Are you there god? It's Me, Bobby

On the weekend that the blockbuster movie "Superman" (by James Gunn) came out that promises to be one of the "hit movies of the summer," I watched a less heralded movie called "Are You there god, it's me, Margaret, based on the novel Judy Blume. Sometimes the movie business gets so caught up in the marketing and the pushing of blockbuster films that the really good movies get lost in the shuffle, the ones that everyone really should be seeing that reflect the cultural zeitgeist and just make us feel good about ourselves but also have cultural relevancy and a deeply compelling story, back to feeling like we did when we were younger. In 2022 I remember that movie being "CODA," the story about a young girl being the daughter of deaf adults, a movie I had no problem sitting through and hanging onto every scene, and laughing the whole way through. "Are You There God" is very much the same and it definitely earned its 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, just the soundtrack itself is full of bangers and Jeopardy worthy material like Dusty Springfield "Son of a preacher Man," The Guess Who's "These Eyes," and "Signed Sealed Delivered" by Stevie Wonder. So why didn't I hear about this movie in 2023 when it first came out? The release date serves as a clue: April 28, 2023, just weeks before the summer movie phenomenon known as "Barbenheimer," when both Barbie and Oppenheimer were released within weeks of each other and everyone had to go see one or the other, leaving no time or attention for movies like "Are You There God." I really appreciate a movie about girls growing up, because as a boy I watched plenty of boys movies like Sandlot, Mighty Ducks movies, Free Willy, etc., that focused on the adolescence and growing-up on boys, so much so I never considered how girls grew up, like it's a totally different world as in Men are from Mars, Girls are from Venus. It's a whole different world of worrying about bra sizes, having crushes on boys, secret societies, making friendships as a girl, what to wear at all times.......all topics brilliantly depicted by the movie and through Margaret's life, portrayed by Abby Ryder Fortson. I specifically remember when I also asked my own conception of "God" similar questions, like helping me through a test, winning my next game of chess, hoping I would get into my dream school. I sympathesized with Abby who struggles with her religious identity of being in a family with a Christian mom and Jewish dad; I never really got into religion at all but had seen so many depictions of God through media and heard good reviews about him, yet I had no relationship with God or any way to contact God, so I came up with my own inner God to guide me. To this day, I still have inner thoughts to a very non-specific "God" (not really thinking about a white guy with a huge beard), more of an amorphous being that transcends the world we live in, maybe more of like karma or some other cosmic force, to just consider blowing the winds of fortune my way, which they already have in many ways throughout my life, but maybe just a little more with some upcoming events in my life. I only wish I could be as pure of thougth as Margaret in the movie wishing for selfless things for her family and for other people, than for myself. Watch the movie! Currently streaming on Peacock, where Poker Face Season 2 is also streaming, and 300+ old episodes of the Weakest Link! I swear the trivia shows of America all use some of the same material, a lot of the questions I see on Jeopardy come up in various forms on other shows like Weakest Link too.

Golf Cart (高尔夫球车, ゴルフカート, 골프 카트)

Using a golf cart on a hot summer day has to be one of the most indulging experiences in the world. Instead of carrying your own clubs around for 18 holes, up and down, under the sun, over rivers, uphill and downhill, through the fairways and onto the greens, you just use modern technology to get to to the next hole. It's one of the reasons I and others view golf as one of the more high-brow sports out there: guys walking around swinging pieces of steel or lumber and trying to get a little ball into a hole hundreds of yards away. Definitely not a sport I grew up with, and I remember getting bored in gym class when we went outside to swing golf clubs for half an hour. Where was the running? The jumping? The touching of a ball and making it go far? Golf seemed like it was just a mechanical process, not much resistance or dynamic play to it: just aiming your ball to a certain area. The other great thing about a golf cart is you can keep water and other essentials in the cart within arm's reach, which is great for cold drinks, snacks, and.......yes, I realize many golf courses are doing this now, alcoholic drinks that they have a nice lady come with a mobile bar to sell you. Now in my late-30s, though, I definitely realize the appeal of golf, at least the golf cart/ fancy golf course part of it. I'm still not very much into staying in one place and hitting balls, but getting out on the golf course and enjoying the great outdoors? That is something I can get behind. Americans reserve some of the best land for this recreational sport of golf for some reason, with tiny creeks and trimmed lawns just waiting for you to walk through. This weekend, my grade school buddies enjoyed a whole weekedn of golf (and even Mario Golf the N64 video game). They enjoyed it a little more than I did because they actually knew what they were doing having practiced their shots plenty of times before, but the few times I could actually hit the ball generally in the direction I wanted to? Great feeling walking with my chest puffed out feeling like a hundred bucks. It's weird, golf: such a sense of accomplishment for just the simple action of swinging a club on a ball that's not even moving....baseball players might say this is like hitting a sitting duck; a lot of moving parts go into hitting the perfect golf shot: your legs have to be in the right position, you have to swing your hips, rotate your arms, follow through, keep your head level, keep your eyes on the ball: I kept reminding myself all these things before every shot but even then I still messed something up at least half the time: it's one thing to know what to do, another thing to actually do it. In some ways, golf is kind of like trivia: it takes a LOT a LOT of reps before getting good at golf and being ready to get to the best golf courses: my buddy took me to the open-to-the-public clubhouse of Whistling Straits, one of the fancier courses in all of Wisconsin, home to a few PGA championship events over the years. There's no way I'm ever playing there at anywhere near a competent level, unless I work on it for years and years. Yes I could pay the $700 to get on a wait list or something to play, but I wouldn't be able to do well, wouldn't understand the intricacies of the game well enough to even enjoy the game, and I'd look pretty foolish for even trying. Getting good at trivia takes a LOT of reps. It's not hard to take practice and shoot a few shots, but really getting good at both golf and trivia? A lot of dedication is involved, but like the Malcolm Gladwell concept of 10,000 hours, if you dedicate yourself for 10,000 hours to the game, you will get good at it, because you just drill yourself with enough questions to know what to expect, condition yourself to know the answers, and to answer quickly. 5 years ago when I first started watching Jeopardy, I would NOT have been good at the game, and getting onto the stage would have made me look silly, and I wouldn't even know how much I still needed to know to get good. Now, almost 5 years later, I do realize how much I know and how far I've come, but it's like a neverending tunnel: the more I know, the more I understand how much I DON'T know.

Sequels (续集, 続編, 속편)

I recently caved after seeing this movie pop up on Amazon Prime and suggested for me and trending and every other buzzword to get me to click and watch it: I finally watched "Gladiator 2," starting Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington and Connie Nielsen.... but no Russell Crowe, who wasn't even asked by director Ridley Scott to appear in the movie because Maximus died in the first movie. Sounds like Crowe and Scott didn't like each other, is what it sounds like. No dream sequence where Maximus wife's sees him in a dream? Flashback scenes? Hallucinations? Nothing? It's just one of the many things that was off about Gladiator 2, with the main thing being that it just wasn't Gladiator the original movie, the live shots of the colosseum, fights with live animals, the whole epic quality of it was just missing, despite them admittedly putting some really cool graphics into it and even having a naval battle in the Colosseum. That seems to be a general rend in Hollywood: the sequel of hit shows just doesn't capture the magic like the original does, and no amount of marketing, cliffhangers, new cast members, etc. to capitalize on the previous movie's success can mask how difficult it is to like the movie, and give a sinking feeling that they've cheapened the original. Gladiator 2 was OK, it didn't completely sink the ship, but The Matrix: Resurrections definitely brought down the reputation of the whole series, and it was a triple stumper on Jeopardy with no less than Ken Jennings dunking on it by sympathizing with the contestants, "I didn't see it neither." When I'm on a plane and have so many options to watch, (and really it's the same at home now too with the amount of movies available through streaming platforms) I will always get lured to the original, more flashy movie with new concepts and new characters than the sequel. Even Disney has the same problem: I heard Frozen 2: (no subtitle) came out but really didn't go to see it, and same with Moana 2: (also no subtitle). Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir's project after the Martian, kind of feels like a sequel to the Martian, and..... has a lot of great concepts, but I do think it suffers a little because it's too close to the original, it's the same plot of man gets stuck in space by himself, has to find a way home. I think it'll be bought as a script (the book pretty much reads like a film script already) and they'll definitely want to stay away from calling it "The Martian 2" or anything suggesting a sequel. My dislike of sequels, however, doesn't extend to TV shows for some reason: sometimes the first season is the best season out of the 5, but oftentimes it takes the showrunners a couple seasons to get into the characters, form a bond, and season 3 becomes the best season. Why do human beings dislike sequels? For me, at least, it's the constant need for new stiumulus, the hedonic treadmill of needing new things all the time. As much as I loved going to new art museums and new sports stadiums and visiting new cities or checking out new restaurants, the second and third times, inevitably, lose a little luster. They could still be great experiences because the first time was so epic that there's plenty of room down from the top, but you never really get back to experiencing that for the first time, it's like your body adjusts to it and it's never as excited or stiumulated anymore. I wonder if it's the same with parents who have their second children, that the first time was so unique and so special (and traumatizing) and so unforgettable that the second kid just becomes old hat, with slightly newer challenges but the same baselilne needs. I bet the moms, though, feel every bit of that pain and turmoil giving birth. It can't be easy going through childbirth again! I wonder if the body just shuts down all memories of the problems of childbirth so that the mother will want to procreate again, and that's how the human race continues and life finds a way. That may actually be similar to how sequels get made, the studios block out all the negative experiences and knowledge that the second movie will not measure up to the first, but makes it anyway for the sake of art, the franchise, and the lifeblood of everything that gets made: Money.

Three-child policy (三孩政策)

Ever since I was a child, I was aware of the "One Child Policy" in China because my parents were subject to penalties if they went over one child, and I was that one child. Talk about pressure! Recently though, due to declining fertility rates around the world and especially in China, they changed their policy to encouraging prospecive parents to have kids, upping the number not from one to two but jumping up to "three is best." (There was a brief period in parts of China were they had a "two-child policy" where any parents who had more than 2 children would be subject to penalty, but that's now been scrapped for three kids. It's a lesson in not trusting the government to stay committed to one policy, as the government needs to adjust its policies based on how the world changes, but the Chinese government especially looks foolish now for limiting parents to one child for such a long time. Basically, if you go for a radical policy that goes against incentive structures and human behavior, you might regret it later: all those only children in my generation lived rather lonely lifestyles and in my opinion made us less likely to have children because we experienced what it was like to be lonely as a kid without a big family and the joys of having a big family, so we don't need it. (I do have a sister but our relationship is not a typical sibling relationship due to the age gap). There's also wacky stuff about the one-child policy: what if you have twins or more? (probably a provision in there that said you could keep the babies if there were unexpected multiples). And a big problem in America is unexpected pregancies: Parents with a kid already: You get drunk one night, make some bad decisions, and boom you have a second child: do you get punished for that? The financial punishment and socially the second kid could not be put into the national system, so they didn't technically exist and wouldn't get benefits, education, etc. Pretty intense, and you have to wonder how many children were aborted due to those looming punishments. The ironic thing is, now that the one-child policy has been lifted and the "three is best" philopsophy has been adopted and encouraged when it's convenient for the government now to have more children (it's blatantly just a social welfare thing and nothing individually beneficial for the parents like say, mothers get healthier if they have more children or anything), it's the financial incentives that are keeping people from having children, this time not imposed by the government by worldwide it's the looming cost of having another mouth of feed but also daycare, education, owning a home, gas prices, just everything: I can't be the only one who frets about inflation doubling prices every 10 years or so, meanwhile what the jobs be like in 10 years? Will there even be jobs? People are ALREADY worried about not having enough money to have kids now while there are jobs, what will it be like when there aren't jobs? Maybe every generation has the same worry and it all works out 30 years later that having kids was a good decision and worth it financially ("it all worked out in the end") but during my parents' generation there was still optimism about the future, computers weren't even generally accessible yet, you could think of more jobs coming, growth industries, various fields in science and technologies needing people to help guide them into the new century. (Ironically, the time when people were optimisic was when China clamped down on their birth rates, while now people are pessimistic but the government wants them to have more kids. Going against the grain). And yes, three kids seems too ambitious. I polled my friends who have had kids: There are not really any "savings" to be had after the first child, it's not like you can recycle everything from the first kid and give it to the 2nd kid and 3rd kid and so on. Each kid has their own costs, own lessons (you don't get a 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 deal in most places), they have to pay for each seat they take up in the airplane, you have to buy a bigger car, each has their own dance lesson classes, tennis classes, etc. (Unless you do what I plan to do is give my kid a book and tell them to read, everything costs money). So many scams and things you don't need (the American economy and probably the Chinese economy thrives on people paying for these!) are lumped on you when you have a kid whereas I can avoid it now: daycare, going to Disneyland, getting games and phones for the kids (if one kid at school has it, all the kids want it), food, the coolest clothes and shoes, baseball games, it's like opening up a Pandora's box of temptations and guilt trips for parents thinking they might not be doing their best for the kids. And parents are supposed to be saving for college during all this time of supporting the kids, who are negative inputs into the household income? Another big thing I thought of just writing this: healthcare, maybe the biggest scam of them all. Need a family plan! It's all pretty daunting. I know China wants everyone to think "three is best," but most sane people and their bank accounts think, "zero is best, but we'll settle for one if you really need one." One of my friends with 2 kids said he'd gladly have a third kid.......if he could afford it. And then there's the lingering fear of what our world will be like in just 10 short years. I just watched Terminator from start to finish for the first time: we as humans can take all the precautions and preventative measures against rogue AI that we want, and do a good job 99% of the time (given the current political climate and what world leaders are doing, doubt the number will be as high as 99%), but all it takes is that one rogue machine that's a super-intelligent being higher than all of us to go out of control and then you get Arnold Schwarzanegger marking us all for elimination. The machines will think for human babies "Zero is best."

Bar Tab (바 탭, バータブ)

The world is fascinated by the lives and spending habits of Gen Z, and the New York Times just ran an article this past weekend about Gen Z closing out their bar tabs after each drink they order even if they might order more, giving themselves more flexiility to leave whenever they want (and possibly curbing their spending) but leaving the bartenders and bar ownership miffed because they have to process the credit card more than once, give a receipt, have them sign, whereas before there was this concept of "running up the bar tab" where you just left the tab open all night until you were ready to leave. This doesn't happent that often, but I am totally on Gen Z's side on this one; the idea of the bar tab was almost as bad as tipping as a way to force customers to spend money; it's a deliberate ploy by the bar to make customers spend more money because if the tab is "open" it's super easy to order something else, so you keep spending without knowing how much you actually owe. Ever notice how the bartenders are super happy when you leave a tab open but super bummed when you close out? Always asking you if you want to start a tab, but reluctant to have you close it out? It's these little games they play (like at Jiffy Lube telling you to change your filters once every 2 years) and it's effective. It's part of the reason I don't go to bars, that and I never liked alcohol, I don't socialize with people anymore, and I just never fit in at a bar, it's always loud and people tend to be rude and......drunk. I once went to a bar, accidentally knocked over a drink a lady had been holding in the tight confines of a bar, and another dude approached me later "suggesting" that I buy this lady another drink. I didn't think I was really at fault, but I did it anyway and just left the bar life for good. And it's not like I was trying to "meet people" at these bars. Bars are like Disneyland: they mark everything up in price just because they feel like you "want to be there," there's often a cover charge just to get in the place to get the privilege of spending more money there, and it's often hot and crowded, you wait in lines to get the bartender's attention to have them serve you a drink for $15 that you could have made for $5 at home. Seriously, I have a solution for bars and the Gen Z bar tab problem: don't have bars anymore. I don't think anything in society is lost by not going to bars anymore, maybe people would go to church more or more places beneficial to society, there'd be less drinking and driving home from the bar, people migth actually stay home on Friday nights and read books. The bar tab story was one of those stories I kept yelling in my head at whoever wrote this, "OF COURSE GEN Z is doing this!" Talk about a generation who has no respect for prior generations' customs, but also has no money! My sister (on the cusp of Millenial and Gen Z) complained to me about how she has no money and spends her whole paycheck and had to finance the purchase of a mattress out of her own wallet and also pay gym fees and can't afford a trainer anymore........but then of course at lunch she goes ahead and orders the "pink lady" vegan drink with kombucha that's $7.99 on top of the lunch that I was treating her to. They really don't want to spend more money than they have to because THEY'RE ALREADY BUDGETING IT ON STUFF THEY DON'T NEED. And also they have no attention span, so why would you expect them to stick around a bar for more than one drink? They probably spend their time in the bar on their phones looking for the next place to go to. There are actually genuine victims of this phenomenon that I feel bad for like libraries, certain schools (not necessarily elite colleges), hospitals that need nurse, but it's not bars. It's like feeling bad for taxi drivers before Uber and Lyft came into the picture: they're just mad someone else came along to take their ludicrously profitable industry that rewarded price gauging and ripping off unsuspecting customers. Speaking of Taxi drivers being replaced by rideshares, I feel like most of our industries are like the taxi business in 2009 right before Uber took off, or Kodak in 1999 right before the digital camera, or The Pony Express before the US mail service: it's the dying days of some jobs, we just don't know it yet, except unlike previous labor revolutions where one service went out of business and replaced, it's going to be whole plethora of industries, maybe more than half of all jobs getting replaced within a few year span. Actors....do we need actors anymore? Teachers... do we need teachers anymore? Do we need politicans anymore? (We definitely want to get rid of politicans if we can). Do we need lawyers anymore? (Gulp). Everything I'm hearing is that AI is here to stay, unlike a lot of jobs. So don't worry bar owners, you're not alone: everyone else is feeling the pain of new attitudes and new technology.

Slip and fall (滑倒, 滑って落ちる, 미끄러져 넘어지다)

"Slip and fall" is another term of art that only English and specifically America has usage for, it doesn't really make sense in Asian languages because they don't have that giant segment of the law, so the translatino would just be "slipped down" without anyone in Asia knowing that we're talking about an area of the law. In America you say "slip and fall" and I think most people would know you're talking about accidents that might require lawsuits; it's a litigious society and lawyers rely on it being that way. Today at Costco of all places I was witness to a typical Slip and fall accident, when someone loses their footing due to dangerous conditions on the floor resulting in injury. This type of accident is so common in the world and contributes to so much of the workload for personal injury attorneys that there's a special segment of the law for it, called "slip and falls." I remember my first semester of law school torts class dedicated a large part of the curriculum to negligence, the theory of the law that covers slip and falls and who is at fault, what kind of causation can be drawn (direct cause and proximate cause), the reasonable man standard, eggshell plaintiffs, and strict liability statutes. I caught myself thinking too much like a lawyer and didn't like that I could only think about law school while someone got injured, but there was nothing else I could do; it was a big store with lots of people, and the Costco staff attended to the situation. Law school also teaches future lawyers, unfortunately, not to help if you're not sure you can provide adequate support because you would then take on a "duty" as a care provider and that opens you up to liability if someone else goes wrong. A bystander who does nothing, conversely, assumes no duty, just a moral kick in the butt for not doing anything. I wasn't paying close attention to the fall, but the Costco patron apparently got bumped by another customer (happens often on weekends at Costco just due to the sheer mass of people who crowd into their warehoues looking for deals and free samples), slipped on something (she didn't look like she was wearing the most comfortable shoes), and the fell down on her back, possibly the back of her head on the pavement. She stayed down for the entire time after that and didn't get until an ambulance called. She also didn't speak much English; her husband spoke Chinese to her when she was struggling on the ground. Just a surreal situation; could have happened to my parents, they definitely go to Costco too. A more enterprising personal injury attorney might have introduced myself to the husband and todl them about what remedy they might seek from a huge corporation like Costco, but I find that sort of business unsavory, and I hope never to have to stoop to that level; I try to make as much money as I can now at my job to make sure I don't have to do work I'm not good at (there are so many jobs I wouldn't be good at, like mechanic, computer engineering, doctor) but also also jobs that I might be good at but involve being shameless and openly making people spend money they really didn't have to, like what salespeople do or personal injury attorneys do (sue everyone!) Having people spend money on things they don't need is what keeps the American economy booming like it has, but doesn't mean I have to conribute to it unless I have to, I arguably eceive paychecks from law firms that do that by proximity already, so I don't want to double-dip on the money-grabbing. I do wonder sometimes, though, about personal injury cases and they day-to-day grind of dealing with multiple cases at a time, explaining to clients why their case won't be as lucrative as they thought, hearing about people's injuries and misfortunes. There are a LOT of lawsuits out there people don't care about, don't know about, it's the underbelly of society that doesn't show up in the news or on true crime podcasts or Netflix special like the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp case (high profile cases like the P-Diddy case are what people tune in for, but there are millions of regular cases for that one special case). I used to go to the Los Angeles Superior Court civil division and there are whole halls of courtrooms filled with people suing for civil cases, then more floors upstairs with criminal cases, etc. I know it's useless turning a blind eye to these and digging my head in the sand like an ostrich, but I feel a profound level of sadness at all the time and energy going into some of these disputes when the world is just passing by. I guess me being a risk averse peron who's never been in a physical confrontation nor a legal confrontation, nor even really a verbal confrontation (although I have gotten angry at some folks on the sidewalk, and MJ has shown some darkness against bad actors) I just let it go and move on with my life, never even getting anywhere close to being involved in a lawsuit. I just wish there was a better way to resolve disputes rather than go through a long drawn out process full of legal fees, paperwork, talking to lawyers, negotiating, getting health checks (in the case of personal injury, getting a doctor to check you injuries is the first thing to happen), going to court, I personally would just try to avoid all of that if I possibly could, even if it meant gettig less money or paying a little more money. For the couple today at Costco, they might be able to pursue some sort of legal remedy depending on the customer's injuries, but going against a big corporation that has experience handling slip and fall cases would be tough, with an army of attorneys working for them and drowning you in a storm of paperwork. I just hope she gets better and avoided a concussion, and left with just a headache.

7 sisters (7 姐妹, 7人の姉妹, 7자매

Wellesley, Smith, Radcliffe, Vassar, Bernard, Mount Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr. Those are the proverbial "Seven Sisters" colleges established to rival the Ivy League and their "male counterparts. I've never been to any of these schools, but in law school a couple of classmates had gone to Bernard, and another one to Vassar- liberal arts colleges, and the alumna from there seemed just very Northeast Liberal arts schooley.... I get the feeling I would not have fit in one of those schools, not just Seven Sisters schools because they are female-only, but just the vibe, the culture, the elitism, the fancy nature of the schools, the intellectualism; I don't consider myself really an intellectual, I identify more with the masses than the high classes, I don't aspire to be a CEO, I'm just trying to make it in this world. University of Illinois was right for me. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to visit all these schools! I don't have cravings for many things (MJ has a LOT of cravings for different food right now) but my craving is to get out in the world and experience new things, anything but sitting at my desk all day and doing the same mundane thing over and over again, staring at a screen. And I crave being on new campuses; every time I go somewhere knew I try to check out the local university, because at least I know there will be some fancy buildings, and I'll feel like I'm in college again, even though I'm not. The best thing about walking through college campuses: it's free to everyone, despite being exorbitantly expensive for some who actually attend the school. Like casinos, like a positive externality for the rest of the world, funded by the students' tuition, except unlike casinos the students who graduate also get something out of it too, so thanks all the students and former students of every college I've ever went to! Sometimes college campuses are the best places to just walk around. MJ and I (don't ask me why!) visited the campus of Old Domininion University, the location of which I would not have known before visiting Old Dominion University (just like the other day on Jeopardy I didn't know where University of Vermont was located- it's Burlington, the largest city) and Voila, they have an excellent art museum with a Barbie/ dolls exhibit, and a centerpiece every art musuem needs: a Dale Chihuly glass piece. Worth whatever price they paid for it, that's what draws me to art museums. (Old Dominion is in Norfolk, VA, by the way, and not the only major university there, next to Norfolk State). Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Celaeno, Alcyone, Sterope, and Merope. Those are the Seven Sisters aka the Pleiades, a star cluster located in teh constellation Taurus, and a cluster named after Greek mythology, daughters of Atlas (yup, the guy who had to hold up the world on his back). I've never seen the Seven Sisters, never yearned to find them, never looked at a stargazers' map, never took too big of an interest in astronomy until learning trivia facts.......but now I find myself devouring books like "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir about outer space, science fiction, and wondering about the great beyond. MJ got me a free book from the local library here that's doing a Summer Reading Program (an excellent program for kids but even for adults! Adults should read more too during the summer, we just get swept up in going places and summer concerts and being outside that we forget the joy of long days reading outdoors as well).... we each got a free book out of a selection of contemporary popular books and our selections reflected our preferences: she took "Braiding Sweetgrass" about indigenous knowledge and alternative theories to traditional Western scientific technologies, while I chose the fictional book but outer-space related "Project Hail Mary" that I'd heard about for a few years now but never attempted to read based on focusing on actual factual books for trivia study (but you can learn trivia through fiction too!) I loved the Martian, though, and it's one of the last great experiences I've had at a movie theater: totally engrossed in the movie, was engaged from start to finish, and was one of the first movies MJ and I watched together (maybe second after The Good Dinosaur). I would not want to be trapped alone in space, but Andy Weir really likes telling stories about people who do first in the Martian and now in this book, and he probably tapped into something readers didn't know they wanted: the journey of a lifetime, alone, but in extreme circumstances, and using science and know-how to survive. It's like 127 hours or Castaway but in outer space, or a more science-heavy and (maybe more accurate?) version of "Gravity" the Sandra Bullock movie.

Muskrat Love (麝香鼠, マスクラット, 사향쥐)

There are too many types of rodents that feature on Jeopardy. Beyond just the generic types of rodents that everyone is familiar with like rats, mice, squirrels, etc., they get specific about "the largest rodent" (capybara), beavers, rodents named "swamp beavers" that are not actually beavers but are nutria (MJ is grossed out especially by this type) but then also porcupines and hedgehods (you have to know the difference between them!- hedgehogs are much smaller than porcupines), and gophers, prairie dogs, chinchillas, civets, cavies, and so many more. Confused yet? I never had a hamster or gerbil as a pet, never had a classroom that just had a gerbil tank for all the students to see, I never saw the appeal of a rodent for a pet. This weekend though on a visit to a law school friend in Denver, Colorado, I saw lots of wildlife, and a rodent floating in Lake Evergreen and I thought: wow that must be a nutria! I will make my trivia knowledge useful and try to identify this rodent to impress all present company with my knowledge of rodents!!! Nope, as soon as I started thinking about it, someone else opened up google and identified the varmint as a "muskrat," a semiaquatic rodent that lives mostly in North America. And as soon as we had identified this rodent, it swam through the lake underneath the bank, and out of sight. It must have established a home somewhere underneath the main embankment out of sight of humans, or else it may have been exterminated already. Smarter than some humans maybe. "Muskrat Love" is also a popular song by Captain and Tennile about 2 muskrats falling in love, 1976 song. That's all I know about muskrats. Lest you think that a muskrat sighting was my only memorable memory of a Denver getaway, it was a wonderful end-of-May weekend with Red Rocks booming, downtown lit up with summer festivals, and the snowy mountains still beaming brightly in the background wherever you happened to be. If only Denver existed anywhere within 1000 miles of the next major city, I'd consider living there. MJ looked it up, they have a Hmart! Lots of different ethnicities congregating there, real estate market is rising but not terribly so, SoCal folks reportedly flock to the ski cities and try to rent homes within range of the slopes every winter, it has actual snow, the roads are not heavily congested, air is fresh and smog-free, there's an art museum that looks modern and stylistic, what more can you hope for? Indeed, as I walked around downtown, someone remarked that downtown Denver is a lot like downtown Washington D.C., just without the serious political figures possibly walking around. The roads.....can get windy, which is a problem for someone like me who threw up my first time driving through Big Sur on the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) because of all the twists and turns. Every Day is a Winding Road (Sheryl Crow song) literally for people who live near the mountain suburbs of Denver. Huge college presence too, from University of Denver to Colorado State (Fort Collins) to University of Colorado (Boulder) to Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, to this little-known engineering university I just stumbled upon when meeting my friends in Golden, CO called Colorado School of Mines- they are not literally studying mines, but it's internationally known for its science programs, but I guess not by me. The muskrat sighting was at Lake Evergreen, which is also inhabited by nearby elk which were calving when we were there, which means they're very hostile as they're about to give birth. (Perhaps similar to some human mothers before giving birth?) We saw a wedding conducted at a lake house, there was a waterfall created by a dam, and a nearby golf course. Oh and ice cream shops located conveniently at the end of the a walk around the lake....I swear ice cream shops stay open for business just to lure parents and their kids to reward them for "being good." Remind me never to let my kid (if any) experience ice cream and open Pandora's Box. My friend also is the proud owner of 3 cats, 2 of whom are like family members I reconnected with this weekend because they're 12 and 14 years old, respectively. I've met them at least 4 or 5 times, and each time they greet me warmly. Maybe the golden ratio for starting families is not 2.5 kids and 2 dogs, but 1 kid and 3 cats? The cats never age, at least from their facial features, and they always have energy to at least jump up on a table or ask for neckrubs and purring, even though the oldest one is probably around 80 years in human years, which is an age I really cannot fathom. Then again, when I was 20 I thought 40 was an impossibly old age, and now that I'm approaching that mark it's just warp speed to 80 now, I guess. I've never seen the need for muskrats or rodents as a pet, but cats, at least well behaved ones that don't smell too bad or urinate everywhere they please, would be a welcome addition to our household, MJ and I have just never committed to one, despite always noticing cats lounging on the windowsill in other people's apartment. They all seem cute until you have to be with them day in and day out (and pay for vet fees, traveling with them, etc.) Cat Love!

Boardwalk ( 木板路, 遊歩道, 산책로)

All boardwalks are on a beach, but not all beaches have boardwalks. This Memorial Day weekend, MJ and I had the pleasure of walking on one of the prominent boardwalks in America, and it wasn't the most pleasurable. As expected, everything on the boardwalk was marked up, especially hotel prices (we luckily enjoy traveling vast distances by car and thus avoided being milked for multiple hundreds of dollars per night to sleep in a "crappy" Fairmount Hotel or Holiday Inn Express- MJ's standards are understandably high), with half of that charge not for the hotel but for the proximity of the hotel to the boardwalk. Ben & Jerry's was $8.50 for a "large" cup that wasn't that big (but the small cup was "just $7.50 so psychologically it made you feel like you got a deal?- that's how they get you) and the surchage to get on the "jetty" or "pier" stretching into the ocean was.... get this, $4.00 a person for "watching" the fishermen do their thing. It's a racket. The one pleasurable thing that I got out of it, though, other than the weather and calm May winds that made the weekend just a beautiful one foretelling hopefully a temperate and not sizzling summer, was the boardwalk full of U.S. war facts contributed by the local high schools' AP US History Programs, commemorating the service of military personnel for Memorial Day weekend. About every 100 feet there was a long 7 foot panel called "heroes' Walk displaying information about famous wars or individual battles in US history, everything from must-know wars like the War of 1812 to the much more obscure "Battle of Bladensberg (fought in Maryland in 1814 that allowed the British to arrive in DC and burn everything) to the unknonwable "Easter Offensive" of the Vietnam War. A worthy cause for celebration, these panels full of great history, too bad most boardwalk attendees just chose to walk past them blissfully, not paying attention to any of the contents staring them rigth in the face, usually wih head buried in thir mobile phones and oblivious to the ironically similarly shaped wall panel in front of them. I notice the same thing at art museums: there's a lot less interest in great art museum exhibits than there should be, particularly when there are various ways to get into museums for FREE while baseball games (the Amercian pasttime) charges an entry fee AND exhorbitantly charges its loyal fans whom they supposedly care so much about ("Fan Appreciation Night") $8.50 for a hot dog and $15.00 for a chicken tender + fries meal and alcohol for an absurdly higher upcharge. It's almost like at a baseball game you're paying the baseball franchise to subject you to infomercials and being exploited as a consumer, (you get less stuff for higher cost) while at a museum you get higher quality material (Frida Kahlo displays, history of Barbie dolls, famous Impressionist pieces) for often zero cost. Zero obligation to buy, no need to stay 3 hours at a museum and get trapped into having to pay for a meal. It's a racket. But yea, I like the history of warfare, liking the cool sound of wars and the names of generals who get credit for being on the winning side or the losing side, forgetting that for each battle there are at least hundreds who died probably unnecessarily, and if it's one of the more recent wars, thousands to even hundreds of thousands per war, soldiers who didn't make it to a lofty rank like Lieutenant Colonel or General of the Allied Forces who died without seeing their families for the last time, or died horribly in fire, drowned, or worse, tortured by the enemies before succumbing to their deaths. One of the panels wrote about the Tokyo Raids by U.S. Air Force pilot Jimmy Doolittle, who I had heard about from Jeopardy as doing the heroic feat of slipping past the Japanese ranks and dropping bombs on Tokyo. The Boardwalk panel stated it had the positive effect of raising the morale of US troops after Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese last year, glossing over some unnecessary details and collateral damage, but reading more carefully it said that a bunch of the planes that flew out with Doolittle got shot down and either fell into Russia or fell into Japanese-occupied China, where they were captured by Japanese and tortured, while some died instantly upon impact. Only Doolittle got the credit by coming out alive as the hero, but how many had to suffer for that one hero to emerge and some "much-needed morale to boost the forces?" Is that really worth all those lives? I certainly wouldn't want to be one of those who died and just became a statistic. O yea, they forgot about the little statistic (credit to the Boardwalk panel to include this) that 250,000 Chinese people were killed by Japanese troops for trying to help the U.S. fighters who crash landed in Japanese-occupied China. I had to do a double take on seeing that number. I know that the West doesn't value Chinese lives and thinks China has a billion people anyway, who cares, but half a million people died as a result of Jimmy freakin' Doolittle? (O and let's not forget the bombing of Tokyo probably took out innocent civilians' lives, not likely the emperor or any higher-ups in the military who actually were responsible for WWII and Pearl Harbor). I appreciate the dedication to the U.S. troops on Memorial Day, but could we also take the chance to acknowledge that some of these battles were mostly costly and might not have been the best idea just assessing the cost-benefit analysis afterwards?

Emergency Room (急诊室, 救急処置室, 응급실)

One of the greatest things about living a mundane, no-risk life is not having to go to the hospital outside of some earwax cleanup and acne medication when I was younger, almost never, and I have gone exactly zero times to an emergency room, usually reserved for the most urgent cases with dire need and possible life-threatening conditions. MJ and I went to urgent care which is one step below the emergency room, just to get some medication: seemed relaxed, controlled, and just one nurse practitioner on staff running tests and prescribing medciations. We were in and out of there in half an hour, no hassle and no line, and no life-threatening conditions, no sight of blood. That seems totally different from what I've hard of (and seen on TV shows like the Pitt and ER) about how emergency rooms operate: controlled chaos of multiple doctors and nurses running around to address as many cases as they can or the hospital has beds to hold patients, going off a board that looks a lot like a list of departures and arrivals at a major city airport, lots of blood and breathing tubes and various wounds and damaged body parts that normally would make anyone queasy out in public, becomes commonplace in the ER. And that's just inside the treatment center, there's a whole lobby of patients waiting to be seen and checked out who may have been waiting for hours to just get past those doors, ironically shut out because their issues are not that serious: the worse shape you are in, the faster you get seen: it's a perverse relationship of amount of pain and severity to length of time spent waiting: almost like you should hurt yourself more to get seen faster. Would I be a good patient at the ER? Probably not, I'm impatient and try to avoid lines as much a possible, don't like admitting when I have a problem and hope it just goes away (I have a nerve in my back that aches every time I sit for too long that's gone on for more than a year), and don't like the smell of hospitals in general. MJ and I do have great health insurance right now, though: we're on the gold plan, which allows us various procedures but also costs me every month in the form of having to pay for other people's treatment through my premiums. Would I be a good doctor or nurse at the ER? Probably not. There are so many things I am that don't fit the qualifications for being a doctor, despite my parents' hopes and dreams for me when I was a kid to pick the stethoscope when going through the "pick a job symbol" ceremony. a.) I didn't have patience to stay with one endeavor for 10 years through med school and residency and everything just to finally become something that I might even want to be....doctors have to actually know what they're doing; I've faked it through most of life now but doctors have to make a call on someone's life: it isn't the low-level decisionmaking at my day to day job, doctors especially in the ER are making life and death decisions. I'm not confident enough that I'd make enough good calls, and I also second-guess myself and do postmordems (not literal ones) about bad decisions like I made in chess, stocks, fantasy baseball, etc. that I'm sure I'd be killing myself if I was a doctor. Also my hands-on dexterity abilities are rather poor: I colored outside the lines in kindergarten and couldn't do good stitching in home economics class, kind of what you need to do quickly in an emergency. I WOULD probably stay calm under pressure, as emergency rooms are like if car crashes happen over and over again and you have to deal with the fallout; I would sympathize with the patients and not be dismissive of their concerns, and I would like to be on my feet all time time doing something dynamic and trying to juggle many balls at once; I actually enjoy that type of activity when managing events, etc. My childhood friend told me recently about his brother who works as a real-life ER nurse: he works 12-hour shifts for 10 days out of 14, and then just goes back to his regular assignment, and since he maintains a good relationship with the nurses and staff, he can get away with resting during the shift and watching the Super Bowl in his office. Doesn't sound that bad! That's kind of what I do, work 5 days out of 7 every week. Maybe this whole ER doctor thing is not as tense and action packed every second as depicted on TV. I just hope I never end up in one!

Hairstreak (ヘアーストリーク蝶, 细纹蝶, 털나비 )

A clue on Jeopardy mentioned a hairstreak the other day, and I guessed "bird" because while it sounds like maybe a silver streak of hair worn as a type of style, hairstreak sounded like some form of winged animal, and indeed it had wings, except it was an insect, the butterfly, one of the creatures around us with the highest reputation, despite it being a bug. I often marvel at the discrepancy of attitudes humans have towards animals, and I've spoken up for snakes as just misunderstood and discriminated against because of their shape and movement. Butterflies tend to be beautiful with wonderful patterns on their wings, so they look like works of art, not anything harmful, and indeed they don't bite anyone or cause any harm. But we could say the same thing about ants, rolly pollies, and smaller bugs...but MJ often classifies them all as "MOGI!" screams and tries to kill them or get away from them as fast as possible. In some cases, she's correct: a tick that causes lyme disease has been spotted in outdoor areas like gardens around where we live, so it does cause damage! MJ also described a cockroach "lying on its back and moving its legs around" in the lobby of our condo building, which o be fair does sound pretty gross. Some bugs are just attracted to dirty areas and look like they're up to no good. Our condo recently has been infested with seemingly a large nest of fruit flies, probably because MJ leaves out large pieces of fruit like a quickly ripening pineapple, kiwis, oranges, and what we found was the culprit today: a wilted peony flower that went bad on Day 2 of us bringing it home from Trader Joe's and soon the water in the vase became just a cesspool of flower remains and what looked like slime, perfect conditions for fruit flies to gather. In that moment I sympathized with MJ about disliking bugs: they're just creepy, especially when 5-10 or more of them gather around one thing and cluster around. I have the same dislike of groups of pigeons, geese, ducks, seagulls, etc....STOP FEEDING THESE THINGS people, it's bad for the birds' diet and it's bad for me, I don't want to get pooped on or get touched by these birds, who knows what diseases they carry. I guess that's why we love butterflies: 1.) they look beautiful, 2.) they don't gather in groups, although monarch butterlies convey quite a site during their annual migration, and 3.) they're not dirty, or at least known to land on poop or equivalent. They're usually around flower gardens and plants, it's where we all want to be on a warm spring-summer day, just chilling in the garden and enjoying their company. Butterflies also have a pretty cool birthing story that adds to their mystique: the 4-step metamorphosis includes egg, larva, pupa, and adult, as most Pokemon players know already if they ever caught a Caterpie which invovled into metapod into Butterfree. The egg turns into a larva or caterprillar and then into a pupa, or chrysalis (just the name chrysalis sounds cool, like crystal). Compare that to the human process of the egg upon fertilization becoming an embryo and then developing into a fully-formed baby but all inside the mother's womb, I guess the butterly metamorphosis process is just cooler than the human one, it all happens on the outside and we can see the actual changes, whereas humans can only rely on ultrasound printouts and measuring heartbeats until the baby pops out....at which point maybe we can consider that the caterpillar? And then it needs to be wrapped up in the cocoon of the chrysalis (swaddling clothes like Baby Jesus) until maybe Age 13 or so when it comes of age and becomes an adult? (Some would argue kids nowadays never become adults and permanently stay in the chrysalis stage unmoving looking at their phones). Maybe the butterfly metamorphosis is better! And less expensive.

Fanum Tax

Speed round of cool facts I've learned since recently my posts have been pretty critical and makes it seem I'm perpetually in a bad mood, which is partially true as I am turning into a grumpy old man. MJ charges a "Fanum tax" every time I make food for myself, which is eating something from what your roommate made, a phrase from a Youtube influencer named "Fanum" but now just means stealing food. I can never tell how hungry MJ is because she's either very "tempted" by what I have made or actually hungry and just not saying so and when food is presented to her, she suddenly gets hungry even though she isn't. I learned there is something called the "Olympic Peninusla" across Puget Sound from Seattle that is one of the coolest-looking places with cities like "Forks" and "Port Angeles." Really loved a trip in college to Orcas Island, everything around there is just awesome. It also makes me think of the Last of Us Season 2, whose story currently takes place in Seattle, except it's a post-apocalyptic world with fungus zombies, warring factions called the Wolves and the Scars, and competing revenge plot lines. It's this decade's Game of Thrones, and just like GoT introduced us to great locations in Europe (Dubrovnik, Northern Ireland, various desert locations) Last of Us takes place in various cities that are NOT L.A., Washington D.C., or New York, the main settings for any TV show. Habemus Papus- is Latin for "We have a pope!" The whole transition of popes just played out in film via Conclave and then a few months later, in real life with Pope Francis passing away, and the masses have learned all about the phrases like camerlengo (acting head of the Vatican), the papal conclave, white smoke, and all the politics behind becoming the next pope. All in all, this college of cardinals got off relatively drama-free, I guess popes unlike politicans have a reputation to uphold and have to act morally and maintain the high ground, no matter how badly they want the top job. Paul McCartney's real first name was James. It's a big surprise how many famous people you've known since a young age actually had a different birth name, and we know them by their stage names, another layer of the mask that they portray to the world while hiding their true identity. It's also better in some cases to use stage names, it just rolls off the tongue better, like Whoopi Goldberg instead of Elaine Johnson.....I think Whoopi probably got more fans just because of the name change. Good thing to know if I ever become famous, as Robert Yan just doesn't sound like a household name. Bob Dylan was originally Robert Zimmeran, Bono was Paul Hewson; The Rock was Dwayne Johnson. Feels like singers more than actors need a stage name, just because they're their own brand and face of the music, whereas the actor can at least be associated with the movie name. "I'm going to a Dua Lipa concert" as opposed to "I'm going to see Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks. La Nina, unlike el Nino, brings colder conditions to the southeast Pacific Ocean. I had always thought it was a cousin or related idea as El Nino, turns out El Nino is the warm phase of ENSO, or El Nino- Southern Oscillation and occurs around Christmas, and La Nina is the cool phase, like summer vs. winter. Feels like that type of cold/warm contrast in the oceans will become a more important concept as we move along. I really at some point have to understand what this Minecraft thing is all about. There's even a movie I apparently missed out on! Starring who else, the king of kid-young adult movies, Jack Black. And also Jennifer Coolidge, who's late-career breakout has made her one of the world's most influential people, according to Time magazine. There's hope for people turning 40 soon like me to get better! We may not have peaked yet! Apparently Greta Gerwig has directed 4 movies total, and 3 of them have been nominated for Best Picture. That's a pretty high rate, although not as exceptional a feat since the Oscars changed from 5 Best Picture nominees to 10 each year. I propose we go back down to 5........it's a nice round number and fits nicely for best actor and best actress when they put the split screen up of the anxious nominees and their reactions as to who won. I really, really, try to watch all Best Picture nominees every year and it's just hard to get to all 10, even if they're interspersed among the streaming companies and on various airlines' feature movies list during Oscar season. I'm just not into Dune: Part Two, for instance, or the Substance, or Emilia Perez. And the Brutalist is 3 hours 35 minutes long. Adrien Brody might still be acting in that movie, and Adrien Brody might still be giving his acceptance speech (he rejected the fade-out music asking him to stop his speech at the Oscars this year).

Spitting (随地吐痰, 唾を吐く, 침을 뱉다) and the Pope

One of the worst things about being on public streets, more than seeing dog poop on the ground left uncleaned, litter just thrown willy nilly without a care in the world, more than people taking up a whole sidewalk even when seeing someone else approaching them coming the opposite way, is spitting, one of the worst offenses in my opinion anyone could do, and something I just don't understand why it has to happen. Throughout the day, I never get any urge to spit or eject saliva out of my mouth for any reason, and if I do spit I'm going to spit into a sink for brushing my teeth or if I taste someone really bad or a bone in a piece of chicken or something, I'm going to spit it out. But what is it about spitting that people get into a habit of? Is it because smokers need to spit out something? I understand there's chewing tobacco that people spit out, sunflower seeds, etc., but there are people just walking on the sidewalk who just spit randomly, and not into like a corner or anything, just down in the street where everyone is walking. It's also possible on a windy day for that spit to travel and hit someone else, maybe not directly in the face but towards their body; not something anyone wants to subject themselves to. Spit has so many dirty substances in it and can definitely transmit disease, so there's a practical reason not to do it but it's really hard to enforce and unfortunately people just "IDGAF," a name of a Dua Lipa song but also now a standard phrase among the younger generation meaning "I don't care." Living in a society kind of relies on having people who do give a F or who do care, but the prevailing attitude now that explains why spitting is so common is people just don't have respect for rules, consideration for others, trust that what you do for others will be paid back in kind. It's just a further rebuttal of my belief as a kid that the adult world is filled with responsible, capable people who have a very sophisticated system holding society together with a strong foundation and good actors with the best intentions for others. The older I get, the more I realize society is barely held together by a string, a whole ton of people don't do the right thing, and those who do risk being disappointed when the care they have for society doesn't get reciprocated, and another responsible person gets corrupted to teh IDGAF attitude because if others don't care about me, why should I care about them? For example, I thought government leaders were the best in our society and choose leadership because they think they can do the best for the world; now I realize politicans are one of the least trusted professions and most are acting for their own benefit or to gain more power; I thought the police had great moral authority and have to be upright citizens and be trustworthy themselves before enforcing the law and judging others; come to find out police are just people who wield a disproportionate amount of power, some with the correct amount of duty and responsiblity, but very often they also fall prey to human weaknesses. This week I was walking on a walk sign and almost got run over by a cop who had the red light but went anyway by putting his emergency lights on, the ultimate get-out-of-jail card. "power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely."- Lord Acton. Which is one of the good things that religion can help with: showing the morally correct way to treat others and keeping people in line. With religion, at least people have some sort of code, some basis to guide their behavior. And the pope, newly elected Robert Prevost, or Leo XIV, has the unique position of being someone people look up to, to see that he doesn't spit in public or swear profusely or do illegal drugs or trick other people into buying things they don't need, being a bastion of good in the world that we so desperately (since the traditional "leaders" don't look anything like leaders anymore, like the President of the U.S., or chief of police, or local mayor....) there's really no one to turn to because with the rise of the internet and everyone knowing about everything all the time, it's hard to pick anyone who is a leader. It's no accident people who actually go to church is on the decline and belief in organized religion is at a recent low, it's inversely proportional with the number of people who have access to the internet. People just don't have faith anymore, which makes the pope's job more important but also an opportunity to provide something society desperately needs, is faith in each other and showing good behavior actually works. Otherwise, everyone will just be spitting and even worse without any fear of recourse. Also high on the list of things that makes me incredibly angry as an adult for some reason that is just basic things people shouldn't do: 1.) not flushing after you pee in a public stall. Just one flick of your wrist, guys. 2.) loud music at night from cars with incredibly loud basses, that's not even just neglect like some other activities, that's someone purposely playing their music loud so other people can hear. 3.) walking up really close to traffic as cars passing by trying to "time" it so you walk through as soon as the car passes by. Incredibly dangerous, incredibly low upside (gaining half a second as opposed to just waiting by the sidewalk until the car passes by) compared to the incredibly high downside (getting hit by the car or getting your feet run over), and it's also bad for me as the driver not knowing what you're going to do. 4.) flicking cigarette butts all over the place after you're doing. Some people honestly live like animals, maybe even worse than animals because some dogs know to dig a hole for their poop. We shouldn't get angry over the worst of society, but man it's difficult not to comment or consider dropping everything I do for others when others are doing this to others.

