i <3 twitter

the most random thing. i was watching transformers last night and saw an action scene where megan fox's hands caught my eye. i thought i saw all her red nail polish was chipped. normal still. but then another scene where it flashed her hands again. and this time, i saw a close-up shot of her thumb and i only noticed cuz i was wondering about the polish, which was indeed chipped. this time, i saw her horrible stubby, flat thumbnail, weird looking, but whatever.

anyway, today i'm on twitter and someone sarcastically wrote > "Thank you, Twitter friends, for warning me about her thumbs. MEGAN FOX IS A HIDEOUS BEAST!"

apparently! there's whole blog and tweet entries about this topic! her horribly hideous thumb. just google thumb + megan fox. people crack me. here's me just adding fuel to that fire.

camera envy

beautiful hk... my weekend in a nutshell :)

motivation

panini innards & chillaxin @ bed bar



Solid weekend. I amost forgot how much fun it was to have friends visit, but this weekend was a blast. Matt finally got around to visiting China! By the end of our weekend, very little of Beijing was left unscoured. From million-dollar art auctions to the Great Wall and a hairy blues band, we saw it all. Interestingly enough, Beijing had some of the best weather all year.

It also made me realize how lazy I've become since moving to China. After living here long enough, you get a little bit too comfortable and lose the motivation for exploration. On normal weekends, sitting at home with a DVD sounds more appealing than leaving the house. I'm in bed by 11. You forget about all the great music, awesome parities, and diversity of people here -- especially compared to Shanghai. It was odd because even though I was showing a friend around, I, myself also met new friends and saw things I probably would not have been as driven to check out if not given a reason to. You guys have to come visit so I have an incentive to leave the house!!! =)


an underrated new art district - Caochangdi

shanghai auto show

mush, my minions, mush!

sweet jeebus...introducing the awesomeness of the Geely GE Limo, star of this year's Shanghai Auto Show and the smarter cousin of the Rolls Royce Phantom. it looks exactly like it, but instead of a row of seats in the back, it features only one, throne-like seat. is that money or is that money?







vs.





PWNED!!!

in defense of hotpot

reading: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto




on thursday, i lunched at Xiabu Xiabu hotpot, one of the few acceptable places in our building that isn't a rip off _ is tasty and healthy. i went with the crackalicious mala flavor _ curry and clear soup bases also available. it was delicious, but i began to notice, like the other patrons around us, we were devouring our freshly boiled veggies and meats with a fervor like it was our last meal on earth. eating for the sake of eating to fill our tummies because _ admit it _ the food we eat rarely has much flavor these days beyond savory, salty, sweet or greasy.


i just want my hotpot!!!

Chinese hotpot encompasses all those elements. you know it's addictively good, buy you can't really pipoint why _ well... maybe you can.

the point is, most food out there doesn't taste magical anymore. as i was shoveling down mouthfuls of shrimp balls & potato slices _ it just felt wrong. not because i was unsure of what i was eating, but i felt like eating less with more quality. alas!

thousands of books flood out there offer advice on what to eat and how to eat, but it boils down to three things - eat less, more veggies and exercise. my friend deb _ who is studying Chinese medicine in Beijing, recommends jogging four times a week for 1.5hrs each. so why is so hard to accomplish? because food is so, so good and China is the worst place to live when you're trying to have a balanced diet. discipline is challenging here with chuar stands around every corner and smorgasbord of delectible options.

Pollan offers practical insight on why we're confused about what to eat and how we got this way. From scarcity to abundance>

'Eat Food'

The implication of Pollan's advice, however, is that what we're eating now isn't food.

"Very often, it isn't," he says. "We are eating a lot of edible food-like substances, which is to say highly processed things that might be called yogurt, might be called cereals, whatever, but in fact are very intricate products of food science that are really imitations of foods."

Pollan acknowledges that distinguishing between food and "food products" takes work. His tip: "Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

Take, for example, the portable tubes of yogurt known as Go-Gurt, Pollan says. "Imagine your grandmother or your great-grandmother picking up this tube, holding it up to the light, trying to figure out how to administer it to her body — if indeed it is something that goes in your body — and then imagine her reading the ingredients," he says. "Yogurt is a very simple food. It's milk inoculated with a bacterial culture. But Go-Gurt has dozens of ingredients."

'Not Too Much'

A large part of the conversation about food — like debating low-fat and low-carb diets — serves as a way of avoiding the idea that maybe we're just eating too much, Pollan says. He says his advice about how to limit consumption is based less on science, which he says "has failed us when it comes to food, by and large," and more on culture.

"Cultures have various devices to help people moderate their appetite," he says. "Once upon a time, there was scarcity. We don't have that anymore; we have abundance. But if you go around the world, you find very interesting tricks and devices."

One is small portion sizes, Pollan says. "The French manage to eat extravagantly rich food, but they don't get fat, and the reason is that they eat it on small plates, they don't have seconds, they don't snack."

In Okinawa, Japan, a cultural principle called "Hara Hachi Bu" instructs people to eat until they are just 80 percent full, Pollan says. "You do know when you are full, and the idea of stopping eating before you reach that moment … if you do that, you will actually reduce your caloric intake quite a bit," he says.

'Mostly Plants'

Finally, eating plants is very important, Pollan says. "There is incontrovertible but boring evidence that eating your fruits and vegetables is probably the best thing you can do for preventing cancer, for weight control, for diabetes, for all the different, all the Western diseases that now afflict us," he says.

But can you follow Pollan's advice and avoid processed foods without spending a ton of time and money?

"You're going to have to spend either more time or more money, and perhaps a little bit of both," Pollan says. "And I think that's just the reality. It's really a question of priorities, and we have, in effect, devalued food. And what I'm arguing is to move it a little closer to the center of our lives, and that we are going to have to put more into it, but that it will be very rewarding if we do.

"And if we don't, by the way, we are going to suffer from this — you know, we hear this phrase so many times — this epidemic of chronic disease. But the fact is, we are at a fork in the road. We're either going to get used to chronic disease, and be … in the age of Lipitor and dialysis centers on every corner in the city, or we're going to change the way we eat. I mean, it's really that simple. Most of the things that are killing us these days — whether it's heart disease, diabetes, obesity, many, many cancers — are directly attributed to the way we're eating."

WAHHHH!!! So, this means we can't eat sugar, because it has no nutritional value whatsoever. In a nutshell, eating less of it and eating less chemically altered "foods" that we don't even know the side effects for such as delicious chemical soup we call diet coke _ research has shown that, aspartame an artificial sweetener, turns into a form of formadehyde, aspartic acide, phenylalanine, and methanol upon ingestion. Yum!

why asian women are stick thin

said to me by coworker today>
"i like your sweater. it makes you look skinny"

we started it first...

Check out Dolce & Gabbana's Spring 2009 collection >



Looks like some sort of a casual outfit as seen its not worn with bunny slippers but rather 5-inch heels. Seems to me, this doesn't really work no matter how gorgeous you are >



I have a strong suspicion D&G took their inspiration from the streets of Shanghai. For those of you who have never been, no other city in the world has as many people wandering the streets in their PJs! I mean, it's everywhere, people go to the post office and grocery store in same the colorful fleece, silk & cotton outfits they bed with. Men and women, young and old alike. It is indeed a sight to behold.