Sports in translation

A couple of weeks ago, during the initial blushing bloom of Linsanity, I blogged about Jeremy Lin. While I beat T to the punch, T’s posting had much more cred – he actually got to hang out with Jeremy.
For fellow Americans of Chinese extraction, Jeremy Lin is a big deal, although obviously the Knicks’ #17 player is more than just Chinese-American; he’s also big as a Christian, Harvard grad, etc.

What surprised me though, was how it didn’t seem as a big of deal for non-Americans of Chinese extraction! What follows is an excerpt of the back-and-forth-comments on the Linsanity posting between T and Wo Ai (both bloggers in Shanghai of Chinese extraction; the former American, the latter British). It made such an impression on me; I wanted to re-post it here (delayed by T’s blog being down for a while.)

Excerpt from T’s post:
“The other thing I thought was interesting is just how normal a kid he really was. Instead of it feeling like a work/player babysitting assignment, it felt like my mom called me up and asked me to take some friends of hers out in Shanghai. One quick anecdote, when we were walking along the Pudong side of the Pujiang River, Jeremy and his little brother Joseph bought some lasers being sold by the tourist vendors. And in the car on the way back to their hotel, they were shining the lasers all around and at buildings and other cars and their mom went “Jeremy! Joesph! Stop shining lasers!””

Comments
Wo Ai: “I’ve absolutely no idea who this guy is but have noticed his name all over Facebook and other sites recently. But those lasers are freaking awesome. From Puxi you can hit the top of the Pearl TV tower easily. And all for between 20-100 RMB depending on how well you haggle.
I saw Madonna on a chat show last week and she was saying how her kids don’t give a damn how big a celebrity she is when they’re at home she’s just mum. I guess that’s a bit like your laser story, but in reverse. And that’s how it should be!”

T: “I suppose the equivalent would be if an Oxford or Cambridge graduate played on his university team, played a few games in his local beer league, got noticed by Sir Alex, called up to ManU, and then after every mid-fielder on Man U got hurt or was playing poorly, got thrown into the game and began to dominate and basically play as well as any big money player for the span of 9 games.”

Wo Ai : “I’ve done some research and I feel less ignorant now as apparently until a few weeks ago most Americans also didn’t know who he was. Thanks for your attempt at explaining it in English terms. I guess it’s like if Christian Ronaldo went to Oxford then. Sort of.”

T: “He’s not quite as dominant as C Ronaldo and he really came out of nowhere, whereas CRonaldo has been known since he was 14 or 15.”

Wo Ai: “Yeah that’s my point, there isn’t really an equivalent in the EPL. Theo Walcott?”

T: “Nah. I don’t think there’s an equivalent in any sport, anywhere. Well, maybe Kurt Warner who was a grocery bagger and playing minor league football (American) and then came off the bench and led the Rams to the Super Bowl. John Starks is another grocery bagger who played for the Knicks in the mid-90s.”

Maybe I should cut Wo Ai some slack; after all T is quite a serious sports nut. Still I give T full props for being able to translate between the sports/cultures (NBA vs EPL) so fluidly!

Late adopter

This weekend I finally got around to uploading music to my first ever portable mp3 device. (!!!) I bought it out of pity at a silent auction fundraiser three years ago. (No one had bid on it.) It’s a Zune, which is probably not surprising eh, for me to go against the grain. Plus it was red, not a generic black or white color. But there was also a strategic reason I picked it: it has FM radio. I thought it would be neat to be able to listen to radio stations in different places we traveled to. Though of course, now that I’ve finally gotten around to activating it, it doesn’t seem like I’m not going anywhere in the foreseeable future!

The main reason why I hadn’t loaded up the Zune earlier was that I was daunted by the thought of having to upload all those CDs, and how time consuming that would be. As it turns out, it wasn’t too bad, since Joe had already loaded up most of the CDs we have onto the desktop. And even though he has an ipod, which is proprietary with iTunes, I was able to drag and drop stuff pretty easily onto the Zune.

Even though we have the 80’s and 90’s in common, a lot of our music taste is quite divergent. For the past couple of months I’d been playing Flight of the Conchords ad nauseum around the house.
“Aren’t you tired of them yet?”
“No.”
We play his ipod in the car when we’re driving long distances. It’s nice to have variety, but it’s mostly his variety. Sometimes I really want my own variety, wacky as it may be.

