Month: November 2005

War of the Worlds

I joined PeerFlix a couple of weeks ago mainly to get rid of DVDs I regretted getting, and hopefully, I can exchange them with something I wish I’d gotten. Against my better judgement, though, I got “War of the Worlds“. I read reviews and they all said the movie sucked. But I had to see it for myself.

What a mistake.

The movie sucked…

Well, coming from a special effects and 3D background, I have to give it to Steven that the effects are great in the movie. But the plot, story, logic, ending… sucked, sucked, sucked and sucked. I think I am going to avoid Steven Spielberg films until he can remove that sappiness from his ass and starts making movies with decent plots and endings. “A.I.” suffered the same fate when he got too sappy with the ending. The movie could have ended and stayed decent when David gets trapped at the bottom of the ocean. But NO, Steven has to reunite David with his mommy for 24 hours and kill her off for good using Alien technology.

Now I just got to get the rest of the movies on my list, including “Sign with your Baby Training Video“.

Speaking of movies, Grace and I watched “PTU” (Police Tactical Unit) again the other night. It’s easily among the best of the best Hong Kong films, especially those with the Hong Kong police force as their underlying themes. Johnnie To never disappoints. Even crappy scripts can turn into gold with his magical directorship. While we are on the topic of Hong Kong films, “Infernal Affairs” (more about it here) is also an excellent movie though its subsequent sequel and prequel weren’t quite as tightly written and directed. Like all good movies, prequels and sequels never live up to the excellence of the original release of the film (with the obvious exception of “Lord of the Rings. But then that trilogy doesn’t really count because Peter Jackson cheated by making all three movies in one go with creative editing). Yet others will say that the “Godfather Trilogy (more here) should also be excluded. But I say, “whatever, dude”. To see an A-Z list of trilogies Hollywood ever made, find them here.

Emotional Distance

The emotional distance between people usually affect the way we interact with each other physically. For us humans, physical distance doesn’t seem to exist when certain emotional bonds are attached. On the other hand, without this emotional bond, the person sitting next to you in the subway might as well not exist for all you care. This explains why some people can walk right by dying bodies injured from traffic accidents (this has been happening quite frequently in Taiwan, of all places, a “country” that no international community cares about, where its people doesn’t even care about their own!).

“Distance”, in our limited mental capacity to understand the world around us, only makes sense when it’s quantifiable in yards, meters or even in light years. But what about emotional distance? How does science quantify intangible ideas exist purely in the realm of concepts and cognitive matters?

It’s rather interesting to observe that when two people share a strong emotional bond, the physical distance between them seem to drastically shorten, or maybe disappear altogether. In the old days, handwritten letters can instantly fuse two distant hearts. Nowadays, those same feelings can become instant gratifications with the use telephones, emails, instant messages, or combination of all three, Skype. But still, nothing can fill in the lack of emotional bonds between two strangers.

These emotional bonds, of course, fluctuate. People fall in and out of love; the intensity of the feeling changes; this chemistry always affects the emotional distance between people. This invisible distance is particularly evident when two people quarrel. They could be under the same roof and in the same room, but they scream as if the Grand Canyon is in between them. We sometimes also use the analogy that “someone feels distant”, obviously referring to that emotional distance we somehow feel between each other as living beings.

Applying the same logic to physical distance, the lack of emotional bond can sometimes be detected when people-watching in public places. It’s obvious to see the young couples walking by with their tongues practically in each other’s throats don’t suffer a shortage of emotional distance. On the other hand, a couple can walk as close to each other as they want, but that tiny quarter-of-an-inch gap their shoulders are not touching can tell eons about their emotional distance.

Ah, all the things you can conjure up from people watching.

Environmentally Friendly Conumption

Last year Grace’s mom gave us a gift basket from Bath & Body Works. In it were a couple of bottles of foaming hand soaps. The design of the bottle is such that when you push down the dispenser, the liquid soap foams on its way out of the bottle to your hands. The system works great; the combination of little things for this bottle is just right — each push at the dispenser generates just enough soap, not too much, not too little; the foaming liquid soap never hardens at the exit point of the dispenser (like traditional liquid soaps), which if it did, would then block the flow of the liquid soap, forcing the user to push the dispensing mechanism harder, making the dispenser to dispense more soap than needed, which then creates waste (on both the soap and the water needed to wash it off); the foam is easy to wash off and leaves a rather pleasant scent on your hands.

