Friday, November 19, 2004
Holiday gift ideas for geeks
By Craig Crossman
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
(KRT)
OK, here we go again.
It's that time of year where I begin to tell you about
all of those great technology items that will make
any geek in your life literally glow with delight.
This year, the offerings continue to outpace the
previous year when it comes to flashing lights,
strange sounds, tactile feedback and even personal
hygiene.
Because there are so many, this year I plan to keep
them coming for as long as possible beginning with
this week's column.
Let's begin with the good old mouse pad.
This year, it's not your father's mouse pad any
more.
The FlexiGlow FX Illuminated Mouse Pad
($26.99) is more for your eyes than it is for your
mouse
The mouse pad has a built-in multi-color LED light
system that lets you choose any one of seven differ
ent colors by pressing a button.
Or you can have the mouse pad phase cycle
through all of the colors for the ultimate effect.
The colors emit from a translucent material that
runs completely around the perimeter of the mouse
pad via low-power LEDS that get their power from
a USB connection cord.
Turn out the lights in the room for the best mouse
pad show in town.
The next mouse pad is something Minnesota Fats
may have carried had there been computers in his
day.
Envision him strolling into the parlor with his cus
tom pool cue in its carrying case.
I've seen his counterparts with tennis rackets, golf
clubs and even baseball bats, each in its very own
custom carrying case.
But what of the professional computer gamer?
You guessed it.
It's the custom computer mouse pad.
The X-Ray Thunder 8 Gaming Pad ($24.99) is a
mouse pad so fine that it comes in its very own ul
tra-light carrying case.
Open the quality tin metallic shell and inside rests
your unique dual-surfaced mouse pad that can in
stantly let you switch from a smooth to a textured
mousing surface.
The idea here is that you can best determine which
surface works better with your mouse of the mo
ment.
I assume that you'll probably be carrying more
than one mouse for different kinds of game playing,
of course.
The base of this mouse pad is firmly anchored to
the desk surface via specially designed soft, sticky
silicone rubber feet that really grip the desk.
The Thunder 8 also includes a cord clip to keep
the mouse cable out of the way when you elect to
use a corded mouse instead of your wireless model.
38 million children play music to our ears
By Richard Scheinin
Knight Ridder Newspapers
STANFORD, Calif. - In the Republic of
China, 38 million boys and girls are study
ing the piano, learning their Chopin, Mozart
and Beethoven. Shanghai and Beijing boast
at least a dozen symphony orchestras, and
concert halls are filled with young yuppie
couples, because classical music is not only
much-loved, but trendy.
Why is all this happening? How did Euro
pean art music, in danger of withering on the
vine in this hemisphere, grow such deep roots
in China, which is now exporting superstar
soloists and a fresh crop of composers to the
West in one of the great cultural bounce-backs
of our time?
Sheila Melvin, a writer, and Jindong Cai,
Stanford University's new director of orches
tral studies, have some answers. Their new
book, "Rhapsody in Red: How Western Clas
sical Music Became Chinese" (Algora Pub
lishing, $33 paperback), tells the unlikely
stoiy of European music's 400-year journey
into the Chinese heart. It's filled with tales of
missionaries, emperors and idealistic musi
cians, some driven to suicide during the Cul
tural Revolution, some hanging on as heroes
in the service of ait.
Melvin and Cai, who are married with two
young children, spent three years research
ing the book. For Cai, 48, there was an unex
pected payout: He came to understand the
long rollout of history that led to his becom
ing a musician in the Western classical tradi
tion. China's love affair with Western music
happened "step by step, many years of tur
moil and musicians' devotion. Now I think,
'Ah! This is why I learned Western music.'"
He grew up in Beijing playing a violin that
his father, a trolley repairman, had purchased
secondhand for $3. In September, after a sum
mer visiting family in China, he and Melvin
moved to Stanford with their children,
Sebastian, 3, and Cecilia, 11 months. The liv
ing room of their condo is dominated by a
The Cold Heat Soldering Tool reaches a melting temperature in less than one second and then
cools to a touchable temperature in about five seconds
The only choice you may have to wrestle with is
whether you want the base of the mouse pad in black,
green or blue.
Like walking into a pool hall with a Balabushka
Pool Cue, your opposition will probably cut and run
when you walk into the computer room with an X-
Ray Thunder 8 under your arm.
For those geeks who like playing under the hood
of their computers, they may find the need to solder
something back in place.
One of the coolest soldering tools I have seen in a
long time is the Cold Heat Soldering Tool ($19.99).
This amazing device reaches a solder melting tem
perature of well over 500 degrees in less than one
second.
