How the heck did I get a referral from here? No WonderChicken listed, I looked. Funny ha-ha and the other one too.
Distant water-coloured me-mories…
Just finished watching the Ireland vs. Cameroon match, and though I’m far from an expert in such matters, I enjoyed it a fair bit. Averaging one goal every 45 minutes : I guess that’s major excitement in the soccer world, huh?
The reason I mention it is that it was almost precisely 12 years ago, during the World Cup in 1990, that the Wonderchicken was born, the uncreated conscience of my species, forged in the smithy of my liver. A couple of days after this blessed event, Rick and I were in a lovely little B & B in Aberystwyth, Wales, and watching the match between Cameroon and Ireland. Our viewing was made more enjoyable, if indeed that were possible, by the presence of a Large Bottle of Vodka. This we drank (which is the primary use to which one puts Large Bottles of Vodka, other than bonking people over the head, of course), and cheered lustily for the underdogs, Cameroon, who ended up the victors.
Although my powers of recollection tend to suffer when battered by such oceanic quantities of booze, I seem to recall that we ventured out into the night at the conclusion of the game, wobbly but under our own power, navigating by the bottle, and ended up in a pub, where Rick also ended up swapping saliva with a nubile young lady. This was the time in our lives when this sort of thing still happened, albeit irregularly.
The next morning, the proprietress of the B & B, waggling an admonishing finger as only middle-aged Welsh matrons can, suggested that we should find alternate lodging.
She must have been an Ireland supporter.
Wonderchicken World Cup Update #2
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.
For example, this picture from Kimpo Airport of Big Football Hero Ronaldo (reportedly), making a complete f–king racist ass of himself.
Footballer.
Cultural Ambassador.
Cretin.
[found at the 'pile]
Conversation Maps
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.
Delicious cute little bastard, ain't he?
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.
That's got to hurt
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.
Well, I guess somebody was listening…
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.
Recycling
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.
It's Official : I'm outta ideas.
Someone stick a fork in my ass and turn me over, I’m done.
[Another useful service from Wonderchicken Industries]
Some of the funniest things you will never hear in Korea (latest in a long series) :
If you should be coming to Korea for the World Cup, be assured these are among the phrases that you will not need to use.
Stay tuned for our next exciting installment!
I'm trying…
“Lucid dreaming means dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming. The term was coined by Frederik van Eeden who used the word “lucid” in the sense of mental clarity. Lucidity usually begins in the midst of a dream when the dreamer realizes that the experience is not occurring in physical reality, but is a dream. Often this realization is triggered by the dreamer noticing some impossible or unlikely occurrence in the dream, such as flying or meeting the deceased. Sometimes people become lucid without noticing any particular clue in the dream; they just suddenly realize they are in a dream. A minority of lucid dreams (according to the research of LaBerge and colleagues, about 10 percent) are the result of returning to REM (dreaming) sleep directly from an awakening with unbroken reflective consciousness.”
[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]
Grain of Salt
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.