Significant Scribbles III

Chinese Team Searches Museums for Art Treasures

ianshortreed — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:26:56 +0000

Insightful article with probably one of the better quotes of the year:

“China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids. It has suddenly become big but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”

Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese studies at Duke University.

December 17, 2009

Chinese Team Searches Museums for Art Treasures

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/asia/17china.html

By ANDREW JACOBS

China’s “treasure hunting team” descended on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week, and James C.Y. Watt, the patrician head of Asian art, braced for a confrontation.

For the past two weeks, the delegation of Chinese cultural experts has swept through American institutions, seeking to reclaim items once ensconced at the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, which was one of the world’s most richly appointed imperial residences until British and French troops plundered it in 1860.

With a crew from China’s national broadcaster filming the visit, the Chinese fired off questions about the provenance of objects on display, and when it came to a collection of jade pieces, they requested documentation to show that the pieces had been acquired legally.

But then, with no eureka discovery, the tension faded. The Chinese pronounced themselves satisfied, smiled for a group photo, and drove away.

“That wasn’t so bad after all,” Mr. Watt said.

Emboldened by newfound wealth, China has been on a noisy campaign to reclaim relics that disappeared during its so-called century of humiliation, the period between 1842 and 1945 when foreign powers subjugated China through military incursions and onerous treaties.

But the quest, fueled by national pride, has been quixotic, provoking fear at institutions overseas but in the end amounting to little more than a public relations show aimed at audiences back home.

At its core, such mixed signals are an outgrowth of China’s evolving self-identity. Is it a developing country with fresh memories of its victimization by imperial powers? Or is it the world’s biggest exporter, eager to ensure good relations with the outside world to protect its trade-dependent economy?

“China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids,” said Liu Kang, a professor of Chinese studies at Duke University. “It has suddenly become big but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”

Recounted in Chinese textbooks and in countless television dramas, the destruction of the Old Summer Palace, or Yuanmingyuan as it is called in Chinese, remains a crucial event epitomizing China’s fall from greatness. Begun in the early 18th century and expanded over the course of 150 years, the palace was a wonderland of artificial hills and lakes, and so many ornate wooden structures that it took 3,000 troops three days to burn them down.

“The wound is still open and hurts every time you probe it,” said Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer and a driving force in the movement to regain stolen antiquities. “It reminds people what may come when we are too weak.”

Stoked by populist sentiment but carefully managed by the Communist Party, the drive to reclaim lost cultural property has so far been halting. While officials privately acknowledge there is scant legal basis for repatriation, their public statements suggest that they would use lawsuits, diplomatic pressure and shame to bring home looted objects — not unlike Italy, Greece and Egypt, which have sought, with some success, to recover antiquities in European and American museums.

“The ideal scenario would be for the holders of these relics to donate them back to China,” said Chen Mingjie, the director of the palace museum, whose grounds include a shabby exhibition hall and an evocative pile of stone ruins that are instantly recognizable to any Chinese elementary school student.

The Communist Party has long used the narrative of foreign subjugation as a binding force, one that has become especially useful in recent years as the credo of market economics overruns the last remnants of its Marxist ideology.

But arousing nationalist sentiment, Chinese officials have learned, is a double-edged sword. In 2005, officials allowed public ire against Japan, over territorial disputes and textbooks that glossed over Japanese wartime atrocities, to boil over into violent street protests. After some of the anti-Japanese slogans began morphing into demands for action by Chinese leaders, the authorities clamped down.

The delegation traveling to United States museums appears to have been caught up in a political maelstrom. The relics quest intensified this year after Christie’s in Paris auctioned a pair of bronze animal heads that had been part of a fountain on the palace grounds; the sale was met with outrage in China. In the end, a Chinese collector sabotaged the auction by calling in the highest bids — $18 million for each head — then refusing to pay.

The United States scouting tour — visits to England, France and Japan will come early next year — quickly turned into a spectacle sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. As for the eight-member delegation, a closer look revealed that most were either employed by the Chinese media or were from the palace museum’s propaganda department.

“These days even building a toilet at Yuanmingyuan would be front-page news in People’s Daily,” said Liu Yang, a researcher who joined the trip.

But the 20-day spin through a dozen institutions has not been especially fruitful. Wu Jiabi, an archaeologist and the leader of the delegation, said that meaningful contacts were made but acknowledged that the group had not discovered illicit relics.

The visit has had its share of mishaps. Not all the museums on the itinerary were prepared for the delegation. One stop, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., was scrapped after the group realized the museum was in the Midwest, not in the Northeast.

The art experts whom the group met along the way offered consistent advice: the lion’s share of palace relics are in private hands, including those of collectors in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. “The best thing would be to look through the catalogs of Sotheby’s and Christie’s,” said Mr. Watt of the Metropolitan Museum.

Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archeological sites across the country. A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been plowed under for development.

What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant.

“Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”

Like many of the curators the delegation met last week, Keith Wilson, who oversees the Chinese art collection at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, both part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said that he was unsure what delegation members were really after. “They took a million miles of video, but in the end, I really felt they were not controlling their own destiny,” he said.

Mr. Liu, the researcher who was part of the delegation, seemed to admit as much, complaining that politics had upstaged scholarship. Even if he stumbled upon a palace relic, he said, he would be reluctant to take it back to an institution whose unheated exhibition space resembled little more than a military barracks. “To be honest, if you leave a thermos in our office, it gets broken,” he said.

“Maybe it’s better these things stay where they are.”

Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

Lost in Kyoto Gardens

ianshortreed — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 04:59:31 +0000

Having not posted here for about 12 months, I need a good excuse and I have a doozy!

I was just across the street lost in some gardens, running around in 360 degree circles getting really confused so I couldn’t find my way back.

But I took some pictures while I was there to share with you:

http://kyotogardens.org

“Computers make us software”

ianshortreed — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:15:43 +0000

A thought provoking piece in the Atlantic Monthly entitled: Is Google making us stupid? has attracted a good deal of media attention.

Almost instantly, a semi rebuttal cum discussion of this piece appeared in the New York Times exploring the hypothesis that computers might not be so good for our mental health after all.

Or put in a slightly different manner, computers are rapidly contributing to global sensory overload. We have become like a sparrow devouring enormous amounts of information yet without the requisite filtration system to retain what is of bodily value. This filtration system, as these authors argue, is based on good old analog thinking encouraging contemplation, discussion and deeper reflection. Instead, such age old skills have been sacrificed at the digital alter in favor of Twitter-like ambient awareness, an ‘on demand’ trivia feast lacking any real lredeeming human qualities.

Part of the problem seems to be generational: those who are crying foul are more often than not analog veterans, information warriors of the past who bled to get knowledge somewhere in a university library stack.

Another part of the problem is misinterpretation. McCluhan, the guru most often cited in these discussions, has a doozy of an aphorism to sum up this predicament:

” Computers make us software.”

And as we all know, software is only as good as the human brain that carves it out of silicon.

In short, the media has changed: goodbye paper, hello silicon.

No big deal!

Japanese linen, out of the closet and into the mainstream

ianshortreed — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:35:36 +0000

By Kaori Shoji
Monday, August 25, 2008

New York Times

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/26/style/flinen.php

TOKYO: Japanese linen, once made almost obsolete by the general preference for the much cheaper Chinese product, is quietly making a comeback. Up until now, linen had been about summer shirts and suits, but these days the subtext is changing from mere summer fashion to year-round lifestyle.

“‘People are starting to think differently about textiles, and more are buying or using linen in the way Europeans did in the 19th century,” said the interior stylist Mika Sonomiya. “Unlike cotton, good linen is expensive but grows more beautiful with time and washing.”

Sonomiya is a self-professed “laundry fiend” and considers the washing/drying of linen products to be the highest of stress relievers. She insists on 100 percent domestic linen for sheets, towels and wraps, used lovingly in every aspect of daily living.

“Before, I loved the feel of French linen but now I’ve come to recommend the Japan-made product,” she said. “It makes sense to support the domestic textile industry, not just for cost purposes but simply because new companies in that field are doing great work.”

Kyoto and the nearby Omi region had been well known for domestic linen, and a few textile artisans had kept the flame going. But the problem is, their linen products are often formal (mostly kimono materials and related paraphernalia) and too expensive to use on a daily basis, which had kept the average linen user from crossing over to home-grown products.

Recognizing the demand for more casual linen, the textile giant Teikoku set up an online linen shop called Teisen where finely woven sheets, towels, pajamas and other sundries bearing the “made in Japan” logo are available.

“But the ones to watch are the smaller companies,” Sonomiya said. “Hardly anyone knows about them, because they operate on such a small basis and rarely bother to advertise.”

In Omi, the family-operated Loop produces bed and bath items made from ramie and hemp – stitched by hand and the brand logo (artfully faded) stamped with typewriter keys.

Closer to Tokyo, Oldman’s Tailor, run by the young couple Toku and Yuji Shimura, has become a metaphor for domestic linen products in just seven years, from its start in 2001. Oldman’s Tailor has no shop, and there are no employees, apart from the Shimuras (not counting Yuji’s mother, who helps out by washing and then sun-drying the finished products). The office is in their home (located at the foot of Mount Fuji, an area once renowned for textiles) and the more than 200 linen products they create (by themselves or collaborating with weavers) are sold in a handful of selected boutiques, or online.

The Shimuras, intent on making linen products “that would enchant and entice people 100 years later” are not only dedicated craftsmen but also designers – towels, for instance, have a marine theme that is reminiscent of the captain’s cabin of a French naval fleet in the late 19th century.

Sonomiya, a fan of the couple’s work, said: “There’s an unmistakable air of authenticity and romance in everything they make. You can tell that they understand and love linen, how romantic and evocative it is.”

Analysts see the revival of Japanese linen as part of a bigger trend, one that bears the stamp of ecology. The textile artist Hiromi Kanzaki said she sees a shift from “design to materials” in Japanese fashion.

“It’s less about the cut and the silhouette” than “whether the material is natural and how it feels on the skin, where it was made, whether the process damaged the environment unnecessarily,” Kanzaki said. “People are much more attuned to that sort of information.”

The concern and interest in materials is bolstering the domestic textile industry, and design companies, quick to ride the wave, are now creating textile products made from domestic organic cotton, washi and wood charcoal and colored with 100 percent water-soluble plant dyes.

As the editorial director Masanobu Sugatsuke said: “Right now, no fashion trend could emerge or last very long without giving a big bow to the environment, because the consumer is so much more concerned about such things than they were 10 years ago. Now whatever is wasteful, excessive or selfish just won’t cut it anymore, no matter how snazzy the design.”

Jesus phone test

ianshortreed — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 01:53:03 +0000

This is rather interesting: blogging from the Jesus phone directly to WordPress and it actually works. You can grab the WordPress app at the iPhone App Store!

High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom

ianshortreed — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:52:09 +0000

July 11, 2008
New York Times

By SAM DILLON
NEWTOWN, Pa. — First, Ryan Gibbons bought a Hyundai so he would not have to drive his gas-guzzling Chevy Blazer to college classes here. When fuel prices kept rising, he cut expenses again, eliminating two campus visits a week by enrolling in an online version of one of his courses.

Like Mr. Gibbons, thousands of students nationwide, including many who were previously reluctant to study online, have suddenly decided to take one or more college classes over the Internet.

“Gas prices have pushed people over the edge,” said Georglyn Davidson, director of online learning at Bucks County Community College, where Mr. Gibbons studies, and where online enrollments are up 35 percent this summer over last year.

The vast majority of the nation’s 15 million college students — at least 79 percent — live off campus, and with gas prices above $4 a gallon, many are seeking to cut commuting costs by studying online. Colleges from Massachusetts and Florida to Texas to Oregon have reported significant online enrollment increases for summer sessions, with student numbers in some cases 50 percent or 100 percent higher than last year. Although some four-year institutions with large online programs — like the University of Massachusetts and Villanova — have experienced these increases, the greatest surges have been registered at two-year community colleges, where most students are commuters, many support families and few can absorb large new expenditures for fuel.

