October 08, 2003
currently playing Christina Aguilera ~ Reflection
a brief history of mirrors from Encyclopedia Britanica:
The typical mirror is a sheet of glass that is coated on its back with aluminum or silver that produces images by reflection. The mirrors used in Greco-Roman antiquity and throughout the European Middle Ages were simply slightly convex disks of metal, either bronze, tin, or silver, that reflected light off their highly polished surfaces. A method of backing a plate of flat glass with a thin sheet of reflecting metal came into widespread production in Venice during the 16th century; an amalgam of tin and mercury was the metal used. The chemical process of coating a glass surface with metallic silver was discovered by Justus von Liebig in 1835, and this advance inaugurated the modern techniques of mirror making. Present-day mirrors are made by sputtering a thin layer of molten aluminum or silver onto the back of a plate of glass in a vacuum. In mirrors used in telescopes and other optical instruments, the aluminum is evaporated onto the front surface of the glass rather than on the back, in order to eliminate faint reflections from the glass itself.....
.........The use of glass with a metallic backing commenced in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and, by the time of the Renaissance, Nürnberg and Venice had established outstanding reputations as centres of mirror production. The mirrors produced in Venice were famous for their high quality. Despite the strictures of the doges, Venetian workmen succumbed to the temptation to carry the secrets of their craft to other cities, and, by the middle of the 17th century, mirror making was practiced extensively in London
and Paris. Generally, mirrors were extremely expensive--especially the larger variety--and the wonderment created at the time by the royal palace at Versailles was due in part to the profusion of mirrors that adorned the state rooms.....
click [here] to read on more.
xiaoqiang's bitch: everyday, we will make use of this wonderful metal creation of mankind to transport us up and down the building. this creation is called lift . repeat after me, L I F T. it's there for the convinience of all of us. though it's kinda fustrated when there's no reception signal on your cellphone when you are in the lift. And everyday, i took this lift up to my office. Alone sometimes, with other people sometimes, with something else sometimes(eww~ sound spooky~. with cleanly furnished, polished metal as its door interior acting as mirrors. so people adjust themselves, their clothes, their hair before the doors open and took their leave to their level/ floors. but the thing is this mirror reflects the enlarged version of oneself, sideways. i get my colleagues complaining and refused to stand in the middle of the lift. in the end i have to give up my comfortablely rested butt of the railings in lift the and offered them to stand at the sides. i couldn't understand what's the fuss about looking at yourself, enlarge version for a few seconds. after all, you knew that wasn't real you in the mirror. and i noticed a humourous part at the end of lift journey as i allowed myself to be the last to leave the lift. after the " no~ i dun wanna stand in front of the mirror, i looked fat in this mirror" they STILL did a little adjustment in front of the mirrored doors before taking their leaves.
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xiaoqiang's words: watch 2 movies over the past 2 weeks. both movies are with rating, 28 days later is NC-16, and Swimming Pool is R(A). both movies were cleverly filmed. 28 days later is very bloody, more puke . it reminds me of "faces of death" and "event horizon" .Swimming Pool is more abstract and puzzling. it took me quite a while to realise what's going on in the movie after clarification from vincent & Mei and Dickson.
A virus that locks those infected into a permanent state of killing rage, is accidentally released from a British research facility. Carried by animals and humans, the virus is impossible to contain, and spreads across the entire planet. Twenty-eight days later, a small group of survivors are trapped in London, caught in a desperate struggle to protect themselves from the infected. As they attempt to salvage a future from the apocalypse, they find that their most deadly enemy is not the virus, but other survivors.
Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) is a famous British mystery author. Tired of London and seeking inspiration for her new novel, she accepts an offer from her publisher John Bosload (Charles Dance) to stay at his home in the South of France. It is the off-season, and Sarah finds that the beautiful country locale and unhurried pace is just the tonic for her – until late one night, when John’s indolent and insouciant French daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) unexpectedly arrives. Sarah’s prim and steely English reserve is jarred by Julie’s reckless, sexually charged lifestyle. Their interactions set off increasingly unsettling dynamics and begin to unduly influence Sarah’s creative process, as Sarah finds herself drawn into a real-life mystery that Julie embodies.
