the mofo with the info.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times has been circling inboxes lately, especially if you are an Asian American of the Angry variety. It covers the trend in a few new Manga titles in which certain authors are beginning to brazenly deride the cultures and principles of nearby Asian nations (most notably China and South Korea), promoting a xenophobic and supernationalistic mentality. Though I thought it was definitely interesting and possibly something to consider, I did a little investigating and it seems that NY Times’ statements about the reactions from the Japanese media were at the very least misinformed, and at the worst alarmingly biased.

Norimitsu Onishi states that the Manga comics in question “have drawn little criticism from the mainstream media”, citing a quote from a book review in the Sankei Shimbun that praises the work for its balanced view. I found this to be extremely misleading, as further research revealed that many mainstream Japanese papers did criticize the book, and specifically boycotted ads for “Kenkanryu”, the Manga in question. For example, though they did not deign to review the controversial book, Mainichi Shimbun did cover the resulting controversy in Japan, and identified the work as “strongly anti-Korean”, noting that the work was turned down by several Japanese publishers for having unverifiable information before it was picked up by Shinyusha. Though Onishi identifies the Sankei as “conservative”, the full context is not given; Sankei Shimbun is known as broadly pro-Western and anti-Chinese. The portrayal of the Japanese media as being accepting of this book is akin to painting all American media organizations as staunchly anti-rap music based solely on The O’Reilly Factor. As a media organization with a reputation of its own to uphold, I would expect that the New York Times put more effort into providing context, especially with regard to sources that will be unfamiliar to an American audience. As it reads now, this article does little more than to paint the entire country of Japan as a nation of racists and irresponsibly incite more uninformed, ignorant animosity between different groups.

As an American of Chinese descent, I’ll be the first to say that many aspects of this story are worth being worried about. Movements such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform are eerily similar to
Holocaust refusals seen in the U.S. If the popular sales of this book
actually do reflect a growing xenophobia rather than a casual interest in a controversial title, this definitely would be something worth getting riled up over. Unfortunately, this information cannot be gleaned from the New York Times’ article, which is set on sensationalizing a foreign country’s editorial process rather than providing reasonable, reliable facts on the actual subject.

The first annual Vendy Awards were held last night. While I appreciate the awarding community’s attempt to honor the street vendors that sustain me so well, I was a little shocked that they overlooked the best street vendor ever. Kwik Meal is so awesome I have trouble forming sentences about it in my mind without drooling all over my keyboard. I have a lot of friends who evangelize for the Halal Cart man (I even know someone who dressed up as him for halloween), but I gotta tell you all, Kwik Meal is where it’s at.

Whilst IMing a friend, I discovered a huge flaw with the English written language. Wanting to comment on a recent blog post of his, i told him, “I read your blog.” I realized that there were two different meanings for that sentence, usually clearly disambiguated in speech, but in the casual medium of typed communication, the pronunciation was lost, along with any useful meaning. The above statement can mean one of two things, based upon the two tenses of the word “read” which share the same spelling:

1. The past preterite tense: “I read (rěd) your blog” - I happened across your recent post, and am now commenting on it.
2. The simple or repeated present tense: “I read (rēd) your blog” - I watch your blogspot, constantly hitting refresh, straining for some glimmer of information on your opinions, ideas and possibly what you had for lunch. Also, send me a lock of your hair.

The past tense of the verb “to read” is spelled the same as the present tense conjugation “read”. As demonstrated in my simple example above, this is a huge problem that affects IMmers around the world. Er, that speak English. What we need is swift, decisive action to end confusion of this matter once and for all. Luckily, decisive action is what I do best.

To eliminate this ghoti-esque confusion, we should simply change the conjugations of the verb “to read” to match the conjugations of the verb “to lead”. Hereforth I shall now conjugate the past tense of the verb as “red”. There is little chance of a conflict with the color “red” as one is a noun and one is a verb. Other than the slight problem of verbing, the plan is pretty much foolproof.