At Bristol Community College in Fall River, Mass., for instance, online enrollments were up 114 percent this summer over last, and half the students queried cited gas costs or some other transportation obstacle as a reason for signing up to study over the Internet, said April Bellafiore, an assistant dean there.

“Online classes filled up immediately,” Ms. Bellafiore said. “It blew my mind.”

Enrollments in online classes expanded rapidly early in this decade, but growth slowed in 2006 to less than 10 percent, according to statistics compiled last year by researchers at Babson College in Massachusetts. Some recent increases reported by college officials in interviews were much larger, which they attributed to the rising cost of gasoline. Pricing policies for online courses vary by campus, but most classes cost as much as, or more than, traditional ones.

At Brevard Community College in Cocoa, Fla., online enrollment rose to 2,726 this summer from 2,190 last year, a 24.5 percent increase. “That is a dramatic increase we can only attribute to gas prices,” said Jim Drake, Brevard’s president.

Dr. Drake and officials at several other colleges expressed concern that mounting fuel costs could force some students to drop out of college altogether, especially since only a fraction of courses at most colleges are offered online. Dr. Drake has put Brevard on a four-day week to help employees and students save gas.

David Gray, chief executive of UMass Online, the distance education program at the University of Massachusetts, said that at an educators’ conference this week in San Francisco, officials from scores of universities discussed how the energy crisis could affect higher education. “There was broad agreement that gas price increases will be a source of continued growth in online enrollments,” Mr. Gray said.

Once an incidental expense, fuel for commuting to campus now costs some students half of what they pay for tuition, in some cases more. Sergey Sosnovsky, who is pursuing pre-engineering studies at Bucks County Community College, paid $240 a month for gas during the spring semester, while his full-time tuition cost about $500 a month, he said. Other students here and in half a dozen other states told similar stories.

Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Mo., which enrolls residents on both sides of the Arkansas-Missouri border, had 52 percent more students sign up for Internet-based courses this summer than last, said Witt Salley, the college’s director of online teaching and learning.

One student taking online coursework for the first time is Kameron Miller, a 30-year-old working mother who lives in Buffalo, Mo., 40 miles north of Springfield. Her commute to classes in her 1998 Chevy Venture during the spring semester cost her at least $200 a month for gas, Ms. Miller said. This summer, she is taking courses in health, humanities and world music — all online.

“I don’t feel I get as much out of an online class as a campus course,” Ms. Miller said. “But I couldn’t afford any other decision.”

Among the four-year institutions reporting increased online enrollment, UMass Online, which enrolls students at its five Massachusetts campuses and worldwide, experienced 46 percent growth this summer over last among students at the university’s Dartmouth, Mass., campus. At Villanova University in Pennsylvania, enrollment in online, graduate, engineering, nursing and business courses has increased more than 40 percent this summer, said Robert Stokes, an assistant vice president there.

Waiting lists for Web-based courses have lengthened at some institutions. At the University of Colorado, Denver, for instance, 361 students are on the waiting list for online courses for the fall term, compared to 233 last year on the same date, said Bob Tolsma, an assistant vice chancellor.

In Tennessee, the six universities, 13 two-year colleges and 26 technology centers overseen by the Tennessee Board of Regents enrolled 9,000 students for online courses this summer, compared with about 7,000 last summer, a 29 percent increase, said Robbie K. Melton, an associate vice chancellor.

“We had to train more faculty and provide more online courses because students just couldn’t afford to drive to our campuses,” Dr. Melton said.

Sandra Jobe, a 46-year-old bookkeeper who is studying for a master’s degree in education at Tennessee State University, said she reduced the number of trips she had to make each week to the university’s Nashville campus to two from four by enrolling in an online course.

“The campus experience is good; I wouldn’t diminish that,” Ms. Jobe said. “But when you’re penny-pinching, online is a good alternative.”

