Inspired by the egg dish in V is for Vendetta, it was called eggy in a basket. The circular toast that comes out of the center is fun for eating yourself or for toddlers. Want to know from my UK friends if this actually exists as a breakfast dish.
Apple’s Impact on CES
It seems CES is all about reacting to Apple -Ultrabooks that are indistinguishable from MacBook Airs, smartphones that try to beat iPhone on features, cloud services that plagiarize Steve Jobs presentation slides, TV’s you talk to that try to preempt a Siri hosted Apple TV. The best stuff is when they try to be themselves, like Windows Mobile which is not very Microsoft in that it is stylish and easy to use, again like Apple.
When irony is so obvious, it no longer is ironic. It’s just sad. It’s just a bunch of small fish in a small pond. A tall hobbit contest.
Inside of MacBook Air Looks as Good as the Outside
I ran out of hard drive space on my 2010 MacBook Air, and so I decided to upgrade the SSD. The OtherWorld Computing SSD kit and instructions are very straightforward. Opening th MBA reveals shockingly clean lines that are frankly beautiful and fits with the Jobsian aesthetic of being beautiful in the totality of the device. I felt like I was looking at an alien artifact. The fan which you didn’t realize was there has silent gears and fits in organically. It was like operating, changing out the SSD.

More Hoddeok
More hoddeok from maangchi.com. The beauty of this recipe is the convenience of having this treat with minimal prep or cooking. Overall easier than making pancakes for a crowd.
The Holiday Cruise in 30 Tweets
Thoughts before a holiday cruise.
1. If I don’t pay enough for my tickets will I be Irish dancing day and night in steerage.
2. Will there be a series of unsolved murders and will I have to solve them?
3. As we sail into the Bermuda triangle, will there be wifi?
4. If we land on a lost continent, will dinosaur taste like chicken.
5. Will there be monsters?
6. If I ever have to man an oar, will I be man enough?
7. Would the food charge on the lifeboats include tip.
8. Does the rule women and children first include man-children?
9. Does our fare include tribute for harpies, sirens, and cyclops?
10. What is the dollar to doubloon exchange rate?
Thoughts during a cruise
- Some non-Titanic cruise movies they should screen at Movies Under the Stars: The 5th Element, Steve Zissou and the Life Aquatic, Battlestar Galactica, but they don’t take requests.
- Back is aft, forward is forward, right is starboard, left is port, and the bathroom is the head. Kind of funny that left is port.
- Nobody shouts “land-ho!” when land is clearly ho.
- Our steward has better manners than any of us.
- The tropical paradise of Eleuthera is a dollop of sand in the middle of the ocean –if it wasn’t for the concession stand, I’d say two weeks tops before the party descends into cannibalism and Lord of the Flies worship.
- Trying to figure out what is the real reason behind the all you can eat policy.
- Sea Law implies that the captain is a benevolent despot and we are his happy children. Surprisingly, I sleep well.
- Man Overboard! Don’t yell that.
- Vomiting toddlers are treated like infected zombies.
- There is no poop deck, just a walking track.
Thoughts After A Cruise
- Grateful that there were no Kraken, Cyclops, or carnivorous Mermaids showing up asking for tips.
- No icebergs.
- Gastroenteritis outbreak averted by 36 hour quarantine of 2 year old in a 8×10 cell.
- Scopalamine patch effective in creating zombie red eye, furry dry mouth, and Cross Bronx traffic jam constipation.
- Baristas no longer hassling me over my morning precoffee aphasia.
- Income inequality’s logical end point is well illustrated by the juxtaposition of Paradise Island and the slums over the hill from Nassau.
- All you can eat does not mean all you can digest.
- They gouge you with the Wifi, the drinks, the tips, and the duty free stuff that is not profit free.
- Our particular cruise had the ambience of an over the top Bar Mitzvah that would not end.
- Ship’s doctor thankfully didn’t want a tip
The Only Fellow Who Didn't Want a Tip
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One percent of the 1%
From Evernote: |
One percent of the 1% |
The recent focus on Kim Jong Il’s lifestyle brought gasps of astonishment -he sent his sushi chef on a private jet to Japan to shop for rice cakes while his country was starving. Fact is, among the wealthy, there are the über wealthy, and among the über wealthy are the super duper wealthy whose daily budget would feed maybe a thousand families. While we do not begrudge anyone success -as this is the cornerstone of America, even the most callous person has to admit there is some injustice in North Korean society. It does not come from a lack of guns -the noncoms always outnumber the officers, and the fact that people can bribe border guards to escape means that some independent thinking occurs. The fact is that a religion, a cult of personality, sustains the vast inequality of North Korean society. Religions demand faith over logic. Directing the resources of a nation to the sustenance of a few humans at the top defies logic. It is a religious-type faith and fear of retribution, fear of apostasy and heresy, and fear of change that causes this gangrene to linger. What are the idols that drive injustice here at home? It is the belief that success comes from being favored by God and that lack of success comes from sin. It is the belief in absolutes that define religion. This idea afflicts our politics as much as the cult of personality afflicts North Korea.