But what is even more incredible is that it returns
to a touch-safe temperature within 5 seconds after it
is deactivated,
Anyone who has ever worked with a soldering gun
or iron can tell you about bums received from these
tools that can take minutes to warm up and a lot
longer to finally cool down.
The Cold Heat Soldering Tool works on four AA
batteries and will solder over 700 joints before you
have to change them.
It too comes in its own case.
Finally, let's talk about caffeine.
It's the choice of PC champions when it comes to
staying up all night with a computer.
grand piano and a big Chinese gong. Lunch
one recent afternoon was stir-fry followed by
pistachio ice cream.
It's life in the global age: Melvin, origi
nally from Washington, D.C., fell in love with
China during an Asian backpacking trip af
ter college and spent much of the '9os in
Shanghai and Beijing. Cai moved to the
United States in 1985 to attend Boston's New
England Conservatory, studied with Leonard
Bernstein at Tanglewood and spent years
teaching in Cincinnati, Tucson and Baton
Rouge.
Saturday night, his Bay Area career be
gins: Cai will conduct the Stanford Sym
phony Orchestra in a program of Mahler and
Beethoven. In February, the orchestra will
perform works by Cambodian composer
Chinary Ung and Chinese composer Zhou
Long, who has written a concerto for West
ern orchestra and pipa, the traditional stringed
instrument.
"My idea is to create a kind of festival to
introduce contemporary Asian composers,
using Stanford as a base," says Cai, who
thinks the Western music scene can be rein
vigorated by Asian concert music, much as
China was nourished by music from the West.
"How do you attract a new generation, a
new audience to classical music? This is a
way. You have to have something new and
interesting. This is the place for me to do more
things."
"People care about culture here," Melvin
says. In Baton Rouge, where Cai taught at
Louisiana State University, "they care about
football." With its large Chinese and Asian
populations, the Bay Area reminds her, in a
way, of China, where "parents don't push their
kids to play soccer or football. They push
them to play an instrument and hold an intel
lectual conversation about poetry."
This is "the best place to raise our chil
dren," Cai agrees.
He and Melvin met in 1997. She was liv
ing in Shanghai, running the U.S.-China
Business Council and writing freelance sto
ries about Chinese culture for the New York
STUDBNT Lin
Times and the Wall Street Journal. She par
ticularly "wanted to explain Chinese music"
to English-speaking readers, she says, be
cause "music crosses cultures easily. Music
is something that connects."
A mutual friend introduced her to Cai, who
had moved to the United States in 1985 but
was back in China to conduct the Shanghai
Symphony Orchestra in a program of Ameri
can composers. Two years later, they started
dating, had an across-the-globe romance,
they have kept their "thousands of e-mails"
and celebrated their engagement on the Great
Wall of China about midnight on Jan. 1,2000.
By that time, they were already collabo
rating on newspaper features, including a
lengthy history of the Shanghai Symphony,
descended from China's oldest symphony
orchestra.
"Rhapsody in Red" is dense with names,
dates and explanations of China's gradual
opening to Western sounds. Melvin sees it as
part of China's larger opening to Western
trade, science and technology. "Western mu
sic is part of a package," she says. "And for
the Chinese it means a lot of things. It means
strength. It means power."
Several personalities stand out in the book:
Matteo Ricci, a Chinese-speaking Jesuit priest
from Italy, sailed up the Grand Canal to
Beijing in 1601 to deliver a clavichord, an
early keyboard, to the Emperor Wan Li in
the Imperial Palace of the Forbidden City.
The strange new mechanism, and the exotic
sounds it produced, had its intended effect: It
fascinated the emperor.
The rest, as they say, is history, at least un
til 1918, when another Italian, a pianist named
Mario Pad, sailed into Shanghai harbor on a
steamship to give a recital. He fell sick and,
during a lengthy recovery, fell in love with
the "Paris of the East" and decided to stay
for decades. His illness changed the course
of music in China. Paci turned Shanghai's
town band into the Shanghai Municipal Or
chestra, the first symphony orchestra in the
nation, originally composed entirely of for
eign musicians. But he eventually trained a
Geeks first turned to coffee, then Mountain Dew.
then Jolt Cola.
Now it's soap.
But not ordinary soap.
This soap contains caffeine.
I'm not kidding.
In fact, your morning shower may bring a whole
new meaning to waking when you lather up with
this bar.
Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap ($6.99 per bar)
is billed as the world's first and original caffeinated
soap product.
For the health-conscience, Shower Shock is an all
vegetable based glycerin soap, which does not con
tain any harsh ingredients like ethanol,
diethanolamine, polyethylene glycol or cocyl
isethionate.
Now I'm not exactly sure if the caffeine really does
make it through your skin and into your blood stream.
I noticed that the manufacturer makes no such
claim, no matter where on your body you may wash
with it.
