February 06, 2005
Much of Brazil Also Still In the Bronze Age · (sci&tech; department)
In case the educated Americans among my readers were feeling bad, it might help to know that 89% of Brazil is as pig-ignorant about evolution as the majority of Americans. Oh well, at least 54% believe in a god-influenced form of teleogical evolution, de Chardin-style, which I can live with, I suppose.
Japan's Crackdown, and The Dark Secret · (politica department)
It seems Korean's not the only East Asian country cracking down on the sex trade: Japan is now conducting a crackdown on the trafficking of sex-slaves. Heartening news, especially considering it seems to have been motivated not by what I imagine to be an influx of young Korean women who left Korea because of the crackdown here, but rather by the US having placed Japan on a watchlist for its human trafficking problem.
Meanwhile, the Japanese have expressed shock of the possibly raunchy life of the former first lady.
Hmmm. Juxtaposition, anyone? I do think it's ridiculous to say that
Lurid photos of a woman said to be a former prime minister's wife in the throes of ecstasy while being suckled by a young political secretary could destroy global trust in Japan, according to Shukan Taishu.The world's opinion of the USA changed little when the head of state was demonstrated to have had an affair with an intern, after all. I think much of the world will not care, but I suspect that in East Asia one must make a show of shame when one disapproves if one hopes one's castigation to be popularly effective.
UPDATE: I thought excessively short skirts in winter was an insanity limited only to Korea. Turns out I was wrong.
February 05, 2005
Jazz Piper · (music department)
The blog Honey, Where You Been So Long brings you Rufus Harley, Jazz Bagpiper. I swear I thought I was the only person in the world interested in this guy.
50 Book Challenge · (lit department)
You'd think it would be easy to take on the Fifty Book Challenge, wouldn't you? Read fifty books in a year, and blog about them?
I'm a slow reader, though. We'll see. I'm thinking of taking up the challenge anyway, but it'll mean cutting down on a few other things... then again, that might be good for me.
RSSless youth culture? · (sci&tech; department)
Apophenia thinks that syndication and youth culture aren't so compatible, and that RSS is more for the infogeeks while youth culture seems to flock more to things like LiveJournal.
What gets me about syndication is not my personal neuroses around it (although i fear that others will be pushed over the edge with the continuous increase in feeds). What gets me about syndication is that i can't resolve the proposed models with the usage patterns i see in youth culture.I don't know, there may be something to this, but I also think some hybrid might evolve. When I was living in Canada, most people I knew just barely understood who to get webmail accounts working. But when I arrived in Korea, everyone I knew had a webmail.
Now, don't get me wrong: I don't know many Koreans who use RSS aggregators, but I do know that the daum cafe model (which is kind of a weird cross between LJ and yahoogroups) are still vastly popular, though cyworld—which is kind of a cross between LJ and blogging, I guess, from the little I know—is on the rise.
The thing is, I'm certain all of this stuff, which is a mainstay of youth internet culture, would have looked absolutely geeky ten years ago. Youth culture's perception of what is too geeky changes, and given that now everyone I know has an email address, I think the old 80s "computer geek" has found a little roosting space in everyone's mind. Probably, though, some kind of user-nonintensive hybrid will evolve, where, using presets, you can set your "feeds" (friends?) to drop off new posts after a given time, where you will get anything mentioning you brought to the forefront, and where you don't have to fiddle with buttons and knobs and such. Hell, even I—as webgeeky as anyone I know—would like a couple of presets like that for various folders on my blogroll.
Oil Peasants of the World, Unite? · (politica department)
From BBC World News: Protesters hold Nigeria oil plant.
Hundreds of men and women have invaded an oil installation operated by Chevron Texaco in Nigeria's Delta region.The protesters from Ugborodo village said the company had failed to deliver promises for community development.
Several people were injured during the brief occupation of the Escravos plant, the regional army commander said - but could not confirm reports of deaths.
Village elders, company officials and state representatives have been meeting in Warri town to resolve the dispute.
...
ChevronTexaco say they do not know why the villagers were demonstrating.
But there has been a long standing dispute in the area, with local people claiming that the company has failed to honour of promises of community development which it made following the 2002 occupation.
