Rosie Follow-up

Today, via a post on 8asians, I saw this video by Poet Beau Sia:

Rosie saw it and responded here.

Thanks, Beau, for articulating so well what the “big deal” was. And thanks, Rosie, for finally really apologizing and admitting that your actions were hurtful.

WTF?

I speak up against people when they say ignorant crap about Asian-Americans, and I’ll speak up against Asian-Americans when they say ignorant crap about others! WTF, Kenneth Eng! It is completely, utterly despicable and outrageous that he’d write a column entitled, “Why I Hate Blacks” and “support” that piece with a bunch of racist, ignorant diatribe. It sickens me and I intend to write to AsianWeek blasting them for approving it, paying Mr. Eng for that piece of hateful rhetoric, and choosing to publish it. They’ve pulled it from the website already, but the print copy has already gone out. They’ve already given voice to Eng’s ugliness, and in giving it voice, implicitly approved it and gave the appearance that other Asian Americans would condone it.

Well, I do not.

Via Kimchi Mamas.

You can join me in signing a petition against the article here.

You can read a copy of the petition and the original article as a pdf here. Disgustingly, the intro sentence starts, “Here is a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks…” What is this, a KKK manifesto?! I am really, really sickened.

Mega Dinner

It’s late at night (early in the morning?) but I’m still winding down from dinner last night.

A couple of weeks ago, Seppo randomly asked me if I wouldn’t mind having a couple of people over for dinner. It seemed like a decent idea, so I agreed.

[Continued after lunch the following day.]

Seppo put a bunch of people who know each other down for an evite for last weekend. We figured about half will have prior plans, so we’ll get maybe 4-5 people over. That’s doable. Turned out only like 1 person could make it, so we changed the evite for this weekend.

Well, turned out almost everyone could make it and were were gonna have 9 people over, in addition to us! Whoa!

Seppo has recently gone on a food science kick, so suddenly he wanted do a fancy-pants dinner. I randomly decided I wanted to make the French Laundry’s Salmon Cornets, so, not thinking it through, I agreed.

We cooked all day (perhaps we’ll cover the details of the dishes on the foodblog) and had a great time. We had Kevin, Uyen, Klay, Alan, Becky, Hoa, Sean, Holly, and Mack over, and served the salmon cornets, Seppo’s homemade curry-stuffed ravioli (one oversized rav) atop mashed potatoes, mixed greens with slices of smoked duck breast drizzled with reduced balsamic and extra virgin olive oil, short ribs with root vegetables and chive oil, and Seppo’s molten chocolate cake with creme anglaise and blobs of raspberry sauce. Oh yes, I can’t forget the piles of cheese, olive bread, and drinks people showed up with. 🙂 In particular, I enjoyed the triple cream brie Seppo found and a Scottish semi-hard cheese of some sort that Hoa brought.

The party wound down around 1am, after Seppo conked out on the couch. I stayed up until like 4:30am websurfing and programming the new TiVo. Heh.

It was definitely a fun time, and wouldn’t mind doing a big dinner again. Seating was problematic, which sucked, but we managed to get everyone into one room. We need to improve out time estimates. We even had a schedule and a priority list for the day, but still managed to run long. D’oh! 😀

Hopefully, Seppo will post pics soon.

Memer, memer, you are it.

Via Seppo.

RULES: Each player of this game starts off with 10 weird things/habits/little known facts about yourself. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 10 weird habits/things/little known facts as well as state this rule clearly. At the end you need to choose 10 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

—

I need to get this post in ASAP because Seppo and I have the same ten people who read our blogs. Also, some of them don’t have blogs so you can write up your ten things in the comments, if you so wish.