I’ve started to bring my Zune to work. It’s almost silly to listen to it on the commute, because after I get off my bike (I don’t listen to it when I’m biking), I’m only on the train for about 20 minutes. At work, I usually listen to KCSM streamed through the internet, all jazz all the time. When the pledge drive was on for three weeks, I brought in several CDs from home, but I got tired of listening to them over and over again. Another case of esprit d’escalier, the Zune would have been the perfect antidote for that.

The great thing about any of these music players is that you can load so many songs on it, and hit shuffle, it’s like your own hit-or-miss radio station with a wonderful variety of songs. Although the shuffle doesn’t seem completely statistically random: I’ve been hearing a lot of Les Miserables, Janet Jackson and early Beatles. And the volume is a bit uneven, some songs come out very softly, and the others are a bit loud. I don’t know how/if there’s a way to calibrate that.

But overall, I’ve been rediscovering so much music that I hadn’t been listening to in such a long time with the Zune, it makes me smile. Jazz is good, but sometimes you just feel like belting out in lipsynch to the Police or Duran Duran. Or certain music conjures up certain moods, memories or sensations.

The other neat thing is that I could recreate almost all the lagniappe compilations from when we started burning them as CDs, in 2000. I’ve wanted to be able to have them all accessible from one source, and be able to play them in chronological order. It actually took me some effort to re-create them. Some of the source music I don’t have anymore, and I can’t even find all the lagniappe CDs to copy from again.
Joe asked, “And once you’re done with that, will you make playlists of all the mix tapes we made for each other when we were first going out?”
“?!!”
Actually, I still have cassette box covers with the song lists, even if the cassettes themselves are long gone. What would be really neat is if I could find the covers to the original cassette lagniappes from the late 90’s, and recreate those playlists on my player.

Maybe I just am really enjoying and appreciating the player now because I’ve gone so long without one; to me it’s the discovery of a new toy. And I haven’t even begun to load photos or video/podcasts to it (I’m trying to resist, because it could be another slippery slope.)

The not-the-future-Mrs. Lin is hopping up and down on the bandwagon

Joe being the sports nut, we couldn’t help but be aware of Jeremy Lin (local high school!) when he was playing in college. (The irony as every Chinese kid will appreciate is that Harvard [Harvard!] was his back-up school, when he didn’t a get a basketball scholarship to Stanford, Cal or UCLA.)

Around Xmas 2009/New Year 2010, we went to Cal basketball game with T and his his classmate Brian, who told us he was trying to organize more people to show up to the upcoming Harvard-Santa Clara University game, so Joe and I duly went. Yes, the stands were mostly full of East Asians, and it was great to see an Asian guy be the phenomenal, keep-your-eyes-on-him player of the game.

So we were pretty excited when he got picked up by the Warriors.

Later in October 2010, I sent the following email to T:

“We went to the Warriors pre-season game with your mom and dad (he got us free tix from Facebook!) It’s funny to spend most of a 49-minute basketball game watching to see if a Chinese guy is going to take his clothes off . . . Jeremy Lin only played a minute – poor guy gtes a lot of pressure from the crowd cheering loudly for him. “
(Obviously, I mean we were all focusing on the bench hoping he’d be shedding his warm-up clothes to be sent in to play!)

And here we are today. I have nothing to add to all that’s being said and discussed, except to note that whenever I’m having a crappy moment/hour/day I just think of the Linsanity and it cheers me up immediately.
Thank you, Jeremy.

Beautiful is to ugly as shirt is to day

I was having a gobsmackingly bad day today at work. I went for a walk down the main drag to chill-out and ran into Rick coming back from the grocery store. I don’t actually work with Rick, but we run into each other often enough in the agency kitchen, that we’ve struck up a casual acquaintance. He’s calmly cheerful all the time. Must be the vegeterian intake and the pony tail.
“How’s it going?” Rick called out.
“Terrible.”
“Well at least it’s a beautiful day,” he called out as he passed. And indeed it was.

Later that afternoon, when things had turned from terrible to disastrous, I ran into Rick in the kitchen, each of us having come into top up our individual teapots (his Japanese cast iron, mine yixing).

