[this is good], inaccuracies and all.
The price of, uh, somef–kingthing… is eternal something else, man. But you know, whatever. Hey, you see that episode of Lions and Christians last night? f–kin’ A! That totally kicks ass when they, like, die and stuff!
[via MeFi]
What really happened to this man will no doubt remain a mystery. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d venture (judging by what’s said in that report) that it sounds like he was deep in amphetamine psychosis – “… the officer gave Mr. Sellers a piece of paper so that he could write his name, which Mr. Sellers did in a quivering hand, and in fact, ended up writing an entire personal history” – but hell, who knows? He was disturbed, it’s clear, which is odd in someone who is claimed by everyone involved to have been level-headed. Regardless, how did he get to that point? It might be a story worth telling, if one could unravel it. One assumes that whatever else may have happened, though, he died as a result of bungling. And so it goes.
Of this I’m sure : every expat living here in Seoul who reads this sad and unsurprising story comes away with an entirely different picture of the realities of what happened to this guy than someone who has never lived here. Little tidbits like “Mr. Shin, who speaks English, at first glance took Mr. Sellers for a homeless man” ring so false as to be laughable. There aren’t any non-Korean ‘homeless men’ in Korea, as any policeman would know. Stories fly off from offhand sentences in the linked article like fleas from an electrocuted dog. Chasing them down would be more trouble than it’s worth, for me at least, but every second or third line in there rings a J Arthur Rank gong in my brain, and sets me to imagining in technicolor.
But it also makes me think about how difficult, how doomed from the outset is any attempt to tell anything like a true story, ever. How locked into the bone cages of our own skulls we are in the end, and how far from reality even the most carefully worded tale-telling leaves us.
And it makes me think about how many of us will probably die : anonymous, shoeless, babbling, gripped by rage and despair, surrounded by people who can’t understand what we are saying to them.
Which is as it should be, perhaps, and the sooner we come to terms with it, the sooner we can start having some goddamned fun.
Hopefully Matthew had a little fun before he died.
Edit : This thread at the ESLCafe Korea Forums, with posts from some of Sellers’ friends and family and a whole lot of speculation from everyone else, is worth reading, if you are interested.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is running a push-technology trial called CBC Home Delivery, incorporating content from across the range of CBC media outlets. Everything old is new again.
Unlike good old Pointcast (remember that?), this freaking rocks. I’ve just received the first dispatch, and it is amazing, and includes a long and well-done piece on North Korea. (Edit : And Peter Gzowsky interviewing Iggy Pop – two heroes for the price of one.) Give it a go! It started in February, and will unfortunately end, at least in the trial phase, in June, but it’s worth it.
Yeah, this isn’t much of a surprise, but it does steel my reserve to get the hell out of this cesspool of a city as soon as possible. Seoul was recently found to have the worst air quality of any OECD city. I shudder to think of the crap that must be circling around my bag of blood.
[via Mefi]
Some days, you just want to climb to the top of that clock tower and start picking those f–kers off. Some days, the world seems like a private hell created expressly! for! you! Some days, your loathing for every single human face you see makes the bile back up in your throat. Some days, you just want to smash.
Some days, you want to make a difference. Some days you nurture and you shelter and you teach and you cherish. Some days, the air smells clean, and you have a good sh-t. Some days your head clears, briefly. Some days, it seems like the future might actually be better than the past. Some days, the sun comes out and it doesn’t burn.
Some days.
Other days, you just can’t be asked to give a f–k.
There’s some lovely filth down here, Dennis!
Some more fun stuff I found today. Bob Black is my new main man :
RU Sirius is, as always, a most excellent individual as well :
This piece on the attacks of September 11th and their aftermath was a link offered in this equally interesting (if slightly wanky) discussion at Metafilter, and although the two only seemed tangentially related at first glance, the more I think about them the more they seem to be rooted in the same piece of fertile ground.
My next stop was Baudrillardville . All aboard who’s getting aboard :
Make of that what you will, friends.
Jo Jo’s Jacket – a Steven Malkmus video, starring Yul Brynner. Sort of. [other Steven Malkmus videos, with bandwidth selection]
There’s some other groovy music video stuff on offer there, too, including Smog, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, and Sebadoh, amongst others.
Also, music. Including one of my all-time faves from Smog – Dress Sexy At My Funeral.
