Emptybottle.org: February 2003

Friend Adam Greenfield has been doing some thinking about emergent democracy, and has come up with a 'conversation starter' called "The minimal compact: An open-source constitution for post-national states".

Essential reading, and packed full of ideas that resonate very deeply with this particular wonderchicken.

Edit : I am both honoured and pleased that Adam has told me via email that "a lot of this was catalyzed by reading what you wrote about Rick. As a former NYer, I shall know 09.11 in the bone for the rest of my days, but when I read about Rick on MeFi it was my most immediate experience yet of...of...of everything to which I want to offer future generations an alternative."

I believe Rick would have loved these ideas, and it's a beautiful thing if the tragedy of his loss may in any way have helped this kind of dream reach more people.

Go, read, think.

10:58 PM | 1 Comment

As you must have guessed, our apartment move was a success, and all the essential systems are hooked up once again. We're still trying to figure out how to gracefully shoehorn all our aquired crap (which is really a lot less than most couples I know) into the considerably smaller digs, but we'll manage. The new house is closer to the university, and brand new (we're the first people to move in to the building, a low-rise with 10 apartments), and it's much quieter. The perpetually-busy highway 50 metres from our old place is rapidly-fading bad memory. The new neighbourhood couldn't be described as upscale, but it's nicer than the Land Of The Lost we've been in for the last 18 months, and has all the amenities steps from our door, including a supermarket that delivers beer (...er, and food, too).

Some observations on moving house in Korea : moving companies do everything. They showed up, packed everything, emptied and cleaned the fridge, cleaned the house, moved everything to the new place, cleaned the new place, unpacked everything, loaded up the fridge and closets, and went away. I don't know if this is what happens in North America (I've never used movers before), but I suspect it's not quite as easy. All I had to do was stand around, drink coffee, and point. It cost a bomb, but the university footed the bill, as I had to move at their request. Very low stress, indeed.

The DSL connection is the same 4Mb pipe I had before (She Who Must Be Obeyed ignored my wheedling and nixed the monster broadband), but thanks to the new wiring, I guess, feels snappier. I compare the process to Australia, where it took literally months to get someone to come and install the service after I'd ordered it, and approximately 4 hours onsite to get it working : here, it took 4 hours from calling Korea Telecom for a guy to show up, and after 15 minutes in the house, he bowed and bailed, and I had my connection back. Amazing.

Renting an apartment works differently here than it does anywhere else I've ever been. The university provides my accommodation, but I was involved in securing a place (they've sold the apartment I lived in before), to make sure that they found something acceptable. Most people do not pay monthly rent - what they do is give the landlord a massive deposit, and pay either nothing or very little on a monthly basis. The university had to pay the equivalent of about C$100,000 to secure this small 3-bedroom place, and there is no rent to pay.

Needless to say, it's difficult indeed for young people in particular to live apart from their parents, and still quite rare. Whether that's because of the way apartments are rented, or whether apartments are rented that way in part to discourage young people moving out, I don't know.

Anyway. I'm back to work at the University on Monday, after about 10 weeks of holiday, and looking forward to it. I really do love my job.

9:56 PM | 3 comments

Am I what I write? Should I put it all here, the angelic farts and the chuckleheaded non-sequiteurs, or should I keep the best and worst of me apart somehow? Should I hold back, or should I tell the story of the first time I silently and all amazed erupted in watery semen when I was 12 while 'It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World' spooled off in all its madcap glory on the console TV on New Year's Eve, just to pick a semi-random example?

Should I tell all and let the googlecache fall where it may? Should I womb up my Real Stuff in some digital sanctorum somewhere, and just amble and natter and hitch a ride on this familiar hitcount-greased Route 66 down which I'm already walking?

Is it art, or is it socializing? It's pretty goddamn clear that it's not journalism, and the proposition that it might be such is just laughable: but what polestar should I steer my ship by, I ask you? Is it real or an illusion? Is it the goddamn tedious old Platonic shadow play on the cave wall, or is it a new way of gripping and tasting the souls of friendlies without the halitosis and clumsy hugs? What do I want to do with this pretty ever-lengthening scroll?

f--ked if I know. I think I'll have a beer and think about it some more.

