melkimx's notebook

bathroom, ty warner penthouse at four seasons new york

2011-07-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

i posted photos of my apartment in seoul on facebook and it got a lot of nice comments. i never thought my place was that great, mostly because the building is kind of old compared to many others in seoul, but it does have a good layout and view, and it's pretty decently sized. but the bathroom is a crime against humanity. you know how i've always, ever since childhood, had a beef against the fact that the toilet and bath were located in the same room? well, in my apartment, the bathroom is essentially a large shower stall with a toilet in it. you could conceivably sit and do your thing and wash yourself at the same time. it is SO gross. unfortunately, a lot of apartments in seoul are like this. if i wanted to get an apartment with a proper bathroom in my price range, without the insane deposit generally required, i would have to settle for a place that had the approximate dimensions of a shoebox. since i'm grossed out by pretty much most bathrooms as it is, i decided to just go for broke and at least get a place that didn't feel like a prison cell. but in the meantime, i've really started dreaming of luxury bathrooms. this one here almost makes me cry.

kevin's "questions written for other people to answer"

2011-07-30T01:50:00.000-07:00

my brother started answering questions originally posed to other bloggers and columnists. i may be biased, but i think my brother's answers are probably better than the original. check out his blog because he may continue giving unasked-for advice!

Q: Am I the only one who thinks Ted Ginn needs to find his way on the starting line-up? He is the speed they need.
-Ben Roan, Chat with NFL Blogger Mike Sando, ESPN
A: I bet Ted Ginn also thinks he needs to find his way on the starting line-up, and probably Ted Ginn's parents, if they are the supportive types.

demi lovato, "skyscraper"

2011-07-18T04:17:00.000-07:00

it was a nice surprise to learn that demi lovato turns out to have the kind of voice that belies her disney-idol-machine upbringing. check it out, especially at 3:10:

in my opinion, that's not just years of vocal training at work. that's the kind of voice you either just have or you don't. and i love how you can tell that she's putting her all into it. but the video is just awful! demi has killer good looks, but you can barely tell because she's bogged down with those horrible extensions, tacky jewelry, and that baggy white getup. (okay, i get that she's no longer a tiny little ingenue, but she shouldn't be dressing like a fifty-year-old.) even the makeup is terrible. but the video did give us this shot that i like:

demi: 5/5
song: 4/5
video: 1/5

pyeongchang 2018

2011-07-06T22:57:00.000-07:00

man those other countries look thrilled. but i'm sure it would have been the same way no matter who won.

itaewon freedom

2011-05-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

the best place to hear this song is in itaewon!

aziatix, "go"

2011-03-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

someone posted this on our site a few days ago. it's three korean american guys doing R&B. yeah, i thought exactly the same thing, but these guys have pretty much taken over my facebook news feed. super talented!

boxwave elite leather messenger pouch for macbook air 11"

2011-03-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

after a couple weeks waiting, i got my macbook air cover. when i was looking around for covers, i wished there were more reviews and photos online, so i'm posting one now. (you know what my favorite types of reviews are? videos! but that would have meant that i'd have to spend time editing it and my sense of beneficence only goes so far.)

so for $20 (that's the price i paid for it), the boxwave leather messenger pouch isn't bad. it's quite sturdy. it fits properly. it's pretty lightweight. but it looks a little cheaper in person than the website photos indicate. for instance, even though it's not readily apparent in these photos, in real life, you couldn't mistake the material for real leather. there are a few hanging threads (most visible in the last photo), but those don't bother me because i can trim them. smells a little strange, but i think that's fading already. another thing is that the clasp doesn't close too securely -- it's a weak magnet and you have to make sure the center bit is placed right. but on the other hand, the fit is so snug, i can't imagine that the clasp will ever really prove necessary. all in all, it's not bad, and for $20... if you've found a better one for that price, you have to let me know!

the front of this thing is bumming me out. it's so plain. you know what you could do that would be cute is make it look like the front side of an envelope -- mailing address, stamp, etc. that might be a bit twee, though.

sleeves for the 11" macbook air

2011-03-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

my christmas present from stephen was an 11" macbook air! w0000t. i've been using it for a little over two months and i've never liked a computer quite this much. it's lightweight, stylish, and intuitive... it performs quickly and turns on and off in a flash... it's just a great laptop.

however, i've had a hell of a time finding a nice laptop sleeve for this baby, which i need because the aluminum body does scratch pretty easily. 13" macbook air, sure, but 11", not so much. the only available laptop sleeves for the 11" are incredibly bulky and ugly. with a laptop like this, why would i want to cover it with something so gross? after a lot of searching, i found some that aren't too bad:

jolioriginals is a dutch artist who crafts sleek macbook and ipad sleeves with leather exterior and felt interior. my favorite, which has now been sold, was a white sleeve with a fuchsia lining. however, they're pricey -- $75 for an 11" macbook air sleeve. yes, they're leather, and yes, they look like they fit like a glove, but that's too expensive for me! otherwise, i would have bought it in a second.
these covers from pack and smooch are definitely cute. they're made of light gray or dark wool felt, with some brown leather trim, and that interior pocket would be super handy for earphones and various dongles. however, the pricing (in euros) looked pretty pricey, and i although i loved the idea of the pocket, i just wasn't sold on the brown leather trim.
boxwave made a sleeve that looks like an envelope. it's made of faux leather, so the price point is pretty low ($20), and the envelope ensures that the laptop is 100% covered. it's new, so it's available for pre-order on amazon. this is the one i ended up purchasing, because the price was right, and as much as i hate black, it matches with everything, right?
i'm pretty sure this fuchsia neoprene sleeve from incase is available at apple stores. so if you're looking for a basic sleeve that does the job, here it is! $35.
this thin sleeve from radtech in black, plum, blue, green, fuchsia, and gray. it's basically a very thin fabric cover that will protect your macbook from scratches and nothing else. great if you want something very lightweight, but the color choices were a bit sad. i mean, there are a lot of options, but most of the colors have this kind of curiously outdated feel that somehow remind me of 1990's eddie bauer. you don't know what i mean? oh well. the black and plum looked okay, anyway.
the construction of this bubble case by hard candy looks a bit sturdier and neater than that other bubble case for macbook air currently available on amazon. besides the exterior bubble molding, there's additional lining and even rubber bumpers on the interior to prevent any possible damage. if i were looking for a sleeve that would allow me to throw my macbook air across the room, this would be it. $50.

these sleeves from be-ez remind me of those old motorola razr phones that came in three different shades of pink, depending on which carrier you used. i always wanted one of those, but was thwarted by the fact that my family was on sprint. so these kind of strike my fancy for that reason, along with the names ("french rose", "sakura rose", and "lovely rose"). other than that, looks like a standard-issue sleeve.
this pixelsleeve air is cute and zipper-free, for those who prefer easy access to their macbook air. i thought it was attractive, but just didn't like how it left one end exposed. $35.

the king's speech

2011-01-30T01:46:00.001-08:00

i watched this, and well, i really loved it.

all you had to do afterward was tell me that manohla dargis reviewed the film, and i would have been able to predict her response, which turned out to be: "comes with heaping spoonfuls of sugar", "too decent, too banal and... too ingratiating to resonate deeply", and "[the] director jumps from one zippy voice lesson to the next, pausing every so often to wring a few tears". THEN she went on to suggest that the side story of king edward abdicating the throne to marry wallis simpson would have made a more interesting movie. this is EXACTLY why i hate manohla dargis. everything i've ever read about the duke and duchess of windsor makes them sound like the worst people on the face of the earth. of COURSE you could make an interesting movie about them. but who the hell (besides manohla dargis) wants to be watching movies about horrible people all the time? sometimes, i just want to watch a movie about people who are good, because then i can root for them, and then when i think about it, it can make me smile the rest of the day. roger ebert understands that that's a valuable aspect of the movie-watching experience. manohla dargis seems to think she's way too awesome for it. no one wants to party with manohla.

i can't believe i almost went the whole post without mentioning colin firth. so... colin firth is a lot older than he was when he starred in the BBC pride and prejudice miniseries. it doesn't seem right to have a crush on him anymore, but it's hard not to like his characters. i wonder if he's ever played a jerk. oh wait, he has at least once. circle of friends. anyway, this is a good movie. i recommend it.

park jung min, "not alone"

2011-01-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

park jung min is one of many korean male singers currently in a boy band. park's band is called ss501 and he's not one of the more famous members in it, which is to say, he's one of the ones who can actually sing. i gather that several of the ss501 members are releasing solo albums, including park.

as some idol singers do when they attempt to break out of the teenybopper mold, park reintroduced himself with an edgier image, breaking out the guyliner and inviting a bit of controversy when he asked a well-known transvestite to appear in his video (to convey a message of acceptance). but it's not all show and marketing, because, of course, park can sing, and the song is cool. and just like that, now i have a favorite ss501 member. even if he isn't as pretty, isn't he way more charismatic and talented than some other ss501 members who will not be named?

restaurant city "florida's natural" tie-in

2011-01-14T01:10:00.000-08:00

restaurant city is causing me so much pain these days. they introduced about a million recipes requiring sugar while making the ingredient almost impossible to obtain. i mean, sugar has always been difficult to obtain in RC, but it's obvious that playfish has purposely made it even more so lately. it's kind of irritating. i've been considering quitting. honestly!

however, they did one thing that i found kind of cute. RC occasionally has product tie-ins with actual beverages -- coke, dr. pepper, and now florida's natural orange juice. they introduced the drink as an ingredient, made a super easy recipe that everyone managed to level up in, like, two days. here's the cute part. outside the restaurant, there's this adorable little scene:

old man in baseball cap selling OJ at a stand by an orange grove! sweet.

misfits barbie outfit

2011-01-12T13:37:00.000-08:00

my brother recently posted about this barbie outfit my mom once gave me. what's weird is that he seems to remember the situation more than i do. maybe i really am getting old. anyway, what *I* remember is that my mom once came home with a barbie dress for me. i normally liked proper mattel barbie clothes for my barbies, but this one was actually a dress for pizzazz of the misfits. you know, from jem and the holograms. the misfits were the holograms' nemesis. they were bad. especially that pizzazz.

i don't remember those ugly yellow tights, or the gold necklace. did they even come with the outfit? if so, i bet i threw them out because they clearly do not go with the dress, even by 80's standards. and my barbies didn't look like that. they looked like normal barbies. but yeah, that dress, it was pretty cute. i think, at the time, i was at an age where i would have preferred a pretty pink dress, but i liked the misfits one too.

oh. well, maybe the accessories did come with the dress. i must have blocked them from my memory.

alasdair fraser and natalie haas, "grand etang / hull's reel"

2011-01-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

thanks to ted.

at first i couldn't figure out why i only loved the first half of the song, but then i realized they're actually playing two songs, so i must only love the first song, which i think is "grand etang". it starts getting particularly awesome at about 1:45. i've had the youtube page open and i run it on repeat a lot. but since i can't find it on mp3, i've had to walk home without it. i played some de dannan to tide me over.