I can't say I feel bad for Texaco at all. If there was oil in your country's land, under your very village, and you were living like a pauper, what would you do?
BBC News on Science · (sci&tech; department)
Over at CERN they're still looking for the Higgs Boson, but if we're not careful the climate might render any such finds less than immediately relevant.
The Ayatollah's Grandson · (politica department)
Christopher Hitchens passes on some interesting news from a talk with Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson, who apparently called for a U.S. invasion of Iran.
I was thinking, wow, this is what happens if you live long enough. You'll hear the ayatollah's grandson saying, not even "Send in the Marines" but "Bring in the 82nd Airborne." I think it was the matter-of-factness of the reply that impressed me the most: He spoke as if talking of the obvious and the uncontroversial.I wonder what Kim Jong Il's grandson will say.
At Least It's Funny Now · (Friday Five department)
A mite late, this week's Friday Five comes from Mojave Sixty-Six, who asked:
...what are five things that have happened in your life that you can now say "well, it's certainly funny in retrospect...."Here are five moments I can look back on and laugh at, now, though they seemed almost unbearable at the time...
- Two words: bowl cut.
- I'm 14. It's my birthday. I've decided we ought to rent The Exorcist and watch it at my birthday party sleepover. It scared the hell out of me, and the other boys at my party decided I ought to sleep on the cot in the basement, instead of on the floor like the rest of them. I had visions of the cot bouncing and flopping and me being possessed. Y'see, I'd read that the movie was based on a true story, in some pulping ostensibly nonfiction book. (Huh, wahaddaya know, according to IMDB that's roughly true.) It was a night of horror, that birthday night. Damn, I'm spooked out now just remembering it.
- I once sent a pathetic "I think I love you but I know you don't love me but I need to say it anyway," email to a friend. She didn't teply for weeks and when she did I took the "yeah, I can't love you" very personally. It was all very easily understandable given what I'd gone through that summer to have such an unbalanced emotional reaction to a female friend being nice to me, but it was still hard for me, all the same, to get over the embarrassment. We're grand friends now, if a bit out of touch much of the time.
- One of the last meetings by the disgruntled employees of last place I worked in Canada. The girl who was holding us together was fired that day or the next day for "ruining morale", when she did the opposite. I was being told my employer was trying to mess with the government by keeping her family members fully employed (5 days a week) while everyone else was going to be down to 3 days a week. We were all depressed, and had lost one cheer-bringing employee form the office to a better job. I had barely enough money to fly home for Christmas, and didn't know what to do. A few weeks later I was to be in Korea...
- Ever been completely broke in a foreign country in which you were not residing? (See #3 of this previous F5 entry.) Try that experience when you're not the only one depending on the money that was stolen, when you're leaving the city the next day, when it's New Year's Day and you've no idea if you can get a refund in time... It's horror, sheer horror.
anti-Buddhist vandalism · (Korea department)
Lately, Jodi of The Asia Pages has put up a few very interesting, enjoyable, posts, including some—apparently—provocative thoughts about about evangelical Christianity in Asia. You can read the first one here, and then the second and third. While the comment I posted to the last in the series went way off from where I'd intended—veering rather into a kind of rant about the worst sides of Korean Protestantism as I've seen them, what I'm posting here is much more pertinent, and adds something to the intelligent and thoughtful posts that she's written.
This evening, while taking a break from adding bits and pieces to my novel draft, I was googling around for information about the pictoral representations of the Big Dipper God that was worshipped in olden times in Korea, and ran across a piece online that blew me away. It's part of a bigger website called Buddhapia, but the part I want to direct your attention to is here.
What's contained there, for those of you who can't be bothered to click through the link, is a litany of rather bizarre-sounding and extremist attacks on Buddhist temples throughout Korea (tracked from 1982-1998: I don't know why it doesn't track them further). I don't mean people marching up and trying to convert people, the merely annoying and obnoxious and stupid thing that Jodi complained about: I mean things like starting fires, desecrating relics, and the like. Here are a few examples:
1982 May.A man by the name of Myông Chinhong organizes religious gatherings in Seoul to publicly denounce Buddhism. He erects a banner "Jesus Heaven, Buddhism Hell!" He claims to have once been a Buddhist monk who has "repented," though no records can be found to support the claim of his ordination. Using this claim, he puts up posters claiming: "A Dharma Hall is a hall of demons."1983 March 1. During a Christian revival meeting held on the occasion of Korean Independence Day observations, a woman falsely claims to have been the daughter of a famous Zen master and revered national independence hero, Paek Yongsông. She makes statements denouncing Buddhism.
