Some weeks, things really do raise my hackles. It’s the concatenation of all kinds of things that are probably universal, but which in Korea are much more in-your-face or more, I don’t know, commonly accepted. What’s hitting me more and more is how the atmosphere of acceptability impacts negatively on individuals and on society in general. That’s what I’m focusing on now, here in this post.
Tag: politics
No Art Ever Came From Such a Dulled Soul
A few weeks ago, Lime and I had argued about something — one of those dumb, petty, transient arguments that all couples have — and I went for a walk to cool off. As I walked along the street, I saw something awful happen. There was a thin black cat on the sidewalk, coming towards me, and it was so skinny that it reminded me of that poem of Basho’s about the girl cat, so thin on love and barley. Except that this cat wasn’t beloved, wasn’t fed on barley. It was so thin on rats and garbage, poor thing. …
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler… and What We’re Missing Today
This book came up at a party I was at, and when she heard that I had it on the bookshelf, but hadn’t read it yet, told me I could probably get through it in a couple of hours. I scoffed, because I’m a slow reader, but she was right, that was all it took. Properly speaking, I never bought this book. Lime snagged a box of books on some online Korean doctors’ message board, and bought the box for the Robin Cook paperbacks, but a few other things were included, such as autobiographies by the Clintons, a copy of …
Tech We Need
Boing-Boing reports: Biologist Rupert Sheldrake stabbed at lecture. And to think I imagined, immediately, that it was some IDiot. But it was, apparently, a deranged visitor from Japan. I seriously wonder whether it’s going to become easier, or harder, to pinpoint whether another person is a nutball or not as we get more deeply embedded into the Net in our daily lives — I mean, as the interfaces get more and more distributed to everywhere instead of just on little screens in front of us. The scary thing is that to use the advantage, we’d have to be giving up …
Eh?
This Associated Press article had me saying, “Eh?” Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused rival Sen. Barack Obama and his allies of trying to stop people from voting as some of his backers have called on her to drop out of the presidential race. The Obama campaign rejected the charge, dismissing Clinton’s criticism as “completely laughable.” Yeah, I don’t know that I have an opinion on this whole Obama/Clinton thing — I’m more disenchanted with Clinton, like most people, for the obvious reasosn, but I’m honestly dubious about the ability of anyone to change Washington, let alone America, with all …