JarJar Nixon's Blues Kitchen

Sorry to repeat a photo from last year, but at the end of September it will be the big holiday for Korea, the harvest festival, called Chusok. So here's an early happy Chusok to you!

USAID

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 23, 2007
Press Office: 202-712-4310
Public Information: 202-712-4810
www.usaid.gov

USAID Provides Flood Assistance to Vietnam

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is providing $50,000 to CARE International, a leading international non-governmental organization, to support emergency relief efforts in flood-affected districts of central Vietnam.

On Aug. 21, U.S. Ambassador Michael W. Michalak declared a disaster due to the effects of the flooding.  According to the Government of Vietnam (GVN), the floods and landslides have killed 74 people, destroyed 1,800 houses and damaged more than 170,000 houses, schools, and health clinics.   

In early August, heavy monsoon rains exacerbated by Typhoon Pabuk resulted in contaminated water sources, damaged rice crops and an estimated $124 million in damage throughout 15 provinces in the central part of the country.  The GVN and the provincial-level authorities have responded to the flooding by providing food and medical supplies, rebuilding houses, and clearing debris. 

USAID is closely monitoring the situation and will provide additional assistance if needed.
For more information about USAID emergency humanitarian assistance programs, please visit: www.usaid.gov/our_work/humanitarian_assistance/disaster_assistance/.

Agence France Presse -- English

August 21, 2007 Tuesday 11:32 AM GMT

Vietnam jails eight men for poisoning tiger

DATELINE: HANOI, Aug 21 2007

A Vietnamese court has jailed eight men for up to 11 and a half years
for poisoning a tiger to sell its body parts for use in traditional
Asian medicine, a court official said Tuesday.

The men, aged 23 to 39, were arrested in June last year after they broke
into a military-owned farm, killed the caged tiger, cut it into two
pieces and carried off the remains, said deputy judge Le Van Sua.

"We found the defendants guilty of theft and violating regulations on
the preservation of precious wildlife. They were also ordered to pay a
fine of
448 million dong (28,000 dollars)," he said.

The shortest prison term given was seven and a half years, said the
judge after the five-day trial that ended Monday in southern Tien Giang
province.

Bones of tigers -- listed under the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, to which Vietnam is a
signatory -- have been used to treat rheumatism and other ailments for
thousands of years in China and other Asian countries.

Only about 100 tigers are believed to be living in the wild in Vietnam.

Bob Dylan

Billboard.com
August 21, 2007, 11:55 AM ET

Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.
Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello will hit the road for a 13-date fall tour together, beginning Sept. 22 in Duluth, Ga. Amos Lee will also perform; for Costello, the dates comprise his first solo performances since 1995. Presale tickets for some shows are available now through Dylan's Web site.

Dylan is presently in the midst of a short Australia and New Zealand and run, and will also perform Sept. 16 at the Austin City Limits festival in Austin, Texas. As previously reported, he will be the subject of the 51-track, three-disc retrospective "Dylan," due Oct. 1 via Columbia.

Before the Dylan shows, Costello is playing dates with Steve Nieve as well as local symphony orchestras in such markets as Nashville, Cary, N.C., and Minneapolis.

Here are Dylan/Costello's tour dates:

Sept. 22: Duluth, Ga. (Gwinnett Center)
Sept. 23: Clemson, S.C. (Littlejohn Coliseum)
Sept. 25: Norfolk, Va. (Convocation Center)
Sept. 27: Charlottesville, Va. (John Paul Jones Arena)
Sept. 28: Columbia, Md. (Merriweather Post Pavilion)
Sept. 29: Kingston, R.I. (Ryan Center)
Sept. 30: Bridgeport, Conn. (Arena at Harbor Yard)
Oct. 2: Worcester, Mass. (DCU Center)
Oct. 4: Portland, Maine (Cumberland County Civic Center)
Oct. 5: Manchester, N.H. (Verizon Wireless Arena)
Oct. 6: Albany, N.Y. (Times Union Center)
Oct. 8: Syracuse, N.Y. (War Memorial)
Oct. 9: Rochester, N.Y. (Gordon Field House)

BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific - Political
Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring

August 19, 2007 Sunday

Vietnamese PM approves visa exemption for overseas Vietnamese

LENGTH: 361 words

Text of report in English by Vietnamese news agency VNA website

[VNA Report: "Visa Exemption for Overseas Vietnamese To Go Ahead"]

[Text disseminated as received without OSC editorial intervention]

Hanoi (VNA) -Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on August 17 gave the nod to
a new regulation that will grant visa exemptions to Overseas Vietnamese
from September 1.

Ethnically Vietnamese people that hold foreign passports and foreign
nationals who are their husbands, wives and children will benefit from
the new policy.

A certificate must be obtained by the passport holders for the exemption
to be utilised. The certificate will be valid for five years. Overseas
Vietnamese will be granted a maximum of 90-day length of stay with
extensions available inside the country.

In order to be granted visa exemption certificates at Vietnamese
representative offices abroad, overseas Vietnamese need to submit one of
three following documents: a document that proves they are ethnically
Vietnamese; a guarantee by overseas Vietnamese associations based in the
country where they are residents of or by a Vietnamese citizen; and a
document by authorised foreign agencies certifying that they are
ethnically Vietnamese.

Husbands, wives and children of Vietnamese people living abroad will
also need to submit documents that prove their relationship to the
Vietnamese member of their immediate family.

Expecting a rush on representative offices abroad, the Committee for
Overseas Vietnamese has sent 200,000 visa exemption certificates to
Vietnamese embassies overseas.

The move to exempt visas for overseas Vietnamese is part of the
Government's efforts to speed up the implementation of the Politburo's
Resolution No 36 on tasks relating to overseas Vietnamese. The visas
exemption policy was announced by President Nguyen Minh Triet during his
visit to the US on June this year.

According to the Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, there are currently
close to three million overseas Vietnamese who have mostly settled in
the US, France, Australia and Canada. Around 500,000 overseas Vietnamese
return to Vietnam each year.-Enditem

Source: VNA news agency website, Hanoi, in English 19 Aug 07

Le Vu's Viet Weekly newspaper endures OC's latest anti-communist witch-hunt
By Nick Schou
Thursday, August 16, 2007 - 3:00 pm
The white pickup carries two life-sized mannequins suspended from ropes tied around their necks. One has hollow, scratched-out eyes, a wispy beard, and an olive-drab pith helmet and faded green uniform. A yard-long arrow protrudes from his belly. His partner wears a gray business suit and slumps forward on his noose, head lolling forward. American and South Vietnamese flags tied to either side of the pickup’s cab prop up the grisly display.

Signs stapled to the red-spattered clothes identify the first dummy as Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese revolutionary who led his country in wars against colonial France and the United States. The second effigy is of Nguyen Cao Ky, a former South Vietnamese vice president and air force pilot who fought Ho’s troops but now plays a key role in America’s political rapprochement with Vietnam.

Every five minutes, as the pickup passes by, a roar erupts from several hundred people waving South Vietnamese and American flags. They have come in droves on this tree-lined block of Garden Grove’s historic Main Street to surround the shuttered offices of the Viet Weekly, a Vietnamese-language newspaper whose handful of employees have taken the day off. It’s just after 2 p.m. on July 21, and the biggest anti-communist demonstration in nearly a decade in OC’s Little Saigon, the largest community of Vietnamese exiles in the world, has just begun.

Spurred on by a constant barrage of negative press and impassioned denunciations in Little Saigon’s myriad newspapers, radio stations and television programs, the protesters want to send a message to Viet Weekly—and particularly its publisher, Le Vu—that the magazine is not welcome in Orange County. They’ve heard word that editorials printed in the newspaper have praised Ho Chi Minh as a world leader and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a justifiable response to American imperialist aggression. Some in the crowd suspect Le Vu and his employees are actually communist agents sent by the Vietnamese government to infiltrate Little Saigon. A week earlier, California Assemblyman Van Thai Tran told a crowd of protest organizers at Westmister’s Civic Center that the FBI had been investigating the communist inflitration of Little Saigon’s media since 2003. Although he didn’t mention Viet Weekly by name, that year happens to coincide with the newspaper’s inaugural issue….

More at
http://www.ocweekly.com/features/features/red-scare-in-little-saigon/27598/

Amazing! the original on the road scroll is now out as a book. see the parts in the article demythologizing the writing of it. not teletype paper, not fueled by drugs etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Sante2-t-1.html?ex=1188187200&en=e230cbb30c8a46e9&ei=5070&emc=eta1


NYT
August 19, 2007
On the Road Again

By LUC SANTE
ON THE ROAD


The Original Scroll.


