Skeleton Warrior

2003-02-14T00:58:00.000-08:00

Farewell, sweet prince.

2002-04-05T02:15:00.000-08:00

This is tacking much closer into the Sargasso Seas of blogly circle-jerking (from which few emerge!) than I usually like to venture, but : Tom Matrullo deftly and pyrotechnically weaves my post about an oceanic metaphor for the web, which was mostly just a late evening braindump while drinking beer, into a tapestry much deeper and more vital than I could have anticipated. My thanks to him, and to Jeneane and Jonathon also, for taking my thoughts a little further, and helping me better understand this crap that seems to emerge sometimes, unbidden, when I put hands to keyboard.

2002-04-04T17:39:00.000-08:00

I'm a little surprised that few seem to be interested in kicking Dvorak's ass about his latest swipe at blogdom, or even paying much attention, really. I wonder if that's a) because we secretly agree or b) because no one much gives a damn anymore about his odd anti-blog hobbyhorse.

I suspect the answer is b).
People have decided not to feed the troll.

I did find this amusing, though :

"Show that you're an independent free spirit by adding a lot of profanity to your text. "

Fuckin' a, Johnny-boy! You got my number.

Coffee? Tea? Deconstruction? comments.

2002-04-04T04:09:00.000-08:00

U2's alcohol-requirements rider. I knew there was a reason I still like those guys.

2002-04-04T04:06:00.000-08:00

Reuters :

Garbage trucks in the south Taiwan city of Tainan will soon broadcast English lessons from loudspeakers to educate citizens as they haul away the rubbish.

"Even grandmothers and grandfathers will be able to speak the most basic conversational English after listening for a few dozen times," the United Daily News newspaper quoted Tainan mayor Hsu Tain-tsair as saying.

If only they'd start something like this here. Not only would it make my job easier, but all the piles of refuse on the street would become a wistful memory. Of course first they'd actually have to buy some garbage trucks....

2002-04-02T07:54:00.000-08:00

...They hung a sign up in out town
"if you live it up, you won't
live it down"
So, she left Monte Rio, son
Just like a bullet leaves a gun
With charcoal eyes and Monroe hips
She went and took that California trip
Well, the moon was gold, her
Hair like wind
She said don't look back just
Come on Jim

Oh you got to
Hold on, Hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You gotta hold on
...

- Hold On - Tom Waits

2002-04-02T05:52:00.000-08:00

The instant-referrer gadget down there on the right (no, further down, oh, oh, yeah...there!) has just shown me that scant minutes ago, someone reached here with Googlage : how+the+fuck+does+aluminum+sulfate+get+produced?. This is a thing of beauty to me.

Welcome, my chymical friend. Have a beer. Put your feet up. Fuck Aluminum Sulfate, let me whisper to you tales of booze and madness. Give me a few minutes, and I'll make you forget those covalent bonds, I'll sing you the siren song that will lure you into a rich and deeply imperfect world of words and bad photoshops, I will sing the body eclectic...

2002-04-02T02:13:00.000-08:00

"A-hah! Photoshop-within-a-Photoshop. Your move, Mr. Bond."

2002-04-01T15:52:00.000-08:00

This guy has got to have one of the worst jobs in Korea, I thought to myself.

I woke up this morning full of the vigour and optimism of youth. Happens to me once in a while, unexpectedly. The light of morning seems energizing, rather than withering. I look forward to the day ahead, and the morning cup is a sacrament rather than just a stimulant.

This was the mood in which I left the house. Even the chronic pain in my achilles tendons, thanks perhaps to the acupuncture treatments, was barely noticeable. I was downright jaunty, and those who know me know that 'jaunty' is an adjective that doesn't really pop up often in descriptions of me. Although the sun was filtering through brownish clouds of toxic haze, there was at least some sun, and it was already fairly high in the sky, warming me pleasantly on the way to the subway station. Zip-a-dee doo-dah, motherfucker.

The reeking pile of garbage in front of the next apartment building, whose parking lot I normally cut through as a minor shortcut, did little to diminish my jaunty outlook. There was a slight breeze, and I neatly managed to avoid the worst of the stink. I accidentally stepped in a little of it, but it wasn't terribly viscous, and didn't adhere to my shoe.

Naturally, the dawn chorus was in full throat, the old sniff-backhaul-and-hork orchestra all around me, tuning up for another day of mucous mining. This, as always, annoyed me mildly, but I skipped lightly through the multitudes of already-deposited oysters, treating it as a game. Although the scent of the flowering trees that have somehow struggled up through the broken pavement every few blocks was masked by the cloud of diesel fumes from the buses and dump trucks, the colour and shape of them was undeniably appealing.

Outside the station, I was nearly run down by a utility vehicle. It was being driven by a fellow who had perhaps overindulged in the soju last night, judging by the rosiness of his cheeks and his eyes as he swivelled to stare at me, bug-eyed and expressionless. I forgave him, as I too have survived many a hangover, even if I haven't often operated motor vehicles under their influence, or nearly run down briefcase-toting professors in the street as a result. My mood was still quite bouyant at this point, inexplicably, perhaps.

As I sat on one of the broken plastic benches on the train platform, trying in vain to see the nearest mountain through the haze, an old man in coveralls shuffled up, and began pulling the refuse from the garbage can beside me. I actually was quite pleased about this, as more often than not, the very few garbage cans one actually sees for public use are overflowing, and with the warm weather approaching, this means more Stench Zones to avoid on the urban hazard course. Then I quite suddenly remembered that one of the primary uses for those garbage cans was as throat-oyster receptacles for the smallish percentage of men in my neighbourhood who have apparently been well-brought up, and rather than deposit their little glistening bundles of goo on the train platform, instead wander over and let them dangle and drop into the cans. There are no bags in these cans. And this guy's job was to bend over, reach in, and pull out the slime-coated trash within.

Poor bastard.

The air went out of my balloon. And it wasn't even 8:00 am yet.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-31T04:06:00.000-08:00

OK, so I was grumpy.

2002-03-29T05:53:00.000-08:00

Everything is bleak.
It’s the middle of the night.
You’re all alone and
the dummies might be right.
You feel like a jerk.
My music at work.
My music at work.

- My Music At Work - The Tragically Hip

2002-03-29T05:09:00.000-08:00

Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages.
Hours of Fun For The Whole Family!

2002-03-29T03:04:00.000-08:00

New tagline candidate #1 : Abandon Hope All Ye Who CTRL-ENTER Here.

New tagline candidate #2 : Lift and separate.

OK, those are just dumb.

2002-03-29T02:38:00.000-08:00

Here Be Dragons Metablogging

I was thinking today ('oh crap, run! He's been thinking again!') about both the neologism weblog (as in the phrase 'web log') and the blogthread that AKMA and David Weinberger and others have recently been pursuing about new metaphors for the web. Non-spatial metaphors, verbs rather than nouns.

Well, this one is still spatial, and it's a noun too, but hell, I'm not all that clever, really. Note that I don't mean to imply that I've actually been reading that blogthread per se, but I've read about it, and I'm lazier than a dead beaver, and damn it, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. So, onward.

My thoughts were jinking back and forth between the phrases 'web log' and 'ship's log' as I walked to the acupuncturist this afternoon. Years ago, I spent about 6 or 8 madcap months sailing off the Pacific coast of Mexico (a tale for another time perhaps), and one thing that was done, no matter how altered our states might have been by the end of the day, was the Updating of The Log. And the ship's log, though it may have had a few asides about things not nautical ('those German girls, oh dear lord'), was primarily about minutiae, about new ports, new anchorages, new sights, new sites.

Sites. Like websites, geddit? (Didn't telegraph that much, did I?) So, connecting the dots, I'm calling the net the ocean. Big-ass sites like Metafilter or Yahoo are ports, smaller ones are anchorages, bloggers are sailboats, and their web logs are their ship's logs. We meet, raft up, party down, separate and go on our merry wandering ways. We record where we've been. We talk about what those places have meant to us. There are living things swimming around down there, deep in the darkness. There are the IP plankton packets that are the very lifeblood of the sea. A whole ecosystem down there. There are submarines and sailboats, there are ocean liners skirting the Tropic of Cancer, there are freighters plying the trade routes, planes occasionally passing overhead, and the odd dot-com Titanic, lying in pieces on the ocean floor far beneath, slowly decomposing.

I like this metaphor because I love the sea, and sailing on it.

It also resonates pretty damn well with the oft-repeated (at least in the early days of the blog) complaint that a weblog should be about links (those memorable ports and anchorages we visit in our wanderings), and is not, according to some, supposed to be a diary. I personally think the focus-power-grasshopper balance lies in the careful juxtaposition of the pedestrian details of your journeys around the ocean with your thoughts and feelings and all that personal-journally crap. The best ship's logs I've read were ones that had both GPS readings and Wacky Tales. The most interesting weblogs, too.

I am a sailboat. Ride me. So saith the wonderchicken.

Sky of blue and sea of green? comments.

2002-03-26T22:20:00.000-08:00

The world and the people in it never cease to amaze me. This sense of amazement should not be in any way confused with any feelings of delight or pleasure, however.

2002-03-26T20:10:00.000-08:00

Comments? comments.

2002-03-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about it,
Talk about, talk about,
Talk about movin,

Gotta move on.
Gotta move on.
Gotta move on.

Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.
Won't you take me to
Funkytown.

(Repeat)

2002-03-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

''Better to die than to live like this,'' Jang Gil Su, now 17, writes of a public firing-squad execution he saw in North Korea. By adulthood, many North Koreans have witnessed one; sometimes the charge is as minor as stealing food.

