Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog pointed me to this article at Huffpost, alleging that military-style drone helicopters will soon be used to deliver tacos that can be ordered on the internet. Somehow I doubt they’ll deliver to Korea. And Wired says it’s a hoax.
It would be nice to see the drone technology used in a manner less destructive of human life than our current Space Emperor‘s usages.
I just watched a movie called “Colossus: The Forbin Project.” It’s a Strangelovesque, understated science-fiction movie from 1970. It’s not quite as over-the-top satirical as Dr Strangelove – It’s more subtle, and perhaps more dystopian… or utopian – depending on how much stock you own in Google Corp., Facebook, and their brethren. Rather than waiting for me to try to explain that joke, I recommend you watch the movie.
In one of my classes, we were discussing the fact that English has a plethora of vocabulary terms for young animals:
cat – kitten
lion – cub
goat – kid
pig – piglet
duck – duckling
etc.
Then I asked, “so what’s the term for a baby dog?”
All Koreans know the word “puppy,” but they don’t necessarily use it, semantically, as in English – it seems to just mean a cute dog (admittedly English can do the same thing, too). I assumed someone could think of this word, though.
Without even a pause, however, a bold seventh-grader raised his hand.
“Yes?” I said.
“Son of a bitch.”
Brilliant. I laughed for a few minutes.
Unrelatedly, a picture of the Ilsan power generation plant, on the east end of town, taken from standing across the street from the Costco. I was struck by the stark tree and the grey scudding clouds. The picture isn’t that good, though. Just random.
This is Gyeongtae’s dancing robot. I like it.
…Not the space agency: the hip hop muscial collective. It stands for “North America/South America.” Very inclusive.
What I’m listening to right now.
N.A.S.A. (feat. David Byrne, Chali 2na, Gift of Gab, Z-Trip), “The People Tree.”
I originally started watching these N.A.S.A. videos for the surreal animation – they’re all very interesting, each different, mostly creepy, but well-done. So don’t watch just this one video – there are lots of incredible videos. Note, however – all of these videos have vignettes in them that would qualify as thematically NSFW.
But I really like the music, too.
Here are some other videos I liked.
N.A.S.A. “Watchadoin.”
N.A.S.A. “Strange Enough.” This video doesn’t seem very well connected with the song, but maybe I just don’t understand the song.
N.A.S.A. “Money.”
N.A.S.A. “O Pato.” “O Pato” translates as “The Duck” from Portuguese.
남의 떡이 커 보인다
other-person-GEN rice-cake-SUBJ is-big looks
Another person’s rice cake looks big[ger].
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. This is true. But I can never figure out if I even want grass or not. So to speak.
I do “telephone teaching” sometimes, with the elementary students. Not very many, but about a half-dozen a week or so. I have some rules about how this works, since I designed the concept and suggested it as a way to build goodwill from parents (parents love the telephone teaching because they get to see their child actually using English on the phone – it’s a demonstration of the hagwon’s commitment to the students). So really, the telephone teaching is a sort of marketing gimmick more than it’s a valid pedogogical technique.
And it’s true that most of the students are pretty low ability. One thing that I do is that I ask the student to draw a picture based on something we’ve attempted to talk about. The conversations are pretty simple: “What do you like? What are you doing right now? What will you do this weekend?” Anyway, I tell them to draw something and present it to me the next time I see them. It’s a sort of comprehension test, too, then, since if I get the wrong picture (or no picture), I know they haven’t understood.
Jeonghyeon drew for me a Purple Cat and Yellow Lion, based on telephone instructions, on some scrap paper. She presented it to me yesterday, proudly.
What I’m listening to right now.
Madonna, “Frozen.”
I distinctly remember when this song came out, in 1998. I remember I was sitting in the Burger King in Craig, Alaska. The video and song came on, on the TV in the restaurant. It was raining outside. It’s always raining in Craig, Alaska. It’s weird how some songs associate to such vivid memories.
There's a really interesting article from the NYT about the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. I've believed this at some weird intuitive level since I was a teenager, and I made this weird half-hearted vow to spend my life learning languages. I haven't actually done very well. I've learned tiny bits of a lot of languages – but althought I've studied at some academic level about 20 languages, for most I've only done a semester or even less. I've only reached actual fluency in one other language (Spanish). Then, in descending order, I might list French, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese… where I have some rudimentary survival ability. My desire for and interest in languages is obviously much stronger than my mental capacity and/or my actual deep-seated motivation to learn them. I nevertheless believe one of the greatest and most lasting gifts we can give children is 'another language.'
