Okay, I likely wouldn’t be perusing a website called Austinmama unless friends had something up there, but… that said, this month’s offerings are very good, and especially Melissa’s domestic disturbance column, this month on the effect parenting has on a marriage. Stop reading my page for now and go look at Austinmama instead for a while. Then, of course, come back and read my page. Heh. I don’t want you abandoning me just yet…
Month: December 2003
Seoul, Again?
Yes. I am thinking I might as well just move up there next chance I get. This time it was due to passports. I realized that, as of this morning, it was eight days until my departure for India, and I still hadn’t visited the Jeonju Immigration Office. Of course, I need my passport for that, and it was supposed to have been sent to me by now. But the travel agent goofed and didn’t send it. So I came to Seoul to get it. After a quick stop to buy a travel guide to India—perhaps unnecessary but I feel …
Like Bladerunner
Sometimes life is like in Bladerunner. Here I am sitting at a coin-op public network access terminal in a bus station, waiting for my bus to Seoul. I realized that, considering I need to deal with the jerks at the Jeonju Immigration Office, I should probably go pick up my ticket and passport today so that I can get the work on my Re-Entry visa processed before Wednesday. I’ve heard that they purposefully dely things until the last possible day, just out of spite, and I have an appointment in Seoul on Wednesday, so I need to be able to …
Last Poll Closed, New Poll Started…
Hey guys. Last poll is finished, you can view the results here. I’ll write down the results and work on getting as many of those as I can during my trip. There’s a new poll to the right in the sidebar. Please do vote! Thanks!
K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Students…
Last night I went for beer with some engineers I teach on Monday nights. It was an interesting talk we had, and I enjoyed it. Most flattering was when the students started comparing my teaching to that of their other instructors, both other foreign English instructors and also their Korean professors in their major department. As dubious as I am at taking such compliments at face-value (for flattery often seems to be a mere social grace here), their insistance and detailed comparison of my teaching style with other teachers made me feel good. I won’t name the others they mentioned, …
Ariranging
Horrible, horrible sound quality, but here’s a clip of me messing around with my flute. I’m playing the most famous of Korean folksongs, “Arirang”, which is one of those, “My baby’s gone, what shall I do?” lost-love songs. As you can hear, I still can’t really play the flute. But since it’ll be my only instrument for most of my stay in India (barring my buying something new to learn there), I shall probably be not-bad at it once I get back to Korea… as long as I practice everyday, that is!
Philip K. Dick
There’s a pretty good article over at Wired about The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, specifically his popularity as a source for the Hollywood-movies machine these days. At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn’t really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a …
The Weekend
Well, the weekend was good, mostly. Saturday we played a gig at Led Zeppelin, supporting Wounded Fly. For those of you who are not into the younger generation’s music, “supporting” means we were one of the “opening acts”. Wounded Fly is another Cavaret (Cabaret) band, meaning they’re tied to the same label we’re working with for our second album. We played mostly new songs and they went well… despite the sound board guy being in a trance half the time and not fixing any of the feedback problems. The hardest song for me was the new one, Delerium, because I …
About Twenty Years From Now
…. if Iraq is full of people who hate America with a seething passion, don’t be surprised. After all, the only thing they’ll have to go on is what their parents said, and their own vague memories of scenes like this. In this photo by Ashley Gilbertson (from the New York Times), this boy is standing in what used to be his kitchen. Have you ever stood in what used to be your kitchen? I never have. I’ve been fortunate never even to have experienced this via something as pedestrian as a housefire. And the take home message is that …
Kill Bill, Vol. 1
Ooops, I wrote this about a week ago but left it in draft format, and forgot to publish it. So now I am. Eeek! Over on my other little side-project, New Sophists’ Almanac, in a post called Asthmatic Aesthetics, my blogmate Marvin brought up this Quentin Tarantino film that he was excited about, called Kill Bill Vol. 1. Knowing only that it was Tarantino (but thereb knowing a fair bit) I decided I’d see it, if only to have one more “aesthetic experience” to discuss with Marvin. (We’re discussing that sticky area of philosophy, aesthetics, these days… tying to brains …