Mr. Kotter he’s not.
South Korean math teacher Woo Hyung-chul’s teaching methods include cursing at his students and hitting them with a shovel.
But because it’s South Korea, his students love him. According to the Korea Times:
Students who gave up on math call him a “messiah” for redeeming them from the deep, dark valley of hopelessness and a state of utter lack of motivation.
How do you say “Stockholm syndrome” in Korean?
Mystery solved.
That guy who ducked under the security rope at Newark Airport a few days ago, triggering a six-hour panic turns out to be an Asian guy (presumably geeky) from Piscataway, NJ. If you’re curious, you can find his name on Google.
It boggles my mind to think that they were able to pick this one guy out of the thousands of Asian guys who live in and around Piscataway.
I can’t say that I’m too surprised at the ethnicity of the mystery man. When I heard about some guy who, out of an apparent mix of impulsivity and a disdain for authority, embarked on a breathtakingly stupid course of action so that he could spend a few minutes with a woman, well, let’s just say that I’ve been there.
Here’s some video, in case you missed the original story:
I’m standing in the parking lot at Staples, waiting for some cars to get out of the way so I can walk to my Corolla, when someone honks at me to get out of the way so they can take the parking space I’m standing in front of.
More out of reflex than a desire to be helpful, I step aside. Then it sinks in — the person who honked at me is a thin, suntanned woman wearing a fur coat and driving a gleaming BMW.
Suddenly, I am filled with rage.
I dash to my car, hop into the driver’s seat, and quickly back out of my parking space hoping that I’m not too late to drive up behind Ms. BMW as she is walking up to the Staples entrance and give her a nice big honk of my own.
But she is still in her car, yammering away on her cell phone.
Proving that you can be immature at any age, I drive around so that I am in front of her and give her the one-finger salute. I’m not 100% sure she has seen me. For a few paranoid minutes driving down Route 9, I wonder whether she might be following me.
Later the same day, my 14-month old daughter wakes up from a nap and for a second looks like she doesn’t recognize me. My 7-year old asks me why the baby is crying.
“Maybe she had a bad dream,” I venture.
To which my 7-year old replies: “Maybe we’re her dream…”
Wii Mario
I’m about a third of the way through Paper Mario, which I’m playing on the Wii Virtual Console. It’s an awesome game, and I highly recommend it (although if you’re not into RPGs, it may take you a while to get used to the turn-based, tag-team combat).
One thing I’ve always wondered about Mario is whether people of Italian descent are offended by the character.
I’m trying to imagine how I would react to a bestselling videogame from Italy, in which the main character is a stereotypical hard-working Asian guy named Lee who speaks broken English and who karate-chops his way across a magical kingdom to rescue Princess Chrysanthemum.
I guess I would be okay with it, especially if the list of stereotypes for Asian males were expanded to include skillful lover, snappy dresser, and in general someone you don’t want to mess with.
News flash from China: Some Chinese people are [gasp!] racist.
Given that over 1 billion people live in China, you would think that there might be room for one woman with a Chinese mother and an African American father, particularly if that one woman is a drop-dead gorgeous 20-year-old who speaks flawless Chinese.
You might want to check with Chinese reality-TV phenom Lou Jing, who rocketed to fame as a result of her multi-week stint on the singing competition “Go Oriental Angel”:
Thanks to the internet, Ms. Lou doesn’t have to guess what the Chinese people think about her. She has received a large number of emails telling her that she isn’t Chinese, and that she should leave the country. (Although if they really wanted her to suffer, they would demand that she stay in China…)
My indescribably beautiful daughter, who is going to be turning 7 in ten days, wanted to know if I thought she was funny-looking.
When I asked her what she meant, she told me that we should look at her class picture hanging on the wall. (Of the 21 kids in her class, 2 are Asian American, 4 are Latino, and 15 are European American.)
She told me that she was funny-looking because of her eyes — her sparkling, intelligent eyes, filled with endless wonder.
I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to prove to her with indisputable logic how exactly the opposite of funny-looking she truly is.
But then I remembered how little it helped all those years ago when my parents tried, in their own way, to do the same thing when I came home in tears.
So instead of talking, I listened.
Lord knows I’ve got a long way to go in becoming the father my daughter deserves.
But something deep inside of me tells me that the greatest gift a parent can give a child, or for that matter any human being can give to another human being, is to shut up and listen, really listen, to what they have to say.
Happy holidays…
I’m on a roll! I’ve gotten three things to work that were headed for the scrap heap:
Here’s how I fixed them, without spending a dime:
It turns out that the old Gateway computer was the victim of the security suite that comes with Verizon FiOS. (My dad had recently switched over from Optimum Online.) I uninstalled the Verizon bloatware, and all of a sudden the notebook was blazing fast. (I subsequently installed Microsoft’s free Security Essentials software, which apparently has a way smaller footprint than the Verizon package.)
I fixed my Ultrascan monitor by rolling the driver back to the OEM driver that came with the monitor all those years ago. I then used the “color return” feature, and the monitor is now as good as ever, with true black and without those unbelievably annoying green lines.
I fixed my old Zenith color TV by unplugging it (literally pulling the plug out of the socket), and leaving it unplugged for 2 hours. (I found this tip somewhere or other on the internet — it acts as a hard reset.) Amazingly, when I plugged it in again, the greens had come back.
Hope this helps!
In a particularly cruel manifestation of the Law of Unintended Consequences, even though those new big-screen LCD-TVs are safer for children than older cathode ray tube TVs, the number of children’s deaths resulting from falling televisions is up.
There are a number of reasons that big-screen LCD-TVs are safer than older TVs — LCD-TVs are not as front-heavy, and are often mounted securely to the wall with the electrical cords hidden from view. Also, there aren’t any obvious knobs or buttons on the front of the TV for a curious child to pull at.
All well and good.
But sadly, it turns out that displaced CRT-TVs are finding new homes on top of rickety tables or chests of drawers, where they are poised for disaster.
I’m a big fan of continuing to use outdated electronic equipment, rather than adding it to the landfill.
But in this holiday season, if you’re lucky enough to score a new LCD-TV or computer monitor, please, please, please find a safe place for the old one.
No doubt about it — this kid is off-the-chart cute (and possibly quite talented):
Who knows? He may turn out to be the next Susan Boyle.
But oddly, for me, the video is just the tiniest bit painful to watch. I can’t help but reflect on how many Geeky Asian Guys started out life as adorable little kids, showing off with one talent or another. (Okay, maybe I wasn’t that adorable or talented, but you know what I mean…)
From time to time in my life, I’ve felt like this is the role carved out for Asian men in American society — the precocious, non-threatening child.
On second thought, though, maybe I should lighten up and go buy a ukulele.
Here’s the kid playing my all-time favorite Beatles song:
Last night I went to Atlantic City to see Cirque Dreams at the Taj. (It’s a really good show, btw, and the best seats in the house were only $35.)
Anyway, as I was walking through the casino on the way to the parking garage, it occurred to me — what do the following things have in common?
The answer is:
In each of these activities, someone who knows what they’re doing is making a whole bunch of money by taking advantage of someone who thinks they know what they’re doing.
There was a time if you went to a bookstore and looked in the games section the large majority of books would be devoted to chess. (Trust me on that one.)
But now, most of the books are about poker.
And a lot of geeks, having achieved varying levels of success at the chessboard, now dream of making it to the final table at the World Series of Poker.
An obsession with chess can be sad. But an obsession with poker can be downright life-destroying.
I honestly believe that it is possible for someone with the right combination of time, intelligence and motivation to make a lot of money playing poker. (I’m not so sure about day trading, MLM, or sending money to Nigeria.) But here’s some advice:
Good luck!
