The other day, I wrote a letter to a long-ago teacher of mine. He was my English teacher back in high school, and he was, finally, pretty great. I don’t know why, at the beginning of things, he was convinced I needed to be booted out of class. But when things finally turned around, they went great and I learned a lot from him. The reason I wrote the letter was because, a few months ago, a complete prick retired. The complete prick was another teacher of mine, and he was unrelentingly, unabashedly, and rather straightfowardly, a complete prick, at …
Month: June 2010
An EMP in Lagos
UPDATE: More here. ORIGINAL POST: Seriously, I get this weird feeling someday people might just be willing to support something like a sequestration of Lagos from the Internet, or some sort of EMP that would knock out all the computers there, creating a hardware shortage and making it difficult for Nigerians to replace their computers… maybe even getting other nations to forbid export of computers to Nigeria. Then again, how much spam comes from Korea? No, really. Maybe that EMP was a bad suggestion. The other night, some Nigerian scam artist like the kid mentioned in this article hacked the …
In Seoul? Love Jazz?
Here are two bits of news for you: This Friday and Saturday (June 11th/12th) there’s an international jazz festival on in Seoul. There are free shows in the park. Not sure if there are pay concerts also — I wish David Sanchez would have a giant 3 hour gig but I doubt it. Maybe at some other venue, while he’s here? Seems like a shame to come just for 6 songs, no matter how extended the improvisations might be. I just found out about this on Marmot’s , need to look into it more. A jazz fan among my students …
Geek Out
“You know you’re with a bunch of geeks when…” was the line I said most often last night. Being among SF geeks is salutary, though; it’s normal for everyone to totally geek out over an iPad (as we did — trying out a bunch of bookreader and comic book reader applications in sequence), or to check out the bookshelves and talk about all the great books and authors contained thereupon, and so on. There was a party including a nice chunk of Seoul’s SF fandom population, including a number of my own friends and acquaintances. I supplied a sampling of …
Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature
Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation …