Category: Brooklyn

Seeing Charlie Rose back on his show has been interesting.  Monday night was a nice return, with Bill Moyers as a sort-of guest host (but more like a co-conversationalist at the Rose table) and Charlie Rose talking about how it was that his heart condition caused some problems while he was in Syria and how his heart surgery in Paris had complications.  But, he seems more vigorous.  Going to miss all those guest hosts, but Charlie’s looking well.

With the US Open (Golf) going on, there’s been profiles on the latest doings of Tiger Woods.  Coinciding with Father’s Day and the recent passing of his father, Tiger’s dad is something to talk about.  But I also thought this article on Tiger’s mom, who instills his Asian-ness, so to speak, very interesting.
And speaking of Father’s Day, I thought this Best Dads on TV was a good one.  I liked the analysis on Keith Mars of “Veronica Mars” – protective detective dad dealing with detective daughter.  And, Jack Bristow of “Alias”:

But one of the things the show always had going for it was the spectacular Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), who always seemed destined to give his life for his daughter Sydney in one way or another — and who eventually did. Jack made a few mistakes along the way in trying to watch over Sydney without smothering her, but he backed her up in traditional and nontraditional senses. Besides, what’s better than being able to say your dad is a spy?

Captain Stubing of “Love Boat” is an interesting choice; Cliff Huxtable of “Cosby” show – well, kind of predictable.  Martin Crane of “Frasier” – well, he deserves an award for putting up with Frasier and Niles’ shenanigans (particularly the Frasier episodes where I think Frasier forgot that years at Cheers and the torturous marriage with Lilith was supposed to have mellowed him out, which would have made him a far more easier son for Martin; but Frasier kept getting back to that snobby irritant side of himself).

An interesting article in the New York Magazine profiling NY Times puzzle editor Will Shortz – covering what the new documentary about him and the crossword puzzle apparently doesn’t cover: Shortz is a crossword man, but his Sudoku books are making him rich.  Quite a thought.

The comic strips “Judge Parker” has got a new artist, since the previous one retired.  The lines are a bit more modern and crisp and the characters looks more animated, whereas before, they seemed like really, really stiff versions of Roy Lichtenstein comic style artwork.   Randy Parker, the judge’s son and probably a witless junior lawyer, lost his CIA love interest and his ex-fiancee since both dumped him (although, really, he dumped his ex-fiancee already, but she made him feel worst by reaming him for moving on really fast, when he wasn’t even going into a real relationship with the CIA girl).  But, the current storyline can get total focus now that Randy’s love life (or current lack thereof) is resolved: Sam Driver, Esq., and his wife Abby finds out that their adopted daughter Sophie has outsourced her homework to a kid in India, by paying him and e-mailing him the research assignments.  She (who’s either a middle school kid or a high school lower classman) gives Indian kid an open invitation to visit the US and her home in particular.  Indian kid does visit.  Oops.  Abby at least finds Indian kid charming.  But, it gets worse: Sophie told Indian kid that she’s in college.  Sam and Abby are taken aback.  Sophie’s really in trouble.   Using the Internet for the wrong reasons plus outsourcing in one comic strip?  Crazy!  (but, oddly, far more believable than Randy’s idiotic love problems).

Did anybody realize that amoxicillin smells like durian? If you ever have the experience, check it out.

I was OK by Saturday, in time for my dim sum club meeting. One of our number is moving to Taipei, so we had a sendoff for him. Afterwards, we went to a deck party in Long Island City.

Sunday, we saw X-Men 3. Wasn’t bad. If you haven’t watched it, make sure you stay to the end of the credits.

Afterwards, we had lunch at a Grecian festival nearby. We entered the raffle for the crystal bowl filled with Greek cookies, and we actually won!

P’s friends wanted to go to Joya, so we had another snack there, and crashed at home. Back to work again tomorrow….

Saw “Cars” Sunday. Excellent movie – damn, Pixar’s amazing. The “cinematography” of Route 66 was stunning – it looked like the real thing. The cars were cute. Actor Owen Wilson as “Lightening McQueen” – funny and angsty and cute. Kind of like all the various characters Wilson has played. And, Bonnie Hunt – aww, her Sally the Porsche was a burnt-out attorney from Los Angeles and turned into a solo practitioner/motel operator in Radiator Springs, the town dying because of the interstate highway. And, Paul Newman as Doc Hudson, the mysterious old car/town doctor/town judge – cool, man. You wouldn’t know it was Paul Newman but for those blue eyes… 😉 Highly recommended movie, no matter how old you are!

