Dialogue (对话, 対話, 대화)

Recently through some introspection and self-reflection I realized what I really like about books: the dialogue between main characters. I am fine reading encyclopedias and other reference books for trivia and information, but when it comes to pure reading or character development (so mainly fiction), what I appreciate the most is realistic dialogue between characters. Sure prose and artsy descriptions win Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, but I'm just a sucker for real people talking, I suppose, which is why I appreciated Nikola Yoon's book "Everything Everything" about Maddy being confined at home in a hermetically sealed environment and not being to go outside ever. I'm not sure I agree with the message of the book (spoiler: distrust the mom!) but the interplay between the characters had me turning the pages. I guess I'm just a voyeur, always trying to eavesdrop in other people's conversations or understand everybody else's lives. Other books in my years of reading that had great dialogue: The Redwall books (fiction), Michael Lewis books where he recounts real conversations between people like Sam Bankman-Fried, the Elon Musk book where musk tells various underlings that their work is not acceptable and they could hand in their resignation, many Hercule Poirot books (little gray cells) and of course, the Harry Potter books.... come to think of it, that's probably one reason Joanne (J.K.) Rowling's creations are so popular: her characters spring to life through dialogue that's befitting of British schoolchildren, and everyone can relate to that talk. 

If there was an app that tracked how many words I spoke during the day, I bet it'd remind me to meet my target word count and encourage me like the fitness app to "keep going" and "you can still achieve your daily goal, Robert!" I don't think I meet the quotas on most days sitting at home doing work, and sadly even when I go outside it's just to order food, show my boarding pass to the airline operator, tell the Uber where I'm going, etc. There's not much genuine interaction. 

Which is probably why I crave talking to people, and what today's society lacks: live interaction. Dialogue is Greek for "through" and "words," which is different from what I always though it was, "di" meaning 2 people. MJ and I met a couple in the elevator of our "Only Strangers in the Building" condo and the couple was carrying suitcases somewhere. After an awkward strange pause now familiar to probably everyone who uses elevators because either someone has their headphones in or is deep in trance-like state looking at their phone or otherwise nonresponsive, I broke the ice (I'm generally pretty good at doing that when I feel like engaging) by asking, "where are you going?" Turns out the couple (the lady was very obviously pregnant) was going to the hospital to deliver their baby! Wow what a big momentous moment in their lives to walk in on! Yet even in such a momentous occasion (or perhaps because of the momentous occasion) they didn't want to talk in the elevator until I jumped in. Am I that unfriendly-looking? Is social interaction that frowned-upon nowadays? 

I think there's some magic in the creation of dialogue. There's a natural flow that you can develop with someone that fuels a good conversation: both giving each other room to talk, allowing each other to finish one's thought, asking follow-up questions at the appropriate time, making eye contact when necessary to receive emotional cues to see how the other person feels about the topic. When I was a kid I was really bad at it: not knowing what the other party wanted in a conversation, not knowing what was inappropriate to talk about, not catching the draft of the other speaker, and not knowing enough about what other people were talking about to continue the conversation in a clever way. With plenty of training in my 20's in various social groups, however, I got better and better, and I felt I finally honed my skills as an adult at parties, work meetings, happy hours, random people I sit next to on airplanes.....only to have the world turn into phone world and nobody want to engage in dialogue anymore; it's like studying for a test for many years and never actually taking the test. It's a little discouraging really; I learned like 5 different languages, yet the world doesn't talk anymore. Why is that, you ask? I'm at a loss for words. 

