My latest, favorite food from my mom is black ginger tea. Ironically, several years ago, I had discovered the black ginger tea at Santana Row’s Fantasia Coffee & Tea, but had been unable to get the flavors quite right when I tried to make it at home. (In retrospect, my primary mistake was trying to use ginger tea bags rather than fresh ginger.) I gave up on that little project a long time ago, but when I was home recently for the winter holidays, my mom made me delicious ginger tea almost everyday, especially since I was very sick when I first got home. Ginger, along with a host of other health benefits, is particularly helpful with easing nausea, one of my most frequent issues. (Hence, the frequent use of ginger ale to ease a queasy stomach– jump to 1:40 in this MythBusters clip of using ginger pills to combat motion sickness.) In addition to GI symptoms, because compounds found in ginger interact with serotonin 5-HT1A receptors, it may even help treat anxiety itself.

So, my mom showed me how to make her version of black ginger tea while I was home and as usual, there was no measuring of ingredients or exact cooking times, but somehow, it always came out tasting the same every single time and with a perfect blend of flavors. I usually cook like that too– without measuring out ingredients or setting timers– with relative success, if I’m to believe my friends who have wolfed down my food during the many “dinner parties” I’ve hosted (nothing fancy– really just my friends coming over to eat and hang out). However, for this tea, it took a little bit more precision to recreate what my mom seems to be able to do without even one procedural taste test. So, for those lesser beings like me, here’s a how to make an amazing cup of black ginger tea.

Ingredients:

• Fresh ginger, grated/crushed (see directions for specific details on how to prepare the ginger)
• Black tea (no need to get fancy– my mom had Red Rose Tea in stock and any generic black tea like that will suffice)
• Hot water (unlike green or white teas, black teas can take boiling water)
• Sugar, honey, agave or whatever your preferred sweetener, if desired
• Fresh lemon juice, if desired

Directions:

1. Put a tea strainer or infuser inside your tea cup. I use my Bodum YO-YO Mug and Tea Strainer. (Bodum makes a variety of similar items for brewing coffee and tea that will more than do the job, like this Assam Tea Press I use when I want to brew more than one cup. I know these items seem a bit expensive, but I’ve been using mine for more than 10 years and will probably continue to use them for many more.)
2. Cut a few of slices of fresh ginger (make sure to remove the skin first) and then crush it using a garlic press. My mom, who doesn’t really believe in garlic presses, but prefers to crush her garlic with a metal mallet-type object, uses a flat grater (it may actually have a section that is specifically for grating ginger) placed on top of the cup so that the grated ginger just falls into your infuser/strainer. Either way, this seems to be more effective in releasing the ginger juices and flavor rather than simply using sliced ginger.
3. Pour some hot water into your cup, just enough to cover the ginger and let it infuse the water with its flavor for about 2 minutes.
4. Leaving the ginger inside, add a tea bag or your loose tea into the infuser, add some more hot water, and let it brew for another 2 minutes, or a little less than the recommended brewing time. Different teas will suggest different brewing times and in general, you should follow them since leaving the tea bag or leaves in too long will make it bitter. In this case, the tea I am using suggests a brewing time of 3-5 minutes, but since I don’t want to overpower the ginger flavor, I let it steep for only 2 minutes, making a total of 4 minutes for the ginger.
5. If desired, add sugar, honey or whatever sweetener you prefer. Don’t use too much since you don’t want to overpower the other flavors (this is ginger tea, not sweet tea). I think my mom uses agave nectar since it’s next to impossible to find sugar, especially white sugar, in my parents’ house. To add some citrus flavor to the tea, you can also add a bit of fresh lemon juice or try one of these honey sticks with lemon I’ve seen stocked at Target and Cost Plus World Market, which is just a straw filled with lemon-infused honey that you can cut open on one end, stick in your tea cup, and stir.

And that’s it– enjoy!

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Many believe World War II not only helped, but was one of the biggest factors in the US pulling itself out of the Great Depression– some do not– and I’m sure it’s been joked many times over that another war– in addition to the one we just finished fighting like, 5 minutes ago (did you know military operations had websites?), and the one we’re still fighting in Afghanistan– would help us out of this Great Recession. Well, the thought of someone in government or similar sphere of power seriously considering that idea is a morbid thought, but perhaps this is an even more twisted one: although domestic growth created to support wartime efforts could help us get out of our current, particularly deep economic rut, the thought of waging war for economic benefit– essentially letting the blood of American soldiers be payment for a way out of our current economic state, one created by Wall Street’s high risk, shady deals with subprime mortgages and derivative markets– is too “distasteful”. So, instead, those in power look at alternatives and given the somewhat misguided, but constant ranting about how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its regulations are “job killers”, a conspiracy is born to systematically lower EPA regulations to allow corporations to redirect resources they would normally have spent ensuring they were abiding by various environmental laws and regulations, knowing that it may cause adverse health effects on millions of communities around the country. They decide that considering it takes much longer for you to die from cancer than a soldier to die from a bullet or a bomb, and it is much harder to prove that the chemical waste improperly dumped near your home’s water source is the direct reason why you get a particular type of cancer at a particular point in your life– especially if litigation gets tied up in the court system and you die before its conclusion, should you decide to sue your health insurance company and/or the owner of the factory or plant that caused the pollution in the first place– that slow, causally ambigous death of a few million is not only a more preferable and conveniently politically advantageous, but morally justifiable route for economic growth compared to more American soldiers dying in another war (or ideally, just working harder to come up with better economic policies). Besides, the increased health problems may boost the healthcare industry and once we’re out of the rut, the EPA can create even more jobs by raising– or in some cases, re-raising– regulations, therefore creating a need for corporations to go back out and hire workers and obtain other resources to abide by them.

And then the next time there’s an economic slump, all over again… until they find “the next thing”…

I’m not saying this is what could happen under a President and/or Congress that rails just a little too much against the EPA or that anybody is even seriously considering it, or if anybody seriously believes anybody is seriously considering it, but if I thought of it, someone else must have…

“The bottom line is that your country and you have to be on the same page where values are considered, principles are considered, what you believe in. And if that is not the case, then it’s… you may be born somewhere and brought up somewhere, but then you don’t feel that same type of loyalty. Because loyalty comes through ideas, not through the earth, not through mud and trees and hills. That’s the same everywhere in the world. Is there any country in the world that has it enshrined in the constitution that you have a right to be happy?”

And to underline the point even more, note that Larsen is originally from Pakistan. Food for thought– check out the trailer for “Citizen USA” below:

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It’s been a whole year since my last IdeaFarm™ post and I thought I would post an update. I didn’t see the truck around for a while (at least in Mountain View– they apparently have people at locations all over the Bay Area), but then, a few months ago, they popped up again, parked near the intersection of Central Expressway and Rengstorff Avenue. They’ve apparently downsized to this trailer and bike (plus what looks like solar panels?).

This week, the trailer was parked at the corner of El Camino Real and Phyllis Ave after having been “silenced by MVPD” (Mountain View Police Department). I’m not sure what they did since I’ve never actually seen anybody next to/around the truck or trailer, but I suppose just parking for long periods of time in front of businesses and at busy intersections could cause problems. Nevertheless, I haven’t seen anything that would actually be illegal and if they had done something illegal, I assume the truck/trailer/whatever would have disappeared altogether.

So, I’d be curious to know what caused them to be “silenced” and how MVPD silenced them, but I still haven’t figured out what the actual, practical purpose of IdeaFarm™ is, what they do or how they do it. (One commenter summarized it as a version of “libertarian socialism”.) In any case, the IdeaFarm™ website has been updated once again, so maybe you can take a look and try to make some sense of it.

Otherwise– or perhaps as background– you can check out my previous posts:

• IdeaFarm™ (February, 28, 2008)
• Idea Farm™, part 2 (March 27, 2008) – includes information and comments from the man behind it all
• IdeaFarm™, part 3: Return of the Truck

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2. IdeaFarm™, part 3: Return of the Truck
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I meant to post this a while ago, but here it is now: the IdeaFarm™ truck reappeared at the corner of Castro St. and El Camino in Mountain View, CA in late August. It disappeared apparently on September 11 at the conclusion of its Political Economy course. If you can’t read the sign, it reads (I think): “Mexicans colonize because you don’t receive them as brothers.”

