for their home-made films. Fans are also given privileged access to news. And it would be a foolish fantasy-film director who failed to turn up at Comic-Con, a nerdy convention in San Diego.

Then sales began to drop. Mattel said it sold $130m to $140m worth of toys the following year, when the second film was released. Children had their trinkets by that point: it is unnecessary to buy a figurine of Ron Weasley with detachable broomstick every time a Harry Potter film comes out. A downward trend in sales is also evident for the computer games made by Electronic Arts, which have sold a total of $427m in America, according to NPD, a market-research company. Over the years video-game players have become older—the average age is now 35, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Older players are less interested in games based on films.
A new opportunity to sell stuff looms. Next year “The Wizarding World of Harry Potter” will open in a Universal Studios theme park in Florida. Amateur pictures and videos of the construction site (there are hundreds on YouTube and fan websites) show several tall buildings, including a Hogwarts school. There will be three rides and drinks such as Butterbeer and pumpkin juice, together with “traditional British fare”. And there will apparently be a good deal of shopping.
Impressive though it is, this commercial empire is not the only one to be built on Ms Rowling’s creation. Alongside the legitimate one, a parasitic criminal enterprise churns out DVDs. There is also a mountain of paper comment, ranging from newspaper reviews to academic studies. Harry Potter has been subjected to religious critique (“The Gospel According to Harry Potter”), Marxist interpretation and feminist deconstruction (“Females and Harry Potter: Not All That Empowering”). America’s Library of Congress tallies some 100 books in English about the boy wizard.

Harry Potter was in the vanguard of a new approach to big-budget film-making. Most modern blockbuster franchises have two things in common: they are based on known properties such as books and comics, and they are steered by respected but little-known directors. The successful “Spider-Man” films are directed by Sam Raimi, a cult horror-film maker. Peter Jackson, a New Zealander, was asked to steer “Lord of the Rings”, the first instalment of which appeared a month after Harry Potter. Perhaps the best example of the new model is the revived “Batman” franchise, now in the care of an independent-film director, Christopher Nolan. It is again producing critical cheers and plenty of money for Warner Bros. None of these franchises revolves around a star actor, although all have created stars.
In Harry Potter’s case, creative experimentation is possible because of the rigorous control exerted over many aspects of the production. The team that has worked on the Harry Potter films is unusually stable. Mr Heyman and the lead designers have stayed put throughout. All but one of the screenplays have been written by Steve Kloves. Stimulated by a steady supply of complex work, local outfits like Double Negative and the Moving Picture Company have grown in competence and can now handle just about all the films’ special-effects needs. Even more unusually, some sets have been allowed to remain in Leavesden Studios for almost ten years. As Mr Heyman puts it, directors may shoot the action from different angles but they are filming the same Hogwarts. It is as though the auteur tradition has been fused with the industrial approach to film-making that was common practice in Hollywood before the war.
In 2000 Ms Rowling said her “worst nightmare” was that her hero would end up on the side of fast-food containers. He was to appear just about everywhere else. Warner Bros, which had been wary of being seen to spoil a revered series of books with tacky tie-ins, had no qualms about exploiting its own property. As the first film was released, in 2001, a merchandising blitz began. Shelves groaned under figurines, snow globes, beach towels and furniture. That year Mattel, which held the master toy licence, sold about $160m-worth of Harry Potter products.