Fresh fruit is a rarity to most North Koreans; electric fences surround some orchards. At 15, Jang saw a couple be electrocuted while trying to steal some grapes. ''We never get a chance to taste an apple or grapes,'' Jang explains.

Captions from a slideshow of drawings made by a young North Korean refugee, whose family was given safe haven in South Korea last summer after escaping from the north and taking refuge in U.N. offices in Beijing. Here. [Thanks again, Lia!]

2002-03-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

This, via this worthwhile Metafilter thread. Funny old world.

And while I'm at it, via American Samizdat : the Hall of Shame. Not really surprising, is it, how those who raise their fists and call for war so often seem to be those who've never actually seen it?

"In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first."

- Ambrose Bierce

And for good measure, how about this?

MECCA, March 22, 2005 -- President Osama B. Laden today called for a "regime change" in the United States, saying the military dictatorship led by unelected strongman George Walker Bush "is an ever-present threat to world peace."

Speaking in Mecca at a rally marking his first year in power, the Saudi president said that "issues of national sovereignty are beside the point when the civilized world is faced with the possibility of untold carnage. Bush has long been developing weapons of mass destruction. He has announced his willingness to use them. He refuses to abide by international treaties to curtail these tools of evil. I will not wait on events while dangers gather. We must act." [more...]

2002-03-22T06:19:00.000-08:00

*Life is good. Rich, poor, together, alone, happy, sad, drunk or fucking sober, life is sweet.

2002-03-22T03:45:00.000-08:00

It's just not possible to trace the fractal-chain of cause-and-effect back to a single Prime Mover moment in your life, usually. Trace the branches back, navigate around the random events, the decisions made or just taken, and hope to find any kind of actual reason for the way you are today, the way you think, and you'll drive yourself fucking mad with might-have-beens.

Decades ago, Rob Beitel introduced me to a few of the chemicals I've enjoyed in my long and bumpy history of self-medication, ones of which, along with all the rest, I no longer partake. I haven't seen him in nearly two decades. He was found dead recently, in the snow, within sight of his home in Northern BC, half a world away from here, a couple hours away from the town we grew up in. I talked about it a bit on my buddyblog with the Bearman, who knew Rob as well, way back when. Mirrored here because I'm drunker than hell, and sentimental, and having a little one-man wake for Rob tonight.

Rob Beitel's dead.

It's odd that that should deflate me the way it does. I barely knew the guy, to be honest. He got me mind-crogglingly stoned a few times, provided me with a few stories I could regale people with, and have, at bars in far flung corners of the planet, I think he fucked an ex-girlfriend of mine before she actually became an ex, he was a shaggy, bearded, small-town Lizard King with mirror shades and a fast motorcycle.

I wonder if he ever realized what an influence he had on my life. In a small town populated with a vast array of losers and wanna-be's, he was damn near the Real Thing. Meaning, of course, that he wasn't anything like the Real Thing, but when I was young and unschooled in the ways of the world, he seemed near enough to me, damn it. Dissociated, vague, cool.

I remember an evening when I was still a teenager, the Bearman and I at Rob's girlfriend's apartment (she of the Trans-Am, which may or may not have had a large, glam-rock flame appliqué on the hood, but that's the way I remember it), smoking. More than ever before, and probably more than ever since. It may have been the first time I took more than a toke or two. There was rye whiskey, of course, which was all Bearman and I would drink when we were teenagers, and there was an insanely large, complicated, twisty glass bong. There were hash brownies. We smoked and drank and smoked and nibbled. We sang songs. After what may have been minutes or hours, I had gotten to the point where, when I moved my head, my eyes would track to follow a second or two later. This I found uproariously funny, and Rob seemed to take some pride in this cherry-breaking drug-induced first. I don't know if Zeppelin IV was playing, but it should have been. The next thing I remember was staggering around, alone and drooling, on the road to the elementary school, which had inexplicably developed a 45 degree list. I think I slept in a ditch for a while. Good thing it was summer, I guess.

Another time, again the Bearman, Rob and I. A cold night in the city of Prince George, at Rob's aunt's house I believe. One of those nights where you're not quite sure where the hell you are, but glad at least to be inside. There was fungal psilocybin, a lot of it. Rob and I sitting up all night, while Bearman tried in vain to sleep, cackling joyfully, tripping. My jaws were sore, and tears streaming from my eyes, and it was one of the most purely enjoyable chemical experiences in my life.

Yet another time, Barry and I driving that Trans-Am for some reason, Rob following us on the bike. (In hindsight, I suspect there was probably a kilo or two in the trunk, and plausable deniability was the order of the day. What the hell did we know?) He pulled a wheelie somewhere just outside Fort Saint James, and as we approached Vanderhoof, nearly 50 kilometres later, he was still up on one wheel. We shook our heads in dude-respect, took a drink, and mumbled 'crazy bastard' to one another in admiration.

He was a fucking legend in my mind, at least, was Rob Beitel. I haven't seen him in half a lifetime, and now I never will. Drugs took him, it would seem, which was probably what was expected. Sad and pitiful to die in the snow, freezing slowly, it might be said, but at least in character, and maybe that's what Rob would've wanted. Burn out, don't fade away.

Rock on, you crazy motherfucker, wherever the hell you are. Rock on.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

"Where else could a global reach consulting team, with offices in more than 10 countries, staffed by 20+ experts in a variety of fields and professions, with round the clock continuous operation come into being in under a day with next to zero infrastructure costs?" : I am proud in a preliminary sort of way to be a part of the soon-to-be-more-famous-than-Jesus

Blogtank Global Consulting Group

Something Meta This Way Comes ‡

‡not an officially sanctioned tagline. Void where prohibited. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Some settling may occur during shipment. Seek medical assistance if condition persists. Lather, rinse, repeat.

2002-03-21T04:11:00.000-08:00

"Experts warned that the dust storms carry harmful chemicals, such as sulfate, as well as compounds containing cadmium, aluminum, lead, nickel, copper and arsenic. To protect themselves from the sandy winds, people are advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed, especially the elderly and children. While outdoors, they should carry umbrellas, and after returning home, they must wash themselves and gargle, because the particles in the wind could trigger irritations in the eyes, skin and respiratory organs."

Seoul is enshrouded, enfolded, entombed, in a choking cloud of dust from the growing deserts of Northern China, the Hoang-sa, the Yellow Sand. This, to put it bluntly, sucks major ass. As if the clouds of reeking industrial effluent weren't enough, now we're left squinting through veils of yellowish dust to boot. Elementary and middle schools are closed, parents are being warned to keep their children in the house, old people are being advised not to breathe for a few days. My nose, as I sit here, is streaming, as it has been all day, my eyes red, throat afire. If the swirling clouds weren't so irritating to my mucous membranes, I might enjoy them, in the same shivery, mock-fearful way that I enjoyed fog banks as a child, staring into them, alive to the potential mystery and the sheer strange wonder of it all.

But I'm old, and cranky, and I just want it to go away. Now. But at least my students were amused when I stopped at 15 minute intervals in most of my classes today, shook a mock-tragic, operatic Shatnerian fist at the sky, and roundly cursed China for even existing.

They just said on MBC news that's it's going to be worse tomorrow. Thrillsville, daddy-o.

THIS IS THE FUTURE

2002-03-20T04:29:00.000-08:00

"Someday your ship will come in. Today is not that day."

2002-03-19T19:30:00.000-08:00

Via Jonathon and Steve, this. And via Rageboy, something completely different.

2002-03-19T19:13:00.000-08:00

Ah Korea. Even though the constant parade of Really Weird Shit™ continues apace, I find that I'm so inured to it that any response rarely reaches the level in my mind of being consciously noticed. My mental DJ, enjoying his perpetual party up there in the locked-off booth at the top of my skull, is usually busy playing a Mojo Nixon song, or some half-remembered one hit wonder from the 80's, drowning out the hacksaw sniff-backhaul-and-hork of the Throat Oyster Launchers, like some nauseating avian mating cry call-and-response, that surrounds me as I walk the dirty streets to the University and back.

I really need an mp3 player.

One thing that did stick with me yesterday was a new advertising campaign on the subway. Korea, you see, is owned, lock-stock-and-two-horking-barrels, by the chaebols (similar in some ways to the Japanese keiretsu). Samsung, LG, Daewoo, Hyundai and perhaps a score of others own everything. I live in an LG apartment building. Our TV is a Samsung. LG makes the blank CD's on my desk, here, and the soap that my wife is currently using in the shower, as well as the grocery store where we buy our food. Subsidiaries are responsible for the production and distribution of that food. Daewoo made the elevators in my building, and the steel comes from Hyundai steelworks. The huge new apartment beehive going up next door is a Daewoo buidling, and is being built by Daewoo Construction, with Hyundai machinery, mostly. All the cars and buses on the streets are Korean-made, of course, by one of the chaebol. Electronics are sold in LG shops, or Samsung shops, depending on who made them. Pretty much everything you touch or see during your day was either grown, processed, created, built, shipped, imported, sold or in some other way touched by one or more of the chaebol. Each chaebol also has an array of banking interests, and a staggering array of credit cards on offer to the public. When I say that they own this country, I actually mean that literally. It could be forgiven to think that they own the people, as well, but this might be arguable. There are pockets of dissent.

So, me, on the subway. A shiny new plastic proto-banner-ad above my head is touting the Samsung Christian Card. Big black letters emblazoned across a golden Visa card, bigger even than the Samsung logo, saying "CHRISTIAN". In the soft-focus panorama, the card lies beside a wooden crucifix, atop an open Bible. The tableau is somehow as erotically charged as the close-up food-porn fried chicken ad beside it.

