(I would have posted the title in Korean but something about my Linux installation on my office desktop is ganked and I never managed to get the Korean language input interface installed.) I got the news this morning. It looks like, pending official approval by the Prez1, my contract is being renewed for one more year. I don’t know what the loophole in the new national labour legislation is, but I’m glad of it. Whew! That’s a huge relief! It seems I’m having a good week so far. 1. The President of the University… not Lester Young, “President of the …
Category: PERSONAL
Kangnam Microbrew with Charles
Charles at Liminality posted about our recent meetup in Kangnam at a beer/food buffet called Platinum. It’s a pretty good discussion — with pictures, good pictures — of a place well worth visiting (if you like beer) and all I have to add is that: Scots are human too. In fact, if you’re notScottish, you’re crap. Well, not really. But we are human, even if we are oatmeal savages. And I’m only half-Scottish too. Recent tests show that French-Canadians are human too. I could have told you. Their interfertility with Scots is a good sign, and I am living proof. …
Toilet Rules
articulate_ink posted this video: (LJ users, click the link to my site below and watch there!)
No Maps
It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Scranton woman cited for cursing at toilet…
What can I say? This is fucking bullshit.
Memory Bank
My memory is starting to give out. Last year, I was able to keep track of everything that was happening in all of my classes without any trouble. Now, in all the classes for which I have two sections, I have mixed up at least something in each class. Of course, I should be keeping notes, and I’m going to start doing so again, but this distresses me. I also mixed up the bio of several well-known authors in an online crit group, have addressed people by other people’s names, and even gone to the wrong classroom for class. (Though, …
Rachmaninov & Professor Whitney
Sometimes, I write in silence. It’s useful for me when I need to shut everything out and just figure out what’s going to happen next. Of course, sometimes what I really need is to get myself into an emotional space so that I can feel where the story is supposed to go. This is where I’ve found that listening to music I don’t know, on a repeating loop, is surprisingly helpful. Lime’s a big fan of Rachmaninov, or at least his piano music, but I’m not… not really. However, she loaned me a double-CD compilation of different pianists performing various …
Summer Block Kumar
I was wandering about the web this afternoon, during my lunchless lunch break, trying to relax off my morning busywork, when I found a link at Alllooksame to the blog of Summer Block Kumar, which was praised as a blog about China. Anyway, one of the first posts I came across had a cool snippet of information about music and Russian serfs, from a book that’s on my shelf but as yet unread: “Serfs were essential to the Sheremetev palaces and their arts . . . Many of these serfs were sent abroad or assigned to the court to learn …
Things For Looking
Via the flea king, a funky video on the inner lives of cells. (Though I’d love to see an annotated version.) And via Ellen Datlow, very cool book art. (I like it, anyway. Lime’s not impressed.)
The Egan Thief… and a Mention on BoingBoing?
Apparently so. A netfriend alerted me via my much-neglected Facebook account. Sure, just in passing, but it’s still cool. Why? Rudy Rucker published the new issue (#4) of his SF webzine Flurb and my story, “The Egan Thief,” is among those in the latest selection of tasty treats. (This marks my third SF publication, and is very very cool to have it at such a cool venue.) And there are some very, very tasty treats there, so go give everything a look.