After puking up a hairball about how little value I place in links without commentary, I exercise my right to be annoyingly inconsistent : I have nothing more to say about this.
Update : Or this – “If there were to be a war on the Korean peninsula, we would win but at a horrendous cost. It would be a classic pyrrhic victory. We could devastate North Korea, but we would lose hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese allies in the first few days.”
One of the dominant facts in a young Korean man’s life, perhaps the biggest one, is the inevitability of military service. All able-bodied young men (although exceptions are sometimes made for those with enough money, or the right connections, as with everything else here) are required to do a minimum of 26 months of military service (ranging up to thirty months in the Air Force). The callup usually comes about midway through university.
I often wonder if this single fact goes a long way toward explaining some of the enormous differences in attitudes between Korean men and, for example, us Canucks, as much as culture and language and other factors. I’ve talked before about the infantilization of the youth here. Almost every 20-year-old I meet here seems to have the emotional maturity of, say, a 15 year-old in the west. This despite (or perhaps as a result of) the fact that during their high school years, they are driven to succeed, with students who hope to go on to university often sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night or less for years on end, and attending private evening schools for every subject they study, including english, after the normal school day. This kind of grinding 7 am to midnight schedule is the only way, they believe (or more significantly, their parents believe), for them to score reasonably well on the national university entrance exam. Their performance on that exam will decide the caliber of university they attend (at least if their parents are not wealthy, or do not know the right people), and thus the shape of the remainders of their lives. Not attending one of the first-rank (in name if not nature) universities guarantees that you will never reach the top of your chosen profession. The doors will simply not be open to you.
By the time young people reach university age, they may have had very little contact with the opposite sex, as single-gender schools are still very common for teenages, and the long hours they put in preclude much in the way of socialization. With the boys in particular (and boys they still are), the culture has molded them, their mothers have explicity taught and trained them, that they are the absolute center of the universe, and everything is secondary to their will and whim, and amongst other things, that throwing a tantrum is a perfectly acceptable way to react to being thwarted. A first-born male is the shining, much-beloved center of any family, and this is communicated (both to the boy and to his female siblings if any) throughout their young lives.
Suddenly, though, these spoiled, pampered young men are required to join the military. Stories that Korean friends have told me indicate that the treatment of new recruits is uniformly brutal by their ‘seniors’, 
and random beatings and abuse are the norm. It is, by all accounts, a hellish experience, made more so by the fact that it requires a fundamental shift in how these young men must view their world. It is during military service that most young men start the serious drinking and smoking that characterizes so many Korean men, and during this time as well that most of them lose both their virginity and their innocence. Any pretence they held about equality and fairness is systematically stripped from them, and they are taught that the rules for adult life can be summed up adequately by the phrase ‘f–k or be f–ked’. This, it often seems, becomes the mantra that they carry with them into business dealings in later life.
So I sympathize to an extent with Yoo Seung-jun, a singer who recently took full US citizenship, primarily to avoid the draft. He has been barred from re-entering Korea, and there’s a fair bit of controversy swirling around this decision. At this point, though, with Bush-created fears of a new war on the peninsula running higher than in recent memory, there is little sympathy amongst the general population, and little concern about the interesting precendent that this government decision has created.
What would you do if your country were demand military service, or institute a wartime draft? I’m still not certain, but then I haven’t really lived there for more than a decade…
Comments? comments.
At this task, I have failed miserably. Thus the lovely background to this post. Entirely too many colored rectangles around here lately, which means that either I’d better start exercising a little self-restraint, or I’d better start thinking about moving the goddamn goalposts. I put ’em up in the first place, after all.
So my little screed for today came to me whilst I was doing my almost daily rounds. There’s a list of blogs (over there to the right, you see ’em? The ones labelled ‘Voices sweet to my eye’ are the ones I’m talking about here, although there are also a goodly number amongst the Metafilter gang and the Blogrolling list further down) that, after I finish reading, I’ve either had a good laugh, or feel like a marginally better person, or feel like ‘Damn – there’s what I oughta be shooting for here’, or some combination of the three.
The rare ones are the ones that give me the Full Treatment. And this is the point of my little sermon today. You see, I’ve found that I most enjoy reading people, at least in blogland, that I feel like I could be friends with. This is hardly a world-shattering revelation, I know, but bear with me. Some of the Voices Sweet To My Eye are serious. Urbane. Frighteningly intelligent. They give the impression that they will brook no silliness, not from a wonderchicken, not from nobody! I come away from their blogs feeling like a better person. I’ve learned something. Spent some time with someone who knows a helluva lot more than me about quite a few things, and can synthesize entirely new ways of looking at those things while having a crap. There are others in the list who make me laugh, make me smile, make me feel that I’m having a virtual drink or two with them, and the cares of the day pale to insignificance. There are still others that, through their elegance and light touch, through the way they deftly and apparently effortlessly turn a phrase, make me want to work harder at this writing thing, or at design, or coding, or whatever. I love all these folks, and I am grateful each and every day for the existence of this medium that has allowed me to share in their creativity and passion.
But there are very few, and this is the crux of my point, that combine those qualities. What I mean to say is that I am a firm believer in both the value of granular analysis of semantics, for example, and in the ineluctable modality of the fart joke, for another. Preferably simultaneously. And I find that the people I enjoy most in real life are able to exist, and in fact revel in living on both of these planes simultaneously. It’s these madcap philosophers to which I am most drawn. This may be in large part because I try to be that very thing, and of course we often love that in our friends which most closely mirrors what we perceive ourselves to be. Which is why most of my pals are inveterate boozers and reprobates.
I’m not going to list the few voices I’ve found in my travels that give me that ‘Here’s a person I wish I knew in real life’ feeling, which at the end of the day, all the crap I was talking above is about. People who challenge me, educate me, make me laugh until I involuntarily pee – who can do all of those things. I can’t and won’t list them, because you always end up leaving someone out, and besides, there are more out there I haven’t found yet. There are a lot out there, though, and one of the great joys of recent months for me is that some of them, even in this rarefied bloggy air, are talking back to me.
Although it’s slightly embarrassing to do so, I offer you this obvious snippet of good ol’ Jack Kerouac as a coda of sorts :
Afterthought : You can infer how impressed I am by the idea that the most important thing about a weblog is the links. Pfft. They merely add torque to the engine of the brain behind the words.
New! Improved! Less taste, more filling! I’ve decided to flag meta-posts (ie stuff that’s not about life in Korea) with a nice colorful box, and a pretty dashed line, ’cause I’m nothing if not flavour-of-the-moment. Starting now. Offer may be terminated without notice. Void where prohibited by good sense.
Pretzelboy, in his State of the Union address last week, named North Korea as part of his fanciful ‘axis of evil’. This has gotten the government here worried enough that the president has publicly announced “We should not let our 70 million people face the threat of war…We should ease the tension through dialogue with North Korea, and we should keep [the United States and the North] from drumming up a war atmosphere.” Living, as I do, less than 100 km from the DMZ, this concerns me a bit. I’ve talked about this before, but this ‘axis of evil’ thing takes it to a new level, and the sheer white hot rage of a thousand suns that I feel when I contemplate the things that the American government is doing prevents me at this moment from commenting cogently (not that anyone who frequents this place expects cogent commentary from me, I know).
I will note, however, that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is quoted in the above Korea Times article referring to the North as “the world’s number one merchant for ballistic missiles.” To that I would reply that in the year 2000, the US was responsible for more than 50% of global arms trading, and the wackjob up in Pyongyang was responsible for 0.4%.
‘World’s #1 merchant’ indeed.
Update : This “Critical Analysis of the 2002 State of the Union Address” was helpful to me in fine-tuning my fury.
Comments? comments.
A recent report on the Korean news has reminded me that I may never really understand the workings of people’s minds here. What am I saying – ”may never’? I can’t even understand the workings of the minds of the people I grew up with….
Seems this guy bought a car at a Hyundai dealership, and it was a lemon. Despite the reputation that Hyundai cars have in some quarters, this is actually a rarity these days. All sorts of things were wrong with the car apparently, and it was basically undriveable. 
Within two weeks of purchasing it, he took it back to the dealership and demanded that the salesman who flogged it to him replace the car. The salesman spoke to Hyundai, and they basically came back with “We’ll fix it, but we won’t replace it. Not our problem.”
The guy who bought the car was irate, and demanded a replacement. The salesman, caught between his bosses, with whom he couldn’t possibly argue, and the irate customer, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, stonewalled.
