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Sony Dream Machine ICF-C218
I was looking for a cheap alarm clock. Real cheap. I found the Sony FM / AM Clock Radio Dream Machine on Amazon for $11.00. Yes, that cheap. Who needs a stereo alarm clock that plays CDs? Anyways, their marketers are good. On Amazon, the product is called an Automatic Time Set Clock Radio. That’s…
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Dennis Kucinich Pick-Up Line
I stopped by the local farmers market this morning and was bombarded by all the political activists hawking their own candidates. Among the Democrats, representatives from Hillary, Obama and Kucinich were present. For the Republicans, I only spotted the Ron Paul contingent. For the most part, all the reps kept to themselves, except for the…
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Chinatown, 1925
TIME Magazine: Tong. Western Union operators in Boston were puzzled, last week, by a number of enigmatic telegrams sent from their station to various parts of the U. S. The messages appeared, at first glance, to be in code, but a closer scrutiny revealed that they were merely lists of names—Chinese names. The above passage…
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Chinese History From a Western Perspective
Time: Second Thoughts on the Chairman. Not even Mao was perfect, it turns out. Propped up by two solicitous aides, Ye Jianying, 81, the venerable chairman of the National People’s Congress, tottered up to the rostrum last week to deliver the keynote speech for China’s 30th anniversary celebration. If you are ever curious about how…
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Happy Moon Festival
Hope you all were able to enjoy the Moon Festival with your family members. I couldn’t figure out how to take a photo of the full moon, so I looked it up online. I set the Nikon D50 to manual, then set the ISO to 200, aperture to f/16 and shutter speed to 1/200. Worked…
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The Long Tail of Mooncakes
In preparation for the Mid-Autumn Festival, I bought some moon cakes from my local Asian supermarket. Usually, I’m not a big fan of moon cakes because I don’t like the dried yolk in the middle and I’m not too hot on the traditional flavors. So, while shopping around, I came across of box of tea-flavored…
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Chinese Recipes
While searching for some recipes for a Memorial Day weekend cookout, i came across Hearth and Home, a blog that has quite a collection of recipes with photos! It predominantly features a mix of Chinese, Western and Singaporean/Indonesian/Malaysian dishes. I lump that last group together because I am not sophisticated enough to differentiate them. Besides,…
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Left Behind
Los Angeles Times: Taishan’s U.S. Well Runs Dry. Down a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village. The LA Times ran an interesting article about Toisan (Taishan) that deals with the…
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In Search of Roots
As a child, Chinese New Year was a time to receive red envelopes (红包) and eat sticky rice cake (年糕) or nian gao. It is quite easy to be a child during Chinese New Year. However, what about the adults? Whatever customs we picked up, if any, from our parents, one day, each of us…
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A Working Parent’s Lament
Has e-mail replaced the intimate face-to-face, Do online chats end with a paternal embrace, Will our children learn if they are not within sight, Can we really know whether their mood’s dark or bright.