It’s been a whirlwind week, meeting people from the textbook gig I had this year for a dinner party (complete with karaoke and a stop at a wine bar), frantic syllabus-drafting and a meeting with fellow teachers to discuss the new Listening & Speaking Course guidelines, followed by Indian food and beer, an end-of-semester lunch meeting with my department, where we wished the department head a good year off on sabbatical in San Francisco, followed by a meeting with Charles and Jeffery at Carne Station, and lots of meat and drink. Last night, Lime and I went on a futile search for batteries, and ended up wandering around Yongsan station. And today, we’re supposed to be meeting my old friends Kim and Chai.
And I’m leaving for Laos on Monday evening, so it’s not like I have no preparation to do, but it’s good, seeing all these people with whom I’d probably spend more time, if I (and they) could.
During the last meeting mentioned, at Carne Station, Jeffery, I think it was, mentioned a guy who sounded suspiciously like Pat Condell, or so I thought, and we agreed that this blogger we were talking about is very funny, smart, and worthwhile. Pat Condell — I assume it’s his name, since, after all, why would he make up the name “Pat Condell,” right? — is a YouTube videoblogger, and his discussions are about religion, from a very, um, skeptical, or, shall we say, heretical perspective. I’ve been subscribed to his feed for a while, and enjoy just about every post he uploads. Like a shining gem in the dreck of YouTube, really. Here’s a taste.
Yay for heretical viewpoints.
Me, I’ve always thought heresy was a good thing, ever since my uptight, self-righteous Christian Ethics teacher — Mr. McKay — accused me of the “modern heresies” of intellectualism, sarcasm, and snobbery. That I could make a grown man lose his cool over a cartoon, that meant to me that there was something wrong with his thinking. (I hadn’t anticipated a large number of people worldwide losing their cool over cartoons, back in 1991.)
But that’s another sordid story, and I wouldn’t want the tangent to muffle my praise for Pat Condell. Go check out the guy’s feed, and enjoy some of the previous posts there.