May 7, 2006 Archives
Playoffs make for interesting, but ultimately pointless, relations between actors of a series. The Edmonton vs San Jose series: Joe Thornton and Sergei Samsonov, both former Boston players traded during the regular season, whose former team didn't make the playoffs, are now facing each other in the second round. A few years ago, it was the Anaheim-New Jersey Stanley Cup finals, which saw the Niedermayer brothers going head-on (they are now aligning themselves with Anaheim - and both their current team and NJ are still alive). I also hope that Colorado and NJ get elminated quickly, so that the eventual winner of this year's Stanley Cup will be at least either a Canadian team or a team that has never won it before; and neither of those, besides Ottawa, would even have made it into most lists of Cup contenders at the beginning of the year, let alone on list of playoffs-qualifying teams.
After watching the movie, I met up with Danica, had lunch and did a bit of shopping in Chinatown for the house: a pack of shanghai bok choi, char siu, half a duck and a few rice dumplings (zongzi).
Got the zongzi at a place my grandma recommended, on Clark, in the Furama restaurant building (formerly Taiping and then big-Mingdo), in the basement, more precisely. The zongzi are handmade by someone from outside (from what I understood, not a company), and are $1.50 apiece, cheaper (and much larger) than the frozen ones I bought in TO. They come in green beans or nuts flavour, with of course, the lady assured me, a piece of fat pork. Another thing I discovered last year was soya sauce grades... for zongs, one should use at least a dark soya sauce.
For Chinese cold-cuts, diverged from the usual Hong Kong place on St-Laurent, and went to that one in the building housing Kam Fung restaurant. The char siu wasn't nearly as good (has a smoky sort of taste), but my dad says that the roasted pork (siu yok) is especially good there. I'm not very difficult as to siulap: as long as the char siu's color is not bordering fluo red, and the siu yok's skin is crisp.
Went to see Chinese Restaurants: Three Continents, the third of five films where the producer/director Cheuk Kwan goes around the world and recounts the lives of Chinese diaspora members from the perspective of the restaurants they own. In every city, little town out of nowhere, there is a Chinese restaurant. Mr Kwan, an engineer by training, left his job ("mid-life crisis") to focus on his project, which took him to fifteen different countries.
The three countries featured in this film were Madagascar, Norway and Canada. I was particularly interested in the Madagascar one, because my dad was born there and grew up there. Many of the familiar places my father told me about are described in the episode, the very long staircase going up the hill in Tananarive and which my dad escalated twice every schoolday, and a Chinese school opened by Chinese business people (it could've been the one my grandpa helped funding - but then the one in the movie was built in the 40s).
And the colourful Jim Chow from Outlook, SK, Canada, had one of the most interesting answers when asked whether he considered himself Chinese or Canadian: "I am myself". And my own "myself" is probably in a constant state of flux, with varying amounts of pull and push, of resisting, of letting go.
A heck of a series, and if I had $100 to fork out for the DVD set, I would (if it were just half of this, I definitely would - hey, it has it all: diasporic identity, immigration stories, Chinese food - from that-which-fools-gweilo and fusion flavours!). Available at the NFB centre on St-Denis x Ste-Cath in Montreal (first time I go there - and it basically has a couple of screening rooms almost as large as Ex-Centris' smallest, and half a floor with multimedia viewing stations, and that cool robotic film selection thing).
Was playing with my newest Ubuntu install and found in the 'Examples' directory, a recording of Alice in Wonderland's first chapter in spoken form, coming from LibriVox, a free online collection of audiobooks from the public domain and recorded by volunteers. You will find works from Lao-Tsu's Tao Te King to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, poetry (Shakespeare) and other miscellaneous (US Declaration of Independence).
So I took the laptop my brother was using for school, formatted it, and reinstalled it to my taste. It's a machine he got over the Holidays in 2000-01, thus an antiquity of a few hundreds mHz and just 192 Mb of RAM. Of the 20Gb HD, I made a 10Gb WinXP partition, in case, but the Linux partition, an Ubuntu install for regular 32-bit PCs works just as well - there's a working Flash, and network/sound work like a charm, but I am guessing that the multimedia might be choppier than on WinXP.