Caveat: the sound of money

Ōoka Tadasuke (1677–1752) was a Japanese samurai and bureaucrat during the shogunate of Tokugawa Yoshimune. He served as a magistrate of Edo (Tokyo), and his roles included chief of police, judge and jury. He has evolved into a kind of folk hero, as an archetypically fair and honest judge. There is a famous story called "The Case of the Stolen Smell." Ōoka heard the case of a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavor his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ōoka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money. (Above adapted from the wikipedia).

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: el mundo sí es así

My friend Bob asked me if I could help him make sense of the lyrics to this 18th century Mexican musical composition. Unfortunately I don't think I was much use. Anyway it was interesting to try, and interesting to see what was going on culturally in Mexico City in the 1700's.

What I'm listening to right now.

Manuel de Sumaya, "Sol-fa de Pedro," performed by Chanticleer.

Letra.

Estribillo
Sol-fa de Pedro es el llanto.
Oiga, el mundo sí es así.
Pues saben unir
los gorgeos de sus voces,
lo duro de su sentir,
del cromático explicar,
del blando y del duro herir;
qu'en el llanto dice Pedro.
He hallado lo que perdí
del sol la vez que lloré
porque me alumbró él a mí.

Copla 1
Vengan, vengan a oír,
verán el entonar en el gemir.
Vengan a oír del contrapunto
lo dulce y subtil al sol
la vez que lloré
porque me alumbró él a mí.

Estribillo
Sol-fa de Pedro es el llanto.
Oiga, el mundo si es así.
Pues saben unir
los gorgeos de sus voces,
lo duro de su sentir,
del cromático explicar,
del blando y del duro herir;
qu'en el llanto dice Pedro.
He hallado lo que perdí
del sol la vez que lloré
porque me alumbró él a mí.

Copla 2
Desde el ut la pena mía
me subió cuando caí,
a la perdida gloria
y a mí la gloria sin fin.

Estribillo
Sol-fa de Pedro es el llanto.
Oiga, el mundo si es así.
Pues saben unir
los gorgeos de sus voces,
lo duro de su sentir,
del cromático explicar,
del blando y del duro herir;
qu'en el llanto dice Pedro.
He hallado lo que perdí
del sol la vez que lloré
porque me alumbró él a mí.

– Manuel de Zumaya (compositor mexicano, 1678 – 1755)

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

Caveat: hey, he’s kinda cute

Yeoeun is an eighth grader. Like many eighth-grade girls, she's a bit boy-crazy.

The other day in class, she said, "Sometimes you think someone is just normal looking and then you look again and you think he's cute."

I answered, with my typical detachment in these matters, "Why are you telling me this?"

"Kim Jeong-eun!" she announced, elliptically.

The other girls were scandalized by the notion of the dictator-to-the-north being in any way cute. Even I was unbalanced by this declaration. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"Think about it," she explained her peculiar epiphany. "First time you see him, you just think, 'he's little bit fat.' And you know he's crazy. So that doesn't make it better. Second time, he's still just regular. Third time… fourth time. Just normal. And then…," her eyes widened, expressively, and she went on, "one time, you look at him, and you think, 'hey, he's kinda cute.'"

With her typical sardonic aplomb, Hyein said to Yeoeun, "You need to find a boyfriend."

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: 映画に出てくるような 本物のヒーロー

I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a fan of the Japanese polymathic popstar Genki Sudo. I’ve posted at least 3 of his videos on this here blog before.
He and his group WORLD ORDER (all caps, please) made a new music video, darkly satirizing America’s twitterer-in-chief.
What I’m listening to right now.

WORLD ORDER, “Let’s Start World War 3.”
歌詞 (I’m not sure this all the lyrics, but it might be – the song’s actual words seem pretty short).

“We assembled here today
are issuing a new decree
to be heard in every city
in every foreign capital
and in every hall of power.
From this day forward
a new vision will govern our land.
From this day forward
it’s going to be only
America First.
America First!”

つまらない日々に 終わりを告げる男が
世界を救うため この世に遂に現れた
お金持ちで背も高い プロレスもできて頭も良い
映画に出てくるような 本物のヒーロー
Let’s start World War 3
We’re gonna have a party

あなたの金髪に 青い瞳に憧れ
僕らはどこまでも ついていきます
Let’s start World War 3
We’re gonna have a party

“Let’s grab them by the pussy”

Let’s start World War 3
Can’t break out from this feeling
Let’s start World War 3

“We will make America wealthy again
We will make America proud again
We will make America safe again
And yes, together
We will make America great again”

Translation of the Japanese part above (from the subtitles).

On a boring day
A man who speaks of the end
and wants to save the world
finally appeared
He’s rich and tall
And has a mind that can even understand WWE
Like from a real hero
Right out of a film

I yearn for your blonde hair
and blue eyes
Wherever you go
We will follow you

picture[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Logofication

GF Logo

I designed a "logo" for my new website, this morning. The drawing is not really original – it's a free-hand consolidation of several images found online. For all that, I'm moderately pleased with the result, as a first draft.

