in transit

Damo
I was expecting a lot from the drama, because it had universally rave reviews, and the plot seemed different and intriguing - a woman detective in the Chosun Dynasty who solves crime while dealing with the stigma of being both a woman and of low-status. Then I watched the first episode, and was alternately bored and amused (for all the wrong reasons). They used wire-action for the fight scenes, the kind of thing you'd see in wuxia movies and dramas where people walk up walls and trees and fly, rather than the more realistic (comparatively) martial arts style that I've gotten used to seeing in kdramas, and for me personally it didn't work. I kept on having flashbacks to the Prince of Tennis and the increasingly insane tennis moves that Ryoma used. I'm not sure why I had such a negative reaction, because the other times when I've seen this style it's worked for me, but here I found it obvious and boring. All the slow motion flying in space when they keep the same posture for seconds on end, predictable and uninspiring martial arts moves in between the special effects, and in one scene where they were playing a version of polo the heroine did these gravity-defying acrobatics that I just gaped at because, y'know, it's really not necessary to do multiple mid-air cartwheels in order to hit a ball across a goal - you could just hit it. They meant to portray the heroine as cool and kick-ass in that scene, and all I could think was that they were trying way too hard, and for that and other reasons, such as the fact that at times she could be very servile, I ended up disliking her. Also, the romance bits bored me. The silent pining for each other only works for me when (a) I'm already invested in both the characters and (b) it's very subtle, and I have to figure it out on my own. Here it wasn't subtle at all, and it came at a time when I wasn't at all invested in the characters - quite the opposite, in fact.

The Legend/Tae Wang Sa Shin Gi/Four Gods
( cut for length; no major spoilers )

Jumong
An eighty-one episode historical kdrama. I'm only on episode eight, and am somewhat surprised by how much I'm liking this so far, considering that I don't care much for the romance that was featured in the first few episodes or Jumong, the lead. I think its because it feels like we're not supposed to like Jumong right now, and also there was enough political intrigue and martial arts to keep me entertained in between the romance, and I'm really curious about how well they're able to do the hero arc. The only major negative note I have right now - I hatehateHATE how passively accepting the ex-priestess is, and it looks like they're setting her up to be a major love interest. I weep.

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Finally, a kdrama I feel like pimping! A thorough review of Time of Dog & Wolf can be found in this soompi thread, but here's the basic non-spoilery storyline: When he's young, Suhyeon's mother is killed in front of his eyes by Cheongbang, a Thai criminal syndicate. Suhyeon gets adopted into an NIS agent's family (from what I can gather from watching this series NIS is Korea's FBI/CIA equivalent) and grows up to be an NIS agent, and in a quest for revenge infiltrates the Cheongbang.

I didn't expect to enjoy this drama this much. The first episode I thought was slow, and later on there was a love triangle between Suhyeon and his adopted brother and Suhyeon's childhood friend (who turns out to be the daughter of the leader of Cheongbang, the guy who killed Suhyeon's mother, instant contrived angst right there) that I found boring (though, to be honest, that's true of 98% of the romance stories I come across). But, ohman, Suhyeon was just so awesomely dysfunctional and messed up, and a third of the way through there's a plot twist that should fall flat on its face but that ends up working beautifully. I'm on ep13 right now and I can't wait to see what happens next. The tension! The intrigue! The spies and double-spies and double-crossings!

( slight spoilers )

Also, it doesn't hurt that Suhyeon is played by Lee Junki, the pretty boy in the King and the Clown, who imo looks even better in this series.

example:( Read more... )
I almost feel like making an "isn't lee junki awesome *_*" tag for this journal now.

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I've been watching a lot of kdramas recently, and have mixed feelings about them. I like them more than jdramas because they seem more professional, from the picture quality to the writing to the acting, and for the most part the characterization doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out. But at the same time, the pacing and quality of kdramas is very uneven. I really liked both Hong Gil Dong and The Legend in the beginning, but in the second half, each episode they progressively got worse, and with The Legend, by the end even the characters I'd adored left me indifferent, and the storylines I'd found interesting had somehow turned so dull.

