Author: F C

Several of my friends including SSW will be on a panel tomorrow evening. I think it is the surest sign of growing up when you end up on a panel, view by those seeking whatever wisdom you might have accumulated from your life experience. More coverage tomorrow, possibly a joint blog with SSW…

Much catching up with friends and routines this weekend. Saturday, started the gym again for the first time. I’m still sore today. We saw the Fra Angelico exhibit at the Met. This early Renassiance artist produced spectacular religious artwork, one of which demonstrated some of the first modern usages of perspective. Afterwards saw Syriana, which left P and I uncharacteristically ambivalent — as all of the characters were acting in their own self interests, none of the characters are at all likable or relatable. I didn’t get anything new out of the movie when I left.

Afterwards, we ate at Heidelberg, a legendary German restaurant next door to the German deli at 86th Street. The food was excellent – a touch better then Rolf’s and much better then the generic biergarden in Astoria.

Sunday meant the re-union of the schk dim sum club at Golden Unicorn, which has been meeting for the last 10 years or so. Everybody doing ok, just older and with more ideas. Talk about mini-storage, salon culture, domestic espionage and Google subpoenas dominated the afternoon. $75 of dimsum and a few bubble teas later, we adjourned after 3 hours. Afterwards, P and I visited P’s sister’s dogs.

At home, saw on DVD Jay Chau‘s racing movie Initial-D. Wasn’t bad – based on a Japanese manga comic book, it translated well to the screen. You can find lots of info on the Special Features disk. Turns out almost 100% of the driving scenes through the downhill hairpin turns were live action, not CGI. Half of the cast was previously in the “Infernal Affairs” series of movies, and the female lead was in “Snow Falls on Cedars”. Also finished “Lost” season One – that series’ extras disk pointed out that Yunjin Kim, the actress that plays Sun, had 1. originally auditioned to play Kate, and 2. is a superstar in Korea, playing the lead in the action blockbuster Shiri. The producers decided to create a role especially for her, and cast a husband for her.

Another Monday morning rapidly approaching….

Boy, has it been a busy week. To quickly summarize, YC is back in the New York area (acutally New Jersey), but he barely has cell phone coverage, not to mention Internet access. P and I had dinner at Kapadokya, a Turkish restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, with him and his wife on Monday.

Earlier that day, I was locked out on the roof for about an hour. Boy it was cold.

Two days before, we had dim sum at Golden Bridge, and then went shopping around for various CDs and DVDs.

Tuesday, went to P’s work Holiday Dinner which was postponed because of the transit strike. It was at the China Club. The food wasn’t bad, but everyone was fighting to get drinks.

The second half of the TV season is just kicking butt – a lot of good shows on:

24 – part 5, premiered for 4 hours this past weekend. They tried to cram a lot of issues in that time, including mental health, single parenting, and of course, loyality. Wasn’t bad — will follow it. But doesn’t Kiefer Southerland ever get tired of this?

Battlestar Galactica also kicks butt – Adama gets promoted to admiral, but a lot of people had to suffer to get there.

Lost: It’s interesting how each survivor can be identified by occupation. Mr. Eko turns out to have a priestly past in last week’s episode. This week’s episode uncovers the Others on the opposite side of the island, and MSNBC pointed out that the Frenchwoman’s son is mentioned as being among them.

I’m pooped and I stayed up to get some work done. We’ll try this again tomorrow. Check out the flickr bar above for pictures from the week.

Interesting article in the New York Observer, “Office Builders Balking At Downtown Brooklyn”. Apparently, developers are having second thoughts about bulking up on office space, and are instead are going for residential and hotel development.

Mr. Markman is representing another major property developer, Joshua Muss, president of Muss Development, a Queens-based developer who built the Brooklyn Marriott nearby and is adding another 280 rooms to the hotel now. Mr. Muss reportedly has entered into a joint venture with the city’s Economic Development Corporation to construct an 850,000-square-foot building at Red Hook Lane and Boerum Place.

Mr. Markman would not give details of the project, as it has not been announced nor finalized. But real-estate sources said that most of that building would be devoted to apartments, with about 100,000 square feet set aside for an educational institution….

Well, the 850,000 sq. ft. is directly underneath my apartment. In one sense, it is kind of surreal to have an article literally hit home. I can’t beat the rent. On the other hand, the building is old and decrepit, and a deal in the new apartment building would be nice.

In other news, 800,000 pounds of cocoa beans were sunk off of Pier 7 off of Columbia Street, just south of the Promenade. Some confusion when I bought a Wendy’s hamburger combo – tomatoes are by request only because of hurricane damage to the tomato crop, but others claim no problem. And I was good in going for the Chili instead of the fries, and a Diet Coke rather than a regular soda, but my weight is still considerably over the 5′ 9″ expected weight of 154 lbs. for high risk diabetes. For the standard height-weight chart, well, I’m going to need to turn the corner on going to the gym.

On the return of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” from winter vacation, the first word on its daily feature “The WØRD” was celebrated as the American Dialect Society’s 2005 Word of the Year: truthiness – “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”. I guess it is composed of “truthy” [truly likely] + -ness [the quality of being]. We do need a word for this concept, because similar words like “doublespeak”, “delusion”, or “duplicity” don’t quite get the innocent longing feeling or ironic contempt that “truthiness” possesses.

Had the car today so we went to Costco to pick up a few things. As you know, everything is bigger at a wholesale store, including the audacity. In a regular supermarket, super shoppers frustrate the packers by picking around in the back of the freezer case to find the milk and eggs with the latest expiration date. At the Costco, the freezer case is actually a meat locker with rows of glass doors on opposite walls. I saw people opening the refrigerator case doors, actually stepping over the older product in the front to get to the row of carts in the center that are being held in reserve. They would come out of the lockers with armfulls of milk and eggs looking like they had just looted the store. Now that’s chutzpah!

P- was out last night with her high school friends for their post-Christmas gift giving dinner. That left me home alone to fend for myself.

This was the perfect opportunity to try out for myself the Karaoke DVD player that I got her for Christmas. Self-consciousness is not a factor when you can practice karaoke at home! I got the one-legged Chris Martin jig down pat while singing Coldplay’s “Yellow”, and mangled a few other songs on the three disk Memorex economy karaoke set.

The final song I did from that collection was Lou Rawls’ “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”. As my natural range is baritone, the song works well for me. From the second half of the song, which is sung-spoken, I could see how he could have been the predecessor to today’s rap and slam, as some accounts claim.

It was a shock to hear today that Rawls had passed away from cancer. His history of giving back, including the years he ran a telethon for the Negro College Fund, makes him someone to be admired. We’re going to miss his lovin’, baby.

The WMF Microsoft exploit is causing a lot of trouble, and not just because of the mad scrambling for countermeasures for a Windows flaw that only requires you to view a bad picture. SANS, a separate security group, is asking users to install their unofficial independent fix for the flaw until Microsoft puts out their scheduled Tuesday update. What does this mean for the Windows platform – more organized third-party support, a public relations retreat later on this week, or the forced migration of more users to Apple or Linux?

Winter showers: the leak’s back on again in the bathroom. Had about 2-3 gallons of water come out from the side of the patched ceiling. I almost think that someone upstairs is just dumping water down a hole or something, because it doesn’t seem to be connected with actually using the shower – it tends to occur afterwards.

Cool sounds: on digg.com is a discussion about Holophonic Sound – you have to use headphones, but it gives a 3D effect to sound. You can actually hear the things go left to right, and even above and behind. Try listening to the following sounds on your MP3 player – they’re really cool:

DimensionsFX
Cereni

Edge World Question Center offers this year’s Most Dangerous Ideas. Fascinating!

Hi,
This is my annual New Year’s message, where I traditionally recap the last year, give some stats, and pick one topic to write about, usually consisting of a few weeks of research and 24 hours of (possibly) focused writing and resolution-making.

To start off, I wanted to especially thank you for your kindness and support for my family and myself, in this very difficult year with the passing of my father in March. There are never enough opportunities to let you know that it means a lot to me.

Statistics for the Year
Email: 744 megabytes (+42% from last year)
ZipCars driven: 24 (+62% from last year)
Miles flown: 28,168 (-38% from last year)

Top ten search terms on triscribe.com:

1. everwood season premiere [not my idea, never seen the show]
2. new year message
3. Dae Jang Geum/Jewel in the Palace [Korean tv period drama]
4. Incheon Airport
5. Grassland Bus [Malaysian inter-city bus line]
6. Pari Chang [New York Times columnist, not Asian, but married to one]
7. Edith Spivak [New York City’s first female attorney, passed away this year]
8. Eltabina [another Malaysian bus line]
9. Amazing [Race]
10. poutine [a unctuous Canadian mix of French Fries, brown gravy, and farmer’s cheese]

This year’s essay is about observing unexpected paths, and how you can recapture your youth at the mall. I’m going to jump around, but hopefully we’ll get to where we are going.

Whenever I travel, I try to do two things: see a mall/department store and a supermarket. I feel that one gets to see how people really live day-to-day when you observe what they buy for themselves. I get to see the kinds of products that are the same as at home, and see what is important to them. I learnt this the hard way when I was doing a study abroad in Hong Kong, and had to figure out where to get food and supplies without busting my budget eating out.

Last weekend, I tried to do that here in Brooklyn. I went to Kings Plaza for the first time in about 10 years. For those who are not familiar with Kings Plaza, it is a shopping mall in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn. At 24 acres and 130 stores, it is your typical mid-sized American mall. The other thing you must know is that it is in the middle of nowhere. It is on the Mill Basin marina at the southernmost part of Flatbush Avenue, just before the Gill Hodges Bridge to Far Rockaway. In other words, it is one step away from the Siberia of New York.

I want to tell you upfront that I was definitely not a “mall rat” as a youth. Many young people of the “Breakfast Club”/”Valley Girl” era hung out at malls across the country, and the only serious place to do that in Brooklyn was Kings Plaza (the puny Fulton Mall doesn’t count). Many school-bus-pass-holding latch-key kids did just that. At that time, I don’t think I ever went there without my parents, not in high school, not even in college. The primary reason was that it was always so difficult to go there – the only practical public transport was the Church Avenue bus to Flatbush, and then the Flatbush Avenue bus south down the entire length of the borough, which would take over an hour. A ride from high school would be a trek across the breadth of the borough, also an hour.

The way to go would be by car. My dad would pile us all into his white Chevy Monte Carlo, drive down Ocean Parkway or Coney Island Avenue, make a left on Foster Avenue, then right on Flatbush Avenue. After about half an hour, the corner of Kings Plaza’s white block letter sign would peak over the horizon like the “Hollywood” sign if it was mounted on the side of a building.

The routine would be pretty much the same each visit. My mom would do the clothes shopping in Macy’s or Alexander’s, and my dad would corral us around some sort of mannequin display, where we would be hot, bothered, and hyperactive. Occasionally, we would get to see a movie (the first I saw at the Cineplex Odeon was the World War II epic “Midway” – not your typical fare for a six-year-old). Lunch would be at the faux-French restaurant “The Crepe and the Pancake”, where the rotisserie rack of flavored syrups at each table made the pancakes all good and a bowl of French onion soup was a foreign treat. If we were really good, we would get oatmeal raisin cookies from the Cookie House, some kind of health food from GNC (I was allergic to chocolate as a child, so Tiger’s Milk carob bars were my substitute for chocolate), or a smoothie from Bananas. By fifth grade, we were also spending time in the Waldenbooks picking up books of every topic, but I remember getting my first computer and science fiction books there.

