Damn you, little old ladies! How dare you hike up Wonmi Mountain at a pace that puts me to shame! Damn you and your smiling faces as you head back down past me, having passed me on the way up, while I’m still struggling along. Damn you, fellas with neon-yellow- and hot-pink-eared poodles who go along the mountain trails without a drop of sweat in sight, whilst I leave a veritable trail of stinky dew behind. Damn you, teenaged couple who, having reached the top, do not take ten minutes to stop dripping and catch you breath but immediately start …
Category: GENERAL
The Story of Banana Mountain
My father used to tell me stories all the time, stories of the Old Country. That Old Country being Nyasaland, of course, and sometimes Rhodesia. Neither of those countries existed by the time he left the Old Country with my mother and me for Canada. His stories were weird in the kind of way that stories immigrants tell can be, but it used to hammer home to me the fact that, despite being a white man, he was absolutely a foreigner to the place I was growing up. It’s not to say he didn’t have advantages over, say, some of …
I’m Voting…
… well, I’m not. As far as what I’ve been told, I’m not allowed to vote because I’ve been expatriate too long. Which is bloody stupid, but it’s what I was told during the last national Canadian election. (If you know different, please tell me!) But this is amusing and very interesting, and so are the Mac ad ripoff political spots here. I’m sure there are similar things on the right, though I wonder how much mass appeal is possible given the obvious disadvantages of the Right agenda. Still, the thing to remember is, we’ve only had an internet less …
Around the Corner…
Can you smell it? Just there, around the corner: the end of semester. I’ve got three exams next week, though thank heavens two of them are oral exams and graded on the spot. I will receive a stack of fifteen essays to grade, feedback unnecessary since they’re “final exams” and Iam unable to return them to students. I’ll have one stack of forty-odd written exams to grade, but again, no feedback necessary. Some calculations and weeding through paperwork submitted by teams in my two Listening & Speaking classes, along with evaluations and self-evaluations. The exams should be done by Tuesday …
The Mountain’s Just Not Enough Anymore
As I’ve recently mentioned, I’m saving my protests-related observations for an article, but Matt has a great post up here. And I say that not just because he links to my comments, either. Gusts of Popular Feeling is one of those kinds of sites I’d aspire to run something like if I wasn’t just so completely worn out with/by/about Korea these days. This post has been, in part, inspired indirectly by things he and Joe Mondello have had to say of late, for their interest, engagement, and apparent happiness here. The contrast has shocked me into reflection, and the reflection …
I Like Turtles
Do yourself a favor. When the world is annoying you, go to Youtube and search the phrase I used on for the header of this post: “I like turtles” — that should be good for at least twenty minutes of fun.
Because the World Needs More Cheese…
… I’ve uploaded the uncut, massive single MP3 version (please right click and save the file, as it’s huge!) of the second-to-last musical performance I ever made in Saskatoon, back in 1998. My friend Mike invited me, my ex (the vocalist on the track), and two DJs I knew from high school (Phil Greer and Keenan Gauthier) to perform at what he was then calling “parties” (because, I think, “rave” was passé by then. We played a few gigs, and on the last one — just before I took off for Montreal in fall 1998 — Keenan got a buddy …
Fsck It
One nice thing about using Ubuntu is that even when things go a little haywire, it’s usually possible to back up all the important files and then just reinstall. Reinstallation is so fast — at least, compared to the plodding installation process on Windows — that it almost always is like visiting the dentist: great dread before, not so bad once you’re there.
Creeping Specs
I first learned the expression “creeping specs” while I was living in Montreal. Someone who was then a friend of mine got me a tech-writing job. Well, sort of a tech-writing job, but with more graphics stuff, something I was not then, and am not now, qualified to do. (I could bitch about how the “learning curve” was one I was not interested in climbing, but the honest truth is I needed the money, and didn’t turn the work away. I am only bitter because, while he extended the job for as long as he could, he also didn’t warn …
Bracing Myself for Evisceration, But At Least I’ll Probably Still Have All My Horrid Teeth
Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …