Frankly, “Riceball & Tortilla” sounds like the ill-conceived name of a 1970’s TV dramedy with a politically-incorrect ethnic twist, perhaps in the buddy-cop genre (e.g. Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey).
Instead, it’s the name of a fast-food joint in my neighborhood. One of my coworkers brought me something from there – a 주먹밥 (which I’ve blogged before) but coated in something vaguely resembling corn meal instead of seaweed – I guess that’s the “tortilla” part of the name. In Korean, it’s named 주먹밥&또띠아 전문점 [ju-meok-bap & tto-tti-a jeon-mun-jeom = riceball & “tortilla” specialty shop].
Here’s a picture of the container. I ate the actual riceball before taking a picture – sorry.
It’s not bad. I like the kind with seaweed on the outside, better.
뜻이 있는 곳에 길이 있다 will-SUBJ exists-ADJ place-LOC way-SUBJ exists Where there’s a will there’s a way.
This proverb translates almost exactly to the English. I was almost shocked when it dawned on me that it was equivalent. Mostly, proverbs aren’t so easy to translate.
Not very useful advice, to someone such as myself who seems to be suffering primarily from willpower issues.
I’m not, personally, a big Doctor Who fan. I was always a trekkie, when it came to inordinate otakuosity vis-a-vis sci-fi shows (and by the way, I just invented the word “otakuosity” so don’t complain – look up the Japanese slang term “otaku” and you’ll understand).
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but be very impressed and pleased to see an 8th grade Korean girl write the following speech composition for me in 2012 (and note that, as always, I will type what she wrote verbatim – without corrections – I think she did very well for her level):
Hello my name is Yeongeun. I’m going to talk about my plan for camping trip. I want to go to Tardis. Because Tardis is a very interesting spaceship. Tardis can go anywhere even future and past, too. If I go to Tardis, I have to bring some food, water, a sleeping bag and clothes. I have to bring weapons, too, because when I trip with doctor, that I have many happens. Also, I will have to see many aliens, and they will attack me and doctor and I will be scared. But maybe doctor can’t kill them. So, I have to attack aliens with weapons. This is my plan for camping trip. Thanks for listening.
Please note, I did not in any way plant this idea in her mind. It emerged utterly on its own, and in the hostile environment of Korean hagwon-based English education, which for the most part stultifies imagination and creativity and discourages interest in unusual cultural artifacts from foreign cultures, such as Doctor Who.
My students were writing essays in my RN2T cohort. When I have them write, I have no problem allowing them to use dictionaries – I will be going through and correcting their writing with them, anyway, and I think it can be valuable because it encourages them to be more creative with language, which in turn allows them to become more engaged in the learning process.
Allowing them dictionaries in this day and age means allowing them to pull out their cell phones – that’s where the dictionary apps live, along with online (internet) dictionaries and such like. I don’t have hang ups about this. It’s part of the world as it is, today.
One student, Hojin, had his phone out and was grinning at it.
I said you could use your phones for dictionaries,” I said to him – “Not to surf the internet or play games.”
“Teacher!” he objected. He turned the screen away so I couldn’t see it. Then, thinking… “How did you know?”
“No one smiles when they’re using the dictionary, Hojin,” I explained, sardonically.
“Oh. You’re so clever!” He laughed. And he put his phone away.
I recently gave my most advanced class of middle schoolers a speech assignment, based on the idea of interviewing some famous person. I have gotten some very interesting and well-thought-out results. One student imagines interviewing the late Steve Jobs (there are plenty of Apple fans in Korea). He actually did quite a bit of research, apparently, into Jobs’ biography. He asks the following question:
What did you feel when you were fired from Apple?
His answer isn’t exactly perfect, idiomatically, but it’s clear and deeply insightful, if not downright philosophical:
I felt absurd but My mind was light.
It’s worth recalling that Jobs was a practicing Zen Buddhist. This invented “Jobs quote” on the part of my student is even more insightful when considered in that light.
Now… don’t get me wrong: I’m still the ultimate anti-Apple-fanboy. But Steve Jobs as a business persona has always interested me more than the particular strategies and style that he adopted for his company, and they’re something I’m more inclined to look upon favorably.
