Technicat

Topic

Asian

Or Asian American.

Happy Birthday

to my sister, and since I'm not on social media and can't do the lazy @ happy birthday, I'll plug her Wikipedia page, which describes here comic book writing career. It's a bit out of date, though, doesn't cover her recent move into TV writing and is missing some of her

The Nom Wah Cookbook

I read cookbooks for the stories, but sometimes I have to settle for the recipes, and I thought that might be the case with the Nom Wah Cookbook, maybe just a collection of recipes and promotional bits from the restaurant. But it turned out the book not only recounts the

Manzanar

On my recent trip to the Bay Area, I thought about stopping by Manzanar. I've been there before, almost accidentally finding it on the way back from Lake Tahoe. But I figure amidst the constant stream of lockdown complaints, seeing where American-born citizens (and immigrants who could have been citizens

Life Is Art, and Cheap

I recently returned from a trip to the Bay Area, which I always find invigorating from absorbing the tech atmosphere (even though, as someone who grew up in the early PC days, I find Silicon Valley overall a disappointment, more Wall Street 2.0 than Whole Earth Catalog). Also part

The Legend of Avelino Martinez

Sure, it's great to see a Chinese American superhero on the big screen, but I want to see a movie about Avelino Martinez. I finally found his mural (one of a series of Tehachapi historical murals) on the streets of Tehachapi on my most recent otherwise tedious drive between Las

Serenity Found...No One Who's Actually Asian

A while ago I read Serenity Found, an enjoyable set of essays on on Joss Whedon’s Western sci-fi depicted in the TV series Firefly and the movie Serenity. Firefly is probably my second favorite TV series, next to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for the same reasons as as everyone

Finding Serenity

I was sure I’d already read Finding Serenity:Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly, a collection of essays on the TV show Firefly edited by Jane Espenson, but there it was on the sale-priced-because-the-show’s-closing pile in the waning hour of this year’s Comic

How to Hide an Empire

In a bit of karmic retribution for all that personal pandemic overspending on consumer appliances, I'm now TV-less after my robot vacuum knocked over my 4K LG TV (seems there should be market for anti-robot-vacuum defenses). It was just as well, my sporadic monthly netflix subscription expired the day before,

Julia Child

My latest pick from the Writer's Block bargain bin is the Julia Child installment in the Last Interview series. It's actually a few interviews, still a fairly thin book, but enough to expand on my flimsy knowledge of her, consisting of dim memories of seeing her show in my youth

Taco Stand

Las Vegas Chinatown is known locally as Spring Mountain Road. Chinatown is really more of a marketing term. It's a stretch, a long stretch, of continguous strip malls featuring Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Malaysian, Filipino,Vietnamese, European, Middle Eastern, Argentinian and...Mexican food. One that you might miss because it's