The guy went away, came back with a container of gasoline, flung it onto the salesman and himself, and set it alight. He set himself on fire, apparently in protest.
My sympathies are with the car salesman, of course. He didn’t have much of a choice in the little drama. The bit I find incomprehensible is why the irate customer set himself on fire over a car. A f–king car. I just can’t get my head around the self-immolation thing. Even if someone snaps in Canada, they’ll go on a murderous rampage with a firearm or something, rather than set themselves alight. Or was this guy just a nutjob unrepresentative of his peers? I don’t know.
Both survived the episode, apparently, and are recovering in hospital. Hyundai, of course, is denying all responsibility and refusing to assist in the salesman’s hospital bills.
Thoughts?
‘Kim chic’. The popularity of Korean pop culture, appropriately enough, is soaring in East Asia. This is not surprising, as Korean fashion, television shows, films, music and video, and software are all slick and modern in the extreme, if not often precisely my cup of corn tea. Corn tea isn’t even my cup of tea.
The TV shows are invariably concerned with love and matters familial, and seem to reach their zenith in stories of love made untenable by the iron-willed, set-jawed glare of the disapproving mother. The music, as I’ve discussed before, is boyband pap taken to its logical extremes, 
even with the few ‘street gang’ type groups, who always make me giggle with their hollow posturings. The game software tends to be variations on the theme of the real-time strategy, owing to an odd national obsession with Starcraft (‘Stah-crapuhtuh’) that is perennially made fun of in the gaming community. On the other hand, I’ll admit that the few Korean films I’ve seen have actually been quite good, and hard to generalize about.
I would argue that South Korean pop culture is seen as fresh and edgy but non-threatening not because “they’re Asian and they look like us,” as quoted in the linked article, but because it is non-threatening. Designed that way. Even more blatantly than in the west, pop-culture output is targetted at teenagers here, and it shows. The infantilization of Korean youth continuing right up into their university years, which I’ve touched on before here, virtually guarantees that any truly confrontational or countercultural elements are thoroughly avoided, or sanitized and co-opted, if they appear. This is beginning to change, but slowly. Any sort of ‘adult alternative’, in music or otherwise, is very thin on the ground. [thanks y2karl!]
Pop goes the world!
Time, at the end of the day, as a person’s most limited, unrenewable resource, is precious to me. Time to think, slowly, langorously, time to drink a bit when I feel like it and then enjoy the cushioned-by-clouds-of-cotton feeling the next day. Time to pay attention to what I do in my work, examine it, and find ways to do it better. Time to type self-absorbed crap like this into my blog, even.
Time that is not beholden to anyone, my own, privately-owned moments and hours and days and weeks, is one of the reasons I came back to Korea in August 2000. This week I’ve been presented with the opportunity to return to Australia again, to quadruple my salary back to what it was, get back into IT, work with some old friends, and lose all this glorious free time that I so enjoy. Wrestling with the decision is hurting my brain. Thanks I suppose to the (granted, reluctant) work-ethic of my stepfather, I do sometimes feel guilty about the months of paid holiday I enjoy in my current employment, and the four-day work-weeks. I can hear his ghostly voice saying in a loving but ungentle way – “You fink! Get off your ass and do something!”
I’m really not sure what to do, but this article (via rebeccablood) certainly helped me put my thoughts in order. It’s worth reading.
Update : Some interesting meta-commentary from Jonathon.
All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…
Image : Cartoon dog, yapping viciously, running at the source of its frustration, all a-slaver, until – glurk! – it’s hauled up by the tether it forgot about, and sails into the air, landing on its back with a mighty whoomp! Little birdies commence to tweet around its head, in circles.
It’s a novel and fascinating facet of this new medium (to me at least) that people can immediately call you on your sh-t, either with kindness or rancour, and force you to think more carefully about your offhanded rants and screeds. I called the guy I linked to in my last post a ‘cretin’ and opined that he represented the worst of what his country has to offer. Joanne sent me an email and asked a few good questions about why I said those things, and I’ll try to respond in public, at a little more length.
Joanne points out that the main thrust of the professor’s article is that Koreans should not be ashamed of eating dog, and that criticism from the west shouldn’t make Koreans feel ashamed of their culture, and that these points, based on things I’ve said before, are very much in line with the wonderchicken take on the whole issue.
True.