Now, even though I do groove on their funky metaphors of death and rebirth and all that, I'm not especially Xian. Still, that ad struck me as deeply fucked up. Like hardcore porn performed by people in full clown make-up, complete with big red noses and fright wigs. Like the voice of Henry Kissinger coming out of my wife's mouth : "Richart, Richart, you're drahnk agayn." Like a Friday evening without any delicious beverages at all. Just plain wrong.

Somehow brings to mind one of my responses back in University to the 'Jesus saves!' grafitti that was everywhere around Vancouver at the time : 'Buddha spends!'

Jesus Saves! comments.

2002-03-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

Famous last words : In the spirit of refusing to get involved (as I have nothing to add) in all the gonads and strife floating around lately (eek! floating gonads!), and striving for a laugh or two, I present to you the dying words of two great poets :

Walt Whitman : "Hold me up; I want to shit."
Dylan Thomas : "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that's the record."

I can but hope, in my terminal moments, as I lie (-in a feather bed, on pure white linen, surrounded by my loved ones / drunk and drooling, unnoticed on a barroom floor, in a puddle of my own urine-) that I can come up with a legacy for the world as touching, as illuminating, as perfectly revealing of the deeper nature of our existence on this planet.

[via this amusing Metafilter thread]

Your famous last words? comments.

2002-03-17T03:48:00.000-08:00

SPACE GHOST: King like that don't need hair. Speaking of hair, what's up with your 'do?

GEORGE CLINTON: Oh, my 'do. Well, what comes around, went that way. And I can get around, you know what I'm sayin'?

SPACE GHOST: No. I wear a hood.

GEORGE CLINTON: You wear a 'hood? I, I live in a 'hood. You have a 'hood, yeah, but how would I wear a 'hood?

SPACE GHOST: It's not hard. I take an entire neighborhood, put it on my head and dance around where the neighborhood used to be. The people who live in the neighborhood are terrified by my hopping, and some of them fall off my head and are trampled. It is then that the dance becomes a dance of sadness.

GEORGE CLINTON: Why are you tellin' me this?

SPACE GHOST: Because I care about the innocent victims of my ill-advised dance of joy.

GEORGE CLINTON: Oh...

SPACE GHOST: Fries don't come with that deadly shake.

That is all.

2002-03-16T21:36:00.000-08:00

"There were people out the back in the parking lot smoking pot all the time," said the editor, who also asked to remain anonymous. "The IBM PC was created by people who drank alcohol. The Mac was created by people who smoked pot."

Guess that would explain the whole one-mouse-button thing, eh?

2002-03-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

Jeff at Visible Darkness led me through to this piece about the Dark Side of Blogging. (Insert "Use the blog, Luke!" and related unfunniness here) Questions about how marvellous and whiz-bang this new medium really is, and indeed how "stupid and repellent, sometimes crypto-genocidal" some warblogs can be, for example. Pushing back against utopian paeans to the organic growth of communities that even I, surly wonderchicken, have been guilty of propagating :

But when I suggested that there was something inherently suspicious about online "community," I had in mind a radical thought experiment that forces its way across this divide. Something like: suppose we took warblogs, or even stormfront.org and its satellites, as the model of a weblog "community." Should the kinder and gentler blogrings find that thought sobering? Don't dismiss the comparison too quickly, not if you want a real assessment of the medium in all its potentialities.

Community vs. "strength": Maybe I meant that there should there be more consideration of how to seek individual autonomy through community. That task might be different both from the mindset that one sees in the attack blogs and from the communal sociology of the more benign "clusters" and dialogic blogrings.

Or maybe I could put it differently this way: it's not so much that I disagree with the celebration of the positive, even the wondrous qualities of weblogs. It's just that I suspect they're living on borrowed time.

My only addition at this point is to tangentially woolgather : is it only a matter of time until Hollywood starts regularly hiring hundreds of blogtemps to fire up new weblogs, post furiously and praise to the skies the latest piece of crap opus by Jerry Bruckheimer or some other purveyor of soul-destroying cinematic garbage, interlink to themselves and a few 'a-listers', start offering large cash incentives to Kottke and Rageboy and other high-traffic blognodes to link back to the rent-a-bloggers, and watch the Google rank for their new Product soar? Or record companies to promote their wares? Or governments? Are recent, highly-successful experiments in spiking the GooglePunch like the recent one by Matt Haughey the tip of the iceberg? How soon before big business catches on, before the Office of Strategic Mind Control realizes the subtle power (if they haven't already) of the interconnectedness of blogs and begins working blogspace like the infopimps they strive to be? Before this 'place', too, becomes branded and corporatized? (Forget the stone-knives-and-bearskins, bandwidth-wasting crudity of banner ads - savvy marketers will work the medium, pimp the actual hyperlinks, and tickle Google till it quivers, moans, and page-ranks, gratefully. Linkwhoring could become a serious business. Perhaps we could form a mafia, a Blogga Nostra, and skim a little of that corporate cream off the top, broker linkage deals, extort flame-protection money.)

Of course it may become moot, if Google fine-tunes their page ranking system for blogs. For now, though, please hold my hand. I'm a little scared.

(Edit : I see that Doc talked about this, recently, grumpily, kinda. Whoops.)

This blog entry has been brought to you by the new film from Tom Green : "Somebody Kill Me Now". In theatres next week! comments.

2002-03-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Mike for pointing to Douglas Ord's work. Light shattering as it shines through a window, but somehow undamaged by the passage. The Korea Postscript (far down the index page) in particular says Important Things, I think, in a way that opens a door for me. Highly recommended, but you may need some patience if you are not sucking down the bits with a wide pipe.

2002-03-15T05:28:00.000-08:00

I didn't take this picture. I don't know who did.

2002-03-15T03:24:00.000-08:00

There was a point, not long after I finished university, and spent 10 months or so holding forth nightly, Ouzo-and-water in hand, for the entertainment of the patrons on the porch of Stavros' Irish Bar in Mykonos, Greece (where I spent some time writing software for a small hotel and making sure that the owner's VIP gun-running buddies and their mistresses had clean sheets and plentiful champagne) that I stopped thinking that I actually had anything to say. Or that there was any point actually saying it to anyone. Well, not exactly that, perhaps - I made a deliberate decision to Stop Thinking So Goddamn Much. I think it had something to do with the fact that the other straight guys (of whom there weren't really that many on Mykonos during the Season) were by and large not the Thinking Type, and it seemed to me that they were perenially achieving much more demonstrably significant levels of romantic success with the Swedish stewardesses, French public servants, and other maddeningly delightful examples of European femininity that constantly littered the beaches and bars, confident of their hetero groovethings amidst the heaving seas of Mykonian man-on-man action.

Ka-chunk - spurious causal connection made : reduce cerebration, increase fornication. But with my regularly scheduled rocket-fuel rants on the porch of Stavros' place on the nature of life, the universe, or why the hell the Man in The Moon scared the shit out of me so badly, and my almost complete lack of wonderchicken-booty shaking disco action, the young ladies I tended to attract, if any, were more of the cerebral variety, who, without putting too fine a point on it, tended to be less carnally-inclined. Or English, which was worse. At least that's how it seemed to me, sad, mad, alcohol-soaked bastard that I was. My tendency after a certain point in the evening to stagger over to the bar and do stately (if somewhat legless) sirtaki dances with portly, 50 year old Stavros put even them off. Stavros always had one or two young women under his arm, a fact looked upon with an amazing lack of remonstration by Effi, his long-suffering wife. Didn't do me any damn good, regardless.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah : there was a whole nexus of things that made me turn from the life of the mind ("I will show you the Life of The Mind!") to a life lived in the moment. Not that I stopped reading, or thinking, or even talking massive quantities of shit to my friends while drinking beside bodies of water and trying to figure it all out, during my twenties and early thirties. But I did consciously do a trade-in of introspection, bookishness, and analysis for random danger, booze and swashbuckling, and spent the balance received on plane tickets to wherever it might be, eyes closed, that my index finger landed on a world map. And I'll tell you, my friends, I had one hell of a ride.

All of this, in sub-Mike Golby-long-story-long fashion, is meant to leave a minotaur-fearing trail of crumbs to the point of this post : I don't feel as if I have much to say today. Or for the last week, really.

'Cause sometimes the habits of a decade and more well up, lapping gently around my brainpan, and I find myself saying to myself, as of old, "Fuck it. Crack a beer, sing a song. Let the accountants fritter away their lives on the details."

But blogging has been good for me, I suppose, and though I find myself logging into Blogger, ready to say : "Well, I'm tapped out. Go read Jonathon or Mike or Tom or Shelley (except she's also tapped out at the moment) or any of the other fine and fascinating folks in the neighbourhood," well, here I am, a long-ass post later, and I've ended end up talking about Swedish Stewardesses (oh dear lord, the Swedish stewardesses), and had an enjoyable time doing so.

That, from where I'm sitting, is a Good Thing. I hope you agree, gentle reader, but if not, well, the hell with ya.

(Oh, and the 'Me Tarzan, You Jane' stuff? Didn't work worth a damn. You just can't fake being good-lookin' and dumb as a post. Live and learn.)

Well, I was young, OK? comments.

2002-03-13T00:49:00.000-08:00

The Guardian : The US has been secretly sending prisoners suspected of al-Qaida connections to countries where torture during interrogation is legal, according to US diplomatic and intelligence sources.

"After September 11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the time," a US diplomat told the Washington Post. "It allows us to get information from terrorists in a way we can't do on US soil."