Read my previous posts on IdeaFarm™: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The IdeaFarm™ website has been significantly updated since my previous posts and it looks like there will be a big opening performance.

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While nail salons are stereotyped as being owned and run by Korean and Vietnamese people, but there’s always some truth to a stereotype. For example, I am related to people who own and run a dry cleaners, a nail salon and a liquor store. My parents even owned a grocery store back in the day.

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More interesting is the breakdown of each word/category:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

In true nerd form, I found this interesting and worth sharing.

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I didn’t think a show about web videos would be interesting since I’m not a fan of “wrap-up” shows and I think it’s weird when you people use TV to talk about things from the Internet– it’s like they’re dumbing down computers and the Internet to make it more accessible via television because staring at a TV screen is easier than staring at a monitor.

In any case, I gave the show a shot because I love Daniel Tosh and the show is actually pretty entertaining. And yes, I actually find exactly what I thought I wouldn’t like– using TV to “wrap-up” popular web content– useful since I don’t usually have time to troll the Internet for funny videos. And the Tosh.0 blog is actually a nice complement to the show itself, without being redundant. Give it a shot.

Here’s Daniel Tosh’s hilarious follow up to the above video:

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Two Women, Two Babies, One Family (from Real Simple)

A sweet quote:

At night, we started putting our bellies together so the babies could say hi and tap at each other. It was sweet.

What could make this more perfect? Marriage.

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Here’s one of the most troubling paragraphs from the National Review article:

By its own terms, Stanford is failing to live up to its housing contract. As parents, Stanford holds us responsible for payment of our daughter’s bill. We, in turn, expected Stanford to enforce the terms of its own housing contract. It should not be acceptable for any group of students to alter the conditions of that contract. Furthermore, it should not be up to individual students to determine whether to protest a housing arrangement which so obviously violates this contract. There would clearly be social difficulties for any student who protested. Thus, it is Stanford that should rectify the situation.

In reality, Stanford holds the student responsible for payment of her bill, not her parents. And why shouldn’t it be up the individual student to make a complaint? If a student is unhappy with her housing assignment or feels that the housing contract has been violated, it’s up to that student to speak up. Social difficulties are a part of life and especially part of speaking your voice– if you’re not willing to endure the possible social difficulties, then you’re saying the issue is not important enough to you.

In any case, the article is riddled with unfortunate comments– when you read Daisy’s various responses to the article and if you know anything about co-op housing, which I’m sure Daisy did before choosing to live in Columbae– you’ll see that this is a parent blaming Stanford for the differences between her daughter and herself. Karin didn’t even find out about the rooming situation until the end (during winter break) and makes it sound like her daughter was unhappy with the room assignment, saying “she didn’t ask for this room arrangement” and that “she doesn’t want to upset everyone’s consensus arrangements.” She didn’t even get the reason why her daughter wasn’t at the meeting right (she appointed a proxy because she was on a plane, not because she had a friend visiting). In general, Karin expresses a sense of entitlement, that she had the right to know everything about her daughter’s life at Stanford. Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works– while FERPA provides students with access and control over their education records, it also specifically limits to what parents have access. Specifically, when the child turns eighteen, the child takes responsibility of her education records and schools are not required to notify parents of general information that does not directly apply to the student or even answer questions about the student. At the end of the day, it is a rights and privacy act, with the student at the center.

Karin, in response to her daughter’s decision to live in the co-ed room during fall and winter quarter, pulled financial support for her daughter’s final quarter at Stanford, making Daisy take $3,000 in loans (in addition to the loans her original financial aid package included). Given that her daughter is, being well over eighteen, an adult, that’s certainly Karin’s prerogative, but at the same time– again, as an adult– Daisy should be free to make her own decisions. In the course of a lifetime, those few thousand dollars is a small price for Daisy to pay for her freedom and an ultimately trivial amount over which her mother is making a gesture simply to prove a point. (Ironically, her parents pulled financial support for the current spring quarter during which Daisy is actually living in a single-gender room. Co-ops often switch around room assignments each quarter as part of the consensus decision-making process.) I completely empathize and sympathize with Daisy as a member of a sometimes overbearing family and while I hope she works out this disagreement with her parents, I also hope she stays confident that she had and has the right to make her own choices.

Stupid censors.

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Bathroom stall ashtray
Originally uploaded by sindy

Still in Seattle. Stopped in a casino for the buffet and when visiting the bathroom, found this convenient ashtray next to the toilet.

So, is this to discourage people from dropping their cigarettes in the toilet (and therefore, preventing clogs) or is it so people don’t have to stop smoking just because they’re going to the bathroom?

I would say each answer has an equal shot of being the right one. Who knows, maybe it’s both. No matter what, one thing I know is that it sure is convenient.

The Mini-Max
Originally uploaded by sindy

In Seattle for the weekend. While settling into my hotel room, found the “intimacy kit” provided by the good people at the Hotel Max, complete with the “minimax.” (Actually, my friend found it while nosing around my room.) Apparently, my pleasure is their pleasure.

(Sorry for the blurry image; I’m on cameraphone until I find a USB cable.)

UPDATE 4.19.2008: Uploaded a better photo. Click to zoom in on the details.

Mexicali Styles for Women Starting at $24.50, Plus Free Shipping

Is it just me, but isn’t “Mexicali” a derogatory term? This is just like Cheese Nips.

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Just when I thought this chapter: was over, the IdeaFarm™ truck reappears! I saw it parked on the corner of Castro St. and El Camino Real. Looks like the website is back up too– and chock full of stuff.

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2. IdeaFarm™
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Unfortunately, while you can read my original blog post, sometime between March 9 and now, the IdeaFarm website is no longer up and all you get is an “Under Construction” notice. Luckily for you, here’s a copy of the cached version through Google you can take a look at (I grabbed it as a PDF in case it “disappears”). The Way Back Machine took me as far back as 1997 and through multiple versions of the site over the last decade. In any case, the version I saw when I wrote my post last month was actually closer (maybe even the same) to the cached version from Google, so keep that in mind while reading what follows. (As an aside, the site I saw that matches the cached version from Google is actually a “freebee placeholder” since lack of funds forced the “normal web site” to be shut down. Personally, I think the placeholder site looked less sketchy.)

The email from the man behind IdeaFarm was somewhat rambling, but he did address a few specific issues I had raised:

1. The “Governing Propietor’s” real name. Privacy, or maybe more appropriately anonymity, is a key part of the organization’s interactions. One way IdeaFarm is organized is through villages– economic associations that work to “create a compelling economic incentive for everyone in the postal code to live unselfishly.” This work is usually done during anonymous weekly dinners and if names must be used, only first names are allowed. I had originally commented that they should make at least one exception for IdeaFarm’s organizer (he refuses to call himself the “leader”), even if it’s just his first name to help lend credibility (or at least make it feel less creepy– imagine having to call someone the “Governing Proprietor” all the time). Surprisingly, the first thing he pointed out in his email to me is that his name is on the website– at the very bottom, he “signs” the website with his legal name: “Wo’O Ideafarm.” (According to this guy, he changed his name in 1999; from 1954 to 1999, it was Jon Clyde Duringer.)
2. The “accusatory” sign.” He says the photo I used is very old and that the signage was changed several years ago. The phrase “THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM IS THAT YOU HAVE BECOME A SELFISH PEOPLE” is no longer on the sign and what’s left is the word “SELFISH” in a circle with a slash through it. He suggested that I check out his YouTube interview (embedded below) where he talks about the signage and why he changed it, among other things. (Basically, like me, people had a negative reaction to the sign, but some so negatively that they threw eggs and yelled insults and threats. Aside from that, he also realized that if someone is having a hard time, is feeing down and out, seeing that sign might make him unfairly feel worse.)
3. The Yahoo! email address. I had commented that using a Yahoo! address on his site– ideafarmcity@yahoo.com– didn’t seem very professional, but he assured me that it is not his private email address, but a “throw away” one (although that was the address he used to email– seems more like temporary, not throw away). This is apparently one of the consequences of having to take down the IDEAFARM.COM server.