An article on the Williamsburg Building.

Beautiful sunshine on Sunday.  I was at Grand Army Plaza, to see if the Brooklyn Public Library Central Library was open. Nope. In lieu of Sunday hours, they’ve increased weekday evening hours. I still would have liked Sunday hours.

And, an article on the traffic circle of Grand Army Plaza, a literal pedestrian death trap, if you asked me.  We can all wish, as the article acknowledged, that they’d improve it.  Some day.

I don’t have cable, and so I haven’t seen the trendy tv show “Entourage,” wherein tv viewers follow the adventures of a rising Hollywood hunk and his (what else?) entourage of old neighborhood pals/wannabe stars and his agent. The (apparently insane) agent is played by the talented Jeremy Piven, who’s being profiled in all the magazines these days. He’s in Time, Entertainment Weekly, and so on. He has this energy, charisma, and charm. I particularly got a kick out of this Associated Press interview, wherein Piven makes a reference to one of his old tv shows:

Q: Are you interested in writing or directing?

Piven: I’d love being part of the process more. I came into this late in the game, into “Entourage.” The last time I did TV I was a producer of my own show called “Cupid” on ABC. We shot for a season and it was just an amazing learning experience. Then I had to shift into another mode, which is just an actor for hire. I really want to contribute, so I try to pitch things whenever I can. All you can do is throw things out into the universe and hope that maybe, in the spirit of collaboration, they will at least be received in a good way.

Ohmigod. “Cupid” got a reference! It was an ABC cancelled show, only one season, where Piven played a man who claims to be Cupid and sets up these couples, but driving his cynical therapist (played by Paula Marshall) nuts because she distrusts his methods. Sort of a romantic version of X-Files, with Piven playing the Mulder Believer and Marshall the Scully Scientist. The chemistry between Marshall and Piven was cute, and Piven was amazing, playing quite a character (Cupid was nuts – people mistook him for the musician Dave Matthews – and this was when Piven really did resemble Dave Matthews; and maybe – just maybe – he really was Cupid!). I was so mad at ABC for cancelling it (this was back in the struggling for ratings days of ABC). In fact, I wrote ABC a letter. They sent me a post card saying “thanks” and that was it. So, it’s nice to see Piven’s tv career is going well (I believe his movie career was fine; never hurts to be a solid character actor). I just wish it wasn’t on cable…

Ok, anyway, so in the wonderful world of comics, “Doonesbury” did a little dig at the whole MIT-hacking the poll that has Alex Doonesbury’s storyline apparently resolving to send her to MIT this fall.  It’s not clear that Alex is all that happy that she’ll be going, but Trudeau gets to poke fun at MIT for hacking his on-line poll.

Classic Peanuts is running the storyline of how Charlie Brown got his sister, Sally the past two weeks.  Saturday’s edition has Snoopy dealing with a bird who has Woodstock’s attitude.  Woodstock’s precursor form?

In “Blondie,” one wonders if Dagwood will really pursue his dream to have his own sandwich shop, as the comic strip has him seriously considering it.  Kind of weird to imagine Dagwood not being kicked around anymore by Boss Dithers.  But, wouldn’t Dagwood be competing with  Blondie’s catering company?  Hmm.  Maybe he and Blondie should join forces in their own food company.  At least Dagwood would be out of the whole corporate cog stuff.

I’ve got the rest of the week off, but not for the reason I wanted. I was working graduation on Tuesday, and there were a gazillion kids there, and apparently I picked up an eye infection from that. The next day my left eye was killing me. My doctor told me that it was infectious, and that I had to stay home for the next two days. So now I’m pumped up with amoxicillin horse pills and eye drops. At least I’ll be able to catch up on jet lag sleep and when my eyesight gets better, work on my travel report conclusion.

So, Harvard Law is thinking of changing – just a bit – its pedagogical reliance on the Socratic method for a more problem-solving method? Hmm.