By torturing them.

2002-03-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

"Everybody's waiting for something, or somebody, 's not ever comin' back."

2002-03-12T03:35:00.000-08:00

Because there may be (one or two) People Still Living who still haven't seen this, and because I've emptied a few bottles this evening (spot the telegraphing of the thematic whatchamacallit! Yes! I am win!), and because every time I see it, it makes me giggle like a Robotic Giggling Machine from the Future, I give you Gonads and Strife. Enjoy. Again.

(And if ya liked them apples, be sure not to miss the epic Schoolbus!)

Edit : Unrelated flash oddness - Why is the dog being pooped on, and why does Panasonic™ think that's a good thing? Only the Japanese public knows.

2002-03-12T02:31:00.000-08:00

A conversation over dinner with a few of my Korean colleagues a couple of nights ago. In and of itself a little odd, that, conversing over dinner. Koreans tend to get the business of nourishment fully completed before chewing the fat, but a couple of these folks were Korean-Americans, and a couple others well-versed in the oddball ways of us hairy barbarians, and cut the requisite slack, as it was a 'western' meal : massive slabs of pizza and long styrofoam trays of gleaming, oily chicken thighs.

Predictably, it was about America, and the outrage upon outrage that the American government is perceived to be heaping on Korea and the rest of the world. The talk turned to the latest : North Korea as one of countries on the List, one of the countries where contingency plans to use nuclear weapons - in case of 'surprising military developments' - were being discussed.

A sense of outrage is building in this country. One of my colleagues said "They are talking about using nukes against North Korea, if necessary. I have family there. My father came from Pyongyang during the war." Another nodded and said "Mine too. I have family in North Korea, a lot of family." Heads nodded around the table. Almost everyone at the table, it seemed, had some relatives north of the border, close or distant, most of whom they'd never met. "We're an occupied country," said one of the men at the table, a Korean-American in his forties, "we have been for 50 years!"

I had to agree with him. It's quite clear that the presence of US Forces may have staved off another invasion by the North, but the fact remains that South Korea has been a puppet for all these years, willing or otherwise, and the pumped-up, football field cheerleading that Pretzelboy and his cronies are spewing is doing nothing to ease the anger, the fear, and the rage that is bubbling to the surface. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anti-US sentiment is crystallizing everywhere - and this in a country that is ostensibly a 'staunch ally' of America. Set aside fucking Olympic medals, we have 'axis of evil' rhetoric, threats of nuclear strikes on family members, unilateral, illegal steel tariffs, Jay Leno making lame jokes about dog-eating, and Nogun-fucking-Ri, to name a few things that have pissed people off in the last month alone. Even my new freshman students, uncomfortable and standoffish in the early days of this semester, have warmed to me visibly when they found out that I'm not American.

America is making itself many, many enemies around the world recently. Far more, far more widespread, and far angrier, perhaps, than the scattered few that took down the Twin Towers in New York. Shrub and his cohort are stoking the fires of resentment and hatred all around the planet, and it's the ordinary goddamn American on the street, in New York or in Paris, in Washington or Manila, that will lose their lives as a result, when next the next bomb goes off, the next airplane crashes into a building.

It astonishes and saddens me daily, with each new outrage delivered deadpan by the Resident and his handlers, that the American people are allowing their government - a leadership not even clearly mandated by an election - destroy what good is left there, and throttle what goodwill still remains in pockets amongst the peoples of the nations of the world. Dark days, my friends. Dark days.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-12T01:50:00.000-08:00

tag : Prionix

2002-03-11T01:12:00.000-08:00

For BurningBird, in case she (or anyone else for that matter) decides to tour the Great White North this summer : some pictures from my folks' fishing lodge at Tchentlo Lake - a fine place to enjoy a few delicious beverages.

Uh, and some fishing, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing.

2002-03-10T00:26:00.000-08:00

"Worldwide interstimulating inscription" : Who will be the executor of your e-state, the beneficiaries of your last blog and testament? If I kark it tomorrow (which is never outside the realm of possibility), of my few and meagre works in this life, these bits and bytes right here might well remain the longest. Maybe I should install that Dead Man's Switch after all, and rig up a script to make the bastard launch a Terminal Comments Thread, where my dearly beloved could hold a virtual wake, trash the place and <voice class="monotone">pelt me with rocks and garbage</voice> one last time.

That's a little morbid, perhaps, but it is interesting to think that thanks to things like archive.org and the mighty GoogleBeast, our children and theirs and so on in serried ranks into the future will be able to experience the textual voices of their long-dead ancestors, us, and read about the minutiae of their lives, their thoughts, and the truth about which fucking member of Radiohead they apparently resembled thanks to yet another online quiz. I wish I were able to read the journals kept by my grandparents, or my father, when they were young (and alive), and learn what made them tick. They might be disappointingly puerile, but on the other hand, they might not.

It's a mind-buggering world we're building. There are big bobbing icebergs of implication to all this technology floating around out here, and I for one am still bashing my head against them on a regular basis.

Ouch! Fucktacular. Just did it again.

Eulogize! comments.

2002-03-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

Mike Golby shares his innermost. Harrowing to read, and hopefully cathartic for him to write. I am constantly amazed and humbled by pellucid writing like this all around me, by these sudden radiant windows into the lives and minds of other people, multitudes of them...we are truly blessed to have these voices helping us stay the course in our own lives.

I hope you'll join me in wishing Mike and his family well, and I hope Mike will understand if I continue to celebrate the bottle in my own life, while he continues his struggles against the evils it can bring, and has brought to his family.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

Not funny. Not even remotely amusing.

I must note in passing, though, that I like this guy's attitude.

2002-03-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

Funny.

2002-03-07T05:41:00.000-08:00

Having a look at the referrers log, I found that someone had Googled here scant minutes earlier on the faery wings of the search string 'where+are+the+brothels+in+pusan'. I find this amusing as hell. The answer, my horny, pathetic friend, is

a) near Camp Hialeah (the US Army loves its hookers and drugs),
b) 'Texas Street', a nasty little area with equally nasty Russian ladies catering to the appetites of the Russian sailors, and
c) a place called 'Green Street',

the latter two of which are odd in a city without street names, but any taxi driver will know that of which you speak.

I've never been, myself, but I make it a point to know these kinds of things.

You're welcome.

It's all part of the service here at the Empty Bottle... comments.

2002-03-07T04:18:00.000-08:00

There is no way I could say it better. Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That : Transforming Religious Metaphor :

A mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that location or historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical languages of both mythology and metaphysics are not denotative of actual worlds or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

The problem, as we have noted many times, is that these metaphors, which concern that which cannot in any other way be told, are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts and historical occurrences. The denotation—that is, the reference in time and space: a particular Virgin Birth, the End of the World—is taken as the message, and the connotation, the rich aura of the metaphor in which its spiritual significance may be detected, is ignored altogether. The result is that we are left with the particular “ethnic” inflection of the metaphor, the historical vesture, rather than the living spiritual core.

Inevitably, therefore, the popular understanding is focused on the rituals and legends of the local system, and the sense of the symbols is reduced to the concrete goals of a particular political system of socialization. When the language of metaphor is misunderstood and its surface structures become brittle, it evokes merely the current time-and-place-bound order of things and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter. It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denotative rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that is its active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used this “elementary” or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthly geography to be taken by force. Its connotation—that is, its real meaning—however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.

There can be no real progress in understanding how myths function until we understand and allow metaphoric symbols to address, in their own unmodified way, the inner levels of our consciousness. The continuing confusion about the nature and function of metaphor is one of the major obstacles—often placed in our path by organized religions that focus shortsightedly on concrete times and places—to our capacity to experience mystery.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-07T03:58:00.000-08:00

Buddhist tradition calls this samvega :

"the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings that we've all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers all three. It would be useful to have such a term, and maybe that's reason enough for simply adopting the word samvega into our language."

[via a rather disappointing thread at Metafilter]

2002-03-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

BurningBird, Mike Sanders, Steve Himmer, Elaine, AKMA, Mike Golby and others have been spinning up a conversation about belief, something about which I've spent a lot of time thinking over the years. It's a fascinating, enlightening rolling colloquy that continues to renew my enthusiasm for this blogspace we're exploring (to explore strange new blogs, to seek out new ideas and new css designs, to boldly go...well, you get it). That said, I'm not sure if I'm going to take part in the conversation this time. I will, however, point you to my favourite contribution so far (which perhaps in part explains why I don't care to participate at the moment) this play from the Accordion Guy :

Moses (blubbering): I’m...I’m r-really sorry, S-sirs...I know I could never be as smart as y-you guys...I’m just an ignorant pigfucker...
God: Dude, don’t say “pigfucker” in front of Jesus.

God and Jesus look at each other and begin laughing riotously.

2002-03-05T04:25:00.000-08:00

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...

2002-03-05T04:01:00.000-08:00

"Here's a truck stop instead of Saint Peter's
Mr Wonderchicken's gone wrestlin'...."

2002-03-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

Twenty years today since John Belushi died, aged 33. Couldn't handle his drugs. Lame bastard. But I loved him anyway.

2002-03-05T01:41:00.000-08:00

No realli! She was Karving her initials øn the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...

2002-03-05T01:21:00.000-08:00

This is perfect. According to the BBC News, South Korea wasted more food last year than the total amount of food available in North Korea. And it's not by any means a surprise, to me at least. I've noted a few times to my waeguk-in coworkers at my university in the faculty cafeteria that the sheer quantity of uneaten food scraped off the socketed plastic buffet-trays is staggering. I've thought it was odd that we three Canadians tend to scrupulously clean our plates, despite the fact that we all grew up in more-or-less affluent, middle-class backgrounds.

Post-modern Ironic Self-Referential Rockin' Musical Interlude (courtesy of Ben Folds)

Y'all don't know what it's like
Being male, middle-class and white
Repeat X 4

It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say
Repeat X 3
FUCK!

Conclusion of Musical Interlude.

Meanwhile, it seems as if most of the Korean teachers and staff habitually take much more than they can eat, and blithely scrape the uneaten excess into the hole in the dish-table. Elbow elbow, wrist wrist. With the famine in the North, and poverty only a generation or two in the past for many people, I thought it odd. Perhaps it can be explained by conspicuous-consumption boasting : "I'm rich enough to waste food - look!". I don't know.

(I've always wondered with a shudder if Korean restaurants recycle the leftovers from those dozen half-eaten side-dishes of which they are so proud, knowing deep in my heart that the answer is probably 'yes', once they've fished out the cigarette butts.)

What I do know is that Korea is nuts-deep deep into the terminal nightmare of consumer society - disposable, convenient, one-use-only, individually-wrapped, chrome-plated and dying of cancer choking on the factory smoke, lost in the middle of vast grey concrete plains littered with trash. Not enough room, too many people, too many cars, too much of everything except tranquillity and quiet contemplation, and the Faustian trade-offs that were made in the past few decades are coming back to bite them in the ass. Screaming for a bigger piece of the pie, possessed by a crippling obsession with the appearance of affluence, with appearance over substance in general. The sentimental tears shed over the televised temporary reunions of families separated by war for half a century dry up pretty goddamned fast when it comes to giving up your own hard-won wealth and comforts.

And this, at root, is why most Koreans dream of reunification deep in their hearts, but do not for a second want it to happen up in their minds, at least not anytime soon. The lessons of German reunification are not lost on people, and if there were a chance that the slowly recovering economy were to be derailed again, if there were the remotest possibility that I might suffer in the short term, says Mr Kim, well, no thanks. If it's not said in so many words, not something that is even consciously thought, what it still amounts to is : Let 'em starve. [thanks Lia!]

Cake? What the hell's that? comments.

2002-03-05T00:41:00.000-08:00

What I Have Gleaned From My First Two Days Back In Front of A Class

'Cognitive dissonance' presumes the existence of cognition.

2002-03-04T03:24:00.000-08:00

A Møøse once bit my sister...

2002-03-03T14:16:00.000-08:00

Spring semester starts this morning, so it's back into TeachMode™.

We apologize for the last couple of days of sophomoric humour. Those responsible have been sacked.

-The Management.

2002-03-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

Google Imagewhack : intoxicating flatulence

I'd love to know how the hell this happened. I used to go to that theatre all the damn time, and it's a Google Imagewhack for intoxicating+flatulence. Perhaps I left my mark there in ways I hadn't previously realized...

Edit : I find this one more than a little amusing, too.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-02T20:36:00.000-08:00

Jonathon and Burningbird and the usual suspects are talking about something that has been heavy on my mind in recent times, but I'm feeling too whimsical today to do more than note the conversation, and point you their way. Me, I have to think about it some more. Later.

*dances off into the middle distance, scattering flower petals, whimsically.*

2002-03-02T20:17:00.000-08:00

I'd just like to say that even though I try to avoid being a 'joiner' and the whole deliberate-meme-propagation exercise tires me and (as those wacky kids are saying these days) chafes my scrote, I am entirely behind Rageboy's 'fucknozzle' mission. The Register would rightly claim that RB is just doing some more self-promotion here, but even his blatant, throwaway self-promotion tends to be a hell of a lot of fun, so why not? At least he's back in fine form.

I am all for crude and offensive neologisms. I myself have often blurted such double-take-inducing gems of negativity as 'fucktacular', 'fucknuckle', 'fuckeriffic' and 'fucksicle' in my always-erudite spoken discourse (to which my erstwhile workmates at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com will gladly attest), and I warmly encourage creative obscenity. If you lean towards the profane anyway, why not have some fun with it, huh?

Edit : Waaahahahahaha hee hoooooooooo *hic* heheh. It may be an old Regular Expression Cowboy geekjoke, but it's a funny one, dammit.

Cry havoc and let slip the fucknozzles of war! comments.

2002-03-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

Quick note : Frykitty is spreading the inline tag concept from it's mysterious beginnings ~deep in the Alabama woods, where a group of secretive hill people, long isolated from society, have been developing strange and otherworldly shortcuts in their communication.~ The efficiency of their verbal and written interactions render their speech almost incomprehensible to us outsiders, but perhaps, adopting some of their more clever innovations, we can help the textual world become a more intelligible place.

This, I pray. Or I would, %if I were the prayin' type%.

Seriously, I'd love to see these reach critical mass. Very useful, and a hell of a lot more nuanced than emoticons.

Comments? comments.

2002-03-01T18:36:00.000-08:00

At the local grocery store today :

Lady Sense More

Vaginal Wipe Wet Towels

I think the big selling point for these things, though, is in the pretty blue Konglish at the bottom of the box :

Attractive Acacia Smelling

Note : This is not some sort of tangential whacked-out wonderchicken response to the recent genesis of the blogsisters, honest. I just thought it was silly, in a typically Korean way. Not unlike the breast-vibrator thing I talked about a while ago.

2002-03-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

A Few Ways In Which I Have Hurt Myself Grievously

Number 1 : I am 5 years old, in the back yard with my friend CJ. We are smashing bricks onto the top of a low retaining wall, for some reason that I now forget, which is only reasonable, damn it! That was a helluva long time ago! I can't be expected to remember every damn thing...Am I gonna have to kick yer....

Sorry. Lost track there. Anyway, CJ took a mighty swing with one of those rusty red bricks, and managed to bring it down squarely on the middle finger of my right hand, mashing it flat. I screamed like a petroleum-powered chrome-plated screaming machine, and he took the fuck off up the path, running home. I'd have done the same, if I were him. Once I realized that all that blood wasn't a good thing, I pounded up the hill to the house after him, looking for mom or somefuckingbody to help me out with this newly-flat finger I'd acquired. CJ had gotten about fifteen feet ahead of me when he realized, I guess, that he still had the brick in his hand, so, still running, he flung it behind him. Hit me square on the forehead. I was a blood-streaked howling mess when my mom opened the screen door. That finger is still 50% wider than it's twin on the other hand, streaked with scar tissue. I'm a little proud of it, actually.

Number 2 : I'm a couple of years older, and I've traded bikes with my friend David, and we're about to zoom down the switchbacks to the public pool, which is in a deep hollow near the centre of our hilly town. The only problem is that I've never actually ridden a bicycle with hand brakes before, and am somewhat unclear on the concept. As I roar down the hill towards the first switchback, the back of which is a 100-foot dropoff, backpedalling madly to no avail, I take one of the sorts of off-the-cuff decisions which will end up characterizing most of the rest of my life : drop and slide, or sail off the edge into the abyss? I drop and slide through the gravel and broken glass, ripping most of the skin off the left side of my body, and embedding a few pebbles in the babyfat around my beltline. I stop sliding a few feet from the lip of the cliff, and David's bike sails off into space. Still got one of those rocks buried in there. Not much in the way of scars, though, which still amazes me.

Stay tuned to this channel for more amusing tales of agonizing pain!

Or not. Your call.

Edit after a few more beers : It's late Friday evening, which of course means there are an undisclosed number of Empty Bottles sitting around the WonderChicken at the moment : I just had a thought that it would be swell to wake up tomorrow to some similar tales of Really Painful Things from other friends in the virtual neighbourhood, if they were so inclined, just for fun. It'd be a break from Metablogging, at least...

2002-02-28T18:20:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning from a dream of Flores, Indonesia. Bena, a small stone-age village, perched on the side of a volcano, that has stayed with me since the day I saw it, and has been the setting for many of my dreams.

Getting there was the usual trial of endurance that travel in some parts of the world can be. It had been about seven hours the previous day on one of the short buses that ply the narrow roads of Flores. One of the old Indonesia hands that we'd met in the days previous had told us to watch out for long bus trips in Flores - he'd said that the unhappy result of the winding ride through the incredibly rugged terrain, the road only having been in existence for a few years, and the fact that many of the locals were unaccustomed to long rides in motor vehicles was that on the longer trips, there was a tendency for a great deal of vomiting to occur.

'Bah', said I, 'it can't be that bad'.

About 3 hours into the trip, I'd managed to reach a detente of sorts with the chicken that had been pecking and pulling at my shoelaces. I'd noted to myself that chickens do not seem to be as clever as some other animals, in the sense that if you kick them, they forget about it rather quickly, and come back for more. Not that I have a long and noble history of animal-kicking experimentation : one just makes assumptions about being-kicked response systems. At some point, though, it had sunk into the chicken's little birdy brain that my shoelaces were not edible, so I felt I had achieved a minor victory.

There was still the horrible, pathetic bleating of the live goat that was tied to the roof of the bus, unfortunately. This had been getting to me, until the bus driver popped in a cassette of the Rolling Stones' Hot Rocks, which did drown out the poor bastard's lamentation to a degree. In the fashion of all Flores bus drivers, the treble and volume on the cassette player had been turned all the way up, and what bass or midrange there might be had been silenced. After a few hours, I began to loathe that album. Ruby Tuesday still makes me break out in a sweat. But it was better, perhaps, than the goat-cries. Still, when the bus stopped for any length of time, the bleats of goaty anguish would start up again, and me and my vegetarian companion would glance at each other and make 'yikes!' sort of eyes.

