Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an eternal masterpiece, although sometimes I think the story is too naïve and, well, too light.

The story plot is simple. Matured women need husbands, and vice versa. So goes the opening sentence of the book:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

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Geisha is not a courtesan, nor an artist. Probably many Japanese people will beat me to death for the second half of the statement, but I am adamant to that, for I believe Geisha is merely an entertainer. You certainly won’t call an entertainer an artist, just as you won’t call Zhang Ziyi the charming bitch an artist.

The movie, Memoirs of a Geisha, was adapted from the novel. Although the movie is a little bit unsatisfactory, the book itself is a good reading. Remind you, this memoir is a fiction, made up of “a million little pieces”—yeah, I know the “million pieces” book By Mr. Frey is faked. Interestingly, the main character in the Geisha book looks real and is indeed based on a real Geisha who bears the same name as “Sayuri.” A side note, there is a lawsuit filed by Sayuri against the author Arthur Golden.

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雄孔雀的“尾巴”不是真正的形态学上的尾巴（真正的鸟尾是那个缩微型的帕森鼻－熟鸭的装饰尾巴），而是由背羽延长出来的“扇子”。雄孔雀的传说是本书中的亮点。因此仿照正宗的乔叟风格，即一个朝圣者的启示和教诲可以帮助其他朝圣者理解他们自己，在讨论人类进化过程中的两个主要转折点的时候，我也尤其期待孔雀加入我们追寻我们祖先的朝圣旅程。他的（我这里特指“他”而不是“她”）传说将会有助于我们更好地理解这个旅行。当然也不用说，他的传说就是一个性选择的传说。这里，那两个人类转折点是指从四肢爬行到双腿直立行走和随之而来的大脑增大。现在让我们再加入第三个转折点－－也许不是那么重要但却非常有人类特点的一个－－体毛的消失。为什么我们会变成裸猿？

晚期中新世时代，非洲有很多种猿类。为什么突然之间其中一支快速地走上了和其他猿类截然不同的进化道路－－实际上和所有其他的哺乳类都不同？是什么选择了这个猿类并让他高速行进在新奇的进化方向：首先双腿直立，然后又变的很聪明，并在某个时段褪去了全身的体毛？

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Reading through Stephen King’s little book “On Writing,” I can feel his enthusiasm on his own writing. He has weaved his life, his work, and his way of writing together into an enlightening piece.

Stephen’s yearning for writing never stops since he showed his little story to his mom at the first grade. Even though he landed in a position as a laundry washer after graduating from college, he didn’t stop writing. He finally got paid when his first book “Carrie” was published. The snowball started to roll after that book, and keeps on rolling till now. Writing, after all, is what his life is about.

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The story of Narnia is simple. The Narnia world is created by Aslan, the Lion, the king of kings. In Narnia, animals talk like humans do. There are good and evil, and fights.

The movie Narnia depicts one of the seven Narnia stories. Four kids, Peter, Susan, Edmond, and Lucy accidentally entered the Narnia world through a magic wardrobe. During that time, Narnia was ruled by an evil White Witch. The land had been frozen for more than a hundred years. The appearance of the four kids seemed to fulfill a prophecy that four humans would defeat the White Witch and save the world.

Lucy was the first one who entered the new world. She came across a faun called Mr. Tumnus. Mr. Tumnus asked Lucy to leave the land immediately because she was in grave danger. However, Lucy decided to enter the world again that night, and this time she was followed by Edmond. Unfortunately, Edmond met the White Witch herself and was enticed to bring his siblings back to her.

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The long awaited movie, Harry Potter IV–the Goblet of Fire, is frightening but also surprisingly entertaining. The movie is well crafted and the story flow is better than the novel itself, a rare case in the history of film.

The Harry Potter book IV is not my favorite one. The story in this book is complicate and JK Rowlings didn’t handle it well. In addition to pushing through the thrilling tri-school wizard competition, she tried her best to depict the romantic stories among teenagers whose activities are mostly driven by their abundant hormone. Harry Potter has a crush with Chou Chang, and Ron Weasley is fervently jealous about Hermine’s date with Victor. It seems everybody is dating with somebody, which is true at the age of 14. Fortunately, the movie made a good decision between these two conflicting themes.

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Living in the 14th century was no good, no matter whether you were in Asian or Europe. In Asian, China was ruled by Mongolians, a dynasty characterized by discrimination (against the Han native, which accounted for 90% of Chinese population), constant hunger, and rampaging plagues. In Europe, famine, wars, and the “great mortality” killed half of European population.

In Europe, the 14th century is a critical period. Because of the massive decrease of population, the social structure and the role of religion changed dramatically. Skilled labors and unskilled peasants were both in need. Hope was lost and pragmatism replaced idealism. Illuminated scholars turned their interests from philosophy to concrete science. To some extent, the empirical science was burgeoning before Locky wrote his famous books.

Similarly, in China, the suppressed Chinese intellectuals wandered their ways to less philosophical things. Drama was the most celebrated achievement during the Mongolian dynasty. However, the drama language was rogue, the content was lewd, and the plot was ridiculous. The appealing to common people reflected the decreased morality of the society.

These miserable things all happened worldwide at the same time, not by coincidence, but by a microscopic organism—the Yersinia pestis. It caused the Black Death, characterized by either coughing blood (pneumonic plague), or swollen lymph nodes in the neck, armpit, or groin (the bubonic plague), or blood poisoning (septicemic plague). The fatality rate was about one third, with the greatest in septicemic plague, and smallest in bubonic plague.

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I am kind of at a loss. I don’t know what I am going to talk about in this post because I am treading in the troubled water. Well, let me get this thing straight (not the straight you are thinking of): it is about man having sex with man.

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In the satellite map, the middle of China (Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia province, approximately one tenth of China) appears brownish and infertile. That is the great loess plateau (the yellow land), a land of glory and a place of misery.

Modern people may not believe that the barren loess plateau was once the economical and political center of China. The land used to be China’s food storehouse and had supported millions of people. Now the land is hardly inhabitable (but tens of millions of people are still living there) and water is scarce. Poor peasants have to cross their fingers every year hoping almighty Heaven Emperor to pour some drops of water on their land. It is a desperate situation.

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In the morning of September 14, 1953, millions of American women felt uneasy and thousands of families were again in trouble, thanking to the shameless research by the sex professor–Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Many women suddenly discovered that their lives lacked one critical element–the sexual orgasm. Conservatives were also furious about Kinsey’s Reports. Rev. Bill Graham claimed that Dr. Kinsey had been grossly mistaken about millions of born-again women who had vowed for being chaste in their lives.

The notorious book–Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was in fact a serious academic monograph detailing about the sexual experience and behavior among American women. It was a dry book full of tables and arcane descriptions. Furthermore, men’s dark secrets had already been exposed to the public five years ago in the book– Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. These two books (the Kinsey Reports)were sold 300,000 each, a number which almost all academic writers would envy.

The 2004 movie–Kinsey– documented both Kinsey’s fascinating personal life and his controversial research. In the post-Monica era when people are questioning sex and morality, this movie was timely and also necessary. Human sexuality is not a taboo, and talking about it will not corrupt the society.

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