1. When I sit down to eat in the livingroom (this doesn’t apply to if I eat in the diningroom or in other people’s homes) by myself or with Seppo (no other guests), I get all antsy if everything is not just so. I need to have my glass of water nearby, the throw over my lap, the cushions and throw pillows adjusted, remote control next to me, salt & pepper (and any other condiments if appropriate) within reach, and the channel queued to what I want to watch before I take a bite. It’s not something I do consciously, but I feel all weird when I don’t, like I forgot something really important. This is going to be what makes me sound like a psycho the older I get.
2. I love to sing at the extreme top of my lungs when I’m in the car by myself. I’m not talking merely loud. Loud is for mere mortals. I sing like my life depends on how far my voice can reach.
3. Watching my little brother being born was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I can’t think about it without getting a little choked up. I love that little bugger. Also, seeing my mom in such intense pain was terrifying.
4. For about a year, I noticed that everytime I got up to use the restroom at work, I hummed The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” to myself, just the line that goes, “We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.” I have no idea why. I caught myself and had no idea why I was doing it.
5. My head is shaped funny. If you imagine where you’d tie high pigtails with your hair, my head is slightly pointed in those spots. When I was younger, I was 100% convinced this was because my mom tied my hair too tightly when I was a kid, so I’d grumble at her about it, loudly and constantly. Unfortunately, when my little brother was born, shortly after his skull grew mostly together, I found that he had the same bumps. Oh well. Sorry, Mom.
6. I have no fear of public speaking, if I know in advance that I’m going to. Wait, no, I think even when I don’t have advance notice, I don’t have a particular fear of speaking in front of people. I spoke in front of 500 people in high school with only a 5 minute heads-up. I don’t think I did a good job, but it didn’t bother me and it didn’t scare me. I do, however, have an intense fear of speaking with individuals.
7. I am incredibly and illogically vain about my nails and feet. I don’t take good care of my nails and they always look chewed up and the cuticles are always dry. Hangnails are always torn off the nail, resulting in torn skin all around my fingertips. So I’m not vain about how I keep them or anything, just about their natural characteristics. The nail beds are extremely long, about 2x longer than they are wide. They go to about 0.5mm short of the tips of my fingers. See? No one cares. But I think they are awesome. And I love the shape of my feet. I don’t know why. But I think they are cute.
8. I am the worst loser in the world. Well, depends on what it is. I have a grand old time loser at bowling. I laugh as I lose in card games. But if it’s a game that I think I could be good at — never mind if I actually am or not — and I’m on a losing streak, then I’m a total sore loser. I pout and get all grumpy. This is only with losing streaks, not singular losses. I’m such an ass sometimes. 😀
9. I tripped a younger kid once when I was about four years old. And it still eats away at me. It was hateful and shameful. I wish I could turn those two seconds back. I can still see his crying face and the terrible momentary feeling of glee, followed by intense self-loathing.
10. Since the world knows how crazy I am about Seppo and that I regularly shout my love for him from the rooftops, I know I can’t use that for my 10th item. Boo. However, I don’t know how many people know I had a huge, unrequited crush on Seppo for years before we said one word to each other. I did. And I know it embarrasses Seppo. I spent one entire class one semester checking him out and thinking how cute he was. And it turns out that he’s so much more than just his pretty face. 😉 I’ll step away while you go barf.

I tag — in no particular order — niralth, rooparoopa (she’s so not going to see this for days/weeks :D), A_B (so not going to post anything for the sake of anonymity), AngryChad, Stephanie, hapacheese, mini-boss, the two inhabitants of Casa Caudill, and dre.

Bonus challenge to one of the people who I know read this but don’t generally post: edy, TUPbC, Hoa, slightlydope, or kerowack.

Video on Web2.0

This is a beautifully clear and concise visual presentation on why Web2.0 is significant.

Biting the bullet

I’m getting a TiVo TCD648250B Series3 HD Digital Media Recorder!

Dun dun dun.

ETA: Basically, we are stacking a reward certificate, credit card reward points, and referral rewards to make this slightly less ridiculous. And I’m using Price Protectr to make sure if the price drops in the next 30 days, that we will get a price match.

Happy Year of the Golden Pig!

Happy Lunar New Year, everyone!

My older brother is expecting a child around September. I am so excited for him. I just heard that my “baby” cousin (only 4 years younger than me) is engaged to be married this year. It’s a great year! 🙂

Let’s see… On Saturday, Seppo and I cooked up traditional rice cake & dumpling soup (’cause the rice cakse look like round full moons), jap chae (literally breaks down to the roots “assorted/various/miscellaneous” and “julienned things”, and it is literally that), and bulgogi (bought pre-marinated from Koreana) with blanched cabbage leaves and ssam jang (“wrap” + “sauce” — mixed up at home from primary ingredients). We also had seaweed salad and some seasoned fish cake that we bought pre-made.

Max and Amanda joined Colin, Seppo, and me at our house. They brought Meyer lemons and seltzer water, which we mixed up with our Meyer lemon syrup. We also had a fantastic sparkling blueberry juice, coutesy of Colin.

We wrapped up the evening with little walnut-paste-filled bitesized-cakes-shaped-like-walnuts and a melonball scoop of Dulche de Leche ice cream. Hee hee.

And because that wasn’t enough, we all walked over to the newly opened L’Amyx tea bar and hung out there until shortly before closing.