“Are you have a better day?” he asked.
“No,” I shook my head ruefully.
“Well, may your day end up being as beautiful as your shirt.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Maybe I should have worn an ugly shirt instead, so I could have had a beautiful day.”
I was wearing a shirt in this print.

As my other colleague remarked, “Isn’t it something you see more for cushion covers and baby carriers (that tie onto one’s back like a backpack)?”

Cultural currency: Hangtown Fry, celebrity skanks and obsolete gadgets

I was talking to M over beer. (This ended up being the second night in a row where I had to leave a beer half-finished on a bar, which is really mortifying. What a waste.)

I mentioned that Joe had been in the habit of making Hangtown Fry quite often lately.
“Hangtown Fry? What’s that?”
I explained it was an oyster, bacon and egg scramble, dating back from the Gold Rush days, when some miner who had struck it rich showed up in some restaurant in SF and demanded that the cook make him the most extravagant dish possible, and those were the only ingredients available. (California at that point was not yet the agricultural powerhouse it is today.)

The conversation shifted and somehow we were talking about those notorious sisters; one of whom had managed to stay married to a professional ball player for all of 72 days. “Yeah, their reality show is great because it’s completely mindless, which is the perfect antidote to the long, hard hours of work after I get home,” she said.
“The Kadarskanks have a reality TV show?”
“Celia, what rock* have you been under?!” The only reason why M didn’t fall off her barstool out of shock was because she has way too much dignity and poise.
“Hey, you didn’t know what Hangtown Fry was!” I retorted feebly. But it was no use. If you surveyed 50 people in line at Disneyland, probably all of them would know about the Kadarskanks’ TV show, and all of them would know the 49ers only as a football team.

(*I’m actually going to blame this one on Linda. Because once a upon a time, I distinctly remember standing in line at the supermarket with her, seeing one of those Kadarskanks on the cover of People magazine, and wondering out loud why people paid so much attention them? What had they done to earn their fame? Linda gave me a full low-down, but I don’t remember her mentioning that they had a reality TV-show. In reality, she probably did, but I just plumb forgot.)

The discovery of such lapses in cultural currency are constantly punctuating my life. Everything I learn about current culture and events, I find out from reading the newspaper. In my salad days I would actively see movies; now I just read about them. I’ve gone from being a direct to a second-hand consumer. I don’t need to watch the Super Bowl commercials; I just read about them in the business section and then look them up on youTube. Apparently there’s some book called The Hunger Games; Truc asked me if I had read it (no, I hadn’t even heard of it), but my awareness was reinforced by mention in the Food section of the Mercury News, where they announced a contest for recipes based on the book.

It’s funny though. Somehow I manage to get enough out of reading the newspaper or by serendipitous stumbles to maintain minimal technological currency. I know how LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and even Foursquare work, even if I don’t actually use them myself. (And once in a blue moon, I get a kick out being able to tell others about apps they don’t know about, even if I don’t have a smartphone on which to able to use them myself.)

Last week, the NYT ran an article on gadgets that at one time were the ne ultra plus, but are now obsolete. I sent the link to my childhood band of cousins, who were and still are mostly technogeeks**. As part of my message, I mentioned that I had come across the article in the newspaper I picked up off my porch, and that the article’s layout in there had great visual impact. (I had peeked at the article online, where the same content had been rearranged to fit a more compact digital format, but had less ‘wow’ on the eyeballs.)

(**How much so? I once sent them all an email, asking what the flashlight sword in Star Wars was called, because I was irked by the fact that I couldn’t remember its proper name. I got 3 responses back within 30 minutes. Why didn’t I look it up online? Because this was 1997. Dinosaurs were still roaming the earth and Google didn’t exist.)

Biker mentioned that he’d owned all those gadgets before save one: the pager. (Really, he had a Polaroid camera as well? How come I don’t remember that?) Another mentioned it was nice to sit in a café and read the hard paper once in while, with the air of someone who might also enjoy an occasional shoe-shine in the airport. I ranted about my preferences for reading hard copy vs. online versions (harder to skim, too many clicks, annoyance with teasers in the hard copy directing you to go online for supplemental content. I have the same complaints about looking up maps online vs. on paper.)

T summed it best: “You’re a bit of technophobe.”
It’s slam-dunk truth, although I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to explicitly admit it. Why?

