Mocking The Sound Of Chinese and Asian Languages

So a video has gone viral of Purdue Northwest Chancellor Thomas Keon speaking at the school's commencement breaking into Asian sounding gibberish after the prior speaker had made some reference to nonsensical made up language.  Keon subsequently apologized, but the controversy lives on, not only for what he said, but also from the reaction of people in the audience who found this funny.  

This incident has triggered a forgotten memory of mine dating back about 50 years ago, when a local radio disc jockey. Roger Carroll at KMPC, started speaking words of fake Chinese on the air.  While that was something that was much more likely to happen 50 years ago than it would be today, I still found it distasteful and wrote a letter of objection to Roger Carroll, who I was otherwise a big fan of.  Around 6:28pm in the evening a couple of days after I had written the letter, my phone rang.  The voice on the other end said "David R. Chan?  This is Roger Carroll from KMPC."  He said he was calling in response to my letter, and his call was in part an apology, and in part of an explanation that he hadn't realized he said something said something offensive.  I replied that while it may not have seemed offensive to him, it in fact was offensive to myself and to others.

A funny sidelight to the call was that I noticed when it turned 6:30pm, and said to him "Shouldn't you be going on the air?"  He said "just a minute," went to his microphone and said "Good evening, this is Roger Carroll on KMPC" (or however he started his show every night), and then returned to our conversation.  It's funny I hadn't thought about this incident in decades until seeing the Purdue video tonight.  But I do remember "David R. Chan?  This is Roger Carroll" as if it happened just yesterday.

What We Ate On The Boat--Discovery Princess On The Mexican Riviera

It was nice to go on an ocean cruise for the first time since early 2016 on the newest ship in the Princess fleet, the Discovery.   After our luggage arrived we headed for the buffet to check it out.  One major difference from our previous cruise is that we were no longer asked to use hand sanitizer before entering the dining room area.  Now, you were requested to actually wash your hands at the conveinently located sinks before walking in.  I think this was as much intended to deal with norovirus, as well as COVID and whatever else is going around.  Correspondingly, when we got to the food, there was no self serve–everything was served by ship personnel, including drinks. Passengers who attempted to serve themsleves when there was no server at hand, were quickly admonished.   However, about three days into the trip they abruptly went fully self serve.  Not sure whether that had to do with reaching a point where there was unlikely to be any kind of outbreak while the cruise was in progress, to make it faster to get your food, or what.  Another interesting change was the addition of purified water machines for people to fill up their own water bottles, extremely important when leaving the boat for an excursion.  In the past, the cruise lines would try to sell you bottled water at exorbitant prices as you disembarked in port, and now they were giving the water for free.  The water machines touted how many thousand plastic bottles were saved by the machine, so I guess being green was deemed to be more important that creating a revenue stream.

The food itself was a mixed bag, whether in the buffet, in the Juneau dining room, or in the Sabatini Italian specialty restaurant.  For example, a couple of outstanding buffet items were the vanilla French toast and the salmon farfalle.  On the other hand, there was little for me to eat at breakfast (no turkey sausage or similar low cholesterol breakfast items as were common on past cruises), and many dishes were too salty or too sweet.  On the plus side, there were plenty of sugar free desserts at lunch and dinner.  There was a theme every night at the dinner buffet (from Brazilian to Asian to American) which did not track what was served in the dining rooms.

Asian food in the buffet was largely bad, but the lo mein and Chinese egg noodle dishes were quite good.  And everyday at noon they would have cook to order ramen, where the Asian passengers would line up in anticipation of the counter opening.  The first time we had it, the ramen was quite good.  The second time it wasn’t.

 

The pork chop suey was a blast from the past.  Not a good blast though.  Actually it bore no resemblance to the real (??) pork chop suey, as there were no bean sprouts.

 

One of the few items in the breakfast buffet I could eat was the salmon and other raw fish items.

Some items sounded more interesting than they turned out to be, such as the fish stew/bouillabase which was mostly shells.

 

The desserts in the buffet looked good, but they largely tasted the same.  This cake extravaganza was impressive looking though.

Dining time in the Ketchikan, Skagway and Juneau dining rooms (a bit incongruous for a Mexican cruise, but the boat was built to visit Alaska) was completely flexible this time–you didn’t have to sit at the same table at the same time at dinner.  Rather you would make a separate reservation for each dinner.  On the plus side, this was a better to deal with varying daily schedules.  On the other hand there was something nice about sitting next to the same people every dinner.  Once again the food was a mixed bag with both good and bad dishes.  This was a good chance to try duck a l'orange, a dish which I seldom eat.

 

There was a nice beef dish almost every night in the dining room, most of which were pretty good.

Escargot wasn't very good.

A nice dish was the veal scallopini.

Interestingly the ship had items both in the buffet and in the dining room which were seemingly in short supply back home, like this iceberg lettuce salad with bacon (lettuce $4.50 a head back home).  Turkey, too.

The premium specialty dining at Sabatini Italian Restaurant was a clear upgrade from the dining room and clearly worth the $25 surcharge.  This is the Stuzzichino Della Casa with tomato, bell pepper and prosciutto.

I generally don't like western style lamb, but the grilled lamb skewers were great.

Calamari was meh.

 

The cheddar cheese fondue with celery was salty and gruesome.

But the pear and celery salad was good.

Linguine with seafood was excellent.

As was the pappardelli beef.

 

Mediterranean seafood pouch wrapped in paper was interesting and fairly good.

Sole picatta was excellent.

Certainly this wasn't the best cruise food I've had, but you really can't complain about round the clock all you can eat.

 

John Wooden Predicts BCS Semi-Final Losses By Georgia and/or Michigan

Of course not really, since John Wooden passed away in 2010.  However this blog has posted predictions several times based on the principles of John Wooden which have in fact come to pass.  John Wooden has articulated a truism of sports which strangely has never been acknowledged by the sporting public, yet keeps proving itself over and over again.  That truism is that a long winning streak can turn into a heavy and potentially insurmountable burden.  Time and time again there have been stunning upsets in sports, with the only common denominator being the fact that the losing team was undefeated.  In this regard, Wooden stated that a loss at the right time can be a good thing that actually insures a team's success because it serves like a reset button.  There are many examples of this at work, from last year's BCS championship game where one-loss Georgia avenged it's previous loss to unbeaten Alabama, as he predicted on this blog a year ago, the stunning loss by the 2015 Kentucky basketball superteam on its way to an expected 40-0 season, to the unbeaten UNLV basketball team that fell to Duke, to the unbeaten New England Patriots team that lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, among many other examples.  And don't forget undefeated TCU's loss to Kansas State last week.

Of course Wooden's own UCLA basketball team seemed to defy this rule with a number of long winning streaks, which shows this is a subjective rule.  How long does a winning streak have to be for it to become a burden?  If a team is so much superior to everybody else (like some of Wooden's teams), even if a winning streak might be adversely affecting your performance, you still might be good enough to keep on going. But the fact is that a disproportionate amount of major upsets occur where the losing team had been undefeated, and that there are so few teams in major American sports that have an undefeated championship season.  So while everyone expects undefeated Georgia and Michigan to meet next month in the BCS championship game, don't be surprised if that doesn't happen.