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–Probably A Good Movie — Apple – Movie Trailers – Tokyo Sonata

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a student in UP , if you are a film lover probably the best school in an exposure perspective here in the Philippines. We had a Japanese/French/Korean/Spanish festival sponsored by their embassy and other festivals sponsored by student orgs and ngo. Probably 4 to 5 years ago the theme of the Japanese Film Festival was films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and I’d have to say his films are dark and edgy, with some witty but still introspective moments. I remember the scenes and most of the scenes I remember are disturbing at best. I am excited to watch this.

Tokyo Sonata
In theaters: March 13, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Regent Releasing
Tokyo Sonata Poster
Set in contemporary Tokyo, TOKYO SONATA is a story of an ordinary Japanese family of four. The father, Ryuhei Sasaki, like any other Japanese businessman, is faithfully devoted to his work. His wife Megumi manages the house and struggles to retain a bond with Takashi, her oldest son who is in college, and the youngest, Kenji, a sensitive boy in elementary school. The quiet unraveling of the family begins when Ryuhei unexpectedly loses his job. Facing completely unfamiliar circumstances, he decides not to tell his family and begins his lonely sojourn into the world of the secretly unemployed. Along with many other businessmen that save face by concealing their shameful reality from family and friends, Ryuhei pretends to go to work each day, when, in fact, he kills time in libraries and parks. His lies and torment go unnoticed by Takashi, who becomes increasingly despondent and alienated from his family, and Megumi, who can no longer summon the will to keep her family together. Meanwhile, Kenji’s journey begins to mirror his father’s solitary plight. Although his father vehemently refuses to allow Kenji to play the piano, the boy uses his school lunch money to pay for clandestine lessons. What began as lies created as means to survive, gradually leads the family into unforeseeable destruction. In the hands of director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, renowned for his suspenseful films, this story probes the dark side of human nature and the social problems that confront contemporary Japan. Kurosawa’s portrayal of the breakdown and redemption of Japan’s “ordinary family” is every bit as gripping as his previous works.
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* Genre:Foreign, Drama
* Director:Kiyoshi Kurosawa
* Cast:Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa
Apple – Movie Trailers – Tokyo Sonata.

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-Hopeless Emptiness-Why I'm Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

I’ve always tried to walk my own path, this makes me seem weird to most people. I remember reading a phrase that stuck to me “The Age of Distraction”.  We are living in the age of distraction, what is it? Let’s see, watch revolutioinary road, and remember the scene between leo , kate and michael shannon. It was the Hopeless Emptiness Scene. And I would be lying if I sad that I am probably in that mobious strip trying to find my way out. Mobious strip and revolutionary road, seems quite apt. IN my defense at least I know I am in a mobius strip like road and I must be revolutionary enough to escape. (Damn hate it when I can’t seem to let a couple of words go). I try to fight , I don’t know if I am winning, I hope I do! I hope you do to!

When I think about all the hours I wasted this past year on Facebook, and imagine the good I could have done instead, it depresses me. Instead of scouring my friends’ friends’ photos for other possible friends, I could have been raising money for Darfur relief, helping out at the local animal shelter or delivering food to the homeless. It depresses me even more to know that I would never have done any of those things, even with all those extra hours.<Emphasis Mine>
Why I’m Quitting Facebook | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com.

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-rePost-Don't Know Why This Made Me Emotional-How Harvard Law threw down the gauntlet to the RIAA – Ars Technica

Law professor Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (which Nesson co-founded), made their position clear. “Recently, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, Cary Sherman, wrote to Harvard to challenge the university administration to stop acting as a ‘passive conduit’ for students downloading music,” they wrote in 2007. “We agree. Harvard and the 22 universities to which the RIAA has sent ‘pre-litigation notices’ ought to take strong, direct action… and tell the RIAA to take a hike.”
Those notices were an attempt by the RIAA to get schools involved in the litigation process. Universities would, in theory, pass RIAA settlement letters on to students after being provided with an IP address suspected of illicit file-sharing. The schools would be “doing their part,” while the recording industry got its missives delivered without needing to bother with courts and judges and subpoenas.
“Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process,” wrote Nesson and Palfrey. “The RIAA’s charter is to promote the financial interests of its corporate members—even if that means preserving an obsolete business model for its members. The university’s charter is quite different… The university strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA’s messages. It should do so only if it believes that’s consonant with the university’s mission.”
It wasn’t quite a declaration of war, but it did amount to an Army unit trotting out a massive howitzer, oiling it up, and firing off some test shots. Powerful interests at Harvard Law were displeased enough by the RIAA actions to speak out, but they weren’t yet ready to play an active role.
That is, until Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum got in touch with Nesson in 2008. Nesson took the case, acting as Tenenbaum’s attorney, but he outsourced the work of research, strategy, and brief writing to a set of eager Harvard Law students. The students would quickly mount an ambitious defense, not just of Joel Tenenbaum, but of the claim that the RIAA legal campaign was unconstitutionally excessive and improper. Armed with a law library, Twitter, a Web site, and caffeine, the students have already made sure that the upcoming Tenenbaum trial will eclipse the Minnesota Jammie Thomas case for sheer spectacle.<Emphasis Mine>
And, if things go their way, the world will get the chance to see it all live on the Web.
How Harvard Law threw down the gauntlet to the RIAA – Ars Technica.