But of course, nothing can be this perfect when it comes to corporate interests v.s. human interests. As it turns out, the dispensing unit won’t foam any kind of liquid soap other than the specific formula supplied by Bath & Body Works. Sure this is to make sure people don’t buy the dispensing unit they invented and fill it up with someone else’s product inside. I can understand and relate to the market strategy. But surely, they make refills for those wonderful, perfectly working dispensing bottles!

F*&k, no. And that’s the part that really ticked me off about Bath & Body Works. They put all that R&D into coming up with this wonderful dispenser (or maybe they just hired some two-bit Chinese factory to do it) and a foaming formula that works, but they’d rather people throwing away perfectly working dispensers than to sell refill bottles for those units. Is it corporate greed or just plain stupidity? I am inclined to say B&BW is the latter.

In some European countries, providing refillable bottle designs and supplies is part of the recycling legislation. Simply recycling millions of bottles consumers throw away every year is no longer enough to curb millions of tons of perfectly reusable bottles going to waste. This was something that Brian shared with me when he started noticing Austria’s recycling policies. The United States, being the number one consumer waste generator in the world, should take a page from Austria’s recycling program in that aspect. Like Brian, I hate it every time we throw a perfectly reusable bottle away. Unfortunately I don’t see this as something that will ever be legislated in the U.S. because of powerful lobbying efforts driven by greedy corporate interests. What a shame.

Turducken for Thanksgiving

It’s become a tradition to have Ee-bin and Patrick to come over for Thanksgiving. Grace and Ee-bin usually starts the day by prepping the Turkey (which takes a good portion of the day to bake in the oven) and making all other side dishes from scratch. This year was no different, except that they decided to get Turducken (chicken stuffed inside a duck which was stuffed inside a turkey) instead of plain ‘ol turkey this year.

Weeks before Thanksgiving approached, Grace and Ee-bin started planning what were to be included for the Thanksgiving dinner. Starting with email exchanges several times a week, just days before the BIG DAY, they started calling each other several times a day. And when they finally decided on serving Turducken, Ee-bin ordered from Hebert’s Meat Specialty down in Louisiana, which Ee-bin and Patrick saw in National Geographic.

One side note about the turducken: It arrived a day later than Hebert’s Meat had promised. Ee-bin tried calling to complain about the missing bird, but the line was busy. But Grace got through the first time she tried, and they decided to send another turducken free of charge since they couldn’t immediately locate the FedEx tracking number. And sure enough, the original Turducken arrived the next day, and the “replacement” arrived the day after that. So we got two turduckens for the price of one (~$110 each). All three birds were de-boned (read: a lot of labor), which means they probably aren’t making much on each turducken. I told Grace the poor mom’n’pop shops like this go bankrupt because of customers like them. Hah!

As for the rest of the Thanksgiving day, Grace and Ee-bin spent seven hours getting everything ready. But when it’s all said and done, it took us only half an hour to get really stuffed with all the food because we waited all day for this one big meal.

Last year, Kyung joined us on Thanksgiving. That was kind of cool. But that damn turkey was so big that it took Grace and I the next week and a half to finish everything they prepared on that one day.

Stupid turkeys.

E.T., Canada Wants You

Former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, joins NGOs and asks the Canadian Parliament to engage in holding formal political relations with advanced alien life forms. Apparently, this broadcast had a huge effect on his decision to speak his mind.

In a separate news, the world’s ugliest dog died.

Self-portrait Over the Years

Thanks to Jason’s blog entry on this time-waster South Park self-portrait site, I found myself remembering the various versions of myself over the years…

Days of Innocence (High school)
Self portrait: high school

Days of Freedom (College)
Self portrait: college

Working Life (New York)
Self portrait: working life

Jobless Life (California)
Self portrait: Jobless

Grace’s Mental Image of the Ideal Me (Next life)
Self portrait: ideal

What Happens If I Can’t Get A Job (Hello, Defenseless Taiwanese Military)
Self portrait: army

Worst TV Shows and Bad English

Taiwan makes some pretty bad teen dramas, especially those that feature the latest young idols the record labels or model agencies try to make money off of. One of them was “Meteor Garden” featuring the famous F4 boy band. The show effectively demonstrated that not only can’t the members of the band sing, those guys can’t do much else except looking pretty. But apparently the show was so popular that it became the first Taiwanese TV drama to have been imported to Japan and Korea, which was a big deal in itself. Before that, the relationship was one way: Korean and Japanese soaps have made millions of dollars from clueless and gullible Taiwanese teens for decades.

