Hot Take

20 years ago there was only one ramen offering on Costco's shelves. Today I counted at least a half-dozen Asian dried noodle products.

Unfortunately, my increasingly sensitive digestive system won't allow me to sample most of them, especially Samyang's Buldak Ramen: [bold added]

Now, [Kim Jung-soo] is CEO.

Behind the 59-year-old’s rise is the unlikely success of a brand of instant ramen she created herself. The noodles are so spicy that many people can’t eat them. Today, packages of the company’s “Buldak” noodles—literally “fire chicken” in Korean—have landed on the American shelves of Costco, Walmart and Albertsons. They will soon arrive in Kroger supermarkets, too.

Kim Jung-soo developed the spicy ramen after observing the popularity of spicy fried rice in Seoul. Her product development skills helped make Samyang become one of the 100 largest companies in Korea and relegated its 1998 bankruptcy to the past.

In a society where it's rarer to find a woman CEO than in the U.S., the 59-year-old Kim looks much younger than her years and will likely lead the company a long time.

All the Time in the World

Market City is one of the larger neighborhood shopping centers on Oahu. A mile from the family home, it's your humble blogger's regular destination for supermarket shopping and picking up dinner.

The restaurants are busy, but rarely do the lines go out the door and never do they stretch 50 feet. The lady at the Korean barbecue said the new Kamitoku Hot Pot restaurant was charging $5 for a $15 meal. It was a "soft opening" pre-celebration of the "grand opening" in March.

Yelp reviewers already have cautioned that the wait for a table could be well over an hour. That didn't seem to deter the young-ish crowd that was happily chatting away, texting, and taking pictures.

I ordered take-out, bought a few items at Foodland, and returned to the car. After 30 minutes the line had barely moved. When you're young, you have all the time in the world.

Yakiniku Korea House

Later today we'll have November's biggest meal, but I can already say that the best meal I had this month was at the Yakiniku Korea House in Honolulu. Yakiniku restaurants are popular not only because meat cooked on a hot grill is always delicious but also because it's fun cooking together.

We ordered two platters at $70 each for our party of eight. Together with rice, condiments and dipping sauces, the beef and pork belly unleashed the inner carnivore.

Beef and pork belly (Yelp photo)

The meal was a blast, literally, because the steam and smoke were so intense that the waiter had to lower the exhaust pipe to eye level.

Dinner companions asked if we should order more. In my salad days (when I ate much less salad, btw) I would have readily assented, but (sigh) not for me, I answered.

My birthday was earlier this month, so my brothers paid for everything. Like I said, the best meal this month.

Reaction Reconsidered

Trashed too soon?

In recent years I've been ignoring pleas for donations to colleges. The ones that contact me
a) have multibillion-dollar endowments and don't need my help; and
b) have allowed the silencing of points of view that differ from the dominant orthodoxy on college campuses. Without a moment's thought I threw the message from Marvin Chun into the trash folder.

Who is Marvin Chun?

Chun, dean of Yale College, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology, and professor of neuroscience, was born and raised in California by his immigrant parents. When he was 12, his family moved back to Korea where he attended junior high, high school, and college.

Chun was recognized by the foundation for his work in cognitive neuroscience. From images of brain activity alone, his lab has recreated faces viewed by subjects. In a separate line of work, they can read out an individual’s attention levels, intelligence, and personality.

Marvin Chun, who has MIT, Harvard, Vanderbilt, and Yale on his c.v., is studying "mind-reading." From a 2014 article: [bold added]

Pretty good, and that was in 2014.

“It is a form of mind reading,” said Marvin Chun, professor of psychology, cognitive science and neurobiology and an author of the paper in the journal Neuroimage. [snip]

One of Chun’s students, Alan S. Cowen, then a Yale junior now pursuing an advanced degree at the University of California at Berkeley, wanted to know whether it would be possible to reconstruct a human face from patterns of brain activity. The task was daunting, because faces are more similar to each other than buildings. Also large areas of the brain are recruited in the processing of human faces, a testament to its importance in survival.

“We perceive faces in a much greater level of detail than we perceive other things,” Cowen said.

