Day: May 12, 2013

Caveat: bottle+God

Kids / Quotable / The Wonders of Work

As I was correcting some student journals last Friday, I found the following page-o-doodles inside the back cover. Given this is a fourth grader, I was duly impressed.

picture

Many of these little vignettes are quite fascinating. There’s quite a lot going on.

I was particularly intrigued by the “병신 bottle+God” in the upper left. 병신 [byeong-sin] is a word that means things like “crippled”, “deformed”, “retard”, “fool”, “idiot”. It’s standard schoolyard insult vocabulary, in other words.

But here in her picture, the individual morphemes have been (mis-)translated into “bottle god”. Is this a common inter-lingual pun in the 4th grade set? Did she come up with it herself? What about the fact we’ve been reading Aladdin in class – is this “bottle god” the Genie? Was she thinking of that? Or is she recalling some passage from The Little Prince (see other doodles)? Or was she thinking about her drunk father? (I shouldn’t say that, but I, uh, happen to know… there was an incident, this one time at the hagwon…)

Then again, there seems to be a video game character of some kind called “bottle god” which may be an actual intentional or accidental inter-lingual pun on the part of the game developers (recalling that South Korea has a huge native games industry and is not above inserting bizarre bad English and also intentional puns into their products).

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Post-3000

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling

My friend Peter has adopted a convention of titling each of the posts of his new blog with the post number (e.g. “Post-1: A blog”). It’s similar to my own stupid convention of prefixing each post with the word “Caveat” (e.g. “Caveat: Dumptruck“) – as if that ever even made sense except in the rarest of instances (e.g. Caveat: Emptor).

I like Peter’s convention better than I like my own, but he thought of it and I didn’t. He’s doing well with his new blog, I think.

My blog…. well, looky there: this is the 3000th post according to the blog administrator thingy. I started the blog in August of 2004, but in the first 3 years I probably made about 50 posts, total (most of which were during a 2005 trip to Europe), so that number of 3000 has been built largely since the summer of 2007.

I think it was only in late 2010 that I made a sort of “commitment” to posting at least once-a-day, and I’m pretty sure I’ve averaged two posts a day for more than a year now.

My friends and family were visiting my blog a lot during the era when the blog was automatically cross-posting to facebookland, but a technical problem a few months ago ended that temporarily, and my general, philosophical disillusionment with the facebook has meant that I haven’t worked very hard to fix it. I suppose there might be an element of passive-aggressiveness to this “cutting off,” too – perhaps testing to see who’s really interested in what I’m doing, as opposed to the mindless link-following encouraged by the facebook’s format. It’s not unlike how I bury these little fragments of snark behind a wall of digressive prose.

Regardless, my visitor counts have been declining. This doesn’t, actually, bother me that much. My real-life visitor counts (i.e. social interactions outside-of-work) have been declining lately, too – I’ve been in an antisocial phase, as I’ve already remarked elsewhere.

What I’m listening to right now.

Radiohead, “All I Need.”

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