May/June reading: Shakespeare’ Julius Caesar. Very interesting read, since it’s been years since I last read it (way back in 9th grade English). With adult eyes and increased knowledge on both Shakespeare and Roman history, I came to really appreciate what was going on in the play:

– Brutus thinks he’s the hero, but he really isn’t, because he really believes his fight for the Ideal Roman Republic will succeed – and maybe that makes him naive.

– Who really is the Hero: Brutus and his conspirators (and while we know Brutus’ agenda, what exactly were the others getting, besides expressing their personal dislike of Caesar?) vs. the no less ambitious and probably less-democratically inclined Mark Antony and Octavius (soon to be Augustus) Caesar? History and Shakespeare notes that Antony and Octavius win (well, actually, just Octavius, since Antony didn’t win either), but we are meant to still feel bad for Brutus, I think.
– And fate (or Fate) really will do a number on you.

– And, boy, is that Mark Antony a sly politician. No wonder he’d lose, because he’s no smarter than Brutus. Octavius’ one weakness was his youth, but he’d overcome that, as History illustrates.
– Women really don’t come out looking so good in Julius Caesar: neither Caesar nor Brutus listened to or confided in their wives.
(Disclosure: I spent a semester studying Roman history in college; yep, that’s what being a history major at a major liberal arts school does to you – and, mind you, I chose to take that class and it proved quite interesting – those Romans were certainly something).

Monday night: NYC’s local WB channel broadcasted the series finale of “Everwood,” which I taped and will watch later, to at least bear witness to the end of a perfectly good WB show before the local WB becomes the local CW. Why CW chose to renew “Seventh Heaven” over “Everwood,” I can’t begin to fathom. No, actually, I can: “Seventh Heaven” is a long-running 10-year old show that has the pretense of Good Christian and Family Values (never minding the fact that Rev. Camden’s denomination was never clear beyond that the Camdens were some kind of Protestants, since they were pretty obviously not Catholic).

On the other hand, “Everwood” was a show that got pretty visceral over such realities as: life sometimes really, really suck; death really, really sucks; there are times when you hate your parents or your kids or both, and vice versa; love can drive you really, really crazy; and it’s hard to make the life and career balance; and when you’re talented, what do you do with that talent? Plus, “Everwood” had a diverse (well, sort of) world view: you got your Jews and your Christians; an older interracial married couple (who the writers broke up with the passing of Irv, leaving poor Edna a widow again); the married middle aged couple who dealt with the wife’s cancer bout (Dr. and Mrs. Abbott’s travails were very nicely portrayed); Ephram Brown’s travails of love, life and getting over having left NYC for Colorado due to his dad’s good/sometimes selfish intentions; etc.

Maybe CW was too afraid to keep such a show on. Who knows? Everwood, CO, will be missed.

Meanwhile, CW’s keeping UPN’s sitcoms of “Everyone Hates Chris” and “Girlfriends.” For one perspective, I’ll highlight that Slate has an interesting article analyzing the show “Girlfriends.” I sometimes watch the reruns (or at least I did when our local UPN aired them; now that they lost the UPN name and rights, they don’t air them anymore), and I find the sitcom funny. I can see how it transcends and confronts issues of race and class, and it’s a nicely done ensemble, but more importantly – well, it’s just funny. (Kelsey Grammar’s a producer, so he, being the ex-Frasier, ought to know what he’s doing). Plus, it’s funny watch the two attorneys: William, who so loves being an attorney at Big Firm, and Joan (played by Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of Diana Ross; well, during the course of the series, Joan leaves Big Firm, since she realizes that she hated being a lawyer – oh, well, nothing new there in the world of law practice and for lots of attorneys).

I was behind on my Time magazine reading, so I mention these here now:

Dragon Boat Racing is apparently turning into quite a business opportunity.

And, Time reports that yogurt may turn into the next best thing since pizza and coffee in the wonderful world of food business. Huh?

Sigh. I wish I had another weekend already. In fact, a three-day one would be nice…

Just got back in – we’re 2 hours early. The flight was relatively bumpy, and the food, while still better than any other airline, wasn’t quite as good. A really bizarre HK movie, McDull, the Alumni
was on, which seemed to be something like a Cantonese version of Monty Python. Ultraviolet and Pink Panther were really bad. The Discovery channel was the best overall.

As a rule, I bump into at least one person that I know on just about every trip. I didn’t know it was going to be P from the bar association, and that he was going to sit across the aisle from me on the plane back with his girlfriend.

