For the most part I don’t watch too much TV. Mostly I stick with the morning news & traffic (before work), sports and occasional DVD movies via Netflix. Andrea watches a little more than I do but all in all, our TV consumption levels are pretty similar. Instead of my sports games, Andrea prefers Oprah and some reality shows. Recently however, we have both become very hooked on a couple of TV shows. Both Andrea and I are hooked on ABC’s LOST and Andrea recently completed watching a Korean drama (aka K-drama to those in the know) called First Love of a Royal Prince.
LOST
It started pretty innocently for us. Curious as to what all the hype was about, we ordered LOST Season 1 from Netflix. And honestly, it sat on top of our entertainment center collecting dust for a while. I think we watched Dukes of Hazard (one of the worst movies ever) and The Longest Yard (another bad movie, except for the cameo appearance of Rob Schneider… “You can do it!”- always cracks me up) before we decided to take LOST for a test drive. Within the first 10 minutes of Episode 1 of Season 1, we were hooked. I don’t think either of us quite expected it and since then, we have been watching a few episodes daily to get finally caught up to LOST’s current schedule. We burned through Season 1 pretty quickly (24 hour-long episodes), thanks to Netflix. However, when we reached the end of Season 1, we realized that the rest of the TV world was currently in the midst of Season 2 and none of the Season 2 episodes we missed thus far were available in a DVD format (unless you bought homemade copies through eBay sellers, mostly from the UK). The only legal source was found through Apple’s iTunes at $1.99 per episode. Being the good law abiding citizens, homemade eBay copies were not even considered. That left us with iTunes as the only solution to our LOST fix. Downloading LOST videos from iTunes posed several questions and problems for us. We could download each episode from iTunes and watch it on our computer screen or we could try hooking up our laptop to our plasma TV and try watching it “normally”. After a little bit of googling, we decided that we would try to connect our computer to the TV. The biggest concern I had was how the quality of the downloaded shows would scale up to fit a big screen plasma TV as these iTunes videos were made originally to only fit a small screen (it’s all pixels these days). I bought a S-Video cable from Radio Shack and connected my laptop to our TV and after a few minor adjustments (I had to connect the laptop to the TV via S-Cable first and then power up the computer) we watched LOST Episode1 of Season 2. The video quality was surprisingly good (I had low expectations). It was nowhere close to HD but decent enough to make it worth the effort. And frankly, since Andrea and I were so hooked on the show, we didn’t even realize the degradation in the picture quality after a while. Needless to say, we are now caught up to the current schedule of LOST. We can’t wait for next Wednesday to arrive.
So what is it about the show you ask? The story is well written with a lot of twists and turns (much better than X-Files). Watching the show, you feel like you’re part of the whole situation. I sometimes catch myself getting pissed off at the characters on the show…
- “That Michael is such a hot head. Screw him… let him go off into the jungle.”
- “Charlie is such a damn whiner and a drama queen. Stupid crack head!”
- “They’re all idiots for entering the numbers on the computer. I wouldn’t.”
And the last reason for watching the show? Small island full of good looking people!
First Love of a Royal Prince
Andrea is about as non-Korean as you can get. Tall, blond, blue-eyed from Grand Forks, North Dakota. But everyday she is becoming more and more Korean. She has embraced my family, taken Korean language classes, developed fondness (even more than me) for Korean cuisine and has even taken up Korean cooking (you can check our her blog). I am very grateful that she finds my cultural heritage to her liking. And for the most part, I fully support her interests in Korean customs. However, I am somewhat skeptical of one particular source of information that Andrea has been using for her Korean assimilation… K-drama. It all started with Andrea watching a K-drama show as a way of augmenting her Korean conversational skills. And I must admit, the first K-drama show that we watched, All In, (I only watched it to help Andrea correctly absorb as much Korean as possible) was pretty enjoyable. The storyline was that of a tragic love triangle… two friends of opposite backgrounds, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, Jung-won and the street tough, In-ha, going after the same girl, the innocent and delicate, Su-yon. Andrea purchased the DVD box set of All In online and we promptly watched it together. Unlike the American dramas, K-dramas only last 1 season, usually not more than 24 episodes. Then Andrea discovered a TV station called AZN which is dedicated to a wide range of Asian TV shows and movies. That’s where Andrea found the K-drama, First Love of a Royal Prince. The storyline was that of a tragic love triangle… two separated-at-birth brothers of opposite backgrounds, the son of a millionaire hotel owner, Gun-hee and the workaholic self-made Mr. Perfect older brother, Seung-hyun, going after the same girl, the innocent and delicate, Yoo-bin. Sounds familiar? No it’s not a typo or some sort of blogging error; all K-dramas have the same freakin story line. The shows, All In and First Love of a Royal Prince, are the exact same shows with different actors and different location settings. However, unlike All In, I found the First Love of a Royal Prince to be unwatchable. It was full of over emotional acting with no sense of reality. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this question… if you were a normal dude (and I don’t care what country you’re from) and the girl you liked, repeatedly told you that she didn’t like you, repeatedly told you never to contact her, repeatedly ran away from you (even to other countries), and got engaged to your older brother, would you still go after this girl when you have other hot women throwing themselves at you? Not convinced yet? Here was the deal breaker for me… this innocent and delicate girl, Yoo-bin is about to get married to Mr. Perfect, Seung-hyun. She is having doubts so she breaks down in tears and asks her fiancé, Seung-hyun (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Do you love me? I need you to tell me that you love me!” Very touching moment. And how does Mr. Perfect respond? “I will call you later”, checks his cell phone and walks away to another meeting. Bravo! Brilliant acting!! So real!!!
Despite all this, Andrea faithfully Tivo’d and watched all the episodes. Andrea’s mother, Karen (when she was in town with Rick) and even my brother, Brian, managed to catch a few episodes of the show and actually enjoyed it. Now Andrea is waiting for another “good” K-drama to come onto the AZN network. And I have a good idea what the storyline will be.
One side effect of Andrea watching K-dramas… Andrea is becoming aware of some of the mannerisms of a Korean wife and has threatened to use these virtues of my people against me. Some of these traits are:
- Korean pinching (ggoh-jjip): when a Korean wife is pissed off at her husband she uses her thumb and index finger to pinch the husband, usually in the arm. When the wife is really pissed, she adds an additional move… she pinches and then twists.
- Korean kiss (bbo-bbo): when kissing on the lips, this technique requires the wife to close her lips air-tight and pull back the mouth into an anti-pucker. When the husband leans over to kiss, the wife holds tight this position, never moves her head, keeps her eyes open and stares blankly straight past the husband.
- Korean nagging (bahgga-ji): according to K-drama, there are 2 types of Korean wives. One is an emotionless stoic pillar of self control and the second kind is an over sensitive nagging hot head.
Does anyone know how to use the Parental Lockout Control?
No comments:
Post a Comment