I am listening to A Prairie Home Companion, Saturday night broadcast on MPR (which I listen to at 8 AM Sunday, over here west of the date line). There's a skit retelling of "The Ugly Duckling." Lots of good duck puns. The best: "All these duck doctors are quacks if you ask me."
Category: Found Online
Caveat: Knees, Toes and Monkeys
I have been discovering how much fun the younger students have with “TPR songs” – “TPR” is an acronym for “total physical response” which is a rather grandiosely-named language-teaching methodology which basically means “have kids move around because it activates their learning.” I’ve always been a believer in this – although I was always personally a very visual learner, I know there are kids who learn better when material is connected to movement (kinesthetic learners). So TPR songs just means songs where there are physical actions that the kids can do.
I’ve been going out into youtubeland and finding good videos to show the kids. Some are more successful than others. Here are two that have been by far the two most popular so far. I have that CJ version of “5 little monkeys” stuck in my head, and the every time I see a first grader now, she or he will say “teacher! knees and toes!”
Caveat: Vote for this guy.
I thought this was pretty funny.
Caveat: Only Funny For Computer Nerds
xkcd is still one of my most reliable destinations for humor:
Caveat: Steampunkish (Punk Optional)
Pretty awesome:
Caveat: Corea, Colbertized.
Thanks to fellow Jeollanam teachers Sam and Matt (who I met at orientation in April) for pointing out this clip in facebookland. I couldn’t resist embedding it here – especially given Rain came up in this blog just two posts ago. Cool. Funny. Funnycool.
[UPDATE 2024-04-18: There used to be an embedded video here, but that link rotted some time in history, and I have no replacement.]
Caveat: “God’s Right”
This cartoon summarizes, perfectly, my feelings about the immigration debate.
When those who oppose immigration, legal or illegal, have each taken the time and made the effort to learn at least one Native American language, and have considered the merits of Native American spirituality and culture and “walked a mile in their shoes,” only then will I take their arguments about the need to “control” immigration, and their sanctimonious arguments about “rule of law,” at all seriously.
Until then, I think Herman Melville (160 years ago!) summed up the only, truly ethical stance on immigration quite succinctly, when he wrote: “If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.”
Period.
Caveat: bp cares
So now that I have some internets, I’ve been doing some surfing around.
There’s a guy who goes by the nom-de-twit of Leroy Stick, who is apparently behind the fake BP PR tweets on twitter that have been such a hit. A sampling:
Not only are we dropping a top hat on the oil spill, we’re going to throw in a cane and monocle as well. Keeping it classy.
I found his press release on Huffington Post, and he actually seems pretty smart. I really like the following line:
You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions.
This is brand management 101 – and it’s why 90% of marketing people don’t get it. And why the remaining 10% of marketing people are the secret masters-of-the-universe behind the magic of ethical capitalism, by functioning as the watchdogs that keep businesses honest. And it’s why I don’t believe that marketing as a profession is a bad thing. It can be – and often is – a bad thing. But it can also be right up there with saving the world. Too bad BP doesn’t seem to have any of those types of marketing geniuses on staff.
Caveat: English Teachers
A person dies and goes to Heaven. St Peter asks, "Who is it?" The person replies, "It is I." St Peter says, "Go to Hell, we already have enough English teachers."
Caveat: Curses! It’s Carl Kwan!
I have some time to kill, sitting in my classroom, and not yet assigned classes. It’s nice to have the time to adjust – so much better than the hagwon way of throwing you into the deep end on the first day. But I can’t work on my blog, because the school’s internet filter blocks my blog-host’s IP address. So I turn to Carl Kwan, to kill some time.
The orientation I attended last week was pretty good. Well-designed, well-paced, with good presenters. But another aspect of working as a pet foreigner for the public schools system in Korea is that the central Education Ministry can come up with some ill-conceived rules, requirements, and initiatives. I’m suffering from one of them now.
They have required everyone to complete a “20 hour online seminar” series about teaching as a foreigner in the public schools. I think it might have once been a good idea – but the badly designed/written curriculum, combined with a stunningly irritating presenter, make the actual completion of the series of videos and quizzes excruciating. Carl Kwan, the Chinese-Canadian presenter, likes to say his own name. I suppose that can be an effective schtick with students, but it gets old fast. And he loves the word “um” – which I very much doubt is effective with English learners.
Well, anyway. Here’s a screenshot of the now infamous (in my mind, at least) Carl Kwan.
Caveat: Funnier than it is
xkcd #688: "self-description" 
Caveat: Flaming Decrepitude
I watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show online sometimes. A dose of American current events seen through a very sarcastic lens.