room in a box

2010-12-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

i've kept this image on my desktop for a few days and i want to get it off. it's cool though: this is a box that contains everything you need for a bedroom. the only way it's not cool is if the box is actually the size of a room. then i guess it's not so impressive.it's one of those super minimal efficient design things that must have been designed by the swedish, germans, or japanese.

sound of music "do re mi" ultimate flash mob

2010-12-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

i'm a year and a half late on this one. over 200 people participated in this awesome flash mob at central station antwerp in belgium. it's totally awesome, but i bet it resulted in a lot of people being late to work, or class, or wherever it was they were going. "sorry, boss, but i was at the train station when hundreds of people spontaneously began dancing in perfect synchronization to 'the sound of music'! i HAD to watch!"

of course, i'm sure there were a few people who ignored it and went on their way, like "hey, why are florian and arnaud and hanne and michiel not in the office yet? do you think maybe it had something to do with those hundreds of people i saw at the train station who spontaneously began dancing in perfect synchronization to 'the sound of music'? that was pretty unusual, i guess. maybe i should have stayed to see it. but aren't flash mobs are a dime a dozen these days? and i really should be using those five minutes to finish up my report on exporting fine chocolate and waffles." or something.

marion cotillard for the lady dior bag

2010-12-10T23:25:00.000-08:00

i tweaked the layout because it hasn't changed for a couple years, but the internet has. i was getting sick of having to resize all the pics and youtube embeds. let's see if this works:

YES!!! now, in case you're thinking a dior short film isn't your thing: it also stars ian mckellan and is directed by the guy who helmed "hedwig and the angry inch".

cats playing patty cake

2010-12-05T22:26:00.000-08:00

IMing with dad

2010-09-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

me: i thought it was interesting

but some people said it was boring

dad: ㅎㅎㅎㅎ
ㅛㄷ모 소됴 ㅡ묘ㅠㄷ 갸홋*
me: what?
dad: gee
I said 소됴 ㅡ묘ㅠㄷ 갸홋*
me: what?
dad: ==> they maybe right
me: haha
dad: i still don't look at the monitor a lot of times
me: i can tell

* what my dad wrote in korean didn't constitute anything remotely legible. it would be like me writing "awlihg rihefhv wawd", or something.

i suppose it's not funny when i explain it.

carolina herrera spring 2011 ready-to-wear

2010-09-15T22:00:00.000-07:00

i was looking through the carolina herrera spring 2011 ready-to-wear collection. that's what i do; i check out all these runway shows even though i can't afford any of the clothes and even if i could, it's a long shot that i'd actually be willing to buy them. anyway, i was scrolling down and i thought, "hey, this looks a little like a hanbok. and that looks like those old-fashioned korean hats. wow, this looks even more like a hanbok than the last one. hey, what is going on? have i been so exposed to korean culture at work, day in, day out, that i'm just starting to see korea everywhere? am i going to be that person who can't drink a can of pepsi without thinking the logo looks like a taegeuk? is that what i'm turning into?"

possibly. but in this case, as you've probably already figured out, carolina herrera really was inspired by korean traditional clothing. (her other official inspiration was 18th-century botanical prints -- strange bedfellows.) check it out.
you know how some korean designers are always trying to modernize the hanbok, usually by removing the outer jacket so the models are walking around looking like they forgot to put on their tops? well, maybe you didn't know, but now you do. anyway, i hate those, for the most part. and this looks a little like those, but it's much nicer, probably because the interpretation isn't as literal. i appreciate the thin bows. when i wore hanboks, my mom would tie the front for me like that and it used to bug me because i thought it looked lopsided and i wanted a proper two-sided bow. but i'm coming around. and i like the airy white outfits with the hats, even though they look a little like a guy in a korean drama going to a funeral.

anyway, if you want to see the rest, click here.

the new world

2010-08-30T23:42:00.001-07:00

when i was in hawaii earlier this month i kept seeing posters for the princess kaiulani movie starring q'orianka kilcher. even though the posters caught my interest, i don't think i'll watch the movie because the reviews weren't stellar. it's too bad because q'orianka kilcher is someone i don't get to see enough of. she stars in one of my favorite movies, "the new world". even now, the trailer gives me chills, but it's better to be seen with a higher resolution than on my blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zLPM8FLMtk

a couple people watched "the new world" on my recommendation and came back to me, like, "WHAT did you like about that movie? it's so slow!" i don't know. i guess i liked it because i could imagine things went down the way they did in the movie. it wasn't "evil greedy white man" versus "wise nature-respecting native american". everyone was just different shades of gray. i think roger ebert noted that it didn't set you up for moralizing about what you knew was going to happen after the movie ended. and i liked that it was kind of just a slice of time, like people were just trying to get by from day to day. and i liked the courtship of pocahontas and john rolfe. it wasn't some sweeping grand love story, but it was quiet and imperfect and beautiful. and i liked the usage of mozart's concerto no. 23.

i first saw the movie in the theater with my friend kelly, who is part native american, and i'm so lame i actually thought this was super cool. the second time, i brought home the DVD, intending to watch it with my mom. well, my mom fell asleep like ten minutes in, but my dad, who mostly loves fast-paced action films, stayed and pronounced it "a very good movie".

superman ice cream

2010-08-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

during lunch today i was reminiscing about my favorite childhood treats, and i said, "and of course, my brother used to love superman flavor ice cream". everyone just stared at me, the exact same way they stared at me the time i waxed nostalgic about eating elephant ears. that's when i realized that maybe superman ice cream wasn't as ubiquitous as i'd thought. upon googling, i discovered that superman ice cream was yet another culinary concoction from, and still largely confined to, michigan.(photo credits to various flickr users)

when i visited thailand, my fellow volunteers and i would often head to the local shop to buy some sweet treats (when the mangosteens and lychees weren't cutting it). there weren't any chocolate or cookies, but there were these neon-colored spiderman ice cream bars in the freezer. i asked a volunteer what the ice cream tasted like. she thought about it and said, "it tastes like spiderman." thinking back on it, this wasn't necessarily the most intelligent statement in the world, but at the time, it struck me as a completely sensible observation. this may have been because my fellow volunteer had a british accent that made everything sound sensible, if not profound. or it may have been because, in my experience, superman ice cream was obviously superman flavor. it's kind of bubblegum and fruity, but mostly, it just tastes like how it looks, at least once you stop thinking that it looks like multicolored play-doh.

unlike many american parents, my parents weren't big on keeping us away from sugar. we always had various types of cookies, hostess treats, and ice cream in our kitchen. then, when we got bored of the neapolitan breyer's at home, my mom would often take us out for ice cream. i don't remember that i ever stuck to a particular flavor, but my brother was very, very loyal to superman. if i say that superman ice cream is part of my childhood memories, it's not because i ate it, but because i remember my brother, who in those days still struck me as cute and smallish, enjoying his superman ice cream cone because it was colorful and because it was named after a superhero.

my desk at work

2010-08-06T17:58:00.000-07:00

we moved! now i save five minutes walking to and from work everyday. we also (FINALLY) have a daily janitor and temperature control, as well as an in-building cafe staffed by a nice older korean couple who will make you a bibimbop lunch for $5. here's my desk:
unfortunately, it's not going to look like this for too much longer; apparently the leaf canopy and red boards were meant for the coders, who toil away in the room next door. our office -- we're two girls, plus a rotating team of interns -- is going to be less playful and more feminine. T_T i feel so sad, because i'm sitting under this leaf canopy right now and i love it. it makes me feel like an industrious ant.

how to type korean with windows vista

2010-07-19T20:54:00.001-07:00

i am commencing a korean-english language exchange with my coworker taehoon's wife, who is learning english. my inability to speak or understand korean has only ever been a slight inconvenience in my daily life, but being the only full-time employee who doesn't know korean is quite embarrassing. we have non-korean interns who speak korean far better than i do.

when you google "how to type korean", the first result that pops up is a tutorial written by one of our admins. it's great, but it's four years old and i use windows vista, so it actually wasn't very helpful. i had to really click around the web to figure out how to do it. nothing comes easily to me as far as learning korean is concerned! so i would like to provide an accurate tutorial for others. we're all in the same boat! except for those of you who aren't. get out of here.

How to Type in Korean with Windows Vista

1. In the Control Panel, click the Regional and Language Options icon to open that window.

2. Click the Keyboards and Languages tab.

3. Click the Change Keyboards button to open the Text Services and Input Languages window.

4. Click the Add... button (in the "Installed services" section) to open the Add Input Languages window.

5. Scroll down the menu and select "Korean". Click the + button to expand the Keyboard submenu. Click the + button again and select Korean and Microsoft IME. Click the OK button.

6. Click the Apply button in the Text Services and Input Languages window.

7. On the right side of the taskbar, next to the system tray, you should see the letters EN (for English). Click on the letters to reveal a menu. Select KO instead.

8. In the same menu, click Show the language bar. An expanded set of options should appear in the taskbar.

9. If Microsoft IME is not selected (when you click the globe icon), select it. Click the letter A to switch to Korean typing.

10. Start typing! Your output should now look something like this: ㄴㅇ로ㅓ혿ㄱ퍼ㅇ가ㅡㄹ.

"floor it, trixie!"

2010-07-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

lolcats

routine from "so you think you can dance"

2010-07-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

i have never watched "so you think you can dance". when someone sent me this video, i thought it was a clip from the show that featured kate gosselin trying to dance to lady gaga. but this is so much better! it's a ballet dancer who's learning hip-hop. skillz.

they're not letting anyone embed, so here.

"23", blonde redhead

2010-07-02T23:24:00.000-07:00

i'm going to yellowstone! happy fourth of july!

this has nothing to do with anything, but here is one of my favorite songs, even though the singer can't sing.

kimbop

2010-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

this was my lunch today:
i have a really really soft spot for kimbop. it's healthy and filling and flavorful and super convenient to eat and non-pungent. it's veggies (fresh and/or pickled), and maybe meat or crab or egg, wrapped in rice, wrapped in dried seaweed. maybe a bit of sesame oil or seeds in there. mine contained pickled radish and carrot and spinach and beef, and there was extra pickled radish and kimchi on the site for more bite.

kimbop is usually spelled "kimbap", but as we all know, koreans have no standard romanization, and i think "kimbop" looks cuter, so until they get their act together, i'll spell it this way.

the best kimbop i ever ate was outside of seoul, with my dad and my mom's dad. my grandpa lives in seoul. he's maybe past eighty and he hikes a lot. when i visited him, it was about thirteen years ago and he was going hiking almost every other day, but i think now he only hikes once a week, which is still once a week more than i go. in 1997, like all old men everywhere, he'd hike his shorts up to about his ribcage, pull on some knee-length socks, don a cool hat, and off he'd go, riding the subway to someplace well outside the city. my dad and i accompanied him one afternoon, and it was no joke -- it wasn't the most difficult hike in the world, but still, we cleared an entire mountain. we had bought kimbop from these ajummas who had a stand by the side of the road at the foot of the mountain. it was different than other kimbop i'd seen because the seaweed had been rolled in rice, and then the rice had been rolled in sesame seeds. we went up the mountain about halfway until we got to this spring trickling down the rocks. there was a plastic cup lying in the spring for people to use (no thieves up there, i guess). we sat down in the shade (actually most of the trail was shade, since the mountain was covered with trees), collected some water, and ate our kimbop. it might have been the hike, or the nice surroundings, but it was the most delicious kimbop i have ever tasted. maybe it was the ajummas.

