A Day in New York, On Camera

Broadway Autumn Street Fair

We were in the city this Saturday and just happened to pass by this street fair at Broadway between Waverly St. and 14th St.. Let’s let the pictures tell the story.

Re-publishing Bizarre Mooncakes

I accidentally published Bizarre Mooncakes yesterday and immediately un-published it. Today I re-published it and found it didn’t show up at the top as I expected it to be. So in case you missed this very “delicious” post, here it is.

Theme Change: Style or Functionality?

As you see I have changed the theme of this blog. It was a very painful decision. I really love the look of my previous theme “Thirteen” (created by Beccary), which has such a classic, elegant feel it brings peace to my mind just looking at it.

However, good things always come at a price. “Thirteen” is also a two column with lots of blank space on both the left sidebar and the right hand side.

DWTS Week 1 Results: Fan Base

No surprises. Josie went home, as I expected. Like she said in her clip, “being a model you only need to look good, you don’t have to train the strength”, and Alec summed up “(she is) deceptively unfit”, I don’t think many people were shocked that she’s gone.

What was a little surprising was Mark Cuban was the bottom man, not Floyd. Considering their physical talent and body attributes, I would think Floyd should’ve danced a lot better than Cuban, but in fact he did worse. Fan base is always a big factor in the first week.

Bizarre Mooncakes

An idea inspired by some comments made in my post Moon Festival: Celebration of Togetherness, here is a collection of some of the most novel, intriguing, <put your own adjective here> modern mooncake fillings that I’ve seen mentioned on the web (in large part thanks to wikipedia).

Disclaimer: I have not tasted any one of them.

Sad.

DWTS Season 5 Opener, the Men

Two things I didn’t expect to happen happened tonight:

1. Mark Cuban is better than I thought.
I like how he said he’s doing this for his little daughter.

2. Helio Castroneves is way better than I thought.
Before the show I was saying to my hubby that a race car driver would have nothing but upper body strength, when lower body is probably the more important portion in dancing. It turns out that

Moon Festival: Celebration of Togetherness

First let me say this really loud,

Happy Moon Festival to Everyone!

DWTS Season 5 Opener, The Women

Three things I liked the most about Monday’s opening night show:

1. Co-host is no longer Samantha Harris (I don’t dislike her but she’s just not been a very good co-host). Instead it’s Drew Lachey which I think played off Tom very well. The Len’s assessment joke came very natural and cracked me up. He also related better with the celebrity dancers, being a former contestant himself, as a result asked more sensible questions.

Do you know WikiWax?

Saw this at LifeHacker’s Top 10 Wikipedia Tricks a couple of days ago. A website called WikiWax.com lets you see what pages exist on Wikipedia as you type, in a way similar to how Google Suggest works. It’s kinda neat. Try it yourself.

Kabab Cafe: An Egyptian Experience

An old Chinese proverb says, 民以食为天 (Men deem food as God). After spending a delightful evening at Kabab Cafe, Astoria, I came to the thinking that if food is not a man’s God, it should be at least, as Ali the owner says, his soul.

We first heard of Kabab Cafe from Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations on Travel Channel. It was featured as one of the most popular restaurants in “Little Cairo”, the middle-eastern neighborhood in Astoria, Queens. Astoria, with its “sizable and diverse immigrant population”, is said to have “some of the best and most authentic food in the country”.

Another Fable: The Old Man and The Children

I read this story first on a friend’s blog (3rd comment from bottom). You can either read the original Chinese version there or read my English translation here:

The Fable of Motivation: Who are you “playing” for?

The Fable of an Apple Tree

This seems to be a famous story circulating around the internet. The original text is in Chinese (English translation follows):

成长的寓言：做一棵永远成长的苹果树

The Coming DWTS Season

If you already know what the acronym SYTYCD stands for, the chance is pretty good that you know what DWTS stands for (even if you don’t, it’s not too late to start learning). If you, like lots of other people, have no clue either of these two is, like I just said, it’s not too late to start learning… =)

DWTS is Dancing With The Stars, which has been ABC’s most watched TV show for 4 years in a row now. Its 5th season starts 2 weeks from now, Sept 24th.

Lots of buzz has been going around everywhere since the celebrity cast has been announced and I figure, being a fan myself, maybe I should blog a little about it, too.

Nokia N800 – The Geek’s iPod Touch :-)

A day after I wrote my surprisingly popular post Nokia N800 – The Geek’s iPhone, Apple announced iPod Touch (and at the same time cut the price of iPhone to the same as N800). iPod Touch, from the look of it, is basically an iPhone without the phone. And it’s priced at $399. So that makes it really, really similiar to the little device I own that is called Nokia N800, because the latter is not really a phone either, though it does have VoIP ability i.e. Skype.

I’ll just briefly list the differences of the two now to complete my N800-iWhatever series:

Re-watching Hitch

Was channel surfing Saturday night and one of them was showing Hitch. I’ve watched the movie twice before and really liked it. One of the better movies in its genre. It’s also one of those movies that once you started, it kind of grabs you and makes you not want to leave until it ends.

The beginning of the movie was a bang, very intriguing. The dance-teaching scene was hilarious. Both Kevin James and Will Smith gave stellar performance. There were lots of memorable scenes and some moments were even touching (which is very hard to accomplish in a comedy). Yes it has its “Hollywood bits” but I think overall it’s a really well written, entertaining movie and very, very well acted.

A dialogue from the movie to end this post:

Sara: … relationships are for people that are just waiting for something to come along.
Max (Sara’s boss): Ah, spoken like a true cynic.
Sara: I’m not a cynic, I’m a realist!
Max: Or a realist masquerading as a cynic who is secretly an optimist.