My excuses:

I overly resist them, just to be contrary in a I-don’t-jump-on-the-(Apple) band-wagon way.
I broke down and got my first cell-phone because I took my dad on a road-trip to Crater Lake a week after his eye-surgery, 24 hours after he disembarked from a 14-hour plane ride . . . and my bleeping car broke down. Lovely, lovely man that my dad is, he cheerfully walked along the weed-infested shoulder towards the freeway exit with me as we sought help. I’ve still not completely forgiven myself.
I’m also a slight hypocrite. I did buy Joe an ipod for his birthday once, but it was because I couldn’t think of anything else to get for him.

Price
Several hundred dollars for a gadget, is it really worth it? For the same amount of money it costs to have dinner at Evvia and Kaygetsu (Steve Jobs ate there), I could buy an iPhone and a one-year data contract. I’d rather have the eats, even if they last no more than several hours. I could afford both financially. But it goes against my fiscal-philosophy to spend so much money on gadgets.

Planned obsolescence
Consumers are willing to be suckered into wanting the latest and greatest thing, and buy upgrades even though their existing devices are still functional. (I have to admit, I am the beneficiary of many such hand-me-downs.) This causes an excessive demand for goods, which is good for corporate profits, but at social expense. These devices are not entirely environmentally benign, even if they do save trees from being felled into paper, or fuel consumption of not having to ship materials, or the carbon emissions of flying people through the skies simply because communication has gone digital. On the production end, there are well-reported health issues involved for those who make these gadgets. There’s also the problem of disposal: these gadgets all have components which are difficult to recycle or toxic to the environment when they end up in landfills, etc.

Fear of dependency/addiction
One of my colleagues left his ipad on BART. It reduced him to a blubbering mess. “My whole life is on that ipad. My notes, my movies, my music, everything,” he moaned.
“Look, would you rather lose your ipad or get hit by a bus?”
He thought for a moment. “Nudged by a bus?”

I need the reassurance and convenience of redundancy. It takes pro-active effort to back-up and protect everything to begin with. And even if everything ends up being on the cloud, and can be easily recreated/retrieved, it’s still a pain the ass to have to repopulate and reorganize everything. My ultimate fear is that if there was no electricity, none of the fricking gadgets would work, and none of the data would be accessible. I don’t want to be such a vulnerable hostage.

Black is boring:
Gadgets are usually small and usually black, and thus all too easy to lose, although not small enough to really fit in jeans’ pockets. Why, why why? One of the cousins is notorious for leaving behind wallets and gadgets on restaurant tables, planes and hotels. Easy come, easy go. I’m very good about beating myself up for losing stuff like that. OK, it’s easy enough to buy a skin that’s a screaming shade of hard-to-miss fuschia . . . but still, I think most technogeeks have too many inadequacy hangups to go for anything other than a basic black Otter cover.

Utility
The good thing about being a late adopter is that the early adopters are the beta-testers (they get bragging rights for compensation) of the inaugural version, leading invariably to a sophomore model that has more of the kinks worked out. Even then, there’s a lot of deliberate consideration on my part as to whether to get a certain gadget:

Choices, choices, choices:
Which one should I get? DVD or Blu-ray? iPhone or Android or Blackberry? Laptop vs. notebook vs. tablet?

Will this gadget be more of a help or a distraction?
Yes I have the discipline to use it under proper conditions. But look at all the morons out there who text while driving, talk on the phone at the movies, or disturb their fellow audience with the bright screen on while at a performance. And all those whose heads are bowed to the glass screens instead of lifted up in engaging with humans around them. Maybe it’s the ultimate solution for the age-old dilemma of guys who don’t want to have to ask someone for directions when they are lost; they can simply look it up on GoogleMaps. (And indeed, it could be more reliable)

Will I be able to learn how all the features work?
I can never remember how to set the auto-timer on my digital camera?

Will I end up under-using it?
My mom spends the majority of her time on the ipad playing Solitaire. My dad has an Airbook – primarily for reading email. People ask me dumb questions all the time which could easily be answered by googling their fricking smartphone. What’s the point of having a smartphone?

