Yuna Park

A new study finds that texting and driving is worse than drinking and driving. Still neither of those is as dangerous as drinking and texting.

- Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 6/26/09

1. Eating out is much cheaper than cooking at home.

I guess that’s it for now.

News is dying, news is dying. It’s something I was taught in all my courses in Communications and Media Studies at Tufts. Something I picked up during my internship with WNBC, NY’s local NBC affiliate. Something I sadly learned about as my journalism-type friends hounded for jobs all over the country.

But now there’s news about Verizon launching two new local news channels for its FiOS subscribers in northern NJ and Long Island.

It’ll be typical stuff: weather, traffic, local news and sports. What’s its edge?

“With Verizon technology, we can be a little more fresh and a little more accurate than our competitors,” said Terry Denson, Verizon’s vice president of content strategy and acquisition, to The Star-Ledger.

Yeah, okay.

Verizon plans on hiring its own reporters, as well as partnering with Regional News Network, The Star-Ledger and NJ.com for content.

This is all very silly.

Verizon got in big doo-doo in March 2009 with New Jersey for “deceptive advertising” of its FiOS service. NJ.com reports that there had been 266 complaints filed by FiOS customers, about “billing customers at a higher rate than the originally quoted price, billing inconsistent amounts for the same services, failure to provide promotional gifts and failure to honor requests to cancel the service.”

Now I hate to be a cynic, but it really does seem that Verizon is doing this local news thing to appease New Jersey. This FiOS local news good-deed gave Verizon an opportunity to get free press from NJ.com about its improved upstream connections, new bundles and added incentives – such as Compaq Mini netbooks and Flip Ultra camcorders. (Details can be found in the fine print here.)

Free advertising from partnering up with news agencies always helps too, huh? Oh sheesh.

My blog was down for a few days because I forgot to change my credit card info with my domain provider.

I had lost my previous card and received a new one.

Were you panicking?

My recent blog posts have been way too lengthy. Here’s a short one to stop the awful trend.

Here’s a picture of my friend Nate in front of Australia’s Luna Park.  I really need to visit one of these amusement parks.

I like to keep tabs on all the Yuna’s in the world.  Yuna Kim is an 18-year-old Korean figure skater who is ranked 2nd in the world. (Her name is actually pronounced Yun-ah, but she still gets my attention.)

She is the face of the newly released Yuna’s Haptic phone from Samsung’s Anycall (SPH-W7700).  By the way, this phone is obviously nowhere close to coming to the US. Keep reading and you’ll see it’s too cool to make it here yet.

It comes in three colors: Snow White, Sweet Pink and Noble Black.  That’s what I’d name my unicorns if I had any. It’s around $475.  Koreans are used to paying big bucks for their cell phones.  I had a cousin pay $1,000 for a 5 megapixel phone back in 2005.  I believe the tradeoff is a cheaper service plan.

Check out the unbelievable UI (user interface) on this device:

The screens show a feature called My Diary which allows you to compose and customize blog posts without a third-party application. It’s also got a 3MP camera on the back and a camera in the front for in-call video.  We in America jaw-drop at that, while Koreans shrug that detail off.

You know, I’m not the girliest girl but I would thoroughly enjoy a phone this cute.  American cell phone companies, please take note!

I attended a family wedding on Saturday night with my mother in Port Washington, Long Island.  And while I do not plan on marrying anyone in the next 7 years, I was happy to attend and take notes on what I want my wedding to look like.

1. The ceremony was 18 parts long.  Some of my family members are devout Christians so there were many lengthy prayers and hymns that required us to close our eyes and keep quiet.  Those 18 components took up 1 entire hour. MY wedding ceremony will be 15 minutes long. I’ve already got my mom’s approval. She was flipping through my iPhone pictures during the lengthy ceremony.
2. The bride’s and groom’s parents sang a song to the bride and groom.  MY wedding ceremony will not include my mother or my in-laws singing to me.  If anyone’s singing, it’ll be me. We can do karaoke at the reception.
3. It was a completely dry event.  My cousins and I eagerly pulled out the chilled bottles from the table’s champagne bowls to discover… sparkling cider. MY wedding shall feature an extensive open bar not only for the reception, but also for the ceremony.
   
4. At the reception, an emcee threw out trivia questions about the newlyweds to the diners and asked us to  submit our answers via text to win prizes. (What?!) MY wedding will definitely have live streaming of comments projected on a huge screen.
   

Despite my family’s insisting I join the group of girls in the bouquet pit, I passed, telling them it wouldn’t be fair for me to catch the flowers if I didn’t even want to get married. Right?!  You’re welcome, ladies, and sorry to the one girl I stilettoed… yikes.

