Emptybottle.org: March 2002

Everything is bleak.
It’s the middle of the night.
You’re all alone and
the dummies might be right.
You feel like a jerk.
My music at work.
My music at work.

- My Music At Work - The Tragically Hip

6:53 AM

Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages. Hours of Fun For The Whole Family!

6:09 AM

New tagline candidate #1 : Abandon Hope All Ye Who CTRL-ENTER Here.

New tagline candidate #2 : Lift and separate.

OK, those are just dumb.

4:04 AM

Here Be Dragons Metablogging

Sky of blue and sea of green? comments.

3:38 AM | 1 Comment

The world and the people in it never cease to amaze me. This sense of amazement should not be in any way confused with any feelings of delight or pleasure, however.

11:20 PM

Comments? comments.

9:10 PM

Well, I talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about, talk about,
Talk about movin,

Gotta move on.
Gotta move on.
Gotta move on.

Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.

(Repeat)

7:33 AM

Captions from a slideshow of drawings made by a young North Korean refugee, whose family was given safe haven in South Korea last summer after escaping from the north and taking refuge in U.N. offices in Beijing. Here. [Thanks again, Lia!]

11:56 PM | 1 Comment

This, via this worthwhile Metafilter thread. Funny old world.

And while I'm at it, via American Samizdat : the Hall of Shame. Not really surprising, is it, how those who raise their fists and call for war so often seem to be those who've never actually seen it?

And for good measure, how about this?

10:34 PM

*Life is good. Rich, poor, together, alone, happy, sad, drunk or f--king sober, life is sweet.

7:19 AM

It's just not possible to trace the fractal-chain of cause-and-effect back to a single Prime Mover moment in your life, usually. Trace the branches back, navigate around the random events, the decisions made or just taken, and hope to find any kind of actual reason for the way you are today, the way you think, and you'll drive yourself f--king mad with might-have-beens.

Decades ago, Rob Beitel introduced me to a few of the chemicals I've enjoyed in my long and bumpy history of self-medication, ones of which, along with all the rest, I no longer partake. I haven't seen him in nearly two decades. He was found dead recently, in the snow, within sight of his home in Northern BC, half a world away from here, a couple hours away from the town we grew up in. I talked about it a bit on my buddyblog with the Bearman, who knew Rob as well, way back when. Mirrored here because I'm drunker than hell, and sentimental, and having a little one-man wake for Rob tonight.

Comments? comments.

4:45 AM

"Where else could a global reach consulting team, with offices in more than 10 countries, staffed by 20+ experts in a variety of fields and professions, with round the clock continuous operation come into being in under a day with next to zero infrastructure costs?" : I am proud in a preliminary sort of way to be a part of the soon-to-be-more-famous-than-Jesus

Blogtank Global Consulting Group

Something Meta This Way Comes ‡

‡not an officially sanctioned tagline. Void where prohibited. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Some settling may occur during shipment. Seek medical assistance if condition persists. Lather, rinse, repeat.

5:22 AM

Seoul is enshrouded, enfolded, entombed, in a choking cloud of dust from the growing deserts of Northern China, the Hoang-sa, the Yellow Sand. This, to put it bluntly, sucks major ass. As if the clouds of reeking industrial effluent weren't enough, now we're left squinting through veils of yellowish dust to boot. Elementary and middle schools are closed, parents are being warned to keep their children in the house, old people are being advised not to breathe for a few days. My nose, as I sit here, is streaming, as it has been all day, my eyes red, throat afire. If the swirling clouds weren't so irritating to my mucous membranes, I might enjoy them, in the same shivery, mock-fearful way that I enjoyed fog banks as a child, staring into them, alive to the potential mystery and the sheer strange wonder of it all.

But I'm old, and cranky, and I just want it to go away. Now. But at least my students were amused when I stopped at 15 minute intervals in most of my classes today, shook a mock-tragic, operatic Shatnerian fist at the sky, and roundly cursed China for even existing.