By Jack Kerouac. Edited by Howard Cunnell.

408 pp. Viking. $25.95.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac feverishly pounded out the first draft of “On the Road” in three weeks on a single huge roll of paper. This believe-it-or-not item earns a place on the heroic roster of spontaneous literary combustions — Stendhal writing “The Charterhouse of Parma” in 52 days, for example. It also stands alongside the image of Jackson Pollock — in the series of photographs taken of him by Hans Namuth just a few months before Kerouac’s siege of the typewriter — dripping and flinging and flecking paint on a horizontal canvas, fighting and dancing his work into being. Writing is not usually thought of as excessively physical, which is why some writers feel the need to compensate by racing bulls or whatever, but feeding that 120-foot roll through the typewriter seems like a feat of strength. Most writers merely produce effete works on paper, you might say, but Kerouac went and wrestled with the tree itself.

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

In some ways, the differences are minor. “On the Road” in all of its versions is the story of a series of cross-country trips made by Kerouac between 1948 and 1950 — “trips” rather than “travels,” because they are all about covering ground, whether by hitchhiking, by bus or by drive-away car. The cardinal points are New York City, Denver and San Francisco, with spikes down to New Orleans, the San Joaquin Valley and finally Mexico. The trips are sometimes motored by impatience — if only the Rockies began on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel! — but most often Kerouac revels in speed as an ecstatic medium, a way of concentrating as much experience and as many aesthetic and spiritual highs as possible into a week or less. Essential to the whole enterprise is Kerouac’s relationship with Neal Cassady (called Dean Moriarty in the novel), who is one of the greatest characters in American literature without any need for imaginative tinkering on the part of the author.

A writer sufficiently attuned to an idea can find all the materials required for its fulfillment lying around in the street. Kerouac, a working-class French Canadian boy from Massachusetts who won a football scholarship to Columbia but decided before long that he was less interested in sports than in writing, had given evidence of his obsession with the road as early as 1940. Meeting Neal Cassady, though, made it possible for him to write the mid-20th century’s answer to “Huckleberry Finn.” Cassady, with his need to move, his vast yahooing enthusiasm and his insatiable priapic drive, could have stepped out of Western legend. That he compulsively stole cars instead of guiding wagon trains and achieved enlightenment in bebop clubs rather than medicine lodges was merely a function of history. But he wasn’t a primitive, and was rather more than a found object. He read books and wrote sometimes spectacular letters, and he was more on top of the zeitgeist than his big-city admirers. He was a born hero and a euphoric lover of the world, who gave the Beats their soul, saving them — if just barely — from choking on their own mysticism.

In “On the Road” he is the love object, as Kerouac chases him from one coast to the other, and as well as being Kerouac’s Huck he is also his Virgil and his Dr. Johnson. He is the book’s biggest voice, a matter much more apparent in the scroll, where the voice is allowed to wail and swoop and riff without the commas that hobble it in the novel. For example: “Jack when I was working for the New Era Laundry in Los Angeles 1945 I made a trip to Indianapolis Indiana for the express purpose of seeing the Memorial Day races hitch hiking by day and stealing cars by night to make time. I was coming thru one of these towns we passed with a set of license plates under my shirt when a sheriff picked me up on suspicion.” It may not be immediately apparent from a brief excerpt out of context how the lack of punctuation replicates the speaking voice — the frantic rush of 16th-notes that will finally be punctuated halfway down the page by a thunderous “Yes!” or “Yass!” Not only did the editors of the novel add six unnecessary commas, but Kerouac himself can be charged with interpolating one sentence, two phrases, and an adjective (the sheriff is “nosy,” he “accosted” Moriarty “on the main drag,” and the plates are somehow intended for legitimate use) that groom and housebreak the character as well as his jazz.

Besides changing all the names (arguably necessary for legal reasons) and cutting or veiling the depictions of sex (very necessary in 1957), Kerouac altered the scroll to make it a novel mostly by garnishing it with sprigs and drizzles of literature. One of the most famous passages in the novel appears here — the ellipses are Kerouac’s — as “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.” In the novel he inserts “mad to be saved,” while the roman candles become “fabulous” and they are “exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ ” Concerned that he might not have sufficiently overegged the pudding, Kerouac then adds, “What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” None of this sort of eager-beaver poeticizing litters the scroll, which just keeps its head down and runs, and is all the more authentically literary thereby.