1984 February. Red crucifixes are painted on priceless temple wall paintings at Muryangsa Temple and Ilsônsa on Samgaksan Mountain outside Seoul. Dirt is smeared on the paintings and on a statue of the Buddha located outside one of the temples. A large ancient carving of the Buddha chiselled into stone is damaged with axe-like instruments.
...
November. In an official Korean textbook, Buddhism is called " a fading religion."
1985 April. Four major daily newspapers accept and publish advertisements which assert that the content of the Buddhist scriptures are "selfish" in intent.
May. A Protestant minister named Kim Jingyu publicly claims to have once been an ordained monk in the Chogye Order. Though there is no record of his ever having been a Buddhist monk, he hangs up banners which read "Why I Became a Protestant Minister," and organizes meetings to denounce the Buddhist faith.
September. An individual by the name of Kim Sônghwa organizes a series of mass gatherings to denounce Buddhism in the cities of Pusan, Taegu, Kwangju, and Taejon. (This individual and his wife Kim Mija regularly advertise their mission to convert the "25 million Buddhists of Korea" in the Christian Newspaper Kitokkyo Shinmun, July 1996).
October. An unidentified man disrupts a Dharma talk at the Nûngin Zen Center by driving nails into the tires of believers' automobiles parked outside. The perpetrator also pours corrosive chemicals into various car engines. An accomplice meanwhile uses portable amplification equipment to sing Gospel songs up at the Buddhist gathering, located on the third and fourth floors.
There's a lot more, and it includes some stunning examples of arson and vandalism that certainly do not fit with an ethos of doing unto others what one would have done unto oneself. Personally, I would have imagined much greater antagonism between Buddhists and Christians over this sort of thing, but I suppose there are two or three factors (at least) which would mitigate this:
- Most Buddhists don't "go to church" and so would be much less likely to hear about such vandalism immediately, or take it as personally, as Christians likely would if the church they attended were vandalized by Buddhists.
- There's probably some sense that this is representative of just the extremists, and that yelling about it would do no good. Now, while I think most Christians in Korea would never go out and do such a thing, I have met a number of Protestants whom I think would have to think for a while before they could say whether they think "crusading for Jesus" in this way is a bad thing. A woman I dated for a (short) while even said that she thought Buddhist countries like Thailand were full of sinners... and then justified it by saying she meant it in a pitying way, not a hateful one. Do I think most Christians would support such an action? Well, not openly. But churches do tend to use highly divisive rhetoric about their religion in comparison with other denominations of Christianity, let alone totally different religions altogether. My girlfriend has a friend who was entertaining the idea of attending another church of the same denomination in a city closer to their new home while she was living away from home and attending University; her father, the minister in her home church, cast these thoughts as "the work of the devil", and forbade it. With the kinds of absolutist, totalizing ideas that are floating around in that kind of religious environment, I think that even people who wouldn't openly support vandalism against temples would still not be the most eager to denounce that kind of behaviour, either.
- Finally, occasionally skirmishing monks aside, Buddhists in Korea (the ones I've known, anyway) just generally seem very laid-back. I often don't discover someone is Buddhist until long after I've known them, while I often find out who's a Protestant within the first conversation or two. Buddhists laypeople are less likely to do this kind of thing, to get worked up about this kind of thing, and so on, I imagine—though I would love to interview a few and see what they have to say.
I wonder, though, if I've missed something here. I can't imagine Buddhist hoodlums attacking Churches, and certainly nothing turned up on my cursory searches. Googling Christian vandalism Korea and Buddhist vandalism Korea seem only to turn up more of the same, and none of the reverse. But as this US State Department report points out, this kind of thing is relatively rare, and it's seemed to cool down since 2000 or so.