This wacky meme is ancient in internet terms, and I remember running across it a few years ago, but I didn't blog it at the time. I ran across it again recently, and, although it's in horribly poor taste, it really did make me laugh several times. So, without further ado, here is… Rainbow Stalin.
I’ve made allegations before. Allegations are what alligators do, right? Um… no?
Alligators are my “brand” as a teacher, in a way. I have my alligator schtick, which comes in handy especially with younger students. To recall a conversation I had some years ago with a student: “Teacher! Why do you like alligators?” “Because you like alligators!” But the fact is, there’s no reason at all – I don’t have any reason to like alligators. It all came about by accident.
Here is a doodle that I had to retire from my desk. Rather than just throw it away, I decided to immortalize it on the interwebs, first. Isn’t that exciting?
말보다 증거 word-THAN evidence
Evidence [is better] than words.
Evidence for what?
I had a list of proverbs I was trying to go through them in order but I skipped about 5 of them, because they were too difficult to figure out. Seeing evidence of my poor Korean Language skill (and doing nothing about it) is better than learning new Korean vocabulary. There, that really confounds the intended meaning of proverb.
And here is the best explanation of this kind of problem.
I was hoping to get some stuff done yesterday, too.
Here's Ira Glass (who I'm not always a fan of, but, well…) on the topic of creativity, with a creative accompanying animation by someone named David Shiyang Liu.
Is it possible for me to follow this advice? I did some writing today, but when it comes to the recommended focus on volume, I'm not really doing that well. My perfectionism (or my "taste" as Glass calls it) is too annoyingly interfering.
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue… Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here's a scary technology – some Japanese company is developing a device that can be pointed at someone, gun-like, and stop that person from talking. Here's a discussion of it, at Language Log.
Walking home I stopped by my bank's ATM to take out some cash, and it occured to me that I hadn't updated my bankbook in a long time. I don't receive mailed bank statements for my Korean bank account(s), and I don't have online banking configured, although I reckon if I tried, I could get either of those things set up. I just never bothered to. So if I need to get a list of transactions, Korean ATM's have a function where you insert your savings/check-card passbook into the machine and it prints updated transactions into the passbook. I stuck my passbook into the machine and it printed 5 months' worth of transactions. There weren't any surprises – the only reason I'm mentioning this is because it was really surprising to me that I'd not done so in so long – time has really been flying by quite fast since I came back to Ilsan from my sojourn in Yeonggwang.
I had a group of 7th-graders who didn't know my age (either they were relatively new students who hadn't been through an "introduction" class with me, or else they'd completely forgotten).
I had them attempt to estimate my age. I do this when they ask how old I am, unless I make a joke and say something outlandish, like "I'm 647." Kids are notoriously unreliable in estimating my age, but I nevertheless feel discouraged that the average age estimate was almost 10 years too old: 55. Normally the average, at least, comes out not that far off, despite some outlying individual estimates.
Am I looking old, lately? Acting old? Is my ennui showing?
This song was on the radio in 2001, I think. I associate it with living in Burbank, California, and driving on the 134 toward Pasadena to visit my dad. I imagined going to visit a frontier psychiatrist, who would help me in some difficult-to-define but appropriately frontiery way. The video is pretty entertaining, in and of itself – I can honestly say I never saw it before this current moment.
I made a Tomato & Yogurt Curry from a pre-mix (“seasonings only”) package, earlier. This is quite adventurous, since the directions on the package are entirely and solely in Korean (see right).
So it was a cross between a Korean Language lesson and a cooking class. I wonder if this has potential as a means of motivating me to study Korean better. I kept confirming my understanding of instructions and vocabulary with a dictionary and/or googletranslate, worrying I wasn’t making it right. But the basics: veggies and potatoes (I left out the meat called for in the recipe), boil in the first packet of mix, add the second packet, then the third, serve over rice. Here it is.
Yesterday I went with Curt to go on a small hike up a mountain (well, really just a hill). His daughter came along, who’s just entering 4th grade. The mountain we chose is called 심학산 [simhaksan]. It has a view of North Korea, like many mountains around here – it was hazy and not very distinct but I’m always very aware of it – I guess it’s just my geographical interest kicking in.