There was a bit he did with John Oliver, where they were mocking the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, making parallels between old age (senators) and possible gayness in soldiers. John Oliver used the line, [approximately] "I choose to ignore your flaming decrepitude." It was a very funny line.
Caveat: Tagging on the 10
See video embedded below: take some geeks, a lot of hardware and software and do some crazy coding. Mix that together with some quadriplegics who got attitude. And go out "tagging" on the 10 freeway. As I understand it, it's a sort of "virtual tagging" that doesn't involve real paint, but I'm unclear as to whether the images are projected onto the real objects in real time (i.e. using something like an lcd projector of the sort ubiquitous now in business meetings for showing powerpoint presentations), or whether it's a matter of manipulating the video signal of the scene/surface in question after the fact. Either way, it's a strange, unique, entertaining way to spend a lot of money and time. The video is on a site called vimeo.com. I like the content on the site, but the streaming rate, at least from where I sit currently in South Korea, is horrendously terrible.
SE2 EP4 – Eyewriter Tempt LA from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Caveat: The Revolution Will Be Twittered, Apparently
"The revolution will not be televised, but you can damn well believe it will be Twittered, and then promptly forgotten as it scrolls off the screen." — Ted Dziuba (in his column "Fail and you" at theregister.co.uk)
Caveat: How much does the internet weigh?
Sun Microsystems, working with Internet Archive (the people who host the "wayback machine" which is basically a historically aware copy of the entire internet all the way back to 1996), has packed the whole thing into a single shipping container full of servers. According to the article at the Reg, that means that there's a copy of the entire internet in that box. That's pretty cool. And that means you could put the entire internet (well, a copy of it) on the back of a truck. Or store it somewhere safe. Or launch it into space for some future alien civilization to try to make sense of.
Caveat: Breaking point
Normally I have a pretty high tolerance for cute animals. But this picture found while surfing randomly online made me break down. A cat and rat cuddling together.
Caveat: Anytime, now
xkcd is so funny. That I think that, proves that I'm a nerd.
Caveat: Let’s put a moratorium on fun
"Let's put a moratorium on fun." – my timid student Sarah, when asked to use the word "moratorium" in a sentence in a workbook.
And Ellen, summarizing an article, had some problems with a certain homonym: "Ulsan asked the International Wailing Commission to allow wailing on a limited basis."
Meanwhile, I was surfing around earlier today and found reference to something I'd explored a while back but never got around to posting (I don't think, anyway… I've been blogging long enough that I don't actually know everything I've posted, but a cursory autogoogle says "no"). I've always been into abstract art that looks like writing or maps (but isn't actually writing or maps). This is sometimes called "asemic writing" apparently, and I found an interesting commentary on "asemic art" recently at a blogger named The Nonist.
If I ever ventured to be a "real artist" in the field of visual arts, that's one sort of aesthetic I'd try to pursue, I'm pretty sure.
Caveat: The news as it it was meant to be consumed
"There is a lot of news."
Caveat: The atheistic gyrovague – who me?
I'm cleaning house among my documents. Here follows another set of collected "non-starters," from my list of "possible things to blog about." Utterly random.
1. "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don't exactly know what they are!" – Alice, after hearing the Jabberwocky poem. But this reminds me of something Tracey said in class the other day: "Teacher! I understand the topic. I just don't understand my ideas."
2. Found at at https://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/07/kill-first-find-guilt-later.html:
Student Leader: In Iran we always use this joke to describe this situation: they say that a group sees a fox that is running away, they ask him, "Why are you running away?" The fox says, "The ruler has ordered that all foxes that have three testicles be killed." They note, "But you have two testicles," and the fox responds, "But first they kill and then they count."
This is exactly the situation activists in Iran are facing. Any crisis is an excuse to suppress them; their crimes have been decided beforehand.
3. I don't normally have much interest in chess. But I was surfing wikipedia and found a long article explaining some aspects of "fairy chess," which I found fascinating.
4. What is a voodle? [it's a "video doodle" … nice.]
5. Comedy Central neologisms…
Stewart: "obitutaiment" (RE Jacko's infinite death coverage)
Colbert: "the dead can twitter!" (RE Jeff Goldblum's visit to his show)
6. "Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?" — 'Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, while reading about Wm S Burroughs' life in wikipedia…
7. "not proven" is apparently a concept in Scots law, which creates a double opposition to traditional English law's "Guilty vs Not Guilty" … hmm, cf. Arlen Specter, years ago, on President Clinton's guilt during the misfired impeachment of that era.
8. Multiculturalism in Korea … in the newspaper, and poking around online: https://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2008/05/expat-living-multiculturalism-in-korea.html
9. "…the idiosyncrasies of civilization…" a sculptor talking on Canadian radio show "As It Happens," about his bronze sculptures being stolen by meth addicts.
