When I was in high school I had a pet rat. I remember being surprised by how easily trainable he seemed to be – I got him to jump and climb on command without even giving any kind of reward. "Jump, rat!" I would say, and he would crouch and look around and then jump several feet, from my hand to various other surfaces.
The rats in this video are much better trained.
[daily log (1100 pm): walking, 5 km]
I ran across this web comic.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
"Will is merely the drive to reduce dissonance between each of our active neural circuits." – An internet philosopher who goes by "Athene."
I'm really not sure what to make of this. At one level, it's pretty serious philosophy with strong grounding in the sciences. On the other hand, it seems gimicky in presentation, and I have some scepticism because of that. And what's with that voice? Something computer-generated, I think.
[daily log: walking, 7.5 km; running, 3 km]
What an awesome story. Plus… legos – how can that go wrong?
I was doing so well, this week, with my new, more hardcore exercise efforts. But today, leaving work with a pretty bad headache and feeling tired… I couldn't. I just didn't.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
This is an aphorism from my book of aphorisms.
청보에 개똥
cheong·bo·e gae·ttong
blue-wrapping-paper-IN dog-shit
[…like] dog shit in blue wrapping paper.
This is like that wonderful English aphorism about putting lipstick on a pig – the outside doesn’t match the inside: the problem of false advertising.
What’s the solution? Transparency, transparency, transparency. I guess I’m thinking about work.
Want to hear something funny? Typically when I’m typing up these aphorisms, I will run a google search on them, just out of curiosity or to see if anything interesting comes up. I will do a web google search and an image google search.
Guess what the first image was that came up when I put this aphorism in to google? A picture of former president Lee Myung-bak (이명박) giving a speech, with the title “청보에 개똥을 쌀 놈, 이명박” (“guy who wraps dogshit in blue wrapping paper, Lee Myung-bak.”).
It's a little-known fact that I once took a graduate course in the Ancient Sumerian language. It was all part of my general interest in obscure and difficult languages, which continues unabated to this day.
I had to memorize archaic hieroglyphs, cuneiform logographs and vocabulary meanings, not to mention the bizarre Sumerian grammar (the agglutinative nature of which I am sometimes reminded of when I look at Korean).
I don't remember much of it – Sumerian is just not something one has much occasion to use.
Somehow I ran across a proverb that was allegedly Sumerian, the other day, and I wanted to find out if it was just an empty attribution or if it was really from Ancient Sumer. So I researched it a little bit. Apparently it's the real deal. I really wanted to find an image of the cuneiform inscription, but my googling skills have proven inadequate to that task. So here is the proverb and the transcription I found (at this website):
A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred.
Segment A: 1.105
71. šag4-ge šag4 ḫul gig nu-ub-tu-ud
72. dug4-ge šag4 ḫul gig ib2-tu-ud
Above right is an image of the archaic style (c. 3000 BC) I mostly focused on in my class but it's utterly unrelated to the quoted proverb. Below, likewise unrelated, is an image of the later, more refined style of the civilization at its height (c. 2000 BC – and note that the refined style below is just as likely to be Akkadian as Sumerian – the civilization was bilingual and used the same writing system for both languages, which were linguistically unrelated – actually, that's similar to the situation between Korean and Chinese in the pre-modern era).
It's a few days late, but I just now ran across it.
Warning: if you are unfamiliar with Burroughs, be forewarned – you might want to reconsider listening to his "prayer" (which is not a musical track, either, by the way – this is poetry being read by the author).
Burroughs was a great American writer in my humble opinion – one of the greatest – but he was undeniably deeply profane and gallingly liberal (or perhaps more correctly he was a type of libertarian – he was pro-drug but also radically pro-gun, for example, and though he despised "lawmen" he didn't seem to have much of a problem with big government in principle).
His iconoclasm comes across plenty clearly in this short bit.
William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer."
Text:
For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day, November 28th, 1986.
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.
