Falcon (鹘, ファルコン, 매)

 I like all kinds of animals (did you know that elephants have the longest term of pregnancy of all mammals, at 2 years? That seems like a long time to be pregnant and carrying another life within your body, I think MJ would not appreciate that), and falcons definitely are high up there on the list. I once volunteered as the audience member at the L.A. Zoo to be the lucky guy to hold up 5 dollars for the falcon on display to come grab it from my hand and return to it to the falconer (the falcon trainer). I looked cool for the kids at my summer camp for awhile, so I appreciated both falcon and falconer in that endeavor (don't remember if it was a peregrine, kestrel, or merlin falcon, should have paid more attention). 

But this post is about a very famous historical figure in trivia circles but also possibly explorer and adventure circles, Robert "Falcon" Scott, who set out to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911 as part of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, but was beaten by Roald Amundsen who got there weeks before Scott did and planted the Norway flag there to prove it, as if to signal a huge "I win" to his rival Scott. Falcon was already low on provisions and energy by the time he reached the South Pole, but to make it worse his crew encountered a blizzard on the way back to his ship the Terra Nova, and he didn't make it, freezing to death with the rest of his crew. What a shame, and makes me wonder how devastating it must have been to be Mr. Scott: your life's ambition, the thing you've been working for your whole life, is foiled by your rival, but then the effort also cost you your life. If I'd known better, I would have just let Amundsen get the glory and stay the heck away, maybe try something else! I wonder if Scott either a) knew he would die pursuing the ultimate goal or 2.) knew Amudsen would get there first, would he have tried anyway, just to say he did it? Maybe.......he's now one of the most famous explorers ever, and one of the most popular Jeopardy trivia answers next to Queen Victoria, Henrietta Lacks, and Charlemagne. 

Whenever I watch Jeopardy and great players piling up long streaks like current superchamp Chris Pannulo, I wonder worry that I will wind up being Robert Falcon Scott.......going through all the preparation and work and spending all that extra time learning about arcane and trivial (by definition) facts, only to have others the goal before I do. Reaching the South Pole would be something unattainable, like breaking Ken Jennings's 74- game winning streak, the gold standard in trivia, which is impossible for a guy like me who never did Scholastic Bowl, never read through the encyclopedia as a kid, and never got into trivia until 2 years ago, but like a 10 or 20-game winning streak has been done and requires just a bit (actually a lot) of luck. But when people Chris Pannulo have great games (buzzing in on 51 out of 60 clues, for example) my blood kind of boils; he's Amundsen to my Robert Falcon Scott; he got there first and there's nothing I can do but watch. 

You know what's worse than being Robert Falcon Scott, though? The crew members who followed Falcon through thick and thin, unflinchingly on the worst place on earth, or at least the coldest: Antactica, only to die with him and not even get his glory in the historybooks. That really sucks. 

Oil Change (换油, オイル交換, 엔진 오일 교환)

 It's time for a synthetic oil change! A sentence that I've never been excited for, like going to the dentist. Much like visiting the dentist's office, it's not so much the service of the oil change or teeth cleansing that I'm worried about, it's what can happen in addition to just the basic service, the extra repairs that the mechanics find that "needs urgent repair" and I wind up leaving the repair shop with a much larger bill than I anticipated (or budgeted for), and a gnawing sense that I might not even have needed that repair. 

In the case of dentists, it's an easy fix: I stopped going to the dentist! That one time where a dentist asked me for cash to repair lesions in my teeth at an exorbitant rate really traumatized me because I've never trusted any dentists ever again, and pledged to keep my teeth clean on my own. Not the greatest long-term strategy, but so far it encourages me to floss more and self-repair; although maybe one day those wisdom teeth need to come out. 

No such luck with car repairs: although I have seen people doing oil changes themselves, it seems like a hassle, requires patience, and the right oil. After dropping my car off, I endure what I imagine must be similar to the feeling after dropping one's kids off at school, a sense of anxiety and dread of something terrible about to happen...and usually at repair shops the bad news arrives in the form of my "friendly" service person informing me of all the necessary repairs and the cost. Oh, the cost......a small portion of the cost is for the actual parts, but the labor cost is how they get you........just like lawyers need to get paid by the hour, the mechanics need to get paid by the hour too, and just like attorneys throwing out fancy legal terms to scare customers into agreeing on services, mechanics giving me terms like "coolant fluid flush," "brake fluid flush," "spark plugs renewal, valve cover gasket leak," and "corrosion on the batteries." They all sound awful, don't they? And that's not even counting the 4-year-old set of tires that had been worried about due to driving in some rough city roads. "Oh no, that's actually fine. We just need to rotate the tires next time you come in." Shrug; shows how much I know about cars. 

