Teej's Secret Box

Remaining Shows: Nov 3 – 2pm & 7:30pm; Nov 4 – 2pm.
Show reviewed: Nov 2 – 7:30pm

This is another show by the Arizona Deaf Theatre at Phoenix Day School for the Deaf, based on the spirit of modern Halloween. Directed by Sean Furman with a cast and crew of 25, it is a fairly large production for the organization, perhaps too large. Most of my critique are related to the script being used for this show.

First off, this is an enjoyable and sometimes hilarious take on a Halloween party, the only party around that you must study for, and fun is regulated to five minutes breaks. The existing crew are on the ball with their efforts, with the newcomers taking it up a notch. A special note must be made for Michael Olivier who play his part with aplomb, along with fabulous clear use of sign language, subtle pauses, and all around excellence. It is deeply hoped by this reviewer that Michael would have an encore (or two) with Arizona Deaf Theatre.

Unfortunately, there are simply too many people on the stage, a limitation of the script clearly written for a hearing audience. Unlike a hearing audience who can focus on voices on a wide range, it is prudent to direct the deaf audience’s attention to the signers at all time. There are subtle clues that can be employed, including specific lighting, the actions on the stage, and prominent stage actions by the signer in question. Unfortunately, some of the audiences were having difficulty following the conversation at times, especially during the opening scene.

The script also contains a large amount of side conversations that drags the show down at points, making the play seem longer than it really is. Hopefully the actors would take it upon themselves to tighten up the efforts (which usually happens in later shows). Voice actors/actresses sometimes would miss their lines, inducing one moment where an actress would repeat her lines twice in hope that her voice partner would pick up the cue.

Despite the flaws, this is a very entertaining show. I strongly recommends everyone in the Phoenix and Tucson area to take the opportunity to see this show. Based on past experience, pranks are rampant on the last show, so hilarity should ensure — adding to the charm of this show. Beware, P.J.! Beware!

Please note:  This discussion (not quite a review) contains spoilers for the movie, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno (Espanol)).

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I was able to watch this movie over this past weekend.  Upon the conclusion of this movie, I went digging to see what conclusions other viewers may have for this movie.  From what I have seen, the vast majority of viewers hold a conclusion that contradict with what I have seen.

This México movie, based during Franco’s mopping up exercise after the Civil War in España (Spain) is sometimes called a fairy tale for grow-ups.  Those who claims as such failed to realize that the original Nursery Rhymes are quite devoid of “Happily Ever After” type of ending — preferring to dive into a moralistic tale full of consequences.  This movie is so powerful in its story-telling that it moved Björk, a well known musician, to write a song, Pneumonia.  It is clear that Björk came to the same conclusion as I did.

You see, Americans are too used to a “Happily Ever After” type of films.  Even the American’s version of Fairy Tales Storyteller,  M. Night Shyamalan, fall victim to the need to have such type of movies especially with ‘Signs’.  To confront such a depressing film without this said “Happily Ever After” conclusion, audiences across this country seemly grasped to Ofelia’s “heroic return to her parents” fantasy as reality.

But the true conclusion is much more horrific.  She died dreaming of happiness in the middle of a brutal world in where she lost both of her parents.  The brutality of the world is shown in stark reality.

An overzealous captain and step-father, Vidal, is seen as abusive toward his staff, and destroying his enemies whenever he could.  Torture and mutilation are common tactics in interrogation.  Instead of accepting a mistaken identity, he berated the guards for not investigating more closely before bringing the accusations to him for his own brand of summary justice.  Wounded enemies are shot at point-blank if they could not or would not share their information.

Ofelia (or perhaps Ophelia — a famous character in Shakesphere’s Hamlet with the same type of struggles) lost her father, a tailor, during the Civil War, and is confronted with a very pregnant and very ill mother.  Both were transported to be with Videl, who demands that a son be born near his father, despite the dangerous terrain due to resisting rebels.

The death of Ofelia’s mother, the battle, and the destruction of the home base of Videl, and more weaves a cruel world where Ofelia is living.  Add to this a voracious desire for books of a fantasy nature — and a story is spun.

