You are currently browsing the archives for June 2011.

The Morality of Doing Bad Things to Bad People

  • June 27, 2011 12:01 am

The other day, I started my morning run in a foul mood from some news I had recently received. About a mile into my workout, I see a hipster dude in Buddy Holly glasses and skinny jeans walking his dog about a half block ahead of me. The hipster is yapping away on his iphone and doesn’t seem to be paying attention when his dog shits on the well-tended lawn of a house they are passing.

I don’t think much of this until I see what the hipster does next. He looks down, sees the big pile of shit his dog has just ejected, turns back to his phone and starts to walk off. No effort to pick up the shit, no sign of guilt or even an effort to hide his crime—it’s obvious this is a typical morning routine with this dude and he’s obviously gotten away with it so far.

Well, not this morning. Not on my watch.

So I run up to hipster dude. “Hey, man, your dog just defecated on that lawn, you need to clean it up,” I say to him.

The hipster juts his finger out in front of my face. His phone conversation is clearly more important than anything I have to say. If I was feeling grumpy before, I’m starting to grow enraged now. All bets are off.  Read more...

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VIDEO SPOTLIGHT: Assassin’s Creed Revelations trailer.

  • June 27, 2011 12:00 am

Not to be out-nerded by Offender Anderson (there can be only one!), I am compelled to share the trailer for an upcoming video game.

Before I gave up on the relatively nascent art form, one of my favorite franchises was undoubtedly Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed.

Initial information on the first in the series made it seem solely like a period game set during the Crusades featuring assassins.

And while, to an extent, it actually was, you as the player wouldn’t actually be playing through the game as if the Crusades were ongoing.  The brilliant spin is that you would actually be playing as one of this man’s descendants.

The conceit is that your ancestors’ memories are embedded in their DNA and are passed down from generation to generation.  Someone in the present is searching for an important artifact and their only lead is one of your ancestors.

Using a machine called an Animus, they are able to watch you navigate your ancestor’s memories and inadvertently help them find the location of this artifact.  Read more...

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Indian Woman Chopped Off Head of Man Who Tried to Rape Her Then Paraded the Head Around Town

  • June 26, 2011 3:21 pm

Here’s a cautionary tale for all you would be stalker/rapists out there: If the notion that stalking and raping women is wrong hasn’t registered in your twisted pea brains yet, then at least consider this…don’t try to stalk and rape a woman while she’s holding a sickle.

One fool learned that the hard way recently when he tried to attack a 35-year-old woman in the remote Indian village of Makkapurva. The woman was working in the fields; using the aforementioned sickle to cut grass when the man tried to sexually assault her. But the woman decided to defend herself. One guess what she used to fight back with?

If this guy’s sick fantasy was to give this woman head…well, mission accomplished, sir. Mission thoroughly accomplished.

But the story doesn’t end there. Not only did the woman cut off her attacker’s head, she later paraded it around the local market as frightened onlookers fled in horror.  Read more...

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WHAT I LEARNED ON YOMYOMF THIS WEEK – JUNE 18 – 24, 2011

  • June 25, 2011 12:00 am

What I Learned on YOMYOMF This Week is a capsule of the week’s blogs with sarcastic commentary from Yours Truly (that’s me!).  If you’ve been busy and missed out on a couple of our daily gems, this is a perfect way to catch up.

But seriously – what was more important than reading YOMYOMF?

This week, the blog discusses memories of The Karate Kid 2; fast food’s new Spam delivery system; and testicles.

Yes, the long-awaited (by me, at the very least) testicle-themed blog is finally here.

PERHAPS I AM EASILY DEPRESSED.:


In which I make my own strongest case for taking some Zoloft.

REMEMBERING ‘KARATE KID 2’ AND THE DANGERS OF ACRYLIC NAILS:

“One thing I can tell you all is that I still feel the same feelings in being recognized as the girl from “The Karate Kid”. It’s always been a mixture of disbelief, embarrassment and a funny kind of pride.”

Funny – I feel the same things about not drinking until I was 21.  Being the girl from The Karate Kid 2 is undoubtedly much, much cooler.  Read more...

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Balls

  • June 24, 2011 4:25 pm

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I Get Off Way Too Much On Returning Overdue Library Books

  • June 24, 2011 4:17 am

In my defense, this one was way overdue – five weeks.  After finishing the book, I must’ve dropped it.  I found it under the bed, beginning to collect dust bunnies.  Fine: $13.21.

I felt good about returning it and good about paying the fine.  I felt closure.  I felt I had owned my mistake, looked it in the face, and made things right.

The rest of the day kicked ass, too:

I returned a DVD of The Exorcist to the video store.  Having seen it for the first time when I was 14, I decided it was time to expose my own 14 year old to this masterpiece of dread and horror.  (and btw, am I the only one out there who thinks the scenes of Linda Blair undergoing a painful spinal tap are just as scary – especially for her poor, helpless mother- as her head spinning around?)  Read more...

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Apparently Blogging About Bad Food in Taiwan Can Lead to Jail and Fines

  • June 23, 2011 8:15 pm

We can add one more reason why it’s not such a bad thing to be a blogger in the good ole’ U.S. of A: we won’t be jailed and fined if we criticize something we don’t like…such as the food at a shitty restaurant.