MJ and I have agreed on our next car being at least a hybrid vehicle, and possible an electric vehicle (if we are lucky enough to get selected from the waitlist). Sure repairs will still be required, but at least we'd be repairing a car we believe in. Not to disparage my 2013 Honda Accord at all, it's actually done a heck of a job (not counting all those repairs we had to do), but it hasn't ever broken down in the middle of the road due to engine failure; only once due to me driving on excessively hot roads and probably literally burning rubber. 

Cars are a true weakness for me, so I've brushed up a little on them recently: the definitive history of cars, from the pioneer vehicles to the Ford Model T to the modern electric cars. I often try to look at different cars on the freeway and associate their shape and appearance with their make and model, but the history of cars didn't start with Hondas, Toyotas, Chevrolets, Nissans. The Mercedes-Benz, for example, figured almost as prominently in the early history of cars as the Ford Model T, as well as Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, and even some French brands like Renault and Citroen. Maybe in a different life I could appreciate cars for their elegance and beauty and some super fast cars' ability to get to 200mph. In this life, though, all I see in cars are big lumps of steel transport who sips on ever-more expensive fuel and is full of parts, each of which can cost quite a lot at an auto shop to repair. I wish I was friends with auto mechanics. 

Vapid (乏味的, 気まぐれ, 맛없는)

 My posts have taken a negative turn towards complaints and grievances recently, and that's probably due to the fact that I wake up every day knowing that I gave up almost all of the gains I've ever made in the stock market in the last 10 calendar months, or possibly because MJ and I have yet to achieve our goal this year, a year that's quickly becoming quite frustrating...Also I echo the thoughts of one of MJ's managers, "I don't like when people make complaints that they don't have a solution for." I'm guilty of the same thing. 

The word "vapid" means, according to the dictionary, offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging....which is what Celebrity Jeopardy epitomized last night for me: a show that featured celebrities (nothing against Candace Wu, Ike Barinholz, and Jalen Rose personally, they just embody the typical celebrity nowadays) who are only famous as entertainers, answering clues that have been dumbed down for a national TV audience (not just the syndicated show, this one was on a major TV network, which still means something even in our current era of streaming networks) to have mostly clues about celebrities, actors, movies, and mostly the entertainment business. Our general society has an appetite for those sorts of things, unlike anything that really matters like science, improving the world.....our society just is in a constant hedonistic state (a hedonic treadmill if you will), like eating junk food constantly without any real nutritional values (in this case, stimulating or challenging content). And that's me included! I engage in all the fun stuff without wanting to worry about the hard stuff......life has just become a constant search for the next thrill, the next thing, without challenging myself. I cringe whenever a TV show category and/or a movie category comes on knowing most shows are just mindless entertainment and will pass by and end in a few years and not be remembered nor have any impact on society, but I nevertheless engage because we relate to those things, they're the fun stuff, they're the candies/ ice cream of life. We crave them. 

What brought this on? I was listening to the "Go Fact Yourself" podcast (an interesting but catchy name) with Brandon Blackwell and Amy Schneider, 2 trivia legends, and Brandon's self-selected specialty category was the Period Table of Elements, an excellent scientific category that I envy him for memorizing every element (there are 118 elements, and they're already seeking to create No. 119 and No. 120!) The podcast brought on a special guest who had literally written the book on the Table of Elements, a professor of UCLA......and I'd never heard of him. Our society just doesn't know many scientists anymore, nor do we reward their findings with fame/ recognition. For example, name a famous scientist in our modern era. Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Maybe Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, who's still alive today? Anthony Fauci (more of a celebrity who benefited from the pandemic). I don't really know any of the Nobel Prize winners for physics, chemistry, etc. Science seemed to be much cooler in the 20th century and before, with revolutionary inventions and legendary scientists the Curies, Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Edison, etc. Now we just know characters from the Big Bang Theory. Maybe it's because scientific innovations have slowed down? Mankind has everything it needs, the rest is just convenience, coming up with faster internet and faster smartphones? Maybe, but it definitely has something to do with the celebrity culture of worshipping people great in sports, music, entertainemtnt, etc. In an ideal world, more people would read the autobiography of Richard Feynman (Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!) than "Bossypants" by Tina Fey, or more people would show up to a science convention or space camp than an NFL football game.......but no. Our society is content with the vapidness of our culture, and the money follows the eyeballs/ selection of the general public. Now I kind of get why my parents were disappointed at me for not choosing science as a profession since they were both chemists/ research scientists. 