kevin has a much funnier story about the time he went hiking with my grandpa, which involves his old hiking buddies and endless shot glasses of soju. but this is mine, and there was no soju involved, just kimbop.

world cup soccer players

2010-06-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

i checked out all the asian players in the world cup. people might favor park ji sung because he plays for manchester united, but in my eyes, the only good-looking one is still this guy:
BUT this guy is cooler because he looks like annyong's older brother (and didn't annyong play soccer as well?):
for those of you planning to watch the match tomorrow, here are some fun korean cheer songs to get you ready! includes most of the major boy bands and girl groups. for the record, i support US, south korea, and north korea (mostly because i feel sorry for them, being stuck in the group of death and living in north korea, not in that order). and when i say "support", i mean that i am hoping that they are playing well while i am sleeping, eating, surfing the web, or working.

mario paper stop motion

2010-06-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

a must-see. very mesmerizing and clever!

korean woman mummy and her handbag

2010-06-08T15:27:00.000-07:00

meant to post this awhile ago; forgot. researchers discovered the 500-year-old remains of a 16th-century korean woman dressed in fine clothes, with a satchel, prompting ribs from asian american sites about how no one gets between a korean girl and her handbag. (i don't know about you, but none of my handbags would be anywhere near the top of my list of things to save from a fire.)
i am providing a link to the photo of the mummy just in case people are sensitive to this sort of thing. i think it's not that bad, and i have a low tolerance for gross pictures. what i find striking is how korean she still looks. the cheekbones!

sources: dailymail, joongangdaily

neapolitan ice cream

2010-05-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

my mom used to buy breyer's strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla ice cream. this was in the eighties, so it came in this cheap cardboard box with a hinged lid. i was a kid at the time, so i never really questioned her purchasing decisions, but it did seem odd that she kept buying the three-flavor ice cream when we only ate two-thirds of it. we'd have this block of ice cream in our fridge where the strawberry and chocolate portions were partially or completely chipped away (with little spoons, because we always ate it straight out of the carton, the only way ice cream should be eaten), but the rectangle of vanilla would be totally intact. i tried to like vanilla. i read and reread on the breyer's carton about how their vanilla ice cream was made only of the best and purest ingredients: milk, cream, sugar, and vanilla. but the truth was, vanilla is boring. that's why, when something is boring, it is considered "vanilla". i had a friend who believed throughout his childhood that vanilla actually meant "no flavor", like plain yogurt vs. strawberry. even though i laughed when i heard that, secretly, i didn't blame him for thinking it.even though i never understood the inclusion of vanilla, i managed to convince myself its presence allowed me to appreciate the strawberry and chocolate more than i would have done if they'd been on their own. and i really liked the concept of multi-flavor ice cream. i found out later that chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla ice cream, taken together, are called neapolitan, and i liked that too. if neapolitan ice cream was a country, this would be its flag:

tokyo sonata

2010-05-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

i just watched this movie. it's very good.

there aren't many movies i would deem both uplifting and depressing, but i would say so here. you should watch, especially if you like a movie that isn't formulaic.

subway to phase in tesselated cheese WORLDWIDE!

2010-05-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

an open letter to subway about their cheese placement:
http://www.dump.com/2010/04/12/dear-subway-pic/

subway's response:
http://www.dump.com/2010/05/28/effective-july-1-2010-subway-worldwide-to-phase-in-tesselated-cheese-on-all-sandwiches-pic/

i used to eat subway so often that friends said i must be singlehandedly keeping them in business. i used to eat subway so often that the subway sandwich artists always knew what sandwich i wanted -- and the sandwich i wanted was different every day of the week, right down to the dressing and bread. in all that time, i never realized that it was a POLICY to overlap the cheese triangles the way they did. i didn't know there were official "cheese placement operational instructions". i just thought the sandwich artists were all doing it badly. except this one indian guy who insisted on doing it the other way. he was an awesome rebel, way ahead of his time.

moments in LOST finale

2010-05-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

- the smiles on sun and jin's faces when they met sawyer in the flash-sideways. you could see them thinking, "that rascal is a COP in this reality?" and then the look jin sent him as he left the room: "we've gone through so much together, buddy, and you don't even remember it, but you will, and i'll meet you again when you do."

- sawyer and juliet, finally together again. some people thought their reunion scene was too long and drawn-out, but after everything they went through together, i contend that they deserved every second of it. sawyer had to live with juliet's death, for crying out loud -- after that, surely they deserved some "us" time.

to others, there may have been some question about whether sawyer would end up with juliet or kate, but in my opinion, it couldn't have been any other way than how it ended up being. sawyer and juliet were the unlikeliest and the rightest couple to develop throughout the series (this excludes people who had already been coupled from the beginning, like bernard and rose, or sun and jin). they needed to end up together.

- jack, when fake locke reminisces using his host body's memories: "you're not john locke. you disrespect his memory by wearing his face."

- lapidus lives! poor guy was drifting at sea for days, and then he gets a sip of water and goes right back to the huge task of getting everyone off the island.

- boone! i didn't even think i missed him until he just popped up to greet hurley outside that alley. it was nice to see him again, and to see shannon reunite with sayid too.

- people were outraged that it all ended up being "and then they died and met in heaven". personally, and maybe i'm just too attached to the hollywood happily-ever-after, i didn't have any problem with it. any ending where, say, sawyer had to live without juliet, or hurley's life mission would be to protect the island for hundreds of years, with only ben for company, would have been a huge bummer. and the final reunion in the church was heartwarming.

- i didn't notice this at the time, but the "lost souls" were literally led to heaven by "christian shephard". this is so overtly cheesy, i'm almost inclined to believe it was unintentional.

- the final scene: jack's closing eye. all lost fans know that the series began with jack's opening eye, but i don't think many of us really believed that we'd follow him through until his demise. and then walt's dog bounding over to stay with jack during his final moments (where had he BEEN all that time?) just made it all the more poignant.

a house in vietnam

2010-05-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

check out this article and slideshow about this gorgeous riverfront home in vietnam. i love these warm, bright colors... i think they look best, most natural, in the heat and glare of the tropics. there are french influences here, because the tenant is french, and also because, you know, vietnam and france.it's only $1500 a month!

momofuku ssam bar

2010-05-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

most of my blog entries are about things i like. that is the sub-heading of my blog, things i like. i try to be consistent.

i can't say that i like the momofuku ssam bar in new york city because i haven't eaten there yet. at most, i guess i can say that i like that i managed to get a reservation for this weekend. still, i want to use this entry just to get my readers excited about this fact, because most of the people who read my blog are going to be sharing this momofuku dinner with me. to better prepare you, these are the things you should note:

- chef david chang was listed in the 2010 time 100, which is a list of that magazine's 100 most influential people. his entry was written by ruth reichl, who used to be the new york time's food critic and is an awesome writer. however, i noticed that she wrote everything about david chang's food and nothing about his personality. this may have been because she had limited space with which to work. then again, it may have been because david chang is supposed to be a bit of an asshole.

- the "big list" of the best restaurants in the world, the s. pellegrino's world's 50 best restaurants, currently lists the momofuku ssam bar at #26. however, momofuku ssam bar has no michelin stars.

- the momofuku ssam bar is where you eat pork butt. this sounds really gross. the other thing you're supposed to eat are their steamed pork buns. this sounds delicious.

- "ssam" is a korean dish in which leafy vegetables (like lettuce) are wrapped around some kind of meat. last year, my family's post-thanksgiving meal, cooked up by my mom and aunts, was a bossam (pork) feast. the thing is, i normally don't like pork, but this was so spectacularly good, it blew the prior night's meal out of the water. it was so delicious, it nearly made me cry. it was... porktastic.(in the first photo, kevin leaned in to try to get into my food shot. he then spent the next few photos making faces above the food. kevin is the reason i am going to new york. he is graduating from a very good law school and eventually going to work for the fancy law firm where obama met michelle, but not before he does some pro bono work in DC doing i don't know what. whatever he is doing, he will probably be making faces while he does it.)

- there is an adjacent bakery called the momofuku milk bar, where you are supposed to try two things called "cereal milk" and "compost cookie". also "crack pie". i would really love to try these desserts and hope that my fellow diners will not attempt to deprive me. this can serve as a warning.

f(x), "NU ABO"

2010-05-05T22:50:00.001-07:00

i told myself i would try to abstain from posting korean music videos for awhile, because while i may love them, i am pretty certain that no one else is actually watching them. but what's the point of keeping up a blog if you can't even post what you like? so f(x) just released their newest video today. it's pretty cool. nothing mind-blowing, but good pop stuff.

f(x) is the girl group with a chinese member and a taiwanese american member who is like all butch and tomboy while the others are girly. i like f(x) because their image is not sexxxxxxxy. i can't deal with that. why would i want to look at girls dancing around and pouting and wearing practically no clothes? f(x)'s image is more like "we're rebels", but they are a korean girl group, which is the opposite of rebellious.

lady gaga, "paparazzi"

2010-05-04T20:29:00.001-07:00

i was thinking that i really like lady gaga's newest single, "alejandro", but that my favorite lady gaga song is still "paparazzi". as with most of lady gaga's singles, "paparazzi" has a pretty cool music video. the best scene is where lady gaga poisons her boyfriend:

this is the best scene not because he's a cad who deserved to be poisoned (though he was), but because she poisons him by way of a very cool ring in which the fatal powder is concealed. she opens the ring and dumps the powder into a glass of pink neuro beverage. neuro is kind of like vitamin water, possibly less delicious, but with a cooler bottle.

that ring is pretty cool. i like things with secret compartments.

daria

2010-05-03T21:24:00.000-07:00

the long-awaited daria DVDs are finally coming on may 12th! i've never bought a DVD series of anything, but i might consider splurging for this set. i used to love daria. it aired while i was in high school, which was really fortuitous for me, because daria was a misfit who hated high school and i was a misfit who hated high school.

i found some daria quotations, but reading them now, i feel like they're not as funny as i remember. either i had an elevated opinion of the show, or daria just wasn't the kind of show that was best served by these quick-snippet quotes.

Trent: Listen, I got to get to rehearsal. I’m late.
Daria: How do you know? You don’t wear a watch.
Trent: I’m always late. That’s why I don’t wear a watch. They depress me.
Daria: You know, Trent, somehow that makes perfect sense.

Sandi: (sobbing) My life is over!
Quinn: Sandi! You’re not thirty.

Quinn: Listen, Daria, I always say that just because a guy has a girlfriend, it doesn’t mean he’s off-limits. Unless you’re the girlfriend. By “you” I mean me, of course. Remember that.

Jane: A lot of weirdness around here lately.
Daria: Yeah. I won’t be sorry to see this day end.
Jane: You say that every day.

Quinn: Aren’t you a little out of place here? And everywhere else on Earth?

Helen: We tell you over and over again that you’re wonderful, and you just don’t get it. What’s wrong with you?!
Daria: Don’t worry. I don’t have low self-esteem. It’s a mistake.
Jake: I’ll say!
Daria: I have low esteem for everyone else.

Jane: I like having low self-esteem. It makes me feel special.

Jane: Thanks for the ride, Trent.
Trent: No problem. I needed a break anyway. I’ve been practicing for ten hours straight.
Jane: Daria, would you say sleeping with a guitar in your hands counts as practicing?
Trent: As long as you don’t drop it.

Daria: Did you just spend two hours dressing up to go the door for one minute and dump your date?
Quinn: Daria, if you look your best when you blow a guy off, it makes them feel like you care.
Daria: Well, that advice should prove very helpful. Sometimes your shallowness is so thorough, it’s almost like depth.
Quinn: Thanks.

Daria: There’s nothing like watching the sun rise. Except watching the sun set in reverse.

Trent: Uh, who are you?
Jane: You remember Quinn, Daria’s sister?
Trent: Oh, yeah. Daria’s sister. Hey.
Quinn: Excuse me, I have a name.
Trent: Right. Daria’s sister.

Trent (singing): “Your salary offends me, your health plan-”
Mr. O’Neill: “Doesn’t mend me?”
Trent: You know, if you’re not going to take this seriously, we can just stop right now.

Jane: How much money do you have? Trent?
Trent: I have none, so I said nothing.

Theresa: Sorry, ladies, the store’s closing. The hurricane.
Sandi: Let’s get out of here while there’s still time to walk. Running for your life is so geeky.
Tiffany: Oh, no. Wind…. hair.

Quinn: Daria…. I need your advice.
Daria: My advice is leave now, and I won’t turn you into shark kibble.

i thought i'd never see this commercial again

2010-05-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

johnson and johnson's baby shampoo commercial from 1993. when it came out, i seriously considered recording it, because i found that baby way too cute. now that i see it again... yeah, that was definitely a cute baby. but not so cute that i should have spent the past seventeen years regretting that i never recorded that commercial.

exclusive dumbfoundead interview

2010-04-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

really impressed by this guy's ability to take initiative. so the same person who contacted me about showcasing his "top ten asian american rappers" article three days has since managed to score an upcoming interview with jin (who wrote a track inspired by his article), as well as a video interview with dumbfoundead, the korean american rapper who just collaborated with jay park (formerly of 2PM) and has stuff in store with epik high and drunken tiger. people like this are a real pleasure to work with, because they make their own opportunities and they're obviously doing what they love to do. and this interview with dumbfoundead is pretty awesome.

M.I.A. -- born free

2010-04-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

the huffington post called this music video "not easy to watch". that's an understatement. it's been banned on youtube, so check it out on vimeo.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

gil hak mi -- super soul

2010-04-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

i haven't liked a korean pop song this much for a few months at least. gil hak mi is a newcomer who was a finalist in a korean music competition show called "superstar k". she has a powerful voice and the kind of elegant looks you don't get to see too often among korean entertainers, long narrow eyes and small nose. if you liked rihanna's "umbrella", you'll probably like this song too. i'm not saying this is an imitation of that (it's not!), but they have a similar kind of sound.

the A list

2010-04-26T11:45:00.001-07:00

i'm psyched! that soompi article about the top ten asian american rappers was actually spotted and read by jin (the #1 rapper on the list)... and he wrote and performed a song inspired by it! it's called "the A list". check it out:
if you go to 1:34 in the video, there's a screenshot of the article, and jin says he's honored to be on the list.

twilight eclipse trailer

2010-04-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

this looks like it's going to be even shittier than "new moon".
but you'll still see me standing in line at the theater opening night.

a link to the top ten asian american rappers

2010-04-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

someone sent me a pretty awesome article about asian american rappers to post on the soompi news page. although we do focus mostly on the korean pop scene, the article was written with such enthusiasm and detail that it would have been a shame not to feature it. besides, i definitely think that 1) the asian american music scene has been expanding, and 2) the divide between the asian music scene and the asian american music scene has been shrinking. all in all, still a soompi-suitable topic and a good article. check it out!

two talking cats

2010-04-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

this would be why i would want to get a friend cat for mikey.

restaurant city awesomeness

2010-04-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

only people who play this addictive facebook game will know how i felt when i logged in this evening to receive this randomly-selected virtual windfall:
i know there are more advanced players who have no need for butter or cheese, but i think i'm safe in assuming that most players would consider this a minor jackpot. the ultimate jackpot, of course, would be to receive three sugars. but that has never happened to me -- not once in 78 days!

i am positive that none of my readers know anything about restaurant city beyond what i have told them, so i will add more here. one of the objectives of the game is to amass ingredients -- anything from the exotic and unusual (dragonfruit, coriander, or seaweed) to the mundane and common (water, sugar, or flour). you might expect (as i did when i first played the game) that the rarest ingredients would be the most desired, but this is not how it works. case in point: how many dishes do you prepare in real life which require the inclusion of pomegranate or oregano or wasabi? now, how many with flour or butter? therefore, i (and every restaurant city player) make a sad face when we log in to find that we've been given junk like pineapples, kiwis, or leeks. and we make happy faces when we find that we've been given beef, egg, or milk. today was a happy-face day. i hope that enlightened you.

a small girl with a cat

2010-04-05T23:14:00.001-07:00

no... not me.

i was looking for cheap art prints, and i came across this:
hahaha! what the hell? someone actually decided to use oil paint to capture the poignant moment immediately before basement cat tears the face off a little kid. all it lacks is a lolcat caption reading "CALL 911 IN 3... 2... 1..." (it should be noted that the artist, théophile alexandre steinlen, painted another, more famous, picture of a black cat. he must be the ultimate godfather of basement kitty.)

i thought of buying this print just because i think it's funny. but i think stephen would be a little bemused. he was initially pretty weirded out by my poster of the goose wearing pearls, although he finally came around and now says he likes it. i don't want to press my luck. besides, this cat painting might be a bad inspiration for mikey.

"you can be a single lady if you want, okay?"

2010-03-31T14:45:00.000-07:00

they won't let me embed, so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9eL3ejXmE

poor kid :(

comixed

2010-03-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

http://comixed.com

my favorite is the mac-PC one, even though it took me a few seconds to figure out.

hot chinese hobo

2010-03-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

someone on soompi posted a thread about a handsome homeless guy who became a web sensation because of his scruffy good looks and quirky-but-cool style. although his real name wasn't known, chinese netizens dubbed him xi li ge, or "brother sharp". some people on soompi claimed he looked like so ji sup. others said he looked like a bad-ass movie character.
one article reported that brother sharp wore women's clothing because he liked to imagine himself as a woman who would love and care for him. chinese and japanese newspapers printed pictures of him, dissecting the impact of each item of clothing to his overall look. they suggested tips on how to get his style and compared it to gucci and LV.

i was asked to post the thread on facebook and twitter to draw more attention to it, and i didn't quite know how to frame it. considering the obvious situation, it didn't seem right to talk about how his clothes looked like what's coming down the runways this season. on the other hand, it seemed patronizing to try to spin it into a lesson about needing to do more for homeless people. finally, i copped out and posted a vague open-ended question asking what people thought.in the end, his younger brother spotted him on the internet. it turned out that brother sharp had left home ten years ago to make money for his family, but his mental state deteriorated to the point that he no longer functioned in normal society. after some resistance on his part, he verified his name and his father's. people cleaned him up and took him home. his mom and brother must be happy to have him back. i like to think they will take good care of their long-lost family member. maybe they can take the cigarettes from him too. in the meantime, there are talks about turning his life story into a movie, and signing him on to do some modeling. what a crazy world!

my new spice rack

2010-03-03T18:50:00.001-08:00

last week i had a day off from work. i went downtown to run some errands, got lost, and found myself in front of the container store. i didn't even know there was one in SF, but i was thrilled. i love the container store.the clearance section contained (contained! haha) one of these spice racks here. last one left. it used to be $45, but it was marked down to $21. i had been telling stephen (twice that week) that i really wanted to buy a spice rack, so i lugged it home, and even frugal stephen couldn't find any reason to complain about the impulse buy.

my favorite thing about it is that the jars are empty, and there are sticker labels for you to choose from. so you don't have to have a jar devoted to oregano if you never use oregano. that always bugged me about spice racks. i'll pick my own spices, dammit.

unfortunately, since i don't cook anything fancy, the only spices i currently store are cracked black pepper and, oddly enough, vanilla beans. (one evening i'd been inspired to make a grapefruit and salmon salad, with vanilla and honey flavoring -- stephen told me the result was interesting. did you know vanilla beans cost like $5 for two freaking pods? no more vanilla honey grapefruit salmon salad.)

when i look at my spice rack, i think of it as a game, like the restaurant city facebook app i'm always playing. the rule is that i can't buy spices just for the sake of making the spice rack look less pathetic -- i will only buy them if i'm incorporating them into specific recipes. each jar i manage to fill is like going up to a new level. at twelve, obviously, i will max out. it sounds simple, but i think it will take awhile.

kim yu-na, and figure skating in general

2010-02-25T22:20:00.000-08:00

as of now, i haven't watched kim yu-na perform her free skate. i'm waiting in front of the TV for it to air, but i have an inkling, thanks to my east coast facebook friends updating their status too quickly, that she must have done really well. i'm so pumped. i love the winter olympics because south korea really shines. i love it even more because there's figure skating. during high school i used to be really obsessed with watching figure skating. i used to record all the ladies and pairs competitions and watch them over and over. i got chills down my spine when midori ito landed the first triple axel in a women's competition. i cheered when the gorgeous ekaterina gordeeva and her husband, sergei grinkov, took olympic gold performing to the moonlight sonata. i booed when surya bonaly refused to stand on the podium after yuka sato won the world championships.

i lived vicariously through all of them. even though i've only skated twice in my life, in my mind i am a thwarted figure skating champion. figure skating is the only endeavor where being tall or even average height is considered a shortcoming. when you're 5'1", you're not the right height for professional basketball, or modeling, or being a CEO or president. in fact, you're not the right height for much of anything, except being the butt of jokes like "how's the weather down there?" it makes you really appreciate a sport like figure skating, where any female over 5'4" tends to look oddly lumbering and graceless, even if she isn't. in the world of figure skating, when you're 5'1", your height is perfect. never mind that i have proven in every possible way to be unusually uncoordinated and talentless at every sport i ever tried. i still believe that if i had learned to figure skate when i was little, by now i would be a retired olympic champion.

when i watched kim yu-na perform the short program the other day, i was taken with her easy grace and athletic skill. on top of that, she had that extra finesse, that knowing smile, that "it" quality that recent ladies' gold medalists have really lacked (which is why we can barely remember their names anymore). if yu-na takes gold, she'll be the first real superstar in a long while. maybe she already is. i can't wait.

