Team Bulldog

Not that long ago, I wrote about watching Voice 4, and mentioned Partners for Justice.

Then I was reminded of Partners for Justice again, because I watched Team Bulldog: Off-duty Investigation!

This drama is a rather silly but highly-enjoyable show. In the main characters, you have:

• One - a police detective who is extremely rich due to an inheritance from his late father, who was a corrupt policeman who took bribes. He stands for justice (in his own way), and uses that money to fund his own investigations, as a way to “give back” that money to society.
• Two - a crime show director who tries her best to get breaking news for her show before the police get to it.
• Three - a former forensic examiner who was the best in his field (and still is, according to himself), and who now works as a mortician who dresses up corpses for funerals.
• Four - a former gangster who now opens a bar, and can be counted on to lend a hand as long as it is not yet time to open his bar. :P He is also asthmatic, so he would always use his inhaler right before he starts to fight.
  
• Five - a former criminal profiler (also supposedly the best) who now opens a private detective agency. His detective agency doesn't seem to be doing very well, so he does multi-level marketing to supplement his income.
  

From the title, I thought that these five would be working together all the time, but no, they didn’t even all know each other at the beginning of the show! Thanks to that, we have a scene where multi-level marketer is introduced to former gangster (who is rather rich and good-humoured), and sells him a number of items. Haha...

The cases that they solve are quite okay...not specially good but not bad either. Anyway, because of the cast of characters (and all the jokes in the plot, of course), it reminded me of Partners for Justice which was also enjoyable for the same reason. I hope they will make a second season!

A butter boat?

I made Dutch butter cake again!

This time I decided to make only half the recipe. I figured that I could fit the aluminium foil to the size of cake that I wanted.

Well, that was correct, but it seems like the “tsunami waves” (see the photo in my previous post) would make the cake spread if it weren’t “contained” in a pan!

The far end is the part that was close to the door of the oven. So the part that spread the most was towards the inside of the oven, where it was not "blocked" by the edge of the pan. I was afraid it would spill over, but luckily it didn't!

So I think I ended up with a Dutch butter boat instead? :P

At first I thought that the sides did not spread because the shorter edges are held better by the corners. But looking at the waves from last time, maybe the cake wouldn’t have spread in that direction anyway. 

I wanted to take a photo of the boat-shaped cake on the cutting board, before actually cutting into it. But I forgot...so here’s the photo after it’s partly sliced up.

And inside…

It doesn’t look that good in the photo (and probably also in real life), but the buttery taste is as awesome as before!

Getting lucky with my egg

Remember my post on poaching eggs?

I just poached another egg to go with leftover salmon and broccoli (baked for lunch). I also toasted a slice of bread, the heel of a home-made loaf, to go with it. (I recently learned that the end slices of a loaf of bread is called the “heel”. There are other ways to call it, but “heel” seems to be the most common term.) When I slice my bread, the last slice tends to be rather thick, because it gets harder to slice when the remaining bread is thin. It doesn’t work very well for breakfast because even if I toast and butter it, the ratio of bread to butter is too high. (Does that make sense? :P ) So this was a good way to use it.

Anyway, I buttered the toast before putting the poached egg on it. Because when I checked online for what people eat with their poached eggs on toast (popular answers are avocado, tomato, and bacon, none of which I had handy), most people say that the poached egg should be placed on buttered toast.

This time, my egg looks nice except for that little yellowish knob on top. I suspect that there was a tiny break in the yolk...but the yolk seeping out must have cooked immediately and sealed the hole up again. Lucky me! I also forgot to add vinegar to the water before plopping my egg in (add horrified scream emoji here), but luckily my egg still held together quite well. I think that it’s because it was an egg which I had placed in the fridge immediately upon buying it, so it still held its freshness. Some egg white still got lost, and it looks a little more than what I lost in my last few poached egg trials, so I really should remember the vinegar next time!

As for why the egg is not placed on the centre of the toast, it was to cover the unbrowned parts of the bread. Besides being thicker, the last slice of my bread also tends to be uneven (for the same reason mentioned above, that it’s harder to slice), so when toasting it on the pan, the parts touching the pan got browned but not the others.