The Catcher in the Rye

 Catcher in the Rye is the best choice for All-American novel. I say this because in the age of low attention spans and low interest in books, JD Salinger wrote a book that actually makes you want to read it, no offense to any of the other candidates out there, most of which are so long-riding and look so daunting that people can't and won't set aside time to actually read it. Moby Dick, by all accounts, requires a handbook of all the different Bible allegories that are within its dense chapters, not to mention all the intricate industry-specific knowledge about whaling that Melville accumulated in his time on a whaling boat; East of Eden has that one basic retelling of the story of Abel and Cane, but its winding tale through the Monterrey region makes it just a tad inaccessible. Because there's so many things I haven't read that I want to get to, I don't like spending more than a weekend (maybe like 6 hours max) stuck in a book. For someone like MJ who takes months to read a single book, it's damn near impossible (for some reason she bought the thousand-page "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace, which has like 30 different plot points and even more characters to keep track of.......no way the general population gets through that nowadays. Other than that it's a great book. 

The Catcher in the Rye actually reads similary to this blog (I'm not trying to compare myself to Salinger). It's the rambling thoughts of a young man who's dropping out of college and thinks everyone he meets is phony, and details taking the train to New York City and spending time there. That's like a third of all the entries in this blog! It has dialogue, important to keep people like me awake, and it's set more or less in the modern era (before cell phones, so the storytelling is pretty relatable and Holden's thoughts are very relatable: the pressures of going to college, seeing through people who don't act genuinely, and the young man's desire to have sex. It even has recommendations of other classic books to read like The Great Gatsby, the Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa! 

Speaking of Great American writers, It's October, so it's Edgar Allen Poe month, with all his morbid writing and scary stories.....I went to a Poe festival over the weekend where there was dramatization of his short story "Berenice." Very unsettling story not unlike all his other stories of being buried alive, coffins, tell-tale hearts, illnesses.... there was also a couple there dressed up as Edgar Allen Poe and Virginia Clemm, his wife.... all black, heavy black makeup, it was like a Sex Pistols/ Green Day concert. As much as the stories give me the creeps, I appreciate that there are still festivals celebrating legendary authors... it's getting to be a dying breed, I feel like my interests are all aligned with the previous generation of orchestra concertgoers, book readers, and Jeopardy! viewers, which is why I usually end up as places with small crowds and minimal lines, which suits me just fine but also confiness the number of people I met and what I can discuss at dinner parties. I do feel a bit like Holden Caufield, a little isolated from society and dubious of how it works. 

Conflate (混同する, 합체)

The word conflate is interesting in that it has 2 different definitions, but the one I think of is to confuse 2 different things for each other. For example, I often conflate 2 different things that have nothing to do with each other into one thing in my mind, so when a clue asks for "This wife of Andrew Lloyd Webber was a soprano who also sang with Andrea Bocelli," I confounded (another word that I conflate with "conflate" that means almost the same thing, mixing up 2 different things) Sarah Brightman (the soprano) with Sarah Bernhardt, the French stage actress. Or strudel, the layered Geramn pastry dish with sweet filing, with streusel, the German crumbly topping of flour, butter, sugar. The novel "Metamorphosis" by Kafka and the poem "Metamorphoses" by Ovid. "The Stranger" by Camus is often confused with "The Alchemist" by the Brazilian author Coehlo in my mind for some reason, as well as other names/words/concepts that I just didn't learn fully and didn't learn correctly the first time, thus I have to go back and reconfigure the wires in my brain to separate them apart. Moldova the country with Moldavia the region in Romania. Gigi Hadid the model with Zaha Hadid the architect. Thomas Cromwell the advisor to Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England many years later. Moussaka, the Greek lasagna dish, with souvlaki, a gyro-like Greek meat dish. The star Sirius, brightest star in the night sky, with Canus Major, the constellation that it's located in, because they're both dog related. Rin Tin Tin the dog with Tin Tin, the cartoon character. Josh Gibson the Negro League baseball player with Bob Gibson the Cardinals pitcher and Harlem Globetrotter! So many things! Why can't all these names be obviously distinct from each other???? As the great pop singer of my youth Avirl Lavigne once said, "Why the hell you gotta go and make things so complicated?" 

Small details like the above likely won't matter in the big picture of life, but some bigger conflations will, like confounding money with happiness, or confounding "going out on the town" with having a good time. In my twenties I often felt like I needed to do something, anything on Friday nights to justify the Friday night because that's what everyone else was doing and I assumed everyone else was having a good time without me, but I've learned that going out and having beers, going to bars can actually get boring for me and I can't wait to get home, and that often those ideas of a good time on Friday night are just the entertainment/ restaurant business advertising themselves and artificially creating demand. Aka, making me feel like I need something that I don't need. 