the LOST lighthouse

2010-02-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

i liked this week's episode of LOST because it was jack-centric, and i like jack. not as much as i like sun and jin and hurley and desmond, but we haven't seen those episodes yet, so i was well enough served for now. but my favorite thing about it was the lighthouse. where did THAT come from?
i bet you that anyone who's ever played myst and happened to watch this episode last night exclaimed, "whoa, myst!" when hurley and jack entered the lighthouse. (if they were with other people at the time, maybe they just said it in their heads, so they wouldn't seem like total losers.) the pulley system that rotated the giant compass with mirrors angled to reveal certain things at each degree, with each degree associated with a different name? there is so much rotating weird shit in myst to get to the big reveal it makes you dizzy. come to think of it, there are lots of lighthouses too. and the whole thing is on a mysterious island... actually, myst IS a mysterious island. that reminds me, my brother once noted that LOST is like a combination of myst and survivor -- two things i used to love almost more than life itself. i guess there wasn't any hope for me.

one other thing i noticed about the lighthouse -- the first name crossed out on this screencap. i showed it to stephen and i told him he might have been a candidate at one point in time. he said, "cool, what am i a candidate for?" i said i didn't know. anyway, i'm pretty sure all the people crossed out are dead and thus no longer candidates for anything. i didn't tell him that part.even if they never go to the lighthouse again -- jack DID destroy the mirrors, after all -- i'm psyched for the rest of the season. which of the remaining candidates will be the ONE? reyes (8)? ford (15)? jarrah (16)? shephard (23)? kwon (42, and which kwon)? who is 108? who's evil, fake locke or jacob or both? it makes my head spin spin spin!

p.s. i hate to say this, there is one thing about the lighthouse-degree concept that annoyed me. you can see that there's a shitload ton of numbers on that thing. yet all the remaining candidates are under 50, which could be a fact explained later on in the season but more likely is something that happened because the whole connection wasn't made by the writers until later on. we'll see.

toy story 3 trailer

2010-02-19T14:16:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyPixar#p/u/0/6c3K7LhA9Yc

can't wait to see this. love it when barbie meets ken!

books i haven't read

2010-02-14T18:35:00.000-08:00

during the summer of 2005 i went to thailand by myself. i didn't really want to go by myself, because i was afraid it would be lonely and dangerous, but i couldn't find anyone willing to travel with me, and i did want to travel, so i went by myself. anyway, midway through the trip i ran out of books to read (i'd brought six to last a month, which seemed enough at the time, but i wasn't factoring in the sheer number of hours that weren't being killed by TV or internet, because as it turned out, the place i was staying didn't have much of either). and then i got waylaid by a cold (probably because i'd been teaching english at a primary school, which meant that i was interacting with every single grade, every single weekday, and a lot of those kids loved to hug). so when i wrapped up the volunteer work, i got beached at the beach in railay. i had absolutely nothing to do, nowhere to go, and at the hotel, behind the check-in desk, i spied a row of english-language books that had evidently been left behind by other travelers. so i asked the clerk if i could borrow one. he said, "oh, free for YOU" (i don't know why, but thai people are always saying "free for you"), and he selected a book at random and gave it to me. as if all the books were the same, as though it didn't matter which one i got. i hemmed and hawed for a bit, because there were a lot of books behind that counter and i would have liked to browse and choose for myself. but in the end, i decided that i didn't want to seem impolite, and i took it with, even though it didn't look all that interesting. it was a nonfiction book about australia, and at the time i didn't particularly care for nonfiction, nor was i interested in australia. but i had nothing else to read.

about two pages into the book i was literally chortling out loud. i mean, it's true that i was traveling alone and there weren't a lot of english-speaking people around and i was getting to the point where i was actually starting to talk to myself, so maybe i was a bit deprived of jokes and stuff, but even now when i reread it (because of course i took it home with me), i'm always struck again that it is a really funny book. and not useless funny, something to be shelved only in the humor section of the bookstore, but clever, where we're given lots of excellent useful facts and observations and recommendations and we don't even notice because he makes it all so interesting. when i returned to michigan one of the first things i did was go to the library and check out all the other books by bill bryson that i could get my hands on. (actually the first thing i did was go out and buy myself white tank tops and gold jewelry, because i had this fantastic tan for the first time in my life and i wanted to show it off, but i digress.) anyway, after plowing through about three or four of his books and discovering that they were all equally fantastic and hilarious, it completely blew my mind to realize that i would never have come across bill bryson if that clerk hadn't lifted out that book at random... you know, if that book hadn't happened to be shelved closest to where the clerk was standing. and if i had had the nerve to ask him if i could select another book, then i would never have discovered bill bryson, for although he's very famous, he doesn't write the kinds of books i thought i would like, so i wouldn't have read them if i hadn't been so bored in thailand.

and it kinda scares me how many books must be out there that i would absolutely love if i ever got to read them, but which i haven't and maybe never will. you know, another one of my favorite authors, maeve binchy, i only discovered because "circle of friends" happened to be left behind in the cabin where my family was staying the time we went to lake tahoe. i wouldn't have bothered with her either, if i hadn't been in that situation. when i think about that... i really hate that thought. so i try to choose books with a more open mind, and not just stick to certain authors or topics or themes. because you never really know.

the real russell

2010-02-04T14:02:00.000-08:00

credit to curly

actually, that's not the real russell. this is.

WIZARD! YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

2010-02-03T20:52:00.000-08:00

this made me lol:
i seem to be stealing a lot of blog content from my brother lately. that's okay. he owes me. for being related to me.

disney movie ranking

2010-02-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

my brother listed his favorite disney cartoon movies on his blog. here are mine:

enjoyed:

Beauty and the Beast (ultimate favorite movie in the world)
Pocahontas
Mulan
Aladdin

enjoyed parts of:

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

did not enjoy:

The Lion King (i know, so sue me)
Hercules

i didn't list the little mermaid or the movies before it because i don't remember them well enough to rank them. i mean, the first movie i remember watching in a theater was pinocchio (with my mom and possibly my bro), and i may have loved the villains from sleeping beauty and snow white, but i don't remember much about the actual movies.

tim burton's new project

2010-01-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

word is that tim burton is planning to redo another disney classic... but this time from the villain's point of view. what's the film in question? sleeping beauty. which means the villain in question is none other than the magnificent MALEFICENT. awesome!
i think one of my first blog posts was about maleficent. i've thought she was awesome pretty much my entire life, ever since i was little and i had this sleeping beauty picture book. i liked her purple and black costume, and i was mildly obsessed about that mood ring looking thing. and check out those scarlet nails. and that evil black bird is probably like the precursor to jafar's iago. yeah, awesome.

charity navigator

2010-01-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

the charity navigator evaluates the organizational efficiency and capacity of all the big charities, so you can get the most bang for the buck when you donate. if you're like me and you're not a numbers person, you can just look at overall star rating and read the basic info and news on each charity. (for other smaller, private charities, they tell you why they don't or can't rate them, and tell you how you can investigate on your own.) it also made a little statement about wyclef jean's charity.

my top ten korean songs of 2009

2010-01-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

i realize that posting this in january makes me so 2000-and-late, but hey, better late than never, right?

1. "loner", outsider

this was the first i'd ever heard of rapper outsider, who before 2009 was still considered "underground" and unknown. initially, i kept mixing up the song title with the artist name... i mean, was the dude an "outsider" or a "loner"? both, maybe? anyway, outsider proves that he is korea's fastest rapper with a lightning-speed-paced song that i dare anyone to try to understand. in "loner", he sets his super intense style and lyrics against a melancholy, korean-drama-worthy orchestral line.

2. "you and i", park bom

each member of girl group 2NE1 released a single in 2009. sandara park's may have been the most anticipated, but park bom's sweet pop ballad became my favorite the instant i heard it. it's just a really nice song, and park bom has (if just barely) a strong enough voice to carry it off. plus, i dare anyone to watch the video and not get a little misty-eyed.

3. "TTL (time to love)", T-ARA featuring cho shin sung

before this song, i hadn't really appreciated any of the pop/dance offerings from girl group T-ARA. but TTL became an instant favorite of mine, with a good melody, good dance beat, and a surprisingly listenable rap contribution from boy band cho shin sung.

4. "lollipop", 2NE1 featuring big bang

the first few seconds of 2NE1's much-anticipated (unofficial) debut made me cringe: "lolly, lolly, oh lollipop", sung in saccharine tones. much to my relief, g-dragon (of boy band big bang) interrupted: "nah, that's not how we do it." then the real song commenced, and it turned out to be a stylish, fun double hybrid of girl group and boy band, rap and pop. the video is fun too: a eye-popping neon-lit disco set with outlandishly 80's-inspired fashion to match.

5. "wedding dress", taeyang

"wedding dress" is a pretty, simple, ear-pleasing song. taeyang is a fantastic dancer and good singer. the girl in the video has a beautiful smile. i only have one minor issue with the video: why would you propose to your girlfriend in front of your friend? that's just weird.

6. "genie", SNSD

if people say that "genie" is monster girl group SNSD's sexiest offering to date, it basically means that they've toned down their mega-watt smiles a fraction, and they perform their signature leg kicks... in short shorts. wholesome as always, SNSD brings us an infectious pop tune that i enjoy more than anything else they've done.

7. "sorry sorry", super junior

i'll be honest. every time i looked at monster boy band super junior, ithought to myself: "why are there like a million guys here?" there were so many of them, i didn't know what i was supposed to be focusing on. so the first time i heard "sorry sorry" was when i watched the parody performed by the ahjusshis at korean airlines (which was pretty awesome, by the way). realizing i could only fully get the joke if i watched the original, i did just that. the song and video turned out to be a super slick package, and it helped me differentiate between the many members. now i have not one, but two favorite super junior members: the handsome chinese guy, hangeng, and the endearingly chubby guy, shindong.

(for yet another take on "sorry sorry", watch the famous dancing filipino prisoners perform it en masse for the fangirls!)

8. "i hate you", 2PM

it's kinda impossible for me to listen to any 2PM song without automatically picturing the flash mobs around the world, pledging their support to departed member jay park by dancing to 2PM's catchy tunes in public. 2009 was definitely a big year for 2PM, and "i hate you" is my favorite song of theirs, with smooth vocals and a good beat. there's a bit too much autotune here for my taste, but i guess that's how it's done these days.

9. "chocolate love", f(x)

this song wasn't girl group f(x)'s first single or even a major one, but it represented the first time i'd ever listened to their music, even though i'd been hearing about them for awhile. watching the slick music video, i quickly figured out their angle approaching the glutted korean girl group scene -- more sexy and sassy than sweet and wholesome. the inclusion of amber liu, a taiwanese american teen with a distinctly androgynous look, helped to amp up the originality factor and set f(x) apart from the other girly-girly girl groups.

10. "kiss", sandara park

another mini-drama contained within a music video. in sandara park's debut single (and her CF for cass beer), she's an independent girl who dances to her own tune and beats playboy cutie lee min ho at his own game. "kiss" is a catchy dance song, nothing particularly special (especially given dara's undeniable limitations as a vocalist), but enjoyable to listen to and even more enjoyable to watch.

my top five movies of 2009

2010-01-01T14:44:00.000-08:00

i wanted to write a blog entry about "my top ten movies of 2009", but when i ran through the list of movies released this year, i realized that any such undertaking would read more like a list of movies i actually managed to watch in 2009. slim pickings. so i narrowed it down to my top five movies of 2009, with the caveat that there are many movies released in 2009 that i still plan to watch. those movies are:

Where the Wild Things Are
Bright Star
The September Issue
Ponyo
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Princess and the Frog
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Sun

so, that said, this is my current list of best movies of 2009:

1. Up in the Air
a movie about a man who truly believes in flying solo and traveling light. you see why he finds such a lifestyle so appealing, and how it starts to fall apart for him at the end. btw, it's a lot more interesting, and well-done, than i managed to indicate. definitely my favorite movie of the year.