10. "A man of honor lives with whatever he does." – the Rachael MacCloud character, in episode 4-15 of the Highlander TV series.
Notes for Korean:
부드러운= furry, soft, smooth (really! all of those meanings)
Caveat: Bing? uhhhh… Boogle.
I have been trying to use alternatives to Google, when searching things online. Why? It's not that I dislike Google. It's that I always tend to favor the underdog. It's some kind of instinct, almost. I try to be anti-follow-the-crowd.
So, although I despise Microsoft in some respects, especially their Windows consumer franchise (can someone please repair Vista? why does my computer crash several times a week under Vista, but never crashes when I boot under Windows Server 2003, and only crashes rarely under Ubuntu?), lately I've been making an actual effort to try using their newly branded search engine, Bing.
What a joke. Today I was doing some searching on something Bing is supposed to be good at, according to the reviewers: shopping. I've been thinking of buying some "gadgets" before leaving Korea, to best take advantage of my hoard of Korean cash. So I was trying to research camcorders and netbook and small notebook computers. Hahaha. The entire first page of results when I typed in "camcorder comparison shopping" were links to Google directory pages! Which, in my personal experience, are useless for actually finding anything out.
Well, at least we know that Microsoft isn't skewing results to proprietary sites. But, still… how could they allow this to happen?
Anyway, back at Google, I had much better luck finding some comparison buying guides, etc.
Caveat: “Wait a minute!”
Loading…
████████████████████████████▓ 98%
████████████████████████████▓ 98%
Caveat: Post-It Procrastination
Cool.
Caveat: Monomanias
There's a strange man who's goal is to visit every Starbucks in the world. Unfortunately, with recent downsizing, it's become challenging for him to "catch up" to all the different locations before they close. It's a moving target, as locations open and close much faster than he can get through the list. He hasn't even tried South Korea, yet even in my time here I've seen both openings and closings of numerous Starbucks just within my small range of famaliar haunts.
Well, anyway… I can kind of empathasize with his monomania, in some ways. I've flirted with various monomanias of my own, but in general I've been too lazy to really fall into them. I remember once I wanted to try to visit every single subway station in Mexico City, when I lived there. And I think, at one point, I had done it… but then they've added 3 or 4 new lines since I lived there, so I would have to go back and visit more. Once, I was thinking I could go visit subway stations in Seoul. But I really haven't had the singelmindedness to do that. My explorations tend to be less goal oriented, and more just a sort of drifting across the landscape.
Like a ghost.
Caveat: Advanced Stupidity
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice." This is a corollary of Clarke's law, I guess. I think I stumbled across it while surfing tvtropes, as I seem to do rather regularly. It's a pop-culturally-inclined semiotician's goldmine.
Caveat: A chaotic scattering of thoughts
I keep a collection of "blog ideas" that I go to when I can't think of something to write. But the list has been growing unmanageable, and most of these ideas seem destined to never go anywhere. So I'll throw a few of them out here. Random quotes and observations, I guess.
1. "Juche is the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism."– Bruce Cumings quoted by Philip Gourevitch in the Guardian, 2003-11-2. "National solipsism" has a nice ring, even as applied to the comparatively cosmopolitan south.
2. I wonder about this weird convergence of history, such that for the first time in 2 generations, the U.S. has a government farther to the left than either of its two main neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Currently the PANistas are running Mexico and appear to be closing in on a new party monopoly to replace the 70 year-long reign of the vaguely leftist PRI (at least, the PRI was rhetorically and theoretically leftist, if not always in practice), and the PAN is arguably farther right than even the US's Republicans, at least in traditional measures of conservatism. And the Conservatives are running Canada, under Harper. See also… Ignatieff v Grant (his uncle, the red tory)
3. "omgomg! my fans rock! the movie is doing great you guys! omg AND its all cause of you!!!! I LOVE U ALL! IF YOU HAVENT SEEN IT YET CHECK IT!," — Miley Cyrus, on the success of her new movie Hannah Montana (via Twitter). I'm glad I'm still not on the Twitter bandwagon. But, who knows…
4. "Crazy moms make crazy kids." — me, on the sometimes fraught interactions teachers must have with parents.
5. Mixotricha paradoxa… In addition it has spherical bacteria inside the cell; these endosymbionts function as mitochondria, which Mixotricha lacks. I knew that current theory says that mitochondria and chloroplasts arose as endosymbionts… but for some reason, I found this "halfway" adaptation that I discovered surfing wikipedia randomly one night rather fascinating.