Which brings us to the topic of software and servers. Remember that IdeaFarm is a “civil and political project funded by the sale of software products and services.” It seems that, in the last six months to a year, the “real” IDEAFARM.COM server is no longer up and running because a) it is not yet “hacker proof” (one mission guiding development is to “connect people wholesomely” through a “zero spam, zero advertisement, zero thought steering, secure email service”) and b) Wo’O Ideafarm ran out of funds for the normal website. As aforementioned, the website I saw was a simple “freebee placeholder” because he ran out of funds for the “normal website,” which was running IP-DOS. IP-DOS, if you remember, stands for IdeaFarm™ Piggyback-Distributed Operating System, one of the organization’s software products. Unfortunately, it’s a memory hog” (not a good sign) that requires a “full dedicated server,” which costs about $100 per month (versus shared virtual hosting which can be as cheap as $5 to $10 per month or even a virtual dedicated host which is about $45 per month). So, until it can be re-written to be less of a memory hog, the freebee placeholder (or now the “Under Construction” page) will have to suffice. Unfortunately, his resources, programming or otherwise, are scarce:

There is a lot of software work to do, I am doing it alone, and I am doing it under very difficult conditions. (I live in that old truck and do my programming in there and in noisy public libraries. My computer is old, the monitor is failing, its data cable is broken and splinted with paint stirring sticks to keep it working. My second hand keyboard finally became unuseable, so I replaced it with an el-cheapo Walmart keyboard that, even though brand new, is almost as bad; I have to hit the ’5′ key 5 times or more to get a single ’5′ keypress.)

Funds are also short because although he is “one of the most experienced software developers alive today,” he currently works part-time as a minimum-wage day laborer (perhaps as part of his rejection of the selfishness that he says has tainted Silicon Valley) and given the tenuous nature of day labor, especially in California, he’s relocated to Las Vegas, NV, where business is also slow, but he’s keeping busy working on IP-DOS, getting the website back up and then getting some temporary work.

About half of the email, as described above, was useful and informative– he did clear up questions about his name and email address, including clarification on the website itself and IP-DOS (although, I’m still not exactly sure what kind of software it really is). The second half of the email though started with a somewhat lengthy and detailed description of his personal living situation, the part I call the “pity party.” By no means do I think the life of a day laborer is easy and I know that everyday, especially in Silicon Valley, that type of work is devalued in favor of information workers and those jobs are constantly disappearing. However, he made a choice to work as a part-time day laborer, living out of that truck– he explains in his YouTube interview that he started working with computers as early as 1974 and experienced the exciting boom in personal computing of the mid-80′s to the early 90′s. Maybe he didn’t mean for it to sound that way or for that purpose, but it sure came off as fishing for pity, going on about his old computer, failing monitor, broken data cable and cheap keyboard with a faulty “5″ key.

But, the thing that really bothered me in the end was how he ended his email:

Skepticism regarding legitimacy of anything new is healthy, up to a point. But you people in the United States are immobilized by excessive skepticism. This project is totally “out in the open” and I’ve done everything that I can think of to eliminate any basis for suspicion. The bottom line is that if I can’t get you people to take a serious look at this project, get beyond your skepticism, and get involved, then the project will fail. I cannot do this alone… Your first blog article was one of ten zillion responses voicing skepticism and encouraging people to DO NOTHING. Why not be different? Why not break the pattern? Be bold and tell your readers that maybe, just maybe, this project is legit and that it is an opportunity to DO SOMETHING.

For most of you, your skepticism is comfortable because it provides you with just the excuse you need to continue to DO NOTHING. You like that because you are indeed a selfish people.

Anything that includes use of the phrase “you people” starts to sound like a rant and makes it hard (at least for me) to take it seriously. And after having taken down the old sign because it was “accusatory,” those last comments sound like a well-practiced speech full of accusations. Nevertheless, while my original blog post did voice my skepticism, I consider it more of a critical look at something that was being advertised to me very publicly, very often. Interestingly, I asked many of my friends about the truck/sign and almost all of them said they had seen and wondered about it, but had never looked into it. If anything, I did bother to look into this project, to take a “serious look” at whatever materials were available and in the end, questioned whether this project was “legit.” I voiced my opinion, which I think I’m entitled to after having done what research I could, and while I voiced skepticism, I don’t think I encouraged anybody to “do nothing.” I close my original post with the words: “[S]o if you see this truck around the Bay Area, now you know a little bit more. Judge for yourself!” At the end of the day, I certainly don’t think IdeaFarm is the only remedy for selfishness and I’m not sure what necessary connection there is between skepticism and complacency– or in Wo’O Ideafarm’s words, comfort “because it provides you with just the excuse you need to continue to DO NOTHING.”

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll stop here and say again, “Judge for yourself!” In fact, I think a better argument for IdeaFarm is presented in the YouTube interview (filmed about a year ago), so check it out:

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Here’s a random story: I saw these on sale at a local drug store and it made me think of two things: first, I found the use of the word “ginormous” as part of an actual product name amusing– my friends and I were using it often and liberally circa 1999, long before it was included in the dictionary. (Merriam-Webster claims that the word actually dates back to 1948 as British military slang.)

The second, more interesting thing I thought of was that, of course, the “Ginormous Googly Ball” is really a giant version of the 80′s hit, the Koosh Ball. Koosh balls are a little special to me because the son of the inventor of the original Koosh Ball lived in my freshmen dorm. The rumor was that if you were at his house and he was so inclined, his father, Scott Stillinger, would actually take you out to the garage and make you a classic Koosh ball with the original equipment, straight from the inventor’s own hands!

I never really knew his son well and didn’t get the chance to get my very own hand-crafted Koosh ball, but it’s moments and memories like these that make me glad I went to Stanford– there are few universities out there where you can meet such unique people and have such random experiences!

I see this truck almost everyday, parked in various locations along El Camino as I drive from Palo Alto to Mountain View. (I’ve always wanted to take a picture of it, but have never had the chance to, so, even though I have no idea who you are, thanks cjanebuy for posting a pic onto Flickr.) The combination of the self-lettering, the accusatory nature of the phrase/motto of “THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM IS THAT YOU HAVE BECOME A SELFISH PEOPLE, and the strategy here for marketing their message by parking these trucks all over the area and inviting passersby to “come and eat with us” to find out more has all the trappings of a cult, of some type of weird group of fanatics of something. (Not to mention that all interactions are done “anonymously,” participants using only first names.)

I finally bothered to visit the website– www.ideafarm.com– and while I don’t think it’s a cult like The Family International– but it’s definitely an enigma (they also depict IdeaFarm as “IdeaFarm City,” trademarked, of course, and a federal constitutional protectorate of the US.) It’s very Silicon Valley– the “civil and political project funded by the sale of software products and services,” such as the IdeaFarm ™ Piggyback Distributed Operating System (I, like you probably, have never head of this and have no idea of the pros/cons of this OS).

The mission of the project is to “[P]romote unselfish living by creating a compelling economic incentive to live wholesomely connected to other people, to the Earth, and to one’s Higher Power.” The main way to do this is through a yet-to-be-released “zero spam, zero advertisement, zero thought steering, secure email service.” Participants in this project are divided into two groups– the first, composed of non-members, agrees to a) “sign a public declaration of intent to live unselfishly” and b) participate anonymously in weekly community dinners. If you decide to become an actual member, you move up and become part of the second group who agrees to a) “participate regularly in the weekly community dinners,” b) “loan $8 to the organizer for 64 days, and c) pay 1 cent per day.” In turn, you apparently get “nifty” IdeaFarm software products and services plus richer access to the website.

In any case, reviewing the website and information, a few things to note that might raise red flags for you:

• For an organization with unselfish living at its core, it is still a “private, for profit entity” and the “owner can dispose of revenue as he sees fit.”
• The “owner” or “leader” of the organization is never mentioned or known by his name (not even his first name)– he is only referred to as the “Governing Propietor.” While anonymity is central to their interactions, disclosing the leader’s name (at least first name) seems like an acceptable exception, especially to lend credibility to the whole thing since they claim he is a “libertarian student of political economy, a product of the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Chicago.”
• A stratified system of participation and membership, largely based on financial contributions– Scientology anyone?* To be fair, they do assert that they are not asking for nor will they accept donations– financial contributions are considered “loans.”
• Discussion of IdeaFarm and the website will only be done via email.
• They’re using a yahoo email address. Weak.