Auditory assaults were soon to be the least of my worries. About halfway through the journey to Bajawa from Ende, a few more people managed to squeeze their way onto the bus and find places to stand or sit on the floor. Before getting aboard, two men, with the assistance of the driver and some of their friends, strapped a dead manta ray to the back of the bus, like a gigantic grey meaty parasol. The wingspan on this creature must have been close to three metres. Unfortunately, every time the bus stopped, a fragrance began to emanate from the corpse that managed to cut through the clove cigarette smoke like, well, like dead fish through pretty much anything. This olfactory extravaganza was actually preferable, though, to the next hundred or so kilometres. One of the manta-ray guys was standing in the narrow aisle beside where I was sitting, and once he'd made himself comfortable between sacks of rice and hunkered-down bodies, he more or less perched his right buttock on my left shoulder. There wasn't much space to manoeuvre in this bus. Once he'd established to his satisfaction that I wasn't really going to object to the crowding, he proceeded to fart in my left ear, non-stop, for the next two hours. Quietly, surreptitiously, but with a reek that overpowered even the dead manta ray. This, combined with the tinny shriek of Mick Jagger, the bleating of the dehydrated goat on the roof, the unique scent of the mantaray and the redoubled efforts of my chicken nemesis, was beginning to make me a little antsy.

Then the vomiting started...

That wise backpacker had been right. One of the young women in the seat ahead of us stuck her head out the window and regurgitated with a furious, gut-churning intensity. Her seatmate soon joined her, but, sitting as she was on the aisle seat, she didn't have access to a window. Yes, I know. This began a chain-reaction which propagated, in a matter of minutes, to heaving and spewing up and down the length of the bus. Some of it even made it out the windows. The bus driver ignored the symphony of spew, the manta-guy kept farting on my shoulder, I chain-smoked to try and ignore the stench, and we carried on through the mountains.

We eventually did arrive in Bajawa, and I have rarely been as happy to get out of a motor vehicle.

Perhaps I'll save the story of the stone-age village for later....

'Hey, point that thing somewhere else!' comments.

2002-02-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah, and dear Sweet God I love Ftrain. How did it take me so long to find him? Leave this place, hie thee hence, I implore you.

'Course when you eventually come back here, you're probably going to be deeply disappointed.

Ah well.

2002-02-27T17:29:00.000-08:00

I'm knee-deep in geekdom, grinning like a rocket-powered lemur, fiddling with code. Sure and it's a heap of fun, laddie. So rather than write something new, I thought I'd cheat and whack up this explanation from my Metafilter profile of where the StavrosTheWonderChicken thing came from...

In the winter of 1992 (I think), Rick and I had just finished the Mumbles Walk. This is the pub crawl along a seaside stretch of watering holes in Wales, near Swansea, that apparently used to be a regular night out for Dylan Thomas. I'd like to say we were appropriately reverant, but we were just shambolically pissed, basically.

At some point, we stumbled by a phone booth that looked out over the mud flats and dejected-looking rowboats that had been stranded by the outgoing tide, and decided it was a simply great time to give our buddy Derek, back in Vancouver, a collect call. When the operator asked for a name to give for the call (this was back in the last century, before this stuff was automated), the name "Stavros The Wonder Chicken" just bubbled to the top of my brain, with no precedent whatsoever. The operator balked, but we begged, and when we overheard her telling James, his roommate, that she had a collect call from "Stavros the Wonder Chicken", we laughed like the drunken poets we were.

A few minutes after his roommate James accepted the call, we found out that Derek had returned to his hometown because he'd found out that day that his father had died.

We went back to drinking.

Ah-yup? comments.

2002-02-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new pad! Looks pretty much like the old one, I know, but I've got Big Plans. While I unpack some of the crates, please help yourself to some delicious beverages and yummy cucumber sandwiches.

Thanks go in great profusion to the BurningBird and the Bearman for helping me out, and all the cool folks out there in blogspace who inspire me every day to do better.

Disclaimer : No actual offer of delicious beverages and yummy cucumber sandwiches is being made or implied. Sorry.

2002-02-25T22:15:00.000-08:00

If you have broadband, and Realplayer, and an hour to spare, watch this speech delivered by Dean Kamen, of Segway and iBot fame. It'll inspire you. It did me.

(A quick note about my lack of Korea-centric updates of late : I'm back to work next week, back into the fray, after a couple of months of gazing inward. Getting out into the thick of things again will certainly spark some new Hanguk-y observations and rants. And once the new domain is set up (soon, soon) and I transfer over, it'll be a whole new WonderChicken. I'll rock yer socks off. Or die trying. This I swear.)

Never fear, the WonderChicken's here. comments.

2002-02-24T23:26:00.000-08:00

It's like potato chips : once you start, it's hard to stop.

Item the First : Lying is harder when the medium has a memory.

How about this one, kids?

Cached version at archive.org. Interesting that the live version is no longer available. [via ntk.net] (Followup : a call for his resignation is here.)

Item the Second : Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of clue!

Dvorak has a go at the Cluetrainers, and a very caustic go it is, indeed. "This means nothing .... Get over yourselves." Found it via this Metatalk thread, which is hopefully going to be interesting. Regardless, I suspect this is going to be all over the place over the next couple of days...it will be interesting to see what Messrs Locke, Weinberger, Searls have to say in their defense. It's always good to see a little pushback against accepted wisdom, but Mr Dvorak is certainly cranky about something...

So I sez to da guy... comments.

2002-02-24T04:43:00.000-08:00

I was reading Jonathan's post about comments systems and how they have implications he'd not thought about, and it dovetailed so well with some thinking I've been doing lately that I left a long comment there, that I want to expand on a bit more here, if he doesn't mind. (Tangent : Who 'owns' the comments you leave on someone else's blog? You or the person who writes the blog, or if the comments are offsite (like mine), the owner of the offsite system? Damned if I know.)

I've been a Metafilter addict (Tap, tap, squeal - "Uh, is this thing on? My name is Stav, and I'm a Metaholic."), sometimes more, sometimes less, for a year and a half or so, and for me it has always been about the conversations in the threads, foremost. The concept of Metafilter, married so neatly as it is with the useability design, appeals to me immensely. Although I do follow many of the links that are posted to the front page, I have often been guilty of just reading the comments threads behind the posts. Although there has been much (justified) wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth (not to mention the occasional bestial roar of anguish) recently about the decline of the level of discourse around the place, it's a rare day that there aren't at least a couple of threads where Very Smart People talk about things that I have, compared to them, a tenuous grasp on, and that I find fascinating and informative. I've learned a lot there over the last 18 months or so, sharpened my writing skills (to a small degree, ok, fair enough), and feel as if I am part of a well-defined but very diverse community, a group of brainy folks who, most of the time, are good fun to be around. Although many of the 'old guard' are more inclined to believe that a well-crafted post to the front page, with interesting links, is the key factor in what makes MeFi great (in perhaps much the same way that it has been argued in some places that the focus of a 'real' weblog should be linkage), I tend to lean towards the discussion that a great link, or even a crap one, can generate.

Now, I wrote a piece for Waeguk when I had had a few beers one night last month about how important I thought comments systems on blogs really are, but never posted it, because it was more laced with invective than usual, even for me. I believe I went as far as to say make references to cowardly lions. And identical cheese hostesses. (I told you I'd had a few beers at that point...) Later it was gently pointed out to me in a discussion thread in the comments system at BurningBird that some people prefer not to engage in the two-way, not to open themselves up to criticism and so on, and this is just fine with me. Reading that, I was actually glad I'd never posted the aforementioned drunken screed. Each to their own, I say, gosh darn it, but I still think keeping the communication flow one-way cripples the power of the medium.

The non-sequiteurs collide here : I've been thinking about this quite a bit...I feel what may be happening is like a metastasizing of the Metafilter concept ('a community blog') into an overlapping network of distributed micro-metafilters, organically growing, based around virtual peer groups like the ones that I belong to (out along various axes like BurningBird and KeepTrying and Metafilter and 1142 so on and so on and on - different axes, different circles, for different people, variously overlapping). If Metafilter is a community blog focussed on a single site, then the distributed micro-metafilter (Meta-MetaFilter?) equivalent of the 'front page posts' are the things that each of us write on our own blogs, and for me the real gold, the real community, the discussion and exchange and ferment and chaos comes from the rolling, cross-blog, intricately-threaded discussions that flare up and die down in the various comments systems we've implemented. These thoughts and colloquies are then reflected in our blog posts, and the process becomes auto-catalytic, feeding itself, and growing with each iteration!

And I think it's happening everywhere, throughout blogspace, in pockets where people have come together for whatever reason and banded into blogtribes, centred around interests or styles or strong personalities or whatever, and where some critical mass of them have enabled comments systems and are using them to talk....it's endlessly fascinating to me.

Or am I just talking crap again? I have a tendency to do that.

Meta-comments? comments.

2002-02-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

Bush Seeks To Restrict Probes Of Sept. 11

Time for another distraction, deflect some attention, get the fist-in-the-air brigade worked up again...Anyone want to give me odds on how soon the bombs starting falling somewhere new? He promised they weren't going to invade North Korea. <sarcasm>That's good enough for me, damn it! </sarcasm>

Interlude :

I try to steer my way clear of politics. I try to, and for the last dozen years or so, I've claimed to be 'apolitical'. Just wanted out of it. I remember now why I deliberately chose to be so. It's exhausting, when you start to dig, start to work up that red-orange glow of indignation, start to think carefully about the manipulative pap that we're fed by our leaders (elected or otherwise) and their lapdogs. Indignation turns to fury, and you slowly begin to turn into one of those people that sit at Metafilter, obsessively hitting Refresh on any political thread, keen to tear down anyone who disagrees with them, while their marriage falls apart and the pizza box in the corner sprouts new life forms not previously found in any taxonomy or textbook. Not to name any names, of course.

