台湾慈济中学
Hope I can meet you guys next year if I am eligible to go there for studies!
Which Michael Jackson will be remembered? The unsurpassed entertainer, the gifted and driven song-and-dance man who wielded rhythm, melody, texture and image to create and promote the best-selling album of all time, “Thriller”? Or the bizarre figure he became after he failed in his stated ambition to outsell “Thriller,” and after the gleaming fantasy gave way to tabloid revelations, bitter rejoinders and the long public silence he was scheduled to break next month?
In the end, the superstar and the recluse were not so far apart.
Mr. Jackson built his stardom on paradox. As a child star he was precocious; as an adult he was childlike. His only competition was himself. Within the razzle-dazzle of his songs, he sang about fears and uncertainties in that high, vulnerable voice: flinching from monsters in “Thriller,” wishing he could just “Beat It” when trouble began.
He was a racial paradox, too: an African-American whose audience was never segregated, but whose features grew more Caucasian and whose skin grew lighter through his career, to discomfiting effect. His own face had become a mask.
All of Mr. Jackson’s show-business skills — the ones he learned under his father’s sometimes brutal instruction and then within the Motown Records hitmaking assembly line — were at once a way to please the broadest possible audience and to shield himself from them, safe within his own spectacle.
Despite all his time onstage and on the air, Mr. Jackson stayed remote: styled, rehearsed and choreographed. He had one of history’s largest audiences, and it never really knew him.
There was no denying his talent. His voice leaped out of the radio in Jackson 5 songs like “I Want You Back,” even for those who didn’t see how he danced on television. He internalized Motown’s philosophy of making music for a broad audience — not just a black or white audience as pop grew increasingly segmented in the 1970s — and when he took over his own career, with “Off the Wall” in 1979, he applied that philosophy to the newest sounds he could find, in and out of discos.
His ambition was seductive when he urged “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” He offered something to everybody on “Thriller,” which may have been the most strategic crossover album to date: a duet with a Beatle in “The Girl Is Mine,” dizzying electronic beats in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” rock guitar in “Beat It.”
His established stardom helped get his African-American face onto MTV, breaking what seemed like a color line, in what was a hugely beneficial step for both. Mr. Jackson wasn’t just an old-school show-business expert who could sing and dance onstage in real time; he was also more than ready for the music-video era, turning his songs into high-concept video clips that fit the chorus-line production of old Hollywood musicals into television-sized nuggets.
His dance moves were angular and twitchy, hinting at digital stops and starts rather than analog fluidity — except, of course, for his famous moonwalk, the image of someone striding gracefully without ever leaving center stage.
The world-beating success of “Thriller” was Mr. Jackson’s triumph and burden. He had the sales, the Grammy Awards, the screaming audiences in every country he toured. And he would spend the rest of his career trying to repeat the experience working many of the same maneuvers into his music: another duet, another rock guitar, another ratcheting dance track. Mr. Jackson never stopped being catchy, but behind the sheen some of the songs grew darker and stranger, like “Smooth Criminal,” with its intimations of violence, on the 1987 album “Bad.”
Mr. Jackson labored; his albums came four, five, six years apart. The hip-hop era had arrived, with its bluntly candid lyrics and quick-and-dirty productions, both contrary to Mr. Jackson’s style; he tried to keep up the crossover with raps from the Notorious B.I.G., but that didn’t buy him street credibility.
The songs grew increasingly divided between benevolent messages like “Heal the World” and spiteful ones like “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” on his 1991 album “Dangerous.” On his 1995 album “HIStory” — which started out as a greatest-hits collection but added a second album of new songs — Mr. Jackson’s fury boiled over in new songs like “They Don’t Care About Us” and “Tabloid Junkie.”
Part of the pop audience — and critics, too — took pleasure in Mr. Jackson’s setbacks. He had long been billing himself as the King of Pop, and the cover of “HIStory” shows him as a giant statue, the kind that gets toppled when tin-pot dictators (or pop idols) are overthrown.
The underlying sweetness that had made Mr. Jackson endearing, even at his strangest, had curdled, and he couldn’t resuscitate it for his final album, “Invincible,” in 2001. All the pieces he had put together, all the paradoxes that he had been able to resolve with sheer musicality, started to fall apart. He was working on a stadium spectacle for shows in London this summer, and we will never know if all his skill and showmanship could have given him a new start.
The Jackson 5, from left, Tito, Marlon, Michael, Jackie and Jermaine, performed during the "Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" in Los Angeles in 1972.
Mr. Jackson performed "We Are the World" during the World Music Awards in London in 2006.
Janet Jackson and her brother accepted the Best Dance video award during the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards in New York.
Mr. Jackson performed during his "HIStory" world tour concert in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1996.
Mr. Jackson during the Democratic National Committee benefit concert "A Night at the Apollo" at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in April 2002.Here are some of the songs I like the most :
We are the world
I am not alone
Smooth Criminal
Heal The World
Group Photo of IT class in South Australian Matriculation (SAM)
Roti canai and Roti Hong Kong with two cups of teh-tarik...
Coffee Bean Chicken pie with Thailand Sprite...XD
Sketching...
So how's it?
Aluminium unibody..
Nice Design right?
Crystal Glass..
Dubai in 1990 prior to the craziness
The same street in 2003
Last year
The madness of Dubai.
The Dubai Marina is an entirely man made development that will contain over 200 highrise buildings when finished. It will be home to some of the tallest residential structures in the world. The completed first phase of the project is shown. Most of the other high rise buildings will be finished by 2009-2010. Cool right?
Currently, the Walt Disney World Resort is the no.1 tourist destination in the world. Once fully completed, Dubailand will easily take over that title since it is expected to attract 200,000 visitors daily.
The Dubai Mall will be the largest shopping mall in the world with over 9 million square feet of shopping and around 1000 stores.
Some of the tallest buildings in the world, such as Ocean Heights and The Princess Tower, which will be the largest residential building in the world at over a 100 stories, will line the Dubai Marina.
This is what downtown Dubai will look like around 2008-2009. More than 140 stories of the Burj Dubai have already been completed. It is already the worlds tallest man made structure and it is still not scheduled to be completed for at least another year.
The Burj Dubai. Construction began in 2005 and is expected to be complete by 2009. At an estimated height of over 800 meters, it will easily be world's tallest building when finished. It will be almost 40% taller than the the current tallest building, the Taipei 101.
Recently it was announced that the final height of this tower will be 1200 meters. That would make it more than 30% taller than the Burj Dubai and three times as tall as the Empire State Building.
The Al Burj. This will be the centerpiece of the Dubai Waterfront. Once completed it will take over the title of the tallest structure in the world from the Burj Dubai.
Dubailand. Currently, the largest amusement park collection in the world is Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, which is also the largest single-site employer in the United states with 58,000 employees. Dubailand will be twice the size. 
Hydropolis, the world's first underwater hotel. Entirely built in Germany and then assembled in Dubai, it is scheduled to be completed by 2009 after many delays.
Dubai Sports City. A huge collection of sports arenas located in Dubailand.
The Palm Islands in Dubai. New Dutch dredging technology was used to create these massive man made islands. They are the largest artificial islands in the world and can be seen from space. Three of these Palms will be made with the last one being the largest of them all.
The World Islands. 300 artificially created islands in the shape of the world. Each island will have an estimated cost of $25-30 million.