2. Up
curmudgeonly old man who misses his late wife. chubby do-gooder kid who misses his dad. thousands of colorful balloons that light up the sky, holding up a house that flies in the air. paradise falls. even though it had its flaws, you'd have to be hard-hearted not to love this movie.

3. District 9 (tie)i absolutely did not want to watch this movie. big, ugly aliens landing in south africa? pass. but the protagonist is a bumbling bureaucrat who unwittingly infects himself with alien liquid, slowly but surely transforming himself into one of them. and it turns into a much more interesting story than i could have imagined, one where we side with the aliens instead of the humans. creative.

3. Avatar (tie)
the avatar world, pandora, is so beautiful. i would watch this again just to immerse myself in it.

5. Twilight: New Moon
what girl doesn't want to be bella swan? sigh.

pixar movie ranking

2009-12-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

a few weeks ago, my brother asked me to rank pixar movies in order of favorites. i didn't have a specific order, but i did have groupings:

favorite pixar movies
toy story
up
monsters inc.
a bug's life (last place in this grouping; could possibly fit into the next category)

very good pixar movies
toy story 2
wall-e
the incredibles

good pixar movies
ratatouille

okay pixar movies
finding nemo

unwatched pixar movies
cars

merry christmas!

2009-12-24T12:53:00.000-08:00

credit to lolcats

office camouflage

2009-12-10T15:14:00.001-08:00

i think this is awesome (even if dump.com won't let me hotlink the image here for you to see) and would love to know what movie or TV show or whatever it's from. any ideas?

aw mikey

2009-12-03T01:37:00.000-08:00

dump.com

2009-12-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

if you're bored and you want some quality random-style websurfing to keep you entertained, look no further than dump.com, which consists of "interesting, funny, bizarre, inspirational images. Updated daily, 100% family friendly." it's my new favorite site. this is where you go to see a huge, beyond HQ pic of detroit in the 1930's, or an angry fist-clenching baby declaring that he HATES sandcastles, or a recap of a typical CSI episode, or a receipt of a lunch enjoyed by a russian billionaire and five friends, or the differences between a search result of "tiananmen square" with normal google vs. google china, or a political cartoon as captioned by a democrat vs. a republican, or the saddest dog in the world, or why parents should be banned from facebook (ahem mom jk). it's just pretty amazing.

extra points for not allowing comments (because commenters tend to write really stupid things anyway, so not allowing comments helps keep the site top-quality) and keeping the site clean (especially seeing as failblog still hasn't figured out that its constant penis innuendos are just not that funny).

park bom, "you and i"

2009-12-01T00:33:00.000-08:00

people seem to like this song a lot. when it comes to korean songs, i find that i don't usually like the ones everyone else likes, which is why you might think the ones i've posted on my blog are kinda poor, but i can see why people like this one. it's very easy to like.

the music video is guy and girl get married and they love each other, but guy is terminally ill, and he writes to her that he's sorry he couldn't take care of her. in other words, it's a korean music video. park bom may have a nice voice, but she has the WORST eyefold surgery ever... or maybe it's just tape or glue. whatever it is, it's utterly captivating in the worst way possible.

dark blue glitter nail polish

2009-11-19T16:05:00.001-08:00

why is it that whenever a cosmetics brand comes out with a dark blue glitter polish, it is always limited edition and therefore extremely difficult to find? case in point:

the grandmother of dark blue glitter polishes, chanel ciel de nuit. this came out when i was in high school and i always remember it as the first nail polish i ever really, really craved. dark blue with silver/white glitter... actually, most of these are silver/white glitter. another permutation of the "night sky" nail polish: essie starry starry nights. i think it was released and discontinued a couple years ago. then they reintroduced it with a higher price than their other polishes -- then discontinued that too. very mean.
this left many unhappy girls who wanted essie starry starry nights, but were either too late to get it, or too poor to afford the boutique polish price. in came two drugstore brands offering suitable replacements. but these two also developed a reputation as being just as difficult to find. i scour drugstore cosmetics aisles frequently for these sorts of finds and i can tell you that i have never seen either of them.
speaking of scouring drugstore aisles, stephen can attest that i dragged him to every drugstore in the area to look for milani fairytale. it turned out to be a limited halloween 2009 edition available only at CVS. by the way, this is apparently a black polish with blue glitter. not that i've ever seen it in person.
as of now, the only readily available dark blue glitter polish i know of is sephora's sapphire blue. in the pictures i've seen, it looks a lot lighter than any of these polishes, but i think it will suffice. maybe i can add a drop or two of black polish to the bottle.

tol

2009-11-07T01:55:00.000-08:00

no matter how many times i tell my mom that i don't have a text-messaging plan, she continues to send me text messages. (it's kinda weird that my mom is the one texting people everywhere, while i don't even know how to use the text function on my phone. it feels like role reversal.) anyway, she texted me a couple days ago. she wanted to show me pictures of my cousin's (well, not really my cousin, more like a distant relative who's around my age) new baby. apparently this baby is very cute (which makes me want to see it very much), and it is celebrating tol soon.

if you follow my blog, you might have already seen these two photos of my mom's first birthday and my first birthday:
and i thought i'd include my brother's first birthday as well:
(my dad doesn't have a first birthday photo because he was born during the korean war. i guess his parents thought they had better things to do than celebrate his birthday... like run away from the communists and whatnot.) anyway, this is tol, the korean first birthday celebration.

oh, this reminds me, in eighth grade we had this really fun project, to research our family histories. so i included these pictures here, and i wrote up a description of tol and stuff. the teacher said she loved reading it and told me i should become a writer. then some other korean kid approached the teacher and ask why he didn't get many points. she was like, "because you have these same pictures as melody, but she described what was going on and you didn't." the kid looked at me and you could tell he wasn't happy. but i was happy, because that kid was never very nice to me anyway :D but anyway... if it was a "normal american" birthday celebration, would he even need to describe it? probably not.

anyway, what i wrote in my eighth-grade project is that in tol, a bunch of objects are placed on a table in front of the baby: books, pencils, money, noodles, etc. the first object the baby grabs is the indicator of the baby's future. like, if he grabs the money, he'll be rich; if he grabs a noodle, he'll have a long life. i think kevin took a noodle. i took the pencil, which meant that i would become scholarly. yeah, it hasn't happened yet.

wang seok-hyeon

2009-11-03T15:58:00.001-08:00

i just watched the korean movie "speed scandal" (also known as "speedy scandal" and "scandal makers"), which starred an adorable little cutie named wang seok-hyeon. he plays a sleepwalking piano and go-stop whiz kid who shows up to torture his unnaturally youthful grandpa, cha tae hyun. he's so cute i took some screen caps.

hello kitty's 35th birthday

2009-10-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

OBVIOUSLY, hello kitty is celebrating her birthday right after i celebrate mine. only she is turning 35. japan LA, a boutique specializing in all things cute, invited 80 artists to create hello kitty-inspired work.

i NEED some of these prints. NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED. especially the first one. :D
also check out sanrio three apples.

chat with parents

2009-10-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

my dad recently set up my mom with a gmail account so now we can do family group chats. my parents speak english quite well, but writing and reading emails doesn't come as naturally to them. so usually i try to abstain from acronyms, or copy and paste my parents' handy korean phrases (such as "ㅎㅎㅎㅎ"). but today i forgot:

dad: hi mom
dad: ㅎㅎㅎㅎ
me: hi
mom: who are you?
me: huh?
mom: why dad say hi mom to me?
me: i don't know
dad: cuz that's your name
mom: anyway i hope jaebum read your article
me: lol i don't think jaebum read it
dad: lol <== what this mean?
me: it means laughing out loud
me: what did you think it means?
mom: ok i know now..
dad: okay, i thought it was 만세
mom: ha ha ha ha
me: what is manseh?
mom: you forgot what manse means?
mom: horay!!!

hahaha! so my dad thought "lol" was a guy with his arms up in the air, hooray-style! (or horay.) so cute.

2PM hottest flash mobs

2009-10-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

over the weekend, i had this idea to interview the 2PM hottest flash mob girls. 2PM is a popular boy band in korea; its leader, a korean american named jaebum (jay) park, came under fire for comments that he'd made on his myspace years ago, when he'd first moved to korea to begin training. he had complained that he hated korea, that he felt lonely, and that he wanted to return to seattle. i think these were understandable sentiments coming from a teenager who found himself stuck in a new country, but many koreans didn't feel the same way. and here is why i will never understand some koreans: some 3000 koreans signed a petition for jaebum to commit suicide. many more than that expressed a desire that jaebum resign from the band and leave the country. so jaebum issued a formal apology through his entertainment company and flew home to seattle, head down, not uttering a word to the hundreds of people who mobbed him at the airport.the 2PM fans, who call themselves the "hottests", were devastated and disgusted by this turn of events. at first they tried boycotts, but then they realized that boycotts only hurt the existing 2PM members. so they settled on flash mobs, which were a more peaceful, supportive, and fun way to protest. what's a flash mob? just watch here:

that was the original (korean) effort. since then, 2PM flash mobs have been held in brazil, mexico, france, germany, canada, US, malaysia, singapore, philippines, and other places. so i got in touch with some of the girls who'd danced in the flash mobs and interviewed them. it was fun reading their replies, because you could tell how much these girls cared about 2PM and how much effort they'd put into bringing jay back to 2PM. please read the article here!

domo awesomeness at 7-11

2009-10-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

there's a 7-11 at the caltrain station, so i stopped by this evening to pick up some domo straws... but they ran out! i was so sad. but the rest of the store helped me cheer up.
i think the last pic is supposed to be domo horrified that you spilled your coffee. at least, that's what i infer from it. :D anyway, this is what the straws look like:
music domo, hero domo, bling domo, and candy domo! so awesome!

visionaire no. 42

2009-10-19T17:18:00.000-07:00

just came across this blog entry on now smell this:the woman was browsing at goodwill when she came across this little white cabinet with bottles of scent inside. not knowing what it was, but feeling intrigued enough to splurge, she bought it for $19.99. it turned out to be a limited-edition scent collection called visionaire, with matching photos and perfumes corresponding to themes such as "cold", "sadness", "wet", "broken glass", "mother", etc. the photographers and perfumers involved were top-notch names. so this cabinet sells on amazon, used, for $350.

but it's not the fact that she scored a great deal. i just like this concept, even if the lucky lady says it wasn't necessarily carried out well. since i don't have access to the scents, i visited the website instead, which displays a few of the photographs set to various sounds. "cold" is a blue-white glacier, with a quiet eerie noise that sounds (to me) midway between a wind and a train horn from a very long distance. "strange" is an opened durian (although... would durians be considered "strange" in southeast asia?), with a hum that sounds slightly like the drone of electronics.

but you're only able to experience six of the themes. i wish for more online things like this. is there anything?

hello kitty woman perfume

2009-10-16T14:42:00.000-07:00

okay. someone decided to combine two of my favorite things in the world: hello kitty and perfume. i am happy. check out this bottle; i love it!according to now smell this, "Hello Kitty Woman" features notes of toffee apple, grapefruit, raspberry, licorice, frangipani, rose and vanilla.

