This week in Friday-Five-Land, it’s Adrienne’s turn to extract information. She has ways of making us talk. She asks: What are the five Friday Five questions that you hope no one ever asks? Are you crazy? If we answer this question, the next thing you know, our responses will start turning up as Friday Five questions! Okay, wait, nobody ever said that we have to answer every Friday Five question posed. So I suppose revealing which questions I would refuse to answer might be alright. So let me see… [redacted] Trust me, you don’t want to know. Consider the biggest …
Month: August 2004
In Praise of Idleness
Via Arts & Letters Daily, I found a wonderful extract from a book called How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. In it, he makes a simple and astute argument in favour of idleness. One particularly wonderful bit is this: For all modern society’s promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose. Why have things come to such a pass? Well, the forces of the anti-idle have been at work since the fall of man. The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more …
The End of the Day, and End of the Day Thoughts
I wish I could upload some of the pics I got today. One kid wrote a comic book about me where I’m some kind of pig samurai with a flaming sword. Another girl bestowed me with a hilarious comic book after club time today. I got a few good pics of kids in my class too. Needing a shower, but that means going up to fifth floor because all the lower floors’ dorm rooms smell like kid-poop. It’s quite atrocious, actually: by mid-week the sit-down toilet stalls in all floors by second are taped shut to keep kids out; they …
Beyond Comprehensible
Today’s one of those days when Korean inexplicability just leaps up and smacks one in the face. I won’t get into the details but several ridiculous spats have broken out among a few people here, over things that make no sense. People who are doing a very good job are being penalized for personal reasons, comments have gotten back to me that have made me see certain peoples’ bigotries and two-facedness clearly, and best of all, there’s not much I can do about it except just privately support the individuals who I think are doing a good job. I will …
On Penrose’s New Book.
Here’s a review of physicist Roger Penrose’s new book. I won’t spin out all of what I think about Penrose, but I will say that despite the fact I admire his dedication to the ability of “everyman” to understand what the hell he’s talking about, he sometimes also talks about stuff that, it seems to me, he’s pulling straight out of his arse. When I attended a talk by him, I got this impression very clearly; he was pushing the microtubules-in-the-brain-quantum-computing stuff and I got the feeling nobody in the room was biting. He fielded some pretty harsh questions, which …