Sunday: saw “X-Files: I Want to Believe.” I thought it was okay. It’s not a great movie, but it’s Mulder and Scully and their non-traditional relationship (not marriage, but still soulmates). I can understand that fans would hate it; I’d admit it’s not a full-price movie (see the matinee and enjoy the rest of your day, or you could wait for the DVD, but really, go ahead, see it). But… it’s Mulder and Scully! As a film, it was probably more like a good X-Files episodes (a stand-alone episode, that is; not like the mythos arc ones). Plus, a one or two recognizable actors and an appearance from an X-Files character. Stay for a glimpse of a little scene after the credits – that was a kindly scene, actually.
Apparently, it’s news that Roger Ebert blogs at the Chicago Sun-Times’ website; but I think it’s more important that he blogs well. At any rate, it’s kind of interesting that newspapers or mainstream media dropping critics who find sanctuary in the Internet (okay, so Ebert’s not necessarily in that category, but I’m still kind of grumpy over how the Daily News doesn’t seem to have critics the way they used to have them).
The NY Times’ Mark “The Minimalist” Bittman on Indian-style rice salad. The accompanying video really enhanced the text – I wasn’t quite sure what to make of “rice salad.” It sounded like simply stuff in rice, which is what us Asian people eat anyway…. But, really, it looked kind of pretty.
Speaking of food, NY Times’ Dining Section has an article by Julia Moskin about the Chinese cuisine of Flushing. I really ought to check that out; I’m so not up on Queens.
Indeed, NYTimes.com has a whole section on Chinese food. Wow.
As a follow up to the past post, where I linked to a BBC article on the Chinese of South Africa, I’ll note that Time.com has a very fascinating article on the situation of the Chinese South Africans, with a reference to the history of Chinese migration toward Africa too: Alex Perry writes,
….a book called Colour, Confusions and Concessions: the History of Chinese in South Africa by Melanie Yap and Daniel Leong Man. It documents how a tiny minority in a land delineated by race have long been abused from all sides. Many arrived in South Africa as virtual slaves, convicts imported as manual laborers by the Dutch and, later, the British. Their second-class status was formalized after World War II as the newly elected National Party government instituted the apartheid system that denied non-whites the right to vote, to work in certain jobs or live where they choose, and imposed countless other restrictions.
In the often bizarre system of weights-and-measures used by the apartheid state to classify people for purposes of separating them, Chinese South Africans were first deemed “Asiatic,” then “Colored,” and finally “the Chinese Group, which shall consist of persons who in fact are, or who, except in the case of persons who in fact are members of a race or class or tribe referred to in paragraph (1), (2), (3), (5) or (6) are generally accepted as members of a race or tribe whose national home is in China.” Thus Population Registration Act of 1950, whose tortured language underlines the difficulties of creating an objective and rational basis for codifying racism. And a Chinese South African called David Song soon made a mockery of it.
In 1962, according to Yap and Man, Song applied successfully to be reclassified as “white” on the grounds that he associated with whites and was “generally accepted” as one. On March 23, 1962, the liberal Rand Daily Mail remarked: “Under the kind of legislation which allows an admitted Chinese, born in Canton, to be declared a White South African, anything can happen.” Apartheid had “no accepted scientific basis,” the paper editorialized, and attempting to “define the indefinable,” inevitably resulted in “humiliating” and “endless” disputes.
This still reminds me of the Chinese-American/APA experience of being neither black nor white; thanks to Google and other website references, I link to Gong Lum v. Rice, a segregation case involving a Chinese-American kid, in 1927.
Speaking of the law, and in honor of the fact that American law graduates took the bar exam this week: apparently, it’s really hard to be a lawyer in Japan; rural Japan has a real shortage of lawyers, but the reality is that the bar passage rate there really sucks and the Asian cultural value of trying to save face means no one wants to go to a lawyer. The linked NY Times article notes:
In Japan, other legal professionals, including notaries and tax accountants, often perform the duties that fall to lawyers in the United States. Still, even including those professions, Japan has only about one-third of the lawyers found in the United States per capita, according to the federation.
Beyond that, half of Japan’s lawyers are concentrated in Tokyo, leaving only one lawyer for every 30,000 Japanese outside the capital, according to the federation.
The Japanese government is trying to increase the number of lawyers as part of broader judicial reforms that have included establishing 74 law schools since 2004. Under the system that will be abolished in 2011, anyone could take the national bar exam, though it was so difficult that the annual pass rate was about 3 percent.
The government predicted that at least 70 percent of law school graduates would pass the new national bar exam, creating 3,000 new lawyers a year by 2010. But with only 40 percent passing last year, and the low rate driving down law school applications, the government is almost certain to miss its goal. [….]
Until now, townspeople would have traveled to see a lawyer in Hakodate only as a last resort. At first, they would have tried to resolve the issue themselves, asked elected officials to mediate or turned to town hall administrators.
“Now that there’s a lawyer nearby, more people may go to see him instead of coming to us for help,” said Yakumo’s mayor, Yoshio Kawashiro, 64.
The mayor thought a law office would be good for Yakumo, but did not hide the fact that he was peeved that the lawyer had yet to come to pay his respects at the town hall. “We learned of his arrival in the newspaper,” he said.
After his last client of the day, Mr. [Katsumune] Hirai, who is usually soft-spoken but switched with apparent effortlessness to a commanding tone with his clients, loosened his tie.
“If the people here start believing that they can get good advice from lawyers, then, in the future, our job will become much easier,” he said finally. “Well, within the realm of possibility, I’ll take it little by little.”
Although I’m a big fan of Dante, I’m still kind of bemused that Florence wants to give the Italian poet a posthumous honor, to make up for having exiled him 700 years ago. On top of that, as the article notes, a descendant of Dante’s basically refused to accept, because he’s pissed that certain members of the legislature still didn’t want to honor Dante because it seemed futile to them. Umm, well, you can’t make everyone happy, I guess. Funny article anyway.
A travel story: Rule 240. I previously read something about this somewhere in MSNBC.com, but it’s quite something, I must say…
I really like the idea of a wind mill farm in NYC.
And, in honor of the weekend, the NY Times’ Weekend in NY by Seth Kugel profiles East River end of Brooklyn.