Food & Dining: Best Fried Korean Chicken and Pizzas by Pizza Maru Express!!!!

Chickeny goodness!
Image from Locky's English Playground

Ever since the broadcasting of famous Korean drama "You Who Came From The Stars", Hong-Kongers have not only become big fans of rich and handsome Korean-looking aliens, but also of Korean fried chickens. If you still have no idea that Korean fried chickens should be served with beer, you have got a huge problem.

It happened that my wife and I wanted to give a new shop (new to us at least) a go one day and ended up going back again and again!

Pizza Maru Express at Hysan Place
Image from Locky's English Playground

Located on the 11/F of Hysan Place in Causeway Bay, Pizzamaru Express is the one shop you must go to every time you visit. There are a few misleading points implied by its name: 1) nothing is 'Express' here, every order takes at least 15 to 25 mins,  2) they offer a range of lovely food other than pizzas, and 3) their fried chicken is their best and most popular dish in fact.

Oh man! All that juice and sauce!!!
Image from Locky's English Playground

At $89 a set and about half about chicken you get, it is the kind of luxurious food you most likely won't have every day, more like a treat for yourself after a week of hard work. But is it worth it? Just look at the juice in the photo above and the texture from the chicken breast below!

Even the chicken breast is tender!!!
Image from Locky's English Playground

There are 4 choices of taste: sweet and spicy garlic (chef's recommendation), sweet and spicy, spicy, and original. And you might have guessed it correctly, it is basically a combination of 2 types of sauce that gave the 4 choices.

We tried the sweet and spicy garlic for the first time and then it is every time, simply because it offers the most complexed yet the most well-blended taste ever! The crunchiness of the exterior makes incredibly similarity with corn flakes in your cereal, only that it isn't! It is just one giant addictive commercial secret! Would love to run into their kitchen for that secret, but I know I won'that be able to get pass the two pretty staff at the cashier. One thing to remember, ALWAYS ask for EXTRA sauce!!!

Fresh out of the oven
Image from Locky's English Playground

What is not so secretive is the flattening of pizza dough which is demonstrated publicly next to the cashier, but that's all you get to see as the crust will then be passed back to the kitchen staff through the hole in the wall.

20 mins of waiting and out came the gorgeous-looking cheesy pizza. The pickle that went with it did not matter, what mattered was the amount of space in my stomach and the last piece that was left on the plate after just 10 mins.

Cheesy goodness!!!
Image from Locky's English Playground

I did manage to share piece with my wife though, if this tells the quality of it.

Disclaimer: I did not receive sponsor of any kinds, money or food or whatsoever, as usual.

Resources:
TV & Technology: You Who Came From The Stars (aka YWCFTS) feat. LINE & Didier Dubot @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2014/02/tv-technology-you-who-came-from-stars.html

Cooking: Simple Breakfast / Bunch With Tomatoes

Tomato craze
Image from Locky's English Playground

Finally! I have completed my assignment, for now. So it is time to make my family a good lunch! There has been a bit of a tomato craze in town for awhile now, so with just $5 for four tomatoes, what's better than creating a whole yummy breakfast to begin the day with?

Tomatoes and paste
Image from Locky's English Playground

What I did was to chop up some fresh tomatoes, the blend it with a can of tomato paste with a little water.

Purée
Image from Locky's English Playground

After that, pour the purée into a pot and gentle heat it.

Herbs for the taste
Image from Locky's English Playground

Add herbs such as rosemary and thyme, or simply just some Italian herbs in bottles to the heated purée with some sugar and pepper.

Truffle& mushroom scrambled eggs
Image from Locky's English Playground

While waiting, make yourself a nice scrambled egg of your choice.

Cool purée
Image from Locky's English Playground

Switch off the flame and wait for the purée to cool down a little.

Scrambled egg on macaroni
Image from Locky's English Playground

Cook some macaroni or rice to go with the eggs and homemade tomato sauce.

Time to tuck in!
Image from Locky's English Playground

With macaroni in chicken broth, you pour the desired amount of tomato sauce into the soap and DE-Licious!!!! Simple, quick and beautiful homemade breakfast / brunch at low cost!