They just said on MBC news that's it's going to be worse tomorrow. Thrillsville, daddy-o.

THIS IS THE FUTURE

5:11 AM

5:29 AM

Via Jonathon and Steve, this. And via Rageboy, something completely different.

8:30 PM

Jesus Saves! comments.

8:13 PM

Famous last words : In the spirit of refusing to get involved (as I have nothing to add) in all the gonads and strife floating around lately (eek! floating gonads!), and striving for a laugh or two, I present to you the dying words of two great poets :

I can but hope, in my terminal moments, as I lie (-in a feather bed, on pure white linen, surrounded by my loved ones / drunk and drooling, unnoticed on a barroom floor, in a puddle of my own urine-) that I can come up with a legacy for the world as touching, as illuminating, as perfectly revealing of the deeper nature of our existence on this planet.

[via this amusing Metafilter thread]

Your famous last words? comments.

6:18 PM

That is all.

4:48 AM

Guess that would explain the whole one-mouse-button thing, eh?

10:36 PM

Jeff at Visible Darkness led me through to this piece about the Dark Side of Blogging. (Insert "Use the blog, Luke!" and related unfunniness here) Questions about how marvellous and whiz-bang this new medium really is, and indeed how "stupid and repellent, sometimes crypto-genocidal" some warblogs can be, for example. Pushing back against utopian paeans to the organic growth of communities that even I, surly wonderchicken, have been guilty of propagating :

My only addition at this point is to tangentially woolgather : is it only a matter of time until Hollywood starts regularly hiring hundreds of blogtemps to fire up new weblogs, post furiously and praise to the skies the latest piece of crap opus by Jerry Bruckheimer or some other purveyor of soul-destroying cinematic garbage, interlink to themselves and a few 'a-listers', start offering large cash incentives to Kottke and Rageboy and other high-traffic blognodes to link back to the rent-a-bloggers, and watch the Google rank for their new Product soar? Or record companies to promote their wares? Or governments? Are recent, highly-successful experiments in spiking the GooglePunch like the recent one by Matt Haughey the tip of the iceberg? How soon before big business catches on, before the Office of Strategic Mind Control realizes the subtle power (if they haven't already) of the interconnectedness of blogs and begins working blogspace like the infopimps they strive to be? Before this 'place', too, becomes branded and corporatized? (Forget the stone-knives-and-bearskins, bandwidth-wasting crudity of banner ads - savvy marketers will work the medium, pimp the actual hyperlinks, and tickle Google till it quivers, moans, and page-ranks, gratefully. Linkwhoring could become a serious business. Perhaps we could form a mafia, a Blogga Nostra, and skim a little of that corporate cream off the top, broker linkage deals, extort flame-protection money.)

Of course it may become moot, if Google fine-tunes their page ranking system for blogs. For now, though, please hold my hand. I'm a little scared.

(Edit : I see that Doc talked about this, recently, grumpily, kinda. Whoops.)

This blog entry has been brought to you by the new film from Tom Green : "Somebody Kill Me Now". In theatres next week! comments.

7:57 PM

Thanks to Mike for pointing to Douglas Ord's work. Light shattering as it shines through a window, but somehow undamaged by the passage. The Korea Postscript (far down the index page) in particular says Important Things, I think, in a way that opens a door for me. Highly recommended, but you may need some patience if you are not sucking down the bits with a wide pipe.

7:39 PM

I didn't take this picture. I don't know who did.

6:28 AM | 1 Comment

There was a point, not long after I finished university, and spent 10 months or so holding forth nightly, Ouzo-and-water in hand, for the entertainment of the patrons on the porch of Stavros' Irish Bar in Mykonos, Greece (where I spent some time writing software for a small hotel and making sure that the owner's VIP gun-running buddies and their mistresses had clean sheets and plentiful champagne) that I stopped thinking that I actually had anything to say. Or that there was any point actually saying it to anyone. Well, not exactly that, perhaps - I made a deliberate decision to Stop Thinking So Goddamn Much. I think it had something to do with the fact that the other straight guys (of whom there weren't really that many on Mykonos during the Season) were by and large not the Thinking Type, and it seemed to me that they were perenially achieving much more demonstrably significant levels of romantic success with the Swedish stewardesses, French public servants, and other maddeningly delightful examples of European femininity that constantly littered the beaches and bars, confident of their hetero groovethings amidst the heaving seas of Mykonian man-on-man action.

