By Holly T.
It all began with a Spiritual Marketing Quest. I went with the intention to gain insights into my reflexology practice and instead left with an epiphany that could change the world.
Like many second generation Asians, I grew up feeling tremendous pressure to fit in and honor the sacrifices my parents made to move to North America. What that meant was that I had to do well in school and pursue a respectable career with the final goal of earning lots of money.
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Interim Mayor Ed Lee announced on Monday that he is running for the full four-year term as San Francisco mayor despite promising not to run after filling in the vacancy left by Gavin Newsom, who was elected to Lieutenant Governor last November. There was already an unofficial supposedly grass roots campaign for Lee to break his pledge which I blogged about.
I don’t live in San Francisco, but have been open about always supporting Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. Lee definitely has an advantage as an “incumbent” mayor. Now that Lee has broken his pledge and is entering the arena of elective politics, it’ll be interesting to see he handles the scrutiny and how good of a retail campaigner he is. This morning, before Lee’s official announcement, the local NPR affiliate in San Francisco KQED, featured an interesting discussion about Lee’s entry in the race in their morning Forum radio show.
Shopping With GASP!
From the New York Times: “On Saturday, Mr. Kitamoto — along with hundreds of others, including former prisoners, their families, Bainbridge [Washington] residents and tourists — will reflect on that period, when American citizens were exiled from their homes and incarcerated, without due process, by the United States government because of their ethnicity. At a small inlet harbor, among wetlands and old cedar trees, they will dedicate a memorial wall that commemorates what the government later acknowledged was one of the most shameful episodes in its history. [...] Bainbridge Island was home to the very first group of Japanese-Americans to be removed and was one of the few communities to welcome them back when the war was over. Of 277 forced off the island, 20 still live here.”
Gary Locke was recently confirmed as the new ambassador to China, but the U.S. State Department just announced that will.i.am will put on a benefit concert in Beijing to support President Obama’s 2009 “100,000 Strong” initiative – to encourage American students to study in China. Money raised will help fund scholarships to aid students to study abroad in China.
Welcome to the Uncanny Valley, population you. From our good friends at LaughingSquid, Japanese company CloneFactory will make a 20″ tall doll that looks EXACTLY like you, for about $1750. So it’s still a doll, with the little arms and legs. But with your face and clothes. AND YOUR SOUL.
Clearly, I had to get Moye’s take on this over Instant Messenger. Which you can read, after the jump.
After watching The Devil’s Double, I wondered, “What if an actually Iraqi actor was cast in the dual role of Latif Yahia/Uday Hussein?” Then I wondered, “What if they cast Zac Efron in that role?”
Casting Englishman Dominic Cooper in the role of Uday Hussein, sadistic son of Saddam Hussein and his body double Latif Yahia brings me back to seeing Sir Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi — but at least Kingsley looked the part. With Cooper, he needed a little bit more than a shoddy accent and a porno mustache to achieve the full look of two real-life people who had a destructive good twin/bad twin relationship — he needed a little bit more gestation time in the Hollywood uterus.
Well, this brings the whole gold farming business to a new level. This shit’s getting political. The New York Times is reporting that the North Korean government has employed an “army of hackers” to infiltrate popular online games to hoard points for cash: “In a little less than two years, the police said, the organizers made $6 million. They gave 55 percent of it to the hackers, who forwarded some of it to agents in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea…Mr. Chung said the hackers, all graduates of North Korea’s elite science universities, were dispatched from two places: the state-run Korea Computer Center in Pyongyang and the Korea Neungnado General Trading Company. The company, he said, reports to a shadowy Communist Party agency called Office 39, which gathers foreign hard currency for Mr. Kim through drug trafficking, counterfeiting, arms sales and other illicit activities.”
A variation of this piece was originally written for AsiansOnYouTube and has been reposted here with permission.
By AsiansOnYouTube
It was very difficult working on this list of Asian American Gay and Lesbian YouTube channels while at work, because so many of the YouTube search results were quasi-porn. Trying to find quality Lesbian channels was even harder; I had to shift through a ton of Japanese girl-on-girl action videos. Watch my findings, after the jump!
I am not really familiar with the O.G. Planet of the Apes franchise starring Charlton Heston and laden with retro special effects. I do know that the 1968 film spawned an avalanche of sequels which, according to Ape aficionados (or shall I call them ape-ficionados?), were far inferior. Then there was Tim Burton’s take on it in 2001 with Mark Wahlberg which received a less-than-stellar ovation.
One ape-ficionado told me that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a totally different creature from the ones before it. Some people might even consider it a prequel. I just considered it a movie about apes using the technology from Avatar starring James Franco and the so-gorgeous-that-it’s-disgusting Freida Pinto (a.k.a. the hot girl from Slumdog Millionaire).
Hey wrestlers. Learn as Kenny Omega did and don’t ever challenge a 9 year old Japanese girl inside the ring. I still don’t get the world’s fascination with professional wrestling and all things WWE but I think Haruka deserves an Academy Award for her performance. (Because this all fake. Right? Right.)
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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It’s great to see Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh featured on The Colbert Report, who is a terrific example of an Asian American business leader. If you haven’t tried Zappos, it’s the leading online seller of footwear on the Internet and was acquired by Amazon.com a few years ago. In Colbert’s interview, Hsieh goes into his leadership philosophy from his best selling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.
In the last weekend of July, the Major League Gaming had a competition in Anaheim where Korean Starcraft 2 competitor MVP, Jeong Jong Hyeon, pwned opponents and walked home with the trophy and $5K in prize money.
Concurrently, one of the latest viral videos making rounds in geek gamer circles on the Internet is a Korean variety show with a little skit of live-action StarCraft. Though I don’t understand Korean, I laughed until I cried when I watched this little video clip. I’m no good at StarCraft, but I love playing it, so apparently it’s the only Korean I speak.
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