Anyway, so if you see this truck around the Bay Area, now you know a little bit more. Judge for yourself!

* PS to the Scientology folks: please don’t sue me.

However, the most interesting thing I learned about was the site myfreeimplants.com. Cosmetic surgery financing at its finest, the site basically pairs up women who want to get breast implants with men who are willing to “donate” money to their cause.

Only in America. You’ve got to love a free market.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to next week’s episode My Big Breasts and Me.

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3. Amusing Google search

After reading about hiccups in Wikipedia, I probably know more than I should ever know about hiccups, but here are a few interesting tidbits:

• In 1988, Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine published his research on “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage.” In 2006, he was one of the recipients of the Ig Nobel for medicine for his research. Aside from being “research that makes people laugh and then think,” as the Ig Nobel folks say, the additional interesting thing about this is that there’s an episode of House where a patient who claims to be suffering from hiccups, after being told they will go away on their own, requests a specific treatment/cure that he read about, one that some guy one a prize for. Later, House throws the patient’s file on the counter, telling the nurse to make a note about “drug-seeking behavior.” Dr. Cuddy asks, “Morphine?” House answers, “No, anal-digital stimulation.”
• As recounted by my friend during our hiccups discussion, Charles Osborne, after slaughtering or weighing a hog (I’ve found conflicting reports on what he was actually doing, but it definitely involved a hog), suffered from hiccups continuously for 68 years, from 1922 to 1990. (He obviously holds the Guinness World Record for “Longest Attack of Hiccups.”) Contrary to what we thought earlier– that he had hiccups all the way until his death– his hiccups actually mysteriously disappeared on their own in 1990, a year before he passed away. Nevertheless, he still managed to live to the ripe old age of 97, marrying at least more than once and fathering several children.

Check out this interview of a girl who had hiccups for five weeks (the video shows her after about three weeks in):

• Confessions of a College Callgirl. I think the appeal here is self-explanatory, but particularly interesting tidbits lately: Blowjob Tutorial (try comparing notes to what’s in Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man), The Number is Eight, It Happened to Me!, and Workin’ for the Weekend. There usually isn’t art along with the posts that make it obviously NSFW, for tread carefully.
• David Byrne Journal. Aside from the awesomeness of Talking Heads and his continued work as a very talented musician (like being on the composing team that won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1988 for The Last Emperor), he’s a talented and accomplished writer as well. His blog is both interesting and entertaining; the first post I read when I discovered it– Social “Hateworking”, IKEA– got me to subscribe right away.
• Overhead in New York. One of many “Overhead in…” sites (linked to from the NY site), but being a New York-er, this one appeals to and entertains me the most. Overheard in the Office is a pretty good second.
• Stephen Fry. There are so many reasons to love Stephen Fry, including his role as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster (probably the best screen adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories), A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Blackadder (I know there’s an association-with-Hugh Laurie theme here). He’s only been blogging for a few months, but I love the way he writes (reflected well on screen in A Bit of Fry & Laurie) and he’s been blogging regularly since being asked to write a weekly tech column for The Guardian. He knows his tech, among many other things, and both techie and fuzzy can appreciate his posts. Check out his first column post, “Welcome to Dork Talk”, his hilarious review of smartphones, and his very well-written post on botnets.

Check ‘em out. (As if you didn’t already have RSS feeds to get through everyday.)

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1. clippy blog
2. Blog prison
3. Not everyone sees the beauty of the blog

I don’t think I’m breaking any rules by sharing some of these case study examples since they are real world examples of sexual harassment litigation, so here’s a little sampling so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about:

One word: priapism. If you don’t know what this word means, you should learn, especially if you’re a guy, and then check out the 2006 case Arrieta-Colon v. Wal-Mart. Props to Arrieta-Colon in winning the case, but talk about awkward.

That may be sexual harassment, but more importantly, it’s sexual assault. There were one or two examples where one co-worker (usually male) continually made unwanted romantic/sexual advances towards a co-worker (usually female)– advances that weren’t just repeated requests for a date or inappropriate comments, but extended to groping, touching, and more. (Specifically, check out the 2006 case Howard v. Winter as one example.) While admittedly there are serious sexual harassment issues, what about the sexual assault? This type of behavior is illegal not only in terms of creating a hostile work environment, but also because it’s a crime. I don’t know about you, but sexual assault trumps sexual harassment.

Spanking. And lots of it. WTF? There were multiple examples of spanking somehow being introduced into the workplace as a sometimes valid, sometimes invalid form of punishment. Check out the 2002 case Yerry v. Pizza Hut of Southeast Kansas. If someone seriously suggested to me to physically hit or be hit, much less spank or be spanked, as a way to punish someone in the workplace, I think my head would explode. And yet, somehow people involved in such cases went along with this treatment. It’s amazing what people don’t understand about their rights, will put up with to keep their jobs or do to avoid confrontation.

And with that, a little video to lighten the mood:

Related posts:

1. links for 2006-04-13
2. Lame cop-outs

Maybe this is how you get a palace with a phallus.

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1. marinaluz.net

This is about as much as I can show you of the art exhibit we dropped by during lunch yesterday. A series of oil paintings of an Asian-American woman having sex with various American presidents (and we’re talking like George Washington, not Bill Clinton). As one of my coworkers said, “She can paint, for sure.”

View “Join or Die,” by Justine Lai. and read her statement about the paintings. Also, read the Stanford Daily article about the exhibit.

UPDATED 8.29.2009: from reading her statement, I discovered that the woman in the paintings is actually herself!

Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling – washingtonpost.com

This article is from back in July, but it’s a very interesting read about some studies that have been looking at how much women negotiate (such as for salary or promotions) versus men and how women and men who neogitate are perceived by others. In the first set of studies, Professor of Economics Linda C. Babcock from Carnegie Melon (one of my alma maters) looked at, in both experimental and real world settings, how often women negotiated versus men– the not very surprising answer (at least to me) was than men negotiate significantly more than women do, even in experiments where subjects were explicitly told they could negotiate for higher compensation for their participation. In another set of studies, Babcock teamed up with Hannah Riley Bowles from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to look at how men and women who negotiated were perceived by others. These studies found that the women were often considered “less nice,” less desirable to work with, and, in general, penalized if they chose to negotiate; men were less likely to be penalized, if at all. This was the case for both men and women observers (*sigh* the sisterhood has failed us again).

Traditional explanations for this disparity include long-held ideas that men are naturally more aggressive and that, whether its nature or nurture, women are less assertive. However, the second study sheds light on other motivators for the gender disparity. It shows that women’s tendency to NOT negotiate is a direct response to negative feedback in the social environment– there are real social risks for negotiating and women take them into serious consideration when choosing whether to negotiate. I, or any other woman, might say, “How important is this raise or promotion?” Women must assess the risk being taken simply by asking (never mind the probability of actually getting the raise or promotion). In fact, regardless of how successful a negotiation is, women know that they will ultimately pay a price for choosing to negotiate at all.

In the end, these studies give us a new way, a stepping stone to determine what’s behind and ultimately find a solution to close the salary gap, remove the double-standard for acceptable behavior, and, hopefully achieve greater equality overall.

Read the full article for more details on how the studies were conducted and their results.

* Note: social class is often ignored in many of these types of studies because we make the unfortunate assumption, consciously or not, that all members of certain racial/ethnic groups automatically belong to certain social classes. On one hand, given our nation’s history, social class still tends to correlate highly with racial/ethnic background, tempting to take the high correlation as reason enough to roll up social class with race/ethnicity. Not only is that racist and prejudiced at heart, but it is poor scientific work by unfairly trying to simplify the resulting complexities that result when all these variables– race, ethnicity, gender, and social class– come together.

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1. Geek Girls, Part 2
2. Living in Oblivion
3. World AIDS Day

Okay, so it’s more about typography and graphic design, but still. And of course, I’ll watch it when it comes out on DVD (Tuesday, November 20).

Related posts:

1. links for 2007-09-26

I assume they found me by stumbling on my 2005 blog posts on the topic (part 1 and the very brief part 2), but I’m not quite sure of the path they took to find the posts since, unlike some Google searches, I don’t show up as one of the top results for “double eyelid surgery” or “Asian blepharoplasty.”