But just the other day, my theory that Taiwan makes the worst TV shows in Asia was broken. Singapore, despite its self-proclaimed better-than-the-rest-of-Asians status in the world, makes absolutely the crappiest and worst TV show ever. “The Hotel” (【 大 é…’ 店】) has a faithful following with an active forum (Simplified Chinese only) of fans with bad taste. The stereotypes and awful acting, script writing and pretty much everything else makes the sitcom impossible to sit through.

The good news is, Singapore’s investment on a bold new series “The Singapore Short Story Project” paid off with some decent acting and script writing. One thing I would like to comment on the project, though, is that I’d forgotten just how funny “Singlish” sounds (not to say that Taiwanese English is anywhere close to being better; but Singlish is, hands down, WAY funnier). Apparently Singlish is now a “recognized” slang of English that everyone knows what it is. Embarrassed, the Singaporean government is now trying to push for proper English to rescue its image.

Since I am on the topic of making fun of Singaporean English, there’s also “Manglish“, referring to Malaysian English. It’s just about as funny as Singlish but with a lot more “flavors” added in (Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin, Tamil… etc). Because parts of it you can’t understand, it’s not quite as funny as Singlish. Another funny (maybe funnier than Singlish) variation of English spoken in Asia is “Engrish“, really really terribly bad English spoken by the Japanese. I mean, Japanese is a serious, no non-sense culture. Naturally, they take language learning seriously. So mostly, Engrish is just a series of misunderstandings, misinterpretations or misuses of the English language by the Japanese when they attempt to reinterpret Japanese meanings using inappropriate English words or pronunciations. And sometimes it’s funny as hell. Engrish.com is a famous site with countless funny examples (tip: try not to laugh out loud at work). Austin Powers has its fair share of puns on Engrish.

Pets, Infants and Allergies

My mom’s been pestering me about raising Bryan while having two cats at home. Almost every time I talk to her on the phone, she never forgets to nag about it (on top of her 5-year nagging about my thesis). Rightfully, she worries that Bryan may grow up with respiratory problems and more prone to allergies like I have been. And she cites evidence from everyone she’s talked to about the subject. Of course, everyone has an opinion when it comes to childrearing practices.

While at dinner at Jason and Alicia’s, Alicia casually mentioned that a recent research concluded that having pets at home actually HELPS infant and young children build up their immune system to resist allergies when they grow older.

CBC News

The 10-year study showed children who were exposed to the furry pets during their first year of life were half as likely to develop common allergies by about age six than those living in petless homes.

CBS News

The bottom line is that maybe part of the reason we have so many children with allergies and asthma is we live too clean a life. When kids play with cats or dogs and the animals lick them, the transfer of bacteria may be changing the way the child’s immune system responds in a way that helps protect against allergies. Parents should not be concerned about having pets in the home with a new baby but the findings do not go far enough in allergy prevention to warrant the purchase of pets.

The fact is, the society today is super freaked out about being sterile and germ-free. Every cleaning agent you can buy in America sports a guarantee of “killing 99.99% of germs and bacteria” on contact. The same hysteria is driving people to use obscene amount of antibiotics to the extent that someday there will be a new species of superbugs that will be resistant to all antibiotics and kill off a significant portion of the human race. I bet those hardcore, conservative right wing Christians will somehow tie that into the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ the Savior, the only son of God, the one and the only salvation to eternal afterlife. So let’s not piss off God by using too much antibiotics and leave them germs and bacteria alone once in a while.

People, let’s relax. It’s perfectly natural and OK for kids to be dirty from time to time. It’s good for them.

As for my mom, I found similar report in Chinese and am planning on sending it to her, with key points highlighted, along with the latest video clips and printed pictures of Bryan.

Baby Jam

We took Bryan out to the mall yesterday for a walk. Ever since his one-month-old party, he’s never seen so many people in his 3.5 month-old life! He stayed up past his 2PM nap time people-watching. He was fascinated with the sheer number of the Christmas crowd. Jason was right about the crowd. The fact that all those malls and department stores having sales early doesn’t help either.

Another phenomenon Grace and I never noticed before was how many babies there were at the mall. Babies, toddlers, baby strollers…. There were so many strollers at the mall that occasional traffic jams were common among narrow strips full of strollers of various sizes. Grace and I even caused a couple ourselves. Did the architects of the mall even take the strollers into account when they designed those walkways?

It’s a weird thought to see that all those babies will someday be competitors with Bryan for jobs, food, breathes of clean air and social benefits. Good thing competition for mating isn’t quite as bloody as it used to be.

Baby Jams