5:02 AM | 7 comments and 2 trackbacks.

We're moving house, and I'll be offline for the next few days until I get the new VDSL connection sorted out (I'm begging She Who Must Be Obeyed for a 20Mb connection, which is a mid-range speed in the new xDSL product line offered by Korea Telecom ...cross your fingers for me!). In the meantime, why not go have a look at OW™'s new novel?

Keep it between the ditches, amigos. Later.

7:40 PM | 3 comments

My folks are looking to sell Tchentlo Lake Lodge, a wilderness fishing lodge they own and run up in northern British Columbia, where I visited them over Christmas. I've put up some information about it here, and if you or anyone you know might be interested in buying it either as an investor or owner-operator, please feel free to contact them.

That gave me a mild feeling of accomplishment, throwing that together. It's rare that I actually feel like a good son.

1:58 AM | 7 comments

From Kim Dae-shik, a physics professor at Seoul National University to the head of the US Forces Korea :

5:33 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

Shelley speaks so eloquently on so many other topics, you (well, I) sometimes forget she is also a Geek Goddess without peer. This latest innovation from her is a really cool idea, and one that might help to combat that feeling of impermanence and evancescence of weblog comments. I want one too!

(I find myself remembering the toolset for OLAP analysis of financial data that was a small part of the Swiss Army knife professional practice management product that I (almost, if it hadn't been for the f--kwits) almost took to market at my last tech job, and wonder when we'll be able to effortlessly pivot our views of a given weblog against a wide variety of axes, at will. Slice and dice, baby!)

11:55 PM | 3 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Photographs in pairs by Stuart Isett.

5:06 AM | 1 Comment

Today, one of the greats exeunted for the last time, took his last curtain call, and left us for that great playhouse in the sky. How could I tell the rollercoaster cinderella story of Skeleton Warrior, the passion and the pain, the sex and the drugs and the necrophiliac nights, better than he could himself :

8:18 PM | 1 Comment and 4 trackbacks.

Three random thoughts that ambled through the wonderchickensian mind this evening, ideas that to be honest I'm just too damn lazy to flesh out into real posts. Quality is therefore not assured.

1) How much do I hate that everytime someone mentions a goddamn book, they have to link to Amazon?† When did a glorified shopping mall become the primary maypole around which our discussion of books must dance? (I tried to like allconsuming.net, but it gives me indigestion.)

2) 8 Mile = Quadrophenia strained through a Rocky Balboa cheesecloth.

3) Before radio and television, we are told, people entertained one another - told stories, sang, did little skits, whatever. Nearly a century of the glass teat and all that, electronic opiate of the masses, yadda yadda, passes. Us bloggy types are just returning to a long-lost tradition of making our own damn entertainment for each other, thank you very much, just amped-up, sped-up and woven from a spectrum of sources so kaleidoscopic as to blow the muttonchopped or maidenly minds of our forebears.

And, for a limited time only, a special bonus thought, free with every purchase : reading a Kerouac biography the last few days - 'Subterranean Kerouac' (and no, I'm not going to link to the thrice-cursed Amazon page for it) - I found myself wondering how those Beat types found any time to actually write when they were so busy sucking each other's dicks all the damn time. Crikey.

† the answer, of course, is 'one hell of a lot'.

5:31 AM | 9 comments and 2 trackbacks.

You are being lied to, clumsily.

Pass it on.

Also : Douglas Ord is having his synchronicity fuses blown, and expands on a boggling series of odd coincidences some of which were also noticed by the Bearman recently. The mind can take any set of events, or numbers, or words, and automagically see a serendipitous pattern in them - pattern recognition is what intelligence is, I think, at least in part - but sometimes the random patterns end up looking like the face of the Virgin Mary, and all synaptic hell breaks loose.

[both via wood s lot]

Also, while I'm at it : this is an interesting and quite plausible argument (to me, admittedly undereducated as I am on these matters) that the real reasons behind many of the decisions being made by the Bush administration with regard to throwing their geopolitical weight around is the "goal of preventing further Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard."

Not entirely free of spin, by any means, but worth a look. A lot of the dots seem to link up pretty damn well.

