Have you ever heard about Chuseok?

There are just a few people on the streets in downtown Seoul. While I headed for my workplace, I saw some people that look like foreigners, rather than Korean especially in COEX MALL and as well as McDonald's inside. So I felt as if I were in Burnaby's Metrotown Mall on Thanksgivings Day. You know Koreans are likely to cater for Chuseok Festival each their own place with their family members or drive for their hometown on a long journey. Even though today is a big holiday, I worked in order to create a business plan to apply for a BM patent. Thus, am I allowed to look forward to harvesting great fruits in my industry, Jesus?

Hm, tomorrow it could be a good idea to visit Insadong or Korean palaces after Charye.

Chuseok, which falls on August 15 of the lunar calendar, is perhaps the biggest national holiday in Korea. This year Chuseok will fall on the 28th of September. Chuseok is also called Jungchujeol. This literally means "midautumn" day. Chuseok is a period where separated family members gather to discuss their lives while enjoying the newly harvested grains and fruits. The most important activity done at Chuseok is to give thanks to ancestors and also to give thanks to Mother nature for providing a bountiful harvest. After changing into the hanbok, the family busily prepares dishes with the newly harvested grain. Then this is offered to the ancestors as a way of saying thank you. This rite is called Charye. When offering Charye, you will always find certain kinds of food such as: Kimchi, meat, walnuts, persimmons, dates, pears, apples. And chuseok wouldn't be completed without Songpeyon. After the Charye, all the family members gather to go to the graves of their ancestors. They go there to pay their respects and afterwards they clear up the surrounding area by pulling weeds.

The Wisdom of the Crowds

Lately I'm reading a book "The Wisdom of the Crowds" written by James Surowiecki on a subway train during my commuting. Although there are only 30 pages of it I read, I think it seems to be awesome. The main reason I'm reading it is that it could be terribly helpful for my business activities.

I forgot telling about what it is about. Hm, its title will be sufficiently able to explain that.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

I'm just gonna introduce it to you guys right below.

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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest). His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google. If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. "Wise crowds" need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge. Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

[from Amazon.com]

Emailed Blogger.com

I'm now much interested in everything about Blog. That doesn't just mean I like blogging or making a crossing over the ocean of blogs. I would be wondering about RSS, Trackback, Atom, and something else related to blog's technology. Of course, the ideology of blog, too.

Now I'm preparing to create a business plan regarding using blog to make profit.

Ah! I've recently emailed Blogger.com to make inquiry about how to add Trackback to my blog. I'm waiting for the reply of it.

Super soup

Super soup

JENNIFER BAIN

By this time next year, I predict that any true Toronto food lover will zealously vouch for a favourite pork bone soup joint.

Cheap, filling, sublimely satisfying and spiced just right, the soup also known as gamja-tang is a certified craze in Koreatown, where restaurants use storefront signs and colour menu pictures to boast of their prowess.

"Home of Toronto's best pork bone soup," screams a convincingly bold, bright yellow sign with black and green writing that stretches six feet along the window of Umji Bunsik.

At Seoul Restaurant, the words "pork bone soup" have been scrawled on bristol board, with cute pig faces etched into the first two letter "o's."

So what catapults a soupy stew up into the realm of must-eat Toronto treasures?

A mere $5 to $6 buys a feast of meaty pork neck bones and potato chunks in a wholesome broth spiked with Korean soybean paste and hot red pepper powder.

White rice is always served on the side, and you might be treated to kimchi and other Korean nibblies (panchan). Generous cooks round out their soups with a tangle of fresh bean sprouts, a sprinkling of chopped or shredded green onions, cooked cabbage or dark leafy greens, ginger or even crunchy brown perilla seeds (from a plant that's related to the mint and basil family).

While each rendition springs from the same core ("gamja" means potato and "tang" means soup or stew), subtle differences make each unique.

In other words, a gamja-tang spree is a prerequisite before you can declare which precise bowl best suits your taste. I've already enjoyed six. (And if you're fussed about the setting, the Koreatown restaurants range from cheap and cheerful to slick and trendy.)

The real beauty of pork bone soup is that it demands personalized, mindful eating.

It usually arrives, bubbling fiercely, in a heavy stone bowl set on a tray, with huge bones jutting from the broth. With chopsticks and a long-handled spoon as utensils, how you proceed is your call.

Scenario #1: Pick most of the meat from the bones with chopsticks, then pick up the bones by hand to reach the marrow-filled crevices. Discard the bones in the empty bowl that's always provided, then stir the side dish of rice into the remaining broth and vegetables and eat the rest of the meal with the spoon.

Scenario #2: Spoon broth over the rice, then pull some meat from the bones with chopsticks and scoop up some soupy rice. Enjoy.

The variations are endless. But here are three pork bone soup absolutes: It's not practical to share this soup. You must start with a very empty stomach. It's messy business if you drop a bone.

(And beware of bone fragments.)

Oddly, given the attention and effort required to enjoy gamja-tang, it's considered a Korean hangover helper.

"Believe it or not, a lot of people eat it for breakfast after a night of heavy drinking," says Shaun Park, co-owner of Tasty Restaurant in Koreatown. He's a Korean Canadian who loves gamja-tang and the influx of small Korean eateries — known as bunshiks — along Bloor St. between Christie and Bathurst Sts.

"These little places are becoming popular and are pushing out the bigger ones that frankly were very expensive and not very good."

For background on gamja-tang, you're better off scouring the Internet instead of Korean cookbooks. According to the website What's On Korea, gamja-tang originates from ancient times when people boiled pork bones to treat the sick and elderly. It's said to help children grow, prevent aging and snoring, cure pimples, freckles, liver spots and skin troubles.

In less fanciful terms, Seoul Tourism calls gamja-tang "one of the most perfect accompaniments to drinks."

The Korean city of Daegu boasts a "Gamja-tang Alley" with about seven restaurants featuring the specialty. (Hey, we've got more than that!)

Shigol Gamja-tang — on the "famous Eung-am-dong Gamja-tang street" in Seoul — boils its pork bones twice for extra-tender meat.

Gamja-tang shows up on Korean menus in New York and Los Angeles.

Jonathan Gold, in a February story in L.A. Weekly called "Koreatown's Top 40," writes that "Korean hangover remedies happen to taste really good. Among the best and most restorative of these, as unfortunately we have reason to know, is gamja-tang ..."

As Gold observes, "Korean cooking, at least as it is presented in Los Angeles, is not an especially refined cuisine. Korean restaurants here tend to be either homey or raffish, Mom's cooking or sophisticated bar snacks. Nobody seems especially concerned with royal delicacies from the Koryo empire: Korean restaurants, even the expensive ones, serve people's food."

In Toronto, the people are eating. Although pork bone soup has been served for at least six years in Koreatown, it only recently leapfrogged to the top of menus.

"Pork bone soup is very popular and everybody wants to sell the popular food," observes Younmi Kim, a waitress at Boo Ung Ee, a 24-hour student hangout that's known in English as Owl of Minerva. Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, war and crafts. Boo Ung Ee wisely serves just four dishes on its daytime menu.

Susan Ahn, owner of Umji Bunsik restaurant (the one with the big yellow sign), is effusive about the growing adoration of this dish. "Every customer, from different cultures and different countries, they love it. Especially the people who are familiar not only with the taste but the quality and price. Mostly students, young people and families like to come here."

Bryan You, owner of Mat de Mat restaurant, is pleased Torontonians are catching on to something that Korean and Japanese customers already love.

On his menu, gamja-tang is described as "pork born with potato soup" — a delightful typo. Across the street at Joons restaurant, the dish that supposedly translates as potato soup is spud-free.

"The popular thinking is that gamja means potato, but the pork bone neck part is what we call gamja," offers Joons' waiter, Eugene Lee.

However you translate it, this soup revolves around the meat — from neck and sometimes back bones (procured wholesale, since they're rarely seen in supermarkets) and simmered in broth until it practically falls from the bones.

So what's important to you in a bowl of pork bone soup? Please eat your way to an answer.

From Toronto Star

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Hm, it's true that many Japanese people I know really like to eat Gamja-tang.
When I was in Vancouver, my Japanese friends like that better than I do. So they often asked me to eat together at a Korean restaurant 'Jang-Mo-Jip' on Robson St..

Yes, it's delicious but you should know it's hot and spicy. Try it!

Ocarina

In 1991 I decided to buy a cute, small musical instrument Ocarina that creates a powerful and touching sound. (It looks a little weird.) But I couldn't afford to get one. For 3 months I've worked as a Math tutor. Finally in spring of the year I bought one. And I tried to master Ocarina. I know it was just a hope.

Whenever I travel around, I keep it with me. To perform it to someone who doesn't know about it or who is concerned for it. Hey it's high time to listen!