Not one whit. About what?
Month: January 2007
Deepak Chopra: Who Is This Idiot?
After reading Deepak Chopra’s discussion of Dawkin’s The God Delusion all I can conclude is that he’s an idiot who knows jack shit about science. OR, he’s a liar who is purposefully twisting the facts. On some level, I sometimes feel like the biggest war going on right now is one that has been going on, constantly, for ages: between reason and superstition. Don’t get me wrong: I can respect and care about religious people. But it comes back to me, from the television program “Root of All Evil”, that some religionists are so quick to say to atheists, “Don’t …
Rejection #6, Submission #Something
Got a rejection the other day from Fantasy magazine of my story “Triangle Man”, which is cool. Could probably do with another look and some reshaping before I send it off elsewhere. It’s a very odd little story and I’m not sure it’s actually fully bloomed, though I’m also not sure it ought to be fully bloomed, in order to work. Not disturbed at all. I also submitted my story “The Wager” to the Tesseracts11 anthology electronically over the weekend and with the health issues I haven’t gotten to a post office to send the hard copy. I need to …
Recommendations?
Someone I know and care about actually argued to me today that 9-11 was set up by and carried out by the CIA. Anyone know a good, non-hostile book that explains the origin of this myth and why it’s nonsense, without being overly pro-Bush? And if such a book doesn’t exist, why not? Perhaps someone needs to write it.
Two Bald Patches
First I want to say I’m basically happy with the care I’m getting at Yonsei Severance Hospital. So today I headed in to give blood for a test, and to do my treadmill EKG test as well. I did the blood in the morning, so I could eat lunch, and then took in a movie — 조폭 마누라 3 (My Wife is a Gangster 3) — and it probably says something that I understood enough of it to get a fair number of the jokes, in essence if not in detail, despite the fact a lot of it was in …
Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
This book of short stories and a novella is excellent, mainstream fiction about Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, America in Chinese, Chinese in China (a little), Chinese in Taiwan (a little)… Chang’s introduction for discussion groups suggests it’s a book full of stories about types of hunger and how they consume families, which makes sense given the title, but to me, it felt more like a book full of oblique (and not-so-oblique) ghost stories. At times it felt a little bit, oh, I don’t know, too skillful, but there was definitely something very respectable about how Chang wrote these stories… definitely …
Sort of Relieved, Hopefully More Relief on the Way
Right, not to raise alarums, but… … for the last while, I’m not sure how long but long enough to know it’s been more than a few weeks, I’ve been rather constantly aware of my heartbeat. It’s not skipping beats. It’s not causing me pain. It’s not speeding up or anything. It’s just there, in my chest. thumping away. Okay, sometimes it feels a little tired. But mostly, it just keeps doing what it’s always (for 32 years, anyway) been doing. Except that a lot of the time, I can feel it, right them, pumping blood. Sometimes, I’d swear, I …
Bloody Argh Against the Topdown Sysadmin, and Nice Furniture
I don’t know which idiot set things up this way, but I cannot even comment on my own bloody website. Whoever set up this little proxy deal on campus — or at least, that’s what I’m told the symptoms look like — is a moron. People can send and recieve email from Korean servers, sure, but I can’t comment on my website. I can’t send email via Gmail unless I login using “https:”. My access to all kinds of other websites is similarly hampered, as I noticed on several Linux forums I tried to access when I thought maybe it …