Anyway this is the full dish, together with the leftovers. The combination of colours is not bad, so it looks better if we don't look too closely... :P

The salmon was a little dry, so I drizzled olive oil and sprinkled some parsley on it. It was still a bit dry with that...but eaten with the liquidy egg and buttery toast, I guess it was fine.

Portrait of a kitty

 

Because this week's photo theme is portrait! Remember the last one?

Bad guys have it easy

I recently watched Kairos. I didn’t have high expectations, but it turned out better than I thought it would! There is a man whose daughter gets kidnapped, and a woman who lost her phone. When calling her lost phone to try to get it back, somehow she gets connected to the man, and the story goes from there…

The synopsis does mention that they are connected between one month apart. But I had forgotten that detail when I started watching, and it was interesting to see the clues they dropped. (Recently I have started doing this: After I check the synopsis of a story and feel that it is worth watching, I will just bookmark it, and when I start watching, I will not recheck the synopsis. It does seem better not to know so much about the story, and let the details unveil themselves while watching!)

As usual I would have a few gripes about the details. Their phone call can only get connected for one minute, at 10:33pm every night. Any messages that they send will also only get through at 10:33pm. So once they had figured that out, you would expect them to send all the important information first, then make their call at 10:33pm and make full use of that one minute. But...they would check and read their messages at 10:33pm first, and then only make the call! Once they even took the time to watch a video before they started talking!

And they would also say things like, “I will send you the information” during their call, instead of “I sent you the information.” But if they send the information after the call, the other person would need to wait 24 hours to receive it!

As for the duration of the call, at the beginning I admired how they did it, because they would cut the call off in the middle of a sentence sometimes. But it became ridiculous at the end of the drama… at one point, the guy says, “here’s my plan”, and tells her the plan over the phone. There is no way the plan can be explained in one minute!

And after that it gets worse: The guy from the future calls her and she records the call while the guy from the future gets evidence. And in this call, somehow there is no one-minute limit. Again, it’s ridiculous because there is no way they can time the bad guy to say his confession at exactly 10:33pm to 10:34pm!

However, the twists and turns of the plot are really awesome, and keep you interested. Some people get to die multiple times! :P

There are of course some unexplained stuff about how certain things change, and somehow the memory of the guy in the future does not change to include the “new past”. Also, with different “future timelines” (the one where they didn’t change anything from the past vs the one after they managed to change things), they actually made it so that the person in the future would recall the “alternate timeline” when the time comes (for example, old 3 Sept - child gets kidnapped, new 3 Sept - child is fine → on 3 Sept the guy in the future would somehow recall the “kidnapped” memories even though the child is currently fine). At first the guy doesn’t know it was from the “other timeline”, and he needs to slowly figure it out.

However, as a lot of stories go, the good guy needs to spend lots of time figuring out how things work, but the bad guys figure things out pretty quickly! There was also a time when I felt they messed up the timeline and gave the bad guy a memory from the future (from the alternate timeline, but the day hadn’t arrived yet). I could be mistaken though...the order of events got quite messed up in my head as the story progressed, so I can’t be sure of anything!

I do like how they came up with events to make the people believe that they were connected through time. No one believes easily, and needs a good reason to. One was especially funny, because this person answers the phone call from the future, talks to the guy, then sees the same guy in the present, NOT talking on the phone!

The title of the drama is Kairos, which means “the right time” or “the opportune time” in Greek. It seems that there are two words for “time” in Greek. The other word is “chronos”, which refers to the sequence of time (which fits the word “chronology”). I looked up the word when watching this drama; you can find one of the explanations here.

Actually this drama reminds me of Nine, because they both have parallel timelines which are a certain duration of time apart.

Voice 4

Some time back, I watched Voice 4. I have an extremely good impression of Voice after watching the first three seasons, and reading back my old posts on the series, I am surprised to find that I had so many complaints about the first season. :P 

I guess the series left such a good impression because of the second and third seasons!

Season 4 brings in yet another lead detective, this time from the US! He’s a Korean adopted to the US, so he fits into the team easily without a translator. He was on an operation to capture a criminal who had escaped to Korea, and he gets tangled up with the Voice team because his sister is killed by the murderer they are looking for.

