Tag: reviews

Campus Damocles, and Regenesis

gordsellar0 Comments

The internet has been off on campus for two days–not in professors’ offices, and mostly not in department offices, but in a lot of classrooms, and of course the wifi is off. One person told me her Wibro (roaming wifi-like service) even seemed to be blocked–or nonfunctional, in any case–on campus. The official explanation is that pigeons disabled the power and internet on campus two days ago, but the idea that they haven’t managed to fix it since then, is growing more and more, well… you read my blog, and you know that except for an outage on Wednesday, there’s …

Continue Reading

Momo: What Really Fresh-Roasted Coffee Tastes Like

gordsellar0 Comments

If you haven’t had it, and want to know the bitterness-free, rich, gorgeous taste of actually fresh-roasted coffee, there are probably a few places in Seoul to pick up some beans roasted recently. The place I know is called Momo, and it’s a coffee shop (not a Himalayan dumpling shop, much as I may long for one of those) near Shindorim station. The beans aren’t cheap, but they’re also good, so I’d say it’s worth it. To get to Momo (or it might be called Momo’s, I can’t quite recall) go out the front of the Technomart building. Turn right …

Continue Reading

Conscience of the Beagle, by Patricia Anthony

gordsellar0 Comments

I commented a while back on how it was odd that Patricia Anthony had disappeared from the SF scene, after having been such a rock star through the 90s. That was when I happened to decide I would check out whatever of her work I could get my hands on, other than what I already had (which was, at the time, only Flanders and God’s Fires — books I have yet to get to). Conscience of the Beagle is a slim book, and one that I recognized immediately as something I’d read back in Canada, though I couldn’t recall what …

Continue Reading

El Sistema, Musical Utopianism, and Social Change in Venezuela

gordsellar13 Comments

Have you ever wondered how to fix an unfixable mess? That’s the question that faced José Antonio Abreu, of Venezuela, except for one thing: he didn’t regard the mess that Caracas was in as unfixable. In 1975, he decided that there had to be a way to get kids off the street, away from the innumerable dangers vying for their attention, energy, and lives. He realized that there had to be a way to wake up families, to form communities, to give the handicapped and the poor a chance to be respected and shine. How? Music. I kid you not. …

Continue Reading

The Taste of Melbourne: Beers Part 2 (BBCE)

gordsellar0 Comments

The remainder of these beers, I tried at the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which I highly recommend to anyone in the Melbourne area. The first three are from the first visit, the rest from the second. All of these were bottle beers except the Kriek. Visit 1: Silly Saison: This was the beer I started with on the first trip to Eureka. I wanted to get a better handle on this style, since I will be trying to make one sometime soon, but I still feel like I don’t quite know exactly what a saison is supposed to be like, beyond …

Continue Reading