In the scroll the use of the word “holy” must be 80 percent less than in the novel, and psalmodic references to the author’s unique generation are down by at least two-thirds; uses of the word “beat,” for that matter, clearly favor the exhausted over the beatific. While such things may not assist the Kerouac legend or brand name, they help the book immeasurably. The scroll clarifies the book’s connection to the past — to Mark Twain and tramp narratives and Woody Guthrie and cowboy sagas — and underlines the features it shares with its nearest contemporaneous cultural relative, Robert Frank’s great photographic road book “The Americans.” The novel that “On the Road” became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time.

Luc Sante is the author of, most recently, “Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005” and the editor and translator of Félix Fénéon’s “Novels in Three Lines.”

NYT
August 19, 2007
At Nail Salons, Beauty Treatments Can Have a Distinctly Unglamorous Side

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Happy Lee can hardly believe that the nail salon across the street from hers
charges just $7 for a manicure.

"I don't know how they can make it," said Ms. Lee, the owner of Happy Beauty
Salon in Carle Place, on Long Island, which employs nine manicurists.

Ms. Lee said her industry had been thrown into turmoil by a wave of new
salons that have taken away business and driven down prices — from high-end
nail emporiums on the Upper East Side to low-cost shops in suburban strip
malls. Competition is so intense, she said, that her salon still charges $8
for manicures Monday through Wednesday, the same price it charged when it
opened in 1984.

"When we opened, it was easy to make it, but now it's very hard," she said.

Nationwide, the number of salons has doubled over the past decade, according
to Nails Magazine, an industry publication, lifting the number to 3,800 in
New York State and to 2,600 in New Jersey.

As the number of nail salons has surged, Chinese immigrants have poured into
the industry in New York and New Jersey, which has long been dominated by
Korean immigrants, like Ms. Lee. These Chinese manicurists often work for
low wages, helping salon owners hold down their expenses and prices.

These low prices are a boon to the many women and more and more men who have
weekly manicures not just to look good, but also to feel good.

"Nail salons have expanded because there's a lot more attention to fine
grooming," said Cyndy Drummey, the editor of Nails Magazine. "It's a
low-cost, good-feeling thing that's accessible to everybody."

But the demand has taken a toll on many salon workers, advocates for the
workers said. Owners often force employees to work 60 hours a week while
failing to pay overtime or allow lunch breaks. And lower prices mean lower
tips for workers who spend their days cutting cuticles and painting on
polish.

Beyond wage problems, many manicurists say their job requires using harmful
chemicals that often cause allergic reactions, breathing problems and
rashes. In one extreme case, a manicurist in New Jersey was set on fire
after chemical fumes in her shop burst into flames.

"We're seeing more abuses over wages, dangerous chemicals and safety," said
Nancy Eng, an organizer with the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, an
advocacy group for immigrant workers. Concerns about such abuses have led to
stepped-up efforts to confront salon owners.

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has sued two salons near
Lincoln Center, accusing them of violating overtime laws. Several city and
state lawmakers have joined with the Chinese Staff and Workers' Association
to create an alliance that will push for stricter air quality regulations at
salons and screen workers for health problems.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency has distributed more than
$200,000 in grants and published brochures seeking to minimize chemical
exposures that could harm salon workers and customers. And the federal
Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the salon in
Hillsdale, N.J., where a manicurist caught fire and was critically injured
on May 30.

"She looked like a marshmallow on fire," said Russell Andrews, the owner of
a nearby shop who helped extinguish the flames.

Yuki Lin, a 27-year-old immigrant from China, said her salon in Jamaica,
Queens, did not pay her any wages during her first three weeks, and then
paid her just $20 per day for the next three weeks. Like many manicurists,
she typically worked 10 hours a day, six days a week. Often on busy days,
she said, she could not take a lunch break until 5 p.m.

Her boss ultimately raised her pay to $70 a day, not including the $15 or so
she received in tips. But she quit last October because she was convinced
that a rash covering her face was caused by one or more of the solvents,
primers, polishes, glues and acrylics used at the salon.

