Strange Convergence

Date: 2003.05.25 | Category: General; SARS | Tags:

One of the interesting things about living in China is the ready access to recorded music and video. Certainly some of it is pirated, although it’s a bit difficult to figure out. I think the US recording industry is really making a mistake in pricing its products as high as they do—I think people in the US would be happy to buy DVDs of their favorite movies and TV shows instead of renting them. Perhaps they do and I just missed out on it, just like it took me a long time to figure out that the DVDs look a lot better on my computer screen than they do on our TV.

One of the series I’ve been watching is The Sopranos, because I’ve always been intrigued by it when I’ve seen it hotel rooms when traveling. Also because it’s easy to see parallels between the Soprano organization and the current regime here, people trying to adapt the old ways to modern times and having some trouble getting it to work out (NOTE: this should not be taken to imply any other parallels between the Soprano organization and the Chinese Communist Party). Anyway, today I looked at their website, and was surprised to see an ad for this book:

described as:

A NEW book that illustrates the strange parallels between the universe of Tony Soprano and the world of Tao Te Ching.

Apparently they run excerpts each week on this webpage: http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/community/tao3.shtml

So you can learn about Taoism and the Mafia together!