Share and enjoy.
[requires realplayer, via the site that shall not be named]
Observation the First : This post from a while back (“AntiAmerica”) has been attracting googlenauts like flies to poo, and although I keep thinking about closing it to comments, I am compelled (the power of crap compels you! the power of crap compels you!) for the moment to leave it open. It’s fascinating to watch the comments accrete in layers as the weeks go by. Super-terrific-happy-fun-post activate!
Observation the Second : Rageboy stopped drinking at almost precisely the same time I started doing it with any degree of diligence. Funny, that. One of the thrillingest moments in my early blog career was when he linked to a post of mine and opined that I might actually be able to write my way out of a wet paper bag. And I hadn’t even started sending him monthly cheques at that point.
Observation the Third : There is no Observation the Third, but I’m into the beer again, so we’ll see how the evening develops.
Observation the Fourth : This deserves more link-loving. Or maybe it already got the love, and I missed the buzz. I dunno. Way cooler than the last 5 or ten mind-crogglingly cool things I’ve seen, though [alternate view]. Go implant some GeoURL tags in your index pages now, friends, or I’ll hunt you down and give you some serious noogies!
Not an observation at all, really : This one’s for Kaf :
I was watching another Carlin video this evening, and made this for no readily apparent reason, other than one of his bits that I’ve heard about 114 times made me laugh.
Sleep-Fuuuuck. Sleep-Fuuuuck. Sleep’n’f–k! Sleep-Fuuuuck.
So Tom asked me about OhMyNews.com, which has been popping up recently around blogistan and generating some buzz.
(Just as a trivia-question aside : the ejaculation ‘Oh my god!’ is one that you hear almost constantly here in Korea. It was the tagline of a popular comedian a while back, and even young Koreans who don’t speak any English other than the always-useful ‘OK!’ and perennial favorite ‘Do you like kimchi?’ know it and use it with grating regularity. I assume the URL is a reference to that, although I might well be wrong. It happens.)
Well, OhMyNews is pretty neat, sure, and apparently did have some influence in the election of Noh Moo Hyun recently (which is a whole other story), but I don’t think it’s either quite as democratic or as elegant as it’s being chalked up to be. The basic gist of the Korean boilerplate at the site (according to my wife) states that you can send them an article anywhere up to ten ‘pages’, for which you are held personally (and legally) responsible in terms of veracity. If it’s acceptable, they edit it and pay you for it. Discussions are hung off the individual pieces that make it to the site. It doesn’t seem as if there is any reputation system or moderation beyond once-off editorial filtering and smoothing of language.
So not quite as groundbreaking as has been suggested, perhaps. More like a less-sophisticated kuro5hin.org for the Korean non-geeknoscenti, in my humble. Interesting, but more as a concept than a reality. And the concept is a pretty cool one.
We – the few, the involuted, the snarky! – at Metafilter got all hot and bothered about the idea few months back, and spent a good while trying to figure out how to build our own and entirely too much time talking about what to call the thing. Even so, prototypes were made, discussions were held (since disappeared from the server where they were hosted, sadly), thoughts were thunk, a corner of the MeFi Wiki was reserved, and then the two (much beloved, but nonetheless daunting) 800-pound gorillas in our metamidst, Rusty from kuro5hin.org and Matt from Mefi itself revealed that they were planning to build their own version of a collaborative journalism site, and in spite of their exhortations to us to carry on without their direct involvement and just keep bashing away at our plans, the enthusiasm of our little ad-hocracy kinda dissipated. After all, if there are two people out there who have the experience and know-how in the granular details of building and finely balancing the vagaries and conflicting tidal pulls of large online communities, it’s them.
[/brownnose]
Matt recently mentioned in an unrelated thread in Metatalk that they were hoping to have something to show the world by July 1st. I hope this is not a premature outing, and that I’m not pissing him off too much by talking about it now, but I really want to see this thing, and the comments he and rusty have made about it are a matter of public record, so you heard it here first, folks.
Unless you read Metatalk, of course. Then you heard it here second.
Ohmynews? Bah. I’m waiting to see the real thing.
Though most people know of them already, I’m sure : like The Memory Hole, the deliberately unbloglike UnderReported is a good way to try and keep track of the sh-tstorm of lies and propaganda howling around our heads, as of course is the excellent and more weblogesque cursor.org. These sites invite you to draw your own conclusions, an invitation we too rarely receive these days.
