Toisan

A neat photo essay on Toisan. Though the pictures are cool, I wish there was more writing about them.

For instance, the fortified housing towers in the 9th picture? An evolution of the classic village watchtower to protect against bandits and warlords. As one of the poorer regions, Toisan villages were often left to their own in dealing with the anarchy of the times, and so, had to set up their own means of protection.

The emigrants sent back a lot of money to build schools, factories, and even a railroad. When the cultural revolution hit, a lot of these things were destroyed or dismantled and the people who built them painted as petty-boogie oppressors. So much for reunited the worker with the fruits of their labor.

I hope some linguists are doing studies in Toisanese - I heard that it has words that actually have found no translation in Cantonese or Mandarin, which would be pretty interesting to check out. Aside from Toisan, it's a scattered language, across the globe, spoken mostly by older folks in Chinatowns well pushed out by Cantonese, and now, Mandarin.

We're on the same training regimen

My amusement here is thinking of the way some of the folks outta the Drow Lynching discussions, Racefail, those who read my gaming blog and hate think I roll:

http://www.salon.com/life/2010/02/17/we_brunch_hard

It's very hard being an angry militant black man.

First, I have to wake up every morning and say a minimum of 68 "The White Man Is Evil" meditations, which is then immediately followed by my morning run (I have to be in shape ... for the revolution). I take wide strides while listening intently to my Farrakhan and Rev. Wright mixtape. (Yes, there's a mixtape.) Then I come home and sing Negro spirituals to remind myself that slavery happened. That way, when I run into white people (which I try not to, but it happens ... like scurvy), I can be at maximum rage level and can scream at them for all the ills that are within the black community.

Shelter

Glad to see Golda is still rocking it!