After the mountain we went to a brand new giant mall and had dinner and bought his little one-year-old a Pororo-branded toy. It was fun. Here are some pictures. I didn’t get a picture of the boy with the toy. I should have.
This is near the top of the mountain.
Curt and I.
A view southeast, toward Ilsan. Somewhere near the center of that vast cluster of buildings is my apartment and workplace.
Here I am looking dazed with the community known as Geumchon hidden directly behind me. Geumchon is important because it’s where I lived in 1991 when I was in Korea, as a soldier in the US Army.
And here’s the striking view looking North – I’ve added some useful labels to this picture – you can click the picture to enlarge it.
Anywhere in Northern Gyeonggi Province, if you go hiking on the hills and mountains, you will run across military structures – fox-holes, fortified hill-tops, bunkers and concrete tank traps and hidden installations. Here’s a covered “tank-parking-space” amid the trees on the side of the mountain.
Curt’s daughter (and my sometime student at Karma, too), looking focused and tired on her way down the mountain. She was angry because Curt had promised a snack at the top of the mountain and he’d forgotten, and she failed to complain about it. We had a snack when we got back down to the bottom.
Here’s a turtle-based monument seen along the trail.
At the mall.
Lurking in the dusky haze beyond the freeway interchange, there lies the Han River Estuary and the point of North Korea. I wonder what the Northerners think, watching this massive monument to blatant brand-name consumerism through their high-powered binoculars.
Today is a holiday. March first commemorates the 1919 uprising against the Japanese colonial rule. I’ve blogged about it before, but I read something interesting in the wikithing article on the topic today: “A delegation of overseas Koreans, from Japan, China, and Hawaii, sought to gain international support for independence at the ongoing Paris Peace Conference. The United States and Imperial Japan blocked the delegation’s attempt to address the conference.” (Emphasis added by me). Not to be a hater, but, looking at the historical record, ain’t it wonderful how my own country stands up so consistently for human rights?
I spent the day with my sometime friend / sometime boss Curt. I’ll post more later.
I used to watch The Monkees TV show in rerun syndication after school when I was maybe 10 years old. I was only able to watch TV indiscriminately in those few hours when I was a latchkey kid – mom still at work, I would sit at home watching whatever was on. The selection was poor. We got 3 channels, if I recall, in Humboldt County at that time. So I just watched whatever was on. I saw the entire run of the old Batman series, which was my favorite. I saw many episodes of the Brady Bunch (not bad) and The Monkees (I abhorred it – I thought then that it was a sort of pandering cultural fluff – but I watched it anyway).
I was thinking about it today because I heard on NPR that Davy Jones, of The Monkees, has died.
Here’s a music video from one of those Monkees episodes.
La revolución es un pupitre, es un estante en una escuelita toda llena de lápices y papeles.
La revolución es el vestido, es el estreno de los pobres en Domingo y el pantalón y la camisa limpia para cada día.
La revolución es la comida, es una mesa servida con su pichel de agua y el tenedor y el cuchillo sobre le mantel a cuadros, teniendo además otro cubierto listo por si acaso se aparece una visita.
La revolución es la tierra, son los arados surcando los maizales y una familia de azadones cultivando hortalizas.
La revolución es el trabajador (La revolución es el obrero con una flor)
La revolución es el hombre es el amigo que no piensa lo mismo y vota en contra y sigue siendo el mismo amigo.
La revolución es el indio.
La revolución es un libro y un hombre libre.
– Mario Cajina Vega
Se trata de la revolución nicaragüense de 79. ¿Porqué estoy meditando sobre revoluciones? Pasé otro día no muy bueno. Me siento cansado y algo molesto.
"If there is a god, why did he make me an atheist? That was his first mistake." – Ricky Gervais
This is one of those "filler" posts that happen when I'm not really in the mood to write something. But, to provide a diary entry:
I watched the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot of Star Trek last night, and liked it more than I would have expected. I'd actually avoided it up until now. It was clever as a reboot, since it took the characters from the original series and literally rebooted them into an alternate timeline, via a time-traveling psychopathic Romulan – and don't we all need one of those now and again? By dumping everyone into the alternate timeline, they needn't ever concern themselves with complaints about canon-breaking. It reminds of the way Heinlein resolved all possible issues with inconsistencies in his future history(-ies), by just saying "They're ALL true – parallel universes!"