Though undeniably entertaining, reading the ranting of bloggers is less rewarding, perhaps. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Which is not to say that I’m going to stop ranting any time soon, but rather to note that you, dear reader, should most assuredly take it for what it is worth, which is bugger-all other than a bit of (hopefully) amusing wordplay.
It must be said, too, that there are times when one has to stand back and point, with some small measure of humility, at some of the diamond-bullet stuff bloggers are pulling out of their hats, ranty or otherwise, like this little juxtapotato from a certain maniacal South African down the block :
Paul Theroux on Hunter S Thompson [via RobotWisdom]
It is an ancient Blogger,
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me ?
Conferences, conferences everywhere. Mathematics degree or no long-forgotten mathematics degree, I don’t know a power-law from a goddamn cheese sandwich, and I’ll tell you, all these conferences and symposia and self-congratulatory bloggeriffic circlejerkathons lately, unfailingly dotted with laptop-lugging constellations of the Usual fat-end-of-the-comet Suspects, these cadres of neo-imagineering big-brained rent-a-pundits traipsing around telling everyone how breathtakingly important and revolutionary it all is… well, sometimes it just seems a little forced to me, and more than a little reminiscent of the frenzied bandwagonesque me-too (and the gimme-gimmes) of the leadup to the collective technojizz and detumescence and smoking rubble of the fin-de-siecle bubble. Just trade ‘revenue streams and ROI calculation’ for ‘creative renaissance and DIY journalism,’ and everything old smells new again. But it doesn’t smell much like teen spirit to me.
Not to get off on a rant or anything.
Then again, maybe I’m just bored of living in Korea again, and feeling left out and a bit jealous, dejectedly imagining the wild, drunken and sexually challenging parties that erupt spontaneously when all those pent-up wordsmithing blogtypes get together. Conferences, conferences everywhere, and me becalmed. That could be. But just ’cause I consider some of those blogorrheic pundits to be Virtu-pals™ (‘your digital friend who’s fun to be with!’) doesn’t mean I can’t poke ’em with sticks once in a while.
At least that f–king war’s over, eh?
Q : What does it mean when a pirate coughs?
A : He has SAARRRRRRS.
I stole this joke, but if I told you from where, I’d have to kill you. See also : this.
Here are some neat things you may not have seen before :
The Kostnice Ossuary. BIT-101. Tom Vu says if you have no money or no credit to buy property, don’t worry about it! It’s Time To Bone! (Edit : contains nasty Lego Porn and is not at all safe for Eeksy-Peeky to watch at work or anywhere else that freaky animated porn disguised as ‘art’ might be unwelcome.)
Share and enjoy.
They’d be so loveable if they weren’t pure evil!
I’m feeling one of my periodic bouts of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism coming on, during which I customarily have a tendency to gibber and howl, slap my belly and dance and drink and sweat and swear and look at pornography, so if the next little while amongst the bottles is characterized by determined, single-minded stupidity and you, dear reader, find that to be either annoying or contrary to the Loftiness of Blogocratic Discourse and the general air of ‘I’m-smarter-than-you’-iness we occasionally see around the blogs, I invite you, o kind and gentle soul, to either crack a beer and play along or, you know, go away and come back a little later. It’s party time!
“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didnââ¬â¢t betray it Iââ¬â¢d be ashamed of myself.” – Noam Chomsky
“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred.” – Aldous Huxley
“What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?” – Henry Miller
“Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.” – Henry Miller, again
This, apparently, is the man who killed one of the people I loved most in this world, along with 201 others last October. He is going to trial, still all smiles.
This is the action-packed Part One of my long-promised review of Hangul, the Korean writing system. Even with the liberal lashings of foul language and obscene anecdotes, it may bore the tits off you – if so, feel free to either skip it entirely or send me the bill for the mammary reattachment procedure. (It will help to have Asian fonts installed, as explained here, but is not essential. My next post in the series will require them, though…)
Chinese writing in its various historical manifestations has been known and used in Korea for more than 2 millennia, dating back to the time of the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD. By the 5th century CE, the Koreans were starting to write in Classical Chinese – the earliest known example of this dates from 414 CE, and by the 7th century, educated Koreans were speaking Korean and writing in Chinese. Later, three different systems for writing Korean with Chinese characters were created and adopted to various degrees : Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Idu.