I'm currently watching Time of Dog & Wolf, which aside from the romance story I'm finding very interesting (and it totally doesn't hurt that the guy in the king & the clown is the lead - so much eye-candy XD). I can't really rec it, though, because I'm only up to episode seven, and who knows if it will degenerate the same way as the others have done.

Anyway, review.

Hong Gil Dong's somewhat of a Robin Hood tale (though, as tarigwaemir pointed out in the comments, isn't an adaptation of the story but is based on a Korean novel) set in an ancient korean period that reminds me of France before the revolution, where the nobles lived in luxury on the back of the peasants. Hong Gil Dong's the illegitimate son of a noble, but because of inheritance laws is regarded as little better than a slave. For most of the first episode he goes around wrecking havoc and generally acting as a frat boy on kung-fu steroids; then various stuff happens, such as him getting framed for robbery then murder then treason, and he undergoes a Joseph Campbell-type transformation and becomes a hero.

The thing that makes this drama great is how compelling and believable and non-cliche HGD's transformation is, how seamlessly the drama goes from moments of complete hilarity to heartbreak, and how clever the dialogue and writing is. The characterization, with one exception, is completely awesome. Aside from HGD there is also the prince trying to lead a revolution against his insane brother, and the story is as much about him becoming a king as about HGD becoming a hero, and the way these two interacted, how they prodded and pushed and challenged each other, was amazing. One of my favorite moments in the series is their first swordfight (you can find a screencap of it, as well as the prince, in this post) which is probably the best fight scene I've seen ever.

I said that the characterization, with one exception, was awesome. The exception was the female lead, Yi Nok. I liked her in the first couple of episodes, where with her grandfather she was trying to trick the townspeople into buying bogus medicine. But after that she become so extremely stupid, and I'm talking stupid in a 'think of all the blonde jokes you've ever heard and multiply them by a hundred' way. This is totally not an exaggeration, btw. As just one example, a scene where Yi Nok's rescuer is trying to keep his identity secret:

( slight spoiler )

...and that is not even the worst of it. I keyboard mash. A lot.

But, on the whole, in the beginning, I loved this drama, and was ready to rec it with glowy-eyed praise, until I stumbled over later developments, which made me hate it. ( major, MAJOR spoilers ahead )

There are tons of things I keep meaning to post about but never getting around to, which I think is the common state of lj-land. But! Just came across three short (and I mean short - less than two minutes each) prequel videos for The Wire on the Amazon site here, and had to link, because, little!Omar and little!Prop Joe were so cute. I adore these characters so much!

Lunch With a Food Revolutionary
I would love to have her cook for me, because everything sounds so delicious. Also agree with the philosophy she espouses, that whenever you can you should buy local & organic. I'm somewhat of a fundamentalist when it comes to this, actually, and becoming more so as time goes on.

pollanesque
An lj comm devoted to Michael Pollan, who I mentioned in this post. I particularly liked this post & discussion on buying organic.

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Just finished listening to the Jodhaa Akbar soundtrack by AR Rahman, which was such a letdown. I was expecting it to be brilliant, especially after reviews like this, but it turned out to be one of the most boring and derivative things I've ever heard, and I'm left scratching my head wondering if those people are living in the same world that I am, to write such glowing reviews. I've been a fan of AR Rahman in the past, even pimped him on this journal, but honestly, the best work he did was eight years ago - Roja and Dil Se and Taal, which were some of the most innovative soundtracks and changed the course of the industry - and I feel like ever since, with a few exceptions, he's been either flatlining or going downhill (though because he was so brilliant it's taking him longer to hit bottom than most). And now I'm almost disgusted by this, how ordinary the soundtrack was, how much it recycled themes he's used a thousand times already, how people are praising him.

I wish that they'd given this soundtrack to Shantanu Moitra, who did such awesome awesome work in Eklavya (does this song not give you the goosebumps? IF IT DOESN'T DON'T TELL ME), who always comes up with something innovative and good, or even Mithoon, because even though his recent soundtracks have left me less than impressed, they were for modern and not period films. He's only ever done a period film once, when he created two songs for Anwar, and they were two of the most brilliantly produced songs I've ever heard.

