big WOWO

Sarah Palin

It looks like Sarah Palin will be stepping down from her post as Governor of Alaska.  Believe it or not, people are actually saying that she’s doing so in order to lay the groundwork for a shot at the presidency.  Unbelievable.  If you look at the announcement on her own website, it’s clear that she either can’t write, or she hired a ghost writer who is unable to write.  That’s pretty bad for someone who claims to have read “all” the newspapers.  The scary thing is that after Ensign and Sanford got tripped up with their infidelity, she may actually be a GOP frontrunner.  I’m all for watching the GOP stumble, trip, and embarass themselves over the inane nonsense that they’ve put us through, but come on.  If Palin is the frontrunner, it’s hard to make the argument that we’re truly living in a two-party system.

I’d heard of Marie Digby on all the Asian American sites before (she’s half Japanese according to Wiki), but I only checked out her videos after reading Guerilla Publicity by Jay Conrad Levinson et al.  In GP, the authors mention how Digby publicized her original videos by posting her cover songs and picking up fans from people who were googling the covers.  It was a brilliant strategy, and seeing how successful she has become, it clearly worked.  Not only did she pick up many fans, and not only did her success afford her radio and TV coverage, but now I can’t get that “Say It Again” song out of my head.

Another part of her publicity strategy was her youtube singing contest, in which she invited people to copy her work and put it on youtube.  This helped to bring her publicity, plus it uncovered people who are talented in their own right.  See Mr. Cendana below:

By the way, is it my imagination, or do these contests seem to have a lot of Asian American entrants?

Apparently China is way ahead of the United States in implementing green power.  Many of the changes taking place now in our federal government have already been enacted in China, and China is poised to be the #1 market in wind turbines this year.  Solar energy is exploding as well.  With little Bush’s disdain for the environment, it doesn’t surprise me.

We’ve got some catching up to do.  I wonder why no one has proposed that places like Las Vegas and Phoenix don’t try to specialize in green power.  Quoting a Chinese official:

“It’s the Gobi Desert,” said Wang Yu, the vice director of economic planning. “There’s not much other use for it.”

I remember during the housing boom how people were talking about Las Vegas as a software mecca.  Software?  Running hot servers and computers in a place with no water?  It’s the desert!

So I came across this video on the front page of YouTube when I went online this morning.  Asian women can get “Bigger Rounder & Brighter Eyes” through makeup.  Woohoo!  I’ve got an idea though–instead of just faking it with makeup, why don’t we just invent a surgical procedure to make ourselves look more like White people?  Oh, that’s right, we already do that.

It’s unfortunate the way it’s titled.  It would be like a black makeup artist advertising “whiter skin or straighter hair.”  When is this going to end?

(cartoon from here)

If you talk to fundamentalist Christians, you’ll learn that each one has a story about God’s salvation.  Each person has a testimony, a come-to-Jesus moment, where they “realize” that Jesus died for their sins and that all Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, and atheists are condemned to eternity in Hell for not believing in Christ.  I never had such a moment with respect to religion (I still prefer the Flying Spaghetti Monster over the late J.C.), but this week I did have a revelation about life.  My revelation was this: I’ve officially entered middle age, and I’ve adopted the middle aged mindset about responsibility and legacy that comes along with it.

Things are just very different from what they were ten years ago, or even five years ago.  I don’t know if it’s marriage or kids that send a guy into middle age.  I used to value confidence and personal spark in other people.  I still value both, but direction, execution, and endurance have supplanted the other two in terms of importance.  In other words, I value people’s abilities to set goals, fulfill their promises, and keep on running until they hit the finish line, rather than their ability to sprint and change direction.  Sprinting and changing direction are still important, and I think they are absolutely crucial for young people to experience and live.  Older people, however, need the ability to stay the course in what they do.  Otherwise, how can one really expect to achieve anything?  Without discipline, it’s impossible to build anything long lasting.  Without that long term focus, we get caught up on details and never achieve.

When you are young, it’s perfectly fine to run in fits and starts.  It’s good to join and start lots of organizations, and it’s good to learn about what you’re really about.  Date around, and let the world teach you what it needs to.  It’s okay to live in a new city every year; follow life wherever it leads you, and above all, LEARN.  Learn what you’re about; learn what makes you unique.  Learn about your own strengths, and develop them.

Once you hit a certain age–for some it’s older than for others–you need to pick a course and STAY the course.  You need to accomplish and win at something, even if it’s not the first choice of your youth.  This is what the Alpha-Man was talking about in point #1 over here.  I agree with him that 30 is a good age to hunker down.  By that time, you should have picked not just your battles, but your war.

