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Slate.com’s latest television commentary regarding FOX’s “Arrested Development” more or less captures what I’ve liked about the series so far.

Slate.com also has the latest Bushism: this week, George W. Bush said, “So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well.” A good Bushism is one where the president makes a good point, but still leaves you wondering, “What?”

WB had a preview of next week’s “Angel” – yea for new episodes! Angel and Spike will vie to see who is the vampire with a soul with a destiny. And, maybe, is it the return of the missing Cordelia?

Last night’s “The Guardian” on CBS was an example of “when a (morally) bad lawyer continues his path of insanity…,” wherein Nick, played by the ever handsome Aussie Simon Baker, is confronted/and confessed about his recent infidelity and return to drinking. Are we supposed to think that this time, he seems to take responsibility for his actions? (While he claims he could not explain his bad conduct, we know why he’s fallen off track – he’s devastated about his wedding proposal being rejected but won’t admit to feeling hurt except through drinking and carousing. He’s admitted this angst to his girlfriend, but was she listening? Hmm.) Dabney Coleman as Burt, Nick’s senior partner dad, finally yells at Nick for his idiocy (glad someone did). Next week will be interesting – will Nick finally take his path of redemption seriously? (likely not; the writers of this series keeps knocking him down again and again; at least he keeps trying). As a lawyer, he still finds ways that makes a disciplinary committee want to shake him (his bribing a guy to be a foster parent to an orphaned child, while something with good intentions, can’t be that great an idea).

Anderson Cooper’s end-of-the-news commentary (if linking, just scroll all the way down) – very humorous. Apparently, some guy in Wisconsin is planning to sue his cable company for making him and his family addicted to tv (cable tv in particular). Cooper says:

“That’s right. Hooked on the box. Wired on tube. Hopped up on sweet lady tea.

“How can this happen, you ask? It’s simple. He says he tried to kick the habit but his supplier kept it coming for free. That’s how it works. First it’s free. Before you know it you’re popping NBCs and ABCs until you pass out… in a pile of Cheetos crumbs.

“I know. Believe me, I’ve been there. After a while, broadcast channels, they just don’t cut it. Now you need the hard stuff. You start paying for it. Through the nose. You want that spike, your daily FX, E, TNT, whatever you want to call it. Soon, you’d sell your own mama, your whole Nielsen family just for a single hit of pay-per-view. Then you crash. If you’re lucky, it kills you outright. You got to go cold turkey. And I don’t mean the Food Channel, baby.

“Sure, you’ll get the DTVs. You’ll get them bad. Feels like bugs all over you. And even when you’re clean, still be a junkie for the rest of your life. How do I know? I’m Anderson Cooper. And I’m not just a cable new pusher, I’m also a TVaholic. That wraps up our program tonight….”

Hilarious. This almost makes me want to get cable just to watch Cooper. Almost. “The Mole” isn’t any fun without him, but he must be glad to have left that show a long time ago.

That’s it for now.

NY Mets star, Tug McGraw, passed away; his “You Gotta Believe” lives on.

Congratulations to Dennis Eckersley and Paul Molitor for entering the Baseball Hall of Fame. Of course, what this really means is that one is getting old(er) when the baseball players one saw as a kid are now in the Hall of Fame. At least, that was how I felt when Gary Carter got admitted in the Hall of Fame last year.

What is Pete Rose doing by confessing? Is it sincere? Is it enough? Is it a way to get back in baseball, shamelessly? Or is there more to it to be redeemed? Hmm.

NASA’s Mars venture is exciting stuff; funny how the pictures of Mars so far makes it look a lot like… Earth?