12:16 AM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

I'm not sure why I did this - I don't even particularly like Jimmy Buffett (other than the pleasant memories he evokes from my days sailing off the Pacific coast of Mexico, when he was required listening amongst the Cortez cruisers.) Sometimes I just get these compulsions, you know?

Update : A quick Googling, which in my fever to finish the doggerel above I neglected to do, shows me that there is (pretty darn groovy) prior art here. Not that that should surprise, I guess.

10:50 PM | 1 Comment

I'd never heard of this guy before today, but trust me, [this is good].

[via Boing Boing]

6:53 AM | 5 comments

This evening I plan to drink approximately 10-12 bottles of cold, excessively fizzy Korean beer, smoke the one cigarette per week that I allow myself these days, and listen to the entire output of the Tragically Hip.

This may result in amusingly cockeyed posts, either ranty or good-natured, or it may mean that I'll wander off on some little-travelled web byway and forget about the clamorous demands of my sweet readers, for at least one brief glorious moment of boozy freedom.

Wish me luck.

2:06 AM | 6 comments

Although until recently I was often actively drawn into discussions about meta stuff, it seems as if that's no longer the case, and I find myself wondering why. Context in this situation is the new piece by Clay Shirky that seems to have people a-buzz, and around which a sometimes heated conversation is now springing. The aether is a-buzz with talk, but I don't seem to be invited, which is unusual, and which I can't quite figure out. No one's invited me to the prom, mom! I know it's unspeakably lame to whine about stuff like this, and I don't mean to, but it's worrisome, kind of, and on my mind, and has context given the topic of discussion, I think.

I wonder if that f--king Bloggie shortlisting is to blame, actually, and has fostered some sort of 'well, f--k him, he's going in some weird famehog direction' feeling, which is most assuredly not the case. That surprised me as much as it did anyone. I don't think I've gotten any more profane and offensive, lately, that I can see, and I tend to talk in much the same way as I always have, about much the same sort of things. If anything, I get more visitors on a daily basis than I ever have before. But the (smart, good) folks with whom I have felt a sense of neighbourhood in the past seem to have withdrawn. Perhaps I'm just talking more crap than usual, I dunno.

That's life, I guess. But it leaves me befuddled, a little, and wondering if it really is the case, and if so, why it happened.

Anyway, I posted a few further thoughts over at Jonathon Delacour's in light of what I've been reading about the Shirky piece this morning, which I reproduce here because I'm lazy, even if no one is interested (whine, sniff, pout).

8:47 PM | 13 comments

It's strange, but at precisely the same moment as I'm pointing to this

I have this eerie and slightly unpleasant feeling that some ex-girlfriend of mine somewhere is pointing to this

It's a world wide web! Neat!

5:36 AM | 1 Comment

I was thinking of sharing my fascinating thoughts on the North Korean Thing with you, but I find [via Tim Bishop] that Josh Marshall pretty much has it in hand (Edit : As does friend Matt, here), except he doesn't use nearly as many obscenities as I do. A forgiveable offense.

I am quite confident that this too shall pass, but don't quote me on that.

4:30 AM | 2 comments

I asked a couple of days ago, in high dudgeon :

"How much more of this are Americans willing to take? How many more clear signals can there be that the principles for which their nation is claimed to stand are being dismantled and subverted by their almost-elected officials? What will it take to get them to wake the f--k up and throw these weasels out?"

and this was one of the answers left in the comments...

Vote to Impeach

Thanks, Sarah. If I were American, I'd be a little scared of being branded an Enemy of the State for adding my name to the list, and being imprisoned without that old-fashioned habeus corpus to get in the way. But if I were American, you can damn well bet I would sign, anyway. At least someone's trying to do something.

1:48 AM and 1 trackback

This somewhat academic and very interesting piece from Clay Shirky [via Phil] on (in part) the eternal A-list debate is heavy with meaty bits just begging for a good gnawing.

Some bones I plan to worry at a little more, when I'm in a gnawing mood :

Anyway, I ramble, as usual. Although it may seem as if I'm arguing against some of Clay's points, that's not really the case. There's a lot to chew on there, and I found it both illuminating and instructive, and thought I'd try and note down some of my reactions before the coffee wears off.