Jumping a few decades later, I was returning the ZipCar that I had borrowed on Christmas Day to Brooklyn College, and on a whim decided to go down to Kings Plaza. It’s been seriously spruced up – they even have carpet and a sky light on the second level, but many things remain the same. Alexander’s the retail store is gone – replaced by Sears — but Alexander’s the real estate giant is doing great as the landlord of the entire mall. Cookie House upgraded to a corner store, still emitting the distinctive scent of fresh-baked cookies on the first floor. Those cookies enticed me to see what had become of the rest. Waldenbooks, CVS, Bananas and GNC are all in the same places. The Crepe and the Pancake closed years ago, but a new storefront called “Eden’s Crepes and Shakes” has taken up crepe making duties across from Express. The Israeli partners that opened the new stand said that they were told about the previous store, and claim that they are better. I have to give it to them that they are much more authentic, although they are served in a handy hand-held foil pouch. They don’t have the flavored syrups, though (not that you are supposed to use them on crepes anyway).

While my parents didn’t do a whole lot of traveling once they had kids, they, especially my dad, were very supportive of when I wanted to travel. It was a separate part of my education that developed my creativity, helping me to connect disjointed things. I can say this year I’ve had crepes in Harajuku, Tokyo as well as in Brooklyn, New York; Vietnamese pho in Honolulu as well as in Chicago; Japanese dishes from Osaka in Washington, DC. We had an array of homemade dishes at a potluck in a convention center with a guy from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in Inuyama, Japan, where he is an elected official. Steaks at home with my law school buddies and their wives in Taipei. There is even a museum in Yokohama where I had 5 bowls of the best ramen to be had anywhere.

Looking through some old documents that my mother showed me, it turns out that my father actually was something of a world traveler himself before he was married. He was in Yokohama, apparently enroute from Hong Kong. On a separate trip, Honolulu was a port of call on the way to Jamaica. I knew he worked in London as a cook for several years, but I had forgotten that he had gone to Minnesota to learn orthopedics, stayed a night in Chicago with the entire family after being snowed in leaving my cousin’s wedding (ironically, we were put up in the French hotel chain Sofetel, and I believe we had crepes), and had several stops in Miami and Washington, D.C. So, I could see why he was always interested when I told him I was flying to some place or another. I’m glad that I’ve had the chance to experience these places in common, and look forward to traveling to other places with this vision.

Last year’s resolution was “recapture my childhood”. It was not the way I wanted; it was not the way I intended; it was not the way I expected. But, on the last weekend of this year, I did at the mall, and the lesson to be learnt is to have faith in following the path, wherever it may go.

So, for this year, I have two resolutions, one of which I am going to keep to myself – I’ll let you know next year if I came through on it. The other will be to do what I can to share my love for travel. I am not sure how I am going to do this as yet, but you’ll see them in action on my blog at triscribe.com.

I always want to thank my contributors-in-crime on the blog that make sure that there is always something interesting being published when I come up lacking. Finally of course, thanks to my girlfriend, who took a leap of faith and has domesticated my bachelor’s pad and my bachelor’s life. She means the world to me.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope that 2006 will be a much better year for the both of us.

My original entry here got wiped out in a browser crash, but the outline of what was my week included:

• 100 miles of driving (ZipCar to the rescue): 2 round trips to Starrett City, 2 round trips to Richmond Hill, 2 round trips to my Mom’s house. Amazingly I got a car on Christmas Day, although I had to go to Brooklyn College to get it.
• several meals: Christmas dinner: chino latino style – pernil, rice and peas, mac and cheese, hoisin chicken, stirfried veggies; dinner at our sentimental favorite Essex (the Wednesday lobster special is very nice); another dinner with college friends at GermanChristmasWonderlandTavernontheGreenonLSD restaurant Rolf’s (recommended, reservations a must).
• much relaxing, catching up on tv using the new Slingbox that P’s brother in law got me, and going to try out Civilization IV (email game anybody?). I will try it out before I continue working on my annual New Year’s message (which for some reason got a lot of hits from Yahoo this week). It will be something slightly different this year.

More tomorrow….