The subordination of logic to dogma and its use in organizing societies is a old tradition. It gets people across desserts, oceans, and helps individuals process grief and the unfathomable concept of infinity. It is a human trait as ingrained as circling three times before bedding in a dog. Yet this kind of thinking is also used to demonize the poor, write off the sick, and rationalize the unemployed. It is extended into contempt for anything for the public good that comes from taxes -clean water, safe roads, national rail, public health, education and safety. It sanctifies success defined as wealth and therefore denigrates anything that might take away from that wealth.
In our still free society, one’s success is the result of not only hard work, but favorable circumstances, good health, and the support of people who were midwives to the success -the family and community that nurtured the individual and the society that provided the fertile ground for success. It’s the good plumbing that provided fresh water for excellent development. It’s the public safety provided community police and fire departments. It is the critical mass of excellent citizens that allow for success and justice. I think that is the message of the OWS protesters, that the people who get tasty morsels flown in for them not get protections at the cost of the people making it possible.
I wish for the new year the restoration of reason and clear thinking guided not by desire for retribution or a return to a past that never really was. I want an America where everyone has available all the opportunities while being good citizens and supporting the community, state, and country that allowed that to happen.
Jangjorim- Comfort Food that makes me think of my mom
With the winter upon us, I seek comfort food and nothing says comfort like jangjorim which my mom used to make by boiling beef and seasoning late into the night. I found that Maangchi’s recipe was almost as good and took under two hours. Link (http://www.maangchi.com/recipe/jangjorim).
Hunger Games -Apocalypse by Reality Show
The YA category has always been a repository of anxiety and zeitgeist. Now that the age of wizards is officially over, popular literature and Scholastic Publishing need a new hero and that comes in the form of Katniss, the heroine of the Hunger Games trilogy. This past several years, we have been visited by the end of the world in various forms -robots, zombies, flu, tidal waves, asteroids, and the old standby, nuclear annihilation. The last has been updated and promoted by candidate Newt Gingrich in the form of a high altitude EMP blast -a monstrous static discharge that will fry anything silicon, but I digress. The Hunger Games posits a dystopian future where the US is no more, and ruled by a west coast totalitarian state subjugating 12 districts of North America, enslaving the population and stripping their labor and resources. To remind them of their subjugation, the 12 districts are expected to submit annually a boy and a girl as tribute for the Hunger Games -a gladiatorial survival game to the death, televised in reality show style to the entire nation.
This current generation of youth does not know a time when 1984 was both a year and a warning, and I’m glad that totalitarianism is being reintroduced through literature and not the end of a gun. The brilliant thing about Hunger Games is the marriage of fascism and mass media, and in the the world of the Hunger Games, this exists in a vacuum of the internet. When televisions have only one channel and only the nomenclatura have access to telephones, when minor infractions are punished by death, and everyone is kept pliant through hunger, control is easier and really harks back to a time before the internet and reality TV which had its final days during the Reagan administration. It was a time when everyone watched network television and the population hadn’t balkanized into special interest groups. In fact, the Balkans had yet to balkanize.
The warning then is twofold -the hazards of resource depletion and collapse, and the loss of freedoms. We are being challenged at this time with the loss of habeus corpus for American citizens and the erosion of freedom represented by various efforts of telecommunication and entertainment providers to throttle non-commercial internet traffic. These things are happening and bring us a bit closer to the world of the Hunger Games.
I highly recommend the series -it’s mesmerizingly addictive, and my 9 year old, my wife, and I are all obsessively reading it this holiday season.
Grandparents Explain Their Journey
My grandparents in 1981 describe their origins. I was 14 when I filmed this. The whole thing is in Korean, sorry no subtitles in English. It is a two hour retelling of my grandfather’s life story meant to be told to his future generations -which now thirty years later is us. He was born to a family whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Yi dynasty, becoming more desperate after Japanese occupation, but through unimaginable effort, was able to parlay people skills and intelligence into prosperity for a time, but losing everything again, including his mother, when the Korean war forced our family out of our native Gaesong. It’s not an uncommon story from the 20th century, but one that is resonant and inspiring to me. My grandmother who passed away in 1992 speaks up about 40 minutes into the story which is mostly my grandfather’s. The videotape that it was on was Betamax which I had converted in Korea in the late 90′s -my cousin had it done for me. It was not cheap, because by then, it was a dead Sony format. The VHS copy stayed with me through all my moves and I finally digitized it in 2008 and parked it on mobileme, but most of my cousins couldn’t get it to run for some reason even with quicktime. The recent move to iCloud forced me to move it back and now it lives on wordpress.
My grandfather is still alive at 101 (based on his birthdate given in the video), but according to our family’s reckoning, he is 107, although this may be the relic of a fiction given to the Japanese Imperial Army to avoid being drafted. His memories are a link to a forgotten and lost Korea that was poor economically but rich culturally.
