All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

Cigarette Aficionado

"For male Chinese entrepreneurs, the give-and-take of cigarettes represents a kind of semaphore. There are some four hundred Chinese brands, each with a distinct identity and an unspoken exchange rate. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossoms. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city men. Low-level entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. A nouveau-riche businessman tosses out Chunghwas as if they were rice. Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was supposedly Deng Xiaoping's favorite brand, and government quotas make them hard to find."

- Peter Hessler from The New Yorker

A quick question, Monsieur Grumbach

"What is your
greatest ambition
in life?"



"To become
immortal,
and then die."

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

{o,o} {^,^} "Wise midnight bags! It is no honest and blunt
|)__) (__(| tu-whit tu- who of the poets, but, without jesting,
-"-"- -"-"- a most solemn graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the infernal groves...They are the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions."

- H.D. Thoreau

Sugar Bullets

"There are films on politics and there are political films."

"We mustn’t make what the Chinese call sugar bullets."