This is sort of like a repost. I created the Blog Advisory System last December when I realized that my eclectic rambling style may catch people off guard.
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Blog Advisory System: Don't say I didn't warn you!
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Today is GREEN. Short and sweet.
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"Do you feel lucky, punk?"
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Or maybe it should be…
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It is a good thing I do not work in any accounting firm or the Wall Street. I am backdating again. The REAL date is November 20, 2010.
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If you are like me, your life, at least the part that is connected to the computer and the Interweb, is interconnected with Google: Google Chrome (which I am using right now). Google search (Duh!). Maps. Directions. gmail. GTalk. Picasa. YouTube. Picnik. google checkout. google translate. Calender. Google analytics. Feedburner. Google Reader. Google Desktop. Google Docs. Google Earth. (Ok ok. I left Blogger for WordPress a while back ago, but still…) and so on.
So if you were google, what’s the next big thing you’d go after?
Would you have said FASHION?
Google launched Google Boutiques yesterday. They did drop the google name and call it simply Boutiques / Boutiques.com. With Boutiques, google aims to revolutionize the way shopping for fashion is done online, with the help of powerful algorithms.
I won’t bore you with the details, New York Times published a detailed review of the website and explanation for how it’s supposed to work.
Anyway, ever the Early Adopter (<– self-deprecating sarcasm) and Fashion Maven (aka I-wear-jeans-and-tshirt 350 days a year), I decided to check it out.
I started out by going through a series of “tests” so the powerful computers could determine what my taste is. Like this:
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This pair is one of the most "down to earth" in the series of images shown during the "aSSessment/evaluation"
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It turned out to be a long and arduous process of self-loathing…
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no images were found
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which proved my point that some of these things are not meant for you if you have trouble seeing the point. In the case of fashion, if you don’t see the point, you are either too poor, too old, or not thin enough. Or all of the above, which I believe applies to 90.5% of the population. 1% is so filthy rich they can look like whatever and people will still be fawning over them. 8% of the rest of the population is simply self-delusional.
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At the end, a verdict was given, according to the strong and powerful algorithm, my style and taste is…
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I can’t blame Boutiques.com though, after all, I DID hit SKIP too many times and it became depressed and wanted to get away from all of this too…
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… and don’t tell google, but I think I drove it to drink too.
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Coda: Despite the fear and loathing I went through, in the end, I think there are loads of fun that can be had with Boutiques.com. This is online window-shopping and virtual magazine clipping (Think: Tumblr for fashions, fashions that are for sale), and for the competitive amongst us, another place where you can amass followers, this time, with your keen sense of style.
Oh yes he is (oh yes he is), oh yes he is (oh yes he is).
He flits from shop to shop just like a butterfly.
In matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be,
‘Cause he’s a dedicated follower of fashion.
He’s a dedicated follower of fashion.
He’s a dedicated follower of fashion.
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Ah Jimmy Kimmel. My favorite Late Night Show host. (Sorry darling Wicked Shawn. I know you have the super hots for the other Jimmy. Although it pangs me to disagree with you, I believe that THIS Jimmy is so much funnier as a talk show host… Well, now we won’t fight and each have our own Jimmy to jimmy with… )
My Jimmy decided to take on Facebook, the giant that just became a behemoth now that Facebook is offering a form of uber-email @Facebook.com that aims to keep all our young hooked on Facebook and never have any reason to go anywhere else. The thing with Facebook is that You and I and Jimmy are not Mark Zuckerberg’s target audience: he went straight to talk to high school students when they were designing Facebook email. This is where social media is like shopping on Rodeo Drive:
If you have to ask WHY, it is not meant for you.
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Jimmy Kimmel is trying to save Friendship (as we know it) by urging folks to unfriend friends that are not really friends on their Facebook. He calls today, November 17, the National UnFriend Day, aka NUD.
NUD is the international day when all Facebook users shall protect the sacred nature of friendship by cutting out any ‘friend fat’ on their pages occupied by people who are not truly their friends.
[And more importantly] Without guilt or retribution.
In one of his tongue-in-cheek skit, Jimmy suggested this method to see who one’s real friends are: “Update your Facebook status to say, ‘I am moving this Friday and I need movers”; those who that show up are your real friends.”
The fact that I am undercover as far as this blog is concerned, that I have two Facebook accounts and I update one account a lot more often and with more candor, that I maintain two Twitter accounts and I clearly identity with the one where I am not using my real name, points to the other fact that I have a very different definition and interpretation of “friends” from what Jimmy is based on for his new holiday.
Nevertheless, hilarity (has) ensued and I have been enjoying the comedic aspect of it.
From William Shatner (of course!), Danny McBride, Dr. Oz, Lisa Kudrow (“I know friends. I used to be one.”), Wolf Blitzer,
And there is some truth to what Jimmy presented in one of his fake tirades:
All men were not created equal. Some of them are very annoying!
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The most brilliant, most awesome thing, up until now, that came out of this fake NUD holdiday is the holiday theme song by WAR, called, you guessed it, “Why can’t we UNfriend?”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vl-kYbgCsI
Do you suffer anxiety attack when you attempt to write about something that is dear to your heart? An important childhood memory? An experience in a lifetime? Your favorite book? The most significant events that happened that may have shaped who you are?
Maybe it’s just me. This is why so far I have not been able to write about what happened at BlogHer this summer. Why I did not even mention my going alone to a dive bar in downtown Chicago to watch my favorite band The Boxer Rebellion. It meant too much for me to run the risk of potentially screwing the memory up by attempting to write it down.
Does this even make sense?!
I watched “Mary and Max” tonight. I cried so much over it that by the end there was a pile of Kleenex on the sofa next to me. In my usual fashion, I agonized over talking about it at all: What if you watch it and are disappointed because all my gushing is going to make you go into it with high expectations? But I HAVE TO talk about it. I am still awake because I cannot get Mary and Max out of my head. So welcome to my therapy session, Spill and Be Done with It.
Oh, and if you are going to watch the movie, remember you MAY hate it. There. Now we are safe from disappointment caused by high expectations…
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Mary and Max is a feature-length claymation created by Adam Elliot and team (who had won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2003) and premiered on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. The plot is deceptively simple: Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette) is an 8-year old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne. Max Jerry Horowitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a 44-year-old obese Jewish atheist living in New York who also is later diagnosed to have Aspergers syndrome. Mary is awkward, neglected by her parents, unloved, and friendless. Max is, well, in a similar boat. Their lives intersected when Mary randomly picked Max’s name out of an American phone book to write a letter to. You see, Mary wanted to find out whether in America babies come from the bottom of a beer mug like they do in Australia. For 20 years they wrote and sent each other chocolate, with some interruptions, encouraging and supporting each other oftentimes without consciously doing so.
The movie is consisted to a large extent of the reading of the letters they write each other and of the narrator. Dialogues are kept to a minimum. Some of you will no doubt be delighted to know that the omniscient narrator was voiced by Barry Humphries (whose alter ego is none other than Dame Edna).
There are plenty professional reviews to be found via google search which saves me from total panic attack since I suck at writing reviews which require logics and persuasion. I am better at gushing. It is rather my feeble attempt at keeping what moved me in this movie alive via my remembering the bits and pieces. From the opening lines:
Mary Dinkle’s eyes are the color of muddy puddles. Her birth mark, the color of poop.
To the innocent, “nonsensical” questions Mary asked Max (“Do sheeps shrink when it rains?” “Do gooese get goose bumps?”). To Max’s literal answers to Mary’s questions and his straightforward sharing of his life view (“I like being an Aspie! It would be like trying to change the color of my eyes.”) To the parallel between Mary’s innocent questions and Max’s puzzlement over human behaviors (“He couldn’t understand why he was seen as the odd one while everyone else was considered normal. Humans were endlessly illogically. Why did they throw out food when there’re children starving in India?”)
I want to write down every single piece of these gems.
As in all other stop-motion feature films, Mary and Max is a labor of love. An incredible achievement of art, design, crafts, architecture, photography. More than the visual feast, it is an incredible feat that the story never turned saccharin; I half “expected” the movie to be a formulaic tale of triumph of two outsiders over their difficulties through finding each other in this lonely world. It is not warm and fuzzy.
I am in love with the writing by Adam Elliot. I drank in every word. In my usual crazed obsessive fashion, I envisioned myself swallowing the words whole so as to absorb them directly into my being.
Max: I asked my mother when I was four, and she said they [babies] came from eggs laid by rabbis. If you aren’t Jewish, they’re laid by Catholic nuns. If you’re an atheist, they’re laid by dirty, lonely prostitutes.
Mary: I am sorry to hear that you are fat. Mum says I am fat too and I am growing up to be a heifer… which I think is a type of cow. Maybe you should only eat things which begin with the letter of each day!
Narrator: He agrees with his favorite physicist [Guess who?] that there are only two things infinite: The universe. And men’s stupidity.
Like I said, I had this urge to take out a pen and paper fire up my laptop and jot down the letters word by word. I wanted to remember them. I wished, while I was watching the movie, that Adam Elliot had turned the letters into a book. Because he did not, I kind of panicked as the movie progressed as I could not memorize all the things that touched something deep inside my heart. (I am AWARE of how insane in the membrane this was…)
I still wish he would. Many reviews and blog posts mentioned the epitaph used for the movie:
God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends. —– Ethel Mumford
I don’t disagree that this is a major theme threaded throughout the film. However, ultimately the lesson, at least the one that I walked away with, that Max in his unconventional way has taught Mary is this…
Love yourself first.
Screenshot from my new favorite film: Mary and Max, written, designed & directed by Adam Elliot
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“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” — Lucille Ball
“If you don’t love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not able of developing compassion for others.” — Dalai Lama
“NaBloPoMo forces me to change my perspectives on quoting famous people and thus taking an easy way out.” — Lin
Here is something that amused me for an entire hour the other day:
Go to google map, search for Directions from China to Taiwan.
Take a look at Direction Number 55.
Here, I have taken the liberty to show you a composite screenshot. I am awesome like this.
