Fat indicator

My hand cannot fit into a shuttlecock carton any more.

I think a few years ago, I could always use my hand to push out shuttlecocks from the carton. Provided that my hand was clean and dry (not wet or sweaty). Then sometimes I couldn't, but I think I kidded myself that shuttlecock cartons were not all the same size.

But it's been quite some time since I couldn't poke my hand into any carton at all, so I think it basically boils down to getting fat. :P

Tunnel

After the last drama, I started to watch Tunnel. After watching Return, I was intentionally switching to a lighter show (hence the silly Strong Girl in between, which I wasn't as interested to watch as Tunnel) before coming back to a crime drama. I try not to watch two similar shows back to back, so as not to confuse their details...

Tunnel turned out to be so interesting that I started jotting my thoughts down as I watched:

• Firstly the crime part is done really well. The time travel part is poorly done though... this guy travels from 1986 to 2016 and does not have that much difficulty adapting. Sure, he looks puzzled at smartphones, but why does no one ask for his mobile phone number?

• And his then-junior has become his chief in the future. Why does he not even know the chief's name in the beginning? Even when the chief reveals that he knows classified information about the 1986 murder case, why didn't this main character find out the chief's name properly? They were just trying to delay the reunion of these two colleagues, and they couldn't find a proper way to do it.

• I like how they do have other cases in the meantime, which are not related to the main case. It makes it more believable somehow. And in a way, it gives the characters time to bond...

• Another part that is interesting: They even inserted one of the Detective Conan-style murder mysteries, where they get stuck in a rural area in rain and flood, and no one can come in or go out, so they have to catch the culprit before the rain stops. I'm liking this more and more...

• But there's some stupid stuff: This girl wants to become bait, but she goes out all by herself without telling anyone. This is not bait, you idiot, this is a sacrificial offering.

And now that I've finished watching...

Some details are not so well taken care of... we never get an explanation on why some elderly people are killed. Actually a lot of details are not well taken care of. Even the ending seems lacking, like they were running out of time and had to end it without taking time to tie up the loose ends.

But all in all, I think they have a really interesting plot, and that plot would actually be good enough even without the time travel arc. However the addition of the time travel gave them more plot points to develop, so I guess I can't complain. It's really an interesting watch, not a dull moment! I'm still very happy with this drama despite all its flaws. Definitely better than Return (which had its dull moments), but nowhere near as good as Nine (which took care of the details very well!)

Egg attack

On Thursday morning, I woke up to find something smeared on my window pane.

On the ledge outside, there were some eggshells!

Do note that a piece of eggshell was stuck to the window!

There was also egg yolk...

Going outside to clean it up, in addition to the two bigger pieces of eggshell that were on the window ledge, there was a smaller one on the balcony floor.

eggshells collected

Who's throwing eggs at my window?!

Looks like it will remain a mystery for now...

P.S. I saw this on Thursday morning, but it might have already been there since Wednesday night. Since it was dark by the time I opened my curtains, I might have not noticed the stain.

The Witch

So... I mentioned The Witch before, and that I was hoping to see Choi Woo Sik in a non-bumbling idiot role. Well, that wish has finally come true. :P (though I'm not blown away or anything like that)

I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but my internet subscription comes with UnifiTV and one of the channels is TVN Movies. The Witch premiered on the channel last night at around 10pm (I find that their movies always premiere at that time), and they showed it again today at around 3:30pm. So I watched it today instead.

To put it simply: I liked it. It wasn't one of the best movies I've ever watched, but it was pretty interesting. Maybe some details were not that well done, but I think they managed to deliver the story that they wanted. It is a "part 1" movie, so the ending definitely allows for a second part. (though it's interesting that the Korean title does not mention "part 1", only the English title does)

A waste of time if not for the eye candy

So I've finished watching Strong Girl Bong Soon. I feel that it delivers best on the comedy, but still I wouldn't recommend it; it is way too silly. It's only good for passing time if you have too much to spare. I would have stopped watching a few episodes in, but I decided to continue just to watch Ahn Min Hyuk (the main character) gazing adoringly and adorably at Do Bong Soon. He is attracted to her from the beginning till the end, so he didn't disappoint. :P

And this is why I vow not to mix up Park Hyung Sik with other actors any more! (see previous post to know why)

I actually watched a few episodes of Tomorrow With You, but gave it up because of its silliness, which is pretty much on par with Strong Girl. I first saw Lee Je Hoon in Signal, and then My Papparoti (or was it the other way round?), and I felt that he was always playing the semi-gangster role, rude and obnoxious even when he was the good guy. I was hoping to see him play an all-round nice guy, but in Tomorrow With You, he was still that same kind of character. So I just couldn't bring myself to like his character.