She also says, in my opinion correctly, that every culture has things of which to be proud and things of which to be ashamed, and that eating dog meat is neither, if one ignores the cruelty that is often employed in their slaughter. In this I also agree with Joanne, but the last point is an important one, which I’ll touch on in a minute.
So where do I get off calling the professor such horrible names? It actually has little to do with the point he’s arguing. I tend to agree with him that Koreans should eat what they wish, and let the west take care of their own backyard. I believe my suggestion to Koreans was to say “Kiss our hairy asses!”. 
My primary problem with the good professor’s essay lies in the politicizing of the issue, something that not only annoys the hell out of me, but happens constantly in Korea, for complicated historical reasons. He pulls out old chestnuts like the sovereignity and submissiveness ones quoted below, like (to paraphrase) “it’s a conspiracy against to Korea to make us import beef”, like “the attitude of feeling shame by eating dog meat, of humbly lowering ourselves, shifts the cause of the problem and only hinders the solution, spoiling our pride“, and “in many ways, Korea is historically and culturally among the top in the world, but it lacks not only in a firm pride and belief in a traditional culture, but also in a strong will to make it known worldwide” to quote a few examples.
It may well be because I have heard things like this about “Korea’s magnificent culture” so many times that each further repetition becomes an annoyance. When people tell me (as they do, all the damn time) that Korea is unique in that it has four seasons, I nod sagely. When I’m told that kimchi (which I love) is the greatest health food ever invented, I smile in wonderment. When someone insists that Hangul (the Korean alphabet, which may truly be one of Korea’s greatest achievements, I admit) is the greatest alphabet ever created, I agree that that may be possible. When a colleague insists that Cheju island is more beautiful than Hawaii and Tahiti combined, I murmur my amazement quietly to myself.
I understand, as much as it is possible for a waeguk-in to grasp, perhaps, that the Japanese colonial occupation in the first half of this century was one of the cruelest things done to a people, ever. The Korean language was banned, Koreans (for whom family ties are perhaps the single most significant things in their lives) were forced to take and use Japanese surnames, cultural treasures and temples were destroyed wholesale, tens of thousands of young women were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers, the litany of evil goes on and on. I understand how that, coupled with the devastation and horror of the Korean war, a scant few years after the Japanese were driven out, has resulted in a people that, considering they were dubbed the Hermit Kingdom before any of this happened, are still painfully sensitive about both domination and cultural meddling from outside. I understand that the slightly pathetic assertions of Korea’s uniqueness and marvellousness, perennially overplayed as they are, come at least in part from the pathologies that grew from the rape of the country at the hands of outsiders like myself.
But it’s time to let that go. Korea and its people are truly one of the wonders of this age, and talking Korea up in a whiny, wheedling voice like this professor does, smacks of the same tired, masturbatory self-justification that has allowed all that is bad about Korea to poison all that is good. The country is being held back by people like him, and it annoys me.
The last point I feel like I need to make is that every time on Metafilter or Plastic or even gotta-love-em lowbrow Fark that the dogmeat issue comes up, it is invariably the consensus that “Koreans should eat whatever they want,” with the proviso that the preference would be for the practice of beating the dogs to death to end. Now.
Koreans like this professor entirely miss the point here. The vast majority of people in the west don’t care much about the issue, except when it comes to outright cruelty. By glossing this, and by defending the entire practice of eating dog, which I and many others are fine with, he is implicity defending the abhorrent and evil practice of beating animals to death before cooking them. This practice, where it occurs, happens because the belief that the adrenaline released into the flesh of the fear-crazed animal as it is beaten to death tenderizes and adds more of the mysterious healthful properties the meat is said to possess.
This I can’t accept. And I can’t accept that all the defenders of dogmeat in Korea so far miss the point so badly – that this cruelty is the only thing most people in the West object to.
Comments?
You know, I love Korea. I really do, in a tangled-up, possibly unhealthy way, and it drives me up the wall when cretins like this, who represent the worst that the place has to offer, somehow end up being noticed. I have a strong suspicion that reading badly-written, speciously-argued tripe like this will push more people to blindly condemn something they might not have cared much about in the first place.
How about a steaming cup of shut the f–k up? For the sake of your country, at least.
Nonetheless, here I am, linking the little essay. Short version for those who can’t be bothered to click through : it’s another episode in the Dog Meat story. I’ve talked about this issue here and here and here and here and here and here.