At the beginning of the story, the US detective asks his boss to extend his visa so that he can look for his sister’s killer. (he was supposed to go back the very next day after capturing the criminal he was after) He is told that the visa can be extended for seven days at the most. And because of this, I started counting the days as the episodes went by, because I wanted to know whether they really did wrap up in seven days!

And they really did...this drama could have been called Seven Days if it weren’t part of the Voice franchise!

There were still some strange/slightly-ridiculous happenings in this drama...but I didn’t jot them down (I’ve given up and decided to accept most of the odd happenings, so as not to ruin every drama for myself :P ). But one bears mentioning: In one episode, two of the cops find themselves in the hideout of a criminal, and suddenly five wild dogs come in and surround them. They both have guns, but neither shoots, and instead they fight off the dogs with their bare hands. :O

What are the chances of that happening in real life? (Note: The dogs are ferocious, and they know that the dogs have attacked humans before, under orders from the bad guy!)

A few things that I remember thinking while watching the drama:
- This US cop seems to know very well how the police operate in Korea, despite having just arrived :P
- The US cop is extremely serba-boleh, he studied medicine before he became a cop, so he has knowledge in medicine. He also knows a lot about dogs because “he has worked with drug-sniffing dogs in the past”. And he is also extremely observant…a lot of the cases are closed because he noticed something. It makes me worry about how the team closed cases after the previous team leader (from seasons 2 and 3) left, and before this guy arrived! :P

I liked how they brought back a cop who had left the team at the end of season 1. And the ending...let’s just say that even though the whole season 4 could very well be standalone, the ending linked everything back to the previous seasons. But the stupid thing is, how could you go alone to dangerous places, follow strangers wherever they ask, not worrying that they might kill you? *rolls eyes*

Anyway, I’m still looking forward to season 5. And speaking of looking forward to new seasons, it makes me recall Partners for Justice, which has two seasons, but no more are coming out! I really wanted to watch more of that, because I enjoyed watching both seasons...mainly because of the funny interactions between the characters!

User-friendly packaging

Recently I received free samples of a cleanser. When I saw the package, I noticed the screw threads on the opening and thought to myself, "Nice, we can open and close the sample packet."

However, when I opened the package, the top snapped, and I thought, "Eh? It's supposed to break after all?"

For a while I didn't think of it any more...then last night while brushing my teeth, I was just looking at the package in front of me...and I thought again, what are those screw threads for then? It's not like it makes the package look better.

I had left the cap partially stuck on (instead of twisting the whole thing off), so I now twisted it off and rinsed it to see whether the cap was actually hollow and could be fitted onto the screw-threaded opening.

And that's when I noticed that even though the part of the cap that was attached to the package was flat, the other end was hollow! So we are supposed to snap the cap off, turn it over, and screw the cap on to close the package.

And voilà!

On the left is the unopened packet, and on the right is the one that has been opened, and closed back after using!

This makes me think of the other kind of cap that is used on ointment tubes. The kind of tube that has a sealed aluminium surface under its cap, that you need to poke through when you first use it. At first we used a knife or a screwdriver to poke through the foil, then one day I saw a package that had instructions on how to open it: Unscrew the cap, turn the cap over and prick the seal with the top of the cap. The cap of these tubes is always hollow with a pointy cone inside the hollow space, with the hollow space just the right size to fit over the tube opening, and therefore with the cone nicely-positioned to prick the seal! And the genius of that kind of design is that the pointy end will not prick your finger because your finger is not small enough to enter the hollow part!

I wonder how many people don't notice this kind of genius packaging...it's kinda a waste if they are not put to use!

Heating up

Last week's theme was hot. Which was the complete opposite of the weather!

But I do have a hot oven!

Scent of a teddy

I'm watching this drama where they switch the kid's teddy bear twice (up till now). Once to replace it with a teddy bear with a location tracker, and the second time to check the bear for a tracker. (different people switching it, of course) But how come the kid doesn't notice? It's a bear she carries around all the time. Like a bantal busuk, there should be a smell!

Bye-bye, teddies!

This is the last instalment of the TeddyVille posts!

We have now reached the gift shop. I snapped a few photos before they told us that we were not allowed to take photos in the gift shop. But I won’t post them here...since I guess they don’t want to show people what they are selling?

Actually there is one place where we can take photos in the gift shop, which is at the mirror.