In any case, while Montel is one of the more respectable daytime talk shows, it sounds like I would basically be going on the show to tell this woman that I think what she’s already done to herself is wrong. And to be honest, while I am against this desire among some Asian people to try to, as the folks at Montel say, “erase their race” and look more westernized, this desire to deny one’s own heritage, and (for the most part) purely elective plastic surgery in general, at the end of the day, like most things, I don’t feel so strongly about it that I expect other people to replace their own judgement and choices with mine. While I may not make the same choices, your body is yours and, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you are free to do with it as you wish. If you think double eyelid surgery or breast implants or liposuction will make you happy and you really want to do it, you should do it.

So, given all that, one of the things I’m really against is staged conflict (I have enough problems without having to create drama) and that is exactly what most daytime talk shows and going on Montel would be. Sorry America, I won’t be launching my talk show career just yet.

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1. The case of the double eyelid
2. The case of the double eyelid, part 2
3. Geek Girls, Part 2

It’s gone now.

Seven days, three posts. I’m over it, as expected. You don’t need to know what I’m doing all the time, mostly because either a) it’s not that exciting or b) it is exciting and if I wanted you to know about it, I’d tell you.

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1. Book piles
2. Comic book heroes and history

For me however, aside from the clever movie promotion, the reason I’m writing about this is not because I’m necessarily a big fan of The Simpsons– I think it’s a funny show and I watched it pretty regularly at some point, but I really don’t get the cult-like devotion (including how everybody would grab their dinner and rush to watch the reruns in the lounge during college) and frenzied anticipation surrounding the movie. Instead, when discussing the news in the office this week (a particular coworker is our in-house Simpsons devotee and expert, often taking any and all opportunities to relate real life situations, work-related or otherwise, to Simpsons episodes), a coworker (not the same one) told a hilarious story that, on his behalf, I just had to blog (hopefully, I’m summarizing relatively accurately):

On Monday, he got a call from “Brooke” from ABC 7; she left a message, asking him to please call her back at 415… So, naturally curious, he called back and she said she was calling about the Kwik-E-Mart promotion. He was obviously confused, but then realized she was trying to call a 7-Eleven in Mountain View when she asked, “Is this the 7-Eleven on Pear Road?” He said, “No, this is a private residence,” and that was that, but the hilarious coincidence– or not– is that he is, in fact, Indian! And he has, in fact, gotten a “wrong number” call at least once before for 7-Eleven!

I did some digging around– online and offline– and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how they thought his phone number was the number for the 7-Eleven on Pear Avenue. Aside from the fact that the numbers aren’t actually similar in any way and the phonebook, online and offline, doesn’t even list the number for that store (which is weird in and of itself– Google simply lists it as (650) 555-5555), the way to find the correct contact info for the store is easy enough: first, the 7-Eleven website lists the new Kwik-E-Mart locations, including the San Francisco/Mountain View store. I don’t know why, but while the address is listed, the phone number isn’t. However, the 7-Eleven website does have, like most retail company sites, a “store locator” feature and if you search for the closest store near Pear Avenue in Mountain View, CA, you get the correct contact info, including phone number.

So, hilarious coincidence or is someone out there picking Indian surnames out of the phonebook in search of Apu?

(And no, my coworker’s name isn’t Apu.)

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I grabbed lunch yesterday at the Village Cheese House, one of the few great delis around here (at least from an East Coast-ers perspective). They always have a great, eclectic variety of stuff (and manage to do it without seeming snobbish or condescending)– they make their own candy canes from scratch during the holiday season, they’ve got candy and chocolates from around the world (from gourmet European chocolates to fruit-flavored Japanese goodies) and they stock their shelves with a rotating selection of unique beverages.

I’m not just talking about stocking their shelves with stuff that aren’t “brand name” or “corporate” in the way places like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods like to do– instead, I’m talking about Dr. Pepper in glass bottles with old-fashioned labeling; even good ol’ Vernor’s Ginger Ale in glass bottles with labeling/packaging I haven’t seen anywhere else (and as an aside, why don’t more people in this world love ginger ale?). It’s where I found Jolt Silver (and unfortunately, never saw it there or anywhere else ever again).

In any case, my latest find was this bottle of “Leninade,” boasted as having “a taste worth standing in line for” and the bottle itself is stamped with the phrase “the Party wants you.” I bought it for a friend who I thought would appreciate the humor, so I don’t know what it tastes like– I’m sure nothing particularly unique, but I’m sure there’s a pinko lemonade joke in there somewhere.

Go to: Leninade Dot Communist! website.

Found this waiting on my chair in my office this morning when I got in. There are so many things wrong with this that I can’t even begin to get into it. All I have to say is, as Lil’ Romeo says, “Stay in school.”

Go to: Rap Snacks website.

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1. Racist snack foods

I mention Virginia Tech because, as I said, for months I had waited for retaliation against Korean and Asian Americans in general. People lashing out against anyone that looked like the person who was responsible for the deep pain caused by the senseless shooting of those thirty-two young people. Perhaps because it was not a racially motivated attack, perhaps because the press and pundits were more preoccupied with the gun debate, there didn’t seem to be any coverage of any racial profiling or backlash. But just a couple of weeks ago over graduation weekend, my mother asked casually whether anybody had said anything to me about it. I said no, but she said that the day after the shootings, my father had gone into work and his coworkers had asked jokingly, “Mr. Lee, do you have any guns?” My father’s coworkers joke with him often and when I hear the stories, sometimes I feel like they’re laughing at him more than with him. My mother also said that Korean restaurants in the New York City/northern New Jersey area, whose customers had been about forty percent non-Korean, were empty for weeks after the shootings. Perhaps because I live in the Bay Area, I wasn’t targeted, whether it was dirty looks, dirty words, or dirty acts. So, I guess there was backlash, but it was quiet, almost silent, or in the form of jokes that we smile and accept and let roll off our back. We are, after all, the model minority.

More recently, the Azia Kim story has been getting a lot of press, even nationally– if you haven’t heard, it’s the story of a young woman who had managed to pass herself off as a Stanford student since this past September, squatting in Stanford dorms (using a difficult roommate situation as a cover story to ask to temporarily share a room with some other students) and, in turn, using her alleged Stanford enrollment to take ROTC classes and money at nearby Santa Clara University (since Stanford has not had an ROTC program since the 1960′s). Aside from all of the fallout around how did this student get past all of Stanford’s administrative systems and infrastructure, how did students and residential staff not discover the truth until almost three weeks until the end of the school year (ironically, the ruse began to fall apart when one of the dorms she was staying in was putting together their yearbook), when the issue is discussed, people always point out to me the fact that Kim is Korean American. As the story continues to unfold, many believe that much of Kim’s motivations were fueled by her parents’ expectations to attend a top-tier, prestigious college. It fits so neatly into the Asian American stereotype of filial piety, parental pressures, and emphasis on education– and Ivy League-caliber education at that– and her behavior to fulfill that stereotype shatters the model minority myth all at the same time.

And in the same week, another impostor was caught– also an Asian American, but Japanese this time. Elizabeth Okazaki was found to have no Stanford affiliation, despite attending graduate physics seminars and using offices reserved for doctoral and post-doctoral students at Stanford’s Varian Physics Labs. She’s been banned from campus, but there are no reports yet on what her exact motivations were– stereotypical or otherwise.

Back in January, when Chinese American doctoral student Mengyao “May” Zhou went missing, understandably, nobody wanted to consider depression or suicide. Of course, we all hoped she would be okay. When the body was found, everyone was shocked at what seemed like an apparent suicide. Even now, despite toxicology results, family and students still find it difficult to believe her death was a suicide. So much social stigma surrounds depression and suicide in much of Asian culture. A recent study looks at the high rate of suicide in Asian American women, highlighting the link between cultural stress and suicide. We, Asian Americans, are so insular, and women, in particular, are taught so often to hold in our pain. It’s that “quiet inner strength” that we hold up as something to admire, but that slowly kills many of us. In my own family, I hear bits and pieces of someone, of a story of suicide, but I can never get the whole truth, I never dare ask. To think that we might need antidepressants, to think that we just need help– more help than our family can provide– is unthinkable.

Don’t look now, but from the inside, from the outside, I think that model minority myth is cracking, if it hasn’t shattered already. I wouldn’t worry too much– I never really believed in it anyway.

