In LA

You knew that fortune cookies are an American invention, right? They’re related to a Japanese pastry, and were either invented in San Francisco or LA early last century. They do not exist in China. Armed with this knowledge, please to enjoy youtube clip:

Thanks to boingboing.net for bringing this video to my attention, and Jennifer 8 Lee for creating it (I think). I love it. I don’t know where the video was shot exactly, but it makes me miss the people of Beijing. There’s a nice cross-section of people and places in the video. Their good-natured reactions to the strange cookies are awesome.

I just took a little online quiz that attempted to determine which US accent I have based on my responses to a number of questions. The questions actually seem pretty clever, and the result matches up with what I’ve been told in the past. I guess my Minnesota accent has been destroyed by years of living on the West coast.

I tend not to go for online quizzes, but I was very curious what sort of written questions would be used to detect a spoken accent. Here’s my table of results:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

A still of Her Royal Highness Teri Garr¹ from the fantastic film Young Frankenstein

There’s a question that often pops up when people are trying to suss out another person’s interests, ideals, knowledge of history, etc. Something along the lines of “Who are the five world figures, living or dead, with whom you’d most like to sit down and have a conversation over a tray of spam musubi?” I swear every answer to that question I’ve heard from a well-meaning white person includes Nelson Mandela and/or Ghandi. I mean no disrespect to either of those esteemed gentlemen, but with one refreshingly candid interview Teri Garr has knocked them both off of my list.²

An excerpt related to Young Frankenstein:

…it was like when the teacher says to stop laughing, and all you can do is laugh more. Mel would say, “Can we do another take with no laughing?” And we’d say, “We’ll try.” We would laugh at everything. Marty Feldman–God, was he funny. When I went to see the show in New York, I went backstage, and I said, “You’re all doomed.” Because everyone is dead from that movie! Well, not everyone. But Madeline, and Peter Boyle, and Marty. And myself, I have one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel.

She’s recently written an autobiography, entitled Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood³. I plan to check it out.

Technorati Tags: acting, entertainment, film, hollywood, Teri Garr

1. She has multiple sclerosis, and has said she now hates the letters M and S, “and I certainly took the Ms. off the front of my name. I now go as your Royal Highness Teri Garr.” [↩]
2. Honestly, what question have those two figures not already been asked while they shared spam musubi with Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Jesus, and Floyd from accounting? [↩]
3. Apparently she wanted to title the book “Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?” but was dissuaded by the publisher. [↩]

Someone just told me I look like Harry Shearer, he of Spinal Tap and Simpsons fame. I’ll add that to the list of people-I’ve-been-told-I-resemble, which includes “young Gene Hackman”, Kevin Spacey, and Peter Sellers. At least I apparently resemble¹ talented folk. Could be worse.

1. I certainly don’t see the resemblances [↩]

There’s a custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership (run by a man whose last name coincidentally, is Harley) in Britain that not only sells “custom wide tire kits” and other Harley-related items, but in the “Custom Accessory for Harley” section of their site sells some nice looking stainless steel kits and supplies for making your own tofu, as well as tofu recipes¹.

If I was a little less sleep deprived, I’d probably find that this post practically writes its own punchlines, but I’m drawing blanks. This is probably for the best –given how popular Harleys seem to be among people from all walks of life, any joke based on preconceived notions of who would be found riding such a bike are bound to be at best severely outdated. And who wants to tell an outdated joke? Take my wife, please!²

1. And no, I have no idea how I came across this page [↩]
2. Has Henny Youngman’s repertoire become public domain yet? [↩]

Aesthetically, this clone of an Apple iPod Touch, advertised on Facebook’s China network, looks like the closest match yet, though its dimensions are not listed so it’d be tough to say for sure.

Other notable iPod Touch clones are the Optimus Touch, the Tsinghua Tongfang PMC-V560 (apparently only costs $52), the Portronics/Onda VX858, and the Meizu M7.

Of course, these are all just lookalikes, I’d expect they lack the features that make the iPod Touch so appealing –great multitouch interface, high resolution, robust Unix OS, great email application, great web browser, etc. But it’s amusing to me to watch the number of Chinese iPod Touch clones increase.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, OS X

Somehow that statement¹ just looks wrong in iChat next to my smiling avatar.

1. by the way, I’m not remotely violent, and am not about to punch anything. i was just venting some frustration in a chat with a friend [↩]

According to a BBC article, keepers at the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding have been trying to entice the pandas at the reserve to mate by showing them videos of panda porn.

I find it interesting that the article is accompanied by two stills that appear to be from the panda sex video. One is a boring photo of the two pandas looking at each other from across a room. The other is of Qing Qing attacking Ha Lei, accompanied by the caption “Females commonly attack males after mating”.

These are strange choices for photos to accompany the article. The article is specifically about researchers showing this video to uninterested pandas in an effort to get them aroused. It should have been accompanied by photos of the researchers showing the video to pandas, a still of the pandas mating in the video, and (since the BBC obviously has the video of the pandas mating) they also should have posted the video to their website as a companion piece to the article. But that’s apparently not the way Western culture works. Violent photos are just fine, but photos of pandas actually engaged in mating (the horror) cannot be shown, and video –forget it.

Giant pandas mate rarely in captivity, and there are only a couple thousand of them left in the world. The entire video is newsworthy by any definition of the term. Who could be offended at a pair of pandas going at it?

There’s a great new trailer online for The Forbidden Kingdom, and it’s awesome. It is available as flash video embedded within a page and also available in HD Quicktime. To see it, go to Yahoo’s “The Forbidden Kingdom” page, look for the “Exclusive Trailer”, and click the button for the resolution of your choice (the 1080p version looks amazing, but if you don’t have the fastest computer or net connection I’d recommend the 720p), or click the “Click to play” button to see a reasonably ok looking embedded flash version (looks better than the trailer on youtube, but much worse than the HD QuickTimes).

Unlike the “Teaser Trailer”, this trailer concerns itself less with introducing the story and is more focused on imparting the feel of the film. There are tons of beautiful shots of scenery, action, Jackie Chan fighting Jet Li, Li Bing Bing being all hot and evil, Collin Chou looking devious, and Michael Angarano getting beaten up by just about everyone. In my opinion it’s more exciting than the teaser trailer, and given the amount of action in the film, a better representation of the film as well.

Yahoo’s “The Forbidden Kingdom” page also includes a countdown clock to the release date of the film. Right now it says 65 days, 21 hours, 15 minutes, and 55 seconds to go. Aiiiyaa!¹ How freaky to actually see how little time is left until release. I’m going to see that countdown clock in my fitful sleep tonight².

1. that’s Mandarin for “oy vey” [↩]
2. unless I can manage to disable my brain’s javascript interpreter [↩]

And the award for best performance from a quadruped goes to…

An amusing alternate version can be found here.

Edit: Snowball the Cockatoo likes to dance to the Backstreet Boys and is awesome.