I was actually watching a little bit of “Seventh Heaven” on WB (Channel 11) – the show with the parents with seven plus kids. Don’t know why I was watching – the show has its moments, I guess; I’ve followed the plotlines via the commercials over the years. For some reason, I was channel changing and lacked energy to channel-change some more and at least followed the interesting storyline concerning the eldest child, medical student son Matt Camden (played by Barry Watson). Matt’s really stressed out, ready to drop out of medical school and petrified of losing his young bride, a fellow medical student. Instead of turning to his parents for help, he confides in his father-in-law, the Rabbi played by Richard Lewis, who eventually persuades him to (what else?) talk to his parents. Gotta give these two actors credit – they’re very convincing in their respective roles.

Minor tv trivia: The patriarch of the Camdens, Rev. Camden, is played by Stephen Collins, who played Capt. Will Decker in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”; Mrs. Camden is played by Catherine Hicks, who played Dr. Gillian Taylor (aka Capt. Kirk’s 20th Century love interest) in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” It’s a much too… odd a piece of trivia to know, and it may very well explain why I can’t never really get myself to watch “Seventh Heaven” even for guilty pleasure viewing. I would keep expecting Kirk to overshadow Decker and, of course, Kirk would steal the girl… oh, wait, sorry, wrong series.

Totally off-topic links to refer: consider Slate.com’s fascinating take on Mrs. Bush’s sort odd “perspective” on her husband’s “poetry”… And, then there are the Slate.com articles on “World Idol” – (I still can’t believe I actually watched both Parts 1 and 2 on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day (with the results of the votes on all these different idols)). I think there is a consensus that Kurt, the Norwegian Idol, does have a nice voice. He sang “Beautiful Day” almost better than Bono of U2. He had good enthusiasm.

Watch out for the stars in space or the spaced-out stars.

Kosheen, “Hungry” (Windows Media)

The Food Network has been using a catchy dance number for their promo music. A memorable montage includes the flashing of dim sum on the screen, and then an Asian (Chinese?) mother and daughter looking down Victoria Peak to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. I thought it was something that they came up with themselves, but I saw a public television promo for I think some sort of report of starvation in Africa which used the same music. Curious, I hunted down who it was: a UK dance group called Kosheen. The rest of their album, Resist (which you can preview on their website) is really good. The lead singer, Sian Evans, has been compared to Annie Lennox. I want to get a copy.

There are many other instances of sound recycling. The theme music for Iron Chef, for example, originally came from the “Backdraft” movie soundtrack. The most egregious case of sound abuse is the “Wilhelm Scream” which was mentioned recently on Slashdot. The unmistakable “scream and fall off a cliff” sound has been in continual use since 1951 in many major motion pictures, including the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings series. If you look at the bottom of this Star Wars fan’s page, you can download the Wilhelm’s video portfolio to prove it is the same sound.

I went museum-hopping today, even though I should have stayed home and properly recovered from New Year’s (especially in light of my minor complaining of having worked on the day after New Year’s – especially when it was a Friday). Nonetheless, consider the following:

American Museum of Natural History has a fascinating exhibit on “Petra: Lost City of Stone”. Petra is most recognizable as the weird city in the stone that Indiana Jones and his dad went to get the Holy Grail in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” Petra is real, not a George Lucas-made-up-facade, having once been a trade center in ancient Jordan. It was such a trade center of far reaches that even literature of China during the BCE era may have referred to Petra. It’s still open until July.

Meanwhile, my siblings and I managed to catch the El Greco exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before it closes on Jan. 11, 2004. Incredible stuff – El Greco is the 16th-century painter named Domenikos Theotokopoulos – but will forever be “El Greco” because he was the Greek painter in the royal courts of Spain. His exaggerated, intensely psychological style made him seem ahead of his times, and inspired Picasso and others. I admired El Greco’s colors; the intense colors are not exactly traditionally synonymous with “Renaissance” – which made the art work even more remarkable.