Related posts:

1. In mourning
2. Story #1: On Being Korean

I picked this up at the only place I’ve seen it sold (the friendly local gas station down the street) because I heard it’s finally being pulled off the shelf and being redistributed under a new name. Apparently, the FDA considered the energy drink illegal because a) it is being marketed as a “legal alternative” to the illegal street drug (as you can see if you can make out the tag line on the can in the photo) and b) the company claims that it treats or cures disease. When I last checked the website (a few weeks ago, before they pulled the product from the shelves), there were actually a few disclaimers related to both of the above statements– that the drink doesn’t contain any illegal substances, isn’t really an alternative to any illegal substances (and who cares if it really is– is that really illegal?), and doesn’t treat or cure disease, the last point most energy drink marketing materials point out for themselves.

In any case, being a good sport, Redux, the company behind the energy drink, is rebranding the drink with the new name “Censored.” Ha!

If anyone remembers, Cocaine got some attention a while back from a spot on The Daily Show because of the name controversy (if anybody knows where I can get a clip of the spot, please let me know). In the end, it seemed like the worst thing about the drink wasn’t the name or the marketing message, but the taste itself. And after having tried it today, I can say it does taste pretty bad– it tastes like some combination of overly sweet energy drink and cough syrup and goes down with a frightening burning sensation that is probably similar to the way real cocaine burns away your sinus cavities. Yum.

Of course, all this ridiculous hype fails to mention how the original Coca-Cola formula contained stimulants from coca leaves because the original recipe was a cocawine, a mixture of wine and cocaine. How’s that for ya?

Read: Banned ‘Cocaine’ energy drink re-emerges as ‘Censored’

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And it looks like I wasn’t the only one to think it. Read: Spock.com is full of misogynists and Spock’s frat-greek humor.

And most importantly, I always find myself smiling when I read Vonnegut. He was snarky before we knew what to call it.

The NY Times article says how some dismissed him as a “comic book philosopher.” Well, if that’s not the voice of a great American novelist, I don’t know what is.

Check out this post from September 2005 about when he was on the Daily Show. Video clip included.

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1. Vonnegut

This was pointed out by, in his usual high-performing fashion, our new sysadmin from work, along with the broken comment posting on my blog. And here I thought I was just unpopular. (Of course, I may still be unpopular, but now I can’t blame it on an Internal Server Error.)

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1. Zimbardo on The Daily Show, Viacom vs. YouTube
2. The code word is “Bahamas”

Like E.F., there are a lot of common things out in there in the world that we’re all aware of, but don’t have real words or phrases to capture them with so we can refer to them in our daily conversations. The Meaning of Liff, aside from being terribly amusing, manages to capture a lot of those things, whether the word be adjective, verb or noun, made-up or real:

AINDERBY STEEPLE (n.)
One who asks you a question with the apparent motive of wanting to hear your answer, but who cuts short your opening sentence by leaning forward and saying ‘and I’ll tell you why I ask…’ and then talking solidly for the next hour.

BODMIN (n.)
The irrational and inevitable discrepancy between the amount pooled and the amount needed when a large group of people try to pay a bill together after a meal.

YARMOUTH (vb.)
To shout at foreigners in the belief that the louder you speak, the better they’ll understand you.

For the American reader, it may feel a little strange– the book was written by two Brits, Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame) and John Lloyd (who also worked on parts of the radio series of The Guide and produced all four Blackadder series, another favorite of mine), and its contents have a markedly British tone. (Of course, I opted for the authentic UK edition, shiny and new, shipped over from the UK.)

In any case, for those who love words, even made up ones, and being able to sum up the daily idiosyncrasies of life, you should take a look.

Get a random meaning of Liff

*And as my co-worker said of Jack Tripper, “he had such a 70′s f*cking haircut, I just wanted to punch him in the face.” (No offense to John Ritter, God rest his soul. Despite probably being best-known for playing Jack Tripper, he did a lot of other work that I thought was much better and certainly induced less E.F.)

There are more stories coming.

Related posts:

1. Story #1: On Being Korean

There could be a lot of answers to this question. Do you want to know where my parents immigrated from when they flew into JFK over thirty years ago to make a new life? The answer is South Korea, Seoul to be specific. But where is my family really from? Korea. There was no North or South when my parents were born and while the political status may have changed many times over the course of the life they lived before they stepped foot in America, they are from everywhere– from the north, from the south, from the countryside, from the city. They are from the Land of Morning Calm.

I don’t want to say the North-South question offends me, but it does bother me because it reflects a fundamental ignorance of the situation and the Korean experience and outlook. First, if you’re a Korean in America, you or your family immigrated from South Korea. Nobody immigrates from North Korea. You defect from North Korea and you’ll be hard pressed to find anybody who has successfully. Or you’re a Korean national visiting the States, which most likely makes you a South Korean national. There aren’t many North Koreans vacationing or going to school in the US.

But more importantly, these North-South distinctions are just political ones, just words that remind us of an over fifty-years old war that still continues to this day. But some say that with such a deep division, the rapid development of such different political and socioeconomic states, especially with the isolation and cult of personality built in the North, is it really just a political distinction anymore? Haven’t two contemporary cultures developed that only make the divide even greater? Can you really call yourselves one people anymore?

My answer is yes. Koreans share a much longer history and commonality than our recent history in the international arena belies. A fifty year divide that is the “tragic consequence of superpower rivalry at end of World War II” cannot wipe out hundreds of years of history, culture, family. And this recent history is the history of all Koreans, no matter which side you are on. It is the struggle and the suffering of the Korean people as a whole around the world. Han. Those are still our brothers we look out across the DMZ, both literally and figuratively. We are one people and we still hope for reunification into our one true nation. Han nara.

So at the end of the day, am I North or South Korean? I’m just Korean. To be exact, I’m Korean American, American born.

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1. Opening Borders – Part 2
2. Koreans, Koreans everywhere, everywhere the Koreans
3. In mourning

marinaluz.net

She’s the one who made me my lovely sea turtles along with a number of other pieces of photography and artwork around my house and office.

Bits and pieces of her portfolio are up there on her site and although photo is kind of her thing, there’s stuff in drawing, sculpture, and even letterpress and design. Very cool. Check it out. I love her.

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1. Glamour shots

I wore a t-shirt today into the office that featured the Playboy bunny logo in gold. Putting it on in the morning, I certainly realized that it might a bit controversial, a bit eyebrow raising. But I work at a pretty liberal University and specifically, a pretty casual office at that, so aside from the wearing t-shirt and jeans non-issue, I kind of vaguely wondered if people would make an issue out of the shirt. The worst I expected was some ultra-feminist woman to make some snide comment about how magazines like Playboy objectify women. To which, I would probably respond something about how women have got much bigger problems and enemies than Playboy and the like and, if anything, we should thank Mr. Hefner and his magazine for helping to protect and exercise the First Amendment so well. There are certainly those who are supposedly in higher brow businesses, but are much more interested in and better at keeping women down– and many of them are women themselves– keeping us under glass ceilings and telling us what we can and cannot do with our bodies.

In any case, back to my day at the office: truth be told, I usually keep a jacket or something on for most of the day since the office is usually cold, so I didn’t expect many people to see the shirt anyway. During the short time I did have my jacket off, I did get a few quick looks and comments– the director of our department (a woman) did a quick double-take and I got out of the way before she could say something, good or bad. A co-worker said he liked the shirt. My boss first merely noted that I was wearing a shirt with the Playboy bunny on it and then asked the question, part-jokingly, part-rhetorically, “is that appropriate in the modern workplace?”

The interesting thing is that no one is really sure. I probably wouldn’t have worn it in any other office setting, but in this one, I thought I could probably get away with it. But what am I really getting away with it? What is so threatening about it? Is it because the bunny symbolizes “adult entertainment?” Is it because it refers to a very famous, very specific adult entertainment franchise that people might have strong feelings about, for or against? What if a man were to wear a t-shirt from a no-name strip bar– would that cause the same kind of uneasiness? Is the mere presence of the bunny a form a sexual harassment? Is the mere presence of something that is non-sexual in itself, but that is linked to something sexual considered the automatic creating of an uncomfortable work environment? Have we really become that sensitive and paranoid?

