First, the happy news about the gloomy story. I’ve been working hard on my ghost story and I just hit page 160 last night. Second, a funny story about my neighbor Mike’s phone number. He had to change it last term because some kid had gotten ahold of it and was calling him, just to say “F*ck you!” and then hang up. At some point, the kid shared the number with a teenaged friend, who joined in. By the end, the teenager was—and I’m guessing at this—using the voice message system in his cell phone to send a four-letter voice-message …
Month: December 2004
Valid and Invalid Complaints
Sometimes foreigners complain about life in Korea. Sometimes their complaints are valid, and sometimes their complaints are ridiculous. Let me give you an example. I just had a ridiculous conversation on the phone with a woman who told me, “No there’s no problem! No problem!” when I know from recent phone calls that there is indeed a problem. I had gotten a month behind on my internet/landline bill, and die to misunderstandings with the text-messages that the telecom company sent (and my own carelessness reading the bills) I had been perpetually one month behind for a long time. Finally, I …
Remember Earth2? Dead Like Me canceled… and Rebecca Gayheart’s sorta sad story
Yes, Earth2, that ill-fated one-season SF TV show (imdb) (fansite 1 2 3 in-dept-critical-analysis-page rpg-fansite). Okay, it wasn’t as brilliant a show as it perhaps could have been, but it was at least interesting enough to grab my attention in 1994. I remember a few years later, people were still whining online about the cancelation of the show, and even several years after its cancelation, they were trying to agitate for it to go back on the air with a new season. I had desperately wanted to watch it again, and looked online. Someone who’d taped all the espisodes was …
Progress!
I’ve just hit page 145 of my novel draft of my ghost story. I’m guessing there’s another eighty pages to go, maybe. My protagonist has just lost a useful ally (and sort-of friend) but he has managed to almost-complete his errand in Pyongyang, after which he’ll be free to go back South and figure out why he was brutally murdered. And now he can at least speak and understand a little Korean, too. I’m pleased, and conservatively guessing I won’t finish the draft before camp starts on Monday, but that I may well finish it the week after camp finishes, …
For Those New to South Korea
Been working on a list of recommendations for foreigners new to South Korea. They’re available in the extended entry of this post. Comments and refinements welcome. Thanks!
Miss Plastic Surgery, and No Laughing Matter
One poster on Danwei informs us that The Miss Artificial Beauty contest, aka Miss Plastic Surgery is over. The winner is Feng Qian (pictured), a 22-year-old girl from Jilin city in China’s Northeast. Asia can be, as I have said before, a very weird place. It can also be a frustrating, sad place, too. Here’s another article from Danwei about the effects of the Chinese Communist Party on humor in China. This article is well, well worth the read.
How Can You Make People Behave?
From boing-boing: The mayor of Bogota uses mimes for public behavior control. And it’s popular, and it seems to work.
I Believe Mr. Lakoff’s Wrong About The Greens
In an older article at Bush Greenwatch, word is we have a root cause for why the Greens in America are losing to the Bush Brigade: Political and social change often comes down to a war of words. And according to a prominent cognitive linguist from California, anti-environmental forces have been winning that war because progressives don’t know how to talk about issues. So it’s not because the American public is largely pig-ignorant enough to believe that Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” or, worse, “false”? It’s not just because activity on both sides of the partisan political divide is …
Real Life Story?
One more thing I found on Joi Ito’s Web. Did you know that the movie Terminal was based on a real life story? Well, sort of. More here. And here. The not-real-life-story is far more interesting, if you ask me.
Bloglines Catchup
I gave up on doing much of anything useful today; instead, I just kind of relaxed, did a little work on my ghost story, posted some comments to a friend about a draft of a novel she sent me a while back, watched Trainspotting, and turned to my bloglines subs to catch up… a little. There are too many posts to catch up on them all, so I’m going to (a) delete some subscriptions and (b) delete some of the subs I’m not really interested in tracking anymore, or which have stopped existing. One site I will not be deleting …