Disclaimer : My relationships are just fine, thank you, and I rarely get to have pizza these days.

Not only is it exhausting to be in a state of near-perpetual anger, but it's unhealthy, and it annoys other people. There are old friends of mine that I no longer speak to, in part because of their one-note perpetual politicizing of Every Damn Thing. All The Time. It's grating, and unnecessary, and reduces your life to a constant protest, usually against things over which you have no influence whatsoever. I'd rather have my life be a celebration, a paean.

This excerpt from the Tao Te Ching (recently quoted by Richard at Notes From A Life In Progress) is perhaps appropriate here :

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.

If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.

Tao te Ching : 29
trans. Stephen Mitchell

But there comes a point, when it feels necessary to speak out, even if no one hears your voice. At least your conscience will be clear, and if someone does hear you, and agrees, perhaps you've done some good. Some days, lately, I feel like I am somehow failing myself if I don't point out the latest falsehood, the latest manipulative rewrite of the facts, the most recent evil perpetrated on the world by the Evil Empire. Other days, I just feel like pointing to Ethel. I'm funny like that, and I make no excuses.

Everyone loves to quote this one, too, but that's not gonna stop me : "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

Interlude Ends.

Back to the Bombing The Innocent Sweepstakes : well-timed little gems like this would seem to make their intentions pretty clear, to me at least...

Edit : This is good. Laugh, cry, rinse, repeat.

Odds? comments.

2002-02-22T05:30:00.000-08:00

2002-02-21T21:29:00.000-08:00

META BLOG LEVEL 9

This is beginning to scare me.

Now I just need some frickin' lasers or something to go with the 40-foot Killer Robots.

Or sharks with lasers strapped to their heads... comments.

2002-02-21T07:27:00.000-08:00

The Disinfo dossier on Canadian John Ralston Saul is a pleasant find, for me. Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, The Unconscious Civilization and Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century all had profound influence on the way I thought about ...stuff... in my 20s, and are intricately woven into the way I think about the world today (rants like the one below notwithstanding). [via wood s lot] "Recently Saul has been feeling the heat of the Canadian political landscape: he is the husband of the current Governor General of Canada. Saul has been intensely criticized for his newest book On Equilibrium (New York: The Free Press, 2002), in which Saul contends that the West must assume some responsibility for the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks."

Saul's thoughts on globalization and democracy from a talk he gave in Australia in 1999 are very much worth reading (and listening to), as well.

Comments? comments.

2002-02-21T02:14:00.000-08:00

I promised myself I wasn't going to talk about the visit of a certain lying, half-wit sack of dung to Korea recently, as my temper might get the best of me, and I might accidentally let slip pejoratives like 'lying' and 'half-wit' and 'sack of dung'.

But I was just listening to Radio Canada International, and even they are toeing the line of bullshit that the American propaganda machine is spewing out. I just heard "President Bonobo (bit of static there, I think that's what they said) will ask Jiang Ze Min to speak to Kim Jong Il about returning to the negotiating table." What egregious, infuriating nonsense. The Americans were the ones who walked away, they are the ones playing games of brinkmanship and provoking the North Koreans, they are the ones who are most responsible for the 'proliferation of weapons of mass destruction'.

The last time I talked about this, I linked to these two articles from the local English-language media, both of which made it quite clear that the North, weeks ago, were indicating their willingness to sit down and talk. But acknowledging that fact would get in the way of Pretzelboy's scripted bluster about the 'axis of evil', now, wouldn't it? History is being rewritten at the very moment it happens, these days.

Fuck. I know he's just reading a script - I know. I shouldn't get upset about it. But what do they think - that no one's watching? Are they so certain that they can just go about their merry way and no one will catch them in the lies? Has this game degenerated to such an extent that there's no longer anything any of us can actually do, other than piss and moan, while these bastards flush us all down the toilet?

Update : This is classic. Laughing, crying, it's all the same sometimes. Watch this (Warning : Realvideo file), and tell me this Resident knows what he's doing. He says, to the Japanese Diet - "My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific."

Comments? comments.

2002-02-20T19:09:00.000-08:00

Coming soon : New domain, new underpants, same crappy attitude. I'm so excited.

2002-02-18T19:44:00.000-08:00

Arooooo!

2002-02-18T18:46:00.000-08:00

Ah, all around me people are conversing in the hushed whispers of high seriousness, and I've been talking poop. The Wonderchicken : Going Off On Tangents Since 1965™.

That said, how about we talk death a bit? (Gotcha!) And by 'we', I mean 'I'. As well as discussion of disappearing up one's own butt (and a nastier death would be hard to imagine, unless it's disappearing up someone else's butt), there has been some talk of death lately in my virtual neighbourhood, from Mike and Shelley and Jonathon and Kalilily (who lives one block over) and others, and it's been stirring up some sediment at the bottom of my brain, where those weird-ass flat fish with both eyes on one side of their head live. You don't want to mess with those bastards - they have sharp teeth.

But I have years of experience in wrangling the fuckers, so I'm going to poke a stick down there and see what comes up. Not a response, but a riff. This may well be more than you care to know about me, and if so, just skip it.

I remember, unclearly, the first two of the many deaths that have molded what's left of my small family. One night when I was about 4 years old, I think, and sleeping the sleep of the just, I heard a commotion downstairs. It was, by my reckoning, the middle of the night, but that could have been anytime from 9pm to 5am. I had been awakened from a dream in which my father had carried me down to the landing that was about two thirds of the way up the stairs, and told me that I needed to take care of my mother. It was quite a pleasant dream, if a little distressing. The noise downstairs escalated quickly from whispers and voices to sobs and wails. I snuck down to the landing on which I'd been sitting moments before in my dream, and peeked through the railings. There was a policeman, and my mother's sister and her husband. There'd been an accident. Drinking was involved. Fallen asleep at the wheel. He didn't make it. I don't recall anything after that, for quite a long time.

I remember much more clearly, two or three years later, the next accident. My mother had remarried. She'd accepted the proposal of one of my father's coworkers at the TH&B Railroad, and I remember the new bicycle sitting on the porch on the morning of my birthday that year, and how I overheard much later that that was a deciding factor. My new step-father had moved the family out west, in a bid to shake off the oppressive presence of his own family, most of whom he disliked, for his own reasons. We'd ended up in a small northern town in British Columbia, and although the streets saw race-related violence between native indians, pakistani immigrants, and euros, and the first winter brought 6 or 7 metres of snow, more than I'd dreamed of, let alone seen, and the water smelled rotten-egg funny, it was a clean and beautiful place. My dad had bought a riverboat, which we kept at a marina on the river, and took out onto the lake on weekends, to fish and just wander around looking at things.
We all wore lifejackets conscientiously. One late summer afternoon, when we were returning from a day on the water, we were moving our gear along the floating dock, back to the truck. My stepfather was ashore, I was nearing the water's edge, my mother a few metres behind me, and my brother, who was a couple of years younger than I, was just getting out of the boat, carrying a fishing pole. He'd taken off his lifejacket. God knows why.
I heard a splash, and turned to see the circle of disturbed water sliding downstream in the strong current. My mother let out a bellow, ran, and dived in. My father raced past me, and I followed, pelting up the dock to where my mother had dived into the river. We pulled her out. The current was too strong.
The next thing I remember is a couple of teenage girls comforting me as I leant against the back of the truck, hoarsely screaming 'someone help my brother!', and the next thing after that was a numb, silent ride to the hospital. We spent weeks, months, riding up and down the river, searching for my brother, with various people from the town who took us under their wings. We never did find the body.

Other people in my family have died over the years - all my grandparents, great-aunts and uncles and so on. My stepfather too, a decade ago now, almost.

This is probably the first time I've written about those times, that I can recall, although I've told the stories many times since they first came rushing back when I was in my early twenties. The deaths in my family, coming for the most part as they did early in my life, may have given me a slightly different perspective on it than some. Although I love life, with a great, chest-thumping passion, I am...matter-of-fact...about dying. I understand the grief and loss that people feel, but I simply can't get terribly worked up over it, anymore. This comes not from being hard-hearted, as some have assumed over the years - old friends will attest that I'm nothing if not self-indulgently sentimental - but from a baked-in knowledge, not intellectual but deep in my guts, that death is at the end of the road for all of us, each and every one, and what is, is good.

I've tried to live as many lives as possible in the time allotted to me, however long that time may be, and I think this awareness of an End is one of the things that has driven me out onto the Road most of my adult life.

To regard the death of those you know and love as a natural thing, to turn the painful experience of their loss into something that enriches and strengthens your own life (because, face it, they ain't got one anymore) - that's the mostly truly reverant eulogy and memorial one can make. Which is trite, perhaps, but people seem to forget it, again and again.

Thoughts? comments.

2002-02-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Have a yen for some public defecation, coprophagia, bestiality, and a peppy soundtrack? The wonderchicken is happy to comply. Is it the latest from stileproject or one of the other net.cesspools? Nope, it's a new Korean flash cartoon - cute, but somewhat disturbing. (Warning : don't go there if you're easily offended.) I think it's kind of amusing, in a twisted way, but then I'm evil incarnate, me. Almost as much poop-oriented fun as this good old standby : Chil-la - The Ass Shooter Game (which I originally marvelled at here.)