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-"I wish I was still living in the past-Not" or "Things were better then-Not"-Well – The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity – NYTimes.com

I’m starting my own meme. I’ll call this the “I wish I was still living in the past-Not” or “Things were better then-Not” meme!

Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are also waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past. A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.
The rates also went down among younger teenagers. In 1995, about 20 percent said they had had sex before age 15, but by 2002 those numbers had dropped to 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys.
“There’s no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than they ever were,” said Kathleen A. Bogle, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. “But when you look at the data, that’s not the case.”
Well – The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity – NYTimes.com.

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Taking Control Of Your Own Health


Got the previous picture from mattew yglessias.
I’ve been battling weight problems all my life, I am not making excuses, Whatever I am before , now and what I will become is in my delusion to be because of the choices I make. As matt said I tend to focus myslef in the things that I can control, this is abias I must live with because there is no reason to worry myslef with the things I have no control over. I think what  I have to do is to reevaluate often if the things I previously thought to be beyond my control are now well within it!

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-rePost-Random Fact: Abe Lincoln Has A Patent-Inventive Abe | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine

Upon hearing the name Abraham Lincoln, many images may come to mind: rail-splitter, country lawyer, young congressman, embattled president, Great Emancipator, assassin’s victim, even the colossal face carved into Mount Rushmore. One aspect of this multidimensional man that probably doesn’t occur to anyone other than avid readers of Lincoln biographies (and Smithsonian) is that of inventor. Yet before he became the 16th president of the United States, Lincoln, who had a long fascination with how things worked, invented a flotation system for lifting riverboats stuck on sandbars.
Though his invention was never manufactured, it serves to give Lincoln yet another honor: he remains the only U.S. president to have a patent in his name. According to Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), Lincoln’s eminence and the historical rarity of his patent make the wooden model he submitted to the Patent Office “one of the half dozen or so most valuable things in our collection.”
Inventive Abe | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine.

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rePost-Sensible Drug Policies-Matthew Yglesias » By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs

Conversely, restrictions on marijuana use should be eased. I think it’s good that we don’t have a “marijuana industry” with slick marketing campaigns and lobbyists on the Hill, but letting people “grow your own” in the basement and smoke it in your house would help undercut serious criminal enterprises and let people have some relatively harmless fun.
Matthew Yglesias » By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs.

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Why Can't We Have A Better Press Corp (Inquirer.Net Edition)-BNPP revival based on ‘faulty economics’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

Hmm proofreaders/copy editors ? Damn this is another example of an organization that really doesn’t care much for the web.

GREENPEACE SAYS
BNPP revival based on ‘faulty economics’
By Amy R. Remo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:28:00 02/02/2009
Filed Under: Nuclear power, Protest
WB country director Bert Hofman declined to comment directly on the decision of the House of Representatives to clear the Filipino contractors permanently debarred from bidding for bank-financed projects.
“We’re quite confident that due process has taken place,” Hofman said at the sidelines of the yearend assessment of the Kalahi poverty alleviation program, an initiative of the government and the World Bank.
The bank’s internal investigation concluded that the three firms and two Chinese firms engaged in collusive practices to rig the bid.
“In response to questions, I elaborate on the process of investigation and evaluation and the sanctions of the Board,” Hofman said.
Hofman defended their investigation as a “very long and very careful” process, designed by the World Bank staff.
The process was approved by the stakeholders of the World Bank, including the Philippines, Hofman pointed out.
Eduardo de Luna, owner of the E.C. De Luna Construction Corp. which was banned permanently by the World Bank, denied in the two congressional hearings that he colluded with other Filipino and Chinese companies in rigging the bidding for a $33-million road project.
On January 14, the World Bank released a statement, which said it had banned the Filipino and Chinese contractors “for engaging in collusive practices under a major WB-financed roads project in the Philippines.”
Leonard McCarthy, World Bank Integrity vice president, said in the statement that this incident was “one of our most important and far-reaching cases, and it highlights the effectiveness of the World Bank’s investigative and sanctions process.”
“As the World Bank Group continues to ramp up its anti-corruption work, INT (Integrity Vice Presidency) will remain vigilant in investigating allegations and holding wrongdoers accountable,” McCarthy said.
According to the statement, the INT is “responsible for investigating allegations of fraud and corruption in Bank-financed operations.”
BNPP revival based on ‘faulty economics’ – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost–The Winner Stands Alone : My comments on the book by Paulo Coelho at Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Excellent read

The Winner Stands Alone : My comments on the book by Paulo Coelho
by Paulo Coelho on January 23, 2009
FOLLOW MY DREAM – BUT WHICH ONE?
One of the recurrent themes of my books is the importance of paying the price of your dreams. But to what extent can our dreams be manipulated? For the past decades, we lived in a culture that privileged fame, money, power – and most of the people were led to believe that these were the real values that we should pursue.
We all should be a “winner”. Not in the sense of someone who finally wins what is important to his/her life. Not in the sense that happiness is the most valuable gift on Earth – and it can be attained here and now, when your work fulfills your heart. We should be a winner in the sense that the system portraits a successful person: celebrity, influence, photos in glossy magazines, behaving like the masters of the universe.
Yes, you may reach the goal society has fed you – but will you be satisfied? Will you be whole? Will you be in peace? This cycle of possession never ends – because the moment that you think that you have reached your goal another desire creeps in. And how can you find rest when it is the hunt that moves you?
The Winner Stands Alone : My comments on the book by Paulo Coelho at Paulo Coelho’s Blog.