Well, I haven’t heard anything from anyone yet, so perhaps I’ve gotten through a day without causing too much of a controversy. Maybe the fact that I was a woman wearing a t-shirt with a Playboy symbol over some big boobs was just a little too weird. What could they say? “Some women feel threatened by the bunny symbol on your very large chest.” Right.

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Is it just me or is it bizarre that a product with a racial slur right there in the name exists in the world? For some reason, I had never heard of Cheese Nips until I moved out to California almost 10 years ago now and the first time somebody mentioned them, I thought he was joking. But no, they’re quite real. I mean, is it that people just don’t realize that “Nip” is a racial slur referring to Japanese people? Is it that people just forgot that Japan is also called Nippon and that “Nip” is just like the more familiar “Jap?”

I know it’s kind of funny and it’s all about context and as battles go, this isn’t at the top of the priority list I’m not saying we should boycott all Kraft products (although I personally refuse to buy them and prefer to go for Cheese-Its) or launch a protest, but it still amazes me that in this day and age, with how politically correct we’ve all tried to become, a company would so brazenly continue to use this product name. I mean, there aren’t any snack foods with “nigger” or “beaner” or “spic” in the name, are there? And if somebody did try to name a product something like that, you know that there would be a huge outcry. We (Asian Americans) might be a model minority, but we’re also too often a silent minority. Maybe if they come out with rice cakes called “Chink Cakes,” we’ll be forced to say something.

(As an aside, here’s a weird thing I found: Racial Slurs Database. Interestingly enough, “Cheese Nip” is actually listed there for a person of White and Japanese descent.)

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1. The case of the double eyelid
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In my weeks of illness and lack of sleep lately, I’ve noticed that my eyes have been doing some weird things– specifically, one or sometimes both of them will develop a “double eyelid.” It’s not really consistent and it will stay sometimes for a few hours or a few days and it will switch between eyes, but it’s definitely weird.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the reduced prominence of the Epicanthal fold, the fold of skin that covers the inner corner of the eye, as well as development of an eyelid crease, both of which make Asian people (among others) have “slanted” eyes (although the palpebral slant– the angle of the eye itself– is yet another separate factor or trait). I’ve had this on and off thing as far as I can remember, but it’s never stayed around as long as it has lately. I’ve kind of grown to expect it considering my dad actually only has the fold in one eye and it’s always been like that. Strange, no?

When I was younger, I, like many Asian women and probably men too, wished that I had a double eyelid to make my eyes bigger– that is, look more “American.” You know, basically more “white.” I remember my first little boyfriend in eigth grade (who was as white as they came) pointed out once how he was fascinated by my almond shaped eyes. Can you imagine? You just moved to a new school and you’re one of the handful of Asian students in the whole school and this is what your first boyfriend says to you? And for the longest time, half jokingly, half serious , everytime my brother and I would pose for a picture, we would say, “open your eyes as wide you can!” to avoid looking chinky in photographs. If you ever take a look at our family photographs, you’ll see we’ve taken a lot of photos with our sunglasses on.

It’s a huge complex that Asian people have. And that’s why so many Asian people, mostly women, have gotten Asian blepharoplasty– plastic surgery to create the crease in the eyelid. Isn’t that horrible? How desperately we’re trying to look more “American?” I suppose its the same as someone getting a nose job or liposuction to fit into some idealized American standard of beauty. But unnecessary plastic surgery (as in anything other than reconstructive surgery) has always made me a little uneasy and certainly so when it’s part of some weird cultural and racial inferiority complex. People will pay something between $3000 and $5000 dollars for the surgery and frankly, a bad one will make you look like a fish. Do they think everyone won’t notice when it’s done? With liposuction, it’s plausible that you actually lost the weight.

And somewhere in the time that blepharoplasty became increasingly popular is when I finally accepted, even among some Asian teens I knew that were way too young to be getting any type of plastic surgery, that this is the way my eyes look and this is the way I look. I’m Korean, I’m Asian, and nothing I will do will change that, so why obsess? And of course, years later now when I least expect it, I’ve started to develop some phantom double eyelid that passes unexpected in and out of my life. Well, at least I saved myself a few thousand dollars and maybe putting on eye makeup will get a lot easier.

I love Kurt Vonnegut and here’s another example of why I love him.

The best part of this? Vonnegut’s commentary on how good America is at democracy– after 100 years, you have to let your slaves go. After 150 years, you have to let your women vote, etc.

Just as Jon Stewart says about his own life, Vonnegut’s book helped make adolescence just that much more bearable. I’d rather forget the person who introduced me to Vonnegut, but I’ll never forget Vonnegut and his books. I absorbed his books throughout high school and have probably read almost everything he’s ever published. He introduced me to satire and black humor and that you could somehow find a balance between science and religion and that you could find fault with man to the point of utter disappointment and pessimism and yet still be a humanist.

I just picked up his newest book A Man without a Country. More hilarious insight ensues.

Related posts:

1. Book piles
2. Books
3. Books, Part 2

I am often reminded of this, but it’s particularly driven home when I talk to people who grew up in California or who have lived in California for much longer time than I have (it’s been about eight years now). Nobody’s burning a cross on my lawn, but the little barbs, the comments, the questions– they happen more often than you might think. For example: yeah, you know, being part of interracial couple is not as easy as you might think, even in California. Oh, and don’t even get me started on assumptions about Asian fetishes. Is it possible that someone might be interested in someone for who they are, not what they are? Yes, thank you, our children would be beautiful, but some bizarre breeding goal is not the reason we’re together. Oh, and where am I from? Uh, New York. No, you mean “originally?” Uh, the Bronx? Oh, I see, you weren’t looking for “New York” or anything else within the US or the Western Hemisphere for that matter as an answer. And no, I’m not Chinese or Japanese. You realize that there are other Asian countries out there, right? And no, I’m not the same person as my Asian female coworker. If you’re so politically correct and culturally sensitive, why can’t you tell us apart? And yes, I keep up with the news on North Korea, but no, I don’t have some special “inside information” nor am I responsible for what that crazy fuck is doing there. Or how about this one: “oh, well, you had help getting into Stanford because you’re Asian.” Yeah, because at nearly at 25% Asian American undergraduate enrollment, they’re really looking to accept more of us even if we’re unqualified. You know, because that’s how affirmative action works.

For many people, these anecdotes may not be very surprising and you’ll write them off as the everyday experiences of being a person of color in this country. But often, when I discuss it with people who have grown up or lived in California for a significant period of time, they are surprised and to some extent, don’t actually believe me. The even weirder part of this is that it’s not just white males that have this response– I often meet people of color here who have these reactions. Everyone seems so surprised that there is still intolerance in this world, or at least that there is still intolerance in California, this “great melting pot” of a state.

Then why is it that materials like these could be produced so high up in the 49ers organization– you’ll take six million dollars from a Chinese-American for your stadium, but you’ll turn around and portray an Asian man as buck-toothed and speaking in broken English (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, anyone?) in your media training tapes? Or two Asian police officers only have to pay a $250 fine after clubbing and pepper spraying a 59-year-old black man?

I don’t know if it’s just an overgrown sense of political correctness, but when faced with a racially-charged situation, I find people desperately trying to find some other explanation. Now, I hate it when people play the “race card” unnecessarily, diminishing the credibility of true accounts of racism and prejudice, but sometimes, when it’s staring at you in the face, you should call a spade a spade (no pun intended). To not do this, to not confront it is to say that these episodes aren’t important, to say that people’s feelings about these issues aren’t important. As human beings, we’re the same, but we’re also different: history has shown us that the fact that you’re white, he’s black, she’s brown, and I’m yellow surely affects the way we interact with each other, for better or worse. Saying that race or ethnicity doesn’t play a factor in certain situations when they clearly do or even saying that it is an issue, but that we should “rise above it” or “ignore it” or “not focus on that” only perpetuates the cycle of intolerance and feeds our complacency.

I finally got home a few hours ago and I’m look through my news headlines to find this:

Racial Switch Halts ‘Huck Finn’ Production

Have race relations really become this absurd in this country? For that matter, has copyright really become this absurd in this country?

