In a “English Debate on Current Issues” course. Well-spoken, well-read, issues-aware, and intelligent young man. I’d just finished explaining how preparing for a debate is best done using the same language that will be used in the actual debate, in order to help debaters prepare not only their ideas, but their topic-specific vocabulary and their comfort in speaking about the idea. He looked up at me with a somewhat surprised expression, and asked: “Debate: English?” My answer: “네!” (Yes!)
Month: September 2007
Woman Got Pipes
I am probably the absolutely worst person to be introducing Lime to Aretha Franklin, since I really only know a couple of her songs, but when I got home tonight, for some reason, a little chunk of the backing vocals on “Respect” had suddenly bloomed into an earworm, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I think the word “respect” summoned it up, but in any case, it’s the bit in some versions where the backing singers start chanting “Sockittomesockittome…” [Sock it to me, but really fast] over and over. In my head it comes at a major …
Writing Update and Stuff
Warning: this is the kind of “Writing I did today” sort of post that some people have no interest in. If you’re one of those people, skip it. Today was an incredibly productive day for me. I got big chunks of several big projects done: completed preliminary revisions on The Spike (formerly “The Broken Path”, a ~9800-word Write-a-thon story, and posted the story to my crit group finished about half of the work on a last-minute academic editing project completed about 85% of the edits on “Realer,” a ~6500-word story I’ve been working for — wait for it — eight …
2 Cans of… What?!?
I was swooping around the Net this afternoon, searching for useful recipes. Lime and I got ourselves a little oven, not a full-sized one but a bit bigger than a toaster oven — big enough to roast a chicken inside it, for example, but too small for a turkey. Anyway, I noticed something about the recipes some people post. One of them is that anyone who includes ketchup as an ingredient in any recipe, I don’t need to ever look at any other recipe he or she posts — they’re all going to be unlikely to appeal to me. The …
Meeting Mr. Lal
My first day in Sapporo, my third day in Japan, I was lucky enough to meet up with Lal, a very cool guy who’s been out there online for years — about 6 years, as he notes, of contact on the Culture List (and I think he showed up on the Brin-L too) and who happened to be in Sapporo studying. It was a great evening, though a pity there was only one chance to meet. Just before he caught the subway back to his dorm to finish packing, he asked a random passerby to take this picture. And there …