The movie opens with a narration and ends with narration.  The story claims of a girl, a princess who ran out to seek what it is like above ground, and was blinded by the light to the point of losing her memory, and dying.  The father longs and expects her soul to return in a different body.  Then you see that it was a story being read by Ofelia.  The seed was fed of an attractive alternative universe, where her father (who have long passed) is waiting somewhere for her to return — a real father, not that evil step-father she is confronted with.

At the ending, as Ofelia lay dying due to a gunshot wound inflicted by her step-father, she fantasized of returning home as a princess, not only to her real father, the King, but also her real mother, the Queen, seen only under heavy garb and makeup.  They all congratulated her for succeeding with her three tasks.  But as you see, her real self is there, dead albeit with a smile.

Everything she went through was either a complete fabrication of her own imagination, or an extension of such.  She was warned many times to end the fantasy and to enter the real world by many people, especially Mercedes — an incredibly strong woman, and friend to Ofelia along with being a spy for the rebels.  She failed to seperate the reality with the fantasy that was born out of the loss of her father and the marriage by her mother with Captain Vidal, fed to her by fairy tales books.

There were a few oppositions to this conclusion with a few evidences provided.  What of the mandrake who were “clearly alive” and the fact that her mother appeared to be better?  Very simple:  The mandrake was only alive in Ofelia’s eyes.  The stress of discovery of the root drove a healing mother to death due to excessive exertion, which is something that was repetitively warned of by the doctor.  It was even at a point where Ofelia was banished from her mother’s side as Ofelia’s antics harmed her mother’s health.

I can not yet explain the chalk wall, other to say that her escape from the room was NOT through the chalk door.  If one would pay close attention to the chalk left on the table for Captain Vidal to discover, it was clearly unused.  Somehow she was able to sneak out of a guarded room (although the guards were nowhere to be found, perhaps deciding to go out and clean up the aftermath of an attack on the base.)

She died with a dream.  However, the question is whether it is better to be Ofelia or to be Mercedes?  One who sticks to a fantasy and die due to this — or one who gave up the fantasies, and yet is confronted with a cruel world where she constantly fight to stay ahead?

This is a fabulous movie, one of the best I have ever seen.

11401 Carson St, Unit A
Lakewood, CA 90715

When you have to name a restaurant, you come across a great challenge — how to make it as distinctive as the food you serve. Many companies struggles with finding the right name for anything they serves. Grey Goose was the result of careful thinking on how to find the right name for an ultra-premium vodka.

Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, the name of this restaurant belittles the type of food they serve. Nested in a corner of a small plaza opposing the ever-presence of Walmart, this restaurant quietly sit there competing with a large number of restaurants in a nearby larger plazas. Sparsely attended tonight may present a mood of a restaurant that is simply not good. Heck, even its crude website does not present any impressive image.

Please, ignore all of those negative signs. Because whomever the chef was behind that kitchen stand, the food was good. Not just good, but absolutely incredible. Perhaps it was the art of lowering a person’s expectation to the point where a solid meal would bring bliss to your heart. Whatever the reasoning may be, this is definitely a place I will go back to, repeatingly.

We started out with the Summer Rolls — a traditional appetizer dish from South-East Asia. Also known as Spring Rolls, Fresh Rolls, and the like, this minty shrimp roll is an absolute delightful simple dish anywhere. This restaurant served it in a beautiful layout surrounded by a sea of slightly sweet and wickedly spicy sauce that brings a new dimension to this excellent dish. Not only that, it was clearly obvious that this roll was made to order, unlike most places that would have it made in advanced — the shrimp was freshly cooked, and carefully wrapped among mint, sprouts, and noodles for a complete mixture of sweet, spicy, crunchy, fresh delight.

Let me emphasize the little fact in the previous paragraph — freshly made. Everything was so clearly freshly made that it is absolutely a delight to eat there. The wonton soup I had were clearly a prepared broth, with fresh ingredients added just before serving. The chicken tasted like a freshly steamed chicken, not a soggy mess as soups would tend to make them. Wontons were all just steamed, along with cabbage, and other additions to make this a delightful fare.

The main courses we had, the least favorite was the Pad Thai, but only due to having a strong personal preference for the style served in a small hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant at University of Pittsburgh in Oakland, PA. The second dish, Pad Kee Mao is chicken on top of noodles, mixed with delightful ingredients, and spiced just enough to give a kick. It is definitely an excellent addition to the Thai palette that I would know.

The star of the show would be the special, Kao Mun Kai. Think of freshly cooked chicken, steamed just right. Slice it up and lay it on a bed of steamed rice. Only the rice was steamed with chicken broth, not regular water. Garnish the dish with sliced cucumbers, and serve it with a ginger sauce with a devilish punch of spice. It is a traditional dish served in Thailand, and does not sound like much to our varied palettes. But with the right chef, as it is clear here in this story, everything was prepared just right, and the meal was just perfect.

Everything was portioned just right, instead of oversized as most Asian restaurants are victims of. Everything was prepared to order, and gave the right tinge of freshness. I was tempted to have more, but with this and the Thai Iced Tea, I had enough for the night. As for Thai Iced Tea – think of hot tea just iced, with just enough sweet cream doused on top. Overdo the cream, and the drink is too sweet. Underdo it, and the strong tea fight through to your brain. Just right, and it’s liquid dessert.

As noted above, I will go back. I do hope the readers here will someday join me there.

The Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell

Very rarely would a book actually cause you to think beyond the context of the book. No matter how epic the Lord of the Rings may be, you wouldn’t wonder if forest fires in Greece have anything to do with the world within that epic tome… other than thinking of the poor Ents. No matter how inspiring The Foundation would be, it wouldn’t inspire you to ponder about your job… other than those lucky Astronauts.

The Tipping Point is a book that takes a stab at explaining the mysterious world of interconnection between people and things. Why is a fad, such as Pokemon a wildly popular thing a decade later? What make the Wii so hot? Why did the crime rate fall so quickly in New York City? These are general behavior trends that got influenced by a few small yet critical points. Certain people somehow were able to kick-start the growth of popularity for a certain products. Some companies are able to keep their employees happy. The list goes on.

Without spoiling too much about the book — I have a few personal anecdotes to share that are inspired by the book: Why I used to love the job I have, and why I am starting to not enjoy it. You see, I was hired by a 450 people-strong company, but into a department, 120-strong. We have this mailing list that involves a good chunk of those consultants and several of the engineers and others. We had annual get-together where everyone within the field gets to pow-wow about subjects in general. We get together again at least once more every year within our own group to get a better understanding of what we are doing. I knew almost everyone within the US. I was able to find exactly where to go to get the answer I need. I knew who to ask the right questions. I knew who would know someone else that would get the right answer.

Then we got bought out by a mega corporation with a staff in the hundred of thousands, and a philosophy that pride itself of buying tons of small companies for insane prices, and somehow cobbling them all together into weird suite of products that only increase the headaches of our peers as we try to make it work, and our customers as they try to figure it out in a way that’s useful to them. In the meantime, this company has skillful marketers that make it all sound so delicious and sweet.

Suddenly, I don’t know who my human resource representative is. I do not know how to get my laptop repaired. I do not know who the sales group leader is – after all, instead of maybe 50, there are now 25,000 of them. I do not know how to even download new versions of our products we are using. I do not know how to even get paid properly for the travels I take. Suddenly, there are too many rules and regulations requiring us to follow. We have to take online courses to ensure that we’re nice to each other, and that we keep our stuff secret and how our honor is affecting our corporation’s honor.

Instead of the natural peer pressure to better ourselves, improve our efforts, and be pushed by each other to go further, we find ourselves mandated by the invisible human resource team to do the same thing. But there are so many of us, that the strength of the group – the power of 150 in other words – became impossible to keep strong. Information became zealously guarded by certain sects, instead of freely shared within the group. It became a mouse race between each other.

When I was first hired upon, the person interviewing me both had a mutual knowledge of another person. He went on to discuss on how much the departure of that person deeply affected him, especially since it was not a happy departure. I strongly doubt that this person I interviewed with would care as much about my departure, simply because he have too many people to worry about now, instead of the 120 people he used to work with.

Reading this book really crystallize the issues that were affecting me, and gave me a several directions to go to. It also opened a new world of ideas and possibilities. The fires in Greece are a perfect example. Could it have been inspired by a single charismatic developer with a huge problem with bureaucracy in that country, and a simple solution to get around this problem? The sub-prime mortgage industry rise and crash. Could it have been triggered and encouraged by certain folks who found a way to make more money?

