At last, an explanation for that disturbance in the Force that I’ve been sensing all day: Emma Watson, “Hermione” from the Harry Potter films, turns 18 today.
My advice for today: if you’re about to enter a room with a computer and the door is closed, knock first. You will thank me.
I think I’m going to stay the hell away from online chats and discussion boards tonight, as it’s gonna get icky.
Denki anma is just one example of Japanese High Weirdness.
Here’s a conversation that my friend Kelly recently had:
Kelly’s friend: Want to hear something funny?
Kelly: [Looks up from her laptop]
Kelly’s friend: In the Japanese version of Romper Room —
Kelly: Stop.
My first impression after reading the Toronto Life article Baby Invasion (which I mentioned in this article) was: The people in this article seem to think that Stuff White People Like is some kind of instruction manual.
More later.
For the curious, here are the net worths of the U.S. presidential candidates, as reported in Ramit Sethi’s blog, I Will Teach You to be Rich:
Taken from I Will Teach You to be Rich.
As one wag put it: “Yeah, Obama’s clearly the one we should be pointing out as the elitist candidate.”
Perhaps it’s because the latest edition of Toronto Life has only been on the stands for a few days, but I’m surprised that there hasn’t yet been much lively debate over the cover story, titled Baby Invasion, which bears the subtitle They’re taking over our bars, restaurants and sidewalks, and further subtitled with The stroller mafia vs. the city. I’m surprised it didn’t come with one more subtitle along the lines of “keep your uterine dumplings the hell away from me!”
The description of the article in the table of contents continues in its attempt to hit reader hot buttons:
Hipster parents are clogging cafes with their king-size strollers and inflicting their unruly toddlers on the childless masses. Is grown-up space a thing of the past? A not entirely impartial report on the battle for downtown.
Despite all the button-pushing on the cover and in the table of contents, as of this writing, Google only reveals two mentions of the article: here and here.
I just picked up the magazine, as I hear some friends of mine are one of the featured families in the article (good photo, painful quote). I’ll read it when I get home tonight and comment afterwards.
I’ve had this article sitting in my backlog for a couple of weeks and I thought today would be a good day to set it loose.
My teen years were spent smack in the middle of the Golden Age of teenage coming-of-age movies. One of the classics of this era was Sixteen Candles, which launched the careers of a number of people, including Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall as well as more successful actors including John and Joan Cusack. However, the character in that movie who left the greatest mark on North American culture wasn’t played by any of the aforementioned people. That character is none other than Long Duk Dong, who makes a memorable entrance in the movie:
He’s so memorable a character that when you rent Sixteen Candles from Netflix, it’s Long Duk Dong’s face on the sleeve, not the face of the protagonist Claire (the just-turned-sixteen character played by Molly Ringwald).
Created by taking every bad Asian student stereotype of that era and rolling it into a single character, he was William Hung twenty years before William Hung. “The Donger” was a creation of John Hughes, the man behind some of the biggest teen movies of the eighties, including The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Hughes’ characters were broad archetypes: the rich kids with ridiculously expensive clothes and cars, the geeks bristling with gadgetry, the jocks with barely three brain cells to rub together and the plucky misfits with more hip quotient than the entire high school put together.
I’ve read that character of Long Duk Dong was ammunition who high school kids who needed a racial epithet to fling at Asian guys. In the NPR article Long Duk Dong: Last of the Hollywood Stereotypes?, many stories about Asian guys being called “The Donger” or greeted with one of his lines from the movie. That’s never happened to me; in fact, I’m quite sure I’ve appropriated his dialogue, especially the lines “What’s happening, hot stuff?”, “No more yanky my wanky!” and “The Donger need-a food!”. (And these days, I’d love it if my entrance into the room was accompanied by a gong.)
Not every Asian guy viewed The Donger in a similar light. Indy comic artist Adrian Tomine, creator of some angsty comics in the same vein as Derek Kirk Kim, provided an interview and a comic for NPR. A small version of the comic appears below; click on it to see it at full size.
Click the photo to see it on its original page at full size.
Great books deserve great covers, and Shepard Fairey’s new cover designs for Penguin Publishing’s editions 1984 and Animal Farm are gorgeous:
Click the photo to see the original article.
Click the photo to see the original article.
[Found via MetaFilter.]