But when I tried on a hat and went to the mirror to take a photo, the employee came up to me and clarified, “You cannot take photos of what we are selling, you can only take photos of the mirror.”

So I guess we can only share reflections of what they are selling. :P 

There is writing above the mirror too!

I bought a postcard...and they gave me three stickers.

Then we exit to the area near the entrance...which you have seen a bit of in my first post on TeddyVille.

There is a Steiff Welcome Bear (only one in Asia). I guess it must be quite old, because it is ugly. :P

Then we have this huge tribute to Beary…

What's that hanging from the top? Let's take a closer look!

It's a tiny teddy bear!

Seems like the museum received a few recognitions.

There was also a bear catcher machine. Which we didn’t try (would need money :P ), but it was probably not available during Covid season either.

Are these two bears visiting TeddyVille Museum too?

I just noticed that the handbag is heart-shaped. :P 

That's all folks! Guess what? This is the 21st post for TeddyVille Museum. I took five months revisiting the museum, so I guess the entrance fee was worth it!

Stories that shouldn't have existed

I just watched the movie Recalled. It is very interesting! I would recommend it if you like thriller/mystery.

But there's a problem... at the conclusion of the story, I was left with a fundamental question. Asking it would be a minor spoiler, so I shall put the text a little smaller: Why did the guy have to pretend to be her husband in the first place?

It is similar to when I read The Da Vinci Code: Why did the dying guy have to leave all those clues in the first place? The ending basically told us that it was unnecessary to pass on the secret!

But Recalled is still good...it keeps you guessing about what is actually going on! And though there were many curious events, I didn't have any problems accepting the chain of events once everything had been explained.

Only that one question. The one that would mean the whole story didn't have to take place...

P.S. There is a superman in the story! (you'll understand only if you watch it; it would be giving away too much to say it here :P )

A blue coffee shop

This coffee shop that I frequent when I go to the market has a blue sign board and also a blue zinc roof.

I was just going to snap a photo of the blue sign, and saw that the colour of the zinc roof was also blue when taking the photo. Then it was only upon looking at the photo that I noticed the giant cup of kopi-O!

Sleep sleep sleep

A friend shared this on Facebook, and I just wanted to store it here. :D

To the windowwwww to the wall.
To my comfy bed I crawl.
Don't need to hang out with y'all.
Ahhhh Sleep Sleep Sleep.

Other flavours of mackerel

At the beginning of the year, I started cooking mackerel. I wrote about my saba shioyaki here.

After cooking it several more times (and buying frozen mackerel two more times - each packet comes with 3-4 fillets), I decided that I should look for different recipes to cook with mackerel.

I found several recipes from Jamie Oliver, and some were really simple.

The other day, I grilled my mackerel after marinating it in honey and orange juice (plus some orange zest too). It was inspired by this recipe, though in the end it was nothing similar since I changed it a whole lot :P 

The skin looked nice until the very end when the liquid had evaporated, then it caramelized and turned black. Taste-wise, it was okay.

Then today I tried out this simplest recipe which involves just grilling the mackerel and adding lemon juice. It even starts from a cold pan, definitely a recipe for children! And you don't even need oil!

Basically we put the mackerel fillets skin-side down in a non-stick pan, then turn on the heat to high. Then we season it a bit, and leave it there for 4-5 minutes for the skin to crisp up. After that, flip and just cook for 30 more seconds. Then comes the flavouring: Put lemon juice in the pan (without touching the crispy skin), and shake the pan. The recipe says to turn off the heat before giving the pan a shake, but I forgot, and left my lime juice (I used lime because it was cheaper...and a lime is smaller than a lemon, so it suits my portion :P ) there to evaporate while soaking into the fish.

Overall, it was nice. A little bit too sour, maybe? But it was fine eaten with rice.

The end result looks practically like my saba shioyaki... I think that I will try this don't-touch-for-four-minutes method with saba shioyaki in future.

Also, since we use lime here, the fish didn't need to be treated with cooking wine. I might also just try it with orange juice next time, but I'm not sure whether that would be acidic enough to take away the fishy smell.

Tourist bears

In the last post, we were at the photo section at the end of the TeddyVille Museum. Here’s what else they had there.

There was a map on the right of the doorway. There were two photos on it, and I think that they are trying to get customers to buy a teddy bear (called Beary) from their gift shop, then send them a photo of themselves with the bear somewhere around the world. Unfortunately (but understandably :P ) it doesn’t look like they have received a lot of photos!

Beary went to Japan!

For this next photo, I didn’t know where this was, but I was curious because it looked like it was in Malaysia! When I searched up “the grand old lady”, I found that it is situated in Miri, and is the first oil well in Malaysia.

There are also bears sailing in the sea!

Then there was a bear taking a selfie…

...with this as the background.

See?

Note: Here we have our back to the doorway in the previous post (or should I just say that the bear is facing the doorway?), and the photo booth is on the right.

After that, just before the entrance to the gift shop, for some reason there was some trivia about the Malayan sun bear, which is the world’s smallest bear.

With an ugly fake bear :P

Five times poaching eggs

I had tried making poached eggs before (I found that I had already posted about poached eggs six years ago!), but stopped trying because I always lost too much egg white in the process.

But recently a friend posted a lovely poached egg she had made, and also shared a video that helped her. She said that the method worked for her immediately, so I decided to give it another try.

Well, it definitely did not work for me on the first attempt. The first attempt was so bad that I did not even bother taking a photo.

The video that she shared does it this way: Boil two inches of water in a non-stick pot, add vinegar and reduce to a gentle simmer, then add eggs, cover and turn off the heat, then leave for 4 minutes. After that, scoop the eggs out with a slotted spoon, drain the excess water, and serve.

I tried this, but the egg white disintegrated and I was left with just an overcooked yolk and a bit of egg white not really sticking to it.

I decided that the simmer may have been too “gentle”, so I tried again with adding the egg when the water was actually boiling (I figured that the first thing I should do is to keep the egg white together! Otherwise each attempt would be such a waste, which is why I gave up on it all those years ago)

Attempt 2: Did it work?

This one turned out beautiful! Except that both the egg white and the egg yolk were extremely cooked. The white was as firm as a fried egg. The good thing about using a non-stick pot was that the egg could be taken out easily.

But my non-stick pot is huge...and boiling the water takes ages, too much just to cook one egg! So I checked online whether it was really necessary to use a non-stick pot. And at the same time, looked around for more tips.

Here is what I found:
- Practically all recipes that talk about poaching multiple eggs say that we should put the eggs in a clockwise/counter-clockwise direction, so that we can take the eggs out in the same order. Makes sense.
- Some people add vinegar to the water. Some people say it’s not needed; your eggs just need to be fresh and the egg white will stick together better. Someone says that vinegar helps to “cook” the egg white so that your egg white won’t fall apart even if your water is a little less hot than necessary. (I still plan to use vinegar as a fail-safe because it is most important to me not to waste my egg whites!)
- Some people say that using a non-stick pot is a must because eggs are not non-stick and they will stick to the bottom of the pot. This is why I decided to try using my smaller non-non-stick pot, but put my sieve in and cracked my egg into the sieve. That way, I could just take the egg out in the sieve.
- Everyone says that the water should be simmering, not boiling. Some leave the water on the stove (without turning off the heat). The time is 2 minutes for a soft poached egg, and up to 4 minutes for a firmer one.

Taking into account all these tips, I tried another poached egg in my small pot (with the sieve method that I mentioned above). I tried to use a gentle simmer (they say, lovely small bubbles!), but my egg white disintegrated again. :(

Attempt 3: What is this?

At least the yolk is not that much overcooked this time.

This morning I was going to make half-boiled eggs for breakfast, but I suddenly figured that I could make poached eggs instead. So I tried again, with a boil instead of a simmer (again, I just wanted to avoid losing egg!). The egg white still separated into pieces, but at least most of it stuck together in clumps and I didn’t lose so much.

Attempt 4: Very ugly

For the second egg, I decided not to turn off the heat. So I cracked the egg in again when the water was boiling, but instead of switching off the fire, I turned it to low so that the water would continue simmering. And...voilà, finally it works!

Attempt 5: Looks nice...

both eggs on a plate

after seasoning and poking the yolk

It may be hard to see from the photo, but the first egg had a slightly oozy yolk. The second one is more watery, so we can see it flowing out. I just hope I can replicate it next time. I am still not sure how much of it is due to my eggs being fresher (my first attempt, the one without a photo, was using older eggs, and the four with pictures here are using eggs that I just bought). Seeing that attempt 3 was actually quite similar to attempt 1, maybe the eggs don't need to be that fresh if we use vinegar...there might still be hope for slightly older eggs!

