Classes are going well. Waiting to hear about my ticket to India. Feeling tired. Not going swimming today. Too close to the edge of a headache and I’m worn out. Practiced saxophone today for an hour. Was pleased to find nobody cared. No harassment, no attention except for the fact students looking for an empty room tended to look in the window—because the light was off—for a second until they realized someone was practicing in the room. Now I’m going to take a little nap. Ungh.
Author: gordsellar
According to Seong Hwan
Last night after band practice, Seong Hwan and I hung out with Thai, drinking ginseng wine and talking. Among the many things we learned from Seong Hwan, here are the two most interesting. 1. Elliot Smith, the wonderful American folk singer, recently killed himself. Knife in the heart. Very sad. Listen to him, you’ll be as sad about it as I am. 2. The Korean euphemism for having sex all night long is “Man-li Jjangseong mandeul-da.” Make the Great Wall of China. Huh! Gotta go! By the way, my net connection at home is screwed, so I can’t check email …
Pumpkin Carving
Well, I carved pumpkins tonight at the Jeonju pre-Halloween Jack O’Lantern carving party at the Deep-in. It was strange at first: I started to feel a little blue, because of memories about the last time I carved pumpkins. I was looking at happy people around me, and trying to be happy with them, chat with them. And I decided to just forget last year, and live in the present. I decided to carve the best damn pumpkins I could! And I did! I personally carved two pumpkins: one was A Very Internet Pumpkin, which consisted of Western- and Korean-styled smiley …
Evolution is NOT A Theory. Period.
I’ll say it again. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is something we know happened. We see it happen in nature even now, with creatures like cichlids in Lake Malawi, who speciate unusually rapidly. We see plenty of evidence for it in the fossil record. Anyone who spends any amount of time looking at the world around them will sense the genius in Darwin’s simple, elegant, and brilliant insight of how the world came to be as it is now. The claim that Darwinism is in trouble is to claim there is the crisis to cover one’s own ignorance, and …
Right, Left, and Wrong About History
So I was reading this article about how Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the coming of the End of History when the Berlin Wall came down is something that seems, retrospectively, naive and totally mistaken. The article is called Why History Has No End by Victor Davis Hanson and it’s online over at City Journal. Never mind that, in my opinion, one shouldn’t have need of hindsight to see that statement was very foolish. No, I read on anyway… here’s a snippet: European animosity toward the U.S. also has a snobbish component—an anti-bourgeois disdain that is the dual legacy of Europe’s …
Shock!
Wow! Well, it seems like the ESL section of my website is more popular than I imagined. There are tons of teachers out there doing what we teachers do best… stealing goodies from other teachers, namely me. It makes me happy to see it going on. Another teacher, in New Zealand, has sent me some more goodies and I’ve been too busy to look at them. These days I am working in a very different program, where minimal handouts are the best way to work… so I haven’t had a chance to add anything new. But it seems people are …
Now listen to Han Young Ae
I mentioned listening to some wonderful music on Saturday night. Well, it seems that the gods of the Internet have seen fit to deliver unto my my hard drive the full album Behind Time: A Memory Left in an Alley by Young Ae Han, a somewhat older Korean singer. While my younger friends will probably consider her dated, maybe even a kind of Korean easy listening, I think of her more as a Korean cross between Loreena McKennit, without the faux celticism, and Björk, without the psycho voice. In any case, I liked her songs so much I thought I’d …
한영애의 CD BEHIND TIME
이 CD를 듣었어요? 토요일 밤에, 공연 했고 우리 (서울 밴드 Plastic People의) 친구 김민규씨랑 작은 술집에갔어요. 밴드 같이 갔어요, 하지만 친구 이야기 했어서 나는 늦 왔어요. 그래서 밴드와 친구 술집에 만았어요? �n은 술집? 이름은 “술”인야고. 이 작은 술집 너무 좋았어요… 스타이을도 음악이 너무 좋아 했어요!!! 아줌마도 아저씨도 마났어요. 감자기 아주마는 노래 하는것 시작했고 너무 슬픈 노래 했어요. 기븐이 좋았어요. 그 밤에, “술”에, 특별 음악을 듣었어요: 한영애의 CD BEHIND TIME: A Memory Left at an Alley. 너무너무너무 좋아요. 한국의 옛날 노래 했고 새로운 장르를 만들었어요. 내 생각에는, 때때로 좀 Björk 같은 스타이을 이애요… 하지만 너무 다르다! 노래 한개 듣을수있어요: 이 것은 …
Listen to ME!
UPDATE (2 Feb. 2012): I’ve moved things around since 2003, including uploading some more music and also creative work from other fields. If you look up at the top of this page, you should be able to find links for all that. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, for people who skim… I’m gonna make this clear, because I mentioned it before but someone mentioned not seeing it. There are some recordings available on this website of me performing music. The Dabang Band tracks are probably very familiar, but the Apocrypha tracks may not be. So I’ve added them to my music section. …
Why Blog?
One of my friends recently asked me that question: Why blog? My response was pretty long, and pretty rambling… but it can be boiled down to the following, which I suppose is a kind of mission statement or even a Blogger’s Manifesto. The following is therefore my, well, whatever it is… Mission Statement or Blogger’s Manifesto or whatever. I blog because my thoughts are interesting. If you don’t believe me, I can show you my site traffic information, showing thousands of people come here every month. Failing my refuge in that, I can show you my thoughts. You can judge …