Nancy Hudson-Rodd in DVB - Trouble brews as Burma turns to world markets

http://www.dvb.no/analysis/trouble-brews-as-burma-turns-to-world-markets/20116#comment-48580

How to prep coffee beans - in Thai cafe - photo copyright Kyi May Kaung

Born a Criminal (in Burma) by Francis Wade

http://asiancorrespondent.com/54660/born-a-criminal-in-burma%E2%80%99s-prison-hospitals/

Memorial Poem for Astronaut Dr Janice Voss

Dear Linda please feel free to use this on the Memorial Cards and to read at the Service. So long as my name is on the bottom in small print it is fine. I don't know why the email is typing like this. I did not change to Plain Text as formatting would be lost. Sincere Condolences Kyi May http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/voss-jan.html A veteran of five space flights, Dr. Voss has logged over 49 days in space, traveling 18.8 million miles in 779 Earth orbits. Dr. Voss first flew on STS-57 (June 21 to July 1, 1993). Mission highlights included retrieval of the European Retrievable Carrier (EURECA) with the Shuttle’s robotic arm, a spacewalk, and the first flight of the Spacehab module. She next flew on STS-63 (February 3-11, 1995). Mission highlights included the rendezvous with the Russian Space Station, Mir, the deployment and retrieval of Spartan 204, and the third flight of Spacehab. She also flew as payload commander on STS-83 (Apr 4-8, 1997).

Moon Flower and Blood Grass - photo - copyright Kyi May Kaung/ Janice, I wish I had met you/ before the cancer got you./ I only ever met two other/ Astronauts in my life. One man and one woman/ about five feet tall./ You loved science fiction and square dancing./ Look down on us from your last/ Circling of the Earth./ Know, we miss you./ Copyright Kyi May Kaung

Dead whale shark in Karachi

http://videos.geo.tv/VideoGallery.aspx?ID=3438 I wonder what the did with it did they stuff it? Kyi May Kaung

A partial Burmese economic history through its banknotes

http://banknotesofburma.blogspot.com/ Banknotes of Burma Blog by Min Sun Min U Kaung in the early banknotes was my father who was at one time Chairman of the Burma Currency Board. In the early 50s. Kyi May Kaung

Dickens vs lawyers from New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/opinion/dickens-v-lawyers.html?_r=1

Military rule mars hopes for democracy in Burma

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/military-backed-rule-blurs-hopes-for-democracy-in-burma-184814-page-2.html

US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs scratches his eyebrow frame grab

Kyi May Kaung's article - Burma's Economy: Can World Class Advisors Make a Difference? -- in Asian Correspondent

http://asiancorrespondent.com/75403/burmas-economy-can-world-class-advisors-make-a-difference/

Badly split banana leaf - photo copyright Kyi May kaung

Kay Htwe's translation into Burmese of my poem Mother Rape

http://www.scribd.com/KayHtwe/d/51893056-Mother-Rape

Kolkata Massala slide show - India

http://telsawy.tripod.com/Kolkata_Masala/publish_to_web/index.html

Wislawa Symborska's The Joy of Writing and other poems on her Nobel Prize page

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-poems-5-e.html

Young bamboo that will become invasive Photo copyright Kyi May Kaung.

An Iranian Vote - from an Iranian dissident

MY VOTE! ای دشمن آزادگان، ای جمهوری اسلامی ایران ، ما بی شمارانیم 33 years of Torture, imprisonment, injustice, rape and stoning, taking out eyes from the socket, amputations, over 100.000 executions, oppression, suppression, 8 years of forced Iran-Iraq war with 1/2 millions death, drug addictions, poverty, lack of jobs and security... And more. After all these, is there anyone in favour of the ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN?

Image provided by Iranian Dissident posted with permission. Note: It says in Persian: Islamic Republic of Iran, you are the enemy of freedom fighters but we are so many and in abundance.

Burmese-born poet Ko Ko Thett translates Symborska

Yahoo! Mail true love: a tribute to Szymborska (1923-1212) Saturday, February 4, 2012 4:03 PM Just noticed Szymborska died on 1 Feb! I was oblivious to her passing when I gave her poem 'true love' in translation to kaungkin the other day, for Valentine's. I am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop. I won’t catch what is distant: what’s too close, I’ll mix up. While trying to plumb what the void's inner sense is, I'm bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies. What a loss when you think how much effort was spent perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent for the one-time appearance, which is all they're allowed, so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud. from 'Birthday' translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh She has passed through. Her one-time appearance is intransient. -- KKt ko ko thett အခ်စ္စစ္ အခ်စ္စစ္တဲ့၊ ပံုမွန္မွဟုတ္ရဲ့လား အေလးအနက္လား၊ လက္ေတြ႕ေရာက်ရဲ႕လား ႏွစ္ေယာက္တည္းတစ္ကမၻာလုပ္ေနတဲ့ လူႏွစ္ေယာက္က ဒီကမၻာႀကီးကို ဘာေပးႏိုင္မွာတဲ့တုန္း။ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ ေျခေျချမစ္ျမစ္ မရွိဘဲ မ႑ပ္တိုင္ထူလိုက္ၾက သန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာထဲက တစ္ေယာတ္ကို စုံလုံးကန္း ေရြးလိုက္ၿပီးမွ ဒါဟာ ဒီလိုပဲျဖစ္ရမယ္လို႕ ယံုၾကည္လိုက္ၾက ဘာအတြက္လဲ - သဲထဲေရသြန္။ ရုတ္တရက္ သက္ဆင္း လာတဲ့ အလင္းတန္း။ ဘာေၾကာင့္ တျခားသူေတြေပၚ မက်ဘဲ ဒင္းတို႕ ႏွစ္ေယာက္ေပၚက် ဒါဟာ တရားမွ်တမႈကို ပါးခ်တာမဟုတ္လား - ဟုတ္ပါ့။ ဒါဟာ က်ားကုတ္က်ားခဲ ထူေထာင္ခဲ့ရတဲ့ စည္းမ်ည္းေတြကို ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္တာ၊ အထြဋ္အထိပ္ ေရာက္ၿပီးသား က်င့္ဝတ္ေတြကို လႊင့္ပစ္တာ - ဒါေတြအားလံုးဟုတ္။ အဲဒီစုံတြဲ သဲေနပံုကိုၾကည့္။ သိုသိုသိပ္သိပ္မေနႏိုင္ၾကဘူးလား သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြကို စာနာစိတ္နဲ႕ စိတ္ဓာတ္က်ခ်င္ေယာင္ေဆာင္ မေနသင့္ဘူးလား။ နားေထာင္ၾကည့္ ဒင္းတို႕ရယ္သံကိုက- ေစာ္ကားေမာ္ကား။ ဒင္းတို႕ေျပာတဲ့စကားေတြက ရိုးလြန္းလို႕ယံုႏိုင္စရာမရွိ။ ဒင္းတို႕ရဲ႕ အေသးအမႊားေပ်ာ္ပြဲေတြ၊ အပရိက ထံုးတမ္းစဥ္လာေတြ၊ အပိုဆာလား အျပန္အလွန္ နိစၥဓူဝေတြ - ေသခ်ာတာက အခ်စ္စစ္ဆိုတာ လူသားမ်ိဳးႏြယ္ရဲ႕ ေနာက္ေၾကာက ကလိန္ျခဳံမႈ။ လူတုိင္းသာ သူတို႕လို အတုျမင္အတတ္သင္ျဖစ္ကုန္ရင္ ဒုကၡ ေတြးေတာင္မေတြးရဲ။ ဘာသာတရားနဲ႕ ကဗ်ာကို ဘယ္ေပၚသြားထားမလဲ။ ဘာေတြကိုတသ၊ ဘာေတြကိုစြန္႕ပစ္ရမွာလဲ၊ ဘယ္သူေတြကမ်ား အေႏွာင္အဖြဲ႕ေတြၾကား ေနခ်င္ပါေတာ့မလဲ။ အခ်စ္စစ္တဲ့၊ တကယ္ လိုအပ္လို႕လား။ အရွက္ကြဲမႈတစ္ခု ဘဝရဲ႕အျမင့္ဆံုး အသိုင္းအဝိုင္းေတြထဲ လူသူမသိ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္သြားပံုမ်ိဳး လိမၼာေရးျခားရွိမႈနဲ႕၊ လူပိန္းေတြးေတြးမႈက အခ်စ္စစ္ကို ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ဖို႕ ငါတို႕ကို ေျပာတယ္။ ေျခာက္ျပစ္ကင္း သားသမီးရတနာေလးေတြေမြးဖို႕ အခ်စ္စစ္မလို။ အခ်စ္စစ္ ဆိုတာ ဒုလႅဘမို႕ သူ႕အားကိုးေနရင္ ေနာင္ႏွစ္တစ္သန္းလည္း ကမၻာ့လူဦးေရ တိုးတက္မွာမဟုတ္။ အခ်စ္စစ္ကို မႀကံဳဖူးတဲ့လူေတြ အခ်စ္စစ္ဆိုတာ ေလာကမွာမရွိဘူးလို႕ ေျပာၾကပါေစ။ အဲဒီလိုယံုေတာ့ သူတို႕ေတြ အေနေျဖာင့္ အေသေျဖာင့္တာေပါ့။ ဗစ္စ္ဝါဘာ ရွင္ေဘာ္စကာ ႏိုဘယ္လ္ဆုရ ပိုလန္ကဗ်ာဆရာမ Wislawa Szymborska (1923-1212) ၏ true love။ Stanislaw Baranczak ႏွင့္ Clare Cavanagh က အဂၤလိပ္လိုျပန္ထားေသာမူကို ကိုကိုသက္ ျမန္မာမႈျပဳသည္။

Outsider artist in Texas with bottle cap art - photo Copyright Kyi May Kaung - with permission of the artist, 2011.

Race, parenting, the South, etc - Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is 50 years old

Harper Lee & Truman Capote were first cousins and both became bestselling novelists. http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/showbiz/to-kill-a-mockingbird-50/index.html?hpt=hp_bn4 Kyi May Kaung

Quote of the Day - Dr Zarni in LA Times Oct 2011

"We're basically dealing with the same creature, with slightly more enlightened posturing," said Zarni, founder of the London-based Free Burma Coalition, an activist group, who uses one name. "We shouldn't fool ourselves that the regime is driven by reformers. "

Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei -- frame grab

NPR - interview of Emma Larkin (pseu) Finding George Orwell in Burma

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=4761169&m=4761207 This is a very good book, as is her second "Everything is Broken" Kyi May Kaung

My Amazon.com review of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UGSVAK6M3TYV Red Sorghum: A Novel of China (Mass Market Paperback) I read Red Sorghum by Mo Yan and translated by Howard Goldblatt about five years ago. It is unforgettable and beautifully translated, though not an easy read as Mo Yan writes about a grandmother in the voice of her grandson, so the time shifts are sometimes jarring. Most of the story is in flashback. I have not seen the film. However, many scenes are unforgettable. A great work of international literature. Yes, I don't usually like to read "Chinese" or "Burmese" or whatever fiction written by writers who base it all on research, not on life. Red Poppy by Alai, a Tibetan writer who writes in Mandarin, also translated by Goldblatt, is also excellent. Kyi May Kaung See your review on the site

Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi in The Lady

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/Burma-in-the-balance-30174980.html

One person who should also be called in to advise on Burma - Jeffrey Sachs

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1770

Mitch McConnell interviewed by PBS about Burma

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/01/changes-in-myanmar.html