It’s got to be one of our nation’s greatest ironies. Bergen County, NJ, home of The Westfield Garden State Plaza, Bergen Town Center, Paramus Park Mall and Riverside Square Mall, still observes the antiquated Blue Laws of the 1960’s.  This means on Sundays, Bergen County commercial sites can only sell food, prescription medicine and gasoline.

As of 2005, Paramus (where three of the aforementioned malls are located) annually recorded the largest dollar volume in retail sales – over $5 billion – out of all the zip codes in the nation.  As of 2007, Bergen County was 17th on the list of highest per capita personal income counties.

Do the Blue Laws make sense?

These laws have been around since the colonial period. Fortunately for most Americans, many of them had been appealed in the 1960’s. Unfortunately for us, Bergen County continues to abide by these anti-shopping absurdities.

There have been several attempts to repeal the Blue Laws in our county. In 1980, that attempt was defeated 192,394 to 157,648. In 1993, another vote produced some surprising resuts.  The attempt to repeal the Blue Laws was squashed by an even greater margin, 80,000 votes.

Those who fight to keep the Blue Laws alive are mostly concerned with the traffic that inundates the Paramus area (specifically Routes 4 and 17) during shopping hours/seasons/days. I know for myself, during non-shopping-rush hours, I can get to the Westfield Garden State Plaza in 20 minutes. In traffic, that could easily take an hour or more.

It’s quality of life.  I get it.  But in the age of the recession, but isn’t it time to reconsider this?

Michael Gartland of NorthJersey.com wrote on the issue last May and found that many storekeepers were doing all they could to work around the laws.  One clothing storeowner allowed customers to browse through the shop on Sundays and then would hold the items they chose for purchasing on the weekdays. Many Korean shops in the area do the same.

Of course, these storekeepers are concerned they are losing business to neighboring counties.  Sundays often meant a trip to Short Hills Mall in Essex County for my mom and me. Or a trip to NYC or the Palisades Center in Rockland County. It was fun to venture out to different shopping centers, but it got annoying. Of graver concern is the fact that those who observe the Sabbath have no choice but to shop on the weekdays.

Retail is a money maker in affluent New Jersey. Bergen County malls employ thousands and thousands of local workers. With so many families in the county suffering from foreclosures, preforeclosures and bankrutpcy (a browse through foreclosures.com shows 3,000+ properties in jeopardy), why don’t our Freeholders consider a temporary repeal of the Blue Laws, just to see how it goes?

Screw traffic.  Bigger things are at stake here!

In just a few days, I will be moving out of my mom’s house, into a place in Gramercy (for non-NYC people, here).  This feels BIG to me.

As a child, I grew up in 8 different houses with my family, all in Queens and Bergen County, NJ. In college, I had 4 different residences. We vacationed fairly often and spent months and months in hotels all over the world.  I say this to make the point that I’m no stranger to moving.  But this is different.

My moving out of my mom’s comfortable suburban house comes one year after my graduation from Tufts.  Unlike many of my peers, I loved my hometown and was eager to return to it. I had a big room with a private bathroom and walk-in closet, a nice TV, a car and a nanny who cooked and did the laundry. Furthermore, I had no bills to pay thanks to my mother. But most of all, I adored having my sweet little brother just a few yards away, after four years of being apart from him.

Everything was very convenient and I was very comfortable.

Moving out is a decision that was hard to make because it’s the first (moving-related) one that I had to make on my own. It’s not because of my family or schooling. It’s all me.

(Confession: I’m also terrified of possibly growing apart from my family.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dreading this! I am very much looking forward to it, in fact. The apartment’s great, the roommate’s cool and the neighborhood’s awesome. It’s just very strange to be leaving my home with no plans to return.

Here’s to the next step of my life.

So I already wrote about some of the silly magazines we receive in Bergen County.  Here’s a new one to add to the list: Bergen County Home & Decor.

We just got this in the mail. It’s the first time I heard about this publication. The thing is 30+ pages of advertisements and advertisements only.

ABSOLUTELY no original content. In fact, the table of contents is called “Index of Advertisers.”  I’ve seen many local magazines that were guilty of being ad-heavy (see: Clipper Magazine), but I had always found one or two pieces of writing buried somewhere in there.

Bergen County Home & Decor Magazine has none.

There is no reason for me to NOT immediately throw the next issue away, come fall (the present issue is for May through September 2009). Maybe I’m too old-school, but I think a magazine ought to have some non-advertisement content.

I’m upset because I spent a minute searching through this so-called magazine after fetching it from outside.