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!