South Texas College, which has five campuses in Hidalgo and Starr Counties in the Rio Grande Valley, saw a 35 percent increase in online enrollments this summer over last, said William Serrata, a vice president. Other years have seen summer increases of 10 percent to 15 percent, he said. “This really speaks to students’ not wanting to travel due to the gas prices,” Mr. Serrata said.

Elvira Ozuna, who is 37 and studying for an associate’s degree in occupational therapy, was driving four times a week, 50 miles round trip from her home to South Texas College’s campus in McAllen. But this summer she enrolled in two online courses, eliminating that commute.

Ms. Ozuna said she found online work more difficult than classroom study. “But I saved on the gasoline,” she said.

Distance education is no silver bullet that can alone solve the challenges posed for higher education by rising gasoline prices, officials warned.

For one thing, many students, especially in rural areas, lack the high-speed Internet connections on which online courses depend.

“The infrastructure doesn’t exist to give all rural students clear online access,” said Stephen G. Katsinas, a professor at the University of Alabama. “Rural America is where the digital divide is most dramatic.”

Furthermore, most colleges still offer only a fraction of their courses over the Internet. Bucks County Community College, for instance, will offer 414 credit courses during the fall term. Only 103 of those will be offered online, and another 48 as hybrid courses, that is, partly online but with some campus visits required. So most students will still need to come to campus.

Mr. Gibbons, who is 20, works days and aspires to be a writer. He said his online course, “Introduction to the Novel,” had been a good experience, especially the Web-based discussions of Jane Austen’s novels. (He likes posting comments by e-mail better than speaking in class.) He said he still preferred on-campus study, “but with the price of gas jumping up, I’ll probably be taking more courses online now.”

This srikes me as pefectly normal behavior… how about you?

ianshortreed — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:15:08 +0000

Tuesday 27th May, 10:02 AM JST

Man disguised as schoolgirl arrested for trespassing in Ibaraki school

IBARAKI —
A 30-year-old man was arrested Monday night for sneaking into an Ibaraki high school, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform and wig, police said Tuesday.

Shigemitsu Kajiro, 30, was caught by a teacher in a corridor around 5:30 p.m. after the teacher noticed he was wearing shoes which did not match the school’s uniform. After discovering the student was a man, the teacher took him to a staff room and called police. The suspect has so far said nothing about what he was up to or whether he had done this before, police said.

E-COMMERCE REPORT

ianshortreed — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 01:25:19 +0000

A Referral Service That Ensures Someone Actually Makes a Sale

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/technology/18ecom.html

By BOB TEDESCHI
ONLINE shoppers who can’t decide whether to pull the trigger on their next purchase may be surprised at a new alternative: an offer to get it free.

The offer is not a swindle, nor is it a return to the insanity of the early days of the dot-com boom, when retailers practically gave away goods in order to attract buzz and customers. Rather, it is a new marketing method that relies on a web of business relationships to give consumers free goods, as long as they buy something else from a long list of well-known online stores.

The idea comes from TrialPay, a company that has recently gained a following among online businesses and investors. Now that the idea is attracting more well-known retailers, analysts said, consumers could see more free offers in the coming months.

“This is a very strange, unique animal, but I could see where it would work,” said Dana Gould, an analyst with Financial Insights, a consultant group based in Framingham, Mass. “And since these offers come at exit points, companies are basically saving lost sales.”

Stopzilla, which sells computer security software for around $40, already offers 15-day free trials for prospective customers. After the trial period, those who go to the site to uninstall the program are shown a pop-up window asking if they would like to receive the product free.

They are then shown a list of companies, including Blockbuster, GameFly and Citi, that have agreed to subsidize the cost of the Stopzilla purchase if the customer agrees to also sign up with them.

If they agree, customers are taken, at that point, to a Web site like Blockbuster or Gap, and when they complete their purchase they are sent a code by e-mail for redeeming their free item. Sometimes, these merchants and other TrialPay advertisers, like Gap and Stamps.com, will sweeten the deal with discounts of their own.

