Brewed up another batch tonight, this one a nice coffee stout. Specific gravity ended up at 1.040 right after I mixed the wort with the water. May have actually put too much water in, not sure — the bucket I do primary ferments in now has a more-than-23-liter capacity, so I may be in for a surprise with the carboy. If that happens, I think I’ll keep the remainder in my second bucket, even though it’s usually best to dump it. (I’ll steep it in even more coffee and see what comes of it; if it fails, well, it was …
Tag: KOREA
Didn’t Do Hallowe’en This Year
Free Hallowe’en PDF at GUD — stories from the first four issues. (Available for now.) Plus some other stuff too… Didn’t do Hallowe’en this year, beyond watching Inglourious Basterds. Stuff to say about it, which meshes pretty well with what I have to say about another SF film, District 9. SF? Why yes, Inglourious Basterds is an alternate history, after all. Need one make a spoiler alert at this point? Well, wait, I’ll save it for when I actually post about that. Today, however, I must send in my paper, plus it’s beer-makin’ day. So… more on both those films …
It is to Flunk
I was grading a stack of student assignments — specifically, feedback on readings, which I make them do on the theory that it helps them prepare for discussions of the texts — when I ran across a particularly saddening passage in response to “The Multiculture,” an essay about Torontonian multiculturalism, which I’ll only paraphrase here: If I were a Torontonian, I would look at foreigners in two ways. In one way, I’d see them as invaders, because they would be speaking foreign languages and bringing foreign customs to my land. But I would also see them as bringing new life …
Angst and Rant No(t much) More
Yesterday I had one of those days that is inevitable for everyone who lives abroad. No matter how happy you are in general, there are those days, those cursed days, when everything you don’t like about your chosen place of residence just comes up and slaps you in sequence, one by one. It’s one of those days when the place you’ve decided to live, and the place you care about or even love, decides to drive you crazy. Sometimes, people have those days when it’s just really one jerk who annoys them. Sometimes they have those days because of the …
What’s Happening in My ‘Hood?
I know, I know, I promised a post detailing (to some degree) my adventures this summer, but I just had to note what I saw yesterday. It was the weirdest thing, or, well, maybe not. Maybe it’s totally normal, and I just haven’t been paying attention. Yesterday, I was invited out but I was feeling a bit worn out and decided to stay home for most of the day, get some cleaning and some work done. But in the evening, I decided to go take in a movie. I didn’t care which movie, but I wanted to get out and …
Orcs!
One of the fascinating things that keeps coming up in my Korean lessons is the generation gap. It’s not that I was unaware of this before, but my tutor has made a careful point of noting when she shows me a word that older people either won’t find appropriate in speech, or which she considers a “young people” word. One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few …
I Even Remember My Teacher’s Name…
To those of you who are teaching here, and given to shooting your mouth off, let this be a lesson… Something funny happened this semester in one of my classes. A student was complaining about one of her first foreign teachers, who taught her English while she was in middle or high school. (I can’t remember which.) This foreign teacher said some things that, at least as the student recounted them, were pretty ignorant and obviously not wise things for a Western adult to say to a Korean kid. The funny thing that that the student ended her rant with, …
Karaoke Songs?
I know it’s on the horizon now. It was brought up in the context of a goodbye party for my co-worker and friend Gwen, who will be leaving for the States soon. If it’s not at her party, it’s still bound to happen eventually — me and the profs I work with will eventually end up in a noraebang (a karaoke room). I don’t think they have songs by Cam’Ron at these places: [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/qbzYXQpdUfU” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] … so I suppose I’ll have to settle for a good old standby from my teenaged headbanger days: [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/IYRC4H64EFk” …
I Want to See You in Jakarta
If you’d told me in 1999 that a decade hence someone would be hugging me in an Indian restaurant in a suburb of Seoul, and then saying that sentence to me, “Please try… I want to see you in Jakarta…” I’d have laughed in your face and said, “What?!?” Well, ona good day I would have laughed. Isn’t life just wonderfully bizarre? And so it goes… another ex-student of mine (since turned friend) ventures out into the world, and I dare to nurture some small but bright nugget of faith in her ability to change it in some small but …
On Roh’s Death, Steve Reich, and the Tao of Imagining Sisyphus Happy
I’ve been saddened by what happened recently in regard to ex-President Roh’s suicide. Not the suicide itself, or all of the political wrangling related to it.I’m saddened because I fear suicides will worsen here, for the next while. Korea has a serious suicide problem. It’s the number one killer of people in their twenties, as many blogs are eager to state. It’s the kind of thing many people think about in their youth, of course. But suicide is tragically common here, and in recent days a number of people have talked about it with me. Korean people, I mean. Young …