Would you genetically engineer your baby? Now you can.

A Los Angeles fertility clinic is offering a new service that would allow couples to choose their baby’s physical traits, including eye and hair color.

This is straight out of Gattaca and I really believe it’s the future. We have the technology. We know how. We just need to get over the moral hurdles we have placed in front of ourselves.

In a recent U.S. survey of 999 people who sought genetic counseling, a majority said they supported prenatal genetic tests for the elimination of certain serious diseases. The survey found that 56% supported using them to counter blindness and 75% for mental retardation.

First genetic engineering will be used to weed out diseases. Then it won’t be long before genetic engineering bleeds over to controlling physical traits like eye color and more complicated things like height. And with just the right combination I’ll be able to make my son Hapa.

I’ve already lived through the 80s once; and with all the neon colors designers are integrating into clothes this year, I’m having flashbacks every time I walk through a mall. It pains me, literally, to see a new generation making the same fashion mistakes we made in the 80s. Along with Flock of Seagull haircuts, neon colors should have been left in the last century. I have pictures of myself from the 80s and I cringe everytime I even think about my skate-or-die haircut with my bangs hanging down in front of my eyes and a gawdy neon print t-shirt bright enough to flag down an airplane if I ever got lost in the wilderness.  Now these poor kids are going through it again. They’re gonna regret their fashion choices in a few years when they look back  and say, “What the hell was I thinking?”  Now with the popularization of facebook, their pictures won’t just disappear into a box under their bed, they’ll be forever imortalized on the every present world wide web. Now it looks like their gonna make the mistakes of the 90s as well.

I caught this candid picture of a college girl at Office Depot in the San Gabriel Valley. (Please, no comments on me taking candid pics of young girls in public places) Anyway, notice the telltale red and black lumberjack plaid. Grunge was an anti-fashion movement that originated in the 90s Seattle music scene, that was popularized by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and characterized by its combination of plaid button downs with shorts or ripped jeans. Now it looks like this anti-fashion is becoming the latest trend for the uber-fashionable. According to this article from late last year ’90s Grunge Is Making a Comeback.

Despite attempts to be new and original, I think fashion is circular because when it gets too avant garde it becomes completely unrecognizable and then it’s just mistaken as having no taste at all. The way I see it, the trendsetters try to set themselves apart from the rest of the masses by wearing items that are on the edge of good taste. Then everybody else picks up on this, and wanting to be trendy but not too different, adopts items and trends that are recognizable with them, like trends from the past.  And every time a fashion era is recycled, it gets a slight update in some way, like with a more current cut or getting paired with more current accesories like the black tights and oversized purse of the chick in the picture above. In my completely unfashionable opinion, sometimes it works and sometimes you end up with the eye scorching color palette of the eighties. Next thing you know, we’ll be wearing Birkenstocks and Doc Martens again.

As a filmmaker, I make a lot of fun short videos that I want to post to my blog and the omnipresent YouTube flash player has become too pedestrian for me. It’s everywhere, everyone has seen it, and I want my blog to look unique. Also, YouTube has recently implemented a new anti-piracy feature that scans the audio in your video and compares it to a database of songs. Sometimes, Youtube can mistakenly tag your video as infringing on music even if it isn’t. Take for instance you film your friend and a car on the street has its radio too loud. Youtube can pick up on the song and potentially delete your video from its site. For those reasons and a few more, I decided to look for an alternative and found Vimeo worthy of giving a try.

Like Youtube, Vimeo offers HD support and provides an adequate amount of storage space. But more importantly in order to compete with YouTube’s dominance, Vimeo got all innovative with their features. Vimeo offers built in widgets that you can implement in your blog or website. I’m really looking forward to playing with this one widget where it displays all of my latest videos. I’m going to make a dedicated videos page and use the widget as a visual gallery of my videos. In addition, Vimeo gives me a personal email that allows me to post videos by email. In conjunction with the widget, I can update videos to my blog from the road. Vimeo also lets me specify the size of the video so that I can embed the video with a size that fits the layout of my blog. Yes I can do this in Youtube with an easy alteration in html; but for people out there that don’t know html, this feature is key. Lastly, Vimeo’s free account caps me at an adequate weekly limit of 500MB and 1 HD video per week.

The following is a test/example of Vimeo:

Another of the final episode of BSG airs tonight and I just can’t seem to get excited about it. Mostly because I don’t know which BSG I’m going to get. Is it going to be the exciting space adventure thrill ride from season 1 or am I going to get the melodramatic daytime television space-opera the we’ve been seeing way too much of. BSG was arguably once the most innovative, entertaining show on television. It kept me tuned in by having captivating stories and taking great risks like reinventing Starbuck as a woman.  It brought the Sci Fi channel to the forefront of must-see-television with it’s docu-style camera work and relevant storylines. BSG was a deep and nuanced allegory for what our nation was going through and how we deal with tragedy. The memorial wall of pictures was straight out of New York ala 911. BSG tackled hard topics like can there be justification for torture and internment camps. If you’re a cylon, can you be held in captivity indefinitely without trial? It was topical, relevant, and riveting.