The crowds were heavy – probably the one complaint I had about museum-hopping. NYC tourism is evidentally back in business, at least with popular exhibits. Popular exhibits open for a limited time are always sure to get crowds, but meanwhile, the permanent exhibits don’t attract the same numbers at all, considering how the Asian art galleries of the Met were otherwise empty. I had chills walking through the Central Asian stuff – Buddhist statues from Afghanistan were haunting reminders of the Buddha statues that the Taliban destroyed a few years ago.

NFL playoffs – stuff to make my other brother stay home and watch tv. Otherwise, bring on the new stuff on tv; I can’t take that much longer with the reruns.

A couple of random stuff that I found to be fun news:

Police-Seized Loot Is Online, and Yes, It’s a Steal

And the latest politics and gender converging from Slate:

Off Limits

Basically, I think the message should be that if the woman doesn’t initiate, then you better just zip it up and stay away. Make a move and a woman can have you shirt and pants if she so chooses.

=YC

Always count on F C to come through! I did a quickie search of my past as a poster king on USENET. I love some of these quips from an angry, egotistical, smartie-pants.

Background Note: We had a lot of threads devoted to identity and terminology. As you can imagine, the two are intertwined, can’t talk about identity without talking about terminology/names. Talked about “oriental” vs “asian american” vs “american” vs “ american”…

Some gems of mine from a 27 post thread:

“Finally, not to start another flame war on terminology but I appear to
be the only one who finds something irksome with the term Asian
American.” (March 12, 1991) Prior to this there were some posts about “Asian American” and I stated I found it to be insulting to me to be labeled such. I argued that I was an American, without the descriptive qualifier “Asian”.

From the same post:

“….what does an Asian American have to do with Western culture given
the person’s roots are Eastern? An interesting corollary question would
be: what is the heritage of an Asian American?”

In the same thread, responding to A. H from Stanford, I again railed against the term “Asian American”!

>[A.H]
> All the more reason to have Asian-American studies.
> At least then there would be *some* information opposed
> to the traditional stereotypes.

Yes, that’s the argument. A counter argument is that the effectiveness
of “studies” can not and do not overide the stereotypes and incorrect
perceptions that people who have not been in contact with different
ethnic groups. Books that seek to “bring” reality to ignorant people
are not real so therefore the effect is diminished. I also would argue
that the effect of media (ie. television and pictures) are more powerful
that than words in shaping the ideas of people.

> >[YC wrote:]
> >Finally, not to start another flame war on terminology but I appear to
> >be the only one who finds something irksome with the term Asian
> >American…
>[A.H wrote:]
> I’m not that fond of it either. How ’bout “Yellows”? 🙂

Heh heh. The term Asian American fails the “diversity” test if you
will. Those PC people who trumpet the ideal of “diversity” and use the
term Asian American fail to recognize that diversity can not exist when
you try to cram so many different ethnic Asian groups under “Asian
American”. Not only are the experiences between Korean Americans,
Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Indian Americans, Philipino
Americans, Vietnamese Americans etc as a whole but the individual
experience within each group is different depending on generation and
geographical location (ie. West vs. East and MidWest or North vs. South).

It does an injustice to these individual differences (aka diversity) by
lumping everything together into some term that hardly describes what
exactly it is to be an “Asian American”. The term implies a paradigm
that everyone exists under and follows but that is hardly true. And
it’s quite ironic.

Here’s another one, rather prescient hmmm:

>[Yale Poster]
> Now here’s a question for all you out there in net-land: what should
> replace “minority” in the language? I’m not too crazy about “person
> of color” either, since a) white is a color too, and b) it’s really close
> to “colored person,” which carries extremely negative connotations.

Why should there be a change? Are we going to create yet another
arbitrary “politically incorrect” term? You confuse the way “minority”
is used *in context* to describe American society, not the world.

Asians in this country are indeed minorities for they make up a small
percentage of the total population. However, using the word “minority”
has had an implicit comparison to the “majority” group (white in this
case) but with the continuing influx of ethnic groups, there may be a
time where “minority” and “majority” will become meaningless.

here’s another gem where I rant against the enforced separation of Asian Americans:

Some kind poster asks SCAA group what they thought of Asian greek organizations. I flamed back:
“I understand the need for such ethnic organizations. However, it merely
enforces a premeditated separation which defeats the very purpose that
these organizations were created in the first place.”