Working with funding from the Yale Provost’s office, Cowen and post doctoral researcher Brice Kuhl, now an assistant professor at New York University, showed six subjects 300 different “training” faces while undergoing fMRI scans. They used the data to create a sort of statistical library of how those brains responded to individual faces. They then showed the six subjects new sets of faces while they were undergoing scans. Taking that fMRI data alone, researchers used their statistical library to reconstruct the faces their subjects were viewing.

By strapping some electrodes to your head the scientists could approximate the faces you were seeing, and that was in 2014. One can only wonder the state of the science today ("an individual’s attention levels, intelligence, and personality") and how much--not whether--the government is involved.

I'm sorry, Dr. Chun, for my overly quick reaction to your e-mail. Yale is extremely important to me and my family, whose continued health is also extremely important. Where do I send the check?

Thanks, Willie, But It Didn't Work

Former SF-Mayor and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown has advice for Republicans. (Appreciate that his tone is not snarky or insincere, as is much of the "advice" given by partisans to their opponents.) [bold added]

Willie Brown (OC Register)

It’s clear that Republicans’ slip in California relevance has turned into an all-out slide. The midterm results show that Republicans are being hurt as young adults and other progressively inclined people fan out from the Bay Area and Los Angeles into onetime GOP territory like Orange County and Central Valley cities.

Add in the toxicity of President Trump, and you have a party that is clearly in need of major retooling if it ever again hopes to be a factor on the state level.

Republicans could start by getting rid of the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus types who have made the GOP platform so distasteful to new voters.

But if they really want to make a comeback, the GOP should turn the party over to women. Not only would they give the party a better public face, they would inject a better balance on social issues.

Well, the Republicans did try the woman strategy; they had a textbook candidate in Korean-American Young Kim:

Young Kim (CNN)

Kim was considered by many to have an edge going into the race because of her name recognition and long history as a district staffer for [ex-Representative Ed] Royce, who had endorsed her....Kim broke with Trump on several of his policies, including family separation at the border and curtailing family-sponsored visas. Nearly a third of the district’s residents are Asian American, and a third are Latino.

If ever there was a seat that Republicans should have taken it was the seat held by Ed Royce(R) in the formerly conservative bastion of Orange County.

Democrat Gil Cisneros was the eventual winner, overcoming Young Kim's lead with provisional and mail-in ballots days after the election.

Tendering for Tenderization

Hundreds of sheet masks to choose from--Here's one offering on Alibaba.

The Wall Street Journal asks the important question: Do Korean Sheet Masks Actually Improve Your Skin? (If one watches--or is forced to watch--Korean soap operas, one can't avoid noticing that lovely actresses walk around with these beauty treatments.)

Answer: they probably help. [bold added]

the masks are mainly a Korean phenomenon. Sold in individual packets or as multi-packs, they consist of a pulp, fiber or bio-cellulose base soaked in a serum that purports to brighten, moisturize, smooth or perform other tricks when applied for the prescribed period of time, usually around 20 minutes. Manhattan dermatologist Dr. Dendy Engelman said that the form itself is effective: “Sheet masks use the material to trap active ingredients on the skin, forcing it to lock in the moisture and receive all the benefits.”

I wonder if the personal-care product developers got this idea from the kitchen. Any cook can tell you that plastic Ziploc® bags are effective in the marinading process because the bags help the meat to be in constant contact with the spice. The sheet masks use the same principle, albeit in a classier and more expensive manner.

It all depends on how much you are willing to tender for tenderization.

Quiet Diversions

The North Korean regime may seem completely alien to First-Worlders, but it must have an instinct for self-preservation. North Korea is in the position of the hostage taker who is completely surrounded by a SWAT team; he knows that if he fires a single shot--which may or may not kill his hostage--he will be dead in a second. That's why I'm not worried....much.