I was collateralized once before – in the advertising sense, where my image got included in advertising material. It doesn’t bother me.
I like the picture this time – I’m deploying my alligator.
There’s a write up in an Ilsan area “trade publication” of some kind, about the hagwon biz. There’s a picture of the cover of the magazine, at right. The title is “학부모를 위한 최고의 명문학원 가이드,” which would roughly translate as Guide for Parents to the Best Hagwon [after-school academies] in Ilsan. The magazine is distributed at public school parent meetings.
For some reason that our boss doesn’t understand, Karma English Hagwon is the first write-up in the guide. This is extremely lucky, from an advertising perspective. There’s a two page write up on Karma Academy, with yours-blogging-truly, alligator to hand, on the second page.
Here’s a scan of the two pages. You can see our entire staff (yes, it’s a small hagwon). There were a bunch of children down the hall behind me yelling when we took the picture – because they were all in their classrooms unsupervised. Very exciting moment.
The picture of me with the alligator is slightly ironic – because that is perhaps my single most difficult student there, facing the alligator. You can click the below image if you wish to embiggen it.
One of my students called me 할아범탱이 [harabeomtaengi]. I didn’t really know what this meant, but I could guess it was related in some way to 할아버지 [harabeoji = grandfather, old man]. I asked my colleagues later what it meant, and they said it’s kind of an informal way of saying grandpa that can be either condescending or affectionate, depending on context. I would guess since it was coming from a second grader, it’s more likely to be the latter than the former. I’ve decided the best idiomatic translation would be a word like “gramps.”
I confess that, as has happened before, it’s really disconcerting if not downright depressing to be called “gramps,” regardless of context or language. I’m only 46.
It’s the gray hair, I would guess. And receding hairline. The fact that Korean men universally dye their hair in middle age and late middle age means that only genuinely really old men have gray hair. So that sets the cultural context.
I think I want to join a monastery.
"You can't just walk away from your responsibilities because you made a mistake." – Captain Janeway, in a homily delivered to the character Neelix at the end of the episode "Fair Trade" (Star Trek: Voyager, Season 3, Episode 13). That's so Korean. Or something. But the point is, I was watching that episode, somewhat listlessly (it's really a pretty dumb episode, and not that well conceived or written), and that line just jumped out and grabbed me.
I've been struggling with a strong desire to "flee." To give up on the Korean project and go do "something else" with my life. It was very clear that the situation down in Yeonggwang County, last year, wasn't sustainable, but there is no objective reason why this situation here isn't sustainable. They've in no way affronted my basic humanity in the way that was almost routine at Hongnong Elementary, and the work itself isn't impossible, and it's sometimes fulfilling. So am I wanting to quit just because it's frustrating? Captain Janeway explains that that's a lazy response – which I already know (knew).
I had a rather uncomfortable conversation with my boss today. I tried to remain humble, and explain that I was hurt by his remarks last Friday. He continued to make some rather broad accusations regarding my "tone" and "mood" – which may, in fact, be somewhat valid – but I still resented them. I resisted getting angry, though, this time. I need to make changes in my life. But the changes required are mostly on the inside, not on the outside. There is therefore no valid reason to be listening to the man in my head yelling "abandon ship! abandon ship!"
More on this theme later. No doubt.
On the matter of Star Trek, I've probably said it here before, but one should never, ever lose track of one essential fact: none of the "rubber forehead" aliens that inhabit the trekkiverse are so alien to the human culture of the Federation (AKA Americans) as the Koreans in 2000 AD.
So… here I am: a Vulcan in voluntary exile on the Klingon homeworld… it's year 5. How's it going?
Christopher Walken reads Where The Wild Things Are – most excellently. Actually, as some commenters at the youtube have observed, it’s probably not actually Christopher Walken, but someone doing a pretty good impression. That’s OK. It’s funny and well-done.
I have a lot of work to do. I’m descending into the workaholism I associate with states of denial.
This may be the world’s coolest bookstore. I saw a mention of it, with pictures, at the My Modern Met website.
"Individual o colectiva, la juventud necesita creerse, a priori, superior. Claro que se equivoca, pero éste es precisamente el gran derecho de la juventud: tiene derecho a equivocarse impunemente." – José Ortega y Gasset, filósofo español.
En trabajar como maestro de jovenes, creo que debo siempre recordarme de este pensamiento.
엎드려 절 받기
face-down bow receive-GER
[…like] receiving a bow [while?] face-down.