Holocaust (大屠杀, ホロコースト, 대학살)

 Holocaust is a word that comes from Latin and Greek meaning "whole" and burnt" but has taken on a completely new meaning due to the events that occurred in 1930s Europe and the crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany before and during World War II. There's actually no Chinese equivalent word for it, where the word assigned to "holocaust" is more of a generic genocide or slaughter, literally "big slaughter" but also used in events like the Rape of Nanking of 1939. I learned that this was the word after asking my mom about it (like a little kid asking his mother, "what's so-and-so big word mean and how do I say it in Chinese?") except this was a 36-year-old grown man asking his elderly mother. I realized by my mother's reaction of the Holocaust that Asian might have a different concept of the Holocaust and that the Holocaust might mean different things to different people. My mom once refused to go into the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. (free to the public with a $1 transaction fee and donations accepted) because she was afraid it would be too bloody and grotesque and that she couldn't bear the sight of it. I'd agree that it is rather grotesque in the displaying the nature of evil that human beings could get down to, but it's not an off-putting museum and doesn't show any blood; it's more of a black-and-white depiction of old pictures of the Holocaust, but it's even more powerful than scenes of carnage or blood; the depiction of mass graves and people starving in camps is offputting enough, and also I think they want to allow kids in to learn about the history.

Reallyt he holocaust just shows that any type of people can be evil; there are just evil people in the world. Luckily there are (so far) more good people than evil in the world, but we have to try damn hard to preseve the goodness in the world to resist the evil forces, but not sure if humankind can ultimately turn back our basic instincts of distrust and self-preservation and for some people, just pure cruelty. How does one have enough evil inside him or her to torture another human being? Maybe if you need to do so to protect your family or save a building with 100 people from a ticking time bomb, but the Nazis apparently just did it because of their belief of a superior race and the inferiority of Jews. If I were asked to torture I would like to think I'd refuse and fail to do so just because of my consideration for other human beings, but would I do it if I knew if I didn't do it, then someone else would do it to me? 

Some of the pictures just showed some emaciated near-corpse human beings that showed the depravity of concentration camps. One really disturbing story I read about the Holocaust was that even as the Allies and Soviet troops liberated the concentration camps that Jews and other prisoners were enslaved at, there were still many people who died even after the Germans ceded control because they had been so diseased and malnourished at the camps. The conditions were so bad that they never recovered, or when they tried to eat food they ate too much and too quickly that their stomachs couldn't adjust and they died of internal diseases. Such a cruel way to die: first to be deprived of food to the verge of starvation (I can imagine that's a really painful way to die, to die of hunger or more likely thirst because just the insanity that there is food and nourishment available, someone is just depriving it from you) but then also on the other end depriving even after freedom has been granted. 

Famous writer Elie Wiesel had several appropriate quotes from the Holocaust, as he himself was a survivor of Auschwitz, but most memorable "opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." Very true. As it's 2024 and very few Holocaust survivors are still living, we have to strive to not be indifferent, maybe create a better word in Chinese for Holocaust to emphasize the hopefully once-in-the-history-of the-world event it was, and focus on the big things like preventing evil and preventing holocausts, not just arguing over social media and getting upset that someone cut me off in traffic (although yea that is annoying). 

Dreams (梦, 夢, 꿈)

 Currently listening to the song "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, their only song from the famous "Rumors" album to reach the U.S. Billboard No. 1. Talk about an embattled band full of infighting and love but also divorces with Lindsey Buckingham, John McVie and Christine McVie, all each having a falling out, but also a ton of good music. I'm more partial to the explosive "Edge of Seventeen" by just Stevie Nicks myself, but Fleetwood Mac is definitely a culturally significant band, and it passes the "MJ hum test," which is if I start humming a tune and MJ knows it from my humming, (or vice versa where MJ hums and I identify), it's a song worth knowing about. It also is discussed at length in the TV series "High Fidelity" with Zoe Kravitz, a film that made me jealous of record store owners. 

I used to dread waking up when I was young because it meant I'd have to start the day getting up in cold Chicago, go to the bus stop and wait to go to school, or finish some homework I hadn't finished the previous night, or later in life, get up to go to a job that I was slogging through, and it shouldn't really shouldn't be like that, we should all get up with a sense of purpose in life, with some excitement, not just get up to do something we dread. Recently, though, I've diagnosed "wake-up lethargy" (refusing to wake up in the morning) as a symptom of a different problem: I don't want my dream to end. I hypothesize that at least for me, dreams are so enjoyable and life-like that I don't want to leave them, and want to return to the world that I had left behind in the dream. ESPECIALLY after not sleeping well the previous night, I get some of the most lucid, long-lasting, and enjoyable dreams. It's not as dramatic or visually aesthetic as the Christopher Nolan movie "Inception," but who knows, maybe dreams are a link to another dimension somewhere, maybe past lives, parallel lives (good movie that I discussed previously), future lives, other people's lives, imaginary lives, transient lives, etc. Whatever it is, I can almost feel like I'm in a dream while I'm in a dream, and yet I continue walking the path, or flying the skies, or shooting the basketball, whatever I'm doing in my dream, knowing that I probably won't come back to this world again when I wake up...but that's OK, I don't feel loss, I dont' feel strong emotions, it's just a nirvana-like state of being, like I'm floating just watching a movie without thinking about anything else. Rarely do I hae any similar type of experience in real life: I try to finish all the tough tasks I have and just wind down in the evenings, but those times are few and far between, with some bad after-dinner gas mixed in, worries about tomorrow, desperately trying to multi-task, cooking dinner and washing dishes, all kinds of distractions. Dreams are so much better, like nothing matters, I feel no anxiety, no pain, no worries, exactly what I'm searching for in life but paradoxically never get because I'm always trying to do 3 times at once in a hurry to get everything done. In many ways I imagine dreams are the best version of what death can be, just a state of being going on in my head, no worrying about what happened in the past or fretting about the future, just letting everything be. And the best part is, I can wake up after a dream and everything is OK. Maybe that's what death will be like, with Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" playing the whole time? 

champagne (香槟酒, シャンパン, 샴페인)

 I always liked the word "champagne," enough that I went to undergrad in a city that sounds like "champagne" (little did I know that the word come from a wine region in the northeast of France. I was reading through all the cocktails (a cocktail encyclopedia, if you will, because it's one of the areas I consistently know nothing about) and thinking of all these drinks that people come up with fancy names for: a screwdriver, a rusty nail, a lightning bolt, monkey wrench (I guess a lot of tool names for some reason, maybe has to do with the type of people who drank them), bloody mary, Cosmpolitan, and marveled at the levels of drunkenness people must get after having a Long Island Ice Tea (just look up the ingredients). A lot of them is just adding a sugary soft drink with some sort of liquor, with the main liquers usually being vodka, gin, cognac, whiskey, tequila, brandy, rum. Those seem to be the main ones, but never champagne for some reason, because I guess sparking wine is a type of wine, not hard liquor. Perfect for me as a lightweight who doesn't want to get drunk, champagne is sweet enough on its own and doesn't gross me out, plus it works well into what I consider a good starter cocktail, the mimosa. (known to brunchgoers everywhere due to the "bottomless mimosa" adds outside of seemingly every brunch place. Mimosas, just orange juice, nothing fancy, no bitters or capers or any additions needed, just some of the easiest ingredients you can have, no need to go to bartending school for that. I always wondered what it's like to be a bar tender, doing the cool shaking move with the shakers to mix the drinks and putting it in front of you. I have recently learned that Moet& Chandon is like the trusted brand of champagnes, always a good reputation, and hopefully something I can enjoy after I do something noteworthy one of these days; the last "accomplishment" I've secured might be winning my fantasy baseball league, or finishing a long case at work, or when Nividia quadrupled in price from when I bought it; all those are very superficial accomplishments, I've waiting for a really big occasion to pop the bubbly, and I'm eagerly awaiting popping the bubbly. 