I thought about getting a blackberry for work, mainly because I get scheduled for so many meetings, it’s hard to keep track of where I’m supposed to be and where I’m supposed to go next. But that’s all I want it for, because it sucks for surfing the internet, and I actually do want to keep my own phone. So it’s not worth it. I don’t need two phones. Besides, not having a smartphone means I don’t have to be tethered to work communication all the time, which is a good thing. I am neither so vital nor so critical to the work, and I intend to stay that way.

Is it suited for what I want it to do?
I’ve had to type on iphones and ipads, and I hate it. Apple is notorious for forcing you to use their products in a way that’s dictated by them. (Steve Jobs and his “the consumer doesn’t know what they want; I’m going to give them what I want” be damned.) The ipad has no USB port? You have to create playlists on the computer and then upload them to the ipod? That’s so f—king inconvenient. I wanted to buy someone a specific title for their Nook? No can do (but I would have been able to on the Kindle.) I got them a hard copy book instead – I guess I could have gotten it autographed as well. Can’t do that on an e-reader.

Does it have extra features that I don’t want but are stuck getting?
My first car had wind-up windows, which made me happy, because I’d once been stuck in a car with power windows which malfunctioned. This meant I sat freezing and wet in the back seat, because we couldn’t get the windows to roll up during a typically rainy California winter. When I was forced to get a new car, I was disappointed that they all came with power windows.
Likewise I don’t really want a new laptop that has a built-in camera. Because I’d like to be able to pick my nose while I’m skyping.

For all this ranting, I think that the proliferation of gadgets has been more of a plus than a minus. It’s not really the gadgets themselves, but the way people use them that really needs a lot more mindful and thoughtful application. While it’s enabled more people to do more and push boundaries intellectually and creatively, in some alarming way, it’s also enabled people to get away with doing less, being more complacent and being controlled by other without really realizing it.

It’s going organically in both directions. Where will we end up?

Litmus tests

I caught up with a friend of mine over drinks not too long ago. She’d sort of dropped off the radar for bit. “Work’s been busy, I got the flu, romantic issues, the usual, you know.”

That triggered my memory of litmus test for relationships. It was something I came up with back in my college/new hire days, so I told her about it, if nothing for a laugh. I’ve got three of them; and actually I’m sure everyone’s got their own version. Like Portia and in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice having her potential suitors pick the gold, silver or lead casket.

1) Bay to Breakers
Today I’m go around proclaiming how much I hate running, but believe it or not I used to run the Bay-to-Breakers every year. It started when I was in high school, when I merely didn’t like running, but got challenged by my punk-ass cousin Hot Toes to run it. It became an annual ritual, because it was just a lot of fun to go with a group of friends, and then all meet up at the letter E (for El Cerrito High, yeah go Gauchos!) at the Polo Field afterwards and stagger off to Yet Wah on Clement St for dim sum.

When Joe and I started going out, naturally he came along for his first Bay to Breakers with a group of our friends. Joe was, and still is a much better runner than me. The thing is, even without that differential, I believe that each individual runs at their own natural pace, just as each individual marches to the beat of a different drummer. So while we were riding on BART over to SF, I said he should just run at his own pace, and we’d all meet up at the letter E afterwards. After all, I couldn’t push myself to run as fast as him, and neither did I want him to be forced to slow down to my pace*. No, he argued, he’d slow down and run/keep pace with me the whole way (in that cute “we’re dating we’re should do everything together while holding hands and singing la-la-la” kind of way.) No, I argued back, I don’t want to hold you back: I’d feel bad about imposing on you that way. We got into a very heated discussion over this, and so when we got off at Embarcadero BART, I exercised my wiliness and my Hong Kong crowd-slaloming skills and shook him off my tail. Bingo! He’d be forced to run at his own pace, because he’d lost me. I didn’t have to worry, having already impressed him with ‘the letter E, the letter E’.

I told this story to another friend later. Coincidentally, she was an fellow high-school classmate of mine (although she hadn’t done the B-to-B), and we were having dinner where I got to meet her new boyfriend for the first time. They both got really indignant: “That’s really awful, how can one partner abandon the other, you have to stick together, otherwise you’d hurt the your partner’s feelings, etc.”