Yesterday was all about a trial run for Saturday’s dinner. I’ll upload the pics for Saturday and Sunday’s efforts and post about them on the food blog this week. Bonus: I’ll change the stupid food blog template so that it’s not all messed up anymore.

O.M.G.

IMG_0601
Originally uploaded by cindybaek.

I was in the 7th grade; please forgive me.

Stuff I’m Reading

Now I don’t have to blog about what I’m reading, because I can share my favorite entries from the blogs I read with the doo-hickey widget thing on my right. In Google Reader, you click “Share” on the entries you like, then you go into the list of your shared items (click on “Shared items” on top left menu), then click on “put a clip of your shared items on your site”.

It’s particularly easy if you are using the new Blogger with your blog hosted on blogspot. I had to do one extra step (edit my template) because my blog is hosted on our own server, but it was fairly straight-foward. My only regret is that I can’t control 100% of the formatting of the data that it spits out.

I went back to the last few days of reading and chose a couple of things to share, so they are out of order. In the future, the list will automatically update with items I mark for sharing, with the newest stuff on top.

Neat!

Update: Damn that Colin! Here is the feed for my shared items. 🙂

Stuff I was wrong about

Wow, where do I begin? :p I’ve been wrong about a lot in my life, but the thought that prompts this blog entry is nutrition and exercise.

Here are the two prevailing thoughts I had growing up regarding nutrition and exercise:

• Diets are inherently unhealthy. Only people with poor self-image and potential eating disorders went on diets.
• Exercising is stupid. I don’t want to fake moving stuff around (resistance exercises) or pretend to go somewhere (running, swimming, stair climbing, etc.). People should be fit by actually doing stuff.

Now, I realize how wrong I was. I was blessed as a kid (and now, to a large extent) with a good metabolism, and I loved to run around and play. As I got older, I ran around less, but due to walking everywhere I went, taking public transit, and being busy with work, I didn’t really put on weight and had a good amount of healthy muscle.

I had a lot of classmates in school (both high school and college) who seemed overly concerned with their perfectly healthy bodies, always worried that they were fat. This led me to form a false association in my head between diets and poor self-esteem, rather than forming the correct idea that a diet is simply being cognizant of what you are eating and attempting to make good decisions about food.

I sit at home, I sit in the car, then I sit at work. I’m no longer the walk-everywhere girl who had strong legs and didn’t mind walking a mile and a half or more to where I wanted to go. My metabolism has slowed down — not a whole lot yet, but it’s definitely caught me off-guard in the last few years.

As I look forward to the rest of my life, I’ve seen that I have to make active, conscious choices to get and stay healthy. I’ve read enough literature now that I know that changing my diet simply means that I’ll be giving my body better fuel to operate for years to come, not trying to starve myself for some shallow purpose. I know that exercising means that I’ll make my body stronger, so that I can live a longer, more fulfilling life.

I’ve learned some interesting things about nutrition too. I’ve learned that good fats are really important and that there isn’t just a small difference between the good and bad fats — there is a HUGE world of a difference in their roles in the body. “Good” and “bad” isn’t being used in a relative sense here, but in an absolute sense.

I’ve learned the importance of fiber to overall health, why it’s good for the heart as well as being correlated to decreased chances of various kinds of cancers.

I’ve learned what role various types of vitamins play in the body.

I’ve also learned that some of what I learned about nutrition when I was younger was waaaaay off. For instance, complex carbs are not all good; white potato is technically a complex carb, but it has almost nil nutritional value and is almost equivalent to just eating sugar. I learned that milk is not necessarily good for you and isn’t necessarily the best calcium delivery agent, despite what the dairy marketing machine will tell you. I learned that eggs are much better for you than believed during the ’90s.

I learned that when I think of the Food Pyramid, I have to keep in mind that it was produced by the United States Department of Agriculture, not a medical or health association, after much lobbying by various bodies within it.

I’ve been eating better for the last month and week, and it’s really nice. I am eating a bigger variety of vegetables in different colors, I’m eating less meat high in saturated fat, and I’m still eating pretty much everything I love, but in smaller quantities with fruits and vegetables taking up the void that would have been second helpings of meat or pasta or rice. I’ve been trying to have a piece of fruit or vegetable at every meal.

I haven’t had the mid-afternoon, post-lunch blahs all year, except once when I had a lot of rice. It’s a nice change. 🙂

The latest book I’ve read on nutrition was Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating.

I highly recommend it.