I’ve been researching the Comfort Women issue (most recently, having completed George Hicks’ book on the subject), and ever since I read Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, and more recently, since I got into a discussion about rape in the comments section of this post, I’ve been thinking a lot about rape in terms of it being a human behaviour. It’s the theme of a story I’m slowly reworking these days, called “The Crystal Methuselah,” as well as one of my Clarion stories which I’d like to rework and send out in the next little while, a horror tale called …
Category: GENERAL
Who’s More Embarrassing, Ted Haggard or Richard Dawkins?
Over at Goth House Comics you’ll find a “a really long essay about the nature of religion” which I think merits some attention, though I disagree with parts of it. It was, apparently, written in response to this interview with the wonderful, terrible, fascinating Richard Dawkins, whose latest book, The God Delusion, is on my to-read list though, with the number of books I brought back from Canada, it may be quite a while until I actually read it. (And, I should add, Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels is on the very same reading list.) The post reminded me of …
Back…
We’re home. Not much more to say for now. Slept till almost noon, but feel confident I’m not far off local time now. Lime’s off to the hospital to pick up where she left off. There’s about twenty days of work left for her now, and then she’ll have a short holiday, at least in theory. As for me, I’ve done some of the unpacking, but must start in on the repacking. Once I enter my books into my LibraryThing account, that’s what I’m going to start doing. We’re moving to a bigger apartment in this building sometime this month, …
Narita
We’re in the United Airlines lounge in Narita Airport, in Japan. I got my wireless working, but only in Windows — still, not bad considering I only reinstalled both Windows and Ubuntu Linux on this laptop the day before we flew to Canada. I’m about to go for a wander, but first, I thought I’d post this. Let’s see… we managed to get our upgrade to business class. Everyone we talked to made it sound likely, but uncertain, so we ended up getting up early in the morning, getting to the airport at 8am (for a 12pm flight), and we …
Old Friends, New Realizations
Last night Lime and I met up with a couple of Clarion Westies (Guy and Tinatsu) and their respective spouses, and slept at Guy’s place. It was so wonderful to hang out, and Guy and I had another one of our long late-night talks, just like the talks we had in Seattle. It’s funny I call these classmates from Seattle “old friends” since we’ve only known one another since July 2006… but I guess shared baptism by fire tends to lend a depth to relationships that may otherwise require a lot of time to build up. Once again, Lime is …
Poulet en Fuite
Or something. The only person who would get that in-joke doesn’t know enough French to know what it means. Anyway, Yae Rim and I have passed a good day and a half in Montreal–pigging out on foods we cannot eat in Seoul, shopping (we got some books and some winter clothes of a warmth, quality, and price that is unmatchable in Korea), meeting the one friend I got hold of and was available (good old Astrid), and she’s now sleeping. I should be, too, but I promised myself I’d sleep on the plane tomorrow, so I’m not terribly worried. Up …
À Montréal
We’re here in one piece, staying at a very nice hostel that, despite all expectations, I in fact prefer to the last one I stayed at in Montreal. We pigged out on Lebanese food, which we’ve both missed, and marveled at how lots of the places we’d planned to go had changed in the years since we’ve lived in the city. Tomorrow, we’ll start out early and go to a few places we wanted to go, eat a few more things we’ve missed, have an evening coffee with my friend Astrid, and prepare to leave for Vancouver on Friday morning. …
So Brief
Having just arrived late Friday, I realize now it’s already Sunday, and Wednesday morning, we’re off to Montreal. This trip is turning out to be altogether too brief for me. Ah well. We’re meeting some old friends of mine for dinner tonight, as my mother is working a shift tonight. I think we might go and do a tiny bit of shopping beforehand, if I can get Lime to wake up. She’s more jetlagged than I am, and still asleep now at 3pm Sunday. No photos yet. I’ve just stopped being dizzy and exhausted, so maybe today I’ll get some …
Once Again in Transit
We’re flying in about 20 minutes. This time I’m posting from the posh, lovely, important-people lounge. Nice. I wanna coffee, so that’s it for now.
Spill it…
Lex tagged anyone who feels like it, so here we go. Five things you may not know about me: I used Ubuntu Linux because I’m a cheap bastard. Okay, also because it basically fulfills my needs, and also excludes the possibility of gaming, which is good for me. But basically, when I bought my laptop, I was considering installing Linux, but I was too lazy. So I ran Windows on it for a while, just the factory-installed default WinXP. After a week, it was collapsing on me, and finally I gave up after several times having to reset to the …