That was an ‘aha’ moment for me: not just the reality that they were compatible for each other (they’re now happily married with a daughter, by the way); but that this was a good litmus test. Not about how well-matched you and your partner’s natural running pace; but whether each of your personal approaches are compatible, i.e. does one have to slow-down to stay with the other, does the other have to over-strive to keep with the other, or are you each comfortable enough with the notion that the two of you don’t have to be in lock-step the whole way, but each temporarily do your own thing and meet up together.

*(It’s not even about running a good time; I’d discovered that running slower than your natural pace makes you more tired and sore. A previous year, we walked the damn B-to-B because one of our friends had gone to prom the night before and was too tired to run, and we’d kept to her pace in solidarity. Big mistake. It took me a full week to get over it, instead of the usual three days.)

2) Spike and Mike’s
Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation used to do an annual college circuit tour. I looked forward to it every year, a series of short, funny films. It just so happened that I’d recently started seeing someone when S&M came to town, so naturally I asked him if wanted to go see it with me. I had met this guy through a mutual friend and for the life of me I have no idea why he decided to ask me out. He spent a lot of time working out at the gym; all my friends were terribly impressed with his high-Fabio-quotient. Whereas, then as now, I was unprepossessing-looking and nondescript as they come.

We settled into our seats with the flip-top desks in the Wheeler Hall Auditorium. The lights dimmed, the film rolled . . . and we watched the whole thing without once laughing at the same exact time. There were bits where I laughed and he didn’t. There were bits where he laughed and I didn’t. After that, I knew no matter how hot-looking and sweet this guy was, there was just no way I could go out with someone whose sense of humor was aligned so differently from mine. Because in a long term, relationship I think the ability to make each other laugh is more important than say, Malcolm Gladwell.

I don’t know if Spike and Mike still do these films. (Update: They do.)If not, I guess if you wanted to try this litmus test, you’d have do cue up a series of Youtube clips and see how your potential paramour would react to them. Or for most people it’s simply picking a favourite funny movie, and watching it together.

3) Freeway Exit Coming Up!
This is a pretty basic litmus test; I’m sure everyone knows it or uses it without really thinking about it as a litmus test.

If you were driving, and found yourself in the far left lane of the freeway, and but the freeway exit you want is coming up in less than ¼ mile, would you (1) do an aggressive series of merges in order to be able to make the exit, or (2) merge in a normal manner, and get off at the next exit and detour back to the original intended exit? Actually, it could just be about driving styles in general. I think how you feel (irritated, fearful, etc) about each other’s style of driving (cautious, impatient, etc) could be a harbinger of your relationship together, although maybe it wouldn’t be so much of a deal breaker if they
were different.

4) If you were a transit route, what sort of transit route would you be?
My friend offered this one up, but it’s more of a litmus test for interviews (i.e. for a job.) This one stopped me in my tracks for a good long time; I had no idea how to answer, which is ironic since I work in transportation. So she said, her answer would have been an express bus route, because it goes to the important places, and it gets to those places quickly and directly, as opposed to a local bus which would be slower for having to make so many stops at lesser locations.

Litmus test questions for job interviews, now that’s something interesting to think about!

Malcolm Gladwell

A few weeks ago, the following library books were on my nightstand:

Nicholson Baker’s “House of Holes”: The funniest thing in there was the use of ‘Malcolm Gladwell’ as a euphemism.

Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” : There’s a scene where this woman picks up a man in a bar, by asking him whether his Malcolm Gladwell is below, above or at average size.

It struck me: how do guys know how the size of their Gladwell’s compares to that of the general male populace? Discreet peeks in the bathroom? My dear husband, in an uncharacteristic fit of prudishness, wouldn’t tell me.

The last time I came across something that piqued my curiosity so insufferably, I went around asking everyone about what they thought or knew about it. This time, I had to exercise more discretion in the respondent pool. I emailed three of my favourite male ‘drinking-buddies/international men of the world’ A, B, and C with the question. I didn’t get any response for about a week, but then the following delayed reaction email exchange gushed forth . . .

A: Interesting question posed. (I guess at least you know better not to ask male co-workers.) However, it looks like neither B nor C have volunteered. So as your most foolish ‘drinking buddy’ on the To: list, I will. Since the question posed implies the notion of ‘average’ (i.e. “compared to the general populace”), I believe men who need to capably answer that question in order to get laid should go out and buy this classic book. (Obviously, women who often ask this question should read the book as well to avoid getting tricked.)