I really hate it when someone I used to consider brilliant falls like this. There are few enough people I admire in the world already. :/ (And after listening to the Akhbar soundtrack I had to listen to Eklavya & Anwar again, just to reassure myself that there was still a reason to live. I might or might not be taking this too personally.)

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I've been absently following the debates over the new farm bill. An article I found interesting:

in the fight over farm aid, this is the front line

"Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat from the big-farming territory of western Minnesota, is pushing a farm bill that continues big crop subsidies, while Rep. Ron Kind, a Democrat from western Wisconsin, is leading a revolt to focus the farm bill more on topics like clean water, nutrition and global trade.

"A lot of my colleagues in Congress are connecting the dots' between corn subsidies, obesity, and the use of cheap sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup, Kind said. 'Is it any wonder we have a Type 2 diabetes epidemic in this country?'

"Thus far, Kind's reformers have only slightly budged the farm lobby. The Agriculture Committee reluctantly voted to cap subsidies - but only to farmers earning $1 million a year ($2 million for married couples). It extended a welcome mat to organic farmers. And it promised to be fairer to vegetable and fruit growers."

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he only saved a billion people

An article that uses Borlaug's (the man behind the green revolution) relative anonymity to argue about how shallow our culture has become. It's - hm. I don't disagree with its main point - our culture is shallow - but dude, Borlaug (and by extension the methods he champions) has also done a lot of harm, and portraying him in such an unqualified positive light is a bit disingenious.

Parts like:

Borlaug scoffs at the mania for organic food, which he proves with calm logic is unsuited to fight global hunger.

um, what? Where is the so-called calm logic? I need more than a claim that cow dung is an inefficient source of nitrogen, especially when weighed against studies like these which prove that organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as the methods championed by Borlaug and the big agribusinesses.


There's "no evidence the food is any different than that produced by chemical fertilizer."

Some of the major drawbacks of using chemical fertilizers. There are tons of links about this on the internet.

Even if the above wasn't true, eating organic isn't just about avoiding foods that have been grown using chemical fertilizers, it's also about avoiding foods that have been genetically modified and use pesticides. How is addressing only one of these issues a refutation against the practice?

Another point to note - there has been controversy over the claim that this entire article is based on, that the Green Revolution saved the lives of a billion people. According to the wikipedia article:

Increasing food production however is not synonymous with increasing food security, and is only part of a larger equation. For example, Amartya Sen’s work has found that large historic famines have not been caused by decreases in food supply, but by socioeconomic dynamics and a failure of public action. [21] There are several claims about how the Green Revolution may have decreased food security for some people. One such claim involves the shift of subsistence-oriented cropland to cropland oriented towards production of grain for export and/or animal feed. For example, the Green Revolution replaced much of the land used for pulses that fed Indian peasants for wheat, which did not make up a large portion of the peasant diet.[22] Also, the pesticides involved in rice production eliminated fish and weedy green vegetables from the diets of Asian rice farmers.

Add to this what I talked about before, that organic farming yields several times more than conventional farming in third-world countries. Also, there is the question of whether the increased food production from conventional farming practices is sustainable, for the use of chemical fertilizers in the long run depletes chemicals from the soil, the use of pesticides in the long run creates weeds and insects that are pesticide-resistant, and the mass farming of only a few crops leaves the population as a whole more vulnerable to famine. And we're not even getting to the issue of the severe health effects of being exposed to pesticides, the hundreds of thousands of people that have died as a result of accidents in plants that create such things, that the safety of genetically modified foods are based on a theory that has been scientifically proven as false, etcetc.

That the author of this article did not bother to do any research, and just took Borlaug's word on this and other issues, is something I find very sloppy, turning what could have been an interesting, informed article into a misleading PR piece.

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site links:

organic consumers association
This site links to a lot of interesting news articles.

local harvest
If you live in the US, this is a great site to find farms & farmer's markets near your area.

sustainable agriculture listserv
Still checking this out.

articles:

china not only worry on imported food
About the dangers of a centralized & international food supply. Only 1% of the food imported here is inspected by the FDA, and in the past they've found things like Mexican cantaloupe irrigated with water from sewage-tainted rivers & candy laced with lead.

bylaws to curtail pesticide use in Canada
This was rather scary. Apparently pesticides can lead to severe cases of rash, cancer, such horrific cases of diarrhea that you lose control of your sphincter muscles.

gene theory flawed
A New York times article that describes how genetically engineered foods can be much more dangerous than previously assumed. The biotech industry is based on the idea that the human genome is a collection of independent genes with each sequence linked to a single function. However, research shows that genes operate in a complex network, so the gene that makes tomatoes redder could also presumably produce intestine-eating toxins, and scientists probably wouldn't know until enough intestines have been eaten that the link is clear.

Welcome to Richistan, USA
There is something very wrong with our country if someone like Warren Buffet pays 17% tax and his secretary pays 30%.

how high fructose corn syrup damages your body
"I am HIGHLY confident that the health improvement [from giving up soft drinks] would be FAR more profound than if everyone stopped smoking because elevated insulin levels are the foundation of nearly every chronic disease known to man, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, aging, arthritis, osteoporosis, you name it, and you will find elevated insulin levels as a primary factor."

the obesity epidemic
An interview with Dr Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, on how food manufacturers by adding fructose to our foods, are making the obesity epidemic worse. One fact I found surprising: "In fact fructose, because of the way it's metabolised, is actually damaging your liver the same way alcohol is. In fact it's the exact same pathway, in fact fructose is alcohol without the buzz."

reasons to buy organic
Some reasons that I'd never thought of or known of. An example - "Done properly, organic farming builds up healthy soil through moisture retention, composting, crop diversity and fostering of beneficial organisms. It takes soil so long to form that most scientists essentially consider it a nonrenewable resource, and enormous amounts are lost through erosion, chemical inundation and overly intensive commercial agriculture. Check out a satellite image of the gigantic plume of brown at the mouth of the Mississippi River to get a visual sense of what the next generations are losing to poor management."

FDA moves to stop requiring labels on irradiated foods
This was so depressing. Another example of how the government is so completely controlled by the big agribusiness companies.

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As far as I can determine, conservatism has two main supporters - religious conservatives and those that are against so-called big government (I say so-called because government spending has grown considerably during the Bush administration, and yet as far as I can tell these conservatives still support the administration and the party). What’s not readily apparent at first glance, however, is that the trade-off being supported is of the private versus the public sector, of corporations making their own rules and the governments accomodating them.

Conservatives say that governments are too inefficient and wasteful, and point to corporations as models of efficiency. I agree with them on the problem - our government, today, is inefficient and wasteful - but disagree with how to fix it. Governments are only as good as the people they govern, and together we can fire corrupt and morally bankrupt politicians simply by refusing to re-elect them. I think that the citizens of this country should be made more aware so that they can elect good representatives. Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to prefer getting rid of the government altogether, or squeezing it into as small a shape as possible. But, as I said before, I don’t think the trade-off here is of government control versus freedom, but rather of the rule of the majority, which is what governments are supposed to represent (I say supposed to because the recent administration so obviously doesn’t, always putting corporate interests above those of the public) versus the rule of the rich, which is the class that rules corporations.

When the Bush administration cuts taxes that corporations have to pay and supports those tax cuts with cuts in public sector programs such as those that support health care and education, it promotes the growth of corporations at the expense of the public sector, a move that bears all the hallmarks of Reaganomics. And it’s surprising to me that people still think of Reagonomics as a viable economic theory, when any rational look at the data, and just plain common sense, would indicate that wealth does not trickle down but tends to accumulate at the top. Money is spent by the poor; by the rich it is horded.