The voyaging apple

When I was moving some things around in the fridge, I thought I saw and heard two apples fall out. But looking around, there was only one apple on the floor, so I thought that I may have been mistaken. But I was still very much convinced that I had seen two apples falling, so I looked further around...and found the other apple, rolled all the way to the living room! (almost 5 metres away)

Ways of doing things

When writing code, we need lots of names for the variables and functions that we use. It is especially a pain when people use strange names that actually mean nothing (or worse, mean something other than intended) because of bad English. Sometimes those with bad English actually misunderstand a name/comment that was written in perfectly good English!

Here there will be some idiots who refuse to improve naysayers who will say, “We should use our bad English so that we can understand it!” Well...nope.

Because there are so many ways to write badly, and different “bad English” users would still interpret it differently. But when something is written properly, there will only be one way to interpret it correctly, as long as the person is capable.

I recently wrote about watching Mouse. I watched a post-drama interview (I mean post-drama as in after the screening had ended), and one of the actors mentioned that playing a bad guy opens up possibilities. He says something like this: “There aren’t many ways to play nice characters, but for a bad character, there are so many ways that we can choose to portray it!”

In the same way, there are many ways to write bad code, but much fewer ways to write good code.

A mysterious door

Where does this door lead to?

(Well, it's actually the door at the bottom of my bookshelf :P )

Mouse

Mouse is a psychological thriller, and it definitely lives up to its name!

Every episode reveals something new, and keeps you wanting to know more.

The first few episodes had me really interested, but although it did manage to keep my interest till the end, it slowly descended into the realm of ridiculousness ("realm of ridiculousness" - I like this expression, I should remember it for future dramas :P ). The plot is seriously thick...there are so many characters that I wish I had taken notes :P 

There are multiple shocking revelations in the course of the show, and though some are good, some of them left me feeling tricked. The good thing is that most of the "strange" points are clarified later.

I am annoyed at some discrepancies though:
1. The boy said he killed his whole family! And then they twist the story here and there and it turns out to be not true?
2. How did the prison inmate manage to go to the crime scene and figure out this and that about his son? It seems ridiculous that a prison guard would bring him there for no reason, and it supposedly happened even before anyone knew that was the crime scene! And even if he did go there, it didn't make sense that he could find out that information...
3. How did the girl see who operated on the main character? The doctor was quietly brought in and out!
4. The "very nice" boy turned into a "cold" man. Why? No good reason...so it didn't make sense.

There are some points which I am not sure whether they really did not explain, or whether they did but I missed them. I am a bit tempted to re-watch the whole thing just to get all the details... but unfortunately Lee Seung Gi is the main character, and I don't feel like seeing him all over again :P

Overall, most of the plot still makes sense, so I would still say that this drama is recommended!

Oh, and there are four very unfortunate women in the story...they keep incurring mishap after mishap! For some of them, you could say that the later incidents are due to the first, but at least for one of them, it is not...

Teddy doctors and sportsmen

Oh no! These bears are sick! Luckily TeddyVille has its own hospital and doctors! (or maybe just one doctor? :P )

Next we come upon a prize-giving ceremony. Who are these champions?

They are Nicol David and Lee Chong Wei!

Then we reach a doorway guarded by a teddy guard! Except that it is not a doorway...

Back to the doorway later, but first let’s take a look at this photo booth. The booth was unmanned, probably because it was MCO time (I’ve forgotten which MCO). There was a teddy bear sitting there, and it was so cute I gave it a hug.

When we were taking photos with the doorway, my friend decided to take a photo with this teddy bear. So I followed suit!

Come to think of it, the teddy “guard” was probably meant for photo purposes...but poor thing, we ignored it! :P

There were plenty of other photo-purpose items in this area, but since this post is getting long, I shall keep that for the next post!

Pikachu the protector

I got myself a cable protector!

It actually isn't a perfect fit for any of my cables, but I bought it for its cuteness, not for its functionality :P

It is of a rubbery material, so the ears can wiggle when you move them! ♥