>Discreet peeks in the bathroom?

Wait a minute – men don’t peek in the bathroom. Not even the discreet kind. That’s a no-no. There is a complex protocol in the men’s room regarding staring, plus another major protocol in picking urinals which guys have it all hard-wired into their CPUs and we can all process that info in the initial 0.00001 ms that we step into a public toilet crowded with guys.

Picking urinals – there is a text book on this. After you read it, try this simulation here to test your ‘guyness’:

B: U mean I didn’t have to do the circle jerk after all?

C: I will note all rules do not apply in China where men will stare at other men and also use adjacent urinals when choices are available

A: If it works for you… I do agree we all need to do what we need to do to get it going so to avoid the embarrassing silence in our urinal.

B: Personally, I wouldn’t go for the door in the first scenario. I ‘d put buffer between the guy on the far left and any potential people walking in. Surely you guys would do the same outside of the US with all the female janitors walking in.

Uzbekcelia: What the hell is a circle jerk? Never mind, I’ll look it up.

C: You probably don’t want to look that up

Uzbekcelia: Too late. I did. It was a bit ‘eww’

A: Agreed. And that brings up a good point – the sampling error for the well-travelled international man to estimate his size against the ‘general populace’ is too great. When asked the question posed by a pretty lady, just assume you are comparing against South Koreans – based on this link.

I wonder how Malcolm Gladwell feels about his appearance in the “House of Holes”?

Lagniappe 2010-2011

This year’s edition was mostly compiled by Joe. Credit or blame goes to him accordingly! And for the first time, it’s available through the cloud. Contact me here if you want details on how . . .

1. Hawaii Five-0 theme – The Ventures
   A fan at Comic-Con was busy taking shots of Grace Park while texting “she couldn’t act her way out of a bag.”
2. Save Me, San Francisco – Train
   Heard the single in Uluru in Australia, long before the single was released in the States.
3. Rocketeer – Far East Movement
   “Like a G6” was overplayed, and Joe is still bitter about the Giants overtaking the Padres.
4. The Swan  –  Camille Saint-Saëns
   The origins of the meringue desert known as the Pavlova is hotly disputed between the Kiwis and Aussies. One thing they would agree on is that ‘The Dying Swan’ was a signature dance of the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.
5. New Years –  Ohbijou
   2010 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival featured theme song from indie Toronto band.
6. The Choice Is Yours (Revisited) – Black Sheep
   Memory jarred by In Living Color re-run.  Has it really been twenty years?
7. The Walls  – Survival Guide
   Bay Area band heard on local indie hour on radio airwaves—not streamed.
8. Lovesong – Adele
   Celia did the math and realized that Adele hadn’t even been born when the original Cure version was a hit.
9. I’ve Done Everything For You  - Sammy Haggar
   You may be more familiar with the cover version from the Australian singer.
10. I Love Trash –  Oscar the Grouch/Sesame Street
    Curmudgeons are usually more entertaining than the normal shiny, happy characters
11. I Should Be So Lucky – Kylie Minogue
    Our innkeeper at Cape Tribulation, Queensland, said she would request Kylie on New Year’s Eve to cheese off the DJ.
12. Truganini – Midnight Oil
    Another in the line of songs about Aborigines from the Australian group.
13. Psychedelic Sally  –  Eddie Jefferson
    KCSM never fails to introduce a zinger in Celia’s life.
14. I Send A Message – INXS
    We wondered, “How many bands do we know from Australia?”
15. Golden Gaytime – The Bedroom Philosopher
    Somebody needs to import this iconic ice cream bar from Down Under over here.
16. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap – AC/DC
    Made the pilgrimage to Fremantle to see Bonn Scott’s statue.
17. On Melancholy Hill – Gorillaz
    Band did not have the luxury of this song also being pushed by Apple.
18. We Are All Connected –  Richard Howell Quintet
    99% + 1% = 100%
19. Six Months In A Leaky Boat – Split Enz
    Yes, a New Zealand band!
20. Ladies Of The World  – Flight Of The Conchords
    New Zealand-based comedy duo had a two-year series on HBO.
21. Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole        A favorite of legendary coach John Wooden (1910-2010).  RIP.

