Monday, December 25, 2006
Monday, October 09, 2006
Ashlyn's First Week
| Welcome to My 1st week of life! | |
Sunday, September 10, 2006
just a gag
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
When I was young and growing up, I was a country pumpkin who didn’t know anything, and I really mean it. I remember that we lived in places like that didn’t even have electricity. But when I was 5 I moved to Hong Kong, and then I experienced what electricity was like. It was like light in my life! It was something very new for sure. Back in Canton, out home used those kerosene lamps, and then to come to Hong Kong where all of a sudden you flip this switch and out comes the light! It was amazing!!
With electricity, you could use the radio. It was in the 1960s, and I remember we had one of those square box radios, kind of like a toaster, and you got two knobs that you tune in, and it was just an old, old radio. You would hear ghost stories and I remember funny stories and soap operas. It was fun, it was really fun, we enjoyed sitting around listening to it. Sound was coming out of nowhere, because you didn’t know much about the radio and how it works, so it was really somewhat amazing. We were still in HK at the time. And with the radio, you got to know more of what was happening around the community and city. I mean we were quite narrow-minded back then. We had funnies and world news for the most part. I personally liked the soap opera type stories. It wasn’t like today’s soap operas though. It was a wholesome. I liked it because there was a guy that did it really well. He would imitate the man’s voice, the woman’s voice, the grandma’s voice and the children’s voice. It was great to hear him. His name was “You and Me” which is the direct translation from Chinese.
The radio and hearing the news changed your whole perspective. You now knew more about what is going on in the world, and even at my young age you would analyze the situations. Knowledge is power, and if you don’t have knowledge you can’t analyze the situation. Now we were exposed to all these new things. Newspapers were popular at the time as well but for younger children and teenagers we didn’t read it that much. We were relatively poor, so radio was a substitute of the paper, and because we didn’t have a lot of money so it was hard to buy a paper each day. We would get one every now and then but it wasn’t always worth the money you had to pay. In addition, to be able to read the newspaper in Chinese you needed to have a pretty big vocabulary, and you need to know at least 3000 characters to understand what it was saying. But when you’re 9 or 10 years old, you still have a hard time reading the paper because you are still learning the characters. So in radio you don’t need to learn how to read, and you can hear it more often. Education was a rare thing for us too.
In 1965 was when I first encountered the television. We lived in Hong Kong and it was black and white. They were expensive and there were only 2 stations, maybe even just one station actually. It was very limited, but still very interesting. It was very interesting because all of a sudden you’re not just hearing, but you’re also seeing things. It was the power of audio and visual. To see and hear is inseparable. You know you used to think, wow, I can listen to the radio and from nowhere hear things, but to see the television and to hear as well, it was even greater! At the time you didn’t understand where it was coming from, because you didn’t know the station and how it worked, but at the time you thought it was coming out from the air. It was like magic. We watched rediffision, which was a very limited cable. There weren’t any game shows, but there were a lot of human-interest things, and they talked about things, always telling it in a story format. And of course there were kung-fu movies!! We watched things in series too. They didn’t have single shows like they do today. They would always have things that would end with “to be continued.” That was how they hooked you to the television so you wouldn’t get off of it. They would always start a series and it would last maybe two months, but during that time they would start another one, so you wouldn’t keep getting hooked into these series. So if they got you interested you wouldn’t want to leave it. Shows didn’t last for more than a few months and there was none of this season stuff. Oh yeah, there were also sports too; there was soccer, which was a big thing in Hong Kong. I didn’t watch television that much, only when I went to my friend’s place because we didn’t have it in our house. But whenever I went there we would watch television. In fact, not until after I left home did they start to have a television.
When we were first married, I think we bought our own first television, a Zenith I think, it was a big cabinet thing. It was just like a box. We saved that money to buy one because we felt it would be important for the kids to watch Sesame Street, and of course I liked television a lot too. It wasn’t as shocking, because I already had been exposed to it. The programming is very different (when comparing China to America). It’s hard to do a comparison, because I was in Hong Kong. In HK programming was different than it is here in America. It’s in Chinese there and English here. It also portrayed different ideas and there was a different way to present it. There was a big cultural difference. I think the way people try to present themselves and organize their programming and the content, even sports, though it’s quite universal, is different in all places, so it’s hard to compare.