My friend Marina finally finished the lovely piece of artwork shown here in my own little private dining room exhibit. The photos don’t do it justice, especially since I’m using my simple point-and-shoot DiMage and I couldn’t get the lighting to quite work out the way it should. Nevertheless, to take a closer look, check out the closeups of the whole piece, the left-hand panel and the right-hand panel.

All that aside, after fiddling with Yahoo! 360 for all of ten minutes, it looks pretty feature rich to me (although they also don’t let you just point to your own RSS feed instead of using their blogging tool– they say it’s “coming soon”) and offers some nice privacy settings support that provides some comfort and peace of mind. Also, it’s got way better/cleaner/more professional design and since it’s not even one month old, it doesn’t seem to have the sketchiness that has become MySpace. Although I’m not sure that’s a good or bad thing. I would almost want to suggest that my friends get onto 360 as a less sketchy and more professional looking alternative to MySpace, but I don’t think that either of those things would appeal to most of my friends. They, like most people, like MySpace (and the net in general) to be where they can be a little dirty, a little less professional, and free to create some of the most difficult to read, annoying to load, multmedia rich content-filled Web pages to serve as their presence on the World Wide Web. And that, my friends, is called serendipity.

Related posts:

1. Social networks

This is what it feels like sometimes on MySpace.

I signed up for a MySpace account a while ago because a friend of mine from high school said I should sign up. Now, I was already on Friendster, Orkut, and inCircle (the Stanford Alumni networking site that was the predecessor to Orkut). And since joining MySpace, I’ve also joined LinkedIn. It never stops and it’s sad really because I never do anything with those accounts after setting them up. Maybe I’ll put a new picture up once in a while when I get a good one, but that’s about it. Most of the time I usually end up using the system to reconnect with old friends. By putting myself out there on as many social networking sites I can, I hope that those I might have lost in touch with for whatever reason might be able to find me (and those I purposely lost touch with can see that I’m doing pretty well for myself). And this has been the case on most of these sites.

But who knew that MySpace would be the place I would reconnect with the most friends from high school and the like? And who knew MySpace with its janky site design (do you hear the circus music?) would beat out its more professional predecessors? Maybe it’s because MySpace, with its Tapioca Express color scheme and breadth of services (even though quantity not quality seems to be the rule here) hit it big when attracting young people to a place where they can easily put together an online profile, develop their own Web presence and use it to do a whole variety of things, from making new friends, reconnecting with old friends, tell each other about what’s going on in their lives, etc. Of course, the biggest thing that has happened is the downright naughtiness that has sprung up and taken over. Browse through the profiles and you’ll see a lot of photos of underage girls willing to show just about anything and equally clad guys just as eager to say anything.

Case in point: when I’m on these networking sites, I usually limit my interactions to those I know in real life and use the service as a way to come together in one virtual space to send notes to each other, let us know what’s going on in each others lives, maybe even introduce mutual friends, etc. It serves as a compliment to my social life in the real world. But now, on MySpace, aside from getting in touch with some old friends I haven’t talked to in almost 10 years, I also get the random messages asking for friendship/answer to a question or just plain out fucking. See, you take away most of the barriers to visibility, access and opportunity and we all just break down to the lowest common demonominator: sex.

Some examples of messages I have received:

Hello there. I ran across your profile on myspace and I think that you are very attractive. Check out my profile to see what you think of me and if you like what you see, you can email me at [...] or message me on Yahoo ([...] is my screen name). I hope to hear from you soon.

Which is not that bad. It’s actually very nice. But here’s another one:

i’m checking my heart beats. think i’m missing one—omg…since i’m writing you personally i dont mind saying… you look fucking hot!! i would love to do you some “bad” things;)
anyway i’m not much of a writer but can talk (with an accent though;))
so if you feel comfortable gimme a call sometime. you are invited for milk and cookies;)

Does this work? Do these lines make women drop their panties and just want to fuck? I don’t know. It just seems like to me that no matter how attractive he might think I am, how could he really tell with the picture I have up there? It’s just a head shot and probably one of the more tame pictures out there compared to the naughty naughty stuff 15 and 16 year olds will put up there. Maybe I just have a look about me that invites trouble.

Now, facilitation of more risque (or at least “taboo”) and random sexual experiences has been a tried and true use of the Internet. However, for the most part, when people go on the net looking for “anonymous” sex, they usually try to stay just that: anonymous. They use pseudonyms and screennames, lie about their personal lives (spouses and the like), put up fake photos of themselves. And while people have certainly become more open about using the Internet for these kinds of interactions (just check out the casual encounters section on craigslist), I don’t know if they’re necessarily willing to divulge their identities so openly. But on MySpace, with the exception of the occasional fake celebrity profile, people seem surprisingly willing to a) divulge real and true information about themselves and b) be frank and open about their search for sex. Maybe it’s the simplicity of MySpace that invites a group of people that may be considered less “net savvy” (just take a look at some of the crap people put on their profile pages), but who they are, branch out to reconnect with old friends, and yet still reinvent themselves into something bigger and better and look for a way to meet new people and have new experiences…

• Friendster
• Orkut
• MySpace
• LinkedIn

And to be honest, I always feel like an asshole whenever I fill out the profiles on these sites– I usually just cut and paste from another site. I’m basically just making up whatever is on my mind at the moment, including descriptions of my work experience. If you had my job, you’d know that the focus of my job changes about every three months whether I like it or not and more often than not, I’m a jack of all trades.

The only real benefit I think I’ve gotten from these social networking sites is reconnecting with old friends, which is valuable in and of itself, but I don’t know if it’s worth the subconscious inferiority I feel when I don’t have a lot of friends/connections.

From my experience, fan fiction writers (along with their other fan culture counterparts) have always existed in this underground realm, exchanging stories via homemade zines and now, thanks to the Internet, via chat rooms and the Web. And thankfully, most of the time, The Powers That Be in the entertainment industry usually just look the other way. While most of these works are considered “derivative” and ride the fine lines between fair use, parody, satire, and flat out copyright infringement, they are usually expressions of deep love for the originating works (not to mention the original producers responsible for those works) and drive the growth of a deeply committed fan base that, in the end, only strengthen the success of the original television series, movie, etc. The first recognized fan fiction grew out of fan love for “Star Trek” and despite what some may consider prurient use of Star Trek characters and storylines as slash fan fiction embraced the homoerotic subtext between Kirk and Spock, I would certainly argue that the Star Trek franchise has only had greater success and sustained the test of time better than any other franchise thanks to the “derivative” work of its dedicated fans.

But how strange to see a formally, officially published version of what could only be called fan fiction! Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened– lots of entertainment franchises publish “supplementary” books, like reader guides for the Harry Potter series or the young adult novels for “Smallville.” But these, along with Quinn Brockton’s Queer as Folk books, are somehow christened and blessed by The Powers That Be and allowing them to, get this, make money off of the derivate work that thousands, millions of devoted fans have been doing underground and for free for decades! Now that’s capitalism. Too bad we can’t lift the stigma, not to mention occasional litigation, placed on the other “rogue” fiction writers who were not so lucky to have made a quick buck on their love and dedication to the actors, artists, and characters that visit our homes and grace our television screens every week.

Related posts:

1. Rollercoaster

All this throwback stuff is coming back into fashion and I can’t help resenting the appropriation of my childhood pop culture. I know, I’m starting to sound like a bitter old person who starts every phrase with “back in my day…”, but it’s strange to think how we spent so much time making fun of the 80′s and early 90′s and how embarassed most of us Generation X kids (hey, I still fall into the 1961-1981 bracket) became of cheesy 80′s fashion, music, and culture filled with consumerism and conspicuous consumption. And now, we embrace it in a throwback craze (like in the VH1 show “We Love the 80′s”) and Generation Y is buying old adidas shell-toe shoes and off-the-shoulder Flashdance t-shirts and sweatshirts. And look at celebrities like Will Smith– he owes his celebrity to the cheesy flourescent-colored fashions and pop rap of the Fresh Prince of Belair and now he’s promoting the old Converse basketball shoes in I, Robot.

Of course, when we embraced the old school basketball shoes, we were in a throwback crazy to 60′s style. Every generation steals from the previous one– in my mind, Baby Boomers were the last ones to really come up with something new. Since then, we’ve merely been recycling cultural artifacts and repackaging them for consumption. The commoditization of culture!