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Women's Day

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Today is International Women's Day. This festival, commemorated at the United Nations, represents almost a century of struggle for equality, justice, peace and development. Unlike other festivals, the story of International Women's Day has not been the past. Someone suggests that the French Revolution sparked off the movement of Women's Rights. Parisian women calling for "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" marched on Versailles to demand women's suffrage. And the first Women's Day was observed in US on 28 February 1909. It seems that democracy can bring the Rights of Women. In the ancient Greek, citizens who could vote for the democratic government and public affairs did not include women as well as children, slaves and prisoners. Women were considered as naive, incredible, sensational, dependent and slaved. After two thousand years, some people still think of women in such way today. The movement of Women's Rights can be considered as two directions. O...
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Bookcrossing

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Before the Internet is popular, we used to making friends around the world via some PenPal programs. When we were children, we paid a PenPal organization for its administration fee and then started our exchange of letters in our unrecognized English with counterparts in the other side of the world. Behind pieces of letter sheet, there were friendship, curiosity and fun. We can no longer find such feeling via emails or instant messengers that are supposed to replace letters. The speed of the interaction is rapid and they can carry images, audios and videos. However, the key of PenPal is not information exchange but soul exchange. Can we retrieve such feeling in the world of Web 2.0? Yes, we can do it through Bookcrossing. Bookcrossing is an activity of leaving a book in a public area to be picked up and read by others who will do so then. With the power of Web 2.0, such personal and free activities can be traced and coordinated by an online database and a website. Bookcrossing.com (URL:...
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Love of the Phantom

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Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera is evergreen. You can get a long list of links related to this musical and its movie in Google. Topics include its songs, its characters, its special effects and so on. I watched the DVD of the movie three times last week. The story is simple but touching. What can shock me in the movie is the last scene that Raoul found a piece of rose with Christine's engagement ring on the side of her grave when he sent the Phantom's monkey music box to her grave. This scene is additional to the original plot of its musical, while the musical ends with the Phantom's disappearance and his mask only. The musical's ending is typical comedy ending while the movie's ending highlights the true meaning of love. In the ending of the musical version, Christine kissed the Phantom so that he released them because of accepting their solid love. This is well known as a happy ending of Raoul and Christine over the tragedy of the Phantom. This ...
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