The Mongols came to Korea and left behind some genes and great barbecue.
Apple Mappish
This is depressing. I kind of flipped when I saw it but the got over it.
Bow Ties
- No longer just for overweight, angry men.
- Should be hand tied
- Should be worn without irony.
- Should be worn from the get-go, meaning from the time you start wearing ties. A late start brings on questions about mid-life crises, neo-retro hip-to-be-squareness, and excessive fanciness.
- No longer just for skinny, old, popcorn selling men.
- More hygienic than neckties, especially when inspecting gangrenous feet.
- There can only be one. Too many bow tie wearers in a group makes people uneasy.
- Avoid wearing with floppy hat, green wax cotton coats, and wellies because then you look like Paddington bear.
- Worn properly, you’ll get taken very, very seriously. Very few people can pull it off properly.
My Grandparents
My Grandfather passed away three days ago and in 1981 he and my grandmother who died in 1992 recorded this video testimony of their struggles before and after the Korean War.
Milestones and Millstones
The top ten list from iTunes shows Taylor, Kanye, and Bieber just who’s boss.
When I was a kid in the 70’s, mentioning that you were Korean-American got at best a shrug, maybe a laughing reference to the backdrop people on MASH, or a punch in the face. This began to change in the 80’s as more stuff started coming from Korea -people forget that for a time, Korea was to cheap stuff what China is now, but the first real milestone was the arrival of Hyundai automobiles in the mid eighties. No question, the car they sent over was a cheap POS, but it was a sign that we were arriving. The Olympics in ’88 in Seoul further confirmed this, and capped off a run that while sputtering in the late ’90s with a debt crisis, was balanced by real democratic transfers of power between competing parties, and the rise of Korean popular culture in the 00’s. K-POP, a genre that mixes commercialism (think Monkees perpetrated by a Zenith/IBM/NBC conglomerate if it had existed in the late 60’s) with world youth culture, has exploded first in Asia, then Europe, now the rest of the world. PSY’s viral Youtube video (http://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0) is just establishing a beachhead for the rest of KPOP which is already here in the US among pockets of youth who like to be different.
If you check out other KPOP groups like 2NE1 or BigBang, you’ll see that it’s only a matter of time -a few months I bet, before their supermegahits from Asia/Europe/Latin America will hit the US with English lyrics which these groups sing without an accent. The difference between now and the 1970’s when Pink Lady showed up on US airwaves with a variety show (with Jeff!) is the weight of social media which clearly outweighs the effect of traditional media which would never have seen/featured/mentioned/played PSY.
What does it mean to have PSY dancing with Al Roker on the Today Show at 30 Rock? What does it mean to have a Korean-American Jersey Shore-type reality show (Ktown – http://youtu.be/2rhDjxDLyjk)? What does it mean to have K-Drama and K-Movies on Hulu and Netflix? Not a clue, but the sudden urge to get my weight down to 150lbs, bleach my hair platinum blond, and go and wear Prada has hit me because I want some of that Gangnam style, and that is the real deal -getting into my head and programming me is something The Killers, Jay-Z, Eminem, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, and Nicky Minaj haven’t been able to do as well as PSY has with the opening scene of his music video (is that a short person or a really talented toddler?).
Now, I must go and dance.
The Millstone:
Installing Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to Virtual Box
I have a great love of Virtual Box, the free virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems on top of a host operating system -in my case OS X Mountain Lion on a souped up Mac Mini from 2010 -RAM has been maxed to 8GB and the hard drive replaced from a pokey 160GB spinning at 5000 rpm to 750GB spinning at 7200 rpm. The only problem is since Snow Leopard was phased out to Lion, Rosetta -a feature of Snow Leopard, was dropped.
Rosetta was a critical piece of Apple’s migration from PowerPC chips to Intel chips, allowing for PowerPC programs to run on Intel based Macs. When Lion was introduced, Rosetta was killed off, and my favorite game from 1994, Spaceward Ho, was killed off with it. Spaceward Ho has been laying dormant awaiting a iOS upgrade but for some reason, Joe at Delta Tao has been sitting on it.
After putting it off for a while, I decided to give running Snow Leopard 10.6.0 out of the box without updates (to prevent killing Rosetta) a try. Here is a snapshot of it loading successfully -it required a little bit of tweaking and appears to be loading well!
The One Percent’s Favorite Sports: CNBC
While acknowledging that the upper market of golf can be very expensive, I disagree that golf is a purely elitist sport. Go to any municipal golf course and you will see America (and her Id) on display.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
A Haiku Deck For You
Here’s a Haiku Deck for you: ‘Golf Ethics’ http://www.haikudeck.com/p/rqcd5awESS
Haiku Deck is the simple new way to create stunning presentations for enlivening a meeting, inspiring a group, teaching a lesson, telling a story or igniting a movement. It’s fast, fun, and you don’t need to be a designer to make something beautiful.
Download the free app to start creating your own Haiku Deck today. Set your story free.
Sent from my one of my gadgets.
Original Hipster’s Automatic Camera
Pictured above is a Minolta fixed lens camera from the sixties. It was a very hopeful time in Japan and it was reflected in the solid manufacture of this camera which was meant to compete and undercut traditional German cameras like Rollei and Leica. This particular camera had an interesting provenance. When I was living in Washington Heights, I lived next door to an elderly lady, a Holocaust survivor, one of many who settled in Washington Heights after the war, including Henry Kissinger and many other German Jews. She was moving to Florida and was throwing out everything and this was her gift to me. She stopped using it after she first got it because she could never figure out how to use it and her husband used it only sparingly. It has its original box and manual and a handsome leather cover.
Jennifer had a box of old film which I’m sure has gone bad but may still take pictures -I am going to shoot it all and see what I get!
Typewriter, tip tip tip…
Being someone who likes to write, I can tell you that writing on a manual typewriter is different. The typed words have the quality of memories that you keep in shoe boxes compared to the ones you keep on your smartphone. When you make a nice page of prose, you keep it in that shoebox which soon becomes a chest. These thoughts then are like friends that you keep in touch with a once a decade trip to Prince Edward Island, Patagonia, or the strip at Myrtle Beach where you can ride a cheap roller coaster shoulder to shoulder.
I should plan a trip.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 