Caveat: Angry Legoguys… Oh The Humanity

pictureI saw an article (hattip to Sullydish) that talks about some study that shows that legoguy facial expressions have been getting angrier over time. This is … interesting, and utterly plausible. I would not place myself in the camp that views this as some kind of reflection of our society’s broad decline or somesuch – at worst, I think it merely reflects Lego Corporation’s growing cynicism vis-a-vis the global toy market and their role in popular culture.

I have always loved Legos. I’m too old to have played directly with Lego minifigures myself as a child. My own legos were simpler than what the toy series later became. But the minifigures came out in time for my younger brother to have had many of them, and later, my stepson had a large collection, too.

At one point, I invented some very elaborate stories about a Lego civilization called Legotopia with my stepson. I even wrote some of them down in the mid 1990’s, but a lot of those things I wrote down during that period were lost because of the disasterous Hard Drive Failure of 1998.

I recall that I had drawn a kind of map of Legotopia, which included a large city called Legoville in the center, and then various surrounding kingdoms and lands, such as a County of Towers (lots of Lego towers and a medieval theme), a Duchy of Roses (lots of pastoral Lego creations on the old Belleville theme), as well as a kind of “wild west” called Castle Pass. It was all more of a universe-creation project than it was a germ of a novel or series of short stories.

I always vividly imagined these lands and places populated by seething masses of undifferentiated “legoguys” with their quotidian struggles and triumphs. I’ve always called them “legoguys” (even the “girls” are called legoguys) – I’m not sure if the original coinage is mine or my brother’s. I made an emperor in Legotopia who went by the moniker of Legoguy XVII – as a proper name, appropriate to the leader of their grand civilization. He was the most generic-looking legoguy I could find in my stepson’s collection.

I still have a (very small) collection of Legos, which I have on occasion shared with some of my students (like the large Lego alligator that lives on my desk at work). Informal survey: I currently own 6 legoguys; two of them are angry. The picture I snapped just now, above right, shows one of them, battling a legogator.

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Caveat: Take a Rest

Last night my friend brought me chicken soup [update: very delicious] and a kale smoothie [update: not delicious, but hopefully healthy]. I'm grateful. A coworker is trying to get me to drink something called "noni juice" which I guess has some antioxidant properties. It's generous of him.

A lot of people have a lot of different ways to show kindness and nurturing. I have to get better at showing gratitude and not being cynical and negative about the curative properties of all these things. My own ideas about what sorts of medicine work or don't work and how they work are likely just as idiosyncratic.

I've been sleeping a lot lately. That's probably good.

Koreans say, "take a rest" – not really idiomatic English for someone who is sick, but somewhere in the long line of English education in Korea they've  been taught that this is the appropriate thing to say to someone who is sick, and so it's now become an integral expression in "Korean English" that I've heard even native English speakers saying..

Caveat: 칠월칠일은 평창친구…

I’ve decided to do a series of Korean tongue-twisters, in the same way I have been doing aphorisms and proverbs.

칠월칠일은            평창친구 


chil·wol·chil·il·eun pyeong·chang·chin·gu      


7-month-7-day-TOPIC  Pyeongchang[a city]-friend
친정       칠순           잔칫날
chin·jeong chil·sun      jan·chit·nal

mom’s-home 70th-birthday banquet-day
July 7th [is my] friend from Pyeongchang’s mom’s 70th birthday party.

pictureI’m not sure if ~친구 친정 here ends up meaning “friend’s mom’s” or “friend’s (at her mom’s house).” Or maybe it could even mean something like “friend’s mother-in-law”? The phrase is too sparse on those optional grammatical particles I like to lean on.

Pyeongchang is where the 2018 Winter Olympics are scheduled to take place.

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