I’ve updated and fixed a cache of old Korean posts on this site, dating back to 2002-2004, which used to be hosted on their own sub-blog. If that doesn’t interest you, skip this post!
고드의 한국어 블로그
Month: November 2014
Some (Admittedly Unkind) Words for Henry Thrale
I mentioned recently that I’d been reading Lee Morgan’s biography of Henry Thrale. I’ve finished it, and collected some material on beer history–what little there was in the book. For the life story of a man whose wealth was gotten in the making of beer, the subject comes up much less than you might imagine… but then, as I mentioned last time, Thrale was always more interested in fox-hunting and clever conversation with upper-class people than the business that gave him such a wealthy lifestyle. Morgan’s text is a funny sort of book: it has lots of things that make it worth reading, including …
On Clueless Criticism
There are these wasabi rice crackers available at my local convenience store. They’re great… provided you know how to eat them. One or two at a time, they’re not particularly spicy: they taste pretty good, they have only the faintest kick, and a small serving more than sates my appetite for snacks. Of course, if you eat more than three at a time, well, then they’re insane: the pain, the panic, the dizzying wasabi fumes pouring up into your sinuses, the flailing for the nearest cup of anything to dilute the wasabi and cut short that incredible pain. I should know: I have, many times, inflicted that pain on myself when snacking while distracted. …
(non-Platonic!) d14 of Korean Hard-Partying
Update (17 Nov. 2014): You, too, can enjoy this wonderful die… if you use an Android device and can read Korean, anyway, or if you visit Insadong (and can read hanja). See the update at the end of the post for more details. Original Post: As promised the other day: the Korean d14 from the Shilla Dynasty, used for drinking games. (Yeah, given the popularity even now of group drinking games in South Korea, that’s hardly a surprise.) But the d14 is unusual: it’s a rather bizarre polyhedral die called the 주령구 (Juryeonggu), which I first ran across during a visit to the Anapji palace in …
d12 of Divination, d4 of Sheep-Ankle
You know those ancient d20s they found in Roman and Greco-Egyptian excavations? Well, this isn’t as cool as that, but I’ve just run across a reference (in Jim Baker’s The Cunning Man’s Handbook, which I posted about recently) to a Renaissance-era d12, and it was used for… divination, of course. (Dice seem to have been used both in divination and gaming, and the line between the two gets fuzzy at certain times in history, of course… like how lots of people today read their horoscopes in the newspaper for fun, but don’t base decisions on what they say.) That makes sense: 12 months of the year, 12 astrological …