The Pit (坑, ピット, 피트)

HBO has a new medical drama trending called "The Pitt" after the city where it takes place, Pittsburgh. The Pitt in the show is actually the emergency room at one of Pittsburgh's hospitals, where the opening episode sees medical procedural veteran Noah Wyle (from ER, which was set in Chicago) take on the role of doctor again leading a group of new doctors in an understaffed, underappreciated department. Does this man know how to play anyone else besides a doctor? The first episode shows a doctor who speaks 6 languages (not sure how this could be true unless inherited from a young age, as balancing a career as a doctor and learning languages seem fundamentally incompatible) and the usual difficulties an ER may offer, like patients suddenly going into cardiac arrest, new emergency cases being brought in, and a dude just needing an enema. All sorts of cases almost like random people from the street walking into a law office asking for legal help, except unlike lawyers the ER cannot just turn them away and refuse them as clients. It struck me watching The Pitt that the actors playing the medical team can just shoot the scenes and remember their lines and give dramatic performances (not saying that's necessarily easy, but it's not brain surgery) versus the people they're depicting, who actually have the tough jobs and can't back away from the jobs. It made me think, "what are the worst jobs in the world, the pits of the work force, if you will?" Nursing has to be one of the toughest jobs, which is probably why they're constantly understaffed and there's a consistent nursing shortage that probably won't go away ever. Hard to imagine ever having a nursing surplus, that's for sure. MJ did the equivalent of a heroic sacrifice to willingly choose to become a nurse as her second career, whereas many people she worked with conidered going the other way, quitting nursing to pursue a second career. Stories of bad patients, bad doctors, bad co-workers, people calling out of work, travel nurses in it only for the money, always being on one's feet all the time, 12-hour shifts that can go up to 13 or 14 hour shifts if you feel guilty for leaving someone with a bunch of work: the one good thing is that there's alway going to be work for nurses somewhere, it's just the level of B.S. you can put up with. It's compounded by the fact that the hospital always has to be open, 24/7, so they need like triple the work force as a normal operation. Say a restaurant or office work, 40 hours a week, closed rest of the time, only need to sign up 40 hours of shifts. Unfortunately for nurses, there are 24x7 = 168 hours total in a week, so that's more than 4 times the number of hours other businesses have to find employees willing to work! That's actually pretty incredible. I really doubt the new Gen Z is going to suddenly flock to the nursing profession in droves based on the conversations I hear at restaurants (hey your Youtube video was so awesome! You LITERALLY killed it) to "I'm so upset at my boss for (doing something annoying that most employees in America have to put up with), I'm very offended and looking for a new job. I can't believe I have to go into work twice a week)." - actual conversations MJ and I overheard while sitting at vegan restaurants. I'm guilty of the same: once someone has drank from the pool of easy work, as I have, you don't want to go back to doing hard jobs ever again. And in this age of everyone knowing all the information all the time immediately as it happens, everyone knows what the easy jobs are and want to do the easy jobs- get paid thousands of dollars for putting up a video of yourself! "Influencer!" Live your best life! Maybe some sort of "draft" will have to be installed to get people to become nurses, like during World War time, conscription. It's a battle against aversion towards difficult jobs. You'd think the free market could handle this by raising the price of nurses, but then where does the demand come from? People don't just "purchase" nurses or healthcare, the insurance system gets in the way of that and the money that I pay for health insurance (pretty hefty amount that gets into 5 digits annually if I consider additional costs than just the monthly premium) doesn't flow directly to the healthcare workers, they flow through the insurance companies to pay the hospitals who then pay the workers. That's at least 2 additional middle men (are we calling them middlepeople now?) Could I see myself working in the "Pitt?" I honestly don't; I'd be like the medical intern the first episode who's there to learn but immediatley faints upon seeing a disfigured leg. Could I be a farmer? Probably not. Could I be a construction worker? Probably not. Could I be any of the various jobs out there that have strong need for workers but are tough on the body and don't necessarily pay as well as white collar jobs? Probably not. It takes a lot of strength and dedication to work in places like the Pitt, and ironically those are probably the ones that won't get replaced by AI. (software engineers, translators, lawyers, "consultants", all white collar jobs can foreseeably be replaced much quicker, especially the ones with high-paying salaries). Will there be a work force revolution in the world, instead of the industrial revolution people moving from agricultural work and by hand moved to machines and mass production...will it be a reverse thing of moving from machines back to labor jobs like nursing and non-machine related jobs? Maybe the reckoning for us sit-at-home laborers is coming and we will be sent down to..... The Pitt.

Lessons in Chemistry

Several months ago there was a contestant on Jeopardy, David Erb, who revealed in his contestant interview segment that his wife was the acclaimed author Bonnie Garmus, author of "Lessons in Chemistry." I'd heard of the book and the TV show, but didn't know much about the content of the book.... until today, in which I finally went to an independent bookstore (the best way to support authors and the entire writing industry, I'm told by a friend who was an aspiring author) and came home with the paperback (I've always had a mental block about buying a hard cover, perhaps the cheap side of me kicking in thinking a book is a book, why do I need to pay more for the binding) that has the red cover with chemical elements displayed, a way to at least remember a random assortment of the elemnts on the periodic table, like Curium (Cm, No. 96) and Nitrogen is 7 (that's actually a big one, squeezed right between No. 6 carbon and No. 8 oxygen). NOT the cover that I've seen around every bookstore with a blonde woman peeking behind sunglasses, after reading the book I felt that depiction is pretty far off from who the main character was except for the pencil in her hair; it looked like Sydney Sweeny in one of her romantic comedies. I was a little disappointed a book called "Lessons in Chemistry" doesn't have much chemistry in it, it's more about......romantic chemistry, but also about life and the challenges women face getting into traditionally "men" fields (which was almost all academic and high-earning fields) in the 1950s. If you left reading Lessons in Chemistry feeling that white men always feel like they run the world and get all the benefits, that's because they were.....at least in the 1950s, based on lack of laws against sexual discrimination, and the culture. You can still feel that to this day, or at least I felt it coming of age in White America in big law firms and working for judges, law professors, and just among some in the "elite fields...." there's a sort of entitlement that's definitely not confined only to white men, but definitely does exist in the "elite fields...." so I sense the frustration that Garmus's main character Elizabeth Zott must have felt. I've steered clear of fiction pretty much in the last 5 years, but when I do get into a good story, I flip the pages quickly and consistently, and for once am engaged enough to stay off the phone checking baseball scores: It's like I'm in a zone of focus normally reserved only for highly competitive endeavors like chess and dodgeball. I find getting through a book is MUCH more enjoyable when unplugging everything and not responding to any emails or distractions: it's like the old days when I was 10 years old lying down on the carpet fully engrossed in a book while my dad was cooking dinner or grandpa was watching TV.....there were no phones back then, no text messages, it was just me and the book, free for me to fall completely in that world, like having chemistry with the pages or the writer: the writer writes the words, I absorb the words and understand the pace of the book and brim with anticipation of where the book is going. YIL (Yesterday I learned) that Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were known for their involvement with the United Farm Workers but also in something called the "Delano Grape Boycott, started in 1965 where the farmers union encouraged consumers not to buy non-union grapes. I never even thought of grapes being non-union, but I wonder what kind of grapes I buy from Costco- union or non-union? Usually I only have to make the difficult choice of "red" or "green," apparently red has more antioxidants due to its deeper color, but green often has a more fresher, simpler flavor that agrees with me, red has more inclination to be sour and have more a tarte flavor. If I'm REALLY adventurous I'll get the black grapes or the cotton candy grapes, but my plain vanilla personality usually just defers to one of the standard non-adventurous flavors. I guess even in 1965 there were ways to influence corpoorate control and enforce rights, so maybe in 2025 we can still influence policy and business behavior through boycotting goods? The obvious example is Tesla cars which has driven sales of Tesla way down (but weirdly not necessarily the stock price) but also......can we change behavior of Costco's chicken policy by not buying their perpetually $4.99 rotisseries chicken? MJ and I briskly march past the rotisserie chicken ovens every time where there and try to avert our gaze to the rows and rows of chickens strung up on a spit and dripping with oils, which looks tasty after they roast it but probably not as appealing when they killed the chickens and raised them specifically fro killing. Perhaps vegan activism or at least supporting vegan restaurants will make some restaurants consider more meatless options and decrease their orders of chickens? That's the hope at least. More and more after reading books like "Soul of the Octopus" by Montgomery Sy or "Book of Eels" by Patrik Svenson (a pun on Book of Kells, maybe?) I get the sense that we should be learning from these animals, not eating them. Even ast tasty as they are. Maybe even have to examine my substitute for meat, shrimp....do they feel pain too? I tried vegan dim sum today in my latest experiment to eat every kind of normal dish in a vegan way: the shrimp rice roll can be replaced with some sort of seitan that makes it feel and taste like shrimp, and somehow they've replaced xiaolongbao soup dumplings with a vegan option. It's magic, maybe even a lesson in (food) chemistry.

Country Music (乡村音乐, 컨트리 음악)

Of the 3 Asian languages I translate to, 2 of them didn't even have a reciprocal word for country music, as American country music is kind of a genre of its own, unreplicated by other country's music. In Chinese it's translated into "village music" evoking images of the countryside, small villages, and farmers, country bumpkins, not city folks. Which country music kind of is, but recently it's gone more mainstream, as evidenced by the ultimate validation, becoming its own category on Jeopardy. And me not getting it, kind of like the "drinking songs" category today....I got the hardest clue about "whiskey shot and a vodka shot" as Tubthumping by Chumbawumba, but 3 of the other ones were just "stare at the screen clues" about day drinking, Brad Paisley, and Little Big Town. As a kid on road trips I remember thumbing through the FM channels and hearing a bunch of country music, but instantly changing the dial as I knew my parents didn't like it and it didn't ring out to me. Nowadays I appreciate a mainstream country hit like "Fast Car" remixed by Luke Combs, or Texas Hold'em by Beyonce (apparently she's a country artist now, with her Emmy-winning album Cowboy Carter) but back then every country song sounded the same to me, with the singer always with a southern accent and signing about alcohol, women, or lost love. Or gambling, like in Kenny Rogers's the Gambler, which gave me the impression every country song was set in a bar, a saloon, a gambling hall, or a combination of all 3. Also a big fan of the hit "Austin" by Dasha, a song whose first comment on Youtube goes, "Where there's a will, there's a way and I'm damn sure you lost it." Yea we've all been disappointed by people, but maybe not prophesizing that "in 40 years they'll still be here drunk." The banjo (apparently required instrument in Texas country songs) and guitar features prominently in country songs, and I might learn to appreciate it more if and when I learn how to play at a later age. Watching re-runs of the Weakest Link, I have to lament that one of the most fun trivia formats is not pitting contestants at each other like Jeopardy does on a nightly basis (and sometimes more often when Masters or Celebrity are on - Season 3 of Masters coming up this week, right after Celebrity Jeopardy just ended), but as a cooperative exercise to build as much cash up as possible. The Chase utilizes that kind of team play pretty well as well as the contestants have to work together to beat a "chaser," but Weakest Link has the best buildup of building a long chain because if someone on your team gets it wrong and is literally "The Weakest link," the whole chain breaks apart. Oh and the questions are easier......it's a great show with funny hosts, Jane Lynch being the latest American one, but as with all good trivia shows in the US, it doesn't get good enough ratings, and often faces cancellation, episodes air sporadically, it's on at 9PM ET on Friday nights, etc.... and oh yea network television is going the way of the newspaper and fading as a media platform. Maybe Amazon Prime will pick it up after seeing the success (I hope?) of Pop Culture Jeopardy? Weakest Link is already pretty pop cultur-ey to get as many views as possible so it'd be a smooth transition and it's kind of the watered down version of Jeopardy but still challenging enough sometimes to give a real trivia player his jollies. Oh and it's like the closest thing a Survivor fan like me could get to actually being on a reality show- the contestants vote each other off after every round of play based on how good each player is but sometimes on the opposite criteria like "how likely is it that I beat this other player." Simple concept, good questions, buildup of drama. Renew! Put some country music questions in there to get the country music demographic, make the show popular and Make America watch Quiz Shows again!