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Before you sneer at how easily I am amused (even though it is true!) please know that you cannot do this for trips between say the U.S. and Europe. google will not allow you to swim in the Atlantic Ocean. Whereas trips to Asia? Google says, “Be my guest!”
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This is why, ladies and gents, we do not complain about air travel...
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This is why, ladies and gentlemen, we should never complain about air travel.
Looking at this 38-day, 10,000 mile trip in which I have to kayak, jet ski and swim across the Pacific Ocean, I now feel much better about my 2-leg 16-hour-in-middle-seat one-day trip to Taipei.
Perspectives. The cure for whining.
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On an unrelated note, I think I may partake in NaBloPoMo again. National Blog Posting Month. I did it last year: I was crying uncle and said NEVER AGAIN! when I emerged from the darkness called “Blogger’s Block aka I ran out of shit to write about on the third day”. Call me compulsive masochistic nuts. At this moment, I thought I’d give it a go simply because they have a category “Psychotic Ranting/Anonymous Foaming”; I simply need to be part of something this awesome.
Yes. NaBloPoMo looks and sounds very similar to NaBloMoFo, and believe me, by the end of this month, I’d be calling it NaBloMoFo. When your spouse complains about your even crazier blogging obsession, erratic schedules and the unfed children, just tell him that next month could be NaBloJoMo if he pipes down, and oh, does the laundry (by laundry, we mean “folding the goddamn clothes too”. Thank you).
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Something that really made my blood boil today and I think we all need to read this excellent investigative reporting by NPR. Please take a look at this and be outraged. As a nation, we need to be outraged by this: Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law
… What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants … That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
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What Laura Sullivan and NPR uncovered gives an evil spin to the catchphrase “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Here is my silent scream, something I wish someone in a position to do so could actually confront Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce with, invoking the famous retort by Welch against McCarthy:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
This has got to be the best week for Sundays in My City hosted by Unknown Mami.
Halloween is our favorite holiday and here are all the reasons why…
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The sun has set. The day is coming to an end. Back to reality people!
As Mr. Monk, my youngest, said to me when I was trying on my wig, again,
“Mom. You need to stop walking around the house wearing wigs.”
Since I have started telling you English words that I simply have a hard time pronouncing, I thought I’d mention this:
What is up with the name DOUG?
I tried and tried and so far I don’t think I’ve managed to pronounce this name correctly. It sounds somewhere in the spectrum between “dog” and “da-g”. People are always going, “Huh? Dog? What?” Seriously? If I am talking about a person, WHAT OTHER NAME is there that sounds remotely like DOG other than DOUG?
One of the guys living in our street is named Doug. So far I have been referring to him as “so and so’s husband” and “so and so’s dad”. If I have to get his attention, well, I hope that day never comes because I really don’t want to be calling him “DOG!”
Yes, I am obsessed. It really bothers me that somehow I cannot master such a simple word. When I go to a social occasion, I actually consciously hope that nobody I meet there is named Doug. And keeping my fingers crossed, so far, nobody at work has this name. KNOCK ON WOOD! It would not look good if I constantly refer to a colleague as “Dog”. HR will come-a-calling soon.
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You can get this shirt along with the others from, where else? Cafe Press, the purveyor of .... everything Doug
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Next Up: Why I never order VANILLA ice cream or request MANILA folders…
I woke up to a bad allergy attack this morning:
runny nose
sneezing
itchy, watery eyes
itching of the nose or throat
p.s. I just copied that litany from the back of my bottle of Zyrtec.
I’ve got them all. As I was using up the last tissue from the giant Kleenex box, I was contemplating tweeting about it. (Yes, I do compose tweets in my head as I go about my daily business. Shut up! Don’t tell me you don’t. Liar!)
Something to the fact of:
Bad allergy! Every hole on my face has liquid coming out of it!
I slay myself sometimes.
This imaginary tweet reminded me of the common Chinese phrase for describing a brutal death (e.g. from poisoning or from a freakishly ginormous renegade Shaolin monk clapping his Thunderous Fists over your ears in a mortal combat) :
Bleeding from seven holes 七孔流血*
Here is an illustration:
This guy is dying from Psychic Powers.
PSA: Do NOT search for images with keywords “七孔流血” or worse, “nose bleed manga” at work. It is like a codeword for “Show me pornographic images please”. Srly, people? The above is like the only image not involving a scantily-clad lass.
Since I am such a math geek (Har har) I automatically counted out the seven holes (and I swear I did not point my fingers to my body parts as I did this…)
My two eyes
My two ears.
My nose.
My mouth.
Hey, that’s only SIX. WTF? So I started thinking of other holes there could be…
Oh.
No.
Could it be that?
No…?
Or that?
Hmmmm.
Then it hit me. Of course! There are TWO nostrils. Duh.
As I opened up a new box of Kleenex, I thought to myself, “I am sucking more and more at being Chinese. And you people really have a bad influence on me!”
—The End—
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* Google Translate is so awesome! I typed in “Bleeding from seven holes” and it presented the exact phrase! I *heart* you Google Translate even though you say dumb things sometimes…