Recovery, and some thoughts later today.

I must say, FC and YC have done some great travel blogging!

Ah, a NY Times Op-ed that seems rather dear to me, at least in reminding me of my poor student days, when I figured that unpaid internships were rather… exploitative and not very enlightening because, well, they’re unpaid: “Take This Internship and Shove It.” Anya Kamenetz writes:

[….] I was an unpaid intern at a newspaper from March 2002, my senior year, until a few months after graduation. I took it for granted, as most students do, that working without pay was the best possible preparation for success; parents usually agree to subsidize their offspring’s internships on this basis. But what if we’re wrong?What if the growth of unpaid internships is bad for the labor market and for individual careers?

Let’s look at the risks to the lowly intern. First there are opportunity costs. Lost wages and living expenses are significant considerations for the two-thirds of students who need loans to get through college. Since many internships are done for credit and some even cost money for the privilege of placement overseas or on Capitol Hill, those students who must borrow to pay tuition are going further into debt for internships.

Second, though their duties range from the menial to quasi-professional, unpaid internships are not jobs, only simulations. And fake jobs are not the best preparation for real jobs.

Long hours on your feet waiting tables may not be particularly edifying, but they teach you that work is a routine of obligation, relieved by external reward, where you contribute value to a larger enterprise. Newspapers and business magazines are full of articles expressing exasperation about how the Millennial-generation employee supposedly expects work to be exciting immediately, wears flip-flops to the office and has no taste for dues-paying. However true this stereotype may be, the spread of the artificially fun internship might very well be adding fuel to it.

By the same token, internships promote overidentification with employers: I make sacrifices to work free, therefore I must love my work. A sociologist at the University of Washington, Gina Neff, who has studied the coping strategies of interns in communications industries, calls the phenomenon “performative passion.” Perhaps this emotion helps explain why educated workers in this country are less and less likely to organize, even as full-time jobs with benefits go the way of the Pinto. [….]

So an internship doesn’t teach you everything you need to know about coping in today’s working world. What effect does it have on the economy as a whole?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not identify interns or track the economic impact of unpaid internships. But we can do a quick-and-dirty calculation: according to Princeton Review’s “Internship Bible,” there were 100,000 internship positions in 2005. Let’s assume that out of those, 50,000 unpaid interns are employed full time for 12 weeks each summer at an average minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. That’s a nearly $124 million yearly contribution to the welfare of corporate America.

In this way, unpaid interns are like illegal immigrants. They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or in the case of interns, literally nothing. Moreover, a recent survey by Britain’s National Union of Journalists found that an influx of unpaid graduates kept wages down and patched up the gaps left by job cuts.

There may be more subtle effects as well. In an information economy, productivity is based on the best people finding the jobs best suited for their talents, and interns interfere with this cultural capitalism. They fly in the face of meritocracy — you must be rich enough to work without pay to get your foot in the door. And they enhance the power of social connections over ability to match people with desirable careers. A 2004 study of business graduates at a large mid-Atlantic university found that the completion of an internship helped people find jobs faster but didn’t increase their confidence that those jobs were a good fit.

With all this said, the intern track is not coming to an end any time soon. More and more colleges are requiring some form of internship for graduation. Still, if you must do an internship, research shows you will get more out of it if you find a paid one.

A 1998 survey of nearly 700 employers by the Institute on Education and the Economy at Columbia University’s Teachers College found: “Compared to unpaid internships, paid placements are strongest on all measures of internship quality. The quality measures are also higher for those firms who intend to hire their interns.” This shouldn’t be too surprising — getting hired and getting paid are what work, in the real world, is all about.

That’s right, Lowly Unpaid Intern. You’re no better off than an illegal immigrant. In fact, you’re either over-educated or under-educated and still not getting anything out of it. Or, in my case, my one-time unpaid internship convinced me to never do another unpaid internship again because I like seeing real money in my real account.

I managed to catch a little bit of the Today show farewell to Katie Couric. Got a bit too sappy if you asked me, seeing the old clips and feeling a bit sorry for Couric, so I turned the tv off and turned my 1010 WINS News radio back on. I prefer radio to go with my breakfast. That’s just me. Enjoy your vacation, Katie Couric, and let’s see how you do on CBS on your premiere date.