Not so in Taiwan where a High Court this week sentenced a popular lifestyle blogger named Liu to 30 days in detention, two years probation and NT$200,000 in fines (about $7,000 U.S.) for criticizing a Taichung noodle shop on her blog.

And what was the horrible offense that warranted such a harsh sentence? Well, Liu called the food “too salty.” She also said she saw cockroaches inside the establishment and called the owner a “bully” for allowing his customers to park haphazardly causing traffic jams.

The High Court didn’t find her claims of cockroaches to be slanderous because they were just a “narration of facts,” but what it had an issue with was the blogger’s “too salty” criticism which the court found to have “exceeded reasonable bounds” because Liu only had tried one dish on her single visit.  Read more...

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Take a Bite Out of This Grilled Ch’i Sandwich

  • June 23, 2011 3:00 pm

Most sports fans are attached to teams from the city they’re from. I know a bunch of guys from the Bay Area who are die-hard Golden Warrior fans. I have a buddy from Atlanta who doesn’t totally watch sports, but feels an affinity to the Falcons and Hawks. I know a classical violinist who I never thought would watch sports but still speaks of the Rick Adelman era fondly — she’s from Sacramento and still watches the Kings (poor soul).

I’ll give you another reason why sports is important to people. The human need to feel bigger than we are. Nobody likes to feel small. Or, should I say, no one likes to be reminded how downright microscopic they really are. You were a sperm in your dad’s balls that fought 200,000 other sperms to arrive at your mom’s egg. You got in. The other 199,000 got second place. Now, you’re a human being existing amongst billions with aspirations to evolve in a universe that contains 170 billion galaxies.

This need for evolution could come in the form of 1) a career that will give you the opportunity to express this need 2) having children who can learn from your wisdom and add to it or 3) simply having an itch to evolve (since you’ll never get rid of it)…or you can call this, feeling unsatisfied with your life.

Welcome back to “The 33 Strategies of Sports”, a concoction of Robert Greene’s masterful book and sports history. This week…  Read more...

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Get your noodle on

  • June 23, 2011 9:11 am

Credit to theminty.com for chiu chow dry noodles (Kim Ky Noodle House)

Maybe I’m overdue for a trip to a hawker stall in Thailand or Singapore.  Or I’m just watching too many episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations’ – my equivalent of food porn.  I can’t help but have food envy seeing him hit up a street vendor and  get turned on as he hungrily anticipates his humble bowl of noodles.  My memories of Southeast Asia usually summon up cravings of dry soup noodles – basically noodles with all the fixings but with the broth on the side.  It’s a different experience from the traditional soup noodles.  The ingredients are not bound together by a mellow broth, but suffused with usually some kind of pork or chicken fat – a special sauce that like the Dark Knight, is both evil and good.

 Read more...

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COMMUNITY QUESTION: Do you leer?

  • June 23, 2011 12:00 am

Ladies and gentlemen:

We are becoming a culture of obviousness.  Gone are the days of subtlety, of subtext, of reading between the lines.

Yes, I sound like an old man, but didn’t I just preface this article with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen”?  I’m really not hiding anything.

Admittedly, yes – I may be looking at the past with rose-coloured glasses, inferences built upon notions derived from popular entertainment.  However, I’m still willing to bet my second-born illegitimate child that our predecessors on the whole were not so blatant.

But before you jump to conclusions, I’d like to say that I, for one, am glad we are giving the guillotine to understatement.

So this week I ask you all:

Look, this is a broad subject – I should know – so I’ll hone in one on particular niche of creeper-dom: looking at people you’re attracted to.  Read more...

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Why Japan is Awesome Reason #484: A Device That Plays Music When You Slap Your Friends’ Faces

  • June 22, 2011 10:22 pm

There’s been a lot of cool stuff out of Japan this past week from meat made out of shit to spam burgers, and now comes this new toy from Takara Tomy. It’s an instrument that makes music when you smack your friends:

That’s right—now children can make beautiful music together by slapping each other in the arm or face. What better way to motivate our youth and teach them that becoming good at something like playing music takes a lot of pain and suffering? Check it out:

 Read more...

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Mentoring Jeffrey (or Showdown in Little Tokyo 2011)

  • June 22, 2011 5:26 pm

A few months ago, a young aspiring filmmaker, Jeffrey Chin, who just graduated from Berkeley and was still living in the Bay Area, approached me to be his mentor. I was pleasantly surprised as I first met Jeffrey at the Asian American Independent Feature Conference that I organized last year. A fresh college graduate, Jeffrey is an energetic and ambitious writer/director. He is just about to start shooting his first half-hour short film entitled Lil’ Tokyo Reporter this summer. Lil’ Tokyo Reporter is the untold story of Sei Fujii, an Issei newspaperman, who defended the Japanese of Los Angeles against unjust laws and unethical business practices from the Great Depression through Internment. Fujii overturned the Alien Land Law in 1952 and laid the groundwork for Redress and the future Civil Rights leaders of today.

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