This means receiving a courtesy such as a bow and disregarding or ignoring it, according to the proverb guide I found. I suspect I make a lot of mistakes with this type of thing in Korea – the rules are so different from how courtesy normally works in Western culture, although I sometimes think they’re not as different as we think they are – they just seem really different.
I’m feeling really down. I’m engaging in major escapism, playing a game on my computer and ignoring reality.
I had a bad, bad day. On top of a pretty crappy week.
I've been feeling really lousy about my teaching ability. And today, I got in an argument with my boss. Nominally, it was about the fact that I have this very low-ability 6th grader who has been placed into a class of slightly higher-ability 2nd through 4th graders. My concern is that – given Korean social dynamics, especially – he's setting a really bad example to the younger students. And frankly, I personally have no idea how to control him, or what to do with him.
But it turned into an argument about me complaining "all the time." I don't think I complain all the time. So that made me angry, that he would accuse me of that. And then the last straw was when my boss said something to the effect of, "well, it's the job of a good teacher to manage this kind of situation." The obvious implication was that, in complaining about this situation and insisting it was insoluable within the classroom, I was… a bad teacher.
This is not something I take well, even on good days. But in the light of my recent insecurities regarding my teaching, it was a brutally unpleasant blow.
I've been toying with the possibility that I may not renew at Karma, despite everything I've said in the past, and despite my intense desire to remain in Korea. This was a further nudge in that direction. Leaving Karma would be a big decision, not to be made on a whim. I have to realize that, all said and done, it's the best job I've had since coming to Korea, and one of the best jobs I've had, in general. It's really mostly my own insecurities, along with my frustration with a feeling of "stasis" in the non-work-aspects of my life, that are driving this desire… this restlessness.
It's not a restlessness to travel. Even a year after I made a renewed commitment, last March, to never "travel" alone, again (in the touristic sense, I mean), I'm still steadfastly uninterested in being a wanderer, anymore. I have a huge level of a weird kind of comfort with my corner of the world, and if I were to leave Karma, that corner would be hugely destabilized – I can't say I would feel anything but dread about that. It would probably result in my returning to the US, because if I can't be satisfied with the "best job" in Korea, my prospects for other Korean jobs would be quite poor. Returning to the US has about the same level of appeal for me as entering a mental hospital – given the US media's self-portrait, as seen from here, my home-country is going patently off the deep end.
The fact is, though… I'm becoming painfully disillusioned with respect to my teaching ability, these days. I like teaching. I love the children, I get so much from them. But if I can't be a decent teacher, then… for everyone's good, I should get out of it.
하늘에서 별 따기
sky-ABL star pick-GER
[…like] picking stars from the sky
Which is to say, trying to do something impossible. Pretty self-explanatory. I’ve not been very consistent in how I mark (terminologically speaking) word endings – I use so many different reference sources, and there’s certainly no consensus among those sources. I sometimes think of the -에서 ending as an ablative or simply “lative” case for nouns. And there is definitely something gerund-like in the -기 ending for verbs. Hence my choices for today, above.
The sky is overcast. It might rain later.
I have a really smart cohort of middle-schoolers. For our English listening-skills class, we use one of the highest level iBT (internet-based TOEFL / Test of English as a Foreign Language) test-prep textbooks. The topics on the actual TOEFL are often similar to the content of college-level coursework, and thus we end up talking about some pretty advanced material: geology, biology, 19th c. American literature, etc.
Today, we were talking about astrophysics. I was trying to explain Hawking Radiation, despite not being very clear on it, myself. The listening passage was one of those simulated college lectures. It was talking about XRay telescopes. One of my students was more clear on the issues than I was – XRay telescopes must be deployed in space, he noted. Like I said, these students are very smart.
Yesterday in one of my elementary classes, we were playing a game. One of the 4th grade boys was so excited that when he raised his hand, he fell out of his chair. It was quite comic – it had the appearance of someone yanking up his arm so hard that he flew into the air and landed on the floor, but he did it on his own. The other kids laughed, and so he hammed a little bit after that.
The other kids began joking around (in Korean) that he was like a broken machine or toy, and someone said he was 중국산 (chung-guk-san = “product of China”). This was humorous, too. We all laughed. For the rest of the class, we had a little meme going, where anytime someone made a mistake, there would be a chorus of “중국산!” [Product of China]. I guess it was funny – it shows that China’s reputation for mass-produced crap is not just confined to the US.
I am going to join those in the interwebs eulogizing the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition – after 244 years, it’s going online-only.