UPDATE: Ooops, before I noticed Kangmi's comment, I'd gone back and cut the complaint in the quoted section regarding the Pope visiting on Buddha's birthday. The immense traffic jams probably reflect underdeveloped infrasctructure more than any rudeness on the Church's part, though I can't rule out competitive strategy on the part of the Roman Pontiff and His Merry Men. But I'm sure Joshua at Katolik Shinja will have something to say about that. If you're wondering what I mean, well... heh heh, go read the document I linked to last.
February 03, 2005
No Global SMS for me... · (sci&tech; department)
It'd be really nice to be able to SMS my friends in other countries. I thought it might be possible using this service, Free SMS @ SMS.ac, which Joi Ito recently mentioned, but I couldn't find out whether it'd work in Korea till after I signed up.
Unfortunately, it doesn't, and I can't see that changing anytime soon. Argh.
Chinese SF mags · (lit department)
A while back, Cory Doctorow posted about one of his stories being pirated for a Chinese magazine.
Well, it seems there's a boom in SF magazine publication now, and Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei is on the story: here's a post about new mags, and an interview with the editor of one of them.
I wonder if any non-Chinese authors are getting more than just authorial credits... but I figure if it's popularlizing SF in China, it might be worth the loss.
As an added bonus, here's the blog of the editor interviewed, who goes by zhwj; it has all kinds of info about SF in China.
Right To Freedom Of Religion? · (Korea department)
Just a question, but does the Korean government actually recognize freedom of religion? Is one free to reject Confucian beliefs, for example, and is this freedom explicitly recognized in any critical legislation?
Because this news report passed on by KimcheeGI suggests you may forfeit your rights to own property if you aren't a good Confucian. Well, actually, if you fail to be a good Confucian after promising to be one:
The Seoul High Court said yesterday that 55-year-old Huh Jin-heon should not be allowed to inherit the land he was due as the eldest son of his family clan.
Who was the angry relative? His 78-year-old father, Huh Hyeong-du.
The father accused his son of neglecting his duties, such as performing ancestral rituals and caring for their graves. In Korea, the eldest son of the main family in the clan customarily inherits the clan's property...
The father said even though the son in 1999 made a written pledge that he would perform ancestral rituals, he failed to do so and so the real estate of the clan should not be given to him.Was it because he'd failed to follow the agreement, though, or because he'd failed to perform the duties ascribed to him by Confucian law?
I suspect both came into play here, but I would hope if he'd not signed a contract, that the claim against him would not have gotten far. Far be it from me to tell a nation's justice system what to do, but I've known plenty of Koreans who feel those "Confucian duties" are not compatible with their religion (especially Protestants), and more importantly I've known Koreans who did not mow the unkempt grass near their ancestors' graves, but instead stomped it down old-style.
I guess I just get antsy when I see religious (or semi-religious) practices entering into legal rights and decisions.
Download Crackdown? · (Korea department)
The KimcheeGI reports a coming mess:
SEOUL, Jan. 14 (Yonhap) -- The government's planned crackdown on rampant illegal online downloading of music, movie and games has driven the country's Internet users into a state of confusion.In South Korea, about 36 million people use Internet, or 68.2 percent of the country's population.
Many of them have personal homepages or blogs containing downloaded music files and lyrics of pop songs and postings from other Internet sites. It has become a part of their daily life to swap music and movie files using peer-to-peer (PSP) programs.
I have to wonder if it will be all downloads that will be cracked down on, or just those of Korean content. I remember discovering after a DVD-piracy crackdown that foreign DVD pirate versions were still widely available, but Korean ones had become scarce. (Or, at least, so it seemed at the time when I was window shopping.)
I also wonder whether individuals will be targeted as much as buinesses, or more. Most bars I've seen use computers, and some of them use MP3s rather than the free webradio services. I have to admit it's hard to see the difference between them, for most people. Do artists whose songs are listened to via bugsmusic get any kind of royalties?
Blog Posting Styles · (bloggery department)
Amy Gharan over at Contentious has some posts up about Blogging Style: The Basic Posting Formats (Series Index) which are worth a read for some people out there. I know I got at least one good idea from them.
via Blinger.