So my come-to-Jesus moment was this: I realize how fortunate I am to be employed in the post-Bush years, and I need to start working more. Stay the course.  My daughter has taught me that I can live on five hours of sleep a night, and with this new attitude, I’m moving forward.  A few thoughts:

A) Kids are expensive.  I’ve got some major, major kiddie expenses coming up in the not-too-distant future.  They’re good expenses though, as they will give my son and daughter opportunities that I never had.

B) Hanging out only with nonprofit activists, I believe, can sometimes create bad habits.  One reason Thymos has been successful is that our people come from a broad section of society.  We’ve got nonprofit types talking and moving the dialogue, but we have business types who are getting things done.

C)  Working in business teaches a lot about people.  There are some real learning experiences here.

I’m going to continue my activist activities, I’ll give up creative writing when they tear the pen (literally, a pen these days) out of the fingers of my dead body, and as far as I’m concerned, this site will be alive and kicking as long as I am, but I also need to focus on business.  With that in mind, I just launched my new business site.  I’ll be using this new blog to talk about finances and living.  Hopefully my political nature won’t slip out.

Here’s Part I of the request, which only applies to some of you: I don’t expect most WOWOs to be applying for mortgages through some dude in Oregon just because I asked, but I do hope you’ll at least think of me and think good thoughts about my efforts.  Feel free to drop comments on my mortgage site too–actually, please drop comments.  And if you do happen to hear of someone looking to refi or purchase a house, I do hope you’ll think of me.  The money will go towards my two beautiful children–which is as good an activist cause as any.

Now many of you don’t live on the West Coast, so….

Here’s Part II of the request: If you live outside of the West Coast (my #2 source of traffic is New York, #4 is Massachusetts) and don’t plan to buy Real Estate here, my services won’t be of use to you.  However, money will still be of much use to people in your community who support activist efforts.  If there are businesspeople in your community who are doing right by your community, support them with your business.  Help them advertise by telling your friends about them. Establish spheres of trust.  We Asian people screw one another too often over money.  We’ve spoken often on this site about Asian investors in film, and I can assure you the same thing goes on all over the place.  Support those who support the causes you care about.  It’s the only way to make these causes work.

Last year, when Thymos invited Frank Chin and Curtis Choy to Portland, we were in the red for quite some time.  We were fortunate that Michelle Ing, a young partner at law firm Crowell-Ing in Salem, stepped up to help us.  Michelle actually volunteered to financially support the cause without us even asking!  Now that’s support!  John and Janet Jay from Studio J also stepped up soon after.  This is not to discount the wonderful government agencies who also helped us–they were absolutely invaluable too–but the private sector really inspired our people and helped us to solicit more donations.  Without courageous Asian American entrepreneurs and businesspeople like Michelle, John, and Janet, we would’ve struggled to pay for what turned out to be one of the greatest events in Portland’s Asian American history.  If businesspeople support the community, we need to support them.  I believe it’s an obligation.  Find them in your community.  They’re out there.

Seriously, our causes are bankrupt, and it’s because often there ain’t no green supporting it (apologies to those in other countries).  We can change this with the way we do business.

Anyway, that’s my two part request.  Hope I don’t sound like I’m panhandling, but this activist just hit a big milestone.  This’ll hopefully be the last time I mention this.

Hope everyone is experiencing good weather (90’s in Portland tomorrow!).

No real post today because I’m working on a big project that is coming out in the next week or so  ( that I hope you all will help me with), but I saw the video above, and I couldn’t help but laugh.  They look like they’re having so much fun!  Ignore the racist comments on the video; I think it’s great that people can have fun with a foreign song like this.  And even though that dude is a bit intense, he probably sounds better than I do when I go to Asian karaoke.

If you want to see an interesting and strangely relaxing instrumental version of this song, see the video that led me to the video above (the one above was just too fun not to print first):

If you want to read something related to a previous discussion we had about Asian Americans and multicultural stories, see this clip from a K-Drama:

Notice how the woman and the guy in the audience are the only Korean people in the room. I wonder what the story is.  Do they all interact, or is it just the foreign experience just a backdrop to the main story.

(Edit: Check out the K-Drama subtitle at 1:20: “Every shalala every WOWO still shines!”  Hahaha!!!!)

There’s an article in the Times today about Michael Jackson, and how no one will ever be as big as Michael again.  The article presents an interesting historical look at some other big names in the show biz.  According to the author, we have too many choices for any single star to capture an entire public’s imagination as people did back in the day.

Many pundits have presented this same view.  I agree with them.  We only have one President of the United States, so Obama was able to capture our attention, but for artists and others, there are just too many choices and options competing for our attention.  David Brooks wrote a column about this a while back, where he talked about about how we all listen to different music these days.