Ka-chunk - spurious causal connection made : reduce cerebration, increase fornication. But with my regularly scheduled rocket-fuel rants on the porch of Stavros' place on the nature of life, the universe, or why the hell the Man in The Moon scared the sh-t out of me so badly, and my almost complete lack of wonderchicken-booty shaking disco action, the young ladies I tended to attract, if any, were more of the cerebral variety, who, without putting too fine a point on it, tended to be less carnally-inclined. Or English, which was worse. At least that's how it seemed to me, sad, mad, alcohol-soaked bastard that I was. My tendency after a certain point in the evening to stagger over to the bar and do stately (if somewhat legless) sirtaki dances with portly, 50 year old Stavros put even them off. Stavros always had one or two young women under his arm, a fact looked upon with an amazing lack of remonstration by Effi, his long-suffering wife. Didn't do me any damn good, regardless.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah : there was a whole nexus of things that made me turn from the life of the mind ("I will show you the Life of The Mind!") to a life lived in the moment. Not that I stopped reading, or thinking, or even talking massive quantities of sh-t to my friends while drinking beside bodies of water and trying to figure it all out, during my twenties and early thirties. But I did consciously do a trade-in of introspection, bookishness, and analysis for random danger, booze and swashbuckling, and spent the balance received on plane tickets to wherever it might be, eyes closed, that my index finger landed on a world map. And I'll tell you, my friends, I had one hell of a ride.

All of this, in sub-Mike Golby-long-story-long fashion, is meant to leave a minotaur-fearing trail of crumbs to the point of this post : I don't feel as if I have much to say today. Or for the last week, really.

'Cause sometimes the habits of a decade and more well up, lapping gently around my brainpan, and I find myself saying to myself, as of old, "f--k it. Crack a beer, sing a song. Let the accountants fritter away their lives on the details."

But blogging has been good for me, I suppose, and though I find myself logging into Blogger, ready to say : "Well, I'm tapped out. Go read Jonathon or Mike or Tom or Shelley (except she's also tapped out at the moment) or any of the other fine and fascinating folks in the neighbourhood," well, here I am, a long-ass post later, and I've ended end up talking about Swedish Stewardesses (oh dear lord, the Swedish stewardesses), and had an enjoyable time doing so.

That, from where I'm sitting, is a Good Thing. I hope you agree, gentle reader, but if not, well, the hell with ya.

(Oh, and the 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' stuff? Didn't work worth a damn. You just can't fake being good-lookin' and dumb as a post. Live and learn.)

Well, I was young, OK? comments.

4:24 AM

The Guardian : The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources.

"After September 11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the time," a US diplomat told the Washington Post. "It allows us to get information from terrorists in a way we can't do on US soil."

By torturing them.

1:49 AM

"Everybody's waiting for something, or somebody, 's not ever comin' back."

8:22 AM

Because there may be (one or two) People Still Living who still haven't seen this, and because I've emptied a few bottles this evening (spot the telegraphing of the thematic whatchamacallit! Yes! I am win!), and because every time I see it, it makes me giggle like a Robotic Giggling Machine from the Future, I give you Gonads and Strife. Enjoy. Again.

(And if ya liked them apples, be sure not to miss the epic Schoolbus!)

Edit : Unrelated flash oddness - Why is the dog being pooped on, and why does Panasonic™ think that's a good thing? Only the Japanese public knows.

