And it wasn't because of his ideas.  It was just the accent.

Slavoj Žižek is a well-known, contemporary, post-modern philosopher of the so-called "continental" school that I often like to read.  I have read (or attempted to read) several of his books, and find his thinking fascinating.  If I was a "practicing philosopher" – as opposed to a strictly recreational one – his is the sort of philosophy I'd be trying to practice.

So I was excited to find a two hour presentation of his on FORA.tv.  An amazingly smart fellow-foreigner-in-Yeonggwang, a Quebecker named Matty, pointed me at the website FORA.tv a week or so ago – there's a lot of interesting things there, and I can tell it will be a place I visit regularly. 

Unfortunately, as compelling as I find Žižek's thought in writing, his spoken English is quite difficult to understand.  It was like listening to someone you really want to understand in a language you don't know very well – in other words, exactly like every single day of my life, here in Korea.  I hope I can find the text of his presentation on "God becoming an atheist" and other Lacanian approaches to Christianity – which is, as best I can figure out, what he was talking about.

While at FORA.tv, I also found a much more enjoyable presentation by the linguist Daniel Everett, on the issue of disappearing languages and his seemingly somewhat Whorfian take on why they should be preserved.  I might disagree with that aspect, but I like that he's challenging Chomsky on such issues as the universality of syntactic recursion, and he's a compelling presenter.

I don't really trust my little apartment's thermostat, but it alleges that the temperature inside has dropped below 20 C, for the first time that I've noticed.  So far, I haven't turned on the ondol (floor heating) – it seems to be well-insulated and/or to benefit from the heat of the neighbors' apartments (unlike most Korean apartments that I've ever experienced or heard about).  I was watching the news last night in Korean, and they say (well, I think they say – there's always some room for misunderstanding) that snow and cold are coming.