UPDATE #2: You can register, but as of right now (24 January) you’re not going to be able to actually order. See here for more information, and further updates. It’s really pretty cool that foreigners can sign up for home delivery of groceries from Tesco/Homeplus. (It strikes me as a sad sign of how bloody low my expectations have sunk that I find it exciting and cool that the same commercial services available to everyone else in the country are made available to us. It’s so little trouble to make a site basically accessible, but so few companies do it. …
Category: KOREA
Homeplus, Do You Want My Business?
A Few Words About What?
I had my students read and respond to an essay of Nora Ephron’s titled “A Few Words about Breasts” at some point early in semester. Well, now the semester is over and I’m finalizing grades, which means checking my gradesheets against the homework just to make sure everything’s right. I stumbled once again upon a really funny little error that totally changed the meaning of the title of one essay. It should have read: A Few Words About Nora Ephron’s “A Few Words About Breasts” … except the student seemed to have felt as if the repetition was objectionable (good …
Fascinating Paper
This post is primarily about teaching writing in an EFL context, especially in terms of using templates and modeling various writing “moves” or “techniques”, and the use of group crit sessions in essay-writing or other writing courses. If you’re not interested in that, you’re best to skip this post.
Five Essays, Calculating, and Some Paperwork To Go
Final exams are over, but I’m still grading essays and need to update the tracking sheets for the assignments in a couple of my classes. I have five essays left from my Essay-Writing course — someone failed to submit a final essay, I suspect — and I need to tabulate how many people completed how many homework assignments in that course. (I’ve skimmed them all, just as I skim the discussion board where the students were supposed to be writing regularly, but I haven’t tabulated the work yet.) My Listening & Speaking course, which was essentially a Conversation course with …
OVER~~!
I find myself wondering why overacting — vast, wailing reactions of protestation, incredibly fake outrage, and the like — is the norm in comedic “acting” in Korea. (EDIT: Actually, it also seems the norm in movies, but in a different way: long brooding shots, action scenes five minutes too long, and hyperemotional crying is something we see both on TV melodrama and in films, but I’m particularly thinking of comedy at the moment.) Or, rather, not “why” but “how it became the case that…” One example is the various gag TV shows like Uchassa and Gag Concert. These are, roughly …
The Future of English?
Brian’s post — and Roboseyo’s comment appended to it — reminded me of a subject I haven’t yet posted about but have sometimes thought of discussing here. That is, the way SF authors imagine the future of the English language. This is a subject of particular interest to me, since I’m kind of working my way over to looking at SF in non-Anglophone societies, where the role of English-as-medium and English-as-culture impacts what non-Anglophones do (or don’t do) with SF as a literary genre. Of course, for a long time, many Anglophone writers simply assumed that the dominance of America …
Low Point, High Point
Low point of the day: Smarmy Campus Bureaucrat Dude entered my apartment without knocking. Since the house was rather hot (we’re still working on getting the hang of the ondol controls here, which are old-fashioned valves instead of digital controls like modern apartments have), I was at my computer in boxers and a t-shirt, typing away, while Lime was sprawled asleep on the bedroom floor. Smarmy Campus Bureaucrat Dude didn’t even think to apologize for coming in without knocking until I pulled some clothes on and told him it was unacceptable to enter people’s homes without at least knocking or …
Trolls, Net Morality, and Types of Societies
So I just finished writing the latest installment for my column XY for the current issue of Cahoots magazine — it’s not up yet, but I’ll link it when it is. The column is a kind of amateur explanation of the implications of sociobiology, by a non-specialist, which means, er, well, thin ice and all that. Yet surely nobody would disagree with this month’s premise, inspired (if the word can be used) by a recent nasty experience here on my own site, which is basically that when it comes to dysfunctional behaviour online, men run amok digitally in very different …
Purty Good Day…
Why? Some much-needed documents are on their way here. I received my copy of Interzone 219, with some very fine art illustrating it., and a cheque for my story, too. My students in one class — the graphic novel class — volunteered to work during the first week or so of post-semester break, in order to do a good job finishing up their project, rather than rush through and do a so-so job before exams. I was quite stunned. They jokingly asked for extra credit, but the best I can do is give them a pizza party or take them …
The Leak Continues
Those who were reading this blog weeks ago a couple of months ago will remember the leak in our previous apartment, which culminated in our moving upstairs. I still have a key — I haven’t gotten around to moving the air-conditioner upstairs, though I surely will by the time holidays come — and I ended up going downstairs to search for the humidifier, which I figure will help with my cold. Guess what still hasn’t been fixed — not in nearly two months!?!? Yup, it’s been leaking, unaddressed, since we moved out. What method of maintenance is that? The, “Let …