The ABC commercials promoting Charlie (sorry, Charles) Gibson as the Trusted Anchor is a bit irritating. Just a bit. No offense to Gibson, but considering the unfortunate injury of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas’ impending maternity leave, ABC’s ultimate choosing of Gibson (when he might have had this position all to himself all along) – well, it still leaves me with a weird feeling …

On Monday, Memorial Day, I watched “X-Men III: The Last Stand.”  I mostly heard that it was good, “but…” and then there was that Slate review that puzzled me.   But, watching it and making my own opinion — well, it was a good movie.  More or less.  I mean, Wolverine and Storm got lots to do this time, and I liked Kelsey Grammar as Beast (fits very well with the Beast characterization of the X-Men cartoon on FOX in the 1990’s).  And, oh yeah, the appearance of Dark Phoenix.  But without the hokey alien storyline that the comics and the 1990’s cartoon had on the Dark Phoenix.  But a convincing version, covered by Professor Xavier’s psychobabble explanation of Phoenix.  But, the whole Jean Grey-Cyclops storyline…  Umm, well…  I won’t say more, lest I’ll spoil it.  But, after all the series and season finales on tv and after watching Mission Impossible III, I’m pretty much tapped so far as watching characters die.  Getting really tiresome.

At the least, Ian McKellan is a whole lot of fun.

Bad cold. Coughing and nose blowing, and blech.

The passing of Lloyd Bentsen. The most memorable line was Bentsen’s VP debate with Quayle in 1988: “Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy, and you’re no Jack Kennedy.” This Sunday’s Meet The Press showed a clip of Bentsen’s “showdown” with the NRA, where he was brandishing a (undoubtedly unloaded) machine gun and he’s noting that he knows weapons having served in World War II, but he was obviously not with the NRA because, well, such weapons kill… There’s likely not going to be another Lloyd Bentsen again.

A NY 1 story on a fortune cookie factory in Brooklyn.

NY 1 also covered various stuff on APA Heritage Month.

Saw “Mission Impossible III” on Sunday, despite the sniffles and the coughs. The sound system was loud enough to pretty much made it so that no one heard my coughs (and I barely heard others’ coughs or whatnot).

The blow-’em-ups were good enough. I don’t care for Tom Cruise, but I had to see it because it’s a J.J. (“I made ‘Felicity’/’Alias’/’Lost’”) Abrams movie. It had the hallmark Alias moves: the plot that makes no sense, but the wild ride of a journey; the tension of duty versus love; and the impossible is possible. And, of course, that trademark Mission Impossible gag, from the tv series: Your mission should you choose to accept it (as if Jim Phelps wouldn’t)… this message will self-destruct in five seconds…
Cruise was Cruise. Okay. Not so bad. His character Ethan Hunt has his witty moments. Billy Crudup – ooh: “Priceless” man of the Master Card ad pitch. Philip Seymour Hoffman – come on, it’s Philip Seymour Hoffman. Quite the villain. Laurence Fishburne. Is The Man. (of course. And, at least, none of that Matrix stuff). And Ving Rhames, Jonathan Rhys Myers, and Maggie Q picking up the rear, with Michelle Monaghan as Cruise’s love interest.

Maggie Q threw in Cantonese (yeah! J.J. Abrams has this thing about China/Chinese dialects, at least he certainly did in Alias). Jonathan Rhys Myers was either playing an Irish-American or an Irish guy working with the Impossible Mission Force – his accent wasn’t making sense (well, he is Irish in real life; personally, it was nice to see him play a good guy after the – umm – scariness of his role in “Match Point.”). And, Keri Russell – she was cool. It would’ve been nice to have seen more of her.

It was a good movie. A solid B. Could’ve been a B-plus, if I didn’t feel that it was an obvious play on Alias (article on Slate) – I mean, really, the IMF team’s home base tech guy was a play on Alias’ own Marshall (but Benjy’s a Brit/naturalized American, so it’s funnier). I don’t feel that J.J. Abrams has a negative bias about China (as the article I linked above wonders), but he’s certainly has an interest, and he does the tricks of the trade very well (for a more positive look, here’s a Slate review on the movie.). Ethan Hunt’s no Sydney Bristow either.

Mind you, I didn’t like the first Mission Impossible movie (what they did to Jim Phelps was sacrilege) and skipped the 2nd movie. But, I liked the third movie. Good matinee movie.