Emptybottle.org: May 2002

I'm not terribly interested in soccer, but I might just mention some of the other stuff around the edges that you might find amusing (thanks fishrush!) and that you might not otherwise see. This does not make me a journalist. Heh.

[found at the 'pile]

5:17 PM | 6 comments

I'd like to lay something like this on top of blogspace, using posts and comments as data. Just because. Unfortunately, I can't seem to actually see any of the demos, probably because it uses DejaNews as a datasource, and of course DN is no more, having been eaten by Google. Still.

5:04 PM | 2 comments

A Spanish TV reporter, in a burst of inspiration apparently untempered by any inconvenient pretense of journalistic detachment, has purchased one of the meat-puppies on sale at a market in Ulsan and given him to the Spanish World Cup Team, who have made the pooch team mascot. This would seem to indicate that he will not end up on the dinner table. I will be surprised if the dog is actually taken with the team when they leave Korea.

Nonetheless, cleverly done.

5:06 AM | 6 comments

Bum firmly socketed into sofa cushion, I was having one of my occasional 'flip around the multitude of Korean-language TV channels none of which I can understand to any degree' sessions when I stopped on one of the 3 or 4 Home Shopping Network-type stations.

These, I find, are often good for some shadenfreude-laden amusement. It is one of my guilty pleasures, watching the human mannequins go through the self-conscious motions of simulating a life that is almost unbearably joyful, enhanced as it is almost to the point of bursting by whatever product is currently being hawked. You can almost hear, watching their avidly gleeful faces, the exhortations of the stage manager to look more joyful. Watching for a while allows me to feel superior and self-righteous in my chosen role as a singularly poor consumer.

The food porn, which is so obscenely fixated on wetness and bubbling, on glistening surfaces and suddenly-exposed textures, can be depended upon to make me a little nauseous, and since I can afford to lose a couple of pounds, losing my appetite for a while isn't such a bad thing. It must be said that these food porn producers have their job down to a fine art. They are incredibly skilled at eroticizing foodstuffs : so much so that I sometimes worry that I'll wake up mid-sleepwalk one night in flagrante delicto with our store of kimchi.

The models tend to be on the sexy side of the street, too, which is certainly not a bad thing.

As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself : the screen at this particular moment was occupied by a pair of hands, turning and displaying a live crab, which was waving its legs about in dismay. Understandably. You'd be distressed too. With no warning, to the jaunty retro-pop harmonies of the title song from the mostly harmless Tom Hanks vehicle, 'That Thing You Do', the hands proceeded to rip open the shell of the soon-to-be-not-so-live crab, as its little legs went into spastic 'oh-my-god-I'm-being-dismembered' gyrations, and expose its glistening, wet guts to the camera, which dutifully zoomed in. It was a weird combination of the usual food-porn with sudden, unexpected violent death, and it left me a little... discombobulated.

It's been a fair while since I lived in the west (if less than a year since I lived in Oz), and so I might well be wrong, but I'm pretty damn sure this sort of thing would not go over well outside Asia. It was yet another of the hundred daily reminders I get of difference, and I thought I'd share.

1:30 AM | 3 comments

or

Great minds think alike.

I had this idea recently about using Daypop or Blogdex to track ideas and conversations, and lo and behold, someone's written something that is a first step in that direction. I have implemented it here, to give it a whirl. The magic may take a while to appear, as the script runs after the page is fully loaded, and my instant referrer doodad is acting up a bit. When it does load, click on the little [b]'s beside any link to see who else is talking about that link...

The toy erroneously puts a Blogdex [b] beside my category links, too, which I'll try to fix tomorrow, but otherwise it seems pretty cool. Let me know if it floats your boat or chafes your scrote (or appropriate other body part, as required).

Bow to the riff lord.

Edit : I've disabled it. Too obtrusive.

10:23 PM | 2 comments

..although there are possibly many like it that I've not seen. This answers, perhaps, some of the questions about syndication that Eeksy-Peeksy was asking here last week, which Shelley attempted to answer.

Confused? Don't be. Just have a look. Kinda neato.

7:40 PM | 1 Comment

I swear by all that's holy, by the sweet unsucked nipples of the mother of jesus, by the small but nonetheless annoyingly itchy watery little bumpy things on the sides of my fingers, by the lords of the underworld and Timmy too, by gum, by gemorrah, by sodom and moloch, by the dirty diapers of the baby jesus, by Aunt Jemima and her god-blessed pancakes, by all the prime numbers up to and including 29, by land (one) by sea (two), by the funniest number that exists (fourteen), in the name of the whiskey and the beers and the holy smokes, by the SUVs and the Naderites, by chimptacular presidents and semi-masticated pretzels, by the barney and the rubble and the smoking crater, by the inescapable haiku and the inevitable goatsex, by the fat guy and the troll, by the pedant and the pederast, by the vegetarians, the vegans the omnicores the omnivores the omniwhores the carnivores and the single cry in the dark of a lone drunken chicken begging to be eaten, just a f--king nibble you bastards, by the Portuguese scribblers, the Australian nutjobs, the Yankee heroes and the dismemberment of thousand-headed Purusha, by the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space, by the mythical tortoise which upholds the earth, by the shrimplike scent of my swinging dad-balls, by the sacred and inextinguishable fires of the Magi which alone remain to illumine the horizon, by the dirty little chuckle, the self-referential injoke, by the ineluctable modality of the f--king boneheaded, by the end of this post it'll be time for another beer, by the oft-licked nuts of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hell, by good intentions, bad intentions, simple misdirection, sleight-of-hand and honest-to-goodness magic, by the great big ball of thread beside the chest of drawers, by the time I figure it out I'll be dead, by the sweet sweet liquor, by the weed and the hash, by the speed and the coke, by the dimethyl goddamn tryptamine, by the wind and the waves, by the quiet talks on the beach and the naked dancing on the rooftop, by the unreachable goal and the short-term workaround, by the self-obsession and the reaching out to a friend, by the pastoral idyll and the urban hubbub, by the purple steaming mess that spills out onto the pavement as I die, by the husker and the du, by the #006699 and the #CCCC00, by the Math and the Owie, by the wife, the horse and the moustache, by all that's holy :

I've been here before. Archiving. Yeah. That's it.

5:38 AM | 6 comments

They lied about one vital thing : replace the word 'pigeon' with 'wonderchicken' and all will become clear...

(I guess I missed this the first time 'round.)

3:01 AM

Someone stick a fork in my ass and turn me over, I'm done.

12:53 AM | 5 comments

Whenever I want you, all I have to do is rea-ea-ea-ea-eam (also know as the 'ream sequence').

As a certain friend and coworker would say : thas innerestin'.

2:35 AM | 2 comments

Some of the funniest things you will never hear in Korea (latest in a long series) :

I'm struck once again at how even the most literate, erudite and presumably intelligent of thinkers, no matter where they lie on the political map, can be depended upon, when cornered, to bare their yellowed tusks and, with frenzied screeching and flinging of their own excrement, reveal their true simian nature.

This little internecine sh-tfight is instructive to read, while also being sad, pathetic and so completely unnecessary as to bring tears of somedamnthing to my eye. It's no wonder that America (and it can be said of other nations, a multitude of them, I know) has been ruled by this endless procession of greedy, evil bastards for so long. How sad and ineffectual are those who agree on a common enemy, and then proceed to destroy one another in an argument about how to defend themselves against that enemy.

And this fandangled new personal publishing revolution (read that in a 1950's TV-huckster, over-amped voice) in which we're all so proud of participating has at times given me some hope that this time 'it might be different, really it might,' but the recent pointed and pointless screeching and feces-hurling in blogland, sparked by differences of opinion about the bloodthirsty tribal warfare of yet another gang of naked apes busily shedding one another's blood over in the eastern mediterranean... this has left me less optimistic than I once was. How sad and pathetic it is to agree that killing is wrong, then become so involved in arguing about who deserves to die less that we do nothing to stop that killing.

Do I feel smug and superior in pointing this out? No, I do not. Mostly, I feel tired.

The revolution will not be blogged.

5:14 AM | 3 comments

[A Lucid Dreaming FAQ] [Another][Dreaming and Reality][kuro5hin - Hacking Your Wetware][Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep][Dream Yoga][A Buddhist Perspective on Lucid Dreaming][More]

4:17 AM | 1 Comment

[Audio]

4:32 AM | 1 Comment

Now, before I even begin, I must preface this little mousy-squeaky post, this whisper of uncertainty and doubt and anti-communitarianism that will hopefully go unnoticed and unremarked, this little strung-together line of characters drunkenly hunt-and-pecked out late in the evening on a day in which I found that for some reason my IQ unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped about 40 points or so, I must introduce this with the admission that I've had a drink or two. This should not be a surprise to you, dear reader.

But : lately, repeatedly, and consistently, I've found my InTarWeb HerOes, the men (and yes, most, well, OK, pretty much all of my real leftover-from-Spiderman-pajamas heroes, at least on this IntArWeB thing, are men) for whom in the last while, since I've become interested in what's happening out amongst the Magesticallanic Clouds Of Bits, I have come to have respect and to like and perhaps wish to emulate, imitate, celebrate or alternately crush like bugs (being as it is the eternal and everlasting man-desire, no sh-t Dick Tracy, to destroy and supplant the alpha-male bing bang boom) -

...take a breath, wonderchicken...

those fine gentlemen have disappointed me, badly. You slack bastards. Icons, idols, they're leaving me colder than an arctic char's ass (and I don't even know if fish have asses, but carry on my wayward son carry on) of late. Need I explain why? No! f--k that. I'm just venting here, and the fridge is calling.

I'm going to drink a few more beers, and watch Waking Life again. This post may well disappear when I wake up tomorrow.

Well, whatever. Nevermind.

6:09 AM | 3 comments

The question on the table is : 'who do you believe'?

My answer is : not even my own mother.

Edit : Stuff like this - "As U.S. officials continued to issue warnings yesterday about the possibility of attacks by suicide bombers and terrorists, the White House quietly acknowledged that the threats are not urgent and that they are partly motivated by political objectives" - makes me considerably less inclined to believe The Little President That Could and his pack of weasels, though. How about you? Is it excessively hyperbolic to call them worthless scum?

No, no, I didn't think so.

[via the usual suspects]

4:30 AM | 1 Comment

When the movie Wayne's World was released in Latin America, a lot of the film's American idiom and idiosyncratic language didn't translate well, if at all. As a result, many of the phrases and expressions were translated into something very different in the subtitles or dubbing.

For example, when Wayne exclaimed (much to my amusement, which is a shame with which I must forever deal) "Shyaaa! And monkeys might fly out of my butt!" it got changed to, "Yes, when Judgment Day comes," or "Si, cuándo llegue el día del juicio."

What I don't get is why it was felt that Spanish speakers would find the image of monkeys flying from someone's butt any less comprehensible or immediately interpretable as indicating a highly unlikely event than Anglophones would. I'm enormously curious now about how that phrase got translated in other languages when the movie was released elsewhere.

Most amusing, as really dumb things frequently are.

10:00 PM | 10 comments

People love to hate cranky old uncle Chomsky, and it's no surprise really, with the stuff he goes around saying in these dissent-discouraging times. This recent CBC interview with him shows him in fine form, talking about the same things he usually does, jumping up and down on the head of the interviewer, uttering the word 'No' more times that I've ever seen anyone say it before in a single conversation. For what it's worth, though, I agree with many of the things he has to say about governments, and about the press. I'm aware that's an unpopular thing to say, and that many consider him a loon.

Something like this, though, doesn't seem to me to be the words of a lunatic. On the contrary, it seems quite lucid indeed :

[more]

Speaking of hypocrisy, and the Chomster does, this piece covers well-trodden ground, but worth a read nonetheless, perhaps :

[more]

Are we in the weblogging community shouldering the burden of that responsibility to preserve the right of people to know the facts, as traditional media increasing fails in its role as watchdog?

I cetainly don't know. But that should be clear, sporting as I do a tagline like the truth can blow me.

Edit : An interesting exchange between the Chomster and Christopher Hitchens.

9:31 PM | 2 comments

Cheesily riffing on the erudititudinosity and linkeriffomafication of Tom's recent post, I give you this darn-near equally-recent popular image (which I did not make) found at the Site Which Must Not Be Named.

Heh.

Edit : I have discovered that this image originally came from the SomethingAwful forums. SA rocks. Or is that San Dimas Football? sh-t, I dunno. But the bad, bad man who posted it to Filepile didn't credit it. Apologies.

4:25 AM | 11 comments

Mike has come through the fire mostly intact, it would seem, and singing that song of his that I've so grown to love. You're an inspiration to me, you beautiful, long-winded bastard, you. If I have to hunt you down and kill you, like the buddha, it will be out of pure love. This one's for you. Welcome back, my friend.

3:54 AM | 3 comments

I've got to agree with Jon here : even if I'm not on it, this b(l)ogroll from yet another Metafiltron, malevole, made me smile quietly to myself. Which, considering how grumpy I was earlier today, is the humour equivalent of setting off a neutron bomb in my underpants.

Also, do not miss the homepage, which is a marvel. Super extra double cool, with a light dusting of methamphetamines on top. 'Cause they're crunchy.

2:26 AM | 2 comments

...I'm going to keep hammering on this. The world at large is beginning to notice the blogosphere. The marketing shills smell money in the air. The bright-toothed, fast-talking, lucre-fixated hordes are girding their well-toned loins and casting a hungry eye our way. It's coming damn it : the signs are all around, and you should take opportunity to be very afraid.

Alternately, you could make like me : leer dementedly and cock a snook at the bastards.

5:45 AM | 9 comments

Some lovely writing from a fellow Mefiosi, Evanizer. Via yet another member of this growing Metafilter-centred new kids on the block gang of bloggers, this nascent B-List, this renaissance of sorts, Iconomy.

2:28 AM | 2 comments

Cory uses the phrase 'mind-croggling' to describe Ray Kurzweil's writing. I've used the phrase repeatedly over the years. It appears all over the web. But it's not Real English. Of course, that's never stopped me before.

Will 'mind-croggling' eventually become a part of the language, or can it be argued that it already is?

The first time I recall ever seeing the phrase was in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy books. I suspect he just made it up, on the fly, as a natural descriptor for the next step beyond being boggled.

I remember with great pleasure sitting on the beach beside the cold cold lake one summer, out back of the house, in my hometown, reading and re-reading a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide, laughing out loud. One of the first long pieces of writing I ever did, back in my early teens, was in emulation of the gymnastic language and unbridled silliness of the Guide. I've gone back to those books every couple of years since, and they're still dear to my heart.

I loved that Douglas Adams. He had a huge influence in molding the WonderChickonian sense of humour. I guess that he might have preferred more substantial legacies than these, but maybe they'll do just fine.

1:30 AM | 5 comments

Turns out the TV ads that these twisted, evil, moralistic little icepickers (to lift an epithet from Mojo Nixon) have been coming up with are actually encouraging kids to do drugs. That is sad and beautiful.

Sad only because the One Billion Dollars they spent on f--king advertisements telling people what they should and should not put into their very own personal bodies could actually have gone towards doing some good in the world. How many lives could 18 billion dollars save if it were spent on health care for the 40 million Americans who don't have any, for example?

More Mojo :

5:29 PM | 2 comments

I just made this one for the hell of it. I'm having a few delightful cocktails, Mefi's down, I'm 'pilin, yadda yaddaladdayo... The original's been my desktop for the last week or so, and Old Bull Lee is one of my icons.

Also, I've gotta think it'd be fun having a watergun fight with Old Bill. After he'd been into the dexedrine, he'd kick your ass. [hi-res (popup)]

1:50 AM | 9 comments

Via a conversation at Shelley's, I found the weblog of another waeguk-in here in Seoul. And what's more, he's already written a piece on hangul (the Korean system of writing), like the one I was threatening to write (and predictably have been too lazy to actually do). It is perhaps a little more learned than anything I might have come up with, and more about Chinese characters than Korean ones. Not that that's a bad thing, of course.

He does, however, manage to work in an arrogant crack about english professors :

...but since I've often said the same sorts of things myself, I'll let it slide. (Edit : On second thought, f--k letting it slide : I wonder if he includes in his blanket condemnation english professors, who, like a certain Poulet Magnifique that shall go nameless, were recently extremely well-paid (noted because of what would seem to be evidence of an unhealthy preoccupation with money in his blog posts) technologists, but found the profession so filled with lucre-obsessed soul-destroying clones, that they voluntarily gave it up and came back to teaching because they actually love it, and to Korea, because much as they love to complain, they love the people here? Or that actually do speak some Korean, despite the fact that they "don't need to lift a finger"? And speak Spanish, French and German too? And can tie a cherry stem into a knot with their tongue? Judge all you want, my presumptuous friend, but you may find that not everyone fits into your facile, smug little categories.)

It's another manifestation of the Expat Status Games of which I am so terribly knob-chafingly bored. I am unpleasantly bemused to find it in blogland as well.

12:16 AM | 6 comments

Spare a thought and, if you're the praying kind, a prayer, for Mike and his family.

10:03 PM

Reading Joey's dispatches from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, I had an idea. Now everyone hush a bit, because this is a rare thing, and even the slightest breath of wind could blow the little f--ker away....

I was thinking about the chronological organisation of blogs, and how, flexible as tools like Moveable Type are, allowing me to organise my posts by category, for example, (Old Empties - Categorically on the sidebar) or by how much interest visitors have had in discussing the things I've talked about (Recent Conversations on the sidebar), I hunger for a way to conceptually group things. The use of pre-defined categories still feels too rigid for me.

What would be cool, and what I'd like to put together if I had the 1337 5k1llz, would be a sort of Memepop, a Daypop that tracked the memes (ah crap, I am so sick of that word) ideas enjoying circulation in Blogspace at any given moment.

It would use the Google API perhaps, or perhaps not, but it would allow you to (via a XML-fed plugin to MT or Blogger maybe?) grab a quick list of the top 40 (say) ideas with mindshare amongst bloggers at any given moment (Domain hijacking, googlebombing, semitism and anti-, the 'Creative Commons' are some current examples), and flag your new post, if it were a thought that you wanted to drop into the river, as relating to that topic. This act of flagging then feeds back into the Memepool, and pushes the idea higher up into the consciousness of the Blog Hive Mind. A high level conceptual way to thread your way through Blogspace, to organise conversations from the bottom-up and later revisit them...

One big question would be how to cleverly populate that list in the first place...through human suggestions, or through some clever parsing of the Daypop Top 40 or it's equivalent? I don't know the answer to that. But I can see that once it reached a certain critical mass, it would be very very cool.

It would be mondo-groovy to be able to flag this post, for example, with consensus-created categories (dynamic ones, which might disappear again from the Top 40 in a week or two) "Emerging Tech Conference" and "Threading in Blogspace", knowing that other people out there are flagging posts with the same 'categories', and be able to hit a site and see the threading, woven through blogspace, laid out for me, sorted chronologically or conceptually or otherwise...

Perhaps I'm just talking crap again. It gets hard to tell sometimes.

7:28 PM | 4 comments

Dr W mentions this and asks "Does this mean that malevolent corporations will inevitably poison the well of conversation?"

I feel a little self-congratulatory pointing (I did it a few days ago here, and on Metafilter recently, too) to this wee rant I wrote a couple of months ago, but Rule #23a of Effective Weblogging is Work Those Archives, right?

Anyway, I hope this is germane. I haven't had my first coffee yet, so who knows...

6:09 PM | 1 Comment

In light of what Shelley said today, which may or may not have been in response to any degree to my comments yesterday, I feel I should clarify a bit.

I said

I made a mess of that. Besides getting lost in the syntax and being too cleverclever by half, I managed to obscure my actual point. Tales of the commonplace, stories about the small things that make up our daily existence, can be fascinating. They can be beautiful, or heartbreaking, and they can shine a light on our own lives, and help us to understand that, really, we are all the same, us hairless primates.

It's not that I find tales of ordinary, daily life tedious. Not at all. All the meat and juice comes from it : all the tragedy and comedy of our lives is woven into ordinary, daily life. "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans," goes the cliche.

But I do find a badly-told tale tedious, no matter the subject. If your story of your trials and tribulations at the local Starbucks (to use the same example I used before (and I'm hoping no one who happens by here has actually written one of those recently) has all the music and muscularity of a shopping list, it's unlikely that I'll find it interesting.

I make no claim to being the most pellucid, or entertaining, or skilled writer, or even having any greater skill than being able to string a few words together in an occasionally pleasing fashion. Far from it.

I hope I'm not coming off as elitist. But, speaking for myself, I'm only interested in the minutiae of someone's daily existence if they can relate to me those tales of the commonplace in a way that piques my interest.

(Edit : Uh. I just realized thanks to a BB post that Our Gonzo Standard Bearer and All Around Ranteriffic Guy, a certain Mr. Locke, recently talked about his experiences at a Starbucks, and did so in a most engaging fashion. The example used above was not intended as some sort of bass-ackwards commentary about that. I am nothing like that subtle. My brain simply doesn't work that way. I suppose that's what I get for reading EGR after I've had a few...)

8:54 PM | 5 comments

I woke up several times during the night last night, and each and every time, as I swam up into semi-consciousness, a phrase was running unbidden through my head : "pepperoni zamboni".

In some sort of Field-Of-Dreams-Close-Encounters-esque fit of compulsive behaviour, the first thing I did this morning was whip up this quick and dirty pic, which comes reasonably close to reproducing the mental image that accompanied the phrase.

I couldn't make this stuff up, folks.

7:40 PM | 6 comments

I just had a brainfart, and wondered how many warblogs are actually written by employees of the Office Of Strategic Mind Control as sub rosa propaganda tools.

Has my natural predilection for paranoia gone over the top this time? Are the American propaganda machines really that clever? Are they just the bumbling-halfwits-that-always-seem-to-get-away-with-it, Gilligan-stylee? Or something else entirely, something less reassuring to believe?

You tell me.

5:00 AM | 9 comments

So this evening I took my own advice : I started at a weblog I like, and proceeded to check out the sites in his blogroll that I'd never seen before, looking for groovy new folks who might prod my brain a bit.

Slightly unfair, perhaps, but I tried to limit myself to reading the two most recent entries from each weblog I visited, and if something went *ping* in my wee chicken brain based on that small sample, I decided right then bingbangboom that it was a keeper. (I should mention that I am not much interested in weblogs which are primarily links to other things, unless those links are truly mind-blowingly cool. Nor am I terribly keen on reading about your adventures in buying coffee at the local Starbucks, unless in the telling of said adventures your words are so cunningly crafted as to make me grin like a monkey (and even better, leap up and down and fling my excrement), or otherwise evoke some feeling other than 'well, that's five minutes of my life I'll never get back.' Do as I say, not as I do!)

A fruitful random walk, some results of which I present to you now. If you like the stuff I say here, or the way I say it, or just the way my bum wiggles when I walk, you might just like these folks too :

Apologies for coming off all wide-eyed and Macauley Culkinesque, but there are just so many people out there, aren't there? I think I might have to make my little stroll through the neighbourhoods a weekly ritual...

3:40 AM | 11 comments

Those following the googlebomb discussion over at BB's might find this MeFi discussion interesting.

2:40 PM

Returning to the ovine digestion theme of earlier in the week : "The 45 million sheep and 10 million cattle in New Zealand make for a lot of burped methane—about 90 percent of that country's methane emissions, according to government figures."

3:54 AM

This Metafilter thread is good medicine if you're keen to work up a head of righteous steam and then go smite the hell out of the first person who annoys you. But that's not what I wanted to talk about... one of the many fascinating links out of that thread is to this : The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the '90's. And down near the bottom of that list I found :

It would appear that some of the chaebols (the huge corporations that own this country outright) were attempting to buy themselves a president or two in America back in the last decade. I wonder if it was one of the Shrubs, or Slick Willy who was their rent-boy...

3:41 AM

Good piece on how expats in Japan rank each other in the unspoken pecking orders. The author's observations apply quite well for waeguk-in in Korea, too, except for the fact that there are effectively no jobs at all for a foreigner here who isn't either an english teacher, working in the local branch office of a foreign corporation, or an exploited migrant factory worker.

It's always a quandary - what to do on those rare occasions that you do see a foreign (read 'caucasian') face. Being the big friendly galoot that I am (provided I'm not having a Grumpy Day), I generally nod and smile conspiratorially. Due either to some deficiency in my powers of charm, or the fact that most foreigners here spend a great deal of their time having their very own Grumpy Days, at least 60% of the time my friendly mugging is met with a blank stare. That's OK by me, as it helps me to realize that it's not the majority of Korean people that I dislike, it's the majority of people in general. It's important to keep your misanthropy honed to a keen edge.

'On being a gaijin', from the same writer, hits very close to home as well.

At the moment, all the TV networks are running a pre-World Cup ad campaign whose basic message is : "If you're approached by a foreigner, don't squeal and run away, or shoo them off like a great dairy-product-reeking beast, be nice to them! If they come up to you, babbling incoherently in their long-tongued, incomprehensible gutterspeak, brandishing a map, try to help them! Strange as they look and outlandishly as they may behave, they won't bite, usually."

The fact that the government finds it necessary to run these ads on heavy rotation speaks volumes about this place. Not for nothing was Korea once called the 'Hermit Nation'.

1:12 AM | 6 comments

6:38 AM | 5 comments

[Brought to you by the good folks at EmptyBottle.org - "Give it to Mikey, he'll eat anything!". Absolutely no guarantee of accuracy or completeness is implied or intended. Void where prohibited by law. Settling of contents may occur during shipping. Some assembly required.]

5:24 AM

f--k the 'A-list'. f--k 'em in the eyeball with Adolph Hitler's wasabi-dipped dick.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, and good night.

(Edit : I kid because I love. No, really.)

4:40 AM | 9 comments

One of the few non-tourist-pose pics from our recent trip to Soraksan. That's a big Buddha! The black slates are prayers...for a small fee, you can go to the little booth that sits over on the Buddha's right, and have them write up the prayer of your choice - for health, wealth, for your kids, or whatever - which you can then place on the pile, and make an offering.

I'll make a gallery with some others later today, perhaps...

3:50 PM

There's a strange eerie silence out on the wires tonight. It feels like the hush before Something Big happens - it feels like the brief interregnum of silence between the doctor's slap on the ass and the first juddery indrawn breath and full-throat wail. It feels like the puff of air that precedes the flash flood. It smells like blood, and piss, and it scares the hell out of me.

Then again, it could just be that slightly elderly spaghetti sauce I had at dinner coming back on me.

3:10 AM | 1 Comment

I was going to comment on a recent post from Shelley when I realized that I already had, sorta.

6:59 PM

The above is an amusing spam message I received today, which was send to a shell mail account I used a couple of months ago to leave comments on a Radio-based weblog. A variation on an old theme, of course, but the amusement factor almost makes the annoyance of dealing with crap like this worthwhile.

Anybody know if Radio has fixed its vulnerability to email-harvesters reading comments threads yet?

(The return email address for this piece of crap was isiomaprosper@qrio.com, by the way. Harvest away, spam-robots!)

6:51 PM | 7 comments

Who teaches logical positivism, and is he (or she) also in charge of the sheepdip? If not, I hereby volunteer for 'Professor Emeritus of Being In Charge of The Sheepdip'.

Update : As the Good Reverend has seen fit to put me in charge of Analytic Philosophy and cruelly denied me my request to be in charge of the Ovine Excreta, I figured I'd read up on it. Most interesting.

6:37 PM | 2 comments

It's been a while since I've done a shameless plug, so : if you're fond of 'vintage blues and various cognates, kith and kin thereof - from a capella to zydeco, including but not limited to deep delta blues, jump blues, Hawaiian slack key, hillbilly, Western swing' and so on, I most highly recommend Karl Kotas's (y2karl of Metafilter fame) streaming show here.

6:11 PM

[more...]

I'm not sure I agree with Mr Odlyzko, entirely, but that may only be a matter of semantics. My feverdream defense of 'content' a couple of days ago took as its launchpad an understanding of the word that is broader than the one Mr Odlyzko uses (and in some ways is actually diametrically opposed to it, but that's a side-issue, I think). Blogs as open letters, as content rather than Content....

One of the things Mr Odlyzko is saying is that the internet is not a broadcast medium. As obviously wrong as it seems, thinking it is was one of the core dumbass mistakes that businesses were making before the bubble burst, one of the dumbass mistakes that's still being made. AOLTimeWarner indeed. LOLTimeWarner, maybe. (Ba-dump dump tish! Thank you, you've been a great audience. I'll be here until Thursday!)

One-to-oneness is where value (questions there are aplently about the word 'value', too) lies, more than one-to-manyness (Mr O talks about letters and newspapers, about email and the web). The bridge between the two concepts is (ta-daaa!) the weblog, of course. It's not email, but it shares much of the intensely personal nature nature of correspondence. It's not 'Content', at least not in the way that Big Media regards it, as a 'non-recoverable expense'. But it is true that blogspace contains some of the most compelling writing and imagery and pure fun that's available on the internet or elsewhere, 'content' that's constantly renewed by the passions of thousands of individuals singing their individual songs for the pure joy of the singing, and for the comradeship that comes from finding people who hear similar music in their heads...

This message of Mr O's reminds me very much of the sort of thing that a certain Mr Locke (quoted recently here: "You can broaden the pipe as far as you want, but if everybody can play, it's not broadcast any more. There isn't that control of the passes. The channel is out of control and that makes it a different game...") and his cohort of merry cluesters have been saying for a while, and are still saying.

I like it when things come together like that.

1:26 AM

[more...]

12:55 AM | 3 comments

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but I think I like it.

I always find the visceral hatred some web-purist types seem to harbour for Flash puzzling, particularly when wacky folk can use it to make trippy stuff like Crankbunny. Each thing in its proper place. Kumbaya, my lord. Something like that.

12:44 AM | 3 comments

This Metafilter thread has put me into an old well-worn groove wherein, despite many thoughts ignited and roman-candle launched across the night sky, I keep circling back inexorably to a conviction that people are evil, and that we are all circling the bowl waiting for that terminal clean-up flush, and so, before I get too terribly worked-up about it, I just move on.

Edit : Yes, I know :

"People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

1:18 AM | 6 comments

Exhibit The First
Exhibit The Second

A Rant, in One-Part Harmony.

See me feel me touch me heal me. Wasn't that what the Burning Sun God sang, all falsetto fakery? It's really all in the way the words are said or sung or screamed, rather than the actual words you choose, isn't it? I am content. I am content. See what I'm sayin', there, folks? Not what you deliver, but the delivery itself!

Shuffling, whether off the mortal coil, or into the spotlight, it's the motion, not the meat, mama. The medium ain't worth a rat's posterior. The eye is drawn to motion - 'don't move or he'll see us' is whispered child's-voice breathlessly in a technicolour dream of Monsters Under The Bed.

Shoot the messenger, or wait until the marathon man Phidippides collapses of his own accord, it's all the same to me. Amp up that pure sweet white-noise signal. "These ones go to 11!" Don't talk to me about Signal versus Noise - the noise is the signal. The carrier wave carrying itself. Not amplitude, but frequency modulation.

It's not the Message, by golly, it's the Carrier.

Go go gadget fugue state!

Comedy comma improv. The native indian aboriginal american whatever the hell we're supposed to call those poor bastards these days (racist sacks of redneck dung, amongst drooling cadres of whom I spent my formative years, referred to them as 'chugs'), anywaywhatevernevermind, the tribe that lived for a few thousand years in the area in which I grew up in Northern British Columbia before us white devils arrived, the Nikozliautin the Pintce and the Nakraztli, are collectively referred to as the 'Carrier Tribe'. This name arose from their custom in which a widow was obliged to carry the cremated remains of her husband on her back for three years after his demise.

Just think of that. Three years of carrying that dust and those bones.

Exeunt omnes, with sackcloth and ashes for damn sure.

All that you see, all that you eat, all you excrete (sucker that I am for scatalogical humour, one of my favorite moments of the late lamented Family Guy is when the son, Chris (ain't that a kicker), stares intently at a chocolate bar before gleefully declaiming in his oddly-timbred voice : "I'm going to turn you into poo!" and taking a bite), and so on a la U2 ripping off Pink Floyd : it's content, baby. And we are all just containers : conduits, conductors, conspirators. In this I am content.

Now gimme that money, 'fore I smack you up!

6:11 AM | 5 comments

-Billy Bragg

5:08 AM | 9 comments

I really should be ashamed of myself for linking corporate crapola (bad chicken - *whack* - bad!) and the results might well be ugly, but there are some truly astonishing images here and in the archives.

I want to live forever. I want to see everything. Is that too much to ask?

2:38 AM | 4 comments

[via AccordionGuy]

From 'The Philosopher's Magazine on the Internet', it's Battleground God! Give it a whirl. Just don't do it after a few beers, like your humble host. That was a bad, bad idea.

The instructions - "the aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency" - threw me off a bit, dammit. I think this may be why after a couple of years of university philosophy, I deemed it all a big wank, and henceforth focussed with laser-like intensity on holding forth from barstools. More fun than parsing out logic, 'twas, by golly.

Regardless, an amusing diversion. Enjoy.

1:03 AM | 3 comments

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, one who would condone the spraypainting of graffitti. Even the 'urban art' thing. Give the bastards some brushes and cleaning solution, and make 'em do something useful for a change. Pay 'em to do it, even. If they spray paint even one word, arrest the little bastards, and put 'em to work.

Now, despite this aversion to defacement I feel, this image (popup, 16k) from Page 3 of today's Korea Times annoys the hell out of me, because it speaks so eloquently of Koreans' endless ability to either blame their problems on other people, or shine the light of disapproval on the Outsider, while ignoring their own failings. The mote in your brother's eye, and all that crap. Find this halfwit Cedric and his hydrocephalic girlfriend Andrea and make them scrub the throat-oysters off subway platforms for a while, sure, but don't turn a blind eye to the endless acts of incivility and filthmongering your own people do, every goddamn day, you sanctimonious, self-important bastards!

(Whew. That feels better.)

If you've been following the Korea-related rantings of the wonderchicken for any length of time at all, you know how I feel about the filth and pollution that a city dweller here in Korea must wallow through. I really wish I had that digital camera I want to buy, just so I could show you some of the refuse-handiwork around my neighbourhood, by way of comparison. Later, maybe.

5:31 PM | 3 comments

Happy 70th birthday to Harold Kindall, Jerry Kindall's dad. Just 'cause I'm a sentimental old chook, sometimes.

4:00 AM | 4 comments

Via Lia, these more-than-slightly-surreal photos of the so-called Arirang Festival in North Korea at the moment.

Isn't it just amazing sometimes the stupid stuff people do? I mean, at least once a day I mutter to myself about things South Korean : "What the hell can they be thinking?"

But even the most oddball of behaviours here in the South (today's example was the environmental Green Festival posters plastered pell-mell across every non-moving surface, vertical or horizontal, at the university, literally hundreds of them, printed on paper that will dollars-to-donuts not be recycled...) are peanuts compared to what would to all intents and purposes appear to be some sort of weird consensual hallucination (possibly triggered by the predilection (seemingly limited to Koreans and Ukrainian grandmothers) for mixing swaths of pastel pink and green wherever possible) north of the DMZ.

(My, I'm parenthetical today, aren't I? Must be the vitamin B.)

3:07 AM

I offer these Canadian facts as accompaniment to the post about America earlier :

These shocking facts and more can be found here. Once again, I leave my gentle readers to draw their own conclusions about this hateful, evil nation and its unpleasant denizens, with their incessant foul language and their flip-top heads. [via boingboing]

7:01 PM | 4 comments

4:10 AM | 7 comments

This is a test post using w.bloggar.

Edit : Now, that's cool. The propellor on top of my beanie is spinning like nobody's business.

2:59 AM | 1 Comment

I just love this image (276k), and I'm not sure why, exactly. I found it a while ago at Fark, I think, and I don't know what to do with it, other than show it to you.

6:39 PM | 3 comments

Korea is not a nation known for it's consumption of dairy, although people here are eating a lot more of it in recent years. These days, I only have to travel about 40 minutes on the subway to buy some actual cheddar cheese, imported from Australia.

There's still a racially-based prejudice that Koreans have, expressed in the commonly-known, accepted-wisdom phrase (transcribed into roman characters for your delectation) used to describe the smell of euro-descended people : buttah nemseh. The 'buttah' part of this phrase means, as you might expect, 'butter'. 'Nemseh' means 'smells of', or 'stinks like'. The idea is that westerners stink of butter, and the assumption is that this is because we (the generalized monkey mass of 'we') eat so much dairy. Whether the difference in odor one experiences in a crowd of Koreans as opposed to westerners (although it must be noted that a diet heavy in kimchi creates its own set of quite pungent scents : early morning elevator rides can be trying) is due to diet, or the oft-repeated claim that there are enzymatic differences in the sweat of those of Asian descent, I have no idea, and am unqualified to guess.

This butter thing would apparently be the norm in Japan as well. Fujiko, a Japanese porn starlet, is quoted in this article at NYPress.com (of all places, and I have no idea why I remembered it, but the piece is well worth reading) in which Jonathan Ames is invited to be a porn director-for-a-day :

Fujiko and her colleagues, I would think, are perhaps uniquely qualified to evaluate the differences in scent between men, at least, of different nations. Of necessity, she obviously gets more up close and personal than, say, your average secretary or computer programmer might, and has a larger sample group from which to draw her comparisons.

Maybe there is something to the phrase, and the preconception. I have never really imagined myself smelling 'buttery', though. My wife claims that I am veritable chameleon of scent, which is perhaps mildly reassuring.

What is true, and may have something to do with the attitude towards dairy products here, is that milk in Korea stinks! No, seriously - every morning when I make coffee (which is the only time I use milk), I take a sniff of the milk carton, out of sheer habit, and I am struck once again (as I was just before I sat down to type this) how bad that stuff smells, more than in any of the other couple of dozen countries in which I've drunk it.

At the risk of sounding like a bad standup comic, what's up with that?

6:10 PM | 10 comments

From Iconomy to Styleboost to ThisIsAMagazine. A fruitful hour or so of looking at Nicely Designed Things. Sometimes I just get in the mood to enjoy pretty things. Other times I want to jump up and down on them until they are in shreds and tatters, cursing the preciosity of it all.

I am a man of strong feeling, and in that I am quite consistent. Which direction those strong feelings will go on a given day, however, that tends to be a little harder to predict.

1:44 AM | 2 comments

All evidence points to the fact that Verisign sucks.

6:10 PM

Anil notes some interesting figures of his own : Metafilter, a place I very much enjoy, and one that's run by just one guy (with a little help from his friends), gets more traffic than the Wall Street Journal, Etrade, ABC TV, or universities like Harvard, at least according to Alexa.

This is kind of staggering, and Anil rightly notes how important the implications may be of such a thing : "..what I'm pointing out is the dynamic... there is momentum behind a future where a Google search on a particular piece of legislation will yield a discussion by ordinary folks on the web ahead of the sponsor's official platitudes about the bill. "

Edit : This comes with a few grains of salt, discussed here (of course).

2:28 PM

As someone who received 4 years of intense training in mathematics, precisely none of which he is able to recall, I am aware that raw numbers like these are sometimes deceptive. I have not verified these numbers. Nonetheless, I will put a few here, and I suppose if you are so inclined, you can go and have a look at their source, and draw your own conclusions.

Forgive if I don't burst into spontaneous songs of praise, OK?

[link via abuddhasmemes]

5:29 AM | 31 comments

An amusing Google API toy : The Google Smackdown. Brought to you by the same fine individual who made SnapGallery, the XHTML version of which I used to make (with some hand-tweaking) my (experimental - don't expect much) galleries here.

Edit : I am the KING!

Not unlike What's Better, which is also kind of fun.

6:58 PM | 2 comments

Both of the new Tom Waits albums are streaming, in their entirety, from here, for! a! limited! time! only! Enjoy.

6:25 PM | 2 comments

Just in case you weren't quite certain how harrowingly well Chris Locke can write, I direct your attention to the last few EGR dispatches. That is all.

(Edit : Well, that's not quite all. I'll point, as does BB this morning, to Mike's latest as well, and encourage you to enjoy more phenomenally affecting writing from around the virtual neighbourhood.)

3:26 AM | 1 Comment

The waeguk-in (foreigners) (other than the migrant workers, about whom I've written an essay elsewhere in the archives), the human flotsam that wash up on the shores of Korea are a motley lot, and they tend to fall into three or four broad, hairy, buttah-nemseh categories. (Tangentially, I've always wondered how flotsam is differentiated from jetsam...)

There are the young 'uns have just finished university in Canada or the States, with a fresh and sparkly new degree in Interpretive Kinaesthetics or Theatre or Information Technology or some damn newfangled thing, and they can't find a job to save their souls back home, wherever that may be. It doesn't take them too long to discover that in Korea you can make pretty good bucks babysitting children or having a chat with university students, and they'll take anybody. Anybody who managed to drink their way to a whateva cum laude, that is. A prospect that's a damn sight better than sitting in your parent's basement trying to roll joints out of old roaches and collecting pogey... getting paid to live abroad - damn, that sounds good! Over they come, in droves. Some last a month or two, or even six, before the psychotic boozer that is their 'Academic Director' drives them over the brink, and they bug out. Some make it to the end of their contract, but are emotionally scarred for life. In a weird parallel to hostage syndrome, some come to actually like the abuse, and sign up for another Tour of Duty.

A number of these become the long-termers, mostly men, mostly of a certain age (ahem), many of whom have had the great good fortune (in most cases) to fall in love with a Korean woman. They are the ones who've been here for years, or the ones that ricochet all over the damn place, but inevitably seem to boomerang back to Korea, just because once they reach a certain mellow, equitable, detached attitude about how f--ked-up everything tends to be, through sheer weariness if nothing else, well, it becomes clear that Korea can be a remarkable easy and occasionally pleasant place to live. There's also a subset of these long-termers that I think of as 'the predators' - they are single and towards the younger end of the scale, and they are here for the women, who very frequently are very lovely.

There is also a large contingent who simply don't, or can't fit in anywhere else. Why these folks would decide that coming to Korea, of all places, where they are virtually certain to be ostracized by the vast majority of the population, overtly or otherwise, is a Great Idea™, after failing completely to make themselves part any tribe back in their homeland, is inexplicable to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that the multitudes of bottom-rung private schools will literally take anyone with a heartbeat and a North American accent. It's an adventure going to a bar here and chatting with whoever ends up on the barstool beside you. A scary adventure, that sometimes ends in violence, as were are led to believe the best adventures do. There are some very odd foreigners floating around this country, and I'm a connoisseur of odd. Which is why I do most of my tippling at home, these days.

The reason I tell you about all of this is to set a bit of background to an anecdote about this certain new arrival I met about 4 years ago, whom I'll call Chuckles. A Canadian, he showed up to teach at the school where I was Head English Teacher, and it fell to me to orient him (pun intended) a bit. After a week or two, I was pretty sure he'd be a washout - he just didn't seem to have the slightest ability to build a rapport with anyone, never mind his students. A few months later, I left for Australia, and he was still there.

Well, he's still here, apparently. Since my return to Korea, I've been regaled with a few amusing stories about him from a mutual aquaintance, but the latest one has got to be the topper.

It seems Chuckles recently applied for a teaching job in Japan, and was shortlisted, since he's been teaching, if not well, at least steadily, for almost 4 years here. The school in Japan said that rather than flying over for an interview, he could send them a video tape.

I know, you can see this coming, can't you?

It seems Chuckles made the sample lesson tape, but he neglected to erase the part after the lesson was done, encoded on which was a rather long segment of him in Laos, 'chasing the dragon'.

Yes, as part of the interview process, he sent a video of himself bogarting a massive pipe full of opium, while someone off camera apparently urged him to 'Be careful - that's the first time you've smoked opium, man!'

I haven't heard yet whether he got the job or not.

1:52 AM | 2 comments