I just saw the best Korean movie I’ve seen in years, a biopic about Park Kyung Won — the first civilian female Korean aviator — but before I talk about that, I want to tell a story which might help explain why I think so highly of the film. I have many excellent students. By excellent, I mean intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and compassionate. I mean hardworking and relatively critical-minded. One of my moist outstanding students — someone who’s been abroad, who’s got an excellent handle on English, who gets Western culture just that little bit better than her classmates, in …
Category: REVIEWS
Welcome to the Server Room (to the tune of Welcome to the Jungle)
On one of the mailing lists I was on, someone riffed on the idea of a certain Guns’n’Roses song being adapted for sysadmins. I came up with all the lyrics except the first line. Fun like this is why I am still on this mailing list… and why I don’t sleep enough. Welcome to the server room, we’ve got fun and games… We got all the passwords here, for all the usernames. We are the people that can find Whatever you download If you got the login, honey, We got your node Chorus: In the server room Welcome to the …
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
I decided to just relax and do some reading for enjoyment — after all the editing and other busy-work I’ve been doing for over a week now, I needed that. So anyway, I just finished reading this book today, and very much enjoyed it. As I posted over at AllConsuming moments ago, I would be all too happy to recommend it to friends, as my friend Charlie recommended it to me long ago: There’s a good reason this novel is on so many SF top-lists. It’s an excellent novel, because it immerses you in a world, and then propels you …
British TV Documentaries
Lately I’ve been watching a few downloaded documentaries from British TV. Most of the ones I’ve seen so far have been quite good. I will probably comment on Dawkins’ documentary on religion, bearing the provocative title Root of All Evil?, in a few days, but for now, I’m too busy to post about that at the length it deserves. However, I just watched Thomas Balmès’ documentary on Nokia’s ethical appraisal issues, titled Made in China, and posted the following review at AllConsuming. As much as I think it’s important to discuss the plight of exploited workers in factories in places …
C.R.A.Z.Y.
I just finished watching this movie, and posted a review over at AllConsuming. I don’t do that for everything I finish, but this movie deserved a review. I remember when I was a kid, my father said of Canadian films, “Well, you know, they film something like a bug, and the bug sits still, and you’re waiting for something to happen. Then the bug moves, but nothing happens. Ten minutes, you watch that bug, and then you give up. That’s Canadian film.” In some ways, he may have been right. Canada certainly can’t compete in the area of action, thriller, …
timetravelershow.com » Show Notes for The Time Traveler Show #10 Asimov Speaks!
I’m up late recovering files from my memory card. Something bad happened with my camera, something I cannot explain except that it’s a known bug with my model of camera. (Argh.) Anyway, I’m trying to find a piece of software that will save the files for me, for free — not a demo, not a trial version, actually free — and it’s driving me mad. Anyway, while doing this, I ran across timetravelershow podcast episode containing a speech by Isaac Asimov. Now, I didn’t pay attention to the date it was delivered until I heard something worth adding to my random …
What the Hell?
Okay, I usually am relatively neutral about remixes. Some are good, most are okay, some are stinkers, and most of the time, unless nothing is really added to a song by remixing it, I fail to see the point. Now, while editing a huge brainhog of a document — a thing for one of the other offices on campuses, which looked like it was 50 pages (but 30 pages of that is a strangely formatted chart that only took me a few minutes to tidy up and correct thoroughly, thank goodness), I thought I’d put on the Courtney Pine remix …
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
As noted in my sidebar, I’ve finished Ted Chiang’s book of short stories, and here’s what I posted in the way of a review over All Consuming. As for the next book, I’m still (as always) reading a few at once, but the one I’m focused on now is Bester’s The Stars My Destination and it’s such a quick read I’ll probably stick with it till the end. Scary Good. The book isn’t scary, what’s scary is how well-written it is. One of my teachers said that these are simply some of the best stories written in the SF genre, …
Guess What Shuffle Demons Song is in my Head?
Not only because Kevin’s link to thi post by C. Buddha, either? Today, I met Lime in Hong Ik and we had dinner — Vietnamese — and a coffee. She’s very much enjoying the Korean translation of the Jared Diamond book I got for her, and she returned the giftiness with some nice Korean CDs from Purple Records. After that, we went our separate ways, she to the hospital and I to Bucheon. I had considered taking the slow train to Bucheon, and just sitting and reading, but thought, oh, if I catch the Rapid train to Dongincheon, which stops …
The Top 50
Ganked offa Kat Dancing. “This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, and put an asterisk* beside the ones you loved.” I’m also going to use the bold text markup to indicate how much of the unfinished books I’ve actually read. 1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien* — I started read this flying over the Arctic Ocean my first time coming to Korea, and finished it later that year. …