For a long time I believed what the employees at local little cell phone shops always claimed when I asked: that a foreigner cannot get a regular phone with a regular phone plan under his or her name in Korea. They always claimed that I had to have the phone under someone else’s name. So it went, and my phone was under my friend Seong Hwan’s name. Seong Hwan generously allowed me to get a phone with himself signed up as my guarantor. He also let another co-worker of mine do the same. It always struck me as odd that …
Month: July 2005
Are You a Science-Fiction Scholar?
Feet on the ground, but reaching for the stars. You talk the talk, but would you know what to do in an alien invasion? You got 9/11 correct. That’s not bad, considering I don’t actually like Star Trek, Star Wars, and a lot of other stuff that the quiz’s author seems to consider SF. You can try the quiz here. I think I found it on Ritu’s page. Or somewhere she linked, anyway.
A Pardoner’s Tale: Masaru Emoto
This morning I was watching a very so-so movie about Quantum mechanics and “mysteries”, called What the (Bleep) Do We Know? (here’s the imdb entry)and it mentioned some Japanese fellow named Masaru Emoto. Now, during my visit home my parents had been talking about him as someone who’d done amazing research into the effects on water that can be obtained from the power of human thought. They showed me some pages from one of his books, and they had a lot of pretty color photos of ice crystals and some weird commentary about how they’d been affected by his thoughts. …
What The Hell’s The Deal With Ian McDonald’s River of Gods?
The book’s been highly praised, widely reviewed, and yet most of the bookshops I checked for it at (in Canada) had never even had it in stock at any point in time. Moreover, now that I’m asking an excellent book order service about it here, I’m told that it’s actually out of print! How can such a good book already have gone out of print? It’s insane. Well, maybe they’re changing the rights or reprinting it or something? Oh, wait: no, it’s just that the release in the states is simply years behind the release elsewhere, according to the author’s …
Wanna Kill an Hour?
Yes, yes, time is precious. But, for a little while, so is this game. Found on Typefiend’s livejournal, via Derek Kirk Kim’s wonderful website.