망건 쓰자 파장된다 manggeon sseu-ja pajang-doen-da headband put-on-AS-SOON-AS [the exam] ends “Put on the headband just when the exam is over.”
There is a Korean tradition of putting on a headband (such as a traditional horsehair headband – 망건) before taking on some difficult challenge or task, such as taking a major exam or protesting against the government or some other huge challenge. This expression means that you don’t get around to putting on the headband until the challenge is basically past. It’s proverbial meaning therefore seems like something like “Frittering away opportunities.” Some dictionaries have, “muddling away one’s opportunity,” which is essentially the same.
Some translations have “Easier said than done,” instead. I don’t think this is the same thing at all. Thus, I would say the first interpretation above – “frittering away opportunities” – describes my life perfectly. The latter is not as close a fit.
Wait – lemme go put on my headband. I’ll get back to you.
In the middle of February, my advanced middle-schoolers ran for President of Korea. They gave "stump speeches" and impressed me greatly. Below is a video of their speeches, completely unedited. Note that I, too, am running for President of South Korea. This is not meant to be taken seriously, but a core aspect of my debate and speech curriculum idea is that as their teacher, I should give at least as many speeches as they do. The kids know that my ideas are not entirely serious, but a few of them address them in their own way.
I'm ready to vote for Jaehwan for president – he's not the most charismatic speaker (I'd give that prize to Haeun, maybe), but he's got a great grip on the issues, and he offered a rebuttal to everyone else's ideas. I also liked Dongyun's speech a lot.
As mentioned in my last post, these videos are "unlisted" on youtube, and, depending on feedback – i.e. anything inappropriately negative or nonconstructive by troll-like, internet-based creatures – I'll likely remove the embed.
I'm finally getting around to posting some of my advanced debate class student speeches. I have decided I don't have the gumption to produce anything like a more polished, edited version of these speeches, but I want to make them available – I've had coworkers request them and I like to share what the "end result" of my advanced debate classes is – in all its limited glory.
So these videos are somewhat "raw," but I don't think there's anything too embarrassing in them. The sound quality isn't always great – especially for those not used to listening to shy Korean middle-schoolers' accents.
Below, here is a debate we had on the topic of "Plastic Surgery" from the beginning of February. I'll post more tomorrow.
I'm always proud of my students. I think Haeun got the high score on this one.
I'm keeping my videos of student work "unlisted" on youtube – I got too many trolly comments from random people viewing them. So this blog entry constitutes the only "public" exposure of the video – hopefully this won't cause problems, but if it does, I may remove the embed in the future and set up some kind of "authorized viewer" with my youtube account.
This is the recreational philosophy blogentry-du-jour.
Let’s see if I can explain this. “Occam’s Razor” is the “law of succinctness” in philosophy, the dictum that given a simpler and more complex explanation for something, the simpler is better, all other things being equal. So this philosopher named John Holbo, blogging at Crooked Timber, coins “Occam’s Phaser,” in which he suggests, “Do not compound the silliness of your examples beyond necessity.” This is due to one of those trolleologicalparables which he encountered while reading something by Nozick.
Personally, I agree with some of the commenters, who point out that the humorousness of these philosophical examples and stories is part of the point of them – I would suggest that, in discussing awkward or unexpected ethical or philosophical intuitions, these resorts to humor can help “disarm” us, vis-a-vis our preconceptions. They lower our defenses, thus enabling a more objective self-reflection.
Still, in all, I understand his point. Why suggest an outlandish situation that relies on impossibilities, when realistic examples meeting the same criteria (from a philosophical standpoint) are feasible? Perhaps because the philosophers aren’t as comfortable with their conclusions as they’d like to hope.
And beyond that, I love the name – the label – that he’s given to his new principle of trolleological plausi-parsimony: Occam’s Phaser. Occam, of course, would have a blue shirt – he’d be a science officer, right?
John Holbo, incidentally, is someone who offers change you can really believe in (which is to say, I was delighted by the below image, which is one of his compositions):
Yesterday after work I took the subway in to Itaewon to meet my friend Basil, who’d recently returned from a holiday in Turkey. We went to a Middle Eastern restaurant there, of course. I like hearing Basil speaking Arabic with people in Seoul. It feels very international.