The mind would boggle if it weren't taking a year off.

That is odd, isn't it? comments.

2002-02-17T05:11:00.000-08:00

Whew. /me wipes sweat from brow. Spent the evening reworking the blogdesigns for my old buddy, the mighty mighty bearman and for our longstanding blogversation... Pretty happy with 'em so far, but they are a bit heavy on the grey. Ah well...

Edit : Borrowing very heavily indeed from thebluerobot, of course!

2002-02-15T21:28:00.000-08:00

World New York has morphed into the ABC Electric Journal, so I'm going to mirror for the sake of posterity this article I wrote for Grant a few months ago, which was the last thing ever posted there. Oh dear. Hope that wasn't my fault.

In a monoculture, it's difficult to blend in when you look different. In Korea, if you look different and have the additional bad luck of not looking like a businessman or an English teacher, the chances are good that you’ll be either ostracized or ignored. Koreans are proud of their ethnically homogeneous society, and the outsider is generally tolerated as a necessary evil, or viewed with mixed amusement and pity that they were not born Korean. Suspicion of the foreigner, and sometimes outright racism, for cultural and historical reasons, are deeply ingrained, and even respectable publications are sometimes to blame for perpetuating negative stereotypes, doing things like referring to a Muslim missionary as a ‘bright-eyed chimp of a man.’ In this strictly Confucian society, there is no real tradition of respect for the factory worker, the ‘heroic proletariat’. And in the post-9/11 world, sadly, there is a deep suspicion of Muslim people. The convergence of these facts makes for a grim existence for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Korea, many of whom are Islamic.

For the illegal foreign workers of Korea in particular, the situation is often one of desperation and a deep, angry sense of alienation. They come to Korea in hopes that they can make more money, any money, to send back home to their families, and sometimes, if they're lucky, they can. But the life is a hard one, with 12-18 hour days on a 7 day basis, hazardous and toxic workplaces, substandard housing, dishonest employers, and nonexistent safety regulation, in many cases.
According to the Korean Ministry of Justice, there were 217,690 migrant workers in Korea as of January 2000. Of these, 138,049 were ‘undocumented workers’ who were brought in as technical trainees, but later overstayed their contract periods.

The Industrial Technical Trainee Program was introduced in 1991, with the ostensible goal of providing visas to foreigners employed by the overseas subsidiaries of Korean companies. Migrant workers began to arrive soon thereafter. The program was created to allow the chaebols, the enormous conglomerates that loom over the Korean economy and colour every deal, like Samsung, Daewoo and LG, to bring in employees from overseas branches to receive training. Very quickly, though, the program became a way for small- and medium-sized businesses to import cheap labour. The program also helped circumvent backlash against perceived opening of the domestic labor market to foreigners, always a touchy subject in Korea. At the time, Pusan, the second biggest city in Korea, was fading in its importance as the ‘sneaker capital of the world’, at least in terms of fabrication, with thousands of jobs being moved to Nike and Reebok production facilities in places where the average wage was even lower, like China or the Philippines. Most Koreans would not take low-paying factory jobs, given a choice, and some source of labour was required.

Small and medium-sized business lobbied the government to allow them access to cheap foreign labour, mostly from China and Southeast Asian countries. In 1993, the Korea Federation of Small Businesses (KFSB) was given the authority to operate a revised ''trainee'' program to bring in unskilled migrant workers in order to ease the shortage of manpower in the 3-D industries (dirty, difficult, dangerous).

There are, by the best estimates of the government, more than 220,000 people of the Muslim faith residing in South Korea. An estimated 200,000 of those are foreign, and a significant proportion of those people are working illegally. They come from all over Southeast and Central Asia. They belong to invisible communities which are largely ignored and shunned by mainstream society, making pittances to send home to their families and living in constant fear of deportation. Every morning I walk through a factory district to the University where I teach, and see groups of these folks on their way to work. Their story is one of the myriad untold stories about this country.

Most Koreans are unwilling to take what are called the '3-D jobs.' As a result, factory work often falls to the poorest Koreans, or to legal or illegal migrant workers. Factory owners are happy to employ non-Koreans, both because it’s standard practice to pay those migrants considerably less, and because they have little to no legal rights under Korean law. Human rights activists deplore the ''glaring cases of human rights abuses'' against these foreign workers and lobby the government to stop turning a blind eye to their treatment, and although things are changing, it’s a very slow process.

According to the Korea Herald, there have been 809 cases of human rights abuses directed against migrant workers in Korea prosecuted in the past 20 months, including more than 450 cases of the deliberate withholding of wages, instances of withholding compensation for industrial accidents, and incidents of violent attack and sexual abuse. Of these cases, the prosecution has arrested 134 employers, while 675 more have been indicted without detention. (source: Korea Herald, November 12 2001). These few prosecutions come from a pool of 85,000 foreign worker complaints at 1,222 factories in Korea reporting unpaid wages for periods ranging between one month and three years, according to a report by the Joint Committee of Migrant Workers in Korea, as reported by the Asia Times .

The Asia Times goes on to describe a typical story of an illegal worker who has three months of wages unpaid, but says that he would not dare demand payment, for fear that his employer will simply report him to the nearest immigration office, and he will be summarily deported. His monthly wage is 340,000 won (US$269), but he actually receives only 152,000 won (US$120), because the balance is held by his boss as ‘guarantee money’, should he disappear or be swept up in an immigration raid. The chance that he or any of the other workers in a similar situation will ever see their ‘guarantee money’ is effectively nil. The silence of workers put into this position is not surprising. Should they come to the attention of immigration authorities, they will be immediately deported, without seeing their money. In fact, periodic immigration sweeps of factory areas for illegal immigrants regularly result in deportations.

The outcry that came as a result of the backlash against people of Middle-Eastern descent in America and elsewhere after the events of September 11 2001 was, of course, justified. But while the lives of immigrants to America (or Canada, or Australia, or other ‘western’ countries) can certainly be difficult, and sometimes fraught with discrimination, it may be worth considering the desperate lives that are led by those, who for whatever reason, cannot make their way to more multicultural, tolerant nations, and must take what they can get.

Anything to add? comments.

2002-02-15T04:19:00.000-08:00

I'm remembering tonight (after the requisite beer and the appropriate musical prodding) the first time I saw the Southern Cross, sitting in the cockpit of Elmo's Fire, a stolen 71-foot sailboat, two in the morning off the Pacific coast of Mexico, the great chromed wheel in my hand, whales surfacing alongside with their comical wheezes and puffs, squid boats off on the horizon bearing spidery armatures of brilliant white lights pointed straight down into the water. Tight blue shadows, starlight like the light of day, but simpler and somehow cleaner. I remember how sanctified it felt to be out there on the quiet sea, sails luffing gently, sweating out the alcohol, wondering where the hell my life was going to take me, but certain that I'd remember that moment that my skipper pointed out the constellation to me, just above the horizon, for the rest of my life.

This memory doesn't belong here, but I don't know what the hell to do with it.

Comments? comments.

2002-02-14T18:07:00.000-08:00

Currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please do not adjust your set. You may, however, think about getting up and going outside for a walk. It'll make you feel better. Probably. Unless you live in Korea, in which case it may annoy the snot out of you. Just sayin'.

Update : Fixed, sorta.

2002-02-13T18:20:00.000-08:00

I'm finding my self-imposed format here a little limiting, these days, and don't quite know what to do. I want to continue talking about Korea, of course, and I have my blogversation to engage in mindless link propagation and boozy nostalgia with my old friend the Bearman, but I feel I could profitably add my 1.7 bits to the conversations that David Weinberger and Mike Sanders and Mike Golby and Chris Locke and AKMA and Tom Matrullo (and so on and so forth)(Update : Add OnePotMeal to the menu - the things he's talking about at the moment are very much in line with thoughts I've been having as well.) are engaging in. I don't think this is the right place to do it - there are some folks who come here for the Korea bits, even though there are also some who have written to tell me that they enjoy the occasional non-Korea-related rant or monologue more than the cross-cultural schtick. I'm wondering if I should start a meta-blog, or just post more meta (ie colourfully-boxed) stuff here, or what...

/me tugs beard, looks thoughtful.

Any advice gratefully accepted... comments.

2002-02-13T02:31:00.000-08:00

We went to the Korean Folk Village in Suwon today. A beautiful, peaceful place, nestled in a heavily-treed valley, hidden from any sign of the concrete wasteland surrounding it.

The bus ride from Suwon station takes you through the nightmarish urban landscape that rapid industrialization has wrought - human-beehives as far as the eye can see, garbage flung haphazardly everywhere, choking diesel fumes, and a brownish pall across even the clearest of blue skies. It's the sort of dystopian vision of the future that science fiction writers were conjuring up 50 years ago, made real.

The bus pulls into a massive parking lot, shadowed by yet more of the beehive apartment buildings, the surrounding hills actually covered in trees. After you pay the entrance fee and pass through the massive wooden gates (a grandfatherly ticket collector welcomed me in English, which was a pleasant surprise), you step into a world ably and lovingly preserved, free of the kind of kitschy disneylanditis that characterizes these sorts of places elsewhere in the world. Other than some modern sun-yellow and fire-engine-red plastic crap being hawked at a few of the 'market' stalls, the illusion is marvellous. The Folk Village is actually populated full time by artisans, farmers, performers, brewers and so on. It is truly idyllic, particularly in contrast to the unpleasant urban realities outside.

Interestingly, though, the idyll that it preserves, that of Korea of