Man, I need to get out of high school

While I was writing up the post You know you walked into an American when…, I stumbled upon a hilarious set of “generalizations” drawn up by the University of Pennsylvania. Seeing that it is from the International Students’ Handbook, the intentions behind the generalized descriptions were clearly good. But I couldn’t help myself but to giggle while reading through it.

I couldn’t bring myself to finish this list after reading the Penn article of sorts. Isn’t it so ironic that University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s premier universities and an Ivy, even have such a guide for its students in the first place. It goes to show that even some of the brightest students on the academic front don’t always qualify so high on the common sense side of things. Surely Penn attracts students of very diverse backgrounds, but do they really need to be told that they can “firmly decline” whenever they do not feel like drinking or smoking pot?

I wonder if other universities have such a guide for their foreign students. I bet they do.

“Colleges don’t spoon feed you material”

Yeah right.

Man, I need to get out of high school.

Below is the (incomplete) list of You know you walked into an American when…

1. Hunt’s Manwich sauce between two hamburger buns seems okay for him/her
2. He/she like Barack Obama just because… he is Barack Obama
3. He/she can tolerate Miley Cyrus
4. He/she can name more than four American Idols

Who will be the TIME Person of the Year 2009?

Time Magazine releases the annual TIME 100 list at the end of every year.

And the among the 100, the magazine also chooses a person of the year, a person of extraordinary achievement, a person who consistently stole the headlines of the biggest newspapers around the world, a person who exemplifies the year 2009.

And now the time is here for the readers to hit the polls.

The magazine released a poll for the 2009 candidates.

Click here to vote.

Dude, Dance

Matt Harding is not much of a dancer, in fact he’s actually a video game designer.

But one day, he decided to take a trip around the world. And while he was traveling, he decided to record a video of himself dancing. He made one after another and soon enough, he had a massive collection of videos, set in cities all over the globe.

He uploaded a compilation of these videos in 2005.

He uploaded another in 2006 and another in 2008.

Today, Where the Hell is Matt? (2008 edition) has over 25 million hits.

And he is currently the face of Visa Inc. as the global credit card company drew inspiration from Harding’s videos for their television ads.

My Goodness, KIS (Oh for God’s sake, Kobe Bryant)

Firstly, I think I need some KIS Phoenix B’ball merchandise, because the boys are on a roll!

On Saturday, December 5th, KIS Phoenix Varsity Basketball team won their second straight game of the season, creaming the Osan American High School Cougars by… an amazing 16 point margin. (final score 54-28)

The boys are rewriting KIS B’ball history: they are winning games. And KIS is on its first-ever winning streak in the KAIAC first division. A ‘W’ is sweet, but two are so much sweeter.

As an avid fan, I’m usually at their home games during the week, screaming at the opposition players and shouting at the ref if he/she makes a sketchy call. All this still continues to this day. But the winning ways of the Ball team has forced the school to deviate from the norm. The norm was for the spectators to walk off before the end of the 3rd quarter; the spectators gave up on them. The norm was for the bench players to get some floor time during the 4th, in order to prevent the starters from getting injured; the coach gave up on them.

Now, this is all history.

Fortunately, I guess the new additions to the coaching staff really is paying off, (I originally thought the ‘blame the coach’ phenomena were excuses made by pro team owners when they have nothing else to say to the press).

Let the Ws pile up. KIS B’ball is in for an awesome season.

And congratulations to Jae Doh for his assist in the game against YISS (he finally got on the stats book).

Oh and check out this video: Kobe Bryant being Kobe Bryant again

It’s unfair how some players are just so much better than others.

Laughter is the Best Medicine (part 2)

Let the laughter continue.

A few of these videos were chosen by Mashable .com to be the funniest videos on YouTube.

I compiled my selection as a combination of this list and a few others.

Laughter is contagious (with 99129141 hits)

Frozen New York (with 19857112 hits)

Funny Car Ad (with 2674998 hits)

Best Game Ever (with 1958598 hits)

My Culinary Expeditions: The Gnocchi

Even though, I am a culinary maestro in hiding, I do tend to have my weaknesses in the kitchen.

Hard to believe, I know.

The last time I tried to make some potato ‘gnocchi’ (I have no idea how this is pronounced), I ended up with seasoned mashed potatoes. This time, on my mum’s birthday, I wanted to redeem myself.

Gnocchi literally means ‘lumps.’ And essentially, they are lumps. But they are lumps with a very long history. It has been a traditional Italian pasta type of probably Middle Eastern origin since Roman times. It was introduced by the Roman Legions during the enormous expansion of the empire into the countries of the European continent as a type of war rations. It was relatively simple to carry, a good source of carbohydrate and well, it tastes much better than it seems. Over the past 2000 years, respective regions of the empire developed their own specific type of small dumplings, with the ancient Gnocchi as their common ancestor.

The recipe I used was from Master Chef Australia, a relatively famous show/magazine down under.

credit: Master Chef Australia

As always, my plate looked nothing like the picture above.

But I have to say, the gnocchi tasted a lot better than mashed potatoes this time. The prawn was excellent, the thyme (substitute for sage) fit better than I expected. And for the first time in my life, I could smile at the aroma of caper. I couldn’t believe everything fit each other.

As for the recipe, I hope the dudes that works on the website put up a more detailed set of instructions. I had to refer to other websites for reference. This shouldn’t be the case. If this doesn’t improve, I have to take on the words of wisdom from Jaime Oliver instead.

Personal Rating of the recipe: 3.5 stars

And my cooking experiment continues…

Laughter is the Best Medicine (part 1)

Taking a leaf out of Patch Adam’s book, I thought, in a time of stress and sleepless nights, that a few funny videos would be well appreciated by my viewers.

Enjoy!

Who wants to be a millionaire CEO?

Have you ever wondered whether Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Lakshmi Mittal or Indra Nooyi had God-given CEO DNA integrated within their genomes?

I certainly have.

For me, I was almost convinced that some people are fortunate enough to be born with the right kind of genes—whether it is freak height, photographic memory or unparalleled creativity.

But recent studies have challenged this notion.

CNN recently published an article called ‘Learn the five steps of innovation’, which outlines the essence of a six year study conducted by Harvard, Insead and Brigham Young University Business Schools.

According to the article, “researchers identified five skills that separate the blue-sky innovators from the rest—skills they labeled associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and discovering.” In addition, the same set of researchers further identified that “creativity is close to 80 percent learned and acquired.”

FIVE KEYS TO INNOVATION (as outlined by the article)

Researchers say they have identified five skills that drive innovation:

Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.

Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask “why?”, “why not?” and “what if?”

Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.

Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.

Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

As for me, another aspiring entrepreneur, such research brings me some hope. I guess if only hardwork is the path to success, count me in. But at the same time, such prospect cannot be any scarier.

Definitely Not Sick

This is good.

To share this sense of release with my classmates at school everyday is a joy. Most seniors would nod in agreement. You know what, I can see them, nodding in unison, sitting before the computer at this time, wrestling with a 10-page literary article. Their heads are throbbing with a fever-like symptom. The occasional cough and blocked nose doesn’t mean much. I mean, what can it mean? The fact that the weather is getting colder?

But then again, it’s very obvious that we aren’t sick because the temp. readings at school say otherwise. The throbbing is nothing. Just temporary and definitely not the flu. Flu? Good Riddance, the high school students at Korea International School cannot get the flu. We are too healthy, emotionally, mentally and physically, for a measly virus. I heard the Korean Government will need to come up with a new plan of action against this spread. Barack Obama just initiated the state of emergency in the States. But we are KISians. We are too good and definitely not sick.

Flu? What Flu?

We are definitely not sick.

The Spending Phenomena: College Sports

Well, American consumerism is notorious in magnitude. No other nation can match the collective spending habits of the United States of America.

Don’t believe me? Allow me to further elaborate.

Let us just take the notion of Collegiate Athletics for example.

(Never mind the $36.9 billion endowment of Harvard University. They just get bulk donations, that’s all. Never mind the $8 billion it lost during the first four months of the school’s fiscal year. Hell, $8 billion that Harvard lost during the worst of last year’s economic crisis was larger than the entire endowments of all but six universities in the nation. But let’s leave that aside for now.)

The estimated revenue of last year’s March Madness in advertisement alone was around $500 million. And please remember, this was NOT a professional event.

The highest earning college ball coaches have multi-million dollar salaries. Well, this is understandable as their teams earn massive sums of money for their respective institutions. But I thought we are in midst some tough economic times? When the Lehman Brothers and Merill Lynch disintegrated before our eyes, many were simply waiting and cheering on some of basketball’s brightest future talents to show off on national television. I guess some are worse off than others.

If ESPN cares enough to cover College Football and Basketball (I believe the names deserve capitalization), they are good enough for me.

And I have to say, I love this. I can’t wait to attend my first college ball game and football game. Where else are you going to see 40,000 students assemble to watch an amateur football game?

Only in good ol’ America.