I actually own a print edition of Britannica. I don’t have it with me here in Korea, obviously – it’s in storage, with my 4 or 5 thousand other books. It’s not exactly a recent edition. It’s 1950, I think – I bought it, used, from a Salvation Army thrift store in Minneapolis. I would estimate probably read about 40% of it.
Reading encyclopedias is an old hobby, for me. We had a World Book Encyclopedia when I was a child, which I’m fairly certain I read from A to Z when in my pre-teens – but not in order (which is why I’m not really certain if I read the whole thing). One thing I miss about paper encyclopedias, when using Wikipedia (which I also love, nevertheless), is the ability to just keep reading: the article following the one you’d come to the encyclopedia for, and the one following that, and the one after that. This is not, in fact, something that’s not possible with Wikipedia – it’s actually only a design choice, that could be easily remedied, by adding prominent (or not-so-prominent) “next article” and “previous article” buttons to each Wikipedia page. But they choose not to do that – and it’s a loss, in my opinon. Nevertheless, I had another habit with my paper encyclopedias that’s quite easy to simulate with Wikipedia: I would take down a volume at random, and open it to a random page, and begin reading; Wikipedia’s “random article” button provides the same result. I use it many times every time I’m online.
A while back I began writing a blog entry about my weird relationship with Wikipedia. At the time, I wanted to focus on why it is I don’t write for Wikipedia anymore. I used to. I had some writing associated mostly with geography topics, and even originated a few articles in English Wikipedia on Mexican towns and municipalities. The short answer as to why I quit writing for Wikipedia is that I’m lazy – their standards for reference and citation grew gradually more stringent than I was willing to work with. But the long answer (or rather, the psychologically more insightful answer) is that I got tired of writing what I thought were well-referenced and well-cited articles and having others changing what I’d written beyond recognition. So I’m happy at this point to read other people’s writing. I’ve become a passive consumer of the output of egos less fragile than my own.
To return to the loss of the print edition of Britannica – I think it’s a little bit sad, because of my history with encyclopedias. But I understand it, and I’m not going to launch into a luddist lament. I think that technologically, we’re not far off from where we can turn any electronic content into a paper book whenever we have the urge to have a paper book – there are already automatic book-publishing devices out there (see this recent article and picture below).
They (who? scientists…) are building cyborg snails, according to this article. This is very interesting.
El grupo mexicano Cafe Tacvba siempre era un favorito. Tienen una canción sobre el tema de abducciones de extraterrestres que se llama “El aparato.” Mientras caminaba a casa esta noche, salió la canción en mi mp3. Miraba hacia el cielo, y ví unas luces detrás de los altos edificios, en el cielo coreano…
Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.
Café Tacvba, “El aparato.”
La letra:
Ayyyy
Que hombre que maneja el aparato
cuando voltié lo tenía arriba
es una luzAlgun tiempo me dejó inmóvil
solo me quedó el zumbido
de la luzLo escuchaba en mi cabeza
en lengua extraña me hablaba
pero entendíLo juro que no había tomado
solo estaba encandilado
la hora perdíAy yo sé que vendrá por mi aay
y me llevará a un jardín aayyAyyyy
cuando me encontré con Pablo
fue que me contó esta historia
no le creíEso fue algunos meses
desde entonces que no lo vemos
mas por aquíYa no se ni que pensar
desde que llegó una carta
del hospitalPablo tiene quemaduras
y ceguera permanente
no quiere hablarAy yo sé que vendrá por mi aay
y me llevará a un jardín aayyAy yo sé que vendrá por mi
y me llevará a un jardín aayy
눈엣 가시
eye-LOC thorn
A thorn in the eye.
This means the same as English’s “pain in the ass,” roughly. I was very proud to recognize the meaningless epenthetic -ㅅ on the LOCative case ending -에. I wonder whether it’s etymological – a typical linguist’s type of question...
I have two students who are sisters. The younger goes by the English name Sally and is in one of my lowest elementary-level classes, and the older goes by Emily and is in my most advanced middle school class.
Today Sally drew a picture to accompany some practice/review material that I had put together in a “comics frame.” I really like the picture that she drew, just because it’s really cute… and in my subjective opinion, it shows that Sally really, really looks up to her older sister – it shows in how the two figures are drawn, it shows in the fact that she decided to use herself and her sister in an otherwise free exercise (I gave them no instructions about who should be saying these things to each other).
Anyway… there’s no broader pedagogical intent in my posting this here. I just like the picture. The little dogs are very cute.
Meanwhile, what I’m listening to right now.