 

 

It’s all about the blistering barnacles

The New York Times ran an editorial that pretty much sums up my opinion of Spielberg’s Tintin movie.

The only thing missing from the review is how well the movie animated Captain Haddock. As I was telling a friend of mine about how I went to see the movie:

“I went in with misgivings. It is a little weird to hear Tintin with a voice, one is so used to reading him inside one’s head. I’m not crazy about the way they animated Tintin or Snowy, but Captain Haddock is exactly how I imagined he should be in animation.
Captain Haddock steals the show (colorful language! he drinks! my kinda guy!) but then, even in the comic books, Tintin was always a bit bland,a bit too goody two shoes. (Another reason why I prefered Asterix to Tintin.) If you’ve ever read the series, the movie is a mash up of the Secret of the Unicorn + Crab with the Golden Claws, plus a few liberties with the plot.”

I had heard initially that the movie was based on the ‘Secret of the Unicorn,’ which I thought was a pretty lame choice, since the setting was a bit bland. Why didn’t they pick a story with a more exotic setting, like ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ or ‘Flight 714′? But after seeing how the movie mashed up the plots from three books (plus a plot twist that would have been completely unknown to Herge for gratuitous action sequences, it made a bit more sense. It really was an introduction to Captain Haddock, and the ending is set-up perfectly for a sequel (now that’s really Spielberg.) And I’d trade the Milanese Nightingale out for Abdullah.

I was talking to Biker in Bangkok; he said his sons were reading Tintin and Asterix as well, beaten-up copies checked out from the library. They may be the very same copies I read over 20 years ago!

I was riding on Caltrain, and eavesdropped on a woman with a Spanish-accent conversing with a newly-arrived young Indian couple with a young daughter.
“Where are from?”
“Bolivia.”
“Is that in Europe?”
“No, it’s in South America . . .”
“Is it near Peru? Oh I know about Peru. Have you heard of this comic book Tintin? He goes to Peru in the ‘Prisoner of the Sun.’”

Geography teachers everywhere owe Georges Remy big time.

The little things about commuting by train

Friday evening, I was riding the train home from work. I move to the vestibule, as the Mountain View stop is coming up. There were two other men standing there, waiting to get off as well. I smelled something familiar and annoying. Then I realised it was that A&F perfume. Ew.

I’m not fond of that retailer, and it bugs me that literally whenever you walk past any of there stores even outside of it, that you’re forced to wade through a cloud of their signature smell, which I find obnoxious. In fact their NYC store can be detected a full block away by nose, before your eyes see it. Ew ew ew.

I told my friend Dar later, knowing she’d get a kick out of this story, since she’s a big fan of A&F. She wrote back,

“ha..ha… i know why. A&F gave out free fragrance rollerballs on friday with any purchase! i couldn’t go or else I would have loved one!”

The train stopped, and I got off, walking along the full length of the platform toward the other end, to retrieve my bike. I could hear a crowd-babel of voices up ahead, but couldn’t see very well in the dark, what with the rest of the commuters rushing around as well.
“Gee,” I thought to myself, “they’re not very loud. You’d think they’d have bullhorns.” I had assumed they were ‘Occupy Mountain View’ protesters.

Instead, as I approach closer, I hear ‘Jingles Bells.’ All these boys with kerchiefs around their necks are sitting on the access ramp railings, with their dads standing, caroling the passengers getting off the train. To the side is a table with a box; these Cub Scouts are also selling mistletoe as a fundraiser, $5 a pop. Funnily enough, the kid pitching the sell the loudest is an adorably spunky girl in a yellow jacket!

It put such grin on my face that (1) these were no ‘Occupy’ protester but (2) kids singing Christmas carols at the Caltrain station. I actually turned back donated $3 to them. I didn’t have a need for the mistletoe.

Earlier this year, when I was commuting by BART, I got a kick out of the occasional fellow passenger who would be a kid, listening to rap on his or her headphones, and rapping out loud along with whatever was playing on the phone/MP3 player. Neither their player nor their voice was be loud; it was just the earnestness and how much they got into singing along that amused me. It simply reminded me of the ritual chanting by monks that you have at special events in Thailand (weddings, funerals, making-merit). The sacred and the profane both roll along the same rhythms.