By the way, just a shoutout/tribute to Kim Won Hae. Maybe I first saw him in Nine. All I know is that he usually plays inconsequential characters, and usually the bad guy. Even in While You Were Sleeping, he played a rather silly character that no one would root for, but in the end the character turned out to be a very meaningful one.

There is even an article praising him for his versatility. I think the article was written before Strong Girl had finished airing, so they probably didn't know at that time that he actually plays two different characters in that drama, both with high comic relief! Now my admiration for him is on par with Min Sung Wook, whom I have written about before (and as predicted, I couldn't recall his name :P ). But even though they may not be household names, they probably get more jobs, because let's face it: how many major roles are there to cast for? Whereas minor roles are plentiful!

Doppelgangers

Wow... I am mixing up actors. I saw Choi Woo Sik in Rooftop Prince, TEN, and Train to Busan. I saw Park Hyung Sik in Nine, which I have written about before. (but I had actually forgotten all about that, because he only played the young version of the lead actor) Now I just started watching Strong Girl Bong Soon, and at first I thought Park Hyung Sik was Choi Woo Sik. I was thinking, finally he has a more serious role. But uh... it seems not, it's just a different actor.

Recently, before starting to watch Strong Girl, I saw a video review for The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion (very recently!) I saw this actor portraying a mysterious young man. The reviewer mentioned the actor's name, Choi Woo Sik, and I thought, finally he has a serious role (because in the other shows where I've seen him, he's always been the bumbling idiot). But I haven't seen The Witch yet, which is why when I saw Strong Girl, I thought that was my first time seeing him in a serious role.

Not to mention that when I watched Perfect Proposal, I initially thought that Yoo Yeon Seok was Choi Woo Sik too. I also thought that I was finally seeing him in a serious role. Sigh...I guess I just really wanted to see him play something other than bumbling idiot. :P Maybe I finally will get that chance with The Witch.

Looking at photos of these three guys, I still feel that there is really a similarity. However I am now forewarned, so I hope I will be able to tell them apart in future. Now that I have seen Park Hyung Sik in Strong Girl, I think he is the best-looking among the three... I shouldn't insult him by confusing him with the others any more!

Engineers troubleshooting issues

A friend sent me a video of an issue he had found with his new car. We discussed it like we were discussing an issue at work.

Friend: I sent you a video to your Whatsapp. Let me know whether you have a similar issue with your car. (His car is similar to mine, but an SUV version)
Me: Okay, I'll take a look. (He knows that I don't see my Whatsapp till I'm home.)

But then he decided to just come and show me the video on his phone.

Me: What is the issue? How does it happen?
Friend: The radio freezes. Just press... *shows me the video of him pressing this and that button*

After watching the radio touchscreen freeze in the video:

Me: So how to recover?
Friend: Need to restart the engine...

At work, when we have an issue found on our radios (walkie-talkie radios this time, not car radios), the main questions are reproduction steps, the impact to the user, and how to recover from the error.

Anyway, my car radio does not have a touchscreen because it's not the highest-spec model, so I definitely don't have this issue on my car. :P

An ingenious usage of an umbrella

It was raining when I drove to work on Friday. While stopped at a traffic light, I happened to see a man with an umbrella across the street. What caught my eye was the umbrella high above his head.

At first I was surprised at the long handle of the umbrella, but upon taking a closer look I realized that the umbrella was actually perched on the bus stop sign. It's a pretty smart method of hands-free usage!

Unfortunately my camera has been acting up recently and the shutter button can't be pressed properly sometimes. Between the cars rushing by and the shutter-button failures, it took me quite a while to get a proper shot... and from the man's face in the photo, I think I was spotted. I hope he just saw me looking in his direction and not my camera... or maybe he might think that I was taking a photo of the building behind him.

An overly-ambitious drama

I just watched Return. I find that the basic plot is very interesting, but it is a pity that it fails to deliver the plot well enough.

There is this review that praises the drama to no end, and I agree with its description of the drama's strong points (but I wouldn't give it a 9/10 rating like they did). Then there is this other review that explains partly how I felt when watching the drama. The story starts off interesting, but halfway though, something just felt wrong. We keep getting revelations, but somehow the revelations just don't feel interesting enough. It's hard to pinpoint why, but I think that second review summed it up quite well: the characters' decisions were not believable enough.

However, towards the end (the last one-third, maybe), the story picked up and started getting interesting again. All in all, it is quite entertaining; however I still feel something is lacking...it could be better.

There is one major flaw in the storyline that I can see: A medical examiner gets killed for falsifying a cause of death years ago. There was a girl who was hit by a car, and she was thrown into the sea while still alive. We would expect that the cause of death was falsified to be a hit-and-run rather than a drowning, since the driver of the car was convicted. But at one point we see someone looking at the autopsy report, and the cause of death was "drowning". So...what was falsified?

Besides, the medical examiner had a daughter, and we see the girl being brought somewhere by the people who killed her mother. But after that... we have no idea what happens to the girl.

To me, this is a single major flaw, because it seemed like they just needed one other person to die, and that person did not fit properly into their plot at all. This is why I say the drama is overly-ambitious; they have a good basic storyline, but they try to drop too many plot twists, without managing to handle the loose ends properly.

La blague de l'année

There is this wonderful French joke on Facebook that I really need to share. It comes in the form of a video (with English subtitles). I'm not sure how long the video will be around, so I will transcribe the main contents of the joke here.

The radio host was talking to a caller who was a foreigner staying in France (an Armenian, to be exact). This foreigner said that he had difficulty remembering whether he should say un or une (the masculine or feminine version of one) when he wanted to ask for a baguette in the bakery. But he said he had found a solution for it.

The radio host asks, so what is this solution?

C'est un peu plus cher, mais je dis "deux baguettes".
It's a bit more expensive, but I say "two baguettes".

At this, the whole radio station erupts with laughter, and the radio host declares, this is the best joke of the year (la meilleure blague de l'année).

More on those 49 days

So in my previous post last night I wrote about 49 Days. I really didn't expect it to leave a lasting impression like I Remember You, but the story stayed in my mind almost all night and I am still feeling melancholic thinking of the characters, so I will write a bit more about it.

Spoiler alert! Anyone planning to watch the drama should stop reading here.

Stopping?

Not stopping?

You've been warned.


So, the main thing to talk about here is the ending. There is no happy ending in this drama. But to talk about the ending, first we need a little background.

From the beginning, we know that the main girl Shin Ji Hyun's fiancé will not turn out to be her soulmate, and that Han Gang, the guy who quarrels with her, will be the one who really cares for her. Then Song Yi Kyung, the girl who tries to kill herself (and causes Ji Hyun's accident in the first place), has been sad for the past five years after someone she loves died, and it isn't to hard to guess that Ji Hyun's scheduler (the one who helps her understand the rules of her 49 days) is the person Yi Kyung is pining for.

Ji Hyun's soul is allowed to use Yi Kyung's body when Yi Kyung is asleep (she works night shift so Ji Hyun gets to use her body in the daytime), but is not allowed to tell anyone that she is really Ji Hyun. So of course Han Gang, who has been in love with Ji Hyun all the while, manages to figure out that the Yi Kyung that he meets is actually Ji Hyun, due to their similar characteristics. All this is pretty much expected, and the plot twists and turns with Ji Hyun finding out about her fiancé betraying her and her family, and trying to fix it in her 49 days. In the process, of course Ji Hyun starts falling in love with Han Gang.

All this is very much expected, and fortunately the storyline was still told well enough to be enjoyable.

What I didn't like so much was some parts of the ending.

Firstly, Ji Hyun managed to collect her three drops of tears and wake up from the coma. She was supposed not to remember anything from her 49 days as a wandering spirit, but her scheduler told her that she was destined (i.e. scheduled) to die in 6 days, so she was given a choice whether to keep her memory of the last 49 days. She accepted to keep the memory, but (this is where I think it's stupid) she decides to let Han Gang think that she didn't remember anything. It is only when Yi Kyung came to see her, thinking that Ji Hyun would not remember her, that Ji Hyun told Yi Kyung the truth. And lucky for Han Gang, Yi Kyung decided to go against Ji Hyun's wishes not to tell him about her impending death.