But it still makes for one heck of a different holi
day gift, don't you think?
All of the products here are available at Think Geek s
website at www.thinkgeek.com.
Stay tuned for lots more unusual holiday gifts for
the technology lovers in your life.
NHAT V. MEYER
Jindong Cai rehearses with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra at Dinkelspiel
Auditorium at Stanford University, in California
couple generations of native players who, Cai
says, "became the backbone of musical train
ing in China."
When their story about the Shanghai Sym
phony was published in the New York Tunes
in 1999, Melvin and Cai heard from a reader:
Fiona Paci Zaharoff, daughter of the legend
ary Mario. She was about 80, living in New
York near Lincoln Center and still attending
concerts. She still wore outfits made by Ma
dame Garnett, a White Russian tailor in
Shanghai in the 19305.
And she had shoeboxes of her father's
memorabilia, including many programs and
reviews, and an autographed photograph
from Jascha Heifet, "In memory of a jolly
good time!" who had performed with Paci
and the orchestra in Shanghai in 1925.
For Melvin and Cai, writing a book had
become inevitable. They holed up in the
Shanghai Library and Beijing's National Li
brary, examining English-language newspa-
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO/KRT
The Behrend Beacon 111
‘America's Most Wanted’
still captures viewers
By David Bianculli
New York Daily News
It goes unnoticed, but "America's Most Wanted" is
the most-watched program in its time slot on Satur
day nights. It's also No. 8 on a much more impressive
list. This Little TV Show That Could has lasted long
enough to be ranked as one of the longest-running se
ries in the entire history of prime time.
"America's Most Wanted" began on Fox's owned-and
operated stations in February 1988, and went national
on Fox that April.
John Walsh, whose son Adam had been found dead
in a nationally famous missing-child case, was and
remains the host nearly 17 years later, with more than
800 fugitives captured.
Families of victims, especially, trust Walsh because
he's experienced in the ordeal they're undergoing.
"Unfortunately, I've walked in their shoes, so I know
where they're coming from," Walsh said. "The media
can be brutal.
"After Adam was murdered, a lot of the media that
we begged to keep Adam's story going for the two
weeks that he was missing lost interest after the first
or second day. 1 had begged them to keep helping us
look for this little boy, and, of course, when parts of
him were found two weeks later, the most horrible
murder, they were all camped out on our front lawn."
It was a horrible experience, he said.
"It's actually part of my deal with Fox, that I'll never
do a story a victim doesn't want me to do," Walsh said.
"We ll never show the face of a molested or abused
child. That criteria has been my standard for 17 years.
And if they don't want to say something, or are un
comfortable, this is not “60 Minutes,” this is my show.
If they don't want to talk about it, it's okay.”
The program, modeled after the BBC's "Crimewatch
U.K.,” went after FBI Top 10 wanted killer David
James Roberts in its pilot, and caught him identified
by several people at a Manhattan homeless shelter.
"When it started," said "AMW" executive producer
Lance Heflin, "everyone was just shrieking in horror.
'Oh my God, it's vigilante TV! Everyone will be turn
ing in their brothers and their neighbors! Here comes
George Orwell and company!'
"It was never that, and never turned out that."
The show helped catch John List, then the Texas 7,
and, most famously, helped return Elizabeth Smart to
her parents after nine months.
"America's Most Wanted" has lasted so long, Heflin
said, because its audience (7.7 million viewers last
week) is so loyal: "People trust us, and they know what
they're going to get with us."
And that has helped keep the show running. The
top four longest-running shows still on the air are "60
Minutes," the Disney umbrella showcase, "Monday
Night Football" and ”20/20."
How many reality shows will run that long? Not
As for reality the genre, Walsh is dismissive.
"I think it's unreality TV, to tell you the truth," he
said. "A woman in a bikini eating two yards of horse
colon is not reality TV. Who Wants to Marry a Ho'?'
That's not reality TV."
pers back to 1918: "We go page by page,"
Cai says, "to find one ad: Jascha Heifetz came,
or a Russian orchestra came. And you sud
denly realize, 'Wow! Shanghai was like
that.""
Another Shanghai archive has a huge cata
log of unreleased recordings; Melvin and Cai
plan to scour it for Pad's recitals. He is said
to have been a remarkable musician, but the
sounds of his playing have vanished.
"And for our next project," Melvin says,
"we're going to find out what happened to
the clavichord."
She is talking about the instrument deliv
ered by Matteo Ricci in 1601. It hasn’t been
seen in centuries.
"It means we'll have to get into the For
bidden City, which is an impenetrable maze,"
Melvin says. "People think it's still there. They
don't throw anything out."
Cai says, "We're going to find it."
(KRT)