4:35 AM

A conversation over dinner with a few of my Korean colleagues a couple of nights ago. In and of itself a little odd, that, conversing over dinner. Koreans tend to get the business of nourishment fully completed before chewing the fat, but a couple of these folks were Korean-Americans, and a couple others well-versed in the oddball ways of us hairy barbarians, and cut the requisite slack, as it was a 'western' meal : massive slabs of pizza and long styrofoam trays of gleaming, oily chicken thighs.

Predictably, it was about America, and the outrage upon outrage that the American government is perceived to be heaping on Korea and the rest of the world. The talk turned to the latest : North Korea as one of countries on the List, one of the countries where contingency plans to use nuclear weapons - in case of 'surprising military developments' - were being discussed.

A sense of outrage is building in this country. One of my colleagues said "They are talking about using nukes against North Korea, if necessary. I have family there. My father came from Pyongyang during the war." Another nodded and said "Mine too. I have family in North Korea, a lot of family." Heads nodded around the table. Almost everyone at the table, it seemed, had some relatives north of the border, close or distant, most of whom they'd never met. "We're an occupied country," said one of the men at the table, a Korean-American in his forties, "we have been for 50 years!"

I had to agree with him. It's quite clear that the presence of US Forces may have staved off another invasion by the North, but the fact remains that South Korea has been a puppet for all these years, willing or otherwise, and the pumped-up, football field cheerleading that Pretzelboy and his cronies are spewing is doing nothing to ease the anger, the fear, and the rage that is bubbling to the surface. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anti-US sentiment is crystallizing everywhere - and this in a country that is ostensibly a 'staunch ally' of America. Set aside f--king Olympic medals, we have 'axis of evil' rhetoric, threats of nuclear strikes on family members, unilateral, illegal steel tariffs, Jay Leno making lame jokes about dog-eating, and Nogun-f--king-Ri, to name a few things that have pissed people off in the last month alone. Even my new freshman students, uncomfortable and standoffish in the early days of this semester, have warmed to me visibly when they found out that I'm not American.

America is making itself many, many enemies around the world recently. Far more, far more widespread, and far angrier, perhaps, than the scattered few that took down the Twin Towers in New York. Shrub and his cohort are stoking the fires of resentment and hatred all around the planet, and it's the ordinary goddamn American on the street, in New York or in Paris, in Washington or Manila, that will lose their lives as a result, when next the next bomb goes off, the next airplane crashes into a building.

It astonishes and saddens me daily, with each new outrage delivered deadpan by the Resident and his handlers, that the American people are allowing their government - a leadership not even clearly mandated by an election - destroy what good is left there, and throttle what goodwill still remains in pockets amongst the peoples of the nations of the world. Dark days, my friends. Dark days.

Comments? comments.

3:31 AM

tag : Prionix

2:50 AM

For BurningBird, in case she (or anyone else for that matter) decides to tour the Great White North this summer : some pictures from my folks' fishing lodge at Tchentlo Lake - a fine place to enjoy a few delicious beverages.

Uh, and some fishing, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing.

2:12 AM

"Worldwide interstimulating inscription" : Who will be the executor of your e-state, the beneficiaries of your last blog and testament? If I kark it tomorrow (which is never outside the realm of possibility), of my few and meagre works in this life, these bits and bytes right here might well remain the longest. Maybe I should install that Dead Man's Switch after all, and rig up a script to make the bastard launch a Terminal Comments Thread, where my dearly beloved could hold a virtual wake, trash the place and pelt me with rocks and garbage one last time.

That's a little morbid, perhaps, but it is interesting to think that thanks to things like archive.org and the mighty GoogleBeast, our children and theirs and so on in serried ranks into the future will be able to experience the textual voices of their long-dead ancestors, us, and read about the minutiae of their lives, their thoughts, and the truth about which f--king member of Radiohead they apparently resembled thanks to yet another online quiz. I wish I were able to read the journals kept by my grandparents, or my father, when they were young (and alive), and learn what made them tick. They might be disappointingly puerile, but on the other hand, they might not.

It's a mind-buggering world we're building. There are big bobbing icebergs of implication to all this technology floating around out here, and I for one am still bashing my head against them on a regular basis.

Ouch! f--ktacular. Just did it again.

Eulogize! comments.

1:26 AM

Mike Golby shares his innermost. Harrowing to read, and hopefully cathartic for him to write. I am constantly amazed and humbled by pellucid writing like this all around me, by these sudden radiant windows into the lives and minds of other people, multitudes of them...we are truly blessed to have these voices helping us stay the course in our own lives.

I hope you'll join me in wishing Mike and his family well, and I hope Mike will understand if I continue to celebrate the bottle in my own life, while he continues his struggles against the evils it can bring, and has brought to his family.

Comments? comments.

8:56 PM

Not funny. Not even remotely amusing.

I must note in passing, though, that I like this guy's attitude.

6:28 PM

Funny.

9:17 PM

Having a look at the referrers log, I found that someone had Googled here scant minutes earlier on the faery wings of the search string 'where+are+the+brothels+in+pusan'. I find this amusing as hell. The answer, my horny, pathetic friend, is

a) near Camp Hialeah (the US Army loves its hookers and drugs),
b) 'Texas Street', a nasty little area with equally nasty Russian ladies catering to the appetites of the Russian sailors, and
c) a place called 'Green Street',

the latter two of which are odd in a city without street names, but any taxi driver will know that of which you speak.

I've never been, myself, but I make it a point to know these kinds of things.

You're welcome.

It's all part of the service here at the Empty Bottle... comments.

6:41 AM | 1 Comment

There is no way I could say it better. Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That : Transforming Religious Metaphor :

Comments? comments.

5:18 AM

Buddhist tradition calls this samvega :

[via a rather disappointing thread at Metafilter]

4:58 AM

BurningBird, Mike Sanders, Steve Himmer, Elaine, AKMA, Mike Golby and others have been spinning up a conversation about belief, something about which I've spent a lot of time thinking over the years. It's a fascinating, enlightening rolling colloquy that continues to renew my enthusiasm for this blogspace we're exploring (to explore strange new blogs, to seek out new ideas and new css designs, to boldly go...well, you get it). That said, I'm not sure if I'm going to take part in the conversation this time. I will, however, point you to my favourite contribution so far (which perhaps in part explains why I don't care to participate at the moment) this play from the Accordion Guy :

7:16 PM

5:25 AM | 1 Comment

"Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's
Mr Wonderchicken's gone wrestlin'...."

5:01 AM

Twenty years today since John Belushi died, aged 33. Couldn't handle his drugs. Lame bastard. But I loved him anyway.

3:54 AM

2:41 AM

This is perfect. According to the BBC News, South Korea wasted more food last year than the total amount of food available in North Korea. And it's not by any means a surprise, to me at least. I've noted a few times to my waeguk-in coworkers at my university in the faculty cafeteria that the sheer quantity of uneaten food scraped off the socketed plastic buffet-trays is staggering. I've thought it was odd that we three Canadians tend to scrupulously clean our plates, despite the fact that we all grew up in more-or-less affluent, middle-class backgrounds.

Post-modern Ironic Self-Referential Rockin' Musical Interlude (courtesy of Ben Folds)

Y'all don't know what it's like
Being male, middle-class and white
Repeat X 4

It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say
Repeat X 3
f--k!

Conclusion of Musical Interlude.

Meanwhile, it seems as if most of the Korean teachers and staff habitually take much more than they can eat, and blithely scrape the uneaten excess into the hole in the dish-table. Elbow elbow, wrist wrist. With the famine in the North, and poverty only a generation or two in the past for many people, I thought it odd. Perhaps it can be explained by conspicuous-consumption boasting : "I'm rich enough to waste food - look!". I don't know.

(I've always wondered with a shudder if Korean restaurants recycle the leftovers from those dozen half-eaten side-dishes of which they are so proud, knowing deep in my heart that the answer is probably 'yes', once they've fished out the cigarette butts.)

What I do know is that Korea is nuts-deep deep into the terminal nightmare of consumer society - disposable, convenient, one-use-only, individually-wrapped, chrome-plated and dying of cancer choking on the factory smoke, lost in the middle of vast grey concrete plains littered with trash. Not enough room, too many people, too many cars, too much of everything except tranquillity and quiet contemplation, and the Faustian trade-offs that were made in the past few decades are coming back to bite them in the ass. Screaming for a bigger piece of the pie, possessed by a crippling obsession with the appearance of affluence, with appearance over substance in general. The sentimental tears shed over the televised temporary reunions of families separated by war for half a century dry up pretty goddamned fast when it comes to giving up your own hard-won wealth and comforts.

And this, at root, is why most Koreans dream of reunification deep in their hearts, but do not for a second want it to happen up in their minds, at least not anytime soon. The lessons of German reunification are not lost on people, and if there were a chance that the slowly recovering economy were to be derailed again, if there were the remotest possibility that I might suffer in the short term, says Mr Kim, well, no thanks. If it's not said in so many words, not something that is even consciously thought, what it still amounts to is : Let 'em starve. [thanks Lia!]

Cake? What the hell's that? comments.

2:21 AM

What I Have Gleaned From My First Two Days Back In Front of A Class

'Cognitive dissonance' presumes the existence of cognition.

1:41 AM

4:24 AM

Spring semester starts this morning, so it's back into TeachMode™.

We apologize for the last couple of days of sophomoric humour. Those responsible have been sacked.

-The Management.

3:16 PM

Google Imagewhack : intoxicating flatulence

I'd love to know how the hell this happened. I used to go to that theatre all the damn time, and it's a Google Imagewhack for intoxicating+flatulence. Perhaps I left my mark there in ways I hadn't previously realized...

Edit : I find this one more than a little amusing, too.

Comments? comments.

6:27 AM

Jonathon and Burningbird and the usual suspects are talking about something that has been heavy on my mind in recent times, but I'm feeling too whimsical today to do more than note the conversation, and point you their way. Me, I have to think about it some more. Later.

*dances off into the middle distance, scattering flower petals, whimsically.*

9:36 PM

I'd just like to say that even though I try to avoid being a 'joiner' and the whole deliberate-meme-propagation exercise tires me and (as those wacky kids are saying these days) chafes my scrote, I am entirely behind Rageboy's 'f--knozzle' mission. The Register would rightly claim that RB is just doing some more self-promotion here, but even his blatant, throwaway self-promotion tends to be a hell of a lot of fun, so why not? At least he's back in fine form.

I am all for crude and offensive neologisms. I myself have often blurted such double-take-inducing gems of negativity as 'f--ktacular', 'f--knuckle', 'f--keriffic' and 'f--ksicle' in my always-erudite spoken discourse (to which my erstwhile workmates at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com will gladly attest), and I warmly encourage creative obscenity. If you lean towards the profane anyway, why not have some fun with it, huh?

Edit : Waaahahahahaha hee hoooooooooo *hic* heheh. It may be an old Regular Expression Cowboy geekjoke, but it's a funny one, dammit.

Cry havoc and let slip the f--knozzles of war! comments.

9:17 PM

Quick note : Frykitty is spreading the inline tag concept from it's mysterious beginnings ~deep in the Alabama woods, where a group of secretive hill people, long isolated from society, have been developing strange and otherworldly shortcuts in their communication.~ The efficiency of their verbal and written interactions render their speech almost incomprehensible to us outsiders, but perhaps, adopting some of their more clever innovations, we can help the textual world become a more intelligible place.

This, I pray. Or I would, %if I were the prayin' type%.

Seriously, I'd love to see these reach critical mass. Very useful, and a hell of a lot more nuanced than emoticons.

Comments? comments.

11:14 PM

At the local grocery store today :