1 post tagged “堀北真希”

Tuesday night was the night of the mid-autumn festival and I have to say that it was a relatively fun night though some moods were dampened by the sudden downpour that is so characteristic of weather here. Nonetheless, the mood of the day was quite cheery and I went into evening lectures wishing everyone well with an awkward and oh-so-Hong Kong greeting: "Happy Mooncake"...

Admittedly, I have no love for those traditional mooncakes that you're supposed to eat under the moonlit sky. By the way, the history of the mooncake as couriers of secret messages is probably the closest thing that any Chinese will ever come in understanding what a "fortune cookie" is - if your Chinese restaurant is serving you "fortune cookies" with the bill, it's safe to say you just had an authentically American-Chinese meal experience...

It's a great pity that normal mooncakes don't actually have any wise messages written within them though as I am usually in need of deep guidance (perhaps a great revelation of truth like, "The greatest danger could be your stupidity" would help enlighten me). Disappointingly, I am usually only rewarded with two or four salted duck egg yolks for cutting up the cake...

Knowing about people like me who aren't big fans of the yolks and all, food manufacturers who want in on the action have seized upon the opportunity to create more "modern" mooncakes to whet our appetites with items like the "snowy mooncake" (pictured left). These mooncakes are usually served cold and tend to have a sweet taste to them with a distinct white outer layer. They also come in an entire assortment of flavours ranging from strawberry to durian... and if you are thinking of having an ice-cream mooncake, Haagen-Dazs fits the bill perfectly too. (^__^)

Of course, although mooncakes are part of what define the Mid-Autumn Festival, they aren't everything - there is also carrying lanterns around and lighting candles. You can bet that I tried to get in on the action there too, but due to modern legal safety requirements it's more "in" to carry around glowsticks in Hong Kong now. There is even protocol for lighting candles as well... Gone are the good old days when children could frolic in the open streets with a potential inferno in hand... It is on this note that I adopted a green glowstick (pictured right), courteously given to me by Deedee.

As for Deedee's yellow glowstick, I decided to put it to better use than the doused out night had allowed by using it on my girlfriend's Eeyore, giving him a well-deserved halo (pictured left)... in recognition for achievements in the field of cuddliness, cuteness and security... (O__o)

The picture shows how hard I try to be the ever-budding photographer - the light source that gives Eeyore his profile comes, in fact, from my girlfriend's Nintendo DS... which I stole for the night to play Sudoku with. Somehow, I can't get addicted to any of the other great titles available for the DS but Sudoku... well, that's a whole different ball game, LOL

Anyhow, I haven't been using my computer much in the last few days because it was in need of some serious defragging! I admit that I am quite the hypocrite for advising people to defragment their computer at least once a month while I haven't defragmented my computer for over a year now. There were sound technical reasons for this lapse but I won't go into them here. Regardless, it all began on Monday when I suddenly felt this very strong urge to defrag my computer as I was tweaking my computer's memory - so I installed a professional defragging program and its initial report on my drive looked like this:

See the red parts? That is "fragmented memory"... which really means that my computer was a complete mess since the whole darn thing was practically red! If you imagine the computer as a large library with tons of books and the non-fragmented memory blocks (blue) are books in the right shelves while fragmented memory blocks (red) are misplaced books - you begin to see why defragmentation helps the computer run faster. Looking at my computer though, you also begin to see why I failed to secure a job in my university library!

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Look Out for the Jade Solid Gold Chinese Baby Monkiz!
Anyhow, as my computer was chugging along trying to fix the mess I had made, I turned to the television for entertainment and ended up watching an instalment of Jade Solid Gold (I haven't watched it in years!). Jade Solid Gold is basically a music program by Hong Kong broadcaster, TVB, that invites local and international artists to perform their songs live on the show.

The mid-autumn show was filled with artists ranging from local superstar Hacken Lee (李克勤) to German violin extraordinaire David Garrett to Thai hip-hop duo Golf Mike... but these hot acts weren't really the ones who caught my attention during the show. That honour went to a female hip-hop trio from China called Baby Monkiz.

They are a relatively new Chinese group and what caught my attention about them was not so much their looks, moves, music or all the pizazz you'd expect from a hip-hop group. No, it was a very specific part of the song they were performing that blew my mind - namely, the lyrics to the chorus.