The most amazing thing I saw on television was when man landed on the moon, and it’s still the most amazing thing that I can remember. Man went to a place where man has never been before. Something that you have never seen before and they broadcast it to you in your living room. It was really amazing. I remember it vividly—Armstrong taking his first step. The excitement was in seeing it, we are visual beings and we like to see things. A lot of people like television over radio because you can see it and you can hear it instead of just hearing it. A description from someone else can be different in someone else’s perception, but to see it with your own eyes, it would be different if someone were trying to describe it. 1969 was an exciting year for me in terms of the media because of man landing on the moon. You know you see sports and everything, it was not unusual, but to actually see a man landing on the moon, man that was exciting. And it happened thousands of miles away and could be seen by people here on earth. So to see it, it was amazing. In terms of television history, I think that was the most exciting thing.
When I saw color television that was also amazing, because we were so conditioned to black and white. Because in black and white if you don’t adjust it right, it’s not that great to look at, even though it’s better than nothing. Even in 1970 I was still watching black and white. So when I first saw color television in the United States, it was just really exciting because you saw real color, you saw the person’s face and it was color!! It was fresh skin tones, and you could see blue eyes, and it was the actual image itself. In the past you had to imagine it, so when they say someone had blue eyes you just had to believe it, because what you saw didn’t match their description, but now you could see it. Even back then color television wasn’t that good, but it was still incredible. Nowadays technology is better than it was before so it is snappier, you definitely get a better image. Now I have 3 television sets and they are all from different years. They are from1979, 1984, and 1994. We can definitely see the difference in the three of them. And today with digital television there is a big difference from analog television.
Despite the wonders of the media, it’s only a very narrow thing of what is going on. You only see a little bit of the whole picture. It’s very deceptive, and you don’t see everything. You have tight shots and wide shots, and it’s just deceptive. I remember watching a tight shot of the soldiers in Iraq pulling down the Saddam statue and when it was tight it looked like hundreds if not thousands of people were there. However, when they went to the wide-angle shot, there were only maybe 50 people. So it can be very deceptive. And of course today’s programming is not very moral. Another example of how it’s deceptive was when we lived in Edmonton, Alberta. They showed pictures of the aftermath of a tornado that damaged areas of the city, and the media portrayed it as the city in chaos and destruction, though that wasn’t the case. We had people and family from all over the world calling to ask if we were okay, and of course we were, but that’s not what they saw on the television. So you never get the complete picture from the media, which you have to watch out for.
With electricity, you could use the radio. It was in the 1960s, and I remember we had one of those square box radios, kind of like a toaster, and you got two knobs that you tune in, and it was just an old, old radio. You would hear ghost stories and I remember funny stories and soap operas. It was fun, it was really fun, we enjoyed sitting around listening to it. Sound was coming out of nowhere, because you didn’t know much about the radio and how it works, so it was really somewhat amazing. We were still in HK at the time. And with the radio, you got to know more of what was happening around the community and city. I mean we were quite narrow-minded back then. We had funnies and world news for the most part. I personally liked the soap opera type stories. It wasn’t like today’s soap operas though. It was a wholesome. I liked it because there was a guy that did it really well. He would imitate the man’s voice, the woman’s voice, the grandma’s voice and the children’s voice. It was great to hear him. His name was “You and Me” which is the direct translation from Chinese.
The radio and hearing the news changed your whole perspective. You now knew more about what is going on in the world, and even at my young age you would analyze the situations. Knowledge is power, and if you don’t have knowledge you can’t analyze the situation. Now we were exposed to all these new things. Newspapers were popular at the time as well but for younger children and teenagers we didn’t read it that much. We were relatively poor, so radio was a substitute of the paper, and because we didn’t have a lot of money so it was hard to buy a paper each day. We would get one every now and then but it wasn’t always worth the money you had to pay. In addition, to be able to read the newspaper in Chinese you needed to have a pretty big vocabulary, and you need to know at least 3000 characters to understand what it was saying. But when you’re 9 or 10 years old, you still have a hard time reading the paper because you are still learning the characters. So in radio you don’t need to learn how to read, and you can hear it more often. Education was a rare thing for us too.