We stopped at the food store there that sells things like coriander powder and split peas and lentils, and I stocked up. We wandered around the neighborhood because Basil was looking for the hotel where he wanted to stay – I guess he’d been there before but forgot where it was. There are a lot of interesting halal grocers and restaurants and things on the side streets to the south east of Itaewon station. I said… “it’s like visiting New York.” Then, as an afterthought, looking at the uninspiring architecture, I said, “Or maybe Newark, New Jersey.”
I came home last night and made some soup and have had a very lazy Sunday today.
Here’s a picture of dusk from the hill in Itaewon, looking toward Yongsan.
What I’m listening to right now.
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, “Down From Dover,” 1972.
Originally written and performed by Dolly Parton. And riddle me this – why does Lee Hazlewood have the same singing voice as Mr Snuffleupagus?
Obama is basically socialist in the same way that GW Bush is (was) socialist. In most of the areas that I most hoped he would reverse Bushian policy, he's merely entrenched and continued it: civil liberties, various wars, Guantánamo, etc. So, since the Repubs have to "prove" that Obama is socialist, they have no choice but to plunge ever farther rightward, themselves. Even Jeb Bush is uncomfortable, now. Go figure. The quote that's circulating:
I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective, and that’s kind of where we are.
A student presented me with this picture a while back. I like when they give me gifts – even when they are inexplicable (or perhaps, especially when they are inexplicable).
I once studied Chinese for a few months. And, being a perennial if rather unsuccessful student of the Korean Language, I am also constantly exposed to the more than 60% of vocabulary in Korean that is of Chinese origin. I have not, however, ever really seriously been drawn to trying to learn Chinese the way that other languages have interested me.
Nevertheless, this is really interesting, from a “wacky language” standpoint. Below is a poem in Chinese. I can’t read it – though I recognize a few characters (while giving them Korean pronunciations).
Story of Shi Eating the Lions
A poet named Shi lived in a stone room,
fond of lions, he swore that he would eat ten lions.
He constantly went to the market to look for ten lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions came to the market
and Shi went to the market.
Looking at the ten lions, he relied on his arrows
to cause the ten lions to pass away.
Shi picked up the corpses of the ten lions and took them to his stone room.
The stone room was damp. Shi ordered a servant to wipe the stone room.
As the stone den was being wiped, Shi began to try to eat the meat of the ten lions.
At the time of the meal, he began to realize that the ten lion corpses
were in fact were ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.
Strange poem, but nothing too weird, right?
But… now here’s the romanized transcription of the Chinese – the digits at the end of each syllable represent the 4 tones.
I ran across this interview with Chomsky recently. I really despise Chomsky in some respects – his academic authoritarianism (in a field near-and-dear to my heart, Linguistics) reveals no small hypocrisy behind his professed syndicalist anarchism. Nevertheless (or despite this), he sometimes makes some very good points about American hypocrisies, too. Perhaps this is in the vein of “it takes one to know one”? To quote from the interview (which was with the aptly-named Guernica magazine):
Noam Chomsky: Yeah, U.S. terrorism is often far worse because it’s a powerful state. Take 9/11. That was a serious terrorist act. In Latin America, they often call it “the second 9/11” because there was another one, namely September 11, 1973.
Guernica: In Chile.
Noam Chomsky: Suppose that al Qaeda had not just blown up the World Trade Center, but suppose that they’d bombed the White House, killed the president, established a military dictatorship, killed maybe fifty to a hundred thousand people, maybe tortured seven hundred thousand, instituted a major international terrorist center in Washington, which was overthrowing governments around the world and installing malicious dictatorships, assassinating people, [and] brought in a bunch of economists who drove the economy into its worst disaster maybe in history. Well, that would be worse than what we call 9/11. And it did happen, namely on 9/11/1973. All that I’ve changed is per capita equivalence in numbers, a standard way to measure. Well, okay, that’s one we were responsible for. So yeah, it’s much worse.
Yes, the other 9/11 was in 1973, in Chile. And it was brought to you by Nixon/Kissinger, in the person of Pinochet, not Osama bin Laden.
Perhaps I spoke too soon in stating, last week, that my job is relatively unstressful.
