Dinhternet

I recently saw this PSA on a friend’s blog -

The first thing I thought of was, “What if my PIN is a palin­drome?” Turns out, other peo­ple thought of this case, too. The tip is fake.

I don’t under­stand why peo­ple would make up fake announce­ments like this. I remem­ber all sorts of scares that I’ve had passed to me, espe­cially by older, less tech-savvy folks who don’t know bet­ter. In fact, I book­marked Snopes for my mom to check all the ran­dom shit she gets from fam­ily, friends, and co-workers. My aunt would often send me stuff and ask me to fact-check.

What is the point of mak­ing up fake help­ful tips? Either you are scar­ing peo­ple need­lessly about bad things that will not hap­pen, or risk­ing people’s lives by get­ting them to believe in good things that will not happen.

Any­way, long story short, Snopes is your friend. Use it before you pass on ANYTHING you see online.

Dong Ha thinks that our fam­ily is some­what food snobbish.

I don’t think that’s quite right… we were cer­tainly raised to appre­ci­ate food. In fact, my whole extended fam­ily is pretty food-centric. We appre­ci­ate good ingre­di­ents. We were taught to be culi­nar­ily adven­tur­ous. (We always go out to try new dishes and then try to fig­ure out how they were made in order to re-create them at home.)

That said, I don’t think we’re snobs. I enjoyed SPAM as much as the next per­son before I turned veg­e­tar­ian. But I mean, taste (as in pref­er­ence, not gus­ta­tion) isn’t a bad thing. And my par­tic­u­lar pref­er­ences can be pretty inex­plic­a­ble anyway.

For instance, take the following:

(from Can­d­wich and Gigizine [in Japanese].)

The are both instant foods of ques­tion­able ori­gin. What makes one seem so appeal­ing and the other so revolt­ing? The world may never know.

Pos­si­bly the thing I miss most about child­hood is my fam­ily reunions. My mom’s side of the fam­ily is very close, and we used to have fam­ily reunions back in Min­nesota every sum­mer. Since we are a large fam­ily and not par­tic­u­larly rich, these reunions were often achieved through huge fam­ily road trips.

(from But­ter­safe.)

When we were in Texas, my fam­ily would drive up every cou­ple of months. In Cal­i­for­nia, it was a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult, but we drove basi­cally every sum­mer. (Some­times we flew if my par­ents had work con­straints.) When we were in Chicago, we basi­cally went up every weekend.

We always made excel­lent time because my par­ents would take shifts dri­ving or sleep­ing, so we were always mov­ing. My sis­ters and I were always enter­tained with our car games, Game Gear, and TV. (Yes, long before car com­pa­nies started offer­ing that as an option, my dad got a TV/VCR combo and an AC/DC inverter and stuck it between the front seats for us to rot our brains while on the go.)

Some­times, Min­nesota was just a meet-up point, and we would either go up to Canada to visit my aunt or down to Florida to visit our sec­ond cousins. We’d have sev­eral fam­ily cars just car­a­van­ing down the high­way together. There were great stops like Yel­low­stone on the way out from Cal­i­for­nia, being pleas­antly sur­prised at ques­tion­able truck stop restau­rants, and get­ting masses of fire­works on our way down to Florida.

With gas prices ris­ing, the fam­ily more spread out than ever, and other com­mit­ments pil­ing up, we rarely get the chance to do road trips any­more. We still have reunions almost every year, but I’ll miss the journeys.