After reading blogs for awhile, I’ve come to see some patterns in the ways postings in text-based blogs are formatted. As I see it, there are seven basic formats for blog postings. Each serves a different purpose for bloggers and their readers.
The format of a blog posting, if chosen consciously and carefully, enhance communication – particularly the delivery of certain types of content. Consequently, some formats work best for commentary or explanation, others for alerts and references, etc.
One Draft Down, One Major Revision To Go · (gord's life department)
앗싸 가오리! (God I hope I spelled that right.)
Well, there's good news and then there's more work—but hey, no bad news.
I've finished the first draft of my foreigner-in-Korea ghost story novel, which currently had no proper title though the working title is "Dead Abroad." (I know, it sucks... I need to find a title for this thing.) I don't want to get into more detail about it for now. Partly, I'm just tired of typing. It's 270-some pages, about 80 or 90 of which I've written in the last 5 or 6 very productive and inspired nights. Whew!
Of course, there's a lot of work to go...
For one thing, I need to go back and change the grammar of significant hunks of the thing. I only realized late in the game why the character who's telling the story is doing so, and how he's relating it, as well as to whom it's addressed. There will be significant revisions of sections where "she" becomes "you", with all the contextual and tone changes that go along with that.
Secondly, there are some things which I think can be worked in which would enrich the novel, as atmosphere-inducing background material... I have included some interesting moments from Korean history, some interesting facets of things I've come across in my readings, but there are others I took note of, and left out, but which I'd like to work in. (Tomorrow afternoon I shall make a list of them and puzzle out where to work them in.)
Finally, I shall have to retire a few CDs from my listening for a while: I relied on them for mood a great deal, and now I cannot stand to listen to them:
- several CDs of traditional Korean music
- Jang Young-Gyu's soundtrack to the Korean horror film 4인용 삭탁, which was a big mood-aid for the spookier bits
- a couple of Aphex Twin CDs for when I was writing the really harsh part set in North Korea
- I blush to include it, but it helped me a lot, track 13 from Tori Amos' Boys For Pele CD, and
- Massive Attack's Mezzanine, which is perfect for any gloomy writing you ever need to do.
Oh, of bloggish pertinence, I was working up my list of thank-yous (still to be expanded by those kind souls who give me criticisms of my work when I start sending it to close friends next week or so), and I figured it would only be fair to include The Marmot in the list. His observations on Korean history have proved useful to me in my quest for more knowledge, as well as interesting Korean things to throw into this story.
And now, to bed.
GYUNGBOK PALACE: HISTORY, CONTROVERSY, GEOMANCY · (Korea department)
Whilst spelunking the Marmot's Hole (the history section) I followed a chain of links to this beautiful essay: Gyungbok (or Kyungbok) Palace: History, Controversy, Geomancy - by Minsoo Kang. It's definitely worth a look, and I shall hold it in my mind when I am reworking the draft of the novel which, come hell or high water, I will finish this week. (Er, I hope, tonight.)
February 02, 2005
Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely To Respond · (oddities &c.; department)
Ever want to write an open letter to someone you figured would never read it anyway, or would never respond if they did read it?
Schell on Zhao · (politica department)
Orville Schell is someone I've read some work by, and I thought highly of it. Here he comments on the passing of Zhao Ziyang.
via Peking Duck, who also has some other potentially bad news from Cathay.
Paani · (film department)
Hear of this new Indian movie?
Water, the movie. A film by Shekhar Kapur:Ah, yes, I dooooo want to see that. Water wars, man. Water wars!
Thirty-five years in the future in a city of 20 Million, when the Water Wars have begun between those that have it and those that don't, a young, impetuous renegade falls in love with the one girl he seemingly can't have.
China-Wal-Mart · (politica department)
You might think it strange I put this post under the politics heading on my blog, but think about this little fact for a second:
Wal-Mart buys 1.1% of all Chinese outputThink about that. Now think some more. Good grief.
via one of Simon World's very worthy Asia by Blog updates.
