you sick liiitle monkeeeey!

So Rosie O’Donnell has quit or been forced to resign from the View. Good riddance, you unfunny, loudmouth.

Some months ago, I read about the whole Kelly Ripa stink that Rosie raised, accusing the co-host of the Regis and Kelly show of being a homophobe for pushing away Clay Aiken’s hand when he tried to cover her mouth. “If that was a straight man, a cute man”, Ripa would not have pushed him away. (Rosie was implying that Aiken was both gay *and* ugly — he hadn’t come out yet.) All of her co-hosts disagreed, but Rosie continued to vilify Ripa and turn the incident into a personal crusade. You can watch the clip below.

Rosie has made being PC about homosexuality her pet cause, yet she has no problem being very un-PC and very out-of-fashion with her unfunny mockery of the Chinese language in the following clip.

At $600, Blu-ray players are far from affordable. It will take at least 3 or 4 years for the price to come down enough for most consumers to consider adopting– that’s if the format war gets resolved. Sony, however, is doing a smart thing as part of their strategy to promote BD. Just like the PS2 had the ability to play DVDs out of the box, the PS3 has the ability to play BD. Most gamers who were going to buy a DVD player went and bought the PS2. It was a great value, at $300 when it came out. DVD players at that time cost about the same, or more, so gamers naturally bought the PS2.

The PS3, though, is a different story. It’s double the price. Yes, it is light years ahead of the PS2 in terms of raw computing power and manufacturing complexity, but that aside, one other thing is different: there is no clear winner in the BD/HD DVD format war. When the PS2 was introduced, the DVD format was firmly positioned to be the next generation video format. There was no argument about its specifications and compatibility. (The whole DVD+R/DVD-R, DVD+RW format war is a different story..)

BD is clearly a superior format on paper in terms of storage, at 25GB per single layered disc vs HD DVD’s 15. Theoretically, this extra space could be used to store better quality video. A lower capacity means you have to compress the video more to fit it on the disc, trading off quality for size. MPEG compression is lossy, meaning visual information and some detail is lost to save space. With a bigger capacity, less would be lost. In reality, is BD video better than HD? I don’t yet know.

I’ll have to do some tests.

I went to jury duty on Wednesday for the first time ever. Throughout my life, I had known people being called to jury duty, either teachers or co-workers, but I somehow escaped the notice of the courts until now. I didn’t know what to expect, except that from all that I had heard, I knew it was not something pleasant.

I dutifully arrived at the Brooklyn court house at 8:30, as the juror summons instructed. By that time, there were also 200 people who had done the same. After half an hour of sitting around, a man finally instructed us to take a handbook. After that, another man gave us instructions on filling out the summons card, then played a video for us about the importance of doing our duty as jurors, with Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer as narrators. We were safeguarding democracy and the rule of law, they assured us. Fine and good. I was willing to give the judicial system the benefit of the doubt, so I waited…

..and waited… and waited. From 8:30 until 2:15, I waited in the jury selection room as small groups of people got called out to the empanelling rooms. When I finally got called, 10 of us were ushered into a room and we spent another hour and a half there, after being told that only 2 of us would be chosen as alternate jurors. Not the real jurors, mind you- alternates.

It was a personal injury case. An elderly woman had a slip and fall accident in a station and sued the MTA. The case sounded interesting and after nearly a whole day of waiting, I was almost hoping to be chosen. After the Ed Bradley video they showed all of us at the beginning of the day about the history of trial by jury and how we were doing our important duties as Americans, it was all a letdown.

There really has to be a better way of doing this than dragging people from their jobs and making most of them wait around a whole day. All I did was sit on my duff for 6 hours and end up with nothing more than a cynical view of the justice system and reinforcement of how inefficient our government was. Oh, I got a nice certificate of jury service too, saying I didn’t have to do this again for 6 more years.

These are some chicken biscuits my mom got from a co-worker. She’s a pieceworker at a garment factory in Chinatown.

The dubious Japanese immediately drew my attention. The top series of words is “shoku-zai no mochi aji”, which means something I can only translate as “food-ful flavor”, to retain the spirit of the crappy Chinapanese. “Shoku-zai” is a rather sterile term meaning “ingredients”. It’s a word you typically find in a cookbook or the on the back of a food package, not on the front. If they wanted to say “flavorful ingredients”, they need to switch the words around and say “aji no mochi shoku-zai”.

front

The big black words are “shio meku no chiken”. Chiken is the transliteration for the English word “chicken”, so no problems here. I can only guess at what they are trying to say with “shio meku” though. “Meku” is just wrong because it is apparently slang for “masturbation”, as I’ve just learned from Jim Breen’s dictionary.. Thank goodness for the “Chicken flavour” written right over it, cuz I never would’ve figure out that this was a packet of chicken flavored crackers.

It needs a macron to make the word into “me-ku”, meaning “make”, as in the “make and model of a car”, so I guess they mean “salt flavor”. (Yes, in Japan, salty is considered a flavor.)

back

And goddamn it, this is NOT recyclable. No kind of plastic wrapper like this is (I once visited a recycling facility). Putting a recycling symbol on the back is just false information.

This is what they look like inside. I half-expected them to be shaped like little chickens.

It’s late at night and I’m hungry, so I ate the whole pack. The biscuits themselves taste alright.. .but not quite like chicken. And not at all like buffalo wings, like the photo implies. The rest of the Chinese words in that red ribbon I cannot read because they are too complex for my reading level, except for two words, “chicken” and “cracker/biscuits”.

.. one last thing, why is the chicken holding a lollipop?

My rendition of the famous James Montgomery Flagg portrait. I made this because one of my friends keeps complaining about the jerk at her office who sits behind her and causes pain. But she left before I could finish, so I’ll show it to her tomorrow. The next time a co-worker or boss pisses you off, print out this picture and tape it to your cube.