Thanks to Boing-Boing, I know that: Jimi Hendrix made a Sex Tape. And now someone else is releasing it. Psychopaths are great correspondents. (Among others.) Canadian copyright is about to go nuts. (Hardly a surprise: the USA is exported n even-more-draconian form of copyright law to Korea, and Canada’s much more of a USA-wannabe.) As someone commented — who needs The Onion? Reality is weirder!
Month: April 2008
Chinese Violence in the Streets of Seoul
Last Saturday, I was heading in to Seoul to meet my friend Jeffery, and I saw some of my students at the train station, headed the same way. They’re nice kids, some Chinese exchange students, and we chatted until it was my stop. One of them asked me if I knew about the Olympic Torch Relay in Seoul the following day, and I confessed that I hadn’t heard. I’m kind of glad, too, because if I had, I might have anticipated what happened, and gone with a camera. Which would have been smashed to pieces, along with my face, by …
[Some] Koreans’ Perception of The West Wing
A few weeks ago, in one of my classes, we watched that episode of The West Wing titled “Han,” where a North Korean musician playing in the White House informs President Bartlet of his wish to defect, in preparation for a panel discussion on the depiction of leaders in American media. (We also looked at scenes from a King Arthur film that the department had on hand.) I found my students had some interesting things to say about it, though. Well, not “say,” in many cases, but I always have students write up a Prep Sheet and a Reaction paper, …
Impeachment Petition online
UPDATE (5 May 2008): It’s over a million signatures now. Original Post: I know, I know, Korean netizens and all that, but still, you’d think Marmot’s might have posted the story before me, yet I couldn’t find it.There’s an online petition at Daum calling for the impeachment of President Lee, basically just over dumb policies and scandalous news we’ve seen in the last four months. It’s at 56,000+ signatures, at the moment, but some netizens are claiming that 10,000 signatures mysteriously disappeared sometime last night. There are also T-shirts available online with the naughty-looking rodent logo that appears on the …
Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Whenever people talk about The Singularity, one reaction I always feel in my gut is, “Okay, describe it.” Of course, by its very definition, the Singularity is [relatively] indescribable, since it’s what is as incomprehensible to our minds as our world is to the mind of a goldfish. In this way, The Singularity is, I suspect, simply a piece of SFnal dogma, or perhaps, holy doctrine is a better word for what it is. We can’t show you it, but we can hint at it, point at it, hope you get it. The Singularity is what makes things go way …