Me, I like me some conversation, but as moderate fame is thrust upon me, I find it not unpleasant. What do you reckon?

8:59 PM | 3 comments and 3 trackbacks.

This just in! George Bush has declared emptybottle.org part of the Axis of Evil!

My mom would be so proud, even while she's wondering if I'm going to die up here at the DMZ for Bush's lies, too.

6:43 AM | 12 comments

Via MeFi and OW™, something else to be really pissed about, you know, after you're finished with all the other things on your list.

How much more of this are Americans willing to take? How many more clear signals can there be that the principles for which their nation is claimed to stand are being dismantled and subverted by their almost-elected officials? What will it take to get them to wake the f--k up and throw these weasels out?

See, now I'm all grumpy again.

11:17 PM | 9 comments and 1 trackback

I keep linking to Fishrush, because I love it. You know, in a manly way.

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping, and can be enjoyed equally with either spoon or fork. And it makes me laugh, which in these dark times is a be-yoo-tiful thing.

10:52 PM

This guy's on a trip around the planet, and his travel diaries (full of the tales like this latest of difficult defecations, hiking hardships, and all manner of mad and unpleasant things one puts oneself through on a daily basis when backpacking around the world) make me feel like hitting the road again.

Also : "lots of nice pictures too, including penis gourds and big stone penises at a fertility temple, the big jars of Laos, the big heads of Easter Island, dog eating and dried llama foetuses."

Domesticity is wearisome, some days. Particularly on those days you find yourself bickering with your spouse about everything and nothing. Oh, to be sh-tting in a trench latrine with snowflakes swirling around your tender bits on the side of a mountain somewhere...

10:13 PM | 2 comments

Representatives of The Irish Government's Department of Education and The INTO (Irish Teachers Organization) have advised its qualified teachers to "exercise extreme caution" when accepting a teaching contract in South Korea. It goes on on to state that "due to the overwhelming number of complaints routinely received by various Irish government departments from Irish teachers in connection with their experiences in this country, we feel unable to recommend it to our citizens as a safe or viable career option and furthermore impossible to resist the conclusion that the current Hagwon system in South Korea is endemically corrupt".

Endemically corrupt, indeed. Nicely spotted.

('hagwons' are private schools (primarily for English), by the way, of which there are literally tens of thousands in the ROK)

6:20 AM | 2 comments

This article and its associated Metafilter thread make interesting reading, and are germane to the roots of my rant yesterday, perhaps. Really, though, I was just havin' a bit of fun.

4:18 AM | 2 comments

Thanks to the eternally irate Mr Golby for this little nugget.

Yes! Bless us, lord! Let's pray for our troops, pray for our politicians, pray that the bleeding hemorrhoids that have been plaguing us will disappear, let's pray that those pesky raghead pagan f--ks die in their thousands, let's pray that more war will stop war, let's pray that killing will put a cap on killing, let's pray that the sweet light crude manna will continue to pump through the fiscal veins of our great nation, let's pray that our god has a bigger dick than theirs, let's pray that the dazed halfwit apathetic scum that allowed us to take over the most powerful country in the world won't wake up and cut our throats like the vermin we are, let's pray goddamnit, let's pray the great game will continue, let's pray that jesus doesn't f--king come back and rip us from crotch to sternum like trout, let's pray, let's pray, let's get down on our knees and pray to something bigger, let's pray, let's pray our children don't have to do the same evil things we did, it's not our fault, god, please, it's not our fault, we're not bad people, we just did what we had to do, what we were told to do....

[Audio : Dead Kennedys - Kinky Sex Makes The World Go 'Round]

3:52 AM | 6 comments

In keeping with my '00-stylin' (thanks Phil) linkfest, there are some very funny ones (
like this) in this Fark photoshop thread.

I chuckled, I chortled, I nodded in a wry, knowing fashion. You might too!

7:55 PM | 1 Comment

Hey, while I'm at it, Exploding Dog is really good and stuff, too. But you probably already knew that.

I could learn to like this linking without the commentary schtick... Emptybottle Lite! Now with even more sh-t that you don't care about!

10:50 PM | 4 comments

Occasionally I find stuff that I want to share, and this almost resembles a weblog for a minute or two.

Go look at some American pictures, if you're so inclined. I don't know a damn thing about photography, but I know what I like.

6:17 AM | 2 comments

Like quonsar said, not necessarily Metafilter at it's best, but certainly at it's most interesting, in some ways. When the WTC was hit, when the bomb went off in Bali, and today, to offer some examples : all have been moments when it was fascinating to read the raw responses of people to tragedy, to watch how the community dealt with it, to see the both the maudlin sentimentality and the black humour, the heartfelt grief and the political opportunism, the whole sweep of emotion that folks feel when they are hammered by unexpected loss, all packaged up in one neat blue thread.

8:28 PM | 11 comments

In light of recent ruminations in some places about the politics and social implications of hyperlinking and blogrolling, I find this amusing, no less so because of my opinions about some of the names involved. What a sad and silly game it is, and how inconsequential.

For my part, were I asked, I'd have to say that Jim Cappozzola, whoever he is, can take a flying f--k at a rolling doughnut, even if I do agree with him about the virulence and unpleasantness of the Little Green Cesspool. The proper response, I would say, to his threats (is it a threat if the consequences are so completely and laughably trivial?) to de-link people if they do not comply with his demands that they de-link Little Green Poosticks is : "So?"

Fun to watch the fur and feathers fly, I suppose. But it's something a little embarrassing for adult people to be so concerned about, even if it does touch on important issues that go well beyond blogdom, like censorship and freedom of expression, like tolerance and bigotry. My response to LGF and its ilk, though, is a little like the one I have to those fat, 40 year old men who dress up in Sailor Moon costumes : "Yay! for expressing your inner dipsh-t and striking a blow for repressed losers everywhere, Mr Man, but please take it out of my face, OK?"

3:09 AM | 1 Comment

It'd be fun to get some statistics on Blogspot bloggers, or blogs in general, I suppose, to get a handle what the blogly zeitgeist is like. How many would characterize themselves as political, how many consider themselves part of a community, how many try to use the word 'f--k' on a daily basis, how many insist on writing posts without the use of capital letters...

And how many call themselves 'pundit.' A whole hell of a lot, would be the answer for that one, it seems.

7:28 PM | 3 comments and 1 trackback

Say what you will about his recent fictional output (or his older fictional output, for that matter), I still have a soft spot for Kurt Vonnegut. At the age of 80, he's still saying things worth listening to.

And he's not an asshole, which still counts for something, I hope.

While we're talking authors here, another writer whose work I've always enjoyed reading, Gunter Grass, is also speaking out against those murderous C students and psychopaths in Washington.

Edit : This is as good a time as any to share some statistics about Korea with you. I ran across these numbers a few days ago, and they would seem to explain much on first glance. Whether that is actually the case or not is up for debate.

There are a total of 450 public libraries in Korea. In the whole country.

These facilities serve a population of approximately 47 million people : it works out to about 110,000 people for each library, the lowest in the OECD. The ratio is actually worse here in Seoul - which is home to the equivalent of about a third of the population of Canada, a fact that never ceases to boggle me a bit - there's one library for every 330,000 people.

The comparable figure in Europe is about 1:10,000 and in America it's 1:20,000 or so.

Some ad-hocratic systems have arisen to compensate, as is always the case here. There are privately run shops, even in the nasty little suburb where I live, that rent a few books (mostly home-grown manga for the schoolkids) alongside the standard racks of action movies. There's a bookmobile that comes around the human beehives once a week, too, with a couple of hundred Korean novels onboard. Small compensation for the few who have the time or energy to read anything.

As for me, even if any of these few libraries were near enough for me to visit, I'd be out of luck. None carry books in English, of course.

If any webblogger should have an Amazon wishlist and wheedle and beg for books, it's me, by crikey. Maybe I should get a webcam, start peddling my wonderchicken pulchritude, and demand payments ("Put it on! Put it all back on! Please!") in literature....

Nah.

1:23 AM | 5 comments