For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories – all right let's see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Burroughs, as a writer, was perhaps one of the single most influential in my life, though you wouldn't know that by looking at my lifestyle or my other tastes and interests. I am the junkie-that-never-was.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
In my opinion, an across-the-board failure of antibiotics is much scarier than global warming. I was struck by the observation that if antibiotics stop working, things like my cancer surgery become nearly impossible, too – consider that without antibiotics, my post-surgery infection would have possibly been fatal. So when we sit and worry about the future of the world, let's worry about this rather than global warming, which seems much more "survivable" to my perception.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
This article is why, although I love teaching and at this point consider it my career, I probably will never be a classroom teacher in my home country. That's not to say I don't face these kinds of issues in Korea, but being a "foreign" teacher here insulates us from some of the administrative "BS" regular teachers face, and, undeniably, it insulates us, too, from some of the (poorly targeted) responsibility that gets heaped on the typical homeroom (i.e. locally-native-speaking) teacher.
I like the term "Education Malpractice" as used in the article. I don't claim it isn't a problem, here in South Korea, as well, but here, unlike when I was teaching in the US, I get to sit in my privileged position as a foreigner and look the other way with respect to a great deal of it.
Blade Runner is a remarkable movie, and struck me as such the first time I saw it, which is was probably near when it first came out when I was still in high school.
Now, someone with far too much time on his hands has created a tribute to that movie: by painting a frame-by-frame recreation of about 30 minutes of the movie using watercolors, he's then run it together using stop-motion animation and matched it to the original soundtrack.
Although I really like this creation, and I really like Blade Runner, my question is this: why couldn't he have applied such prodigious talent to something original?
[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]
A while ago I [broken link! FIXME] posted about the fad song circulating online by Ylvis, "What Does the Fox Say?" It's a funny and entertaining song.
Now the parodies and imitations have begun. This is a China-bashing parody out of Taiwan. Also funny, in a different way.
Related to the "Fox" song, I also ran across this meme-image.
I was surfing a site called Twisted Sifter and found this map. According to the caption, it shows "Map of Where 29,000 Rubber Duckies Made Landfall After Falling off a Cargo Ship in the Middle of the Pacific Ocean."
This is need-to-know information. Or interesting, anyway.
Some guy is posting his journal entries from the 1970s when he was a kid. That seems like something I would do… if I had had a coherent journal when I was a kid. I mostly just drew things on loose-leaf paper. I still have all those drawings – or most of them – but they are undated and disorganized and in boxes in Eagan right now.
[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]
Anyone who has a blog has had the experience of "spam" comments showing up in the comments section. I recently ran across a piece of spam commentary that seemed almost like poetry. It's not often that spam speaks to one so personally as this passage seems to do.
In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. Cheap Flights to Auckland
I always wonder about the origin of texts like this – computer generation? non-native-speaker authorship? some kind of burroughsian cut-up of wikipedia?
What I'm listening to right now.
Sir, Elvis, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright."
Sir Elvis is a Kenyan country music perfermer. Yes, there is such a thing.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I was skimming The Atlantic website and saw the following headline:
"Nobody Dies after Two Planes Full of Skydivers Crash in the Air."
Of course, I did a double take. Then I laughed.
That's got to be the best headline I've seen in a long time. Apparently, it's entirely true, too.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
Funny.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I ran across this yesterday. Good Halloween-themed thing.
Darren Pearson, "Light Goes On."
I stepped on my little Tesco bathroom scale this morning and it said 76 kg. That's 168 lbs. I've never had a reason to distrust this scale – it was more-or-less in sync with my official weigh-ins during my radiation treatment.
Here's the thing: the last time I weighed less than 170 lbs was 1990. I passed it going the other direction while in basic training for the US Army – "bulking up" they called it, as I got in shape. Before that, I had always been a skinny person. And since the US Army, I have always been a fat person. Permanent metabolic changes were either wrought by my army experience or else corresponded with it.
I peaked in 1998 at around 260 lbs (120 kg), with another peak at about the same in 2005.