And now, I’ve been having a really horrible week. It’s enough to feed into that superstition that speaking positively about something will jinx it, making it worse.
Rhetorically: why do my coworkers ask my opinion if they choose to so consistently ignore it? Several times in the last two days I’ve been asked what I think of the placement (or re-placement – movement from one class or cohort to another) of students. I’ve given my opinions, which have been consistently disregarded. I think I need to just quit stating my opinion – it’s a little bit humiliating to not be taken seriously as a teacher after all this time.
Although… I must acknowledge that simply stating my feelings here constitutes a kind of passive-aggressive “push-back” vis-a-vis work, given that this blog is an essentially public forum, right? Hah. We’ll see if anyone’s reading this.
I saw the graffito below in a classroom. Does it really require comment?
Translation: “This hagwon is really boring.” Below that, in different handwriting, “dude” (not literally “dude,” but in the usage / pragmatics in teen slang, “헐” works the same way).
It was a hard day at work. I think I shouldn't complain about it, though. Just move on. As recently observed, overall, it's one of the least stressful jobs I've ever had. So… I shouldn't let it stress me out.
Changing the subject, the concept of the dangling participle was annoying today.
In fact, English also has something called an absolute construction, and many sentences criticized for including a dangling participle can be explained as including an absolute instead, which is considered grammatical. Is the green sentence above an example of a dangling participle or an absolute construction? I believe it's the latter.
Really, then, I wonder: can something dangle absolutely?.
I was in one of my random internet-surfing modes that I sometimes get into, and ended up watching the video below. I sometimes consider that India is a country near the top of my list of countries that I would consider “moving to next” if I give up on this “South Korean project.” The natural scenery in the video (Ooty, Tamil Nadu state in South India) reminds me, vaguely, of some train trips I took in southern/eastern Mexico in the 1980s, or, also, the tropical setting that is my mother’s home in the Atherton Tablelands of Far North Queensland, Australia.
The video is interesting in part because it was apparently a low-budget, no-special-effects undertaking – those people dancing on the train are really just people dancing on a moving train (picture at right). The song, like most Indian hits, is Bollywood in origin, but according the wikithing article about the song, its lyrics come from a Sufi folk tradition. Which perhaps incidentally explains why I ended up discovering the video due to an article somewhere about Urdu, not Hindi (Urdu [Pakistan] and Hindi [India] are dialects of essentially the same language, often mutually comprehensible). But the video and song are clearly Hindi, although the setting of the video is South India (Tamil Nadu) which is neither Hindi nor Urdu, culturally.
Well, I’m kind of rambling. If I went to India, the South and Northeast are the parts that most interest me.
As a digression… I once came rather close to taking a month-long trip to Kerala (in the South), when I was still considering myself a computer professional. The story was that I’d worked out that, in net financial terms, it would cost me the same to fly to India and enroll in an Indian computer certification program as it would to stay in the US and get a much higher-priced but precisely identical (content-equivalent) certification. So I was going to go to Kerala and become a Microsoft Certfied Database Administrator, or something in that vein.
I never went to India. But I still think about it. My current status as an EFL teacher doesn’t really “work” for India – India has plenty of EFL, of course (it’s an official language, still, even), but it’s so large and so “self contained” in EFL terms that they’re mostly uninterested, as far as I can tell, in foreign native English speakers (especially American-accented ones) – there seems to be no market for my type of work, there. So if I went, I guess it would just be as some kind of long-term tourist. Or else something like the above, where I was trying to break back into computer work.
What I’m listening to right now.
Malaika Arora and King Khan, “Chaiyya Chaiyya.”
I like the somewhat obscure, almost mysteriously ominous ending of the video – perhaps a reference to the movie from which the song is taken, or some other pop-culture reference that is lost on me.
We had an end-of-school-year "level test" today, since the new Korean school year starts at the beginning of March. I asked an advanced student named Jaehwan how the test was – did he find it difficult. He answered, laconically: "It was not boring."
I like kids with a sense of humor – although I'm not even sure he meant it that way. Though I sort of suspect so.
Frankly, “Riceball & Tortilla” sounds like the ill-conceived name of a 1970’s TV dramedy with a politically-incorrect ethnic twist, perhaps in the buddy-cop genre (e.g. Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey).