It is pretty clear what tipped its rapid end – Fannie Mae decided to not buy jumbo loans without certain requirements. Once that occurred, the entire industry turned upside down overnight just a month ago, and the credit crunch began to rear its ugly head enough that the Federal rates were reduced by a half percentage point yesterday. Suddenly, mortgage companies are firing a huge chunk of their employees as a proactive effort to respond to the crash. The symptoms were there – months of people deciding not to buy houses at unacceptable prices due to the rising mortgage rates. But it was not enough to tip the situation until Fannie Mae did their action. Bam, overnight, it was over.

The recovery will take a while, but for the folks in the forefront, they see it as taking years. I see it taking less – after all, the environment will become ripe sooner, and once the tipping effect occurs, the market will get going.

This is a fabulous book that I strongly recommend anyone to read.

[Note: This was written to the customer support line for Marriott Hotel]

This is referring to the Marriott Hotel in Long Beach, California. This hotel is located quite perfectly next to a building where I am currently assigned to. After the splendid stay I had in Portland’s Marriott City Center, the different is striking, and extremely disappointing.

The first error occurred when I made a personal request to a hotel employee to make a reservation for me, they failed to do so, causing me to run a risk of not having a hotel room. Fortunately, a kind lady whose name I did not acquire, were able to fix it the day of arrival. She then informed me that I was placed in a renovated room, and warned me of the construction work on the floor above. It does not bother me considering that I am deaf.

However, if you would call this a renovated room, i would have to express some disappointment. Room 306 has several defects in the bathroom, including a clearly incomplete spackle work. The locations of the lights are not done properly, and require two switches to brighten the bathroom sufficiently.

The cleaning staff seem to prefers outright cold rooms, as they continue to defeat my carefully adjusted room temperature (despite a lack of real thermostats in exchange for some dials with arbitrary settings) by turning it to outright frigid temperature (the coldest setting possible.) This was done, despite the very moderate temperature outside and the fact that I hails from Phoenix, a place that have tuned me to accept a much warmer room than normal.

There has been no turnover service at all, leaving me to arrive to the room in pitched blackness after a long day at work, along with quite frigid temperature — not a warm welcome that I have received from other Marriott around the country.

The staff, despite my statue, failed to program my card to have access to the concierge floor. The lack of healthy options for snacks outside overtly-dried carrots is a common issue with all Marriott, and needs to be addressed. However, the disappointing options of beverages, with the lack of those that are not caffeinated, is troubling at this location.

The straw that broke my back about this hotel is the meal I had this evening at the steakhouse – Mr. R. Grill. The New York strip steak was cut by an incredibly poor butcher to the point where I had to spit out several hardened fat, an experience that belittle the $35 dish. It was clearly previously frozen, and overcooked by an inexperienced chef. This was a steak the completely relied on the peppercorn sauce to make the save, but I saw through the facade. The service was average, a disappointment for a place that strives for an upscale reputation.

I have been well experienced with poor quality for a high price with hotel restaurants, but this took the cake. Despite repeat inquires to the concierge on duty, she barely hinted of the average quality of the fare, but emphasized the top-notched service. Not only was she wrong, she also recommended a sushi place that she have clearly never visited, and relied on me to report back to her of the place’s quality. I refuse to be a guinea pig. I had a ditzy person barely capable of being a hostess, and failing to supply me with the wine menu despite being requested. The wine options were poor, and the vodka selections are limited to grain options, leaving us with a Northern-European preference of potato vodka without an option.

It is quite disappointing when a sports bar in the same Marriott location have far better drink options than a “top-notched” steakhouse.

I am forced by convenience to stay with this hotel, but I would absolutely not recommend this hotel to my co-workers, many who travels from afar and optioning to stay at hotels at greater distance. This hotel should be downgraded to Courtyard. I am completely baffled by the AAA’s overtly generous rating of 3 for this hotel — maybe they were hypnotized by the beautiful manicured grass and maintained pool, and conveniently ignored the heavily rusted exercise machines, too many debris’s in several of the waterfall ponds, and the abysmal room conditions especially after being renovated. The sheer fact that there is an absolute lack of outlets for those of us with alarm clocks that require vibrators and the requirement to pull the bed aside to hunt for one is not acceptable.

This Marriott is not a Marriott.