“All three parties benefit,” said James M. Bortnak, the chief marketing officer of Stamps.com. “The consumer gets a sizable and immediate discount on a purchase, advertisers like us find new long-term customers, and the original merchant is more likely to complete a sale.”

Mr. Bortnak said he started using TrialPay’s service in March, after hearing some industry talk about it. He would not disclose details, other than to say it has a “very positive” effect on his business.

TrialPay’s service is a twist of sorts on a longstanding online practice, where merchants offer bounties of 5 to 15 percent to Web sites that deliver paying customers. This so-called affiliate advertising model is popular because merchants spend less to acquire customers. Meanwhile, as long as the customers buy more than an item or two, the merchant earns back whatever bounty was paid.

As the intermediary, TrialPay receives an undisclosed portion of that commission, and it also uses some technological wizardry to determine which free-product offers a prospective customer is more likely to click on.

TrialPay is the brainchild of Alex Rampell, who achieved a measure of fame when, as a 15-year-old in 1996, he wrote a popular software program that allowed AOL users to avoid losing their connections.

Mr. Rampell started TrialPay in 2003 as he looked for creative ways to entice software customers to pay for his products. In the first incarnation of the service, he offered customers his PC-security software free, as long as they signed up for a Netflix account.

“We made more money on that than we did selling our applications, which cost $25,” Mr. Rampell said. “If someone signed up for Netflix, we might make $40.”

The list of merchants who offer free products is heavily weighted toward software companies, Mr. Rampell said, “because almost nobody will pay for software.” Aside from companies like Stopzilla, WinZip and ZoneAlarm, there are roughly 2,500 merchants who now display TrialPay offers to prospective customers, with about 10 signing up daily, Mr. Rampell said. That volume helped increase revenue more than 10 percent, with annual sales likely to exceed $20 million, he added.

Based largely on the strength of those figures, TrialPay said it recently raised $12.7 million in financing from, among others, Index Ventures, an early investor in Skype, and Battery Ventures, which backed Akamai Technologies.

Merchants who make free offers on their site with TrialPay said that after compensating TrialPay for managing the transaction, they must typically squeeze more business out of the customer to generate a profit. Rick Trefzger, vice president of sales for Stopzilla’s parent, iS3, said his company profits on customers it attracts through TrialPay if those customers renew their annual software subscriptions.

Mr. Trefzger said an additional benefit of the service is that it does not diminish the perceived value of his software, as other discount offers might. “It’s not like we’re saying ‘Hey, buy this for less than what you would’ve paid when you first got to our site,’ ” he said. “TrialPay has to follow through with an offer.”

TrialPay is yielding improved dividends as it reaches a broader audience of merchants and advertisers, said Will Hunsinger, general manager of Gap.com. And, he said TrialPay attracts customers who frequent stores, like Blockbuster, that one might not immediately consider fertile ground for Gap shoppers.

“That’s the kicker here,” Mr. Hunsinger said. “You can reach out into the virtual space and find new customers you wouldn’t have otherwise reached. It’s a little different model, which is something we haven’t seen come out of the Valley in a little while.”

Quebec language police nab Montreal bar for vintage posters

ianshortreed — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 01:59:50 +0000

CBC News: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2008/02/14/qc-olf-0214.html

An Irish pub in Montreal will fight an order from Quebec’s language watchdog to take down antique advertising posters from its walls.

The Office de la langue francaise (OLF) issued the order to McKibbins Irish Pub on Feb. 6, informing the tavern it was violating Quebec’s language charter by displaying the imported vintage posters.

The wall hangings include vintage advertisements for Guinness and St. James Gate Dublin, imported from Ireland.

McKibbins owner Rick Fon told CBC News he will not take the posters down because they serve as decoration, not to advertise beer.

The OLF said it received a complaint about the pub and sent an inspector to investigate the downtown watering hole.

The inspector ruled McKibbins’ bilingual menu, bar service and vintage posters do not respect article 58 of Quebec’s language charter.

The OLF was not available for comment on Thursday.

Good German inspired Japanese Ad!

ianshortreed — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:06:54 +0000