What I would have given... · (Korea department)
... to be a fly on the wall during the discussions leading up to this publication:
The Korea Times : Korea, China, Japan to Publish Joint History Textbook in May.
I'd have given a lot, believe me.
BbongJjak and Dancing on Buses · (Korea department)
The old (and illegal) practice of playing Korean oompah music (known as bbongjjak) and dancing on buses is the subject of a recent funny post by Japundit. Bus dancing is something I've never personally experienced... it's mostly on tour buses, or as one of my friends calls them, "ajumma [middle-aged women] buses". Apparently it still goes on, banned or not, and apparently it can be quite dangerous, though usually it's just old retirees blowing off some steam for the first time in a long life of hard work. I did once party with some old folks like this on a boat, and it was fine except they were all, all of them, drunk out of their skulls on soju and determined to make me dance like a Korean, whatever that actually means.
As for me, I am the only person I know who gets any enjoyment at all out of the techno-bbongjjak superstar E Pak Sa (look...listen by hitting the little orange button at the top of the screen), who I'm told is big in Japan. (I'm not referring to Tom Waits, but whatever.)
From Weird is Relative · (bloggery department)
Weird is Relative is a kind of websmorg of bizarre, weird, interesting, and surprising news. As I was cleaning out my bloglines subscription lists (and ongoing, and unfinished, project), I finally looked through the old posts there and found a lot that turned my head. Here are some highlights, which show why this lj is staying in my subs list, and why you should add it to yours.
American kids think the Constitution is permissive. Are they the New Bush Jungen or are they just ignorant kids?
Available everywhere, but just a reminder: there was good press about the vote in South Vietnam, too.
Don't know what to cook? Have a look. Got a date? Careful with your Mastercard. Got a job interview ahead of you? Think about these questions. Wondering about your height? Compare yourself to some celebrities. Feeling some regret? Send a letter to the Dead Letter Office. Not getting anything written? Make yourself work. Can't keep fictional timelines straight? Double check them, then! Need to write a resume? Get some tips here. Wanna talk to your prelinguistic baby? Try sign language.
An accidental stalker? Jewish vampires staying kosher? Isn't this prom dress ugly? (Why is it selling at all?) Hey, if you've screwed things up, don't feel bad—you could have done much worse! Hey, I remember reading about this statue being rubbed lewdly in some novel, but I can't recall where... Now, this is a form of exercise I could get into!
Hyperdictionary... The online eymological dictionary... curiosities of iological nomeclature... Anatomy for Beginners... what mangroves saved during the tsunami... montage-a-google...
The worst coporations of 2004... Malcolm Gladwell interviewed on his new book, Blink... Carl Zimmer writes about Neanderthals and stem cell research... The possibility of a cancer gene! More Foucault than you'll ever digest. Men's and women's brains are different, see? And here's an interview with Thebe Medupe on astronomy and apartheid. A review of Jared Diamond's new(ish) book at Wired, and
Fingerprint heredity... The risks of too much education for rightwingers... The testing of condoms(not what it sounds like)...
Ah... an archive of old SF stories. Wonderful!
UPDATE: Another review of the Jared Diamond book Collapse, this time from the New York Times. It looks interesting, and I want to read this sucker...
Stats? · (bloggery department)
Actually, I rarely look at the stats for this page anymore. If people are reading, they're reading. If not, then I am writing my journal just the same.
But this is a neat toy, and it's nice to know I'm ranked 135018th in the blogosphere, which is really not too bad.
Thanks for that link, Adam...
Activity in Other Places · (bloggery department)
I'm trying to get back into other side-projects of mine, and two of them I've tested out... (I can't say I've dived in, but I did put a toe in the water to see what the temperature was like.)
I'm back to scratching my head at New Sophists' Almanac. And I'm trying to make real sentences that make real sense over at the 한국어 연습장. Trying was operative word in that sentence there.
Is this a surprise? · ( department)
The Writer
Words captivate me. And, I like to capture words. Blogging enables me to write often. It also provides a place for me to share what I write with a reading public. I can be funny, inspiring, intelligent, cynical, or morbid. It doesn't matter what I write about in my blog. It only matters that I write.
via Blinger.
