Triscribe

Author: F C

  • All this has happened before and will happen again

    Warning:BSG spoilers….

    The Friday Battlestar Galactica half-season cliffhanger was fantastic, but the promise of the final five being revealed did not exactly happen, at lease not as it was being teased at the beginning of each episode. And they find Earth!!! But they have 10 more episodes in season 4.5, so there are plenty of loose ends to tie up. And how the hell did Brooklyn got nuked!!! The remains of the temple of Aurora seems to be sitting right where the Fulton Ferry is now.

    You know when things are old when the oldies station plays the greatest of the 80’s, 90’s and today. By that token, The TWIT Daily Giz Wiz podcast, which specializes in showing old gadgets, whips out the Palm Pilot (which is circa 1997 tech!). I fondly remember that. InsideDGW has a recap.

  • The Wide World of Sports

    Anyone who watched any TV on a Saturday afternoon in the 60s, 70s, or 80s remembers the “The Thrill of Victory – and the Agony of Defeat” of Jim McKay’s ABC Wide (Wild?) World of Sports. Nothing was too small or esoteric, or large and dramatic to fit the 12 inch color TV in my parents’ bedroom, converted into an inside stadium for viewing the world. As it was the only room with the air conditioner, we would all pile in on the bed with “picnic” dinner – takeout from Chinatown, or maybe oven roasted chicken and baked mac and cheese, or even the breaded zucchini topped with cheddar cheese (don’t ask me where my dad picked that one up). The sun would be shining in through the western windows, shaded by the lush catalpa tree outside. That was our shared experience, out of keeping cool, fed, and in tune with that bowling championship, curling competition, go cart race, or triple crown trial.

    Jim McKay was able to see the world, do what he loved, and combine professionalism and humanity. What a wonderful life! If we could be brave enough to do that….

  • Hope

    NY Times continues to gather more details of the China earthquake, and less so the Burmese cyclone (not for lack of trying). Just the concept of this one-two punch is hard enough to get anyone’s mind around, and we’re still recovering from our disasters. To see both the big picture and that every individual life is special is something that we need to to be reminded of daily. A lesson easier learned for some than others – that they should do something, anything.

    (Numbers from Wikipedia as of today)

    9/11: 2,974 killed – 24 missing

    2004 earthquake/tsunami: 283,100 killed, 14,100 missing

    Katrina: 1,836 killed, 705 missing

    Burma cyclone: 80,000 dead, 56,000 missing

    Sichuan earthquake: 60,560 dead,  352,290 injured, 26,221missing

  • T-144 and counting

    Less than 144 days left to the Big Day… sent the Save the Date cards to the printer; hopefully finish the invite design and vetting the Chinese text this week.

    Got P- Madonna tickets from the Citibank presale – it’s the Monday before the wedding at MSG.

    Spent the day at home with a upset tummy – too much late night snacking.

    Kristi Yamaguchi wins Dancing with the Stars – a woman has not won for the last 5 seasons, and joins only two other APA reality show winners: Yul Kwon from Survivor,  and Dorothy Hui from The Mole 2. Speaking of which, The Mole returns to ABC on June 2 (sans Anderson Cooper, though).

    Asian Heritage Month continues — Taiwan this Sunday at Union Square; the Philipines on June 2.

  • Ice Cream Dreams

    I don’t eat a whole lot of dairy (that lactose intolerance thing) but I love ice cream, and Haagen-Dazs has too neato things this week. First, Green Tea flavor is now available in the U.S.!!!!  We first encountered it in Tokyo, where it was a gazillion times more rich and intense than the stuff you get at Japanese-American sushi restaurants. P- actually wrote the company to put it out, and they’ve finally done it.

    Second, Tuesday is free Vanilla Honey Bee flavor day – free scoops from 4 to 8 PM. Profits from the flavor go towards protecting the honey bee, which makes possible agriculture as we know it today.

  • Asian Pacific Heritage + Mother’s Day

    Saturday: worked a table at the CAPA Festival, held at the UN instead of Union Square because of construction. Attendence not quite as good as it usually is at Union Square, but the site is a lot better for the people there. First – actual trees that provide shade. Second, the Japan Society is across the street, and they have Toto Washlets – WOW, I really miss those restrooms in Tokyo. The current Shibata Zeshin exhibit is a tour de force in lacquer works – the lost art of painting with lacquer is something spectacular.

    Dinner in Flushing for P-‘s mom at the Full House Seafood Restaurant – a whole steamed fish and calamari were spectacular, the chicken and beef dishes kind of ok. The thing to get that we missed out on was the steamed seafood casseroles.

    Sunday: Studio photos with my mom courtesy of Microsoft, followed by lunch-dinner at Teresa’s Polish Restaurant, and then a hairstyling makeover for my mom with my hairstylist.  All worked out real well.

  • Identity Crisis

    The Yale Daily News reports on a story of a Trinidadan Asian student who allegedly faked his application transferring into Yale. Apparently he claimed to be transferring from Columbia, and had previously transferred from NYU. Or did he actually go to Columbia, and had his identity stolen by NYU? Or did he take a leave of absence in Sri Lanka? He’s charged with larceny of over $40,000 in financial aid, and forgery, which together could result in a 25 year jail term.

    In a NY Times fluff piece, people go searching out on the Internet for other people with the same name. I was only able to find 4 people of any prominence on the Internet, but there were 12 on Facebook.

    Asian Alumni Dinner at the alma mater law school Thursday – should be fun.

  • Re-awakening

    I slept most of the day on Sunday, just catching up after two whirlwind days.

    Friday night I was invited back to the 25th anniversary of an Asian fashion/culture show that I ran back in college. There was about 50 alums from ranging from the beginning in the late 80s to today. I actually ended up in a photo that ran with an article in the World Journal. Many things were still the same as they were 15 years ago, but the show has also matured and is so much more professional than we ever could imagine.

    Saturday spent 3 hours with P’s friends from high school at vegetarian Kosher restaurant Buddha Bodai. Dim sum choices very good. Later, was invited to a dinner buffet at Tavern on the Green, and then a birthday party at the Gatehouse.

    Plenty of stuff to do this week…

  • Upgrade

    I’ve been on a bit of a Spring Break hiatus (thanks for SSW for holding down the fort). I’ve upgraded to WordPress version 2.5 on the back end, which is actually quite nice. Will make some changes to the template. In the interim, I’ve been doing the following:

    Seen Rent – the musical (have seen the movie, have the cast album, and played out the song book, but finally got around to seeing it in real life). Its run has been extended to September.

    Was in Washington, D.C. for a couple of days for a conference, coincidentally when the Spitzer story broke.

    Seen Patrick Stuart in BAM’s rendition of Macbeth. Awesome, and has been carried over to Broadway.

    Overdid Brooklyn Restaurant Week, visiting

    • Blue Ribbon Sushi (awesome as usual – sushi/sashimi combo the best value)
    • Queen (excellent Italian)
    • Park Slope Chip Shop (2 for 1 was awesome, cod and chips cooked to perfection)
    • Dhaka Indian on Atlantic Avenue (2 for 1 also a value meal)
    • Taze (great food, but cheaper to order off of the regular menu)
    • Mediterra (had brunch, hard to figure out what was Turkish about the cuisine).

    Hope for an awesome week ahead…

  • Chinese Restaurant Chronicles

    This past weekend, in between interleaving celebrations of P’s sister’s 30th birthday (she had 3 parties), we checked out the wedding banquet hall. We had the three set menus for the banquet to choose from, which turned out to be the ultimate in Chinese “special menus”. We had a hard time figuring out what they said, because they were 1. written in Chinese (one of those times I wished I actually went to Chinese Saturday school), 2. written in Running Script style (which P’s parents had a hard time reading – think super-wild calligraphy), and 3. written in super-flowery language that only Chinese culinary veterans could know (and P’s dad, as an retired Chinese chef, had a hard time explaining some of them).

    After polling our friends, our best resource was my best man’s wife, who is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, and managed to type out everything into Microsoft Word. That was a God-send, as I could then just pump up the fonts and produce a Reader’s Digest large-type version. For kicks I also ran it through Babelfish and Google Translate to get independent rough translations. Some of these translations literally converted the flowery language, resulting in 幸福炒飯 “Two Silvers Fried Rice” (no silver is involved), and the 雙喜伊麵 “North Mushroom Burning of Iraq” (sic) which actually means something like Beijing-style mushroom noodles.

    The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

    At the time we were struggling through these choices, P bought for me Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which is a bittersweet look at the world of Chinese food and its place in Chinese-American identity.

    She covers definitively the sources of fortune cookies (not from China), the soy sauce packet (more often than not has 0% soybeans), chop suey (fresh leftovers – that’s what for dinner!), and the take-out container (something recycled from the turn of the last century). General Tso – the man, the myth, the legend of General Tso’s Chicken fame: Lee goes to his ancestral town to learn the truth.

    She somehow figures out a way to expense both around-the-world trips to find the best Chinese restaurant (perhaps she can hook up with Cheuk Kwan’s Chinese Restaurants series), and a search through the American Midwest to find Powerball lottery winners that used fortune cookies for their numbers. She is able to connect with those who take the idea of takeout and literally run with it, and those that are not as lucky and run into hard times in the middle of Nowhere, U.S.A.

    My biased rule of thumb for determining how thorough a book on Chinese or Chinese American history has been researched is to see whether there is any mention of Hakka Chinese. (I am Hakka, so that is why it draws my attention.) She succeeds in making two mentions, and then has coverage of the Taiping Rebellion, which the aforesaid General Tso brutally put down the Hakka-led revolt. That won’t stop me from ordering his namesake dish, a totally American invention which Lee suggests is the inspiration for the Chicken McNugget.

    The book makes for an engaging evening read, all the more amplified by the author’s effervescent appearance on the Colbert Report, which happened to be playing in my living room at the time. Great books are those that you feel that you are having an involving conversation; this was a great one to have with Lee and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Recommended.