233 - People who think foreign food is disgusting

As I was growing up, I was always encouraged to try new foods. With having travelled quite a bit too, at this point, I very rarely refuse to try any cuisine, even if it is a bit out of the ordinary.

Being brought up in Hong Kong in both Chinese and international contexts, I learned very early on that consuming things like duck's liver, bird's nest, shark's fin, and turtle shell jelly (pictured above), was pretty weird to some people - specifically those that weren't local Chinese. But to me, my beloved grandmother, and the rest of my Chinese-side family, it was perfectly normal. (And yes, I've tried and love all of those things.)

Recently, I've been listening to a lot of people give China crap about eating things like dog, because they're a creature that the Western world has domesticated. Or things like scorpion or tarantula, because they sting and they're poisonous and they look too different from us humans. Give China a break, man, it's a big country, with the largest population in the world. I'd be surprised if all 1.3 billion of us were only eating cow, chicken and pig, animals we're 'supposed to eat'.

What, like the French don't eat steak tartare, escargot, or frog legs? The Spanish eat bull testicles. And the Texans deep-fry rattlesnake. Australians eat kangaroo, crocodile eggs and ostrich. The Americans use cod liver oil as a vitamin A supplement. And the English feast on pig's blood every morning in the form of black pudding.

The Americans invented chewing gum - I mean, if you really think about it, that's a pretty weird idea for someone to come up with.

Foreign food should not be looked at in disgust. I respect whatever your personal preferences are, or what you feel about certain animals - I really do. I mean, some things I find weird, too. For example, I find it weird that Ukrainians eat bear, Filipinos eat chicken fetus, Alaskans eat raw fat from whales, and Icelandic people eat puffin. I'm weirded out by it, but I would never feel disgusted by any of these things because it's just what different people in different parts of the world have become adapted to eating. If you're an animal rights activist, well, good for you for trying to conserve different species. If you hate spiders, that's fine as well.

But I'm not pressuring you to like these things. Just accept that others eat these things, just respect that others may even love eating these things. Nobody's trying to force-feed any of these 'disgusting' foods down your throat, so we shouldn't have to swallow our feelings of embarassment when you say that they're disgusting.

232 - Dislike of rice

In my life, I've only ever met two people that actually said, 'I don't like rice.' When I hear this sentence, there are three things that tend to go through my mind very quickly:

1. The biggest export of the Phillipines is rice.
2. China consumes and produces more rice than India and Indonesia combined.
3. I am Filipino-Chinese.

I have probably eaten more grains of rice than there are people in the world. I don't understand what there is not to like. It's a staple food, just as potatoes are to the Irish, just as yams are to the Central Africans. Apparently, this peculiar disfavor may be due to the granularity of it. Small particulates bother people because they don't feel wholesome, they remind one of tiny insects or bacterium. Lots of tiny little things going into one's mouth... IS disturbing...

Some people also say that rice and couscous and similar foods make them choke easily. Yeah, that doesn't make you sound stupid at all. Others say they never know how long to cook it for. That doesn't sound cretinous either.

Another reason people tried to justify their dislike of rice was that it was difficult to finish it all, in that they couldn't possibly get every grain of rice off the plate. They're using spoons and forks, and are apparently people of modern civilized origin, so it amazes me that they are unable to clear the plate with the silver cutlery they are so accustomed to, solely because the foodstuffs are small. They guffaw as some rice is still leftover on their china and say, 'Imagine if I was using chopsticks instead!'

Ha. Ha. Ha.

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225 - Not showering for days

Today, for some reason, I seem to be a magnet for filthy slatterns who do not shower. Since I woke up this morning, I have seen nine slobs - oh, wait a minute, that's the incorrect verb - what I mean to say is, on nine different occasions, I smelled particular stenches, looked up, and then found slobs present before my eyes.