From tomorrow on out, if you see me online, tell me “I red your blog”. If you tell me “I read your blog”, I’ll have a restraining order on you so fast it will make your hed spin. For those of you keeping score at home, this means, of course, that Red is the new Schmool.

I was the esteemed Ronald Weasley for Halloween this year.

My friends all thought that was a bit drastic that I went ahead and made the carpet match the drapes, but I got the last laugh after all.

A well-read friend of mine sent me a disturbing e-mail the other day. After another friend recommended Ender’s Game to her, she discounted the book after reading the amazon review:

I just started to read the Amazon synopsis of Ender’s Game and had to stop reading after this sentence: Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species.

I don’t think I can comment on this.

I consider this friend to be one of the most reliable litmus tests in terms of book recommendations; to see her reject a book out of hand (cart?) because of the mention of “Aliens” showed a closed mindedness that was disappointing, but not at all unusual, given the broad perception of the sci-fi genre as a whole. Between Star Trek Conventions and Hollywood remakes of Philip K. Dick novels, science fiction books and movies are generally seen as a niche, cult-appeal, sensationalist works meant mostly for the off-hours Dungeons & Dragons crowd looking for a break from the orc-hunting.
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Refresh… Eat… Refresh… Eat…

The saddest thing is that I’m not only watching the apple announcements like a total psycho, I’m also streaming the important stuff to my friend Lin’s phone, who is waiting for a plane right now and doesn’t have internet access. Sometimes connectivity is a bad thing.

I read up on Google’s latest mind-boggling project, Google Secure Access, a free, secure wireless initiative, and prepared to get geekily excited about it until I found the increasingly common “(Windows XP and Windows 2000 only)” disclaimer. I thought back to the recent offerings from everyone’s favorite Mountainview mothership, and couldn’t help but think, “Why does Google hate me?” As a home Linux and Mac OS X user, I have gotten by pretty well lately, playing some cutting-edge games (ok, game), finding most new hardware to be OSX/Linux compatible, and using the commodity standard Microsoft Office platform; things were looking pretty good for a lowly Linux/BSD/OSX user such as myself. The systems were finally making inroads to the non-tech crowds, too: my technophobic brother was asking me serious questions about the Mac mini, and I hear you can get a free Linux box with the purchase of a qualifying rifle at Wal-Mart[1]. Just as it looked as if the Redmond beast might have to deal with some serious competition, opposition came from the unlikeliest of places: the company that Microsoft identifies as its biggest threat.

Though the first line on Google’s company overview page smugly declares that the company’s mission is to make information “universally accessible and useful”, a glance at Google Labs is enough to turn a *nix user green with compatibility envy. Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, Google Web Accelerator, Google Video Viewer, Google Talk, and now Google Secure Access are six projects recently released into beta or production through their lab, and all are currently only compatible with Windows systems. Though Google Talk uses open standards for the bland text chatting protocol, the real meat of the service is its VoIP client, which currently only lets you talk to other boring Windows users. Even Gmail, the nothing-short-of-revolutionary webmail client, went into public beta without Safari compatibility (though they are now Safari compatible, advanced features such as Rich Text formatting still only work in IE and firefox).
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I’ve been sick the last couple days, which means I’ve had little else to do but watch Netflix DVDs. I just watched most of X-Files Season 4, and the screenshot on the right here is from “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”. Re-watching that episode now, almost a decade after I first saw that, I can safely and without any hesitation say that it’s the coolest episode of any tv show ever. It has pretty much everything you might want in an episode, including Rashômon style unreliable poly-narration, big-headed gray aliens, government men in black, and a cameo by the venerable Alex Trebek (pictured in the aforementioned screenshot).

On an unrelated note, I like Nyquil a lot. I mean, really a lot. If I still used “hella” as an adverb, it would be used here to describe my feelings for Nyquil.