For this week’s Friday Five, the increasingly well-organized transitus asks: Philip Gulley writes: “Sometimes we lose things before we??re done needing them. ” What are five things you lost before you were done needing them? Oh, there have been so many things. Let’s see: My desire to really, truly learn French. Something stupid happened, and working at the company I was at, I kind of lost the desire to really, truly learn French. Maybe if I’d needed it to navigate a relationship with a woman, I might have tried harder, but I never had a French-Canadian girlfriend and nearly all …
Month: May 2005
Brains With Lime
This is not a post about zombies with strange dietary habits. For those of you who have in email or in person asked after her, Lime is fine. She’s in the neurology department, which is the hardest one so far, it seems, and she’s been working long, long hours there. Yesterday we had dinner together on her first evening off since starting there—she picked up some Japanese on the way over—and when I asked how her day had gone, she said, “I saw brains today. Oooh, listen,” and whipped out her phone to play back a sound file she’d recorded …
Do You Believe Jesus Christ?
I swear, there’s a punchline to this post, but it comes right at the end. The other day at work, some people were complaining about how some Korean taxi drivers sometimes have nudie pictures (sometimes attached to a calendar) up in their cab. This is an extremely rare phenomenon, though. What I encounter far more often is the evangelical cabbie. The taxi driver who has sticks of gum set out, on a donation basis, with the cash going to charity. With laminated religious tracts attached to the backs of the front seats in the cab. With an electronically lit-up picture …
Bulgasari, Again…
In the comments section of a recent post, Hiram asked what the word Bulgasari meant. I offered a few possible explanations, but I just happened on another one and it was pretty fascinating. I posted a comment there, but figured it might be missed, so I’m devoting a new post to the information. I was looking through a book of Korean poems translated into English, and in “On Genesis”, by Kim Kwanshik, there’s a reference to a Bulgasari that lived in “[t]he capital city of Songdo”, which the footnote explains was “a fictitious monster believed to devour metals.” I wish …
Your Personal Saviour
I’m taking suggestions for this T-shirt idea, which I think will be the first one I get made: “Have you accepted ____ as your personal saviour?” is the quote, and I’m just wondering what to put in the blank. Should it be: “Rational discussion”? “The Enlightenment”? “Secular Humanism”? “Science”? And whose picture should I include, with a halo? For science, I’d guess a picture of Einstein. For Secular humanism, maybe Betrand Russell. Anyway, ideas are welcome. I may do up a few. I betcha there’s a small market in the world for it, but an ardent one.