Now it’s just a crappy soap opera set in space. More than that, it seems like BSG has lost its sense of purpose. Who am I suppose to be rooting for? The cylons to break away and start a pure 13th colony? There’s no focus. The writers strike really screwed them and everything in the new season seems like an after thought. Every episode use to revolve around avoiding the cylons and saving the human race. Now we get episodes that go on for an hour with just 1 plot point; where actors over act and characters just talk and talk and talk. The problem got really noticeable when they increased their number of episodes to 22 and had to include a bunch of filler episodes. It’s like the writers put it on cruise control and just started stealing stories lines from Days of our Lives. The mother of your child is really the daughter of your long dead wife kind of stuff. Even worse, they’ve started ruining all of my favorite characters.

Adama use to be the anti-hero we all wanted. Willing to make the hard decisions, he was a rebel who stuck to his old school principles and wouldn’t allow his ship to be weakened by technology like the rest of the fleet. He was the kind of diligent captain that we wouldn’t mind taking orders from. President Roslin was a worthy adversary who wouldn’t let her lack of experience stop her from jumping in the ring with the big dogs. Now Adama is a love struck placating pansy who’s letting his staff tell him to put cylon technology all over his ship. And the President is a new age spineless lackey with no focus and no purpose who just wants to coast by to the end of her days doing as little work as possible. To me, it seems that the character arcs of Adama and Roslin are actually an allegory for the show and the show’s writers.

Either way, my DVR will be the true gauge of how disappointed I am with the show. I have already stopped recording Heroes and even with their big marketing push during the Superbowl, I still haven’t gone back. I will most likely stick with BSG because there’s only a few episodes left but, man …hopefully these two characters pull out of their slump in the last few episodes and hopefully the writers do the same.

So without further ado, here is my list of why BSG is really a soap opera in disguise:

5. Sworn enemies have became friends to fight against a former friend but now are on the verge of becoming enemies once again. That doesn’t even make sense when I write it. All this melodramatic flip-flopping, they’re trying to make the character layered and deep but I just want cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys. I want someone I can root for. This goes the other way too, Boomer is now an ally?

4. He’s really not your son, just another totally unmotivated revelation used to free Tyrol up to leave with the other cylons.

3. Head trauma revealing long lost memories that affect the lives and beliefs of the characters.

2. Using a loose set of unmotivated circumstantial coincidences to bring back a dead character so that they can become the new conniving bad guy. This is like CLASSIC Soap Opera. “Ellen’s not really dead.  She’s come back by some strange twist of chance to be the new antagonist.”

…and the number 1 reason that BSG is a Soap Opera

1. The mother of your unborn child is really your daughter. ” Really! REALLY! ?!?! Your daughter is having your baby? I almost turned off the television.

Besides getting rid of the exposition, exposition, and more exposition which is an integral element of soap operas, BSG is going the have to fix its storylines to keep me tuning in. Nothing happens anymore. Characters just talk and emote. Where did all the plot points go? For that matter, where did all the action go? I haven’t seen a real dradis contact in so long. Well, I guess that’s it. Read, enjoy, comment.

We’ve all been there. We went stayed out a little too late night before and had our fair share of feel good juice. The next morning, we might not be hung over but we’re definitely not in the best of shape. Now, everyone has their own list of favorite remedies for this morning after ailment and here are mine. In order of my preference, here are the five restaurants that I have chosen and the dishes I recommend:

5. Pho Pasteur

8821 Valley Blvd. Rosemead, CA 91770
(626) 292-5888

What to order: Pho Dac Biet

4. Porto’s Bakery

315 North Brand Blvd. Glendale, CA 91203
(818) 956-5996

What to order: Any one of their fantastic sandwiches, just make sure you get their potato balls on the side.

3. The Griddle Cafe

7916 W Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90046
(323) 874-0377

What to order: Banana Pancakes the size of your head

2. El Tepeyac Cafe

812 N Evergreen Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90033
(323) 267-8668

What to order: The Hollenbeck

1. Marios Peruvian & Seafood Restaurant

5786 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90038
(323) 466-4181

& Seafood Restaurant" src="http://www.kwongfucius.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/marios.jpg" alt="Marios Peruvian & Seafood Restaurant" width="500" height="375" />

What to order: Lomo Saltado