Lawrence Leung

Is Lawrence Leung Asian? The name looks Asian, but sometimes people fool me.

Let's see.....

Lord Wiki doesn't say that Leung is Asian, but I saw pictures on Google. He is.

He's known for a television show called Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure.

I'm not getting much about his childhood here. All Lord Wiki says is that Leung was born in 1978, and that he grew up in Box Hill Victoria. Is that in Melbourne?

Yes. Lord Wiki says it's an eastern suburb.

In the beginning of his career, Leung got together with some Melbourne friends, and had an improv group called the Improbables.

What would our world be like if we

knew for sure there 

was life after death, and 

we could easily talk to our 

dearly-departed on the Internet?

The Dead are Online a novel by Dina Roberts 

In 2001, he created a show called Sucker. It won best solo show at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Since then he has made other shows, and won awards. I'm not going to list all of them...at least not right now.

I'm reading what Lord Wiki has to say about Lawrence Leung's Choose Your Own Adventure. The premise sounds cute. It's Leung trying to fulfill the dreams he had as a ten-year-old boy. In the first episode, he tries to impress the girl he had loved back in his younger years. I wonder how she reacted. I'm sure she was swayed by the fact that this reunion was part of a reality TV program.

Here's the shows official website. It's a cute site. You get to pick up Leung with your mouse and drag him around a map-like thing.

It looks like there were six episodes of the show: find love, be a rock star, be a man, be the best in the world, be cool, and be myself.

I wonder what my aspirations were at the age of ten. I didn't keep a diary until I was about twelve or thirteen, so there's really no way to find out.

Here's a promo for the show. I like the Rubik's Cube bit. It looks like this same page allows you to watch the actual episodes. So, I'll watch one. I guess I'll start at the beginning....with the love episode.

Oh, never mind. I can't watch it. They tricked me. Can any of you watch it? Maybe you have to live in Australia?

Well, thank goodness for YouTube. They have some clips here.

This one is from the love episode....it has Leung talking to dating gurus. The first advice he gets is that Leung needs to get rid of his Star Wars pillowcases. See, but I would think that's absolutely charming. I would totally love a man with Star Wars pillowcases. Tim doesn't have them, but he does have Star Wars Light Sabers, and an R2D2 robot (that also belongs to Jack). I love people who are geeky about something. So I hate dating advice like that. It makes assumptions about people. I know. I know. It's all just a joke, but I bet it's partly serious.

The dating guru says that men shouldn't show interest in a woman until she shows interest in them. And what do women learn from books like He's Not That Into You? Burton Kent, a reviewer on Amazon.com says, The author breezily explains to women that if a guy was interested in you, he would make a move. That's it. Every single time. Kent argues with the authors. Some guys are shy! Yeah. And some guys have been told by their self-help books to let the woman make the first move. How the hell do we ever manage to have relationships in this world? It's a miracle, I tell ya.

Oh my goodness. I'm hoping Leung's dating guru isn't for real. His advice sounds so ridiculous.

Nope. It looks like he's for real. His name is Nick Savoy. Here's his website, and he was featured on Dr. Phil.

Here's another scene from the love episode. It's very sweet. He finds his girl, and thankfully it looks like he didn't follow the advice of Nick Savoy. He sings a song he wrote to her. She was embarrassed by it. Who wouldn't be? But still. It was really sweet. Well, at least it was better than following some manipulative dating game plan.

Here's a Lawrence Leung website. I think it might be his official site. It says his show was nominated for an AFI. That was back in November, so I figured maybe the winner was announced. I checked on IMDb, and they won. Cool!

Here's his MySpace. He last logged on 22 February....my sister's birthday. He's 101 years old. Yeah, I was guessing he was about that age.

I really wish I could see more of the love episode. I want to know how he decided to write Angela a song. And what was her reaction after she got over being embarrassed?

I'm having a hard time finding biographical information about Leung...like his childhood. There's not much on his website, or MySpace. And Lord Wiki had nothing to say. Maybe Leung is a secretive guy?

But here's an interview. Maybe this will reveal something exciting.

Ah, here's something. He was clumsy as a child. He learned how to avoid ridicule by making it look like it was planned. That's a good mindset: turn embarrassing moments into comedy.

Leung went to a conservative boys school. During those days, he wanted to be a filmmaker. He was making dark films in the style of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Leung says, Other kids were making The Adventures of My Dog, or My Cat, and I was doing all these special effects and reversing film and putting cotton wool on the camera and really punishing my actors… And doing hundreds of takes. That's cute.

As a child, he had a thing for wresting and The Karate Kid. I loved The Karate Kid too, but probably the sequel more so. I think I was in seventh grade when it came out. I loved that Peter Cetera song.

Tonight is very clear As we're both lying here.....

Tamylyn Tomita is so beautiful. Whatever happened to her?

Well, it looks like she's still acting, but it doesn't seem like she's had any huge roles lately. She did five episodes of 24 in 2002.

As we probably all suspected, Leung got the inspiration for his show's title from the Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Here's an interview on ABC. This is about a show he did called Skeptic. It's supernatural debunking. Supernatural debunking annoys me. Why can't they just let us have our fun? Well, I guess debunking is fun for them, and I should let them have THEIR fun.

Leung is asked why people believe in such things. Leung responds, I think people want to believe something they can't explain. There's a certain mystery out there that people really want to know. The world's not just black and white, there's also those grey areas in between, which are exciting.

Yeah. Exactly. What's wrong with having a little mystery...a little excitement? Let's say our cat Max pees on the kitchen floor (as he does so almost every day). And the pee puddle is the shape of Australia. Is it so awful for me to believe this is a sign from my guardian angels? Do I really need some debunker skeptic coming in an lecturing me about coincidences and all that?

Once I went to a psychic and she told me she was feeling/sensing someone...who MIGHT have been my dead Grandpa Ed. Was she for real? Maybe. Was she faking it? Maybe. But it made me feel good to imagine my Grandpa might be out there somewhere. Oh, but I paid thirty dollars! She could have been scamming me. Isn't it evil that people push others into giving up their money for something totally fabricated? Well, maybe. But isn't it also ridiculous that we pay four dollars for an ice-cream cone, when we could get a whole gallon for that price at the grocery store. And why the hell do people pay thousands of dollars for a tiny diamond? How is a damn rock going to make my life any better? I'd much rather get my palm and tea leaves read....even if it is fake. It's more entertaining than a sparkly rock.

Skeptics would probably argue that mediums and psychics are terrible because they prey on the grieving. Well, guess what. There are people preying on people all the time. Insurance salespeople prey on the worried and insecure. Dating gurus like Nick Savoy prey on the lonely. Dieting companies prey on those who want to look like air-brushed magazine models. Psychiatric drug companies prey on people who mistakingly believe they're supposed to be happy all the time. Why don't I ever see skeptics going after THESE people?