6. Quotes from the TV series "Dead Like Me": "He's as dumb as a bag of hammers." — the character Dolores; and "Death is the one thing that always happens right on time." — the character George
7. Another reason why Rush Limbaugh lacks credibility: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society" — Rush Limbaugh, Aug 12, 2005.
8. El Kabong was just a persona of Quick Draw McGraw's. I didn't know that!
9. "There's a buzz to failing and not dying" — Stephen Colbert. True.
Caveat: Delusions
Hahaha.
Good to see a lolcat is getting thoughtful about life, the universe, and everything.
Caveat: blade haaku
I was surfing wikipedia, and as usual gravitating to language-geek-appealing things. I was reading about the Kannada language – a Dravidian language of west-central India. And there was a list of interesting phrases, and I found that included "Blade haaku – to talk at length to an uninterested listener." Every language needs a phrase that means this!
It might be a good name for a blog, too. This blog? I don't know. I definitely have the strong gut feeling that most of the time, I am, in fact, talking at length to an uninterested listener. But anyway, life goes on, right?
Caveat: Stealth Server
When I worked at Paradise Corporation (a pseudonym), in the National Accounts Department (within the broader realm of Sales & Marketing) with my boss’s permission, I constructed a database server which I used to download and manipulate a complete “copy” of the official corporate data warehouse. The server was not a powerful machine, and a full ETL (extract, transform, load) of the previous week’s data took all weekend (more than 24 hours). But I kept adding more hard-drives, because the size of the dataset was so large. Ultimately, the server had 9 200GB hard drives, meaning it was approaching 2 terabytes. There were only 6 slots for hard drives, however, so I attached the additional drives using duct tape to the inside of the case. I was very proud of the jury-rigged contraption.
The server became known as the “stealth server,” and employees from the IT department would sometimes come by my cubicle simply to admire (and express alarm) at my handiwork. I deployed a business-intelligence website called, alternately, the report-o-matic or NADA (a cynical backronym of my own creation, meaning National Accounts Data Analysis), which ran on one of my two desktops and linked to the stealth server for its source data. Linking directly to the data warehouse was not an option, because the dimensional data there was of the wrong “granularity,” which is why I’d built the copy in the first place. I was “flattening” the dimensions substantially, and then re-normalizing to the “correct” granularity to be able to support invoice reporting for certain finicky National Accounts customers.
I was reminded of my beloved stealth server recently by an April Fool’s blog posting at CNET news. The picture (click thru for the CNET article) is not unlike my stealth server, and I felt both alarmed and proud of the fact that my stealth server’s secret twin was working hard for google. But of course, no real corporation would rely on such jury-rigged hardware for mission-critical data support functions. Right?
To Paradise’s credit, the report-o-matic is now hosted on proper hardware, and most of the “back-end” has been rewritten by “guys in India.” But last I heard, the website was still presenting data for the National Accounts team, much as I’d designed it.
Caveat: The Gas Demands of Costumers
You’d think a concept such as the gas demands of costumers would be the kind of mistake I’d find in my students’ writing, but no… it was on the Wall Street Journal website. Here’s a screencap (since linking to it will eventually show a corrected version, no doubt).
Caveat: Parlamento de niños y niñas
Estos últimos días me ha interesado ver varios videos y artículos sobre el '7º Parlamento de las Niñas y los Niños de México,' que es un concurso de escolares del quinto grado de primaria en que actúan como legisladores, debatiendo varios temas de interés social y político. Estos jovenes son de la misma edad de los a quienes enseño 'Debate' en inglés, acá en Corea. Entonces se trata de tanto temática como actuantes muy parecidos. Vea…
Hay algo sumamente emocionante ver estos alumnos emitiendo una retórica de estilo de los grandes políticos mexicanos.
Caveat: 저는 위키백과 ♥
Which is to say, ”I♥Wikipedia” (roughly… seems to me, the heart should go at the end in Korean, since that’s the verb, right? And… what about endings? Should it end in “-♥요”? “-♥해요”?) What exactly does the heart stand for – the whole verb, including endings? Or just the semantic root. These are harder to resolve in Korean, than in English, maybe. Then again, basically, the heart works like Chinese.
Anyway, back to 위키백과 (wikipaekgwa = wiki encyclopedia i.e. wikipedia). There was an awesome review of it by Noam Cohen in the New York Times.
Caveat: Trapped on Planet Earth
The recent satellite collision in the news got me to thinking about a thing called Kessler Syndrome. The idea that it’s entirely conceivable and possible that we litter our Earth-proximate space with so much high-speed junk that it becomes difficult or impossible to launch vehicles into space anymore, as the debris becomes a kind of space-borne mine field that will pelt and puncture anything passing through. Humanity’s forays into space might be ended by humanity’s own shortsightedness vis-a-vis the appropriate utilization of it.