Religious Freedom, and What Kind of Hero We May Need: A Footnote to Five more on Kick-Ass

This is a follow-up to a series I started last week, which begins here but is not for the faint of heart. This post as well is not for the faint of heart. The series, if you’re interested, began here. Okay, I know it’s an old headline, but how does it happen that a Catholic Cardinal and the Mormon church agree on something… especially on this? Okay, so, as a non-American… how does gay marriage threaten religious freedom in America? Seriously. Set the histrionics aside, the screaming and shouting and wild eyes, and explain it. Because, frankly, unless “religious freedom” …

Continue Reading

More Nigerian 419-Scam-Related Pop Songs

I posted yesterday about 419 scams and a pop song related to the topic, and after a little more poking around, I found a talk discussed here, in which a few more 419 scam-related songs are mentioned. Here they are: and: The first song “Yahoozee,” by Olu Maintain, while the second is “No More Yahoozee [The Reply],” by Harri Best Moradiyo. Both songs seem to be related to the travails and legalities of being a 419-scammer, in roughly the same way that being a business exec is glamorized, or criticized, in the American media. Which gives me an idea for some deep-future …

Continue Reading

An EMP in Lagos

UPDATE: More here. ORIGINAL POST: Seriously, I get this weird feeling someday people might just be willing to support something like a sequestration of Lagos from the Internet, or some sort of EMP that would knock out all the computers there, creating a hardware shortage and making it difficult for Nigerians to replace their computers… maybe even getting other nations to forbid export of computers to Nigeria. Then again, how much spam comes from Korea? No, really. Maybe that EMP was a  bad suggestion. The other night, some Nigerian scam artist like the kid mentioned in this article hacked the …

Continue Reading

GBH and Unknown Famous Koreans

Be warned: this tune is slightly addictive. Not because Kylie Minogue is prancing about in a space-kimono getup, which is amusing the first time through, but because it has one hell of a groove. Not bad for 20th century music (of a relatively obscure sort — it has a poor release history, this track does). So is Towa Tei well known in Korea? Is it widely known that he’s a Zainichi Korean, or do most Koreans who hear of him assume (as does most of the West, I guess, and understandably) that he’s Japanese? It fascinates me which Koreans outside Korea …

Continue Reading

The First Album I Ever Bought For Myself

It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …

Continue Reading