Ed’s corner of the web

Carisa and I had the pleasure this last Saturday of attending the wedding celebration of Mary Ly and Chin Song. We knew Mary from the Korean language classes we took through the Brookline Center for Adult Education, and we were happy for her, if a little sad to see her off to the West Coast.

I had brought my camera along in hopes of adding some interesting angles or framings of the wedding, but I soon found my efforts to be completely unnecessary. There were two photographers, two videographers, and even a lady running around carrying a slave flash on a pole. Far from adding anything to the photos, I had to throw elbows to even get the few snapshots I did. And even when I wasn’t fighting for physical space, I had to deal with errant flashes and video camera lights messing up my metering and white balance (you can see the cool bluish light from a video camera in the picture above).

Failed attempts at photography aside, we had a great time. The reception was at Jin Asian Restaurant, a monolith of a restaurant rising above Route 1 in Saugas like some mythical Chinese palace. The meal was ten courses and almost solid protein - cold cuts, mixed seafood, lobster, chicken, fish. My personal trainer would’ve been happy for me. We didn’t even see carbohydrate until the ninth course. The first plate appeared a little after seven, and we finally finished with cake at around 10:30. It was a very filling meal.

Intermixed with the steady stream - river, really - of food were games, toasts, dances, cake cutting, speeches in three languages, and a slideshow. Mary had two costume changes. Chin (who is Korean) made a game attempt at a speech in Vietnamese. Mary (who is Vietnamese) whipped out some perfectly-inflected Korean that made my jaw drop to the floor. When Carisa and I finally rolled out of the parking lot of the restaurant, we knew that we had never seen a wedding like this, and we felt very lucky to have had the opportunity. So thanks to Mary and Chin for throwing a great party, and best of luck to the two of you as you depart on your grand adventure.

Other photos from the wedding.

I got a message in my inbox a couple days ago highlighting a recent controversy in infant formula. Now infant formula is controversial enough to begin with, so some sort of brouhaha is certainly nothing new. But this one struck me as, if not sinister, certainly a little troubling. Evidently a particular market-leading brand of organic infant formula is being sweetened with sucrose as opposed to the lactose used in other brands of infant formula. Since sucrose tastes more sweet than lactose, this gives the sucrose-sweetened formula a sweetness equivalent to “grape juice or Country Time lemonade” as opposed to the “unsweetened apple juice” of other brands. Maybe this substitution is a simple cost-cutting measure instead of a concerted attempt to sway a baby’s formula taste preference - maybe. In either case, sucrose is also less preferable to lactose because it might cause more rapid tooth decay. We cannot be sure at this point if, by feeding our babies sucrose-sweetened formula instead of lactose-sweetened, we are giving them an early sweet tooth that has the potential to lead to nutritional ramifications down the road (obesity, diabetes, etc.), but at the least it sounds like a bad idea. Consumers and physicians, take heed.

Photo by Wendy Harman

Carisa and I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie last Friday.  Meh.  While it was not quite the childhood-ruining, franchise-destroying crap that Episode I was, there were no terribly redeeming traits about it, either.  (Spoiler alert!)  Returning a crystal skull to a hidden temple in the jungles of South America at least sounds like a cool plot on the surface - but when you mix in nuclear testing, commentary on McCarthyism,  alien coverup conspiracies, and cute CG animals, the idea sort of gets lost in all the noise.

The Indy franchise has always had a gritty flavor, so the hyper-real CGI liberally sprinkled throughout the movie feels contrived and out of place.  What was supposed to be a breathless action sequence gets ruined by Shia Lebouf going Tarzan through a CG forest with an army of CG monkeys.  Yes, an army of CG monkeys.  Might as well be Ewoks.  I didn’t even mention the CG prairie dogs.

Cate Blanchett is underused but is still ten times more memorable than Indy’s sidekick, for whom you hardly care when he gets sucked into another dimension.  (Seriously, another dimension.  Is this still Indiana Jones?)  The batty, nearly aphasic kidnapped archaeologist adds nothing to the story.  At least it was good to see Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood again.

Oh yeah - the movie ends in a wedding.  Honestly, as I continue to type this stuff, I have to remind myself over and over that this really was an Indiana Jones movie.

I could go on and on, but I guess it really doesn’t matter.  The movie is going to make (and already has made) a jillion dollars.  People are going to go see it regardless of what the reviews are (just like I did) because of the history of the franchise.  I know that sequels don’t automatically have to suck, because there have been examples of ones done well (immediate example: Temple of Doom).  So I free up 2+ hours of my time and pay 12 bucks to go into a movie like this hoping, perhaps naively, for something that enriches an entire franchise’s mythology, adds to the magic of a fictional world.  And it hurts when, more times than not, the expectations come crashing down and the movie ends up sucking.  You wonder if the people in charge are just asleep at the wheel, if they made the mistake of taking themselves too seriously, or if they’re just turning the crank to print some money.  In any case it’s a damn shame.

Ok - lament over.  I hear Iron Man is pretty good.