Here's a bigger question though: Am I conflating having kids with happiness? From all the pictures on social media and the general consensus within the larger group of society, I've been lead to believe that having a child/children is one of the greatest joys in life, and I still believe that it is. However, I also thought weddings were a given and a celebration, which it can be, but 5 years after having our wedding, I feel like it was a little overhyped by the wedding indusry.....it's a fun party where I knew everybody at the party and I got to be the star of it, but I could have hosted any other party (Game of Thrones party, dodgeball reunion party) and had almost as good of a time, with a fraction of the cost. Especially nowadays with "eloping" being all the rage and people actually encouraging couples to skip on the wedding (I often heard guests who felt bothered and troubled by being invited to weddings, like it was a nuisance to go or have to send an obligatory gift) I've reconsidered my stance on weddings. So will I reconsider my stance on having kids? It's hard to know until I do it, just like I'm sure I would be wondering what my wedding would be like had I never had one. Unlike a wedding, however, that lasts just one (magical) night, having children is permanent and one of the most irreversible decisions 2 people can make. I see all the cute baby pictures, the excitement that expecting parents are oozing with, the professional family photos that they have of 2 kids and a dog, and I definitely want that life, but am I conflating children with only those happy images and videos? A work employee, mother to a young child, once confided to me that she thought childbirth was one of the tricks society pushes on all members in order to sustain its members, to keep the species alive, that actually it's a lot of sacrifice and the consensus for parents doesn't include all the burdens one assumes.

They're all good points, and I would be wise to consider all those before Fools Rush in (Selma Hayek and Matthew Perry movie, I often conflated Matthew Perry with Matt LeBlanc). I'm still in favor of having children because I've always had a great relationship with kids, I like teaching kids, and always wanted to provide a life for someone else and add a loving member of the family, but I also know that it doesn't always end that way and that my relatively carefree life would become much more care-ridden and anxiety-filled. I know these things, but I still would like to go on and have a child anyway.  

Karate (空手道, 空手, 카라테)

 Just finished watching Cobra Kai Season 5, a very nostalgic TV series that caters to 1980s kids who grew up with Ralph Macchio and the Karate Kid. The series has evovled over the various seasons to be about less about karate and more about growing up in the San Fernando Valley as a high schooler (and also the used car industry in Encino and Reseda- for anyone like me who's ever wondered what it's like in those neighborhoods off the 101 driving from downtown L.A. Northbound to Santa Barbara- well, the Cobra Kai/ Karate Kid universe is a pretty good depiction). I've also wondered what I would have become had I not stopped going to a Chinese school-sponsored karate club back in middle school and stuck with it past just the random demonstrations we did at schools (I vaguely remember going into a classroom with tables and desks and having to perform a karate routine in front of other parents and students- really wish there was better video technology back then to get a sense of what I looked like doing karate moves). 

It's surprising to me why karate/ other martial arts don't get more traction for students in the U.S. Perhaps it's because there are so many other activities that dominate the scene, like football, basketball, and surprisingly, soccer- one of the more popular sports I hear kids play, as did I, I suspect because of the ability to let the kids run around and tire themselves out, making the parents' jobs easier. My sister got into Tae Kwan Do in college and claims she can beat me up nowadays despite never testing that thesis out, but her case gives me an explanation of why people avoid combat sports: potential injuries. She had to go to the hospital and get treated for $3000 worth of a hospital stay despite just getting a couple Tylenol or something. (Side note: the U.S. healthcare system is a pyramid scheme on top of a scam. MJ and I recently experienced a doctor pushing a surgery on us that we had doubts about whether we actually needed, or it was the hospital trying to market more medical procedures to up their bottom line so they could bill the insurance companies beaucoup dollars, subsequently making everyone's insurance premiums go up). Neither middle school nor high schools taught any karate or martial arts, the reason likely being illustrated in Cobra Kai: If the whole school knew karate, everybody would be fighting each other in the hallways. Combat sports will always have a hard time gaining traction with a school board especially in today's environment of prioritizing "safe spaces." Even if people like Daniel LeRusso (the original Karate Kid) promised that karate was just for self-defense. 

