I have the week off. For various reasons, our family are not going to be going out of town this year. Instead, we are going to take it easy. I have several goals I am hoping to achieve during this time of relaxation, rest and rejuvenation of sorts:

1. Upgrade my blog. Wordpress 2.0 is out, so I might take a deep breath and be foolhardybrave. I may even take the opportunity to upgrade the design, although I do like the four columns-opening-to-three layout. Perhaps I will just make a few face-lift type of adjustments. I previously blogged about this compulsionintention to upgrade here, and asked for suggestions. One kind person has responded to my request for suggestions and what he has to say makes a lot of sense. Do you have any suggestions yourself? If you do and care to share, I’d truly appreciate it. Let’s see how far I go with this project.

2. Visit the Cerritos Public Library with my kids. I have heard that it is very modern, state-of-the-art and well designed. Almost theme-park-ish, is how one person had described it to me. I have always wanted to take my kids there, but even though I work in the city, it has not been always convenient for us to make a special trek out there just to drop into the library.

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Last night, I sat down with my family to watch Unleashed, starring Jet Li and Morgan Freeman. Now, as much as I like Jet Li, and as much as I like Morgan Freeman’s work, and as much as I like kung-fu flicks and martial arts, I just could not bring myself to enjoy this distorted attempt at movie story telling.

Somehow I just found the entire movie rather distressing, and, well, just plain wrong! Someone should have stopped it from making it to celluloid.

It might be petty of me to do so, but I just cannot help but complain about the simplistic Hollywood stereotyping of Asians (subservient, uncouth and uncivilized who is tamed twice by the more dominant Westerner. And, how in the world could an abused, traumatized young boy who was caged from the moment he was abducted learn to be a deadly martial arts exponent? Oh, but of course! He is Asian! It just come naturally to these exotic, not-quite-human super fighters!).

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