Only recently did I learn that "straight up" meant without the ice, which gives you more flavor of the alcohol, but doesn't give you a "second drink" that "on the rocks" would do by adding ice and letting the ice melt and dilute the drink for a different substance. Never thought of that; I always just drank my "one the rocks drinks quickly, and sucked on the ice cubes. Wow how many bartenders probably realized I was a novice level drinker right away. Out of all the other liquors other than champagne, I'd probably go with vodka as the one I like the best..... I never really get the taste of gin in gin and tonics (apparently the representative summer drink, although I think most drinks are best in summer), and whiskey has too distinctive of a taste that really just overpowers everything, like in Manhattans. Rum is good, but usually comes with rum and coke, which is too sweet (I don't do sodas) and keeps me up, and I'm still wondering what cognac tastes like, and probably brandy too. I can't say I've had a bad experience with tequilas since margaritas are always delicious with all the lime juice and sweet stuff and usually I'm having chips and salsa and all the Mexican food to go with it; I'm still waiting for the Tequila Sunrise; I guess I just like orange juice. I know one drink that is a safe, good for all-occasions, don't worry too much about getting drunk: Moscow mule. The Russians love vodka for a reason, and the Moscow mule is the most common, because it kinda tastes good. At least a well-done one does. 

Cheers! Salut! Kanpai! Ganbei! Slainte! Prost! 

Ozempic

 I really don't know much about Ozempic and how it works, other than the fact that it was the all the rage in 2023 and that NovoNordisk made a boatload of money off of it, and it's sweeping the nation as a get-thin-quick drug. My barber used it and lost 40 pounds, by his own account. As a former chubby kid, I get it: I would have tried new drugs to try to get thin too if I didn't exercise my way out of it (it wasn't because I managed to eat less, I've always eaten big portions and just had to burn off more than I put in, so in that sense I got lucky that my metabolism saved me. Others are not so lucky. This week I came to my parents' home and all the old temptations of childhood are there: the fruity mochy, the crepes, the snacks lying around, the leftover pizza in the fridge, the yummy home-made food that my parents are so adept at (but likely put in a little too much salt/fat/sugar to sustain a healthy diet) and I've just been so tempted to get a litlte taste of everything. A little dabble here, a little dabble there. It's like everything at Costco that my cheap instincts allowed me to lay off are gathered here by my mom because she's fine with eating all kinds of stuff, and like MJ says, "the food is looking at me." It's a bad combo of having nothing to do and having food lay around. Probably what hurt me as a kid in a home full of treats, and what I don't deal with MJ: we just don't have excess junk food in the home; and I buy just the "Bare Necessities" (a Jungle Book song) of what we need. So self-discipline in not buying the bad food itself is my weight-loss drug. 

Ozempic has a different way of tackling weight loss: it attacks the appetite and one's desire to eat more; so supposedly I could have all these goodies all around my house, but I wouldn't want to eat it because the desire is gone. That's..... a pretty strong drug, and while it's good that such a drug exists for those who are obese and need to lose weight for their own health, I'm not sure of the long-term effects, and side effects of taking. Will you have to be on the drug forever? What happens if you stop taking the drug? I've heard some risky things about Ozempic..... as with any weight loss regime/diet/drug, the secret is to keep the weight off forever, and not have it come back. I always feel a little weird about needing to be on a drug to sustain yourself, like you're addicted to it. (although I guess most Americans are addicted to sugar, caffeine, etc.) I just think to lose weight is more of a mindset, you have to be iron-willed and just not bring that stuff into proximity: out of sight, out of mind. Of course, never having had weight problems in the first place is always the better solution, just like never trying drugs or starting bad habits. The best weight loss drug: not having to rely on drugs. Ozempic is the "break glass in case of emergency" fallback option. 

Brooklyn

On a whirlwind tour of seeing movies and TV shows from a few years ago; I recently saw first 2 seasons of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, got through both Olivia Coleman and Imelda Staunton's reigns playing Queen Elizabeth II on the Crown, and watched Oscar-winning movies the Green Book, the Help, Hidden Figures, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (I actually felt confused about this Quentin Tarantino film and felt it dragged for a long time, and didn't really feel good about Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio coming out of it), I just saw 2 movies headlined by the talented Saoirse Ronan, "Little Women" (directed by Greta Gerwig, I almost wrote Greta Garbo because she's so often a correct response on Jeopardy!) and Brooklyn, a movie she didn't have to share the screen with other great actresses like Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, and Laura Dern, basically all the March sisters (Jo, Amy, Beth, Meg) and mom Marmee, she could just depict the life of an Irish immigrant. She wonderfully displayed the trials and tribulations of immigrants coming to the U.S., the hope, the fear, the passing through immigration, the homesickness, the struggling at a new job. Ironically, in both movies Little Women and Brooklyn, I felt like the love triangles Saorise's characters got involved in hindered the plot: Jo March and Eilis Lacey were both such strong characters who had a great story arc of determination, starting from nothing, trying to make it in the world......and then they got distracted by men, and in an unrealistic way. Eilis especially was this girl from nowhere in Ireland coming to America on a ship, and within a year became romantically involved with a nice Italian boy, then had to go back to Ireland due to her sister's untimely passing but then met another gentleman Irish man who wanted to marry her? Both where charming and handsome and ideal husband types? I felt that whole "who should I be with, I have feelings for both" really took away from the story, suddenly she became the Bachelorette: Brooklyn/Ireland edition. And yea, Timothy Chalamet as Laurie in Little Women was just too much. I was in and out of sleep while watching the movie but for some reason he seemed to be right in the middle of everyone: Jo liked him, Amy loved him all his life, and even Meg wanted to dance with him one night....it's "Little Women," not "Everyone has the Hots for Laurie." 

I resonated with Eilis Lacey's story as an immigrant in many ways coming to a new land (being pulled out of school in China to go to a new land, new school, new faces, new language), and I do actually remember feeling a little sick flying from Shanghai halfway around the world with my grandpa, not having been on an airplane before. And seeing strangers greet me at the airport after we passed through customs, then ACTUALLY getting sick in the car back to our apartment in ghetto Chicago and throwing up. But I think Brooklyn resonated with me on behalf of my mom, who came to the U.S. by herself as a student trying to find a better life than she had at home. She had married my dad by then and gave birth to me, but she was the pioneer, the trailblazer who first came to America by herself. I can only imagine that plane ride to America, not knowing a single person in America and having just some savings to start in a new world, in a world without internet, with cell phones, with just letters to write home, leaving family (and me!) all behind. That must be one of the loneliest feelings in the world, and not sure at all that it's the correct move to make, but having faith that eventually it would work out. And she did all of this without prospect of a breathtaking love story in store like in Brooklyn! There are plenty of movies and books about immigration, and some Chinese movies might more closely mirror my mom's story, but the immigrant spirit traverses all cultures. It's inspiring and I wish I had the courage to do that; I can't even muster up the courage to tell the waiter they got our order wrong at the restaurant sometimes. 

Jellyfish (海蜇, クラゲ, 해파리)

 I miss being a kid. I don't miss the inability to travel large distances, the violin lessons I went to dutifully, the mindless homework we had to complete, the insecurities and not having money, but I do miss the joy of learning about new things, maybe the blissful ignorance of just being a kid, and the class field trips. Man, field trips felt like such a treat back when we were in elementary school and junior high, like we were going on a journey to a distant land, anywhere but another mundane day stuck inside the prison/classroom. Now that I'm an adult, I can choose to go anywhere really at any time if I really wanted to, so it doesnt' feel that special when I go anywhere because it's so readily available. As a kid, going to the zoo or the aquarium or the science museum or the grand-daddy of them all, the 8th grade field trip, felt like given a real gift I remember in 5th grade I went to an Outdoor Ed trip with the class where we slept in bunk beds overnight for 2 days; I liked it so much I cried when I came back because I realized I wasn't going back there any more. (And still haven't). The Shedd Aquarium was THE place to go to for all Chicago-area schools, and Cass Junior High was no exception: I remember back in the day dolphin shows were the main attraction (whereas nowadays they're very limited due to cruelty to animals), and we were given assignments to identify different types of fish. I loved it, as kids should. Even before Finding Nemo and Free Willy and various versions of Little Mermaid movies, I've liked learning about sea life. It's not just the sharks, the whales, the dolphins, the big-ticket items, I like the small school of fish, sea anemones, mysterius moray eels, etc. MJ and I went to half-off night at the aquarium this past Friday night (same night as New Year!) and enjoyed interacting with my new favorite sea creature: the jellyfish. 

Jellyfish belong to a family called Medusoza, so it's kind of hard to say whether they're mammals or fish, or what, they're more "cnidarians." What they look like to me, though, are just cool-looking umbrellas in the water. As soon as MJ and I entered, the first exhibit we entered led us to a pool of swimming moon jellyfish, which all looked similar in shape but different in sizes, like seeing beach parasols on the beach floaing around. They're one of the few sea creatures we're allowed to touch, and also aren't going to sting us. Watching some jellyfish just float around makes me think, in the next life will I just become a jellyfish? If life just converts to other life, will my particles just dissolve into air, or will I come bck in another life form? If so these jellyfish would not be bad way to live, although they only live 1-3 years. All that wiggling around takes a lot out of them, apparently. A cool feature for certain types of jellyfish, as we learned in the "Jellyfish Invasion" exhibit, is bioluminescence: living things giving off light especially underwater. Seeing it through a pane of glass makes it seem like a lava lamp. And hundreds of jellyfish in noe container intermittently giving off ligtht is like seeing lanterns released into the air at a Lunar New Year festival (Happy Lunar New Year by the way), except just continuously doing so, without stopping. 

MJ is not a big zoo or aquarium person, and I had to practically drag her there, but I do think aquariums are a good date night thing to do; there's something soothing about walking around to take your brain off of the myriad things going off in the world, not just the monotnous issues going on at work that occupy my brain space half the time, but also election year worries, Super Bowl, storms in California, Israel still bombing Gaza constantly, Ukraine and Russia incing ever closer to stalemate, AI taking over everyone's jobs, the new generation being hooked on social media, the government pumping trillions of dollars into the economy and never paying it back, it's enough to worry you sick, but spend just an hour at an aquarium to calm you down, and it really works: it's like you doing reverse-Ariel in Little Mermaid: going underwater seeing treasures untold, gadgets and gizmos of plenty, and looking at all the thing-a-bobs and being fascinated by all the fish swimming around on those--- what do you call them?--- oh, fins. I just wish I could be---- Part of that world. 

Peaceful- several couples just ended their night sitting in the old dolphin theater seats (no longer doing dolphin shows), but still 3 dolphins wading around in the pools and enjoying swimming through the pool, wishing to just stay in the world of sea creatures and the totally different for a little longer before going back into the real world. 

Labeorphilists (啤酒瓶收藏家, ビール瓶コレクター, 맥주병 수집가)

 A word that I don't know how to even spell, a labeorphilist is apparently someone who collects beer bottles. Who wants to collect beer bottles, other than college freshmen who display them on their windowsill to boast how many beers they drank recently? It's kind of puzzling to me, although given the number of alcoholic containers in a lot of restaurants/bars/taverns I've been to I don't doubt there are even beer bottles to collect. Through trivia I've learned that there are cool-sounding names for various kind of hobby collectors, like a philumenist collects matchbooks, a philatelist collects stamps, an arctophile collects teddy bears, etc. Seems like people who like trivia often also like collecting things, well, because trivia is essentially its own collector's items, like picking up pieces of trivia and owning them, seems like a natural crowd. MJ and I don't collect much; we live a very simple lifestyle apparently. The closest thing may be flowers, where MJ has picked up a flower each time we've gone grocery shopping this calendar year, and as of writing we have both an orchid in our home and a cool collection of yellow gerberas (didn't know what those were). When asked on a game show about anything I collected, I once said I collected blood donation name tags each time I went to donate blood; I guess the other thing I collect are the free giveaways I get once in a while after donating, like I have a free Red Cross blanket, Red Cross mug, and half a dozen Red Cross shirts/ sweatshirts I've collected over the years. It really is kind of a badge of honor, but they're comfortable (and sometimes creative shirts). Oh and I guess I like collecting languages/ skills to use in life.... MJ and I are going to Mexico twice in the next couple months and she's told me to learn some Spanish. Challenge accepted. 