The key to my current weight is simple: the "amazing cancer diet" works! Just make sure that eating is more painful than exercise, and you're set.
I have to work today but it feels like I have a little vacation. That's probably good.
I plod my way through my breakfast, and add an extra layer against the cool morning air, rather than shut my window.
My coffee is not just lukewarm but almost cold, because I have let it sit so long on my desk. I don't mind – my mouth is still temperature-sensitive, so I definitely prefer that to hot.
I need to do something creative, but I'm feeling exhausted. I guess I'll… surf some art sites on the internet.
I found this picture. It was brilliant and funny. I hope the author doesn't mind my reposting it here.
"What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?"
… from Korea.
According to an article in the Korea Herald, a Korean family (mom, dad, 3 kids) took the family mini van to Portugal, via a ferry to Vladivostok and long drive across Siberia, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc.
They have been photo-blogging about it. Now they plan to drive back.
This is awesome. It's hard to explain all the ways that this is so fascinating to me. I think on the one hand I love the idea of that kind of trans-Russian adventure, and have fantasized about it for years. But the idea of doing it as a family, like as a sort of "family outing," it cool too, and makes it into the stuff of a kind of unconventional novel – not to mention my own childhood trekking across the Cascades or the Rockies or British Columbia with my sister, parents, Peggy, and a dog in a Model A Ford. Finally, it's interesting to see Koreans, specifically, doing things like this because they have a bit of a cultural reputation for being so, um, (pen-)insular… this is a nice antidote.
Here is a screencap of a picture of them setting out, at the Sokcho ferry terminal where you catch the boat to Russia (because North Korea – if it weren't for that, one could just drive all the way to Portugal directly). I like it because I was just in Sokcho last week.
Man Lives Until He Dies
How often do I ponder
Over what I live for?
Innocent of life as it were.
Though the stream
Empties into the ocean
I will not bend
Under the weight of
Workday cares.
Man lives and dies.
Yet I pause to think.
Like ant
Lost in building its shelter
In the warm spring sun,
I will live
Drunk with delight of living.
If man is born to live,
What should I worry?
Man lives till he dies.
– Kim Sowol [김소월] (1902-1934)
translated by Jaihiun Joyce Kim (from A Lamp Burns Low)
I rather liked this poem, that I ran across in translation here. I was very frustrated because I spent almost two hours trying to find the original Korean text for this poem through various strategies of googlings, so as to be able to include it and try to read it, but I utterly failed. If any of my Korean-speaking friends who sometimes look at my blog would happen to recognize this poem and point me to the original text, I'd be grateful and interested. I will update this blog post if I run across the Korean text later.
[Update: my friend Christine almost immediately recognized this poem and gave me a link to the original. She said they read it in middle school.
사노라면 사람은 죽는 것을
하루라도 몇 번(番)씩 내 생각은
내가 무엇하려고 살려는지?
모르고 살았노라, 그럴 말로
그러나 흐르는 저 냇물이
흘러가서 바다로 든댈진댄.
일로조차 그러면, 이 내 몸은
애쓴다고는 말부터 잊으리라.
사노라면 사람은 죽는 것을
그러나, 다시 내 몸,
봄빛의 불붙는 사태흙에
집 짓는 저 개아미
나도 살려 하노라, 그와 같이
사는 날 그날까지
살음에 즐거워서,
사는 것이 사람의 본뜻이면
오오 그러면 내 몸에는
다시는 애쓸 일도 더 없어라
사노라면 사람은 죽는 것을.
– 김소월
Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.
Cough.
I guess something I ate (or rather, the manner in which I ate something), going down the wrong way. It's been several weeks or a month since I had that particular problem.
Cough.
And as commentary, I offer:
Actually, before that coughing thing, I had a pretty good day.
Good night.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]
I don't have much to post this morning, after a gloomy evening last night. So here is something "inspirational" I saw circulating on the interwebs a while back and set aside for a moment such as this when I had nothing much to post. I want to show it to my students, maybe, if I can get subtitles or script for it.
