January 2009 Archives

Tycho at Penny Arcade had a link to this fun diversion.  It's a fun little flash game where you have to place elements on top of each other in order to grow the tower high enough to reach the sun.  It doesn't take too long, but it's worth the time it does take. 

The magazine company where I work part-time gave the staff a traditional Lunar New Year gift: a giant octagon of Spam!  Did you know that there are different flavors of the artificial meat product?  Me, neither, until I opened the box.  Garlic Spam?  Spam with Cheese?  Yes, sir!




Other common gifts are boxes of fruit, especially pears; alcohol sets; toilet tissue; cooking oil and other such things.  Cash is also a quite common among family members.  Typically, parents give their children envelopes full of 10,000 won notes.  Then, after children get jobs, they give money back to their parents. 

Today is Seollal (설날), or Lunar (Chinese) New Year.  I've celebrated by having a party last night and watching season one of Flight of the Conchords today.  

Our hero George Bush saved us from over 200 terrorist attacks on Airlines after Sept. 11.  Read on here Terror on the airplanes.

Just got back in the USA after three weeks in Yemen.  Ten days and I will be in London and then Sierra Leone.  Yemen was incredible.  The people were friendly, the food fantastic and the history ancient.  I am working on getting caught up on the old pictures so I can start posting new ones from my travels.  Ok jet lag is setting in, off to bed. 
END OF TEST

In case you woke up today and wondered "What is aristotle reading?" I have the answers.
I'm about 3/5's through The Book Thief, an extraordinary novel.  The story itself is not unique per se, but the narration is quite stunning.  Set in WWII Germany, it follows the life of desperately poor child Liesel Meminger whose foster family hides a Jewish pugilist.  The book had been staring at me every time I went to the bookstore, but I'd resisted it due to the "Anne Frank Effect".  This is, in my mind at least, the aversion to books and films and conversations about horrific, depressing events, usually regarding the Holocaust or Africa.  Did you change the channel when "Schindler's List" started?  That's the Anne Frank Effect.  Did you send "Hotel Rwanda" back to Netflix unwatched?  The Anne Frank Effect.  Talked to everyone else at the family reunion except your cousin who just came back from Iraq with Humvee shrapnel in his thigh?  Anne Frank again.
Anywho, I finally broke down and picked up the Book Thief and I am definitely glad I did.  Marcus Zusak has a remarkable talent with language.  Some of his sentences are positively exquisite.   "After a miscarriaged pause..."   "The fire was now nothing but a funeral of smoke..."
At moment I also have a couple of articles tabbed on my browser.  The first is Dangerous Minds by Malcolm Gladwell, an essay about the vagaries of criminal profiling.  It's Gladwell, so make of it what you will.  This isn't his best writing, but it's still interesting.  The other is It's Written All Over Your Face, an overview of what the face tells a potential mate.  I'm a huge sucker for stuff like that.

 

Alex posted a pertinent reflection on some of the challenges being a native English teacher in Korea.  Noting something that could be easily taken directly from my own experience, he writes

In my first school, teaching kindergarten, I was still very much of the Westernized school of thought that "You don't touch the children. Ever." After a few weeks, I got pulled aside and the director explained that some of the moms were complaining that I wasn't "showing the children enough love."

What caught my attention, though, is a link he included about a Korean teacher who has been accused of molesting students but is still allowed to teach.  I'll leave the commentary on this to Alex, but this case strikes me as a pattern in Korea regarding sexual molestation cases.  Consider the case of the disabled woman who was raped over several years by her male relatives; the judge released the rapists on suspended sentences because they were her only caretakers.  There are, sadly, many such cases.

Ran across this in Slate today.  Apparently the Tulsa World has embarked upon a, possibly foolish, libel suit against alternative weekly Urban Tulsa.  Stay classy, Tulsa. 

Today on Boing Boing, there is a post about casu marzu. It's a fermented Sardinian cheese made from sheep's milk, believed to be an aphrodisiac by locals but illegal. Why is it illegal? Well, once the maggots in the cheese die, they make the delicacy toxic. Maggots. In the chesse. And to make it more fun, the maggots (in the cheese!) can jump about 15 cm, so they often try to jump into the eyes of those eating. So, people generally hold their hands over the cheese when they take a bite. How exciting. Where can I get some?

Korean pop music is generally characterized by ballady shlock or idol-fronted bubblegum pop.  Less common on the airwaves or music TV here in Korea are pure rock acts, which is unfortunate as there is some real talent there.  My favorite is Jaurim.  Not only does the band have a good pop rock sound, but it is fronted by a female vocalist, Kim Yoon-ah.  The first of their songs that I heard was the Ha Ha Ha Song, but their best, in my opinion, is Magic Carpet Ride, which appears in my 25 most played songs in iTunes.  Jaurim does occassionaly fall into the depressing ballads that mare so much of the Korean music scene, and when Kim Yoon-ah tries to sing in English, it's not great.  I haven't been to many concerts here, so I don't know how common this is, but when I saw Jaurim live at Olympic Stadium for their latest album, Yoon-ah spent almost as much time talking as she did singing. Overall, though, Jaurim is a great act and if you are curious about Korean pop music, I highly recommend checking them out.

My nerd credentials are expressed in three ways: D&D (Viva 3.5!), a borderline unhealthy obsession with the Internet, and Battlestar Galactica. After a too-long hiatus, Battlestar returns to the bit torrent networks this coming Friday.  There are no words to express how excited I am about this upcoming 44 minutes of sublime awesomeness (and I mean awesome in the original sense).  In the extremely unlikely possibility that you are interested in BSG, haven't yet seen a promo trailer, and have somehow stumbled upon my site, watch this:

At the Seoul Writers' workshop on Sunday, a story by Jorge Miramontes contained the phrase "the Siberian afterthoughts of Korea" which perfectly sums up the bone-achingly cold winds of Seoul this past week.  It's only -6 degrees Celsius (-21 F), but with the wind chill, it's hovering around absolute zero, I think.  

I'm working on putting the galleries back online, which is a bit tricky, as I need to download the files from the old host and upload them to the new host.  This is tricky because my Internet connection sucks royally lately; I keep losing connection between my router and cable modem.  *sigh*  Regardless, they should be up shortly. 
The older galleries will, however, have to be completely rebuilt to reflect the newer, cleaner style used in the more recent ones.  Thus, anyone looking to see Justin's pics from India, for example, will just have to wait. 

For a long, long time, I've been contemplating moving the website from my homebrew content management system to something...functional.  So, here it is: Moveable Type.  I'm not going to lie, there is a learning curve here.  I'm used to going everything in PHP, which is a little funky in MT, amongst everything else.  It will take me a little while to get everything set up correctly, get the galleries added and such.
Also, with the new build, there should be a lot more posting, as well as a new blogger or two.