There’s the sense - mainly among conservatives but also, I think, among some ordinary Americans - that corporations are what’s responsible for the progress that our country has made. But this ignores the fact that corporations are a relatively new phenomenon (they arose after the Civil War, and they made up a relatively small part of the economy until after WWII) and also that today, what corporations are about isn’t making things as much as branding things. This is why labels are so ubiquitous, why advertising contracts run to millions of dollars. The major retail corporations don’t even make their own clothes, outsourcing that to contractors who hire the poorest in third-world countries to work in often-abominable conditions. Increasingly, what corporations are about is selling an image, an idea, that often runs contrary to reality. For the most part, they are becoming nothing more than glorified PR machines. Also, at times it would seem that they would do everything they can to halt progress. Witness the lobbying that automobile companies do, as just one example. Almost everyone agrees that in the future we will need to drive more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars. Yet the automotive industry of this country has done very little to make these cars, despite the demand for them as witnessed by the popularity of Japanese hybrids (and once when they did make an electric car they wasted no time pulling the plug, and oil companies bought the patents for electric batteries so they could never be used again), and has instead done all it could to make sure that it will never have to change its practices to be more environmentally friendly. Corporations do not seem to stand for progress but against it, to stand instead for maintaining the status quo.

I can’t count the number of plugs I’ve heard for corporations by the news anchors on channels such as CNBC and CNN (for obvious reasons, I tend to avoid Fox). They claim that pro-corporation policies are essential because they promote economic growth. (It used to be promote employment growth, but they obviously can’t use that slogan anymore after all the layoffs.) And I don’t see the evidence for this. The stock market is rising, but so is the cost of living, so is the price of gas and food, rent, college educations, all the while our currency is falling against that of every other country’s. There is such a huge disconnect between what I hear and what I see, and increasingly I’ve come to think that what’s good for corporations is terrible for the country, for the poor and middle class that live here, that the rising profits are coming at their expense - they are the ones that were laid off, that are being made to work longer hours for less pay. There are now 37 million people living below the poverty line, 5 million more than when Bush came into power, and they have fewer chances of getting themselves out of poverty than in years before, with declining standards of health care and education. And there are also the increasingly lax environmental regulations - properly regulating our food and air and water so that public health is not harmed might hurt a corporation’s profits, and so the Bush administration doesn’t.

As to corporations being models of efficiency, I think a better characterization for them would be that of externalizing machines. Externalities are whenever two parties carry out a transaction and a third uninvolved party has to bear some of its cost. The taxpayers are this third uninvolved party - we’re the ones that pay for the troops to secure Iraq’s oil fields, we’re the ones that bear the costs of pollution. And we have so little say in a corporation’s practices. We can’t fire the retail company CEOs that use sweatshop labor, or the oil company CEOs that are responsible for environmentally destructive practices, or that prop up repressive governments, as in the case of the Shell company (eight environmentalists that protested the activities of the Shell Company in Nigeria were hanged).

Instead of being held accountable and punished for these actions, CEOs that do these things are instead rewarded, with increasingly ludicruous pay packages granted by the boards of directors. It is not the ordinary shareholder that is benefitting from increased corporate profits as much as it is the people already in power - they would prefer to keep the money to themselves, thank you very much. Also, there was an article I read recently that said that CEO pay can be correlated to the number of layoffs performed - the more layoffs the higher the pay. So how is it, exactly, that what’s good for corporations is good for this country as a whole?

Corporations aren’t moral and cannot be held easily accountable for the public good, and it’s surprising to me how much people don’t get this. They exist for one reason, to maximize profits, and they will do this at the expense of anything. In the corporate mindset everything comes down to a cost/benefit analysis in which even things like a person’s health and life have a price, and that is the main reason why I find using corporations as the ideal governing model so laughably absurd, and why I disagree with conservatives who point to corporations as everything that’s right in our society.

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poli sci links pages:

http://www.rvc.cc.il.us/faclink/pruckman/PSLinks.htm
http://www.polsci.wvu.edu/polycy
http://www.etown.edu/vl/
http://www.emory.edu/SOC/globalization/

Taking Sides: Clashing Views in World Politics

I got this book because I wanted to learn more about public policy, and this was one of the books the library had on the subject. I wouldn't recommend it, though. I liked the introduction, but not the essays, which seemed rather insubstantial. (Though some did have great quotes, like the following from Mahatma Gandhi on cultural diversity: "I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.")

Below are my notes on the book.

( Read more... )