Author: gordsellar
Christopher Hitchens on Diets and Dieting
Christopher Hitchens has a wonderful little piece about diets and dieting in the Mirror. Here’s a taste: THERE’S an old conundrum, familiar to those who have viewed the clientele of health-food restaurants. Did these people always look so pale and ill and scrawny and pustular? Or was it the nut cutlets and prune juice and special grains that made them that way? In other words, which came first, the chicken or the egg – and which one would you be better advised to drop from your own intake? The question is an important one because, if people stop asking it, …
The Plumbing
Okay, I never had to do that before. Some of this is gross. If you have a weak stomach, or don’t want to be disgusted, please just skip this post and read about something else.
Hadden On Film
UPDATE (4 April 2015): The video mentioned in the post lives on Flickr now. IT still has no audio: my first digital camera didn’t have a microphone, much to my regret. But anyway, here’s Hadden, a friend who I discovered not long ago passed away a while back: I still miss him. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, it’s a silent film, but you can actually see a lot of his personality in it. I’m actually amazed about how much of peoples’ personalities actually comes across in a silent film, and in a surprise situation, such as when they are being filmed and …
Strange Encounters in Korea… When An Ajeoshi Goes Too Far
::A Geek In Korea:: Crunky!: High-Brow / Low-Brow The link above is to a post on the blog of another foreigner living in Korea. It’s about a chance encounter he had with a drunk Korean man (a stranger, mind you) who tried to get his hands onto the poster’s genitals. Now, I must say, some male-male touching in Korea that’s seen as normal among Koreans and NOT among foreigners, I am comfortable with. For example, when I was depressed after watching a couple of documentaries about the Jeju Island massacres, and my (male Korean) friend grabbed my hand and squeezed …
Rain and Winds…
Min Jung left about 4pm because I got sick. I don’t know why, it was probably just repeated lack of sleep. I started to sneeze a lot, and looked like hell, so she said I should just sleep and then went off to meet another friend before returning to Iksan. (I think that’s what her SMS message said.) And I slept. It’s an index of how tired and sick I was feeling that I didn’t do the dishes immediately. And now I have woken to find that the water is not working in the building. I don’t know why, but …
Min Jung Is Coming…
So this morning I woke to the sound of the rain. I am pretty happy about today for I shall see some of my friends. This afternoon Min Jung is coming over for lunch. I will make a Thai chicken-curry soup and we’ll have some Beef Madras. We’ll hang out at my place for a while, I think, and then go to Iksan together. In Iksan I shall meet John and Mi Seok and maybe (if she ever calls) Young Ja as well. For now, I am having some of this pretty intense breakfast drink that So Young’s mom sent …
Historical Perspectives on Chuseok, and some questions about “tradition”
JoongAng Daily articles on Chuseok (in pdf format) Yes, here are a few articles on the Korean Harvest Moon festival called Chuseok. It’s on right now, and today’s newspaper had some interesting discussions about the history and context of Chuseok. Did you know it was once basically a competition day when women tried to outdo one another in weaving, dancing, and singing. Of course, there was also feasting.
Why George Bush is a doubly a C*NT
The update first, so I don’t get a bunch of corrections. Yes, I checked with Myoung Jae and he’s pretty sure joji is a slang word for a boy’s naughty bits and not a girl’s naughty bits. So this story is slightly less funny. But I’m leaving it up since it still means George Bush is a dink and a p*ssy. And I am censoring this to avoid getting porno search freaks bombarding my site with complaints.
Poems in Retrospect
It’s strange… when I read someone else’s poems, about their life, I always understand the poems that are written at a specific time or from a specific experience or mood or notion to be timeless in a sense, an encapsulation of a moment. But when I look at my own work, it’s somehow different to me. I just found out about the breakup of a couple of friends of mine who were dating; I was looking through some of the archives of my writing and found a poem I wrote for them, and felt somehow uncomfortable with it, as if …