I'm least happy with the vertical lettering – but the constraints of the drawn image, combined with fact that the logo needs to be square, made this the most reasonable approach, I thought. I'll work on it more, at some point.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: A moment of empathy

On Saturday mornings, these days, I have a pop-music listening class (cloze passages and comprehension) with some advanced students. I have been making them find their own songs, prepare the materials (e.g. the cloze passages) themselves, and present the class, taking turns. I just sit in the back and kind of try to make sure they stay on track. 

This morning, Hyein was presenting a song. She's a meticulous student. The girls in the class were behaving the same way they always do: hyper, constantly drifting off-topic, unremittingly loquacious in utterly unprecocious ways. Suddenly Hyein looked up at me, directly, and sweeping her hand across the front row of students, she said with a matter-of-fact tone, "Now I understand your feeling, standing up here."

Somehow, this served to chasten the other students, at least briefly. The class has about 5 minutes of almost-focused quiet before returning to its more standard low cacophony. 

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

Caveat: Poem #586

An overcast dawn asserted rights
to pale entry through my window,
and leaching out my room's warmth,
grasped the edges of things
until they were seen
and knowable,
stained with truth,
silver,
gray.

Caveat: Earth-as-System

picture

I found myself distracted by this amazing animated tool called EarthWindMap, by something (someone?) called Nullschool, that allows you to surf the global climate, including temperature, winds, pressure, humidity, precipitation, and other factors. Here is a view with my current location in a small green circle.

It's worth seeing.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: more hackings

Lately, I feel like I've been "on a roll" with respect to technical undertakings. And meanwhile, my creative efforts have been falling painfully flat. So I've shifted my efforts in my free time from creative work (writing, my geofictions, etc.) to computer tinkering. This is the sort of behavior that led to an entire somewhat-successful but ultimately stressful career in the 2000s.

I decided, in light of this, to go ahead and invest a few dollars a month in a hosted Linux Ubuntu Server. In fact, I already have another hosted server, but it's on Windows, which I'm less skilled at hacking, and mostly I use it as a ftp spot for backing up my data and as an image server for my blog.

Having an Ubuntu server allows me to deploy actual websites and apps rather than just have them running on my desktop. And, frankly, a hosted server is a lot more reliable than my desktop – assuming I don't blow it up through some hackerish ineptitude. 

So I clicked "Buy" early this morning and I made a server. 

I got one of my long-neglected domain names pointed to it: geofictician.net. I hope to get other of my domains pointed there too, over time. I have a half-dozen domains that I basically barely use: jaredway.com, raggedsign.net (my old business), caveatdumptruck.com (which points to this blog), etc.

So far, all that's installed is a skeleton of a mediawiki instance (i.e. an "empty" wikipedia, basically). That's because those things are really easy to install and give a very professional-looking result "out of the box." I'll see what else I can get installed, later.

Here's a link:

https://geofictician.net/wiki

See? It's really there.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: On Canned Beans and Related Technology

I've been trying to eat more beans or other legumes and vegetable protein.

After my cancer, my weight dropped below 70 kg, but four years later I have completely bounced back to my pre-cancer weight equilibrium, which, frankly, I think is just a bit heavier than my ideal, which I'd put at around 75 kg, maybe. I'm currently about 84 kg.

Back in 2006-2007, when I successfully dropped from around 120 kg down to 80 kg, I did so through three main lifestyle changes: 1) walking everywhere as my primary mode of transport, 2) reducing stress by quitting that horrible job in Long Beach, and 3) eating an almost entirely vegan diet.

So, being vegan is not easy, and especially in Korea. In fact, I have no ideological interest in being vegan – therefore, for example, I have no issues with eating meat when out with coworkers or friends or whatever. Nevertheless, I recognize that less meat is probably healthier, and so I try to balance my daily diet toward vegetable proteins. The hardest thing, always, has been reducing or eliminating cheese intake – despite my lack of taste buds, there are still aspects of cheese that I enjoy, including the satiety it grants, the strong, nostalgic smell of things like mac and cheese or pizza, and whatever 'mouthfeel' is, I still experience that, too.

Anyway, all of that is background to mention I was going eat some beans, today, with my rice. And although I sometimes cook my beans from scratch, I also sometimes get lazy and use canned beans. The Korean market for canned beans doesn't run further than simple "pork and beans" type things, or I guess I've seen the native red beans pre-cooked in cans, but of course that product is painfully sweetened – like the red bean paste that is so popular here – I find such sugary prepared legumes almost unbearable (if you're not familiar with it, imagine some Mexican-style refried beans, with a cup of sugar added for good measure). So mostly if I buy canned beans I prefer to get Anglosphere brands (i.e. US or Australian products in Korean supermarkets). They're hardly expensive and easy to find, and so I buy them frequently.

Now, to talk about what I really wanted to talk about: I wanted to open my can of beans, imported from Australia.

Most canned foods, these days, have those "pop tops" – you pull the tab, the can opens. I don't, therefore, own a can opener.

But this can of beans I'd bought didn't – it had the old style top: just your plain surface tin can.

The convenience store downstairs in my building sells can openers – I've seen them there, in a little display with some other common simple housewares. But I have a different approach: a very "low tech" approach, that might be familiar to my grandfather's generation.

My pocket knife (a "Swiss Army Knife" as they're called) has as a can opener tab. It's quite useful, though entirely old-fashioned. You have to develop the right rhythm of push, tilt, advance, retreat, but you can walk it around an old-style can in about the same amount of time as with a normal manual can-opener.

picture

It occurred to me that despite being fully embedded in the 21st Century, with my computer stuff and my smartphone and my highly urban existence on the edges of the Seoul megalopolis, I still use this antiquated method of opening my canned food. And it's worth observing that that pocket knife is now 30 years old – I received it as a gift in 1988.

I snapped a picture (right). The can that I wanted to open, on the left, and a more typical 21st century can on the right, with my low-tech solution below.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

Caveat: No getting off this machine

I decided to spend the day making a backup file of this here blog thingy™. That’s 14 MB of just text – not even counting the pictures, which should be backed up separately (and which I still need to work on, because there’s no quick extract of those files, except in the case of the newer ones where I proactively adopted a more back-up-able storage method).

That’s what I get for 13 years of blogging.

Then, just for the hell of it, since I happen to have a webserver (apache) and appropriate database (MySQL) running on my desktop at the moment, I hacked together a wordpress instance and “published” a clone of my blog on my desktop, just to prove I still have a few technical skills. It took me about 3 hours to get a passable instance (sans local pictures) up and running. Anyway, I can say that as long as I keep my backups up-to-date, my blog is fully recoverable even if my bloghosting company meets a bad end for whatever reason. Here’s a screenshot of the CAVEATDVMPTRVCK doppelgänger I slapped together:

picture


What I’m listening to right now.

Younger Brother, “Train.”

Lyrics.

The world flashing past
So many others moving so fast
I feel my heart slow
As we go under I don’t bow down
Nothing left undecided
Upon steel on steel
Through these cuts in me I’ve
No question who was here first
Many dreams many lifetimes
Any of which could be me
Accept that I’m the one unable to move upon this machine
Upon this machine

On a caravan in motion
Alone in crowds just like me
I fell between the moments
I fell between the ideas
Cuz when it runs around the windows
Nothing here is still
All the patterns colliding
Through these villages and hills
So many dreams so many lifetimes
Any of which could be me
Accept that I’m the one unable to move upon this machine

There’s no one else, no one else, no one else, no one else
There’s no one else, no one else, no one else, no one else

There’s no one else, no one else, no one else, no one can help me now
Help me I’m stuck in this moving thing
Nothing is what it seems
No getting off this machine

picture[daily log: walking, a little]

Caveat: Poem #580

Out from experience slowly we render the concepts by writing.
Sometimes the poem appears in a billowing cloud like a sunset
gathering empire of birds: just some random arrangement of dactyls.

[daily log: walking, 8km]

Caveat: 카롱마

My student Jiwon emailed her homework to me with the following subject line: 카롱마 [karongma].
This is evidently a play on the name of the hagwon (afterschool academy) where I work: 카르마 [kareuma], which is itself a Korean representation of the English word Karma, in turn borrowed from Sanskrit, I suppose. I have always assumed this name serves as a kind of oblique reference to the underlying Buddhist ideological stance of the business’s owner, just as another hagwon down the street goes by 시온 [sion = Zion] to indicate its being run by Christians.
As far as Jiwon’s alteration of the name, I’m not quite sure what all the semantic valances are, but off the top of my head I think there’s at least two things going on.
The first is the substitution of the syllable “rong”, which is a possible reference to the English word “wrong”, which has wider semantics in Konglish than in English (i.e. it can mean a mistake, or general badness – I suppose American slang takes the word in a similar directions, cf. an American teenager snarking “that’s so wrong”).
The second is that syllable final “-ng” on the substituted syllable. In Korean script, this sound is represented by the circles (“ㅇ”) at the bottoms of the glyphs: 롱 [rong], 잉 [ing], 강 [gang], etc. – which is the letter called “ieung”. This sound suffix is used on open syllables (those ending in a vowel) in informal talk, especially by women and girls, to sound “cute”, e.g. “안녕하세용” [annyeonghaseyong = “hello”, said cutely] versus standard “안녕하세요” [annyeonghaseyo = “hello”].
So you have the negative valance of “wrong” but the positive one of “cute”, mixed together.
[daily log: walking, 7km]

Back to Top