"chocolate love"

2009-10-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

korean girl groups SNSD and f(x) put out MVs of the same song, "chocolate love". in korea, people love their cellphones, but aren't big into blackberries or iphones; instead, LG and samsung come out with sleek little phones with cute names like "chocolate" and "ice cream". so the LG chocolate is the phone featured prominently in the MV's. but it's the korean version, which looks different than the american version we all know:
and now the videos! i like how SNSD put out another cute little performance with frilly white dresses and their simple signature leg kicks, and then f(x) came in, all hardcore, wearing black leather, and were basically like, "okay, now we're going to show you how to REALLY dance."

SNSD "chocolate love" MV:

f(x) "chocolate love" MV:

but i still like SNSD better. they have a really cute fan dance at the end. :D

michelle williams in vogue

2009-10-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

i bought the october issue of vogue because i like reading what michelle williams has to say. she always seems so thoughtful and intelligent (and not in that self-obsessed, self-congratulatory hollywood sort of way that almost negates those qualities). she also seems to have a genuine love of art and literature, which is :D"I didn't know what my boundaries were for a long time, which made interviews feel very unsafe. I can talk about grief, because that's mine; about single parenting; about trying to balance work and kids. But what I don't have to talk about is what happened between Heath and me in our relationship."

"Brokeback Mountain was an unrepeatable moment in time, a very charmed time in my life. I was in love; I was in a movie I was proud to be a part of, and with a beautiful brand-new baby. Everything was good in that moment." After the split, she did everything to get away, including taking on a film in Sweden. "I just didn't want to be at home. Geography is a great solution for heartbreak."

"I just don't see the upside to this," she says. "You console yourself by saying it's all a deepening process. But it's weird. After the first year, the pain is less intense; it's less immediate. But the magical thinking goes away, too. And that's a whole new reckoning. But every time I really miss him and wonder where he's gone, I just look at her."

you can read the rest of the cover story here.

chat with bro

2009-10-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

Kevin: macgyver froze up
i'm mad!

me:

"i gotta feeling" lipdub

2009-10-13T13:09:00.001-07:00

this is pretty much awesome and you have to watch it. i'm a sucker for video performance things like flashmobs, but this is even better. i think this is the university of quebec.

"gam gee"

2009-10-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

my first language was actually korean, but after i started attending school, i pretty well forgot almost everything my parents taught me. only a few remnants of my early childhood language stick with me. i can still say (not necessarily properly, but well enough to get the point across): "give me candy" ("satang joo sae yo"), "bring me the hairbrush" ("beet gah joo wah" -- because in those days, my mom brushed my hair, and she would make me fetch the brush), "put your toys away" ("jam na kkam chee wuh"), and "i have a cold" ("gamgee gul yuh"). today, a piece of candy and a hairbrush have absolutely no connotations to my casual, everyday consciousness, but whenever i succumb to a cold, as i have now, the only thing that runs through my mind is the phrase "gamgee gul yuh suh". to be honest, i don't actually know what this means. it could be a question: "do you have a cold?" or it could be a declaration: "i have a cold," or it could be a different kind of declaration: "YOU have a cold." i have no idea. but when i have a headache, and my throat hurts, and my nose is so stopped up that i'm breathing through my mouth, and even my eyeballs feel burned out and tired, it's what i think, even if i don't know the meaning of it. it's a phrase that goes well with soothing cold treatments such as theraflu, that oddly greasy kleenex with aloe, and my mom's hand on my forehead. rather, it's a phrase i believe would go well with any of those things, as i i haven't actually experienced any of them for over twenty years. these days, when i have a cold, the most comfort i'm apt to receive is an ice cold diet coke and a warm blanket. and mikey, of course, kneading his paws on my stomach and purring like a motorboat. the rest of it exists these days only in my head.

soompi interview with park chan-wook

2009-10-09T01:19:00.001-07:00

during the U.S. premiere of "thirst", soompi got to interview its director, park chan-wook. park chan-wook, as you may recall, won the grand prix at the 2004 cannes film festival for oldboy. he's also made a lot of other movies that have become big-time favorites, such as JSA.

the interview took a long long time to get ready simply because we couldn't find anyone willing to translate it into english. isn't that terrible? whenever i heard about how we had this interview that needed to be translated, i wanted to ship it to my parents and say "here! do it!" not that they would have; my mom haaaaaaated "oldboy". finally we got someone. woo ernest woo!

read here: http://www.soompi.com/content/92659

it was little nemo: the dream master!

2009-10-07T20:51:00.000-07:00

well, part of it was. this was the game with the toy trains and the candy that i remembered, and the blue house, and this is the scene with the music i liked. what's missing is the rotund man who reminded me of a penguin, or maybe it was actually penguins. this is driving me a little bit crazy. i mean to get to the bottom of this. in the meantime, check out the music here:

what game was it?

2009-10-06T01:23:00.000-07:00

i just sent my brother a chat message to which he has not yet responded, because he is probably sleeping.

me: hey do you remember a video game we had at home where one level had all these penguins in a mansion or something? or it might have been a man wearing a tuxedo and he looked like a penguin. i was thinking little nemo, but when i look at that game, it doesn't look right. did we have another game that used candy and part of it was set in a house?

i was thinking of this one game with music i used to like, and it was KINDA like this, but bluer, cuter, and better? probably a newer game console. i'm not even sure if i ever played this game here.

i've thought about it some more and i can remember this: the penguin man (who may have just been a rotund man in a suit with no penguin association whatsoever) was evil, and he had a cane, from which he may or may not have shot things that hurt the player.

three rivers

2009-10-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

wow, a primetime drama about DOCTORS that takes place in a HOSPITAL! what a concept! next time, you're going to tell me your newest sitcom focuses on attractive young single people who live in an apartment complex.but those other hospital shows don't have daniel henney playing dr. david lee, a surgeon who's "broken as many hearts as he's replaced." lol. woo!
premieres sunday on CBS, 9/8c.

cartoon pic

2009-10-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

me:Kevin: what is that
me: i think it looks like dad!
Kevin: that looks like a girl
dad's not a girl
me: this isn't a girl
it doesn't look like dad?
Kevin: that's totally a girl
me: ugh
Kevin: it is!
look at that shirt
me: it's a member of a korean boy band
Kevin: oh
then he's just girly

another mystery flower

2009-09-22T23:18:00.000-07:00

these might be some of my favorite flowers in california. they are certainly the most amazing. i have no idea what they are. each of those little red-orange-yellow flower clusters is about the size of a ping-pong ball. so those little flowers (which compose those clusters) are TINY. they look like little bridal bouquets. for dolls, like. or you could pluck out the little flowers individually and put them in your barbie's hair. i think the most amazing thing about them is the neat arrangement of color. here it's red in the center, yellow in the middle, and the ring of orange on the outside. or the ones that have the most little flowers are a gradation of yellow to orange to red, like half of a rainbow. also these flowers also come in the pink-purple spectrum, for people who aren't too crazy about orange and yellow. when i first saw these (outside my first apartment in california, as a matter of fact), i thought, how does nature come up with this stuff? it's incredible.again, these are iphone pictures, so not great quality.

photos from the set of "new moon"

2009-09-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

LA times obtained access to the set of "new moon" and brought us some awesome pics. i realize that if you're a "twilight" fan, you've probably already seen them, and if you're not a fan, then you probably don't want to see them, so posting them here might not seem to make sense. except that i want to be able to see them whenever i want, so it actually makes perfect sense.

my readers (i.e., people i know IRL) definitely, without exception, fall into the latter category, which is unfortunate for me. i figure i have about a year to find someone willing to watch "new moon" with me. (stephen absolutely refuses; he watched "twilight" with me when it came out in theaters and he still holds it over my head as his Good Deed for the Next Ten Years.)say what you will about the story, the characters, the writing (yeeeeeeeessss, there's a lot of bad that can be said) -- but you have to admit that the setting is perfect. the cold gray mist and towering evergreens of washington state are like this century's version of the english moorlands in wuthering heights and jane eyre. and as for the heavy winter clothes -- boy, i wish these movies had come out while i still lived in michigan. "twilight" made bulky parkas and woolen mittens IN in a big way. i can't believe it.
of course, jacob the hot-blooded werewolf spends a lot of time without clothes, to the delight of fangirls everywhere.edward, the brooding, gorgeous, super rich, intelligent, sensitive, ageless vampire who is torn between his love for bella... and his instinctive desire to drink her blood! i'm team jacob. i mean, check out those abs... just kidding. it's really because jacob is by far the most likable character in the books.
"twilight" had a really low budget. so low that stephen and i were able to discern the outline of robert pattinson's golden contact lenses in several scenes. you know, i actually own some circle lenses that look a lot like these. maybe i should be a twilight vampire for halloween.
i love this picture.
as i mentioned before, i like kristen stewart too. she's beautiful and she has the world at her feet, but you don't hear about her doing stupid hollywood things. then again, she's pretty young. i guess time will tell.
there are a lot more pics here.

birds on a wire

2009-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

some dude looked at some birds on wires, saw notes on a musical staff, and played it. hear the result!

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

hawaii recap

2009-09-08T02:41:00.001-07:00

just so you don't assume i spent my entire vacation playing restaurant city, i'll show you pics i took in hawaii... you know, pics which prove i actually went outside and stuff.