Resources:
Cooking & Health: How To Cook Perfect Scrambled Eggs with Healthy Oil and Good Wok @ Locky's English Playground
lockyep.blogspot.hk/2012/07/cooking-health-how-to-cook-perfect.html

Message: My First 7000-Word Paper & Upcoming Talks

Image from PolyU

Have not been writing for quite awhile as I am trying to rush for my first ever 7000-word assignment deadline. It has to be 7000 words in length to meet the word limit requirement for a publishable paper. Of course, to be actually publishable, there is still a lot of work and refinement, but at least, being able to write a paper this long is already quite an achievement. Right now I still have 2000 words to go, let's hope I can finish this by Thursday as I have to submit another paper on Friday for my talk at the upcoming Asialex 2015 at PolyU from 25-27 June 2015, exact time and date have yet to be confirmed.

Image from HKU

On that note, before giving a talk at PolyU, I will be giving a talk at the CAES International Conference at HKU from 4:25pm to 4:50pm on the 11th June 2015. Both talks will basically be on the same topic with slightly different focus.



Here's my abstract for the Asialex 2015,

House M.D. Corpus Analysis: A Linguistic Intervention of Contemporary American English Law, Locky Full-time PhD student Abstract Television drama, despite its enormous popularity across the globe, has rarely received attentions from the linguistics field. The dearth of research into television drama dialogue is further exposed by the thriving contributions from various other fields such as philosophy, psychology, cultural studies and media studies. This paper seeks to promote research interest in this unique mediated text by selecting renowned medical dramedy House M.D. as research subject and comparing its 927,922-word House M.D. pure dialogue corpus (HMDC) to both the 450-million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and its 95-million-word spoken subcorpus (COCA Spoken) using an adaptation of Bednerak’s (2011) ranked frequency list method. Using WordSmith Tools in the calculation of n-gram (n = 1, 2, 3) at the words/clusters level, the findings indicate that HMDC is more interpersonal than COCA and has a closer resemblance to COCA Spoken than to COCA. HMDC also contains 3.4 times more negativity than COCA Spoken and 2.8 times more than COCA. As such, viewers are presented with English far more interpersonal, as well as involving significantly more disagreement than one will encounter in the real world. This study not only shows similarities and differences between House M.D. and contemporary American English, but also provides a preview of the huge potential in television drama-related research. Keywords: TV drama, House M.D., corpus linguistics, ngram, COCA, ranked frequency list References AFP. (2009, June 12). 'House' is world's most popular TV show. Retrieved April 10, 2013, from Google: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gGRhjVWTeAVMws-iEDRJOY3IDH7g Allen, R. C. (2004). Frequently asked questions. A general introduction to the reader. In R. C.  Allen, & A. Hill (Eds.), The Television Studies Reader (pp. 1-26). New York: Routledge. Androutsopoulos, J. (2012). Introduction: Language and society in cinematic discourse. Multilingua , 31, 139-154. Bednarek, M. (2011). The language of fictional television: a case study of the ‘dramedy’Gilmore Girls. English Text Construction , 4 (1), 54-83. Bednarek, M. (2010). The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Biber, D. (2009). A corpus-driven approach to formulaic language in English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 14 (3), 275-311. Bignell, J., & Lacey, S. (2005). Popular television drama : critical perspectives. (J. Bignell, & S. Lacey, Eds.) Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brock, A. (2004). Analyzing scripts in humorous communication. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research , 17 (4), 353-360. Bubel, C. (2006). The linguistic construction of character relations in TV drama: Doing friendship in Sex and the City. Retrieved April 4, 2013, from SciDok-Datenbank: http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/598/pdf/Diss_Bubel_publ.pdf Cascio, T., & Martin, L. L. (Eds.). (2011). House and Psychology: Humanity Is Overrated. Wiley. Chamber, S. A. (2003). Language and Structure in The West Wing. In P. C. Rollins, & J. E.  O'Connor (Eds.), The West Wing: The American Presidency As Television Drama (pp. 83-100). New York: Syracuse University Press Chua, B. H. (2008). Structure of identification and distancing in watching East Asian television drama. In B. H. Chua, & K. Iwabuchi, East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (pp. 73-90). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Clyman, J. (2009, June 22). Inside the Therapy TV Show You Need to Watch. Retrieved April 20, 2013, from Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reel-therapy/200906/inside-the-therapy-tv-show-you-need-watch Cover, R. (2004). From Butler to Buffy: Notes towards a strategy for identity analysis in contemporary television narrative. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture , 4 (2). Davies, M. (2008). Retrieved November 26, 2014, from The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ Davies, M. (2014, December 1). CoRD | The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Retrieved March 21, 2011, from VARIENG: CoRD | The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) Davies, M. (2011). N-grams data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Retrieved November 20, 2014, from http://www.ngrams.info Gonzalez, S. (2009, October 30). There’s A Doctor Behind ‘House’: Internist Lisa Sanders. Retrieved September 4, 2014, from YaleNews: http://news.yale.edu/2009/10/30/there-s-doctor-behind-house-internist-lisa-sanders Goodier, B. C., & Arrington, M. I. (2007). Physicians, patients, and medical dialogue in the NYPD Blue prostate cancer story. Journal of Medical Humanities , 28 (1), 45-58. Guinness World Records. (2011). Most-watched man on television. Retrieved October 10, 2014, from Guinness World Records: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-10000/most-watched-man-on-television/ IMDb. (n.d.). "House M.D." (2004). Retrieved November 26, 2014, from IMDB.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/ IMDb. (n.d.). House M.D. - Awards - IMDb. Retrieved July 7, 2014, from IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/awards?ref_=tt_awd Jacoby, H., & Irwin, W. (Eds.). (2008). House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies. John Wiley & Sons. Jamieson, D. (2011, September). Does TV accurately portray psychology? Retrieved April 20, 2013, from American Psychology Association: http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2011/09/psychology-shows.aspx Munt, S. R. (2006). A queer undertaking: Anxiety and reparation in the HBO television drama series Six Feet Under. Feminist Media Studies , 263-279. O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. (2007). From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge: CUP. Oldenburg, A. (2005, April 17). 'House' goes under the medical microscope. Retrieved September 4, 2014, from USATODAY.com: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2005-04-17-house-main_x.htm Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Routledge. Piazza, R., Bednarek, M., & Rossi, F. (Eds.). (2011). Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Philadelphia: John Benjamins B.V. Pomerantz, D. (2012, October 17). Sorry, Charlie: Ashton Kutcher Tops Our List Of The Highest-Paid TV Actors. Retrieved October 10, 2014, from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2012/10/17/sorry-charlie-ashton-kutcher-tops-our-list-of-the-highest-paid-tv-actors/ Quaglio, P. (2008). Television dialogue and natural conversation: Linguistic similarities and functional differences. In A. Ädel, & R. Reppen (Eds.), Corpora and Discourse: The challenges of different settings (Vol. vi, pp. 189-210). John Benjamins. Richardson, K. (2010). Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, M. (2014). WordSmith Tools Manual . Retrieved May 20, 2014, from Lexical Analysis Software: http://www.lexically.net/downloads/version6/HTML/index.html Song, G. (2010). Chinese masculinities revisited: Male images in contemporary television drama serials. Modern China , 36 (4), 404-434. Stubbs, M., & Barth, I. (2003). Using recurrent phrases as text-type discriminators: A quantitative method and some findings. Functions of Language , 10 (1), 61-104. The Telegraph. (2011, September 15). Guinness Book of Records: Hugh Laurie is most watched man on television. Retrieved October 10, 2014, from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8762970/Guinness-Book-of-Records-Hugh-Laurie-is-most-watched-man-on-television.html Whitbourne, S. K. (2012, March 10). We're Not Psychologists but We Play Them on Television. Retrieved April 20, 2013, from Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201203/we-re-not-psychologists-we-play-them-television Wikia. (n.d.). House Wikia. Retrieved July 3, 2014, from Wikia: http://house.wikia.com/wiki/House_Wiki Wild, D. K. (2005a, October 24). Constructing House: An Interview with House, M.D. writer Lawrence Kaplow. Retrieved September 4, 2014, from Blogcritics: http://blogcritics.org/constructing-house-an-interview-with-house/ Woznicki, K. (2005, September 27). A doctor/writer in the 'House'. Retrieved September 4, 2014, from CNN.com: http://edition.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/09/27/profile.writer.foster/index.html

Resources:
Asialex 2015
http://asialex2015.engl.polyu.edu.hk/

CAES International Conference
http://caes.hku.hk/facesofenglish/

CAES International Conference Programme Schedule
http://caes.hku.hk/facesofenglish/files/2015/01/provisional_programme_schedule.pdf