February 01, 2005
The Coming Cull · (gord's life department)
It seems the biggest distraction I've found for myself to avoid finishing my novel is catching up on my RSS feeds. I have 300-some of them, so it's a big job, since I let them accumulate since about last August. A lot of them, I've just binned, but many more I've decided to wade through, just to see what my favorite bloggers have been posting about in the last few months.
But I've come to the conclusion that with that many blogs in my blogroll, I'm not going to be able to keep up with them all, and also do all the other things I am resolved to do this term, like writing projects, swimming daily, redesigning my site overall, continuing this reading of books (of which I have many I have never even opened) and so on.
So a cull is coming. My blogroll is going to become a lot shorter. It's nothing personal; I will probably be cutting some very good bloggers, and I may miss some wonderful posts out there. But on the other hand, I am already missing tons of wonderful posts out there and don't know what I'm missing. After the first month or so, I'll forget what I'm missing if I get my blogroll down to half its current size, too. So I'm going to go for it...
After I finish my novel. That's tonight's sleepless night project.
Wong Kar-Wai rocks · (film department)
I wondered what this movie was all about when I saw it advertised in the Now Playing poster racks near the theaters here in Jeonju. I'm quite sure I'd have understood nothing if I'd seen it at a cinema here, but this trailer for Won Kar-Wai's 2046 is very, very promising. I love his work already, and I can't wait till this is out on DVD so I can check it out at a local DVD-방.
They're Made out of Meat · (lit department)
I'm not sure which of the SF blogs in my blogroll I found this on, but anyway, it's a good little short story that explains why we're all alone in the universe. Well, it's one explanation. Me, I favour the notion of galactic-scale natural disasters as a likely explanation, since very simple and not-uncommon cosmic events could wipe out life on a huge scale, and rather regularly, too.
But They're Made out of Meat by Terry Bisson is a much more amusing possibility.
January 31, 2005
Rootless Cosmopolitans · (politica department)
Say what you want about his philosophy—I agree with some of it, and have serious reservations about other parts of it—but Peter Singer, along with Renata Singer (whom I assume to be his wife, as a guess) hit a couple of nails on the head in this article called Rootless, Voteless but Happily Floating.
I won something! · (gord's life department)
It's the first time since that 7-pound chocolate bar in 7th grade fundraiser lotto that I won for selling one packet of chocolates to my parents, even though Brett Paddock sold 14 of the damned cases of things and only won a calculator, because it was my one measly ticket that was drawn for the big prize, and his 14 only came out to one calculator.
Well, this time it's a lot better for me, what I've won! It's was for this post which I entered in a competition. Cool! Thank you, Koreanblog!
Now, off for that walk...
Like and Unlike The Yangban · (bloggery department)
Well, just like Flying Yangban, I can't load my page from home.
Unlike the Yangban, I haven't exceeded my server load. Whoops, wait, he's back up now. Whew. That's good.
But I still wonder why my own page won't load at my house. So, anyway, everyone, if you email me and I don't respond quickly, don't be surprised... I check my mail from my web page's server, too.
Yes, I am posting this from a PC-Bang, because I was waiting for an important email (which hasn't come, but ah well, at least my site is still online and the email will get through sometime, eventually).
And now, off I go on a walk that should help me solidify what's going to happen that ties up some (but not all) of the threads running in those novel, so I can come home and finish the first draft. I'm almost almost done—thank goodness, as my current draft is now at 250-some pages!
Korean War Quicktime Map · (Korea department)
I'm doing a little more research for my ghost story, and quickly coming to the conclusion there's almost no good place to set the story... I can't seem to find information on any particular locale where UN Troops wouldn't have been stationed or died. I think I'll just have to go with some kind of explanation that, "There were some who died here, they just didn't survive as ghosts in this particular town."
Anyway, during my researches I came across this animated Quicktime map that shows different front lines and areas of occupation during 27 different stages of the Korean war. It's pretty helpful and vivid... I knew the lines had been very volatile and fluid, but seeing it visually just made me a little more able to imagine the direness of the situation in the minds of the UN/Southern commanders.
I now have a couple of more ideas about what I need to stick in my ghost's hometown, and where it needs to be.