On my list of havens from the world are art museums. Viewing an artwork online is an imperfect substitute for visiting one, but the advantage is that virtual escape is but a click, not a plane ticket, away.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

The Wall Street Journal to its credit will occasionally devote space to a lesser-known work of art, in this case ‘The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’ (1882) by portrait artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

He set his large-scale composition just inside the main door of the Boits’ Paris apartment. The girls, in the foreground, are in a theatrically lighted space that melts into a darkened interior. Much of the painting’s allure lies in its careful balancing of color. Warmth slips in sparingly, through the caramel tones of a wall and the red of a dagger-shaped screen. Blackness holds the center, drawing the eye beyond the riddle of these four self-possessed children.

The most we can be confident of is their relative ages. The youngest, seated on the floor, holds a large, pink-cheeked doll and glances slightly away. The eldest stands in the shadows, in profile, next to her second-born sister. Daughter number three, distinguished by her blond tresses, is planted on pipe-cleaner thin legs at the far left, and seems to gaze inward. It is only the second-born daughter, dead center you suddenly realize, who truly looks back, her eyes alert with expectation.

Her older sister leans against an outsize vase, one of a pair. Flanking the passage into what appears to be a well-appointed parlor, the vases lend a sculptural quality to the three standing figures. A ruffle at the neck of the blond child echoes the fluting on the vases.

The WSJ art reviewer points us to a Velázquez from two centuries prior:

He borrowed his structure from Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” which he had copied on an 1879 visit to Madrid. Both works feature young girls and, unusually, are large and square. Like Velázquez, Sargent overcomes the square’s potentially deadening symmetry with a pleasing off-balance arrangement enhanced by deep space. And, also like him, he upends the conventions of group portraiture by giving each figure room to breathe. A viewer of the Boit daughters could seemingly join 4-year-old Julia on the carpet.

Las Meninas

There are beautiful aspects of the world that will long outlive our current "urgent" concerns. Quiet diversions can remind us so.

Transformation

Before and after

Korean plastic surgeons have become so proficient that patients who come to Korea on "plastic surgery vacations" no longer match their passport photo:

South Korean plastic surgeons are among the best in the world. In fact they’re so good that people from other countries like China and Japan are actually having trouble getting back home.

It's too easy to deplore the vanity behind these surgeries, but we must stifle our criticism when we look at the transformative results. The beautiful have a much greater chance of being well-liked, wealthy, and happy---they just have to explain to their starry-eyed spouses why their kids don't look like them.

The Western standard of feminine beauty has been adopted by the Asian upper class.

It Could Have Been Much Worse

All passengers were evacuated (Mercury News photo)

Little solace to the families of the two dead and the dozens critically injured, but the crash of an Asiana 777 at SFO could have been much, much worse.

Two grim firsts:

It was the first fatality involving a passenger aircraft at SFO since 1953 (1964 if one counts cargo airplanes).

It was the first passenger fatality recorded for the Boeing 777, which was introduced in 1995.

The triple-7 was regarded as a huge risk for Boeing because cutting-edge technology was used in its design, manufacture, and operations: the revolutionary giant twin engines (not a "derivative" of previous models), the exclusive reliance on computer-aided design, the fly-by-wire instead of mechanical controls, and the use of composite materials in its construction. The airplane has proved to be a spectacular commercial success and had a stellar safety record...until today. Here's hoping that the NTSB investigation does not reveal serious problems with the aircraft. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Han Sung BBQ, Santa Clara

Hot coals are lowered a foot from diners' plates.

It was our first time at the Han Sung BBQ, and it was a good thing that we brought our appetites. (It was also a good thing that we went on a Sunday, when Lenten strictures against indulgence are suspended.)

Korean restaurants were serving small plates of kim chi and seasoned vegetables long before "small plates" became fashionable in other cuisines. We sampled everything, including sauces of uncertain provenance. (One is always taking a chance with unfamiliar condiments, which is why one should have lots of beer close by to put out the fire.)

Speaking of fire, Han Sung BBQ uses coals, not the propane or natural gas found in other grill-it-yourself restaurants. It makes for a more spectacular presentation when the flaming coals are lowered into the well; the heat is less intense than with gas, and we had to wait a bit longer for the meat to cook. The chicken, beef, and pork had a pleasant smokey flavor.

The total tab, including drinks, tax, and tip, was a reasonable $30 per person. We'll be back. © 2013 Stephen Yuen