What I really meant was that creating these types of organizations, and not just fraternities/sororities but Asian whatever group doesn’t help bring integration and color-blind society. Back then I was a vocal and ardent supporter and speaker for the color-blind society in America and this put me in somewhat of a “minority” among my Asian American “activist” types. Often was labeled, banana, twinkie, sell-out, self-hater, conservative blah blah blah. I constantly railed against “ethnic” identifiers. The only one that I would accept as it defined me was “Chinese American”, not “Asian American”. I often used the liberal “diversity” petard against the misguided liberals championing “Asian American” terminology by saying that “Asian American” is actually limiting diversity by grouping possibly (dis-) similar ethnic groups under a single umbrella. In a true diversity environment, we ought to celebrate and acknowledge all our different ethnic backgrounds hence, “Chinese American” “Korean American” etc was much more in the spirit of diversity than “Asian American”. They didn’t like my argument :-). They didn’t like it because they knew I was right hehehe!

Anyways, I’m all pooped from reminiscing about my hot-headed past. So flame away :-)!

=YC

[Many of you will have come to this message from my Plaxo email — welcome! I invite you to read what the other Triscribe writers have written on the front page. If you would like to write for Triscribe, please read About Triscribe in the upper right column. The Triscribe web site rules prohibit the naming of anyone that isn’t in the public view, so you won’t see a whole lot of names used, but if you read the descriptions, you should know exactly who you are.]

I’m already late in this, my traditional new year’s message. Every year for the last 10 years or so I get on my soapbox and rant about a few things and make resolutions for the upcoming year. My delay in writing this was because I threw out my back getting some FreshDirect boxes (recommended if they deliver to your area and you actually buy $40-$50 of groceries) down the stairs. Part of this was just reviewing my photos and emails in such an incredible year in terms of experiences.

There is something essentially wrong with the way email is being used nowadays. This is the part of the message where I mention how much email I received last year. My collection of email for 2003 is 1.19 gigabytes, and that is with weeding out a lot of spam and bounced messages (real and bogus bounced messages added up to 286 megabytes, which are not counted in that total). That is two orders of magnitude over this time five years ago. On a weekly basis, I can say that no more than one-third of the emails that I receive are emails from people that I know or do business. I don’t believe the solution has anything to do with charging people postage to send emails, or slowing down email, or placing limits on the email received. Baysian filtering has been 95+% effective, but that 5% is still rather annoying. Two ideas have the most merit in my opinion: verifying the identity of the sender, or verifying the identity of the sender’s server (the SMTP server, for those techies out there). Yahoo’s proposal to use public key encryption and the draft Authenticated SMTP standard are the ones that are most likely to work.

I want to remember Usenet, which was the original Internet community bulletin board system. These days, I only refer to the newsgroups via Google, as the actual Usenet is routinely overwhelmed with spam and people nowadays don’t know how to stay on topic without “flaming” (insulting) each other. However, some of my longest-time friends are from the “Joy-Luck Club” of the New York branch of the soc.culture.hongkong newsgroup, whom we have shared dim sum or another meal together on a regular basis for the last ten years. (One of the first events was a viewing of The Joy Luck Club when it came out). Back then, it was dueling among which of the four “Sky Kings” or “Sky Queens” of Hong Kong entertainment would reign supreme this week, and when our next chance to go to Hong Kong would be. Nowadays, it costs about 50% of what it did in 1991 dollars to go to Hong Kong (1991 was my first trip to Hong Kong) and we have real jobs with real vacation time, but we are terrorized by SARS and are mourning the loss of a quarter of that HK entertainment royal family. Life goes on, but I am thankful for the schk Gang of Four that still keeps together.

