I’ve been dealing with a number of different fires that have broken out lately, including: myself, then Miss Jiwaku, being quite sick in the last week and a half the necessity of finalizing audio tracks for the film we’re making before next Friday (though the deadline was initially today, when I was still quite ill!) a medical emergency with a fellow expat coworker, and all kinds of organizational (re: his family) and workplace fallout for that. (For those who know Michael, his brother has posted an update on his Facebook Wall, which is where the link above leads.) helping a …
Category: PERSONAL
Religious Upbringing and The Basis for Ethics
A friend of mine once commented that my experience of religion, from the way I talked about it, reminded her of the way some people talk about a bad trip on LSD… the kind of story where someone ends by explaining, “And that’s why I’ll never touch the stuff again.” Well, that’s not completely true. I do read about religion sometimes; look at the last book I reviewed here, for example! I sometimes read about the history of Christianity, or of scriptures, because quite frankly, that was the governing tradition of the West the way capitalism is our governing paradigm today. …
What Happens When You Ask Assholes to Be Polite (In Yeokgok, At Least), And How to Get Better at Doing It
I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write bitching rants about Korea anymore, since they do nobody any good. So… I’m not. You might think I am, below, but stick with me: it comes around. Miss Jiwaku and I had a pretty nice day out today… well, mostly. (We saw the only decent film playing in a 5km area of our home, which was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and, well, I have to say: there’s no point in watching a good film — something without a techno music soundtrack, or a plotline even a monkey could follow — in a …
The “Are you sure you want to come to Russia?” Dream
No, I’ve never been, but I have dreamed about visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg. Most recently, last night. And since I rarely remember my dreams on waking, I thought I’d set it down. In which dream I apparently was seen writing poetry (something I don’t do much anymore) somewhere in Moscow, and this was enough for some organization above both the SVR (international intellligence service) and the FSB (the domestic one) to track me, watch me, and strongarm me by visiting my short-term rental apartment in the guise of a plumber and rendering the toilet unusable. Later, when waiting for …
Talking Through Bigotry
Miss Jiwaku and I have an acquaintance, a Korean fellow we know, though I won’t say how we know him. (Anonymity will allow me to speak more honestly.) He is a fine sort of fellow, in general, quite professional and creative, easy enough to work with and even at times funny; she and I have learned many things from him, and I hope likewise he has learned a thing or two from us as well. However, there’s one thing that makes it hard for me to get along with him, something it’s hard to put my finger on exactly because, …
Smoky Brewday: Wonmisan Grätzer
Grätzer is one of those almost-extinct beer styles that people have started talking about again these days. The basic idea is that it’s a 100% smoked malt, low-ABV beer. We’re talking serious smoke, and seriously low ABV, like 3.5% or less. Sounds good to me, so I decided to make some. Thing is, that’s a more involved proposition than I first imagined.
Tidying Up
I am currently on the verge of despairing with regards to getting my post categorization tidied up. I was using a mass editor plugin and somehow — I suspect because of the plugin, but it may have been something else I did — I discovered that a vast number of my posts prior to sometime in 2010 have had an extra category added — FILMS&TV. I’m not sure why, but at some point just about everything is categorized as that, albeit sometimes also as something else. While I do plan on cleaning up the mess eventually, I have a month …
Gobble-Gobble
Yeah, for you Errol Morris fans, that’s a double-gobble: Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later: I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way …
쓰레기 같은 학생, or, Why You Might Need Pepperspray
“Grabage-Like Student” is the title I’ve written in Korean. But a better translation is, “Asshole Student,” I suppose. It’s a reference to the guy who threatened Jihyun today, when she took the city bus that passes by the front of campus. To make a long story short, she (very politely) asked him to stop cursing and complain to the bus driver about the change in route, if he was so annoyed. (After something like ten minutes of his cursing in the nastiest tone.) It ended with him standing over her at the bus stop, his friend in tow, calling her …
Happy New Year
I’m told that not long ago, Koreans tended to reserve the phrase “Saehae bok manhi baedusaeyo!”1 for Seollal, the Lunar New Year (or what we in the West call Chinese New Year). However, people tend to say it a lot more now for January 1st, so that’s what I’m wishing you all out there. For Miss Jiwaku and myself, it was a quiet New Year’s, and a busy week before it. Well, quiet compared to some, I suppose, but we had a lot of running around to do, things to get done, and so on. That cooking at home thing …