Author: F C

Weekend eating:
Friday at Becco: grilled veggie antipasti very nice. Three-way all-you-can-eat pasta hit-or-miss: taglitale with fresh tomato sauce not bad, linguine with white clam sauce – pasta on the very al dente side, pumpkin ravioli was the best.

Saturday: grazing through Chinatown: the unnamed dumpling place on Mosco Street around the corner from Transfiguration Church, random stuff from the Thai grocery on Mosco, Tasty Dumpling, 54 Mulberry Pl. Veggie shopping. A bakery that I forgot what it was called that had tasty but fugly dan tat.

Sunday: dim sum at Grand Harmony: above average – just staples ha gow and su mai were both a-wol. Then a side trip to Kings Plaza, where P wanted to try out the crepe place that I talked about last year, which turned out to have closed and been replaced with a Jackson Hewitt tax place. A number of other major stores were also decimated by this past Christmas season, including my childhood Waldenbooks (sigh), Banana Republic, and American Greetings, which has a 90% off sale until they close this week.

P- insisted that I blog about this one: we were in Macy’s and she was looking at watches. She pointed out one, saying “This is the travel watch, so you can see with time it is in different worlds“. I had to be a wise guy, and say “Oh, so you can tell the time in World of Warcraft, or find out when it is in Second Life”.

Reality show of the week: “Grease – the One that I Want” is a much nicer version of American Idol. All of the contestants have real talent – they get to sing non-60’s songs to show off their talents. I joined the stage crew when my high school did Grease, and boy I remember the songs and the fun times.

Parareality show of the week: Medium had a rocking episode Wednesday with “Better Off Dead”. It’s amazing how they manage to come up with new twists that keep this series fresh. I’m really looking forward to next week’s episode, where they turn everyone into dolls in a dollhouse.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately. ChinesePod’s Saturday Show had a segment about the use of the word “Oriental” vs “Asian“, the former acceptable in the UK, while rarely acceptable in the US, while the latter is preferred in the US, and in the UK only refers to South Asian Indians.

On the Daily Breakfast, Fr. Roderick describes his childhood taunting from other Dutch schoolchildren because his grandmother was Shanghainese, and his hair is black, not blonde. Now he wants to learn Chinese – possibly through Michigan State University’s Zon – think Berlitz meets Second Life, except in this massively multiuser game, you have to talk to everyone in Chinese just to get out of the virtual Beijing airport. My father has relatives in Suriname, which used to be called Dutch Guyana, and I think I have some distant cousins in the Netherlands (you need a scorecard to keep track of the extended relatives).