Author: shun

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

Late Night Rumbling

These couple of months seem extraordinarily long. Most of my classes at UCSC finally came to a close. As for my “Human Centered Design” online class at SCAD, next week is the finals; and finals at SCAD is always hell. Fortunately I invested a lot of time on the project in the past couple of assignments, everything is on schedule to be completed.

On a different note, Bryan finally “discovered” his hands a couple of weeks ago as well. Sometimes when one of his hands gets in his field of view, he freezes the hand and analyzes it carefully with his eyes wide open. At about the same time, he also realized his fingers were better than the pacifier. With his newfound soothing object in his mouth, pacifiers are no longer good enough for him.

Another interesting development about Bryan is that he has developed the ability to giggle out loud. We found out last week when I pretended to sneeze. He just laughed and laughed. Apparently it doesn’t take much to amuse an infant. Nor does it take much to keep an infant occupied for half an hour with the same mobile on top of his crib for the past three months.

Busy baby lives.

Science and Honesty

Stephen Hawking is said to be one of the most influential scientists in modern physics. He delivered a speech on Thursday about the prospects of physics ad its implications on science.

A couple of my favorite quotes:

When asked about his thoughts on President Bush’s proposal to put a man on Mars within 10 years, Hawking simply replied: “Stupid”.

Hawking answered one question with more seriousness than others–that concerning his feelings about the U.S. government’s policy on stem-cell research.

In Britain, he said, stem-cell research is seen as a great opportunity.

“America will be left behind if it doesn’t change its policy,” he said.

Bush’s fuzzy science seems to be everywhere.