소녀시대, “소녀시대 (노래).” Girls’ Generation (KPop girl-group), self-titled song from self-titled song.
Here’s the lyrics.
태연: 날 아직 어리다고 말하던 얄미운 욕심쟁이가
서현: 오늘은 왠일인지 사랑해 하며 키스해 주었네
윤아: 얼굴은 빨개지고 놀란눈은 커다래지고
써니: 떨리는 내입술은 파란빛깔 파도같아
티파니: 너무 놀라버린 나는 아무말도 하지못하고
제시카: 화를 낼까 웃어버릴까
제시카,태연: 생각하다가 (yeah!)모두: 어리다고 놀리지 말아요 수줍어서 말도 못하고
어리다고 놀리지 말아요 스쳐가는 얘기뿐인걸유리: 날 아직 어리다고 말하던 얄미운 욕심쟁이가
효연: 오늘은 왠일인지 사랑해 하며 키스해 주었네
수영: 너무 놀라버린 나는 아무말도 하지못하고
태연: 화를 낼까 웃어버릴까
태연,제시카: 생각하다가모두: 어리다고 놀리지 말아요 수줍어서 말도 못하고
어리다고 놀리지 말아요 스쳐가는 얘기뿐인걸제시카: 조금은 서툰 그런 모습도 어쩜 그대 내맘을 흔들어 놓는지
태연: woo~ 바보같은맘 나도 모르겠어
모두: 그저 이맘이 가는 그대로
윤아: 어리다고 놀리지 말아요
제시카: woo~ 날모르잖아요
수영: 어리다고 놀리지 말아요모두: 어리다고 놀리지 말아요 (태연: 놀리지말아요)
수줍어서 말도못하고
어리다고 놀리지말아요 (제시카: 놀리지말아요)
스쳐가는 얘기뿐인걸 (Yeah!)모두: 어리다고 놀리지말아요 (티파니: 난 모르잖아요)
수줍어서 말도 못하고 (태연: 말도 못하고)
어리다고 놀리지 말아요 스쳐가는 얘기뿐인걸
어리다고 놀리지 말아요
I recently saw the first episode of a show called Portlandia. It has a bit of a Seinfeldian vibe, in the abstract, but cross-pollinated by a lot of hippies and hipsters and other hip-related-objects. I've never lived in Portland, but I grew up in a kind of rural extension of Portland's culture-sphere known as Humboldt County, California. The show is an utter exaggeration, but the germ of the cultural factors parodied in the show is to be found in Humboldt, there's no doubt.
What I'm listening to right now.
Portlandia, "Dream of the 90's." Arguably, this video is NSFW – for semantic content.
Incidentally, I think I recognize that neighborhood in LA where they're walking around, in the video.
Petals
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.
What I’m listening to right now.
Little Dragon, “Twice.” I guess it’s a trailer (or pilot) for a film to be entitled “Drömmar Från Skogen,” too. I like the video.
I’ve been spending a great deal of time on visual arts websites like my modern met or empty kingdom. I love sites like these.
I’m not sure what I’m doing or looking for, exactly. I have certain vague aspirations in the field of visual arts, undeniably, but they’ve been largely dormant. I find striking images or ideas on these sites, and enjoy the variety of them. Just as an almost random sample, here below is a graphic image I rather liked for its visual simplicity and yet difficult-to-understand referentiality, by an artist named Aaron Hogg.
OMG flashbacks.
I was walking around Ilsan near Juyeop subway station, and heard a man advertising Yeonggwang Gulbi on a loudspeaker. This gave me flashbacks to last year, when I lived in Yeonggwang. Here’s a picture of his truck.
It says Yeonggwang Beopseongpo Gulbi on it – Beopseongpo was the next town over from Hongnong, where I taught at the elementary school. Weird to run across this in Ilsan.
Siempre me han gustado los aforismos. Hoy encontré una colección de aforismos del escritor chileno Vicente Huidobro. Algunos sobresalientes:
Las creencias religiosas tienen como origen la ley del menor esfuerzo.
..
Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente la sociedad actual no sea comunista.
Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente el comunismo, no sea anarquista.
..
En nombre del Arte.
En nombre de la Belleza.
En nombre de la Verdad.
En nombre del Orden.
En nombre de la Ley.
En nombre de la Bondad.
En nombre del Deber…
Palabras, palabras.
Finalmente:
No hay amor ilegítimo.
[Imagen: Huidobro por Picasso.]
How many optimists does it take to change a light bulb?
Who says it’s dark?
