Okay, this isn’t a song about Iksan, but it does bring back memories of the days when I lived in a small place with, um, limited entertainment facilities, and was surrounded by Westerners mostly just as bewildered about what to do with themselves in their free time. (And for you LJ readers, yeah, I embedded the video below on my site, but you’re missing nothing if you follow the link.)
Tag: odd
A Little Piece of Heaven
It’s the first day of the semester, and things are a little chaotic but mostly fine. The students in my Monday morning 9:00 am class seemed to get most of the jokes, or at least laugh in the right places — humor is a great test of comprehension, you see. The office is still a little frantic in getting the disorganization reorganized into, um, a semblance of organization, but things are going. I haven’t been posting because I’m working on several things at once (a rewrite, a draft, an article, course preparations, website template stuff, and domestic stuff), and haven’t …
Why Writing is a Solitary Activity
Kind of reminds me of editing projects, communal course design discussions, and other collaborative work I’ve done in the past. And yes, this is why writing is a solitary activity so much of the time. And, I suspect, why the book is usually better than the film. This is why crit groups are useful, too. Because crit groups are almost always full of other writers, meaning, people who are both readers, but also know something about writing. But it always becomes a solitary activity again, in the end. Because crit groups all too often bombard you with dozens of great …
Where I’m From Is Not Flat
Um, or at least you shouldn’t say it aloud. Ha! (LJers, pop over for a funny video about how to survive in Saskatchewan, and what not to do when you’re there.) Hilarious, though totally silly. We know it’s flat. We like it that way. Well, except the winter wind…
Love Detector Phone Test and Voight-Kampff Job Interviews
So there’s a new service available in Korea through cell phone operator KTF that will supposedly analyze voice patterns to see whether a lover is honest, attentive, passionate, or whatever. The first response most people have is one I share: yeah, right. As in, I doubt we’re quite at the point where such an analysis can reasonably be made from a single cell phone call. But that’s not such an interesting observation. I mean, someday we doubtless will be at that point. We’ll be able to analyze voice prints (and other peripheral sound, like breathing patterns, for example) and compare …
Bananagirl Wins the Prize
Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …
Villages Don’t Have Bad Neighborhoods, Do They?
An interesting link on Arts and Letters Daily recently was this one, discussing the following point: … those who travel and live abroad must be continually alert and never fall for the myth that we live in a “global village”. Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to religious observances, traditions, manners and gestures in other parts of the world. It is all too easy to be caught in cultural crossfire. The impetus for this discussion came from the incident involving Gillian Gibbons, a middle-aged British schoolteacher who did something very silly in Sudan. (She let her class name a teddy …
Media Accountability
For those who like to rant about the Korean media and its promulgation of bogus urban myths and the like, US papers (and presumably Canadian ones) are not above reproach. (PDF there, just warning you.) It seems that suicide rates actually don’t go up in the US around the holidays: Newspapers are close to putting to rest the myth that the holidays increase the risk of suicide. A new study shows a dramatic drop in articles that – despite having no basis in fact – attribute the arrival of the holiday season with an uptick in suicides. An analysis of …
Um…?
I happened to googling for something at the Korea Herald and look what I found! I don’t know if this is new, and frankly, it doesn’t scare me — I use Linux, and have never encountered a virus for my platform. But, um, you know, someone at the Herald should probably look into this.
Train Sabotage in France
Sometimes it seems like folks such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling might be right in having turned to non-SF in recent years, since, after all, the world is just as surprising as cyberpunk was. Like, for example, with this orchestrated sabotage on the French railway system reported by BBC news: France’s high-speed TGV rail network has been damaged by a “concerted campaign of sabotage”, the SNCF state-owned rail operator has said. It said acts of sabotage overnight, including fires, caused huge delays to TGV services already hit by a long transport union strike over reforms. What’s unsaid is that …