Philly Cheese Steak

When I lived in Philadelphia for a few months on a work assignment seemingly a lifetime ago (12 years), I had a few Philly cheesesteaks, as unhealthy as I was, because I could absorb it as a guy in his mid-20s: I remember it being greasy, cheesy, and meaty: 3 of the best qualities in food I looked for back then, 3 qualities I've definitely shifted down towards the lower end of my priorities at this stage, showing how much my priorities have shifted since then. I didn't get the cheesesteak from Pat's King of Steaks, or Geno's....I think I just got it from a local shop next to work, which was probably a mistake: I didn't got the best in breed, like Al's Italian Beef in Chicago or Lou Malnati's Deep Dish Pizza, or Langer's Pastrami in L.A., or Ben's Chili Dogs in D.C. Now I'll probably never get one of those cheesteaks anymore, and ever since leaving Philly the only cheesteaks I've gotten are the thawed-out mass-produced Subway cheesteaks. Not great. But what MJ and I have found is the next best thing: vegan Philly cheesesteaks sandwhiches, with tofu substituted for the beef and vegan cheese for the cheese. Delicious. I keep preaching this to my vegan "normie" friends who eat everything: you can eat vegan too, it's not just for vegans. Vegan food has its own art of replacing that flavor of its predecessor without losing the quality and with less of those negative qualities of greasy, cheesy, and meaty. I've constantly suprised at how good vegan restaurants can make their food and how innovative they replace differnet meats, with carrots replacing salmon, mushrooms for chicken replacements, seitan for almost anything. Ah, the power of seitan, a Japanese word that they didn't teach me in Japanese class, from "manufactured from egg" directly translated but actually meaning just made from protein of wheat. Tempeh's the one derived from Indonesian word meaning "fermented bean cake" that is so close to bacon.....all the crispiness, the smokey sensation...I am thoroughly impressed by cooks in the vegan discipline. So much more inventive than when Pat Olivieri originated the Philly cheesesteak in the 1930s by putting steak and cheese together into a bun and serving it to people....who knew cheese and meat went well together? I always give negative impressed points for food that is obviously going to be good, no creativity, you're just relying on the original taste of the food....like who knew chocolate and peanut butter combined into one cookie would be good? Of course! Salty potatoes and sweet ketchup, hey what do you know, people like salty and sugary foods, you don't say. It's making healthy traditionally non-tasty foods taste like traditionally grossly unhealthy dishes like Philly cheesesteaks that's the real skill. The study of postage stamps is called philately, and I get it: it's like collecting art. Like a little kid, I took a roll of forever stamps from my parents' cabinet a few weeks ago to mail tax returns, etc..... and I still get a thrill selecting a stamp and posting it on an envelope. Whoever created the postage stamp system is a genius (Google tells me it was Sir Rowland Hill in 1837 with the first stamp being the penny black) because it allows the user to show proof of payment to get the mail to a whole different part of the world (getting mail from Maine to Los Angeles in just a few days is still a miracle in this day and age in my book) but also in the process creating a little individualized picture for each piece of mail, whether it's an American flag, a winter edition with animals in the snow, Alex Trebek commmemortaive Jeopardy stamp, Betty White stamps, stamps of blueberries, pretty much any kinds of stamps you can think of, are available. It's just another thing I'm sad see go, as much as I love email, it's just a part of the fabric of living life, like talking and recipes, that we sacrifice for convenience and conformity to what everyone else is doing. I still like physically cracking a book and looking at the cover, feeling the pages, just like I like peeling off a stamp like peeling off a sticker and pressing it against an envelope, like I was sending a letter for the very first time in suburban Chicago probably when I was 6 or 7 or something, probably to like a pen pal or something as part of a school assignment. Stamps are cool: if tattoos are art and an expression of oneself, and graffiti is art, and vanity plates are art, then stamps are definitely art. I get why there are stamp collectors all over the world and 5 million philatelists just in the US (that's like 1.5% of the population!) That's not insignificant. Probably almost all old people, but still! One day I'll be old and laughed at for collecting these things called "books" in my home. May stamps live forever!

Life after 35

10 years ago, I was in the midst of an active singles life, flying to Vancouver one weekend, planning trips to Japan, playing dodgeball 2 times a week and sometimes even more on weekends, I lived my best life....or so I thought. I ran a marathon in 2015! I can barely lift my legs now when running, often tripping on the sidewalk if there's just a little bit of a pothole or crack because I'm not lifting my legs enough. Every hill seems like the last peak on Mount Everest, needing a break to catch myself when I get on top. I would never be able to survive the L.A. marathon now with all its hills and intermittent slopes. And that's just one of the things I can't do 10 years later. I met with a close friend from 10 years ago and we did some of the things we'd do back in the day: go to In N' Out, eat yogurt at Yogurtland, and we both came to a conclusion: It's hard to make friends after 35. It feels like I met at least 20 new friends every year in my twenties, Facebook requests would come from people I had barely known once or whom I played a game of dodgeball against and they knew me by reputation......nowadays I don't get any birthday wishes on my Facebook wall anymore, nor do I wish anyone else a happy birthday. (This might be more a reflection on Facebook than anything else). But this, in a sense, is still me living my best life. I cherish being alone now. The alone time is so important for me to do my own thing, not have any obligations to worry about, rushing through L.A. traffic to get to my next appointment trying to cram everything into a tight window like a checklist. I remember all the time in my twenties being late to things and wishing I could teleport there faster, but also thinking, "things have to just slow down at some point and I need to reset." Well, slow down they have: my social calendar consists of maybe 1 item per week, and it's not even 100% guaranteed I make it. I do the things that I want to do, not what other people want to do and I'm tagging along just to stay social. I don't ever go out to a bar just to experience the bar culture, no clubs, barely any restaurants unless it's a vegan restaurant. I shop at Costco. It's not so bad, staying home. I used to get antsy if I didn't have anything to do on Friday nights or Saturdays nights, someone out there must be doing something fun! And I ended up wasting it or trying too hard to make a night of it. Once you've stayed home on Saturday night once, traditionally the time everyone's out there doing something, whether it's weddings, music concert, sports event, night out on the town, singing karaoke, whatever's your jam, I like to take time to read a book, call my mom, catch up on TV- the important things in life, it's much easier to do it again the next Saturday night, and then the next, and the next, and it just becomes a pattern. Age also plays a role: instead of weddings you get invited just to baby showers (attended one this weekend) which are usually during the day, when responsible adults roam and hang out with their kids. All the friends have kids so they only invite you sporadically when they can free up schedule like for Passover weekend or whenever their kids aren't sick or came down with something last second. And there's no impetus to belong to a crowd and hang out every week anymore, to need that feeling of belonging or to escape loneliness......thanks to MJ! The loneliness is mitigated as long as there's someone there who can assure you that there are other human beings in the world. I've been 35 for a few years now, and going to turning 35 again in a few weeks! It's not so bad! But my body really can't handle back-to-back red-eye flights with connections anymore. Booking Bobby and Frugal Bobby needs to get sat down by Adult and Responsible Bobby to say, "we just can't put ourselves through that, you're being penny wise but pound foolish," I don't care how much money you're saving, just make yourself comfortable. TREAT YOURSELF! It's ok to do that once in a while, like Tom Haverford said on Parks and Rec, and when you're past 35, gotta do that once in a while.

Overcompensating 过度补偿, 過剰補償, 과잉보상

I’m writing this entry sitting on a United Airlines flight, unable to sleep because the cabin is so cold. It wasn’t already so cold on this plane, in fact it was warm, hot and humid when we left George Busch International Airport in Houston on a hot and muggy morning, so the pilot took it upon himself to compensate for that heat by turning up the air conditioning and blowing cool air from every single vent above everyone’s seat…. Sure enough now it’s freezing cold, at least 10 degrees cooler than what it was a few hours ago. Unfortunately my spectrum of comfort is only about 5 to 7 degrees each way from 72 degrees, the average room temperature, so now I feel very very underdressed when I go out for a run on a cold winter day. I find the pilot’s overcompensation to be an allegory of human mind’s attitudes and behavior: we often ignore things that are pressing issues, letting them sit there until they become an emergency, and then we overreact, overcorrect, and overcompensate the other way to make it just as bad the other way, sometimes even worse, like reacting to a deer on the highway by veering violently to the side and crashing your own car. We eat way too much because we’re hungry and our body tells us we need sustenance, but then we overcompensate by gorging ourselves with food (most of us, anyway) that most of it turns into fat and extra pounds. We overcorrect for alcohol by installing Prohibition with the 18th amendment but then have to repeal it with the 21st Amendment. In sports, teams often overcorrect for the market inefficiency of trading three pointers for two-pointers to the point of the whole league now shooting way too many three pointers, passing up open layups for the chance at a three. The three-point shot itself, of course, was an over correction to having all shots count the same, they wanted to spice it up for more offense and excitement. Most of entertainment often shifts based on the zeitgeist of zombie culture shifting to a vampire culture to apocalyptic shows to reality TV- we have a glut of all of these. The most important overreaction, though, is the political one and how we wound up with Donald Trump as our president, almost an unbelievable twist of fate for most but explainable by how the masses of our country believe and behave. The 2016 election was shaped by people being tired of the political elite and 8 years of Democratic rule, so people craved a renegade populist candidate like Trump to fight back against those elites (supposedly Trump was fighting for the Everyman), 2020 was reacting to 4 years of Trump fatigue of tweets, crimes, impeachment, craziness, but most perceived the Biden reign as even crazier with the woke movement and various social issues like trans people in sports, and suddenly in 2024 we went back to Trump, like a yo-yo going back and forth. And the overreaction is costing us by allowing Trump to believe he has a mandate to do whatever he wants with his political capital, implement tariffs Willy-nilly, deport immigrants haphazardly, and fire government workers through DOGE. It really feels like living in 2 different timelines, the way political attitudes shift and change, with radicals on both sides driving the hatred for the other side and making it about beating the other team, not really about doing what’s best for the country. It sucks. What can we do about overreaction? Stop reacting to everything that’s “crazy” in the newspapers. Focus on what we can do and have ability to change, not get caught up by hate or mania or radicalism. Very hard to do now with the internet the way it is and having information pumped in to our minds every second, every hour of the day, but I feel a lot of my friends and very educated people, smarter than me, miss the point of life and implications of what they’re doing: they’re so incensed by everything in the world and so intent on reacting to the bad that they miss something key: that overreacting could be just as bad as ignoring it.