The group itself is composed of three members that, in English, go by the names - Hisa, Charli and Kissy. Unfortunately, there is very little information about the group and I couldn't get a hold of the lyrics to the song. However, the internet is a large, large database and YouTube is a large, large database of videos - so I did manage to dig up the MV to that song they were singing, the self-titled Baby Monkiz. You can groove to Baby Monkiz on YouTube by clicking here courtesy of uploader lanfit. Anyhow, the words that struck me from the chorus went, in translation, as follows:


The reason why it struck me was this - this song is self-titled, so it was obviously supposed to define them as a serious hip-hop group but whoever wrote the lyrics certainly didn't seem to have placed much faith in the abilities of the group. My first impression of them wasn't all too bad but they certainly need a new lyricist if they hope to go any further without sounding like they have to plead people just to listen to them sing... I guess you could say they display great humility, no?

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Makipedia
Speaking of confidence, let me move on to the last part of my post - which is on the Japanese actress, Maki Horikita (堀北真希 or Maki-chan, as I prefer to call her). Why am I bringing her up from out of nowhere? Well, I bring her up because it seems that I somehow contributed to a large proportion of a Wikipedia article without even knowing it - namely the article about her here.

I looked her up to see if there is any news I'd missed recently since my participation in online forums have gone down significantly these days and although I follow her blog, she rarely updates and by the time she has - it's all become old news.

Nonetheless, the more I read the Wikipedia entry the more baffled I became with the question growing louder and louder: "Didn't I write this?" As I continued reading, it eventually became clear that I did write it but someone had taken the time to rearrange it into better organised sections and rearranged the flow as well as format. The first two paragraphs of the "biography" segment, the entire "personality" section and a large proportion of the "trivia" components were written by me for a forum known as D-Addicts some time last year (my nickname there is yfcrystalise). So yea, if there is anyone who ever doubted how much of a fan I am, here is proof that I am dead serious about Maki-chan, LOL. (^__^")

My source of information was really the Japanese Wikipedia article and at the time, there was very little English information about her. So I thought maybe I could help out by translating the article into English as per the requests of some forum members.

Anyhow, I want to say "thank you" to whoever took the time to put my writing into coherent sense and create an article for this idol - thank you! Your work is much appreciated (putting my writing in order must certainly be an absolute pain...) and also to all other contributors, I have learnt much from all of you! m(_ _)m

Back on the topic of Maki-chan though, I had decided to "catch up with her" since I am about to embark on watching her most recent drama, 花ざかりの君たちへ (hereby abbreviated to HanaKimi - for plot summary, scroll to the "comments" section of this post). I have to admit that I breathed I sigh of relief when I heard that this drama finished as the number one drama of the season because her last drama, 鉄板少女アカネ！！！ (Akane from hereon), failed miserably. I almost fell asleep from the lack-lustre story of that one... heck, they even cancelled an episode just to shorten the gruelling journey.

It is essential to understand that in Japan television is bigger than theatre, so being a movie star is nothing as big as being a television star. Before Akane, Maki-chan had nabbed two television awards for best supporting actress, one MTV award for best teen actress and one Japanese Academy Award for best newcomer. With Akane then, Maki-chan was going into a leading role for the first time as a major player (she had played leading roles before but, unlike before, she was becoming a household name at that time).

Despite these achievements, her blog hinted that she wasn't adjusting properly to this position in the spotlight as it seemed that she never really had much faith in herself. This is not to say that she doesn't do her best, but merely that she never thought that her best was ever good enough.

Perhaps it was this weight that eventually got to her as her performances began to suffer slightly around that time. Comparing her roles as a support and as a lead, the differences were subtle but obvious. The reception to HanaKimi is therefore reassuring in that it indicates that she is slowly settling in to her place in Japanese society.

This is probably also helped by the fact that she is no longer dividing her time between work and school as she just graduated this year. In interviews, co-stars or other crew members revealed how she would study in between scenes during exam period and jet from the set to examination centres on exam days...

Hopefully, Maki-chan will be able to find her step in life through the doors that have undoubtedly been held open for her. This may or may not be in the entertainment industry, but whichever path she chooses, I certainly hope that she will eventually be able to channel her love for insects into something more concrete (her knowledge of those little critters and her readiness to pick them up is almost frightening as her role as the embodiment of evil in 着信アリFinal a.k.a. One Missed Call Final! (O__o)).

To finish, here is something for Playstation 3 owners:-

It's unfortunate that neither Vox nor Photobucket allow images that exceed a certain size to be saved in full. The image was originally made to fit high-definition TVs displaying at 1080 resolutions... (-___-") *sigh*

Well, I should really get to bed now - I have a sore throat for today and a seminar for tomorrow, both of which need some heavy-duty medication to get through (^___^")