The Hyangchal (Ãâ¥ì°°) system used Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean, and was used mainly to write poetry. (A similar system in use in Japan at about the same time, known as man’yogana, eventually evolved into hiragana, one of the syllabaries used to write modern Japanese. Man’yogana was developed under the supervision of Koreans in the Japanese court.) The Idu(ì´ëâÂ) system, created in the 8th century by scholars of the Shilla Dynasty, used a combination of Chinese characters and special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used in official and private documents for centuries thereafter. Gugyeol (구결) was introduced in the 13th century, and was basically a simplification of some Chinese characters in an attempt to remove some ambiguity arising from the use of some Chinese characters for their sounds and others for their meanings.
China has always been the great civilization next door in Asia, a very big brother sometimes benevolent and more often not, the source of cultural borrowings for all of its smaller neighbours, including the Koreans, and for much of Korean history the language used for learned, official purposes in Korea was Chinese, in somewhat the same way as medieval Europeans used Latin.
By the 15th century, though, it was time for Korea to find a way of writing their own language that was more appropriate to its own sounds and grammar. It could be argued that Koreans had limited need to write their language down up to this time and for a some time afterwards, and when they did, it was sufficient to use Chinese writing to spell it out, but Chinese and Korean were and are very different languages. Korean is a subject-object-verb language, for example, and has a rich system of postpositional case markers. Chinese, a subject-verb-object language, does not. Korean has a complicated system of honorifics, part of which is expressed as verb endings. Chinese does not, and doesn’t have any characters to represent these verb-ending morphemes.
The Korean writing system Ãâ¢Åêµ´ (hangul) was finally created in 1440s, through the patronage of King Sejong, the fourth king of the Choson Dynasty, who ruled from 1418-1450. The new script was easy to learn – a matter of hours in many cases. (Hell, I even developed basic reading skills years ago after a couple of beer-fueled sessions at my favorite bar!) It was elegant, scientific, rooted in philosophy and study of the phonemes of spoken Korean, and is truly a thing of beauty. At the time, it was called ÃâºË민ì â¢ÃªÂ¸Ë(hunmin jeongeum, or ‘proper sounds to instruct the people’). According to King Sejong’s preface to the book in which it first appeared in 1446, the invention of the script was nationalistic in intent, devised to enable the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters. He states, in immodest Kingly (but surprisingly egalitarian) fashion :
possibly starting as a side-effect the long and treasured tradition of Korean men taking credit for the hard work of their underlings.
Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, though, most Koreans who could write continued to write either in Classical Chinese or in Korean using the Gukyeol or Idu systems – the new script was seen to be the province of people of low status : women, children, and peasants, those who did not receive the necessary years of education required to learn to write Chinese.
Reading and writing weren’t the only political issues with regard to the language at the time, of course – spoken Korean at the time was basically a vernacular, used mostly for more homely means. Chinese was still mainly the language of power, of art, of loftier pursuits. With the similar (and certainly more despised) position of Japanese as the language of power during the brutal occupation of Korea during the first half of the 20th century coming hard on the heels of the collapse of the Choseon Dynasty, the idea that Korean (both written and spoken) should be the common language of all levels of society is still a relatively new one. Ideas like universal literacy and egalitarianism weren’t exactly popular ones in the society of that time (nor were they for the 5 and a half centuries after King Sejong, for that matter).
When Korean was written in the newly devised hangul script, it did still make sense for Chinese loan words, of which there were and are a multitude, to be written in their original Chinese. During the 19th and 20th centuries a mixed writing system combining Chinese characters and Hangul became increasingly popular, and literacy rates rose precipitously (as much as a consequence of changes in society as anything else, of course), until today, when the literacy rate in Korea is amongst the world’s highest. Although it has been fading since 1945 (and was outlawed in North Korea in 1949) the use of Chinese characters still persists today – the front page of many South Korean newpapers today are littered with Chinese characters, although to a lesser degree than they were even 10 years ago.
Stay tuned for Part Two, coming as soon as I bloody well feel like it, which in addition to details about the writing system itself, will include naked pictures and senseless violence! Or not. I haven’t decided yet. Please feel free to point out any factual inaccuracies – I am well aware that there are many folks around with more knowledge of this subject than I could possibly lay claim to.