In 1965 was when I first encountered the television. We lived in Hong Kong and it was black and white. They were expensive and there were only 2 stations, maybe even just one station actually. It was very limited, but still very interesting. It was very interesting because all of a sudden you’re not just hearing, but you’re also seeing things. It was the power of audio and visual. To see and hear is inseparable. You know you used to think, wow, I can listen to the radio and from nowhere hear things, but to see the television and to hear as well, it was even greater! At the time you didn’t understand where it was coming from, because you didn’t know the station and how it worked, but at the time you thought it was coming out from the air. It was like magic. We watched rediffision, which was a very limited cable. There weren’t any game shows, but there were a lot of human-interest things, and they talked about things, always telling it in a story format. And of course there were kung-fu movies!! We watched things in series too. They didn’t have single shows like they do today. They would always have things that would end with “to be continued.” That was how they hooked you to the television so you wouldn’t get off of it. They would always start a series and it would last maybe two months, but during that time they would start another one, so you wouldn’t keep getting hooked into these series. So if they got you interested you wouldn’t want to leave it. Shows didn’t last for more than a few months and there was none of this season stuff. Oh yeah, there were also sports too; there was soccer, which was a big thing in Hong Kong. I didn’t watch television that much, only when I went to my friend’s place because we didn’t have it in our house. But whenever I went there we would watch television. In fact, not until after I left home did they start to have a television.
When we were first married, I think we bought our own first television, a Zenith I think, it was a big cabinet thing. It was just like a box. We saved that money to buy one because we felt it would be important for the kids to watch Sesame Street, and of course I liked television a lot too. It wasn’t as shocking, because I already had been exposed to it. The programming is very different (when comparing China to America). It’s hard to do a comparison, because I was in Hong Kong. In HK programming was different than it is here in America. It’s in Chinese there and English here. It also portrayed different ideas and there was a different way to present it. There was a big cultural difference. I think the way people try to present themselves and organize their programming and the content, even sports, though it’s quite universal, is different in all places, so it’s hard to compare.
The most amazing thing I saw on television was when man landed on the moon, and it’s still the most amazing thing that I can remember. Man went to a place where man has never been before. Something that you have never seen before and they broadcast it to you in your living room. It was really amazing. I remember it vividly—Armstrong taking his first step. The excitement was in seeing it, we are visual beings and we like to see things. A lot of people like television over radio because you can see it and you can hear it instead of just hearing it. A description from someone else can be different in someone else’s perception, but to see it with your own eyes, it would be different if someone were trying to describe it. 1969 was an exciting year for me in terms of the media because of man landing on the moon. You know you see sports and everything, it was not unusual, but to actually see a man landing on the moon, man that was exciting. And it happened thousands of miles away and could be seen by people here on earth. So to see it, it was amazing. In terms of television history, I think that was the most exciting thing.
When I saw color television that was also amazing, because we were so conditioned to black and white. Because in black and white if you don’t adjust it right, it’s not that great to look at, even though it’s better than nothing. Even in 1970 I was still watching black and white. So when I first saw color television in the United States, it was just really exciting because you saw real color, you saw the person’s face and it was color!! It was fresh skin tones, and you could see blue eyes, and it was the actual image itself. In the past you had to imagine it, so when they say someone had blue eyes you just had to believe it, because what you saw didn’t match their description, but now you could see it. Even back then color television wasn’t that good, but it was still incredible. Nowadays technology is better than it was before so it is snappier, you definitely get a better image. Now I have 3 television sets and they are all from different years. They are from1979, 1984, and 1994. We can definitely see the difference in the three of them. And today with digital television there is a big difference from analog television.
Despite the wonders of the media, it’s only a very narrow thing of what is going on. You only see a little bit of the whole picture. It’s very deceptive, and you don’t see everything. You have tight shots and wide shots, and it’s just deceptive. I remember watching a tight shot of the soldiers in Iraq pulling down the Saddam statue and when it was tight it looked like hundreds if not thousands of people were there. However, when they went to the wide-angle shot, there were only maybe 50 people. So it can be very deceptive. And of course today’s programming is not very moral. Another example of how it’s deceptive was when we lived in Edmonton, Alberta. They showed pictures of the aftermath of a tornado that damaged areas of the city, and the media portrayed it as the city in chaos and destruction, though that wasn’t the case. We had people and family from all over the world calling to ask if we were okay, and of course we were, but that’s not what they saw on the television. So you never get the complete picture from the media, which you have to watch out for.