Nine times, I've seen long, slick hair sweeped backwards carelessly behind a head all greased up by the owner's own natural oils, and if you were to look down in search of comfort, you would unsuccessfully find instead, moisture, soil, and God knows what excrement, darkening the shade of denim blue at the ankle hemlines, and should you wish to look back up again, you will regrettably observe a great abundance of earwax, shades of yellow and orange, formally watery, initially runny enough to ooze down to the mouth of the ear canal, but on exposure to the air, now dried and viscous enough to adhere to the rim of the concha and remain there as an unslightly spectacle for those unfortunate enough to have caught a glimpse of it, and assuming you draw your eyes downwards again to avoid further analysis of his aural secretions, you will discover sweaty, clammy hands, with nails fraught with rubber shavings-like clumps of dirt, and finally, on the occasion you may look upwards at his face once more, in some morbidly humorous way, for a fifth demonstration of sickly squalor, you will notice a horrifying dentition, teeth ruined by poor oral hygiene and persistent nicotine smoking, yellow like Dijon mustard, reeking a breath reminiscent of grandpa when he used to lean towards you to tell you one of his most valued secrets.

I swear one of them even smelled like vinegar - his sweat was so old and musty that it stank like expired milk, reeked of rotten eggs, funked like decaying meat, the pH level decreased so low that it was caustic, unbearable for me to even stay near him for ten seconds longer.

I'm not asking that people shower everyday like I do... I'm not even offering my hygienical recommendation. If you smell bad, take a shower, because you're upsetting one of my senses, in fact the one that gets disturbed the least, which makes the crime all the more depraved. Otherwise, please, do us all a favor, and don't leave the house at all.

194 - People who don't like Disney movies

So today, I'm going to talk about the reasons why I think Disney films are great, and the problems with people who dislike them. And when I talk about Disney films, I'm talking about the older stuff, the classical stuff, the better stuff in the earlier days, when the movies were completely composed of heart, fun and fantasy. Not the stuff that's been coming out in the past ten years. Not the films that they've sort of moved on with. I mean, Atlantis, Lilo & Stitch, Bolt and a couple of others have been fairly solid, but they've evolved (in the wrong direction, IMHO) since the good ol' days.

No, I'm talking about the masterpieces of Disney. I'm talking about Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan. They brought you to another world, a whole different reality where caterpillars speak in vowels, pumpkins turn into carriages, and kids can fly with the help of a little fairy dust.

In some films, like The Lion King, Tarzan and Dumbo, the anthropomorphic effect made you appreciate (well, they made me appreciate) animals, and at the time those films were released, I was a kid that would actually learn about the animal kingdom through these films. It even made me learn to appreciate my toys after watching Toy Story, even the furniture in my house after seeing Beauty and the Beast. The scenes, the landscapes that were all drawn by hand made it so beautiful and believable, and I find that with a lot of real-life, in the flesh, movies, it's hard to feel that way because cinematographers are trying to make real filming locations beyond what they really are. With animations, especially the way Disney have done it, it can just be breathtaking, and enthralling, how they make a deer's mother matter so much, or how they make a puppet/boy matter so much. It really makes you wonder, and appreciate how much larger the Circle of Life is outside our own lives, our own modern-day age.

One of the other key reasons I also like Disney, is because they bring us to different places and time periods. From China (Mulan), through India (The Jungle Book), the Arabian deserts (Aladdin), France (Hunchback of Notre Dame), Greece (Hercules), to Native America (Pocahontas), how can it not be amazing to any viewer? How can it not be appealing for a parent to bring their kids to see these movies when they're just so educational and mind-opening, yet fun, for the kids?

The overall underlying theme in Disney works is the moral lessons they subtly include. They don't know shove the moral spectrum of right or wrong in your face - and at times, it can be difficult to tell where the ethics lie. Should Snow White learn to distrust strangers like the evil witch? Then again, should she trust her one and only family member, her stepmother, the Queen? Seeing as the dwarfs are strangers to her as well, was it right for her to trust them?

After the movie is over, though, you take away from it a real story, with complexity in the tale. You can't blame Pinocchio or Tarzan for not knowing what's right and wrong, it makes you think, it makes adults think when they re-watch them years later. How can people not understand how Disney movies are so ingenious?

I think it's because they've got their head too far up their bum. They're so narrow-minded, that they only see beauty in what they find beautiful, they find that their morals are sufficient to live the lives they lead, and they can only be emotionally invested in their own life, not the life of some 'stupid cartoon character', because they're self-centered. From where I stand, Disney movies are used to be beautifully crafted, empathetic, exuberant, compelling, and at times, even haunting, morally thoughtful, and absolutely cultivating for grown-ups, and certainly, any child growing up with parents that want their kid to learn.