This time I’ll just let you draw your own conclusions, I think. Read this too, before you do.
Two all-dog patties, special sauce…
Further to a comment I made here:
It’s being reported in today’s Korea Times that the government has decided that its incredibly successful rollout of DSL and cable, that has effectively given Korea pervasive broadband access, is just the beginning (I pay about US$17 per month for my 4 MB DSL, uncapped). It plans to have 5 Gb fiber pipes into homes by 2006. Judging by the success of the first wave of broadband rollout, I think they’ll do it.
The doomsayers in America who have recently offered the opinion that ‘everyone who wants broadband internet access already has it’ ought to visit Korea, and see the impact pervasive fast access has had here, and how the technology, once it reached critical mass, has begun to snowball, economic crisis or no economic crisis. One small but significant effect is that all the major TV networks have video-on-demand services, which allow you to stream past episodes of pretty much every show they air, or watch whatever is on the station at the moment. Think of that, and think about the endless verbiage and millions upon millions of dollars that have been wasted on failed video-on-demand schemes in North America. The Korean stations just went ahead and did it, without fanfare or IPOs or launch parties. And the services are heavily used…when the provision of data as a service reaches the level of a utility (that is, cheap and pervasive enough not to really be noticed anymore), thinking about what is possible, or necessary, begins to change, I think.
In four years or so, when the current 3G wireless network has been replaced by whatever’s next, and I can get a 5 Gb datapipe into my home for the price of a pizza, the mind boggles at the potential uses. Even beyond pr0n!
I hope by then I speak Korean well enough to take advantage of it.
Comments?
Totally unrelated post-script so that this becomes a post about Korea and thus I am not breaking my ‘rules’ : I saw a large ‘cherry-picker’, I think they’re called, today on the street. You know, those big-ass trucks with the extendable arm, at the end of which is a little pulpit for someone to stand in while rescuing a kitty or something. It made me laugh out loud – emblazoned proudly on the side was the name : it was a Hyundai PutzMeister.
I may be way off, but I think that means something quite rude in Yiddish.
Beedfack?
I think I might like Rolf Potts, if we met. ‘Vagabonding’ is something I’ve done my entire adult life. It is actually possible that we could have met, as I lived in Pusan at the same time as he apparently did, a few years ago. His face looks oddly familiar. Unfortunately, my near-perpetual state of blissful inebriation at the time renders the recollections a mite blurry. Anyway – go read his stuff, about Korea and elsewhere. Some nice writing there, and some of the best I’ve seen about modern Korea.
He says in an interview “this would have been impossible without the Internet,” which is interesting. It sounds as if he began his wanderings about 10 years after I did, and as such, was able to get his best, freshest travel writing out to the world via this miraculous inTaRweb, while mine lies mouldering in the bottom of a box somewhere in Canada, as far as I know.
I’m not bitter. Honest. If I’d actually wanted to say anything to anyone other than my friends (sporadically) and my future self (onanistically) over the past 15 years, I would have done it. Submitted, published, lived outside the moment in order to write about it. I suppose I’m finally getting started at that now. I just wish my powers of recall were a little…sharper.
Feelin’ a bit old, this evening.
I am sick. It’s terrifying being really sick, for someone who rarely is. Face of mortality and all that.
Just to keep my thousands of screaming fans (heh) happy, I’ll offer this update in the Korea Herald to a topic I wrote (badly) about in my WorldNewYork piece of a month or so ago.
I’m going back to bed.
Update :
OK, so I switch on the TV this morning as I’m drinking my morning coffee. I usually don’t bother, but I woke up before the alarm. There are women parading around in their underwear on the Shopping Channel, which must have been where SK left it when she came to bed last night.
The models are mostly Korean, which in and of itself is interesting, because 5 years ago, and still to a large extent today, you would never see a Korean woman modelling underwear, in catalogues or on TV. That sort of slutty thing was for foreign women to do – no self-respecting Korean woman would allow herself to be photographed almost! naked!, and certainly no advertiser would presume to ask. Tantamount to pornography, that. Imagine how her family would feel. Ruin her chances for marriage, it would. So, if you did see women in Korea modelling underwear, in catalogues or on posters in department stores, it would always be western women, or Russians.
