So in my searches for information about saxes in Korea, I’ve come across a couple of facts that are pretty interesting. Selmer saxes are WAY overpriced here. A Selmer bari sax runs about W10,000,000, which, yes, is about $10,000 American, and something like $11,000 Canadian. A used one in really poor shape runs about $9,000 Canadian. Several shops have quoted me figures like that. The well-reputed Yanagisawa saxes are more affordable—perhaps shipping from Japan is just cheaper? Or maybe it’s the fact that Yamaha has a bad rep here, and Selmer is the horn everyone thinks is the best (and …
Month: December 2004
What The End of CDs Might Mean, In Fact
Here’s an interesting piece on copyright. If you ignore copyright laws and download content, then good content will cease to be created for you. This is the fundamental argument put forward by contributing editor Stephen Manes, in this month’s issue of PC World. Manes, a fixture of the highest level of technology journalism for the past two decades, says that “if the digital pirates win, we’ll all lose”. The article itself is probably meant to frighten moderate users of file-sharing applications and does not present any new arguments. In fact, it is full of assertions and straw man fallacies. I am …
Recommendations for Students
I’ve just finished the first class-and-a-half worth of testing for the week. I have a couple of recommendations for students: If you find English difficult, then I recommend studying harder, and more, as a solution to the problem. Not studying, I find, tends not to resolve the problem at all. If you fail English in your second year and require the class to graduate, and if you don’t manage to improve your English skills somehow, the least you can do is not leave it to the second semester of your 4th year, because you’ll probably still suck at English then. …
여자의 새상 (The Lives of Women) and False Consciousness
Yesterday I was taking a taxi downtown when I encountered a big chip on a cab driver’s shoulder. We were passing a group of cops who’d formed a Sunday afternoon traffic trap near the bridge downtown. Well, someone woman had just been stopped by a cop (for speeding in a busy downtown area, a rare example of enforcing laws which save lives) and was calling someone for aid—perhaps her father or uncle or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the cop tried to get her to cut off her phone call, and she simply turned her back on him and kept …
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
So wrote SF author J.G. Ballard once upon a time. John Wendel recently sent me a link to a New York Times article about a collection of quotables from Ballard’s ouevre. Gotta read more Ballard, the man is one of those good old Brit SFers who’s gotten halfway to mainstream somehow, without losing the piercing criticism and edge.
The Meatrix…
One of the things that fascinates me about conspiracy theories is how the idea of mass false consciousness is all cool and wonderful when it’s in a movie or a book, when it encompasses a huge magical, mystical, or hypertechnological organization or force that nobody knows about. But of course, when you present someone with arguably real cases of false consciousness, the standard reaction is annoyance, backlash, and insistence on the rational, sensible wisdom of the consumer. People will defend freedom of choice even when the choices are more limited, more demonstrably unhealthy that other alternatives, and more costly than …
One of the things I’ve occasionally wondered about myself…
One of the things I’ve occasionally wondered about myself has finally turned up in an article on gay marriage. Actually, no, it’s in a review of a same-sex wedding planner book. The issue is this: Maybe we only think we want same-sex marriage. Perhaps all we really want are same-sex weddings. I don’t necessarily fault gays in North America for accepting the essentially right-wing value system that governs social relationships in that society: after, I’m not anti-marriage, and I don’t think gays necessarily would have to be either. But it does signal that gay culture is vying to escape the …
A Quiet Saturday
That’s exactly what was called for today, and the only real interruption was a trip to school to participate in a preparatory meeting for the winter camp I’m working at in January. Lime’s been sick and just kind of sleeping all day, and while sometimes it’s nice to curl up with her, I can’t pass a whole day sleeping, especially when I’m not really feeling too sick anymore. So what have I done? I’ve found something on which to spend my over-overtime made teaching at a high school last semester. It was a killer-bad knot in my schedule and I …
Oh, It’s Such a Perfect Day…. I Wish It Were Over.
It’s a perfect day because it’s the last day of classes for all but my writing class. The writing class’s worst work is finished as well, and we’re just going to meet next week for a few free-writing sessions. They’ll hand in their essays today, their course portfolios next Friday, and they have two more classes. But my conversation classes are meeting for the last time today. From Monday on, it’s just exams that are left to be done. Not to give the impression I hate my work, but having been so sick all semester has been a drain, and …
Mood In A Pill
Dan asked this for the next Friday Five: Dr. Feelgood has unlocked the primal secrets of mood altering drugs and can now induce any emotion or mental state with no undesired side effects, so he’s trolling the internet to find which drugs to make first. Which five moods/emotions/mental-states would you most want to have available in pill form, and when would you tend to use them? Note that these aren’t necessarily the moods/etc. that you most enjoy, just the ones that you most want to have available on-demand. This, of course, is the kind of question that is very, very …