plumeria and hibiscus. the hibiscus pic was taken with the iphone. doesn't really do it justice.
downtown honolulu. lots of reminders that hawaii used to be a kingdom. last pic is a statue of father damien at the state capitol.
road to kailua. reminded me of parts of thailand.kailua. gorgeous, relatively uncrowded beach with fine white sand like baby powder. stamp your feet around. no rocks anywhere. i was frolicking in the water, wondering what could possibly compel me to leave this paradise, when a guy came up to me, pointed at a series of bubbles directly ahead of me, and said, "watch out. man o' war." well, i got the fuck out of there.
hanauma bay, a snorkeler's dream. corals and urchins and lots and lots of colorful, extroverted fish. when i say extroverted, i don't mean they came up and started partying and chatting with us. i just mean they let us swim amongst them without scattering like scared little fishies.pretty much the first thing i did when i got to hawaii was climb up diamond head crater. if there's a worse way to acclimate yourself to the heat and humidity of hawaii than by climbing up a freaking volcano, i don't know it. about three-quarters of the way up, i greedily drank half a bottle of ice-cold water and my stomach just turned inside out. but then the summit was beautiful and windy and cool, a real oasis. i finally understood why everyone coming down looked so chipper and refreshed.
haha! believe me, the rear view was even more compelling in person. lots of jiggling going on. imagine climbing up lots and lots of stairs and this is what's moving directly ahead of you.
stephen's waikiki apartment. i had my own room and bathroom and i loved it. i kept telling stephen, "we have to go to puu ualakaa. we have to go to puu ualakaa." he kept saying, "later. later. later." then finally i got sneaky and i said, "we should go to puu ualakaa. you can bring your camera and take awesome pictures," because stephen had recently bought one of those fancy DLSR DSLR whatever cameras and wanted to use it. so we timed the short trip up the mountain to see the sunset, and i thought it was going to be all romantic, because everyone else there was being lovey-dovey, but it was like stephen was there with his camera, not me, going CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK . i complained, so stephen set down his camera and put one arm around me for five seconds. then CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK.
pearl harbor. i left this until the end of the trip because it sounded boring as hell. i just did not want to go. i mean my PARENTS weren't even alive when it all went down. but i dragged myself onto the bus anyway, and WOW. it's free (although you can certainly donate), and what you get is a trip through a museum, a viewing of a short, relatively objective documentary on the events leading up to the bombing, and then a boat ride to the U.S.S. arizona memorial, which is the white structure shown below suspended over the sunken ship (which is the final resting place of the ship's ill-fated crew). you can see the ship in the water. one of hawaii's best attractions isn't even a beach! made me proud to be an american.
waikiki. stephen's apartment was a ten- to fifteen-minute walk from here. nice beach for people watching. if you go to the rockier part of the beach, you can rent a big umbrella and two lounge chairs for $20 total for four hours. two people, four hours, lying on the beach, $20.
waimea bay. shallow clear water. parts of LOST are filmed here, which is AWESOME and i wish i'd known because i would have trekked into the forest to look for the hatch. anyway, there's also a rock formation, and people sometimes climb up to the top and dive into the water. i recorded stephen jumping off. me, hell no.
halekulani. fancy hotel with nice outdoor restaurant and cocktail lounge. you know, sunset with the mellow hawaiian ukeleles and singers, graceful hula dancers, the whole thing.
shopping in waikiki. lots of japanese female tourists, so lots of cutesy pink stuff to be had.

restaurant city, part II

2009-09-08T02:29:00.000-07:00

i accidentally took a nap earlier and now i can't sleep. i thought i would show you screenshots of my new restaurant! yay, i'm a loser. when i was in hawaii, i'd be sitting on the beach thinking, "man, this is awesome and all, but i want to go home so i can play restaurant city. okay, i've had enough of the surf and sand. time to go." then i'd walk back home and log in. i got my employees cute uniforms! half of them came in wearing ridiculous hats, because in restaurant city you hire other people, and other people always want to buy themselves accessories, but none of my employees are allowed to wear anything but this cute ensemble. SUPER CHIC. that's how it is at the house of NOM.

may i remind you, this is more or less how i started the game:

cool mom and dad (who aren't my mom and dad)

2009-09-06T14:12:00.000-07:00

this is a lol fob mom.

Dear Felicia:

How are you doing? Back to school always exited, right ? say hi to your lovely girl freinds and all those sticky boys for me lol ,ahhh, i like this word lol, it looks like somebody hands a ball to me. Capital LOL likes people are kicking a ball. Lol like a ball find a hole to slip away from cage (this is what i feel when i drove you to airport), lOl looks like I am squeezing Chang Yi’s cheeks. lOL Ahhh…….. I am leaning on a comfortable cushion…….ahhhhhhh…………………….

Love,
Mom

i got this from kevin's twitter... some twitter called shitmydadsays. it's so funny, but i wonder if it's even real.

"Everybody loves that Da Vinci code book. Bullshit, it sucks. I read it. It's for all the dummies."

"It's just a fucking june bug, calm down. Jesus Christ, what happens when something bigger than a testicle attacks you?"

"You know, sometimes it's nice having you around. But now ain't one of those times. Now gimmie the remote we're not watching this bullshit."

"How the fuck should I know if it's still good? Eat it. You get sick, it wasn't good. You people, you think I got microscopic fucking eyes."

"Don't touch the bacon, it's not done yet. You let me handle the bacon, and i'll let you handle..what ever it is you do. I guess nothing."

"Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn't stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down."

"Love this Mrs. Dash. The bitch can make spices... Jesus, Joni (my mom) it's a joke. I was making a joke! Mrs. Dash isn't even real dammit!"

"The dog is not bored, it's a fucking dog. It's not like he's waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube. He's a god damned dog."

"My flight lands at 9:30 on Sunday...You want to watch what? What the fuck is mad men? I'm a mad man if you don't pick me the hell up."

all lacquered up

2009-09-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

all lacquered up is my favorite nail polish blog. (scrangie runs a close second.) ALU's blogger, michelle, is from cleveland (where my parents live), and she just sounds like she'd be a super friendly, cool person if you ever met her IRL. so i like her. and she keeps her nails short, as i do, so i really like checking out her swatches. most nail polish bloggers have really long talons, and it's just kinda hard to relate.

i'm posting right now because i was checking out my old links and i realized that i had bookmarked a lot of her entries (like, in the "OMG! I MUST OWN THIS NAIL POLISH!" folder), and i want to put them here in one place. these are currently my favorite polishes that i don't own. i'm not saying they're my all-time favorites... when it comes to nail polish, i always change my mind. but right now, i just seem to be lemming for greens and blues.

1. chanel jade. a slightly shimmery mint green. it really does look like jade, doesn't it? if only it wasn't so expensive!
2. orly pixie dust. a sparkly silvery gray.
3. OPI 1968 by damone roberts. a slightly grayed mint creme.
4. barielle falling star. a blue creme with COPPER glitter. wow!
5. rescue beauty lounge recycle. gorgeous dark green creme.
6. barielle slate of affairs. yep, a slate blue jelly-like creme.
7. nubar going green. deep grass green creme.
8. barielle berry blue. great name! it reminds me of those blue raspberry lollipops.
i listed a lot of shades by barielle, and i don't even think i've ever seen that brand IRL. where the heck do i find it? and also, lots of cremes. shimmers look so bad on me. i think it's because my nail beds are somewhat wide, and shimmer for your nails is like shiny spandex for your body -- makes it look even bigger! no thanks. but i think i could handle the first two.

pearls before breakfast

2009-08-30T01:53:00.001-07:00

i never posted this article before now because it was published before i started my blog, and also because every person to whom i ever tried to forward it, including kevin and stephen, responded with, "whatev. i already read this." it's true it went viral, and thus very probable that you've already read it. but on the off chance that you haven't, i encourage you to do so now. the premise of the article is: what would happen if acclaimed violinist joshua bell performed anonymously as a busker at a DC metro station? and i guess the more pointed question is, what would YOU do if you happened to pass by a musician of bell's caliber on the metro? would you stop and listen? would you enjoy his music?

i still ask myself that from time to time. initially while reading the article, my first thought was that since i'm pretty darn ADD -- often stopping mid-stride to stare at flowers, babies, perplexing billboards, dogs, the sky -- maybe i would have done myself the favor. but then i thought about it some more and realized that i was giving myself too much credit. in fact, i probably would have been listening to music on my ipod, closing out much of the world around me. and even if i hadn't been, i probably still wouldn't have stopped to listen. i believe i would have noticed and appreciated the music, but at most, i would have slowed down to listen. not stopped. that just wouldn't be something i would just do while i was heading to work and thinking about the long day ahead. some people, after reading that article, wrote to say they cried thinking about we've become blind to the most astonishing displays of beauty. i didn't cry, of course, but i can see how it's sad.

also, the writing is skilled. i think the reporter, gene weingarten, normally writes humor columns. his friend dave barry, also a humor writer (and one of my favorite authors), sometimes makes it sound like any talentless goofball can become a successful humor columnist. but reading this article makes you realize that it's not true; you really do have to know how to write. anyway, this article won weingarten a pulitzer prize.

hawaiian food

2009-08-26T04:10:00.000-07:00

edit: looks like blogger rotated almost half of the photos in this post. so when you're looking at the pictures, tilt your head toward the right by ninety degrees.

i stopped by mcdonald's for breakfast the other day. turns out they really do serve up mcd's spam platters here! (for the record, i stayed away. spam seems more like a dinner food, something you have to work your way up to, not start the day off with.) but i did try mcd's haupia (coconut pudding) pie, which was totally awesome. i am such a big fan of mcd's apple pies and almost anything coconut, so the haupia pie was like the best of both worlds.i never used to take pictures of food, but in hawaii i've been snapping away left and right, because i feel like i'm never going to see these delicious dishes again, and it makes me sad! hawaiian regional cuisine is much more unique than anything i've seen elsewhere in the states, and spam aside, it's truly delicious.
dinner at hawaiian ono foods. it kinda reminded me of korean food. for instance, the soupy thing is chicken long rice, but it tasted a lot like my mom's samgyetang (which is one of my favorite comfort foods). and there were all these little side dishes, like banchan... so your tastebuds never get bored! everything was excellent (except for that purply goop, poi... let's just say it must be an acquired taste :P). i will miss this place!
stephen is a pho addict, so we tried out a few rundown pho joints around the city. they were all tasty, but not necessarily more so than anything you'd find in san jose. then we had a brilliant korean fix at choi's kitchen. it's just a stand located in the international food market, so i didn't expect too much, even though it had five stars on yelp. but it was great. it tasted just like mom's food.dinner at rainbow drive-in. i think obama, who grew up in hawaii, was a big fan. when i was a kid, i once read a poem about this place that went something like this: "a display on a paper plate / two scoops rice / one scoop macaroni salad". so i had to try their plate lunch. it sticks in your belly for hours! there are all these meat/rice/mac salad plate lunches everywhere here. they're so heavy, it's like one meal, and you're set for weeks.
after a day at waimea bay, we stopped by matsumoto shave ice. i ordered a rainbow cone drizzled with condensed milk, and i got the biggest stomachache afterward. it always happens if i have something super cold when i've been out in the heat for awhile.
malasadas are like the hawaiian (actually portuguese) version of pazckis... or maybe you could say paczkis are like the michigander (actually polish) version of malasadas. both are sugary, lard-packed pastries meant to be consumed before the lenten season. i ordered six because they were so cheap. stephen thought i was crazy, but he promptly polished off two and a half -- and got mad that i didn't save the extra half for him. later, we went out and ordered fourteen more. they're all gone now.
we had our fancy seven-course meal at alan wong's. when i was little, i used to read about these lavish seven-course and twelve-course feeds and i always thought they must be the pinnacle of fine dining. now i know that i literally can't stomach them. after about four courses, i was wiped out. not even the sight of that beautiful dessert platter could perk me up. (i did eat it, though. turning down dessert? c'mon. i would never do that.)

kitteh om nom nom

2009-08-26T04:02:00.000-07:00

even if you're not a cat person, you have to watch this video. i promise it has enough cuteness to make it worth your while!

clara chung, jcpenney "schooled in style" contest

2009-08-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

jcpenney is having some kind of contest. i don't know what it's supposed to be, but i assume it's geared toward asians because i see that far east movement and kevjumba are involved, along with wong fu productions and david choi and all those good people. anyway, i was watching clara chung's entry, and it took me a really long time to figure out that she was covering a paramore song. she made it sound totally different, and she even stuck in a bit by blu cantrell. very creative. watch it, but skip to 0:30 because that's when she actually starts singing. you can also check out the other finalists.

for comparison purposes, here's the original misery business.