What is also stupid about Ji Hyun's decision to stay silent, is that she still decides to go on a picnic with Han Gang, pretending that she just needed a pretend boyfriend for a day. Haih, this is so silly...wouldn't both of you be happier if you could continue where you left off from the past 49 days?

Okay, over with that, there is a second part of the ending that I wasn't happy with. It seemed to me that they wanted to add something unnecessary. When Ji Hyun collects her three drops of tears, we see that Yi Kyung was crying for her. The only knew each other when Ji Hyun was a spirit, so this was a touching moment of how much they had shared with each other during that short time. However, later we discover that *jeng jeng jeng!* (eyeroll here) that Yi Kyung was actually Ji Hyun's real sister who had been kidnapped a a child.

I guess in a way they wanted to give Ji Hyun's parents a way to deal with the loss of their "only" daughter, by finding their other daughter back. And allow Yi Kyung to recover from her past five years of misery by finding a family. But I would have preferred them to keep in contact, without being blood-related, and dealing with the loss of Ji Hyun together. With the ending they chose, it seemed like they were telling us that they couldn't recover without finding family.

Aaaaand, since they wanted to make Yi Kyung Ji Hyun's real sister, and family member's tears were not counted in the 49-days journey, that meant they needed another person's tears to be the third tear. And turned out that the tear came from Ji Hyun's best friend who had betrayed her (her fiancé's girlfriend). I especially didn't like this, because after all the events in the drama I really can't believe that this girl could cry 100% pure tears for Ji Hyun. Even if she had regretted her actions. Shouldn't there be a longer time before her feelings can change from wanting to hurt her friend to being really sad for her?

So, that's it! Really, I could have accepted that they let Ji Hyun die in the end (though I was really sad about that, I wanted to see her properly together with Han Gang!). I just couldn't accept those three points that I mentioned. They could have done better. I have totally no complaints about the whole drama, except the ending.

Edit: By the way, I wasn't the only one who didn't like the real-sister connection. A review I read didn't like it either, but their reason was because the hints were "too subtle". Another review mentioned "Yi Kyung and Ji Hyun's mother's inability to process oxtail soup" as a hint (Ji Hyun loves oxtail soup, and after she ate it in Yi Kyung's body, Yi Kyung threw up). I totally didn't get that hint! Not sure whether my brain would have gotten to it on its own after being stuck on the story for a few days :P

Edit 2: I found an error! lol They made Yi Kyung a year older than Ji Hyun. But Ji Hyun's birthday is 5 May while Yi Kyung's birthday is 8 November. That is not possible for sisters who share the same mother! (Unless if Ji Hyun was born highly premature, which would explain her smaller size compared to her sister :P )

49 Days

I just watched 49 Days, a Korean drama. It's about a girl who falls into a coma and her spirit is given 49 days to find three people who shed 100% pure tears for her. Then she would be considered worth saving and can come back to life.

Some parts were quite predictable, but somehow I enjoyed the whole drama a lot. The ending was slightly disappointing because I felt the main character acted pretty stupid (silly noble sacrifice kinda thing), and they weaved in too many coincidences for my liking. But still... pretty good overall.

This drama is from 2011, which is quite long ago now, and I realized that they used the same actors as adults and as teenagers. In more recent dramas, the teenage version of the character is usually a younger actor. I guess that trend of using different actors was started less than eight years ago?

Another duck meat kuey teow thng

My parents and I visited a new kuey teow thng place (new to us): Loh Kei. It seems to be a popular place, with some online articles saying that it can be sold out at 9am.

We went on a weekday, and every table was occupied. We managed to get seats at a table where the person was finishing up.

this one is the intestines, gizzard, etc

there's a third bowl of kuey teow thng on the right, which did not make it into this photo

One great thing about this place is that they have red and green chilli (already sliced) at the counter, and you can just go and get it yourself if you need more (emphasis on red!).

However I still think the kuey teow thng at 7 tiao lor (Cecil Street Market) tastes better. For now, that one is still unbeatable!

Finally photogenic mee bandung

I have posted about this mee bandung twice before, the first time for takeaway, and the second time at the stall. When my parents were here, we went to eat at the stall again, and this time the mee bandung came looking quite good (egg spread nicely on top of the noodles, and one prawn smack in the middle.

Since it's a rare occurrence, here's a photo.