Coachella

Every year there's an annual tradition in April that MJ and I adhere to: watching Coachella from the comfort of our own homes on Youtube. I like to think I would give anything a fair shot to try it, but Coachella is one thing I just KNOW I would not enjoy, at least as much as it's hyped up to be. Yes, I get it's in Palm Springs near Joshua Tree and goes on for 2 straight weekends (Week one and Week Two!) and it's outside in the desert and there's various stages where so many artists show up to perform that you can get all the music and live entertainment you want...and there's drugs, so many so many drugs, which is apparently a feature, not a bug of the experience. That and paying through the nose for lodgings or sleeping in tents, mass traffic getting into the event, being treated like second class citizens by being seated way at the back if you're not VIP, and for more checkout Reddit "Coachella is awful." I'm sure some people have a good time who like the music and like the vibe of being out in the desert for 3 straight days, it's just not worth it for me. This year, Lady Gaga(!) was the headliner which is really splashy along with a bunch of name-brand artists Post Malone, Ty Dolla Sign, etc., etc., a good place to study up on pop culture trivia for sure. Oh and Bernie Sanders made an appearance, with a speech to vote against President Trump's policies. Kylie Jenner and Timothy Chalamee were there! Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio were there! All VIP guests in the front row, I presume, and soaking up the fact that they get noticed and everyone else wants be them but can't (no jealousy!) Is it wrong of me to think Timothy Chalamee being one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, can get almost any role he wants, this generation's Leonardo DiCaprio, already Oscar nominated for A Complete Unknown (The Bob Dylan Story) and still not yet 30......can pick a better partner than Kylie Jenner, previously with child and part of the talentless but famous anyway Kardashian/Jenner clan? Maybe their siren song is just strong to attract even the most unattaianble of bachelors. I appreciate Bernie Sanders being out there with the masses instead of giving the vibe like the rest of Congress or the political elite that they're better than normal people. There's a world in which Bernie Sanders wins the 2016 Democratic primary against Hilary Clinton (Feel the Bern!) and gather momentum with the popular vote, taking those away from Trump and the huge populist base he has, wins the election, and the next 8 years are common sense, for-the-people policies that only American's favorite grandpa (and not Joe Biden!) can deliver. He's still clear-headed in 2025! Oh I didn't mention about Coachella that you have to get into a lottery to purchase tickets, it's a whole thing, kind of like trying to chase fame: I hate getting in line to chase after something that everyone wants, and when you finally finally get to the front of the line and ready to see what the commotion is all about, it turns out it isn't even something you like. This has happened to me on numerous occasions of waiting in long lines for food, long lines for nightclubs, long lines in traffic... Life experience has taught me that going against the line for something that not everyone loves but still has great value is the way to go. That and I hate lines. One tradition that I DO miss is reading newspapers with my grandpa in a quiet room, just ourselves, and learning Chinese. I love learning and have loved it from a young age mostly because my grandpa instilled in me a love of learning, so it always felt like a nostalgic practice mixed with intellectual activity mixed with quality bonding time with grandpa to sit in a room and just read. There are no lines to wait in to read, my grandpa was always ready to give me information on Chinese words, to tell me a story about some phrase in the newspaper and why they used that word, some historical context, or a new Internet slang term (my grandpa was born in 1925 and was still learning new slang terms from the Internet!) He would have been 100 years old this year, and if not for his physical body giving out, he would have kept reading and keeping his mind sharp. It's easy to say looking back on it, but you never know when the last time you will do an activity is, and how much you will miss it, no matter how mundane it is. Most of us appreciate reading, but maybe we all need a reading partner, one who keeps us honest by also reading and keeping each other from always checking our phones in this digital age. My grandpa was always game to read and he never owned a smart phone, nor even a cell phone; his life was patterned off of 1940's living of reading and spending time together. Nowadays I can't get anyone to even sit with me for an hour much less days to hang out (kind of a me problem) but still....I guess I didn't appreciate grandpa's willingness to just be there and be willing to drop everything at a moment's notice to teach me something. He didnt' really offer much verbal advice or direct pearl of wisdom on how to live life, but maybe that was his way of giving advice, by showing me his way of life and seeing how appealing the simple life can be: no music, no phones, no distractions, no lining up for 3 hours to get into the other line for 3 hours to buy overpriced alcohol at a music festival.....spend your life doing the things you like to do, not what everyone else wants to do.

Fame (名声, 명성, 名声)

Fame is actually the name of a movie that's "Jeopardy-worthy," a fact that I deem to be well-known enough to possibly show up on Jeopardy. It's a movie inspired by A Chorus Line about high schoolers ironically trying to become famous, through singing, dancing, and acting. Stars Irene Cara, of "What a Feeling" 1980s fame, herself a beneificary of fame but also of immense talent. Talent and opportunity, 2 very important but not completely necessary elements of fame. You can have no talent but just have fame thrust upon you, like Kim Kardashian, Hawk Tuah Girl, and a variety of people everyone knows but for the wrong reasons. That's kind of the wrong type of fame. Then we have Mr. Beast, the famous Youtuber Jimmy Donaldson who became famous due to playing games similar to Squid Game and cash giveaways. Like not just $1000 giveaways, life-changing amount of money kind of giveaways, like giving away $10 million to just the winner of Amazon Prime's Beast Games this past seaon (He gave away more through bribes and various elements of gameplay probably to the tune of about $20-$25 million just in the form of prize money). A lot of people criticize him for feeding the Squid Game spirit of greed and caring only about money and doing it all for show (yes he does nice things for others, but why does it always have to be on camera?) but there's no denying that he has talent, a new type of talent for displaying videos that people care about, that people want to watch (he's the No. 1 most subscribed channel on Youtube, beating out India's T-series and the channel for kids, CocoMelon. He's pretty much revolutionized the way people watch TV; Generation Z and Generation Alpha don't even watch traditional TV anymore, and the once-proud mainstream channels CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, etc. are all pretty much guaranteed to be phased out of relevancy after their last demographic base passes away, Baby Boomers and Generation X. Those networks would kill for anything resembling Mr. Beast's numbers. Mr. Beast has undeniable talent, but also gets my thumbs up at least for using that fame for good, kind of like when I buy a lotto ticket, I know I'm not going to win, but I hope that at least someone who wins it will use it for good. Mr. Beast has won the lotto of life but is also using it (generally) for good, philanthropy. He also does some crazy stuff like trying out $500,000 private jet rides an weird stunts that really have no utility, but he's making videos in Africa helping the hungry, the farmers, getting clean running water going......it's basically what most well-meaning people would do if they could do anything and didn't have to devote half their lives to work, paying the bills, attending to their children......Did I say half their lives? I meant pretty much their whole lives. Mr. Beast can do all of that because he's wealthy, but also because he wants to....I'm not sure if I ever became famous and achieved his level of celebrity, I would trust myself to devote all that energy to what I say I would do with it.....I could definitely get complacent and just spend it on selfish things and put off the philanthropy and giving back until later, which I'm sure there are plenty of billionaires doing now. I also admire some of the Jeopardy winners who do good work with their fame. People who go on Jeopardy normally get about 1 day of fame, the day your episode shoots, but some of the elite few get a week of fame by winning and being on more episodes, and if you're really good you get to keep coming back time and time again, and become "Jeopardy famous" but not really famous worldwide, still not Mr. Beast-level famous or even "Jeopardy-worthy." (Ironically, Jeopardy winners will never get their name on Jeopardy because the show doesn't test any knowledge about the show itself, with one notable exception.......of Ken Jennings). Ken Jennings is the one Jeopardy contestant ever who didn't start off as a celebrity (there is a celebrity Jeopardy show allowing celebrities the easy path to get on Jeopardy, which if I ever got famous or anything might be a better chance of getting on the show than just being a regular joe) who became famous into mainstream status. I recently attended a Jeopardy in-person event where some prominent winners showed up like Drew Goins and Sam Buttrey- they are very much "Jeopardy-famous" and were big stars at the event, getting VIPs to line up to take photos with them and just get a chance to talk to them, got makeup done, etc. Ken Jennings was too famous to make an appearance (actually he can't mingle with the contestants for game show propriety's sake). I was a little too gunshy to talk to them even though I watched both Sam and Drew on my TV so many times ( I really don't know what to see to a celebrity as a no-name peasant, there's no way to sound original or funny or anything without saying something they've heard thousands of times, it's just a weird dynamic of acknowledging their fame and "fanboying out") but while MJ was getting food nearby (vegan chili!) I stood outside of the theater and waited, and Sam and Drew walked out.......as normal people, no entourage, no more waiting fans. It's like when they're in the Jeopardy studio or at a Jeopardy event, they magically become stars, but that magic fades once they go outside....the general person on the street won't recognize them. That's being Jeopardy-famous. It struck me that this is what fame is- it's allusive, it's fickle, anyone can get fame for almost any reason......and they could lose it too if they want to, by not exposing themselves to the fame. It's like a magic trick, you can't just will yourself to become famous, there needs to be some luck, some abracadabra, some magic powder....and it's okay not to get it, it's one of those things everybody who doesn't have it (me) thinks they want, but probably isn't all that it's cracked up to be once you get it (and it's hard to keep). Sour grapes!