Maybe license plates/ driver's licenses for the different states I've lived in? So far I've had 4 state licenses in my life. Also my student IDs; actually those have inherent value if you're like me and look the same as I did when I was 22 years old; you can use it for student discount rates. 

The one thing MJ and I are NOT collecting, but looks like certain people do, are children. Not like adopting children or picking them up from the street, but just having a lot of children. I've been following this one Facebook friend I knew from college over the course of 10 years since he got married; every 2 years or so he just adds a new kid to the collection, it seems. It's maddening for people like me who don't have kids yet (and want one), but at some point (he's going to have a FIFTH kid soon) it seems a little excessive, and not just because you have to take care of the kids/ pay for them. Ten years ago my friends who were parents were saying their kids cost $1 million per kid over the course of a life; I wonder with inflation now how much that is. Sounds like sour grapes, but I would NOT want to have more than 3 kids. And the Facebook friend's wife has had FIVE different pregnancies! Elon Musk has upwards of 10 kids, but some of them were twins, and there were different mothers...... Facebook friend's wife apparently gave birth FIVE times. In the last 10 years she's been pregnant a majority of the time. Seems like a lot of work. I wonder if there are people who have the same personality that numismatists (coin collectors) do or deltiologists (vinyl records) do..... just try to get as many as they can and get fresh and excited about a new one each time. I get plangonologists (dolls), brolliologist (umbrellas), even cigarette cards, but collecting real life people..... you can't just give those back when you get tired of them, and I phase out of stuff pretty quickly/ easily. 

Hans Niemann

 Chess is facing an existential crisis, and the poster boy of that crisis is a 20-year-old grandmaster by the name of Hans Niemann. I admit, I hadn't followed chess for a long time after high school, just dismissing it as a hobby I had in high school. Unlike organized sports leagues, it's harder to keep up with chess if you aren't really good, because by college people have moved onto other endeavors, and spending 2 hours on just one game of chess isn't exactly an ideal way to spend the best years of one's life. So I got out of it with some vague understanding of how the game was evolving and the name "Magnus Carlsen" being the best player in the world for a long time and possibly even the G.O.A.T of the game, (greatest of all time) over legends like Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov. "The Queen's Gambit" came out during the pandemic and got me to watch for awhile, but it was more geared towards the backstory of Ana Taylor Joy's character and stood out because of the story of a succesful woman in chess, which I admit is a pretty big deal. Yes, like many folks in the chess world I got sucked back in because of the cheating scandal of late 2022, when Hans Niemann upset Magnus Carlsen, but then was accused of cheating; he counterattacked by suing Carlsen and others for $100 million. It was messy, and both sides had some image problems, but it definitely put Niemann on the map because of the "tactics" he used to cheat (and the body parts he allegedly used in doing so), even leading to him being the answer to a $1000 clue (the hardest question, thus the most obscure character, but still, recognition). 

A lot of drama, showing once again that no publicity is bad publicity. MJ and I watched the Grammy Awards tonight and saw plenty of celebrities on screen who understand that concept: Travis Scott, who gained fame as Kylie Jenner's partner but also a November 2021 incident at Astroworld where fans at his concert died; Billy Joel in the past has had bad publicity, Miley Cyrus has had bad publicity (didn't stop her from winning Best Record of the Year for Flowers); MJ and I learned, having nether watched the Grammys, that "The Big Award" is the Album of the Year award, the equivalent of Best Picture at the Oscars, and that a lot of surprise guests show up from the celebrity world; Trevor Noah has hosted it for the last several years, Meryl Streep's son-in-law is Mark Ronson, Tony Bennett passed away last year (as did Burt Bacharach and many other icons and frequent Jeopardy answers), the awards typically are at Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center), and both Kelly Clarkson and Oprah are thinner now (I wouldn't categorize them as "thin," but noticeably thinner than before). Seems like Ozempic (by Novo Nordisk, rival of Eli Lilly's Mounjaro) does work for a lot of people, so if there was a pharmaceutical industry awards Ozempic would have won Drug of the Year.... Oprah Winfrey presenting. "And the Pharmy Award goes to....." 

Especially for nobodys like Hans Nieman (or for 99% of the population), and especially in today's world where fame is currency, it's not bad to do something noteworthy even if it's not viewed in teh best light or you get labeled a villain: it makes a story out of it with storylines and plot points, which the general public consumes and hungers for all the time. The problem, though, with Hans Niemann's story for chess is: he's not the only one to cheat. Back when I was playing in like 2000, 2001, it was probably impossible to cheat, and even if you need I don't know if chess computer programs were powerful enough to come up with a move right away to suggest for you to win, and even beat the best grandmasters. Now there are tons of them to tell you the right move instantly, so playing online is the equivalent of the Wild Wild West: there are few rules beyond the basic rules of the game, you don't know who you're playing and if that person just has a bot working on another screen that tells them all the best moves to play. 

Fine, just play live chess, right? But that's the problem that Hans created, he actually cheated in a LIVE game. Especially now with Elon Musk and others working on Neuralink where you don't even need a smart device, chips are just going into your brain, who knows who can just program their brain to think like a computer. (Jeopardy might run into this existential crisis pretty soon, too- I better get on the show quick sometime in the next 8 years). And of course AI is getting exponentially smarter every day; chess has definitely already been "solved," it just might lose the resurgent appeal it has now because people give up. I, for one, love playing for fun without hope of ever being good enough to be a master much less grandmaster, but there's already a feeling of helplessness playing people much better than I am, but also playing a game that's been solved that I can never be THAT good at it. It's tough to inspire interest when you can only go so far. 

Thanks Hans. And yes, your name definitely helps you sound more like a villain (think Hans Gruber from Die hard), or "Neumann" from Seinfield. 

Pennywise and Pound foolish

 I may have used the title before, but I find the phrase "pennywise and pound foolish" to articulately describe myself: I'll resist the urge and starve myself for hours to avoid spending $3.00 for a bottle of water and $7.00 for an overpriced sandwich, but then I'll calmly plop down $76.00/ month (that's like $1000/ year) for a Hulu subscription for the sole purpose of watching Jeopardy. I'll refuse to take the $2.00 bus back home and rather wait for the free city circulator bus that comes 10 minutes later, meanwhile in those 10 minutes during that time I'll neglect my stocks and miss out on opportunities to make a lot more money of passive income, or pass up the opportunity to work an extra day for hundreds of dollars in compensation. If you look up pennywise (not the clown) and pound foolish, there'd be a picture of me doing those things for sure. 

I realized I didn't talk much about stocks in 2023, or if I did it was MUCH MUCH less than 2022. The difference? 2022 was a down year most of the year (bear market), 2023 was a straight line back up, like a V-shaped recovery from the depths of the pandemic up to the euphoric days of late -2021 (halcyon days where everyone in the market looked like a genius) to the painful tech busts of 2022, to the January of 2024 we just went through where everything suprisingly stayed up and kept going up despite the consensus view of having a pullback. When everything's going smoothly and there's no stress, the paradox is I don't even enjoy it- I just take it for granted and let it happen, only to pine for these days again when the market does poorly and wondering why I didn't sell earlier. So it goes. Bill Maher is a genius about psychology of money: the people who have money don't worry about money at all (it's like hunger- people who are full don't worry about food at all), where people who don't have money (or feel it slipping away when the stock market's down) care all the time about money. Which is probably why we all silently detest money- we only think about it when there's a lack of it or need for more, like a water faucet that studdenly stopped pumping out water. (Btw, I read today that we're supposed to flush our water heater every year or so? And there's something called "hard water" that makes the calcium deposits worse and makes flushing even more necessary? First I 've hard of it). 

Is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri too long and wordy of a title for a good movie? - NO, say Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson- a bit of a weird and rough movie, but reminded me of the Wire- truly flawed characters. We can't just have blissfully angelic heros in life like Spiderman or the Barbie movie, we gotta have characters with human flaws so we can relate to them, and also not quietly detest them for being too perfect.