Just because I’ve tweeted it (in much shorter form) doesn’t mean I won’t blog it. I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad lately. He passed away in 2006, and some of the stuff I’m working through now has brought up old memories that I’d forgotten. One of them occurred to me on the way home from the coffeeshop tonight. When I was in the Cub Scouts — well, actually, it was Beaver Scouts, to be technical — in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, my father taught us a Zulu War Dance. At least, that’s what he claimed it was. Knowing him, …
Category: GENERAL
Health Update: Neti & Workouts
After a couple of weeks off, due to a foot injury, a cold, and a root canal, I am finally back into exercising daily. I’ll be honest: I’m not going as hard as I was going before, but then, that doesn’t mean I’m not pushing myself: by the middle of April, I was going for at least three hours a day, and often four. (Usually it was two hours of hiking, about an hour on a stationary bike, and an hour pumping weights.) Now, I’m back down to a couple of hours a day at most — though I’m getting …
Home Again, Home Again
… jiggety jig. I was a busier this weekend than I have been in a while, in a social way. My friend James came up to Seoul and ended up crashing at my place in Bucheon on Friday night, and then on Saturday we headed into Seoul and met up with Roger Wellor Charles Montgomery and his lady (the BLF, as he calls her on his site), as well as the Korea/NZ scholar Stephen Epstein and a number of other interesting people. Now it’s Sunday, and I’m listening to the new Sofanauts podcast, which just came out the other day, …
Missed Call?
If you tried to call me just now? I dropped my phone while answering your call, and it shut off (because the battery is needing to be replaced.) I have no record of your call. Just in case. Try me again.
Woot Canawr, Stage 1.
If you’ve seen that episode of The West Wing where Ceejay (C.J.?) visits the dentist, you know what’s going on. I got me a root canal today. Well, I got myself a part of one, anwyay: Yeah, baby. Stage 1 of my root canal. I’m not feeling pain yet, but I know I’m in for some tonight, baby. Stage 1 involved remving the gold filling, drilling down to the roots, and digging out the meat. The meat! I got these little glimpses of the implements used for the latter — they look like miniature pipe cleaners, or like the mouthpiece …
It’s Earth Day!
Say what you like about Earth Day — there’s someone I know out there is snarking about it right now, if he even knows about it — but if you ask me, it’s a holiday about celebrating and embracing something that is here, visible, tangible, and unarguably real. People survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without holding major festivals for specific deities, without holding big annual parties for imaginary constructions like nation-states. Nation states are all well and good, but the Earth is here, tangible, and absolutely necessary for our survival. It’s as close to sacred as …
Found! Daily Pillbox
A while ago when I first started using hypertension meds, I went shopping for a “daily pillbox” — you know, those plastic thingies with a compartment for each day of the week, into which you can put the day’s pills so you don’t forget to take them. I searched for the damned thing, but the three or four pharmacies I tried all had the same answer: “Nope, never heard of that.” Finally, I just figured it was not something I could buy in Korea, and I’d have to just wait until I got to North America to buy one. (Or, …
Ohrwurm: Capsule
Yeah, Japanese pop music. (“Shibuya-kei,” to be precise. Bsides its association with the district in Tokyo, I have no idea what this refers to…) Most of the songs on the album are a fair bit more ironic than the one below, or, well, maybe I’m mistaking earnestness in a foreign language for an arch tone and ironic sensibility? Anyway, this isn’t the best song on the album, but the only one I found and liked enough to post. This is today’s background music as I work on my most recent installment of my column for Cahoots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBUwmq0yz0 Here’s another video, …
Ideas Worth Pushing: Post-Snark Era?
Jetse de Vries linked a recent post by Matt Staggs which hails an idea I really hope catches on: that we don’t need no more snark. I don’t know to what degree I’m guilty of it on my own website–maybe a little more than I imagine, but less than so many websites I’ve seen–but I do know I’ve reached the point where snarkiness for snarkiness’ sake is simply no longer a novelty. It’s a very tired, boring, useless exercise, and, finally, I think what can be said is that it’s become a self-indulgence. A tiresome self-indulgence, and one that gets …
Apex Book of World SF
Lavie Tidhar has done those of us interested in Global SF a favour. Coming this September: The Apex Book of World SF. I’m not yet preordering it since I’m not sure I’ll be using the same shipping company from the US to Korea by that time, but I will be getting that book this fall! (via ShineAnthology’s Blog)