Hello from Belgium

 

Regarding your comments:

Anyway, all men more or less obsessed with power. That's why men like powerful computers and weapons. Quite a number of guys here just plotting their way to their very own galactic empire

 

Pardon me for pulling age on you, but say "people" instead of "men."  I think it is wonderful that so many young people can busy their hands on the keyboard to create virtual empires (if they need such a thing), rather than use their hands on guns to create empires.  Soon I hope all people will evolve past such primitive, dark yearnings.

 

I worked for many years as senior staff to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives in Washington, DC.  In that capacity in 1975 I chose the very first women to join our five U.S. military academies.    Unfortunately, women are just as blood-thirsty as men, and being a pacifist, I do not think back on this very fondly.  Regards to you and all yours so far away.

 

"It is never wise to disrespect family elders, especially the very oldest and weakest of us all. For although Great-Grandmother's Frailty of Life requires a walking stick, she can still knock you on your ass with it." went to " Bu zun jia ting zhangbei, zui te bie shilao hezui wei ruowo menquan bu zong wei shi ming zhi de. Wei, sui ransheng huozeng zu mude cuiruo yao qiu yi guai gun, ta ke yi reng ran qiaonin ninte yu tade lvzi de."

 

Then theres the traditional and simplified character script (for some reason the pinyin with accents doesn't work very well, so I'm just seeing if you want the other options, just in case)

 

Traditional: 不尊重家庭長輩，最特別是老和最微弱我們全部從未是明智的。為，雖然生活曾祖母的脆弱要求一拐棍，她可以仍然敲您您的與它的驢子的。

 

 

 

Lao Tse:  Also, regarding your motto:

 

Why did you drop the ending, that was something like:  "under new winds."  The motto is really beautiful, but I also loved it with "under new winds."  That really describes the lives so many in our big human family these days.

 

kaysu

 

Thank you dear friend.

 

Kaysu, Saamigirl

 

 

No problem at all, atleast you didn't want it translated from Latin , and yes it's Mandarin.

 

I wish your saying reached my family 400 years ago, it may have prevented A LOT of trouble, but my family had been selected by the Han Empire to be a "Soldier Family", meaning that if the nation were ever to go to war, our family would always be one of the many to lose at least one of the males in the line would be called up for arms while a lot of other families were selected to ONLY farm and produce goods for trade and the military. I guess the nations that took over the area after the Han agreed that we were better soldiers than scholars (although we did have a few smart enough and willing to take the 9-Ranked exam to become an official), so we were a war clan for well over a millineum, almost 2.

 

What I meant by "If/when the government collapsed" was that, in my family's history, whenever we got a lucky official out of the family, they wrote everything that was legal for them to write, including several manuscripts (still translating some of them, the Ming Dictionary and Kangxi Dictionary are proven harder to translate to modern Mandarin and then Manchu, followed by English. It has been common in China to have several ruling households at a time, but in the later of my family's somewhat pre-designated seat in low governments, the increased threat of foregn influence and hostile take-over became a larger reality than ever ( the 8 nations: Italy, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, France, Spain [still had small holds in tea companies], and the United States [the only nation that didn't supply troops during the Boxer's Rebellion, they were busy in the Phillipines and Hawaii] did take over many parts of the Aisin Gioro Da Qing Empire, mostly on the coast, but my family saw this useful in the future, thanks to German influence in Nanjing saving my niece and many other civilians). The luck was that my great-grandfather didn't live long enough to see the rebellion, or the fall of the empire, or we would've left earlier and I would be unable to see what I have seen. but our fears were realised when Chiang Kai Shek found out that in the 1930s we were still wearing sonochos and believing that Cixi was still living, beyond the age of 100. That day was a nightmare, we had a shortage on food and were expected to feed hundreds of soldiers and they made us un-tie and cut our hair, which was, with the soldiers themselves cutting the hair, was absolutely a nightmare, not to mention that our religion and belief of the Qing were said to be obsolete. But anyways, we lived on, for the most part.

 

I wish I taught in New York, they would've been better students than my students in the Phillipines  If you can imagine a 13 year old farmer-child with emerald-green eyes, who barely spoke Japanese teaching a group of people twice his age how to speak Japanese, then you pretty much get my picture. I was the one who had to teach in a stuffy room while everyone else in my group (we were all friends from the "orientation" in Manchuria, and my cousin stayed in the group tuntil the Khabarovsk affair, where almost all of us were divided) got to live with air-conditioning in the money-press building, except in the barracks where we all had to deal with hot, stuffy rooms.

Here is the link to watch live on the internet the program: American Artifacts: USS Monitor Sailors’ Burial.

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

 

Sure I'll watch it

 

Now I have a good reason to watch TV at 11:29, and it sounds interesting