"It was very red, and there were all these bumps," Ms. Lin said. "My husband
said I should quit. When I complained to my boss about it last summer, he
said it was just a seasonal allergy. He didn't want me to quit because the
salon was very busy at the time.

"I spent $1,000 out of my own pocket to see doctors about the rash," she
added. "It finally started going away a few months after I left."

In a 2004 survey of salon employees in New York City, 37 percent said they
often or sometimes had skin problems, 37 percent said they suffered from eye
irritation, 57 percent from allergies, 66 percent from neck or back
discomfort and 18 percent from asthma. For the survey, 100 workers were
interviewed by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health and
a Korean workers' group, Empowering the Korean American Community.

"There are a lot of toxic products, and there's often very poor
ventilation," said Dr. George Friedman-Jiménez, director of the Bellevue/New
York University Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic. Many salon
chemicals cause skin problems, he said, and nail dust and fumes from glues
and acrylics used to make artificial nails can cause breathing problems.

He said his clinic hopes to work with salon owners and state officials to
test air quality and screen manicurists for health problems.

Lisa Huang, who works at a salon in the Bronx, said the chemical smell
sometimes nauseates her. "Of course, I'm concerned about the dangers," she
said, "but I need to work and make a living."

An example of the industry's growing tensions can usually be seen on Fridays
on the West Side of Manhattan, where protesters picket outside a salon at
Amsterdam Avenue and 67th Street. One protester, Do Yea Kim, a Korean
immigrant who worked for 17 years at the salon, 167 Nail Plaza, has filed a
lawsuit accusing the salon of not paying her overtime and not giving her
lunch breaks, as required by state law.

"The owner made it hard because there were no breaks," said Ms. Kim, who
said she worked most days from 9:15 a.m. to 8 p.m. She said she earned $460
a week, and at least $200 more in tips.

Dong Rim Park, the salon's owner, said Ms. Kim's allegations were false. "Of
course we give lunch breaks," she said, pointing to several employees who
were on breaks because the shop was not busy.

Ms. Park said that she was not an expert on overtime laws, but that she
always paid at least the minimum wage. "The workers and I agreed on what
they would be paid, and no one ever protested about overtime," she said.

She said the weekly protests were hurting her business and her employees'
incomes. "Business was already tough before all this happened," said Ms.
Park, a Korean immigrant who opened her salon in 1985. "There are many more
nail salons than Starbucks, but not nearly as many people have manicures as
drink coffee."

More than 80 percent of the salons in the New York-New Jersey area are
Korean-owned, according to industry experts. In California, by contrast, an
estimated three-fourths of salon owners and workers are Vietnamese. The
Vietnamese community there has been far more outspoken about safety problems
than the Korean community has been in New York.

Ms. Lee, the salon owner on Long Island, said many Koreans went into the
business because entry costs are relatively low, with entrepreneurs able to
open salons for $50,000 to $100,000. Asian immigrants, whether Koreans two
decades ago or Chinese today, often become manicurists because the job
requires little English and only a few weeks of training.

"It's hard now to get Korean workers, so we hire Chinese a lot of the time,"
said Ms. Lee, who is co-chairwoman of the Korean American Nail Association
of New York.

"I want to put my daughter in the business, but no way she wants to do
that," she said, adding that her daughter was in college and wanted to
become a teacher. "They don't want to do this any more, the younger
generation."

_________________________________________________________________
Find a local pizza place, movie theater, and more….then map the best route!

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&ss=yp.bars~yp.pizza~yp.movie%20theater&cp=42.358996~-71.056691&style=r&lvl=13&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=950607&encType=1&FORM=MGAC01

Marketing guru Philip Kotler comes to Vietnam
Local dailies
Marketing guru Philip Kotler has arrived in HCMC to preside at an international marketing conference to be held here today. More than 700 leading enterprises from Vietnam and regional countries will be represented by their CEOs and chief marketing officers at the “New Marketing for New Age” conference. Chairman of the World Marketing Association Hermawan Kartajaya will also speak at the convention.

The Financial Times selected Kotler as the number four management guru of all time behind Jack Welch, Bill Gates, and Peter Drucker.   

Having live boiled octopus stew back in Seoul...

Josh Johnston recording his new song at Craig Poland's studio

Cal, Josh and John at Durham NC's rib place, the Q Shack