While I didn’t do quite as much flying as I did in 2002, I did travel over 18,000 miles mostly for work: visiting my cousin in Kansas City, going to a convention at Duke University in North Carolina and driving down to a college friend in South Carolina, a $10 Chinatown to Chinatown bus ride to Boston (recommended – I was actually only one of two Chinese on board and it was far cleaner and efficient than Greyhound, Peter Pan, or even Amtrak), presenting at another conference in Anaheim, California a week after the forest fires and visiting friends from my law school study abroad in Hong Kong, and going to Honolulu for an Asian bar association meeting (lawyers’ convention). Happily, airline security, while I’m not sure it is more or less effective, it is more or less run with uniform standards, so much so that you know what you’re supposed to be doing when while crossing the checkpoint, whether you are in Durham, NC or Los Angeles, CA. Also, as a consequence of my 2002 flying, I had American Airlines Gold status during 2003, and it is quite a difference in treatment — having the card is like the Fast Forward in the Amazing Race – it lets you and your companion skip most lines and go through special shorter security checkpoints. I actually managed a 30 minute run to the gate at JFK from the Howard Beach A train station and I made it with 3 minutes to spare. I’ll really miss it this year.

What I learned is that living in these places is harder and easier than they would appear. I stepped into Walmart and Target for the first time and realized how easy it is to shop there and how incredibly expensive shopping for groceries is on the East and West Coasts. Houses that we in New York would consider multi-million dollar mansions go for under $200,000. On the other hand, the people who live in paradise actually work really hard. On Oahu, the island Honolulu is on, there is a second rush hour at about 3 PM for those workers who go from their office jobs to their second jobs working in the tourist industry. On that island, SPAM canned luncheon meat is $1.50, while milk is $6.00 a gallon.

As for my resolutions last year, I decided to start an online journal and keep better contact with my friends.

Establishing Triscribe as a blog (online web journal) has been rather successful. It took a while to figure out the parameters of the site and what would the ground rules would be. I realized — as one of a dozen “stunt bloggers” for the conference at Duke University in June — that it is very hard for just one person to contribute on a regular basis, but it is a lot easier when there are others working with you. There is something to “peer pressure” – it actually works.

SSW15 and YC have been contributing on a regular basis on many different topics, and it has helped me to keep touch with them in a more concrete manner in what is going on in our lives than instant messaging or even a phone call. If you’re Asian and have a JD (or if you just know me in real life and can write well), I invite you register and join our group. The other thing is using Plaxo to automatically update contact info. It really works well. Even if you don’t end up subscribing to Plaxo, please update your info for me by writing back.

So what about resolutions for the next year? The first one is to go to the gym on a regular basis. I’ve been very good in paying for the membership; I’ve been very bad in keeping with the program, and my physical fitness has suffered for it. The second is to stop being a packrat and reduce the clutter in my life. The New York Times recently had an article about how literally life-threatening hoarding is. In taking the first step in a 12 step program, I have to admit that I am a hoarder. P- has been helping me work on these two together, and for that I’m grateful. I’ve been pretty successful in my resolutions over the years, so hopefully when 2005 comes around, I can report these conquered also.

Thank you for your kindness and friendship, and I hope to share in your happiness in the coming year. Keep reading here for updates to the continuing saga. Happy New Year!

In One Suburb, Local Politics With Asian Roots (New York Times)

According to the article, 9 out of 28 local elected officials are Asian American. That’s amazing! The question is how to encourage public service from Asians.

Imagine my utter surprise during TV surfing to come across this series. First couple was a Chinese guy and a blond gal from Massachussetts. Would not have ever expected this pairing on TV. So for those out there on this issue (still aways)… heh. Second couple were both Vietnamese, groom was partially blind and the bride was a lawyer. They were local to me, San Jose CA. It was very cool.

TLC::Wedding Story

=YC