Alan Watts, "What if money were no object?"
OK, so sometimes I just read history, fairly randomly. Not only books, but online, too – reading wikipedia articles. The other day I was surfing around articles on 19th century US history.
I was reading an article about John C. Calhoun, the senator and slavery-defender. I observed that in the picture in the wikipedia article, he is a scary-looking dude. So I went to see if there were more flattering images of him, and instead I found this (at left) – which made me laugh.
This anecdote was circulating on teh interwebs. I doubt its actual veracity, but I nevertheless found it compellingly funny.
(I'm waiting in line behind a woman speaking on her cellphone in another language. Ahead of me is a white man. After the woman hangs up, he speaks up.)
Man: "I didn't want to say anything while you were on the phone, but you're in America now. You need to speak English."
Woman: "Excuse me?"
Man: *very slow* "If you want to speak Mexican, go back to Mexico. In America, we speak English."
Woman: "Sir, I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English, go back to England."
Genki Sudo, about whom I [broken link! FIXME] posted some years ago, has a new video. Nothing really new in it – it’s “more of the same” – but nevertheless it’s entertaining to watch.
World Order, “Welcome to Tokyo.”
Welcome to the future – almost.
[daily log: walking, 9 km]
I saw this article in the "Strib," and it helps one realize how pointless our "security theater" is with respect to airline travel: a 9-year-old boy snuck onto a flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas. It's kind of funny that it wasn't even an accident – the boy did it entirely intentionally: he planned his actions and then did them, over at least two days. Having spent time in the supremely disorganized Minneapolis-St Paul airport, this hardly surprises me that he got away with it so easily.
Speaking of airports, I'm going to Incheon this morning to send Wendy back home to the US. See you later.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal… on Sunday morning.
Apparently this is a thing, right now.
It was circulating on the facebook this morning, when I looked inside. I'd heard a reference to it yesterday, somewhere, too, and wondered what it was about. Now I know.
What I'm listening to right now.
Ylvis, "The Fox."
My very first thought when I watched it was this: I have got to show this to my students – it's the perfect blend of ironic pop sensibilities and kindergarten English. I especially like the grandfather reading the storybook, in the video.
Lyrics:
Dog goes woof, cat goes meow.
Bird goes tweet, and mouse goes squeek.
Cow goes moo. Frog goes croak, and the elephant goes toot.
Ducks say quack and fish go blub, and the seal goes ow ow ow.
But there's one sound that no one knows…
WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?
Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
Hatee-hatee-hatee-ho!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
Joff-tchoff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
Joff-tchoff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
Joff-tchoff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
Big blue eyes, pointy nose, chasing mice, and digging holes.
Tiny paws, up the hill, suddenly you're standing still.
Your fur is red, so beautiful, like an angel in disguise.
But if you meet a friendly horse,
will you communicate by mo-o-o-o-orse,
mo-o-o-o-orse, mo-o-o-o-orse?
How will you speak to that h-o-o-o-orse,
h-o-o-o-orse, h-o-o-o-orse?
WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?!
Jacha-chacha-chacha-chow!
Jacha-chacha-chacha-chow!
Jacha-chacha-chacha-chow!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!
Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!
Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
A-hee-ahee ha-hee!
A-hee-ahee ha-hee!
A-hee-ahee ha-hee!
WHAT THE FOX SAY?
A-oo-oo-oo-ooo!
A-oo-oo-oo-ooo!
WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?!
The secret of the fox, ancient mystery.
Somewhere deep in the woods, I know you're hiding.
What is your sound? Will we ever know?
Will always be a mystery; what do you say?
You're my guardian angel hiding in the woods.
What is your sound?
Will we ever know?
I want to, I want to, I want to know!
Back before I got my cancer diagnosis, I had been working – on alternate Fridays or something like that – on a little project I was calling IIRTHW (If I Ran the Hagwon). I published [broken link! FIXME] two [broken link! FIXME] parts, but my work on the promised third part was interrupted by the cancer.
In recent weeks, as I've been returning to making some effort at polishing up what was to be the third part of this essay series, I have also decided that I have another, very big problem with continuing the exploration of the chosen theme, in its current style: I keep changing my mind. This is a very grave problem, indeed, but a I suppose it is a common enough bugbear for writers who want to retain their integrity and convey their ideas with sincerity.
My third part was supposed to be either a complete or partial listing of those elements that, in my humble opinion, would constitute "My Ideal Hagwon." Yet each time I would stop working on the list of items and then return to that list later (after some break of a month, or two weeks, or whatever) I keep finding that I don't agree with one or more of the items in my list, or that I want to make some change to the details of one or more items.
This, therefore, calls for a change of strategy in terms of style of presentation. I will not post my Part III here as a blog post, but make it what my blog-host calls a "page." It's exactly like a blog post, except that it's undated – which means that I can unself-consciously return and update it and alter it to my heart's content.
There will therefore be a major caveat attached to the essay: it is and will remain, indefinitely, a "work-in-progress." One major advantage of a blog is that it allows for a sort of "snapshot-in-time" effect with respect to my state-of-mind at any given moment. But with respect to this "Ideal Hagwon" concept, I precisely don't want that effect: I want it to show my current thinking, even as that thinking is evolving (often quite radically) over time.
I'm going to post it this morning, in its current clearly rough-draft state, and then let it refine and evolve over time. Thus, without further fanfare, here is the link to that page-in-progress: [broken link! FIXME] IIRTH Part III.
In the process of returning to working on this above-mentioned project, I ran across a rather remarkable blog the other day.
It's called wangjangnim.com – essentially, it is a post-a-week about what it's like to run a hagwon, from the perspective of a foreigner (ie. non-Korean) who has a background in business (not education – and that's very noticeable and fascinating).
I'm sure there are, in fact, a large number of blogs and other online materials about what it's like to run an English hagwon, online, but, in my limited efforts to find them, they are 100% in Korean, which makes it pretty rough going for me and my limited Korean competency to wade through. What abound, instead, are blogs by foreigners and gyopos (foreign-educated Koreans) working at hagwon as NETs (native English-speaking teachers). Without exception, these blogs (no doubt including my own! – I'm not elevating myself above the pack, here) are not only rather myopic (not to say downright ignorant) about education theory and language-acquisition research, but also they are in utter denial about the business side realities of the capitalist-based free-for-all that is the Korean private education system, with all its successes and failures.
My IIRTHW posts, above, are an effort to address these shortcomings, at least with respect to my own blogular reality.
I have some minor complaints about wangjangnim.com, but the only one I will comment on at all, here, is the bizarre romanazation of the Korean Language that is implicit in the blog's title: in what phonological universe does 원장님 [wonjangnim = hagwon director] become wangjangnim? But really that's just the trained linguist in me, quibbling unnecessarily. I have a no-doubt annoying punctilliousness with respect to issues of Korean romanization which is probably incomprehensible to most people. [Update 2013-10-04 3:30 pm: the author of wangjangnim.com left a comment (below) letting me know why he chose the name wangjangnim. He said "Wangjangnim = Wongjangnim + Wangja (prince) FYI 🙂 It's a play on words." This makes perfect sense and I feel stupid for not having considered this possibility. So consider my quibble retracted!]
Setting such minor (not to say irrelevant) complaints aside, I will say that from my personal perspective, this is the best blog I have ever seen by a foreigner working in the EFL environment in Korea. It's realisitc, it has a certain subtle, self-deprecating humor, it's informed and careful, and the author clearly has a nuanced perspective both on Korean EFL and on Korean culture. I'm deeply impressed. It may be the first time I've read every single entry of a blog back to its beginning.
Even if I disagree with some of his ideas about what makes a great hagwon, I cannot recommend that blog highly enough. It's deeply thought provoking and has induced a great deal of thought on my part vis-a-vis my own IIRTHW project.
