Well, I carved pumpkins tonight at the Jeonju pre-Halloween Jack O’Lantern carving party at the Deep-in. It was strange at first: I started to feel a little blue, because of memories about the last time I carved pumpkins. I was looking at happy people around me, and trying to be happy with them, chat with them. And I decided to just forget last year, and live in the present. I decided to carve the best damn pumpkins I could! And I did! I personally carved two pumpkins: one was A Very Internet Pumpkin, which consisted of Western- and Korean-styled smiley …
Month: October 2003
Evolution is NOT A Theory. Period.
I’ll say it again. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is something we know happened. We see it happen in nature even now, with creatures like cichlids in Lake Malawi, who speciate unusually rapidly. We see plenty of evidence for it in the fossil record. Anyone who spends any amount of time looking at the world around them will sense the genius in Darwin’s simple, elegant, and brilliant insight of how the world came to be as it is now. The claim that Darwinism is in trouble is to claim there is the crisis to cover one’s own ignorance, and …
Right, Left, and Wrong About History
So I was reading this article about how Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the coming of the End of History when the Berlin Wall came down is something that seems, retrospectively, naive and totally mistaken. The article is called Why History Has No End by Victor Davis Hanson and it’s online over at City Journal. Never mind that, in my opinion, one shouldn’t have need of hindsight to see that statement was very foolish. No, I read on anyway… here’s a snippet: European animosity toward the U.S. also has a snobbish component—an anti-bourgeois disdain that is the dual legacy of Europe’s …
Shock!
Wow! Well, it seems like the ESL section of my website is more popular than I imagined. There are tons of teachers out there doing what we teachers do best… stealing goodies from other teachers, namely me. It makes me happy to see it going on. Another teacher, in New Zealand, has sent me some more goodies and I’ve been too busy to look at them. These days I am working in a very different program, where minimal handouts are the best way to work… so I haven’t had a chance to add anything new. But it seems people are …
Now listen to Han Young Ae
I mentioned listening to some wonderful music on Saturday night. Well, it seems that the gods of the Internet have seen fit to deliver unto my my hard drive the full album Behind Time: A Memory Left in an Alley by Young Ae Han, a somewhat older Korean singer. While my younger friends will probably consider her dated, maybe even a kind of Korean easy listening, I think of her more as a Korean cross between Loreena McKennit, without the faux celticism, and Björk, without the psycho voice. In any case, I liked her songs so much I thought I’d …