Knowing karate would be at least an ace in the sleeve in some situations: I've never gotten into a physical confrontation, but there's been a few times I've wondered on a night run whether the couple guys in front of me meant any harm, and that's when karate would be useful as a last resort. Likely it would just be another outlet for my competitive drive and to proceed in the system from the lowest belt (white belt) to black belt. If I've learned anything about myself, it's that I have low pain tolerance, so I might have trouble with people getting shots off on me, although I'd be a lot more afraid of being choked out or having my arm broken in jiujitsu rather than blunt force harm like karate, where as long as I protect my head area I should be OK to deal with striking damage and just bruises to various parts of the body. 

Cheating (作弊, 不正行為, 부정 행위)

 When I watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with Regis Philbin back before 2000, I was just a kid and knew very few of the questions, but I was fascinated by the trivia format and Regis's way of talking to the contestants, as well as the fastest fingers competition, the catchy music: I loved it, even before I had seen Jeopardy, which of course has lasted longer and been more of a consistent force in American TV. But Millionaire definitely had its moments especially at its peak in 2009 when it aired in PrimeTime, and I could see why. It never occured to me, though, that the format of its live audience and 10 other contestants surrounding the stage could leave the format so ripe for cheating, but that's exactly what happened in the British version of the show in 2000, when Charles Ingram colluded with his wife and another contestant to win the million dollar grand prize. There's a Youtube documetary of the whole incident, and it leaves me without a shadow of a doubt that cheating occurred and that Ingram received help to win the million dollars, as it did the jury in the criminal case against Ingram, giving him 18 months in prison. As unclear and confusing as the evidence in the Adnan Syed murder cases is, the case against Ingram and wife and co-conspirator was just as clear, cut and dry. Ingram at multiple times said he was going to go for one of the answers, but after hearing a cough, changed his mind. 

I've never really seen cheating in person, only heard of stories of people cheating on exams by writing notes under the lid of their hats, having secret notes somewhere, writing it on their hands, having special glasses, etc., etc., but I've never busted someone red-handed: I'm usually paying attention to the test itself rather than other test-takers, so it was pretty interesting to watch a case of cheating on national TV play itself out with a system of coughing when the right answer came out. Millionaire used the multiple-choice format, with the right answer coming up in one of the 4 answers, so it allows potential cheaters to just signal the right answer, rather than have to feed the answer from nothing to the contestant playing, and especially with the long pauses during the questions allowing the contestant to think, it's almost shocking that others didn't try to cheat before him (I guess other than the fact that there are hundreds of cameras in the studio and sound devices, etc. that might catch you). 

The Ingram Case is actually a great case on human greed: Ingram "won" the million dollars using the cheating strategy, but because he attracted more scrutiny by going all the way that high (and more chances to get caught), whereas Millionaire would have likely let it go if he had stopped at $125,000, maybe even $250,000. Indeed, right after winning the million his wife seemed to have chided him for something, which turns out to be likely breaking their plan and going for more money than agreed upon. At some point Ingram, in that chair, likely saw that the plan was working, it seemed like a cinch, no one had said anything, so why not keep going? Speaking from some experience with a guilty conscience like playing "mafia" or other similar games involving lying and deception, when you've gotten away a few times with a lie, it fuels one's bravado and confidence that no one finds out, and then greed (I know that feeling from the stock market and not taking profits when the market is at an all-time high) not being satisifed with the money in hand.....always wanting to go for the 2 in the bush. Sad, what a little money/power/love can do to someone who's never had any of those things before. 

America apparently loves scandal, and there have been plenty of sports scandals like the Houston Astros sign stealing scheme (someone used technology to steal the opposing pitchers' signs and buzz it to the hitters so the hitters knew what pitches were coming), New England Patriots Deflategate (deflated some of the footballs to make them easier to hold on to), Spygate (used cameras to film opposing teams' practices), etc., but this is the first time I've heard of game shows. I was thinking if there could ever be cheating on Jeopardy!, and it definitely seems less doable: they are free-response questions that need to be spoken by the contestant within seconds of the clue coming up, so it's very unlikely anyone from the audience can help, and even having a buzzer or some sort of earpiece link with someone at home with Internet access to speak to you the answer would not allow an accomplice a chance to type it into Google and search for answers. The only thing I could see in the future is some advanced technology like a brain chip inserted into the contestant's brain to immediately google the clue like Watson did and come up with a most likely answer, or maybe a Google glass device like in "Iron Man" that processes the clue upon seeing it and spits out an answer in the glasses? That actually......seems doable one day. Oh and the other way would be if one of the writers that had access to the clues/answers sent them out to a contestant.....hmm, I'm sure there are safeguards there, right???? Watch out, Jeopardy showrunners!