For Asian American culture, this will be interesting given that the only really universal AA writer whom everyone knows is Amy Tan.  These days, an Asian American writes a book about about Asian people trying to ingratiate, I mean, assimilate, and no one cares about the next big Asian American thing.  It’s like, “Read that, done that.”  What will life be like in an age where it’s all about choice?

Don’t get me wrong–choice is good.  But how can we get a mass conversation going with such a large variety of choices?  I don’t mean this to be rhetorical–I believe it’s something we’ll have to figure out.

I found this NY Times piece at 8A, which offers an explanation on why the AF/WM numbers are so much greater than the AM/WF numbers–Asian guys are shorter, and therefore White women don’t want to date us.  Similarly, according to the article, black women are taller, which may make White men less interested in dating them–or them less interested in dating White men.  As you can see from the comments, the article and site took a bit of a beating from readers.

For those who have been around the AA blogosphere for a long time, this theory is nothing new.  Ten years ago (god, I’m old), a controversial article by Steve Sailer came out, called “Is Love Colorblind?“, where he discusses his version of the same thing–Asian men are short and feminine, and black guys are tall and masculine, and therefore we get the shaft.  The AA blogosphere went wild.  In the end, according to the White Steve Sailer, he’s a White man, and he’s preferred by Asian women, and therefore, it sucks to be Asian and male.  Woo hoo.  (And dollars from Rice Chasahs since there’s a chnlove ad on the bottom of his webpage.)  However, despite the controversy in the blogosphere, Sailer’s theory wasn’t new at the time either; it just happened to be controversial because it was written by a male member of the majority race whom our current Kingstonian culture benefits.  If you look at some of the work by Stanley and Derald Sue, many were saying similar stuff in the 70’s.   It’s funny to hear this stuff, and then to hear it again.  I had a conversation with one of the 44s, and we were talking about how all this IR stuff from the AA perspective was stated by Frank Chin over 30 years ago.  We say it, and then we say it again; we just don’t know that we’re repeating ourselves as a group.  It’s nice to see it finally getting mainstream press.  Even though it’s an uncomfortable topic, I for one appreciate that people are finally shedding light on this issue.  The more light we shed, the closer we’ll come to resolution.  And maybe we can stop repeating ourselves.

Some of the comments in the Times blog are interesting.  First, there’s an Asian American guy in the UK who talks about experience in Europe vs in the U.S.  See his comment here.  Then there’s a comment about social status, which I’ve found to be true in my own experiences.  Then there’s a comment about Asian men being less heavy than white men and therefore less masculine–I’m losing weight myself in preparation for my athletic training, thank goodness I’m already married!  Then there’s a comment by an Asian American woman about how bad Asian men act.  Believe it or not, I was glad she didn’t just make it a physical thing–it’s much easier to respond to cultural complaints than physical ones.

Seriously, the short term solution is this–for both Asian men and Asian women and minorities in general.  Whenever there’s an imbalance or preference or disparity in any kind of market environment that disempowers you, accept the fact that you’ll have to be better to compete on equal terms.  Still try to solve the problem at the societal level while accepting knowledge that you’re at a disadvantage as an individual.  It’s the way the world works, and the sooner you accept it, the faster you’ll be able to move.  It’s not fair, but at least it’s a way to get in the game and win.

Billy Mays, the well known infomercial pitchman of Oxiclean and other late-night products, is dead at the age of 50.  See the story here.  Pending an investigation, it may be related to a hard landing on an airplane flight.  I wanted to use this space to give him props.  Many people remember the death of celebrities or stars; far fewer remember the death of a salesman.  There was a lot of talk both here and on the 44s about Asian guys going into sales, and this guy was a master salesman.

By the way, it’s been a busy week with the obits.  I haven’t printed them all here, but in addition to Michael Jackson and Mays, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon also passed away.

Zhao Danyang

Zhao Danyang, a hedge fund manager in Hong Kong, paid $2.11 million for a lunch with Warren Buffett.  For that big price tag, he got to bring seven of his close friends and family.  It’s all for a good cause–proceeds go to the Glide Foundation, which benefits homeless and poor people in San Francisco.  But $2.11 million?  I’m glad someone is doing well in this economy.  Evidently, Zhao really is: his fund has had a 600% return over six years, which is much better than what my portfolio has done in the same period.  Hell, that’s better than what Buffett’s portfolio has done.

From the article, Buffett’s strategy of value investing helped Zhao turn his portfolio around.  He started his own hedge fund in 2000, and the fact that he’s still going strong shows that he must be doing something right.  It sounds like Zhao asked some good questions during the lunch.  They talked about investing, as well as philanthropy.  I always like people who take the long term approach.  Buffett may be down right now, but he knows what he’s talking about.  It’s $2.11 million, and depending on future returns, it could be money well spent.