I watched for a few minutes, for, uh, edification, and soon realized that this wasn’t actually a bra-and-panty ad I was watching. The girls would model-strut forward, smile wide and vacant as if they were gazing on the Face of God, and hold up to the camera these flesh-coloured, plastic, crescent-shaped objects. They’d shift their weight to the other leg, cock the other hip, switch hands, and then grin some more, all the while holding this thing towards the camera like an offering at a shrine.
I thought at first that the crescent-shaped things were falsie-related. There’s a huge market here for padded bras and other non-surgical breast ‘enhancements’. But after a few minutes of, uh, cultural research, a brief computer animation revealed what these things were actually (my Korean’s not good enough yet, sadly) Vibrators. Breast-vibrators. Under the breast, crescent-shaped, vibrators. I can only assume from the animations that the theory is that vibrating the boob at a high frequency somehow stimulates breast expansion.
Yeah, right.
Well, at least judging by the glazed, pseudo-orgasmic grins on the faces of the models, it feels pretty nice.
I’m sure I didn’t dream it…
Heh. I didn’t make the finalist list at the bloggies awards thing. Ah well, the soup pot’s only been boiling for about 5 months. Nonetheless, I wonder if I didn’t make the shortlist :
a) ’cause I suck
b) ’cause I said I’d rip the heart out of anyone who voted for me
c) ’cause I say the word ‘f–k’ a lot, in a consistently gratuitous f–king manner
d) ’cause I blow
e) some combination of the above
Despite the fact that I kinda think awards for blogging are a bit ridiculous, I feel a tiny shiver of disappointment, originating somewhere down near my butt. And, well, that’s a pretty scary place. How easy it is to get sucked in, huh? Even for a cantankerous auto-exile like me.
Regardless, congratulations go to all who are on the shortlists, and especially to Lia, who is the Queen of the Left Shore, in my books.
I suck!
I talked last month about why there are so many crosses scattered across the night-time skyline of any given Korean urban area, at least according to some. To quickly summarize, the theory is that Koreans just tend to have a great deal of difficulty getting along with each other, a lot of the time.
An article in the Korea Herald recently has inspired me to revisit that idea. It seems one of the candidates in the upcoming presidential election, Roh Moo-hyun, is campaigning, at least at this early stage, on a platform of reducing regional rivalries within Korea. It seems slightly risible that such a small country could have such powerful antagonism between ‘regions’, but it is the case. It’s common to hear people talk about the way Kyongsang province people talk, or Cholla province people behave. And worse, the major political parties, constantly splitting apart and reforming as they do, tend to be polarized around regional lines, rather than policy-driven. Roh is quoted as saying “Politics [in Korea] cannot take even one step forward and no political reform can succeed under the current circumstances.”
This is not a new problem for Korea. Although the line along the 38th parallel was drawn by the Americans in 1945 as a halfway point for Soviet and American armies to meet and accept the Japanese surrender, the eventual permanent partition was at least in part due to the inability of the Korean negotiators to agree on a path to unity. In the three years leading up to 1948 there were a number of attempts to reach a compromise, including a proposal for a 5 year joint US/Soviet trusteeship, and one for UN-sponsored elections. None were accepted, and in fall of 1948, two separate states were born. Although Koreans are not accustomed to taking responsibility for their history, it is the opinion of some that the partition can be laid at the feet of the multitude of nationalist groups and their constant bickering at the time as much as it can be attributed to superpower machinations, or anything else. Two years later, North invaded South, and failed, thanks to Alan Alda, as we all know.
For what it’s worth, I tend to agree with Mr. Roh, that little will change in this country until it can outgrow not only regionalism but ingrained reluctance to cooperate towards a common goal.
Comments?
Yesterday was a good day on the planet for me. I ate french fries for the first time in almost five months (found a fastfood joint only 4 subways stops away). I decided that I’m going to finally finish a book (it was the idea of finishing a novel that was blocking me. I’m going to write about Korea, non-fictionally, but in that inimitable smart-ass wonderchicken style – I can’t tell you more or I’d have to kill you – and the ideas are just pouring out of my head. I’m very excited about it.) I got some kind, positive feedback on my stuff here (thanks, Shelley). I woke up this morning to find an email from a publisher requesting use of some of my yammering at Metafilter for use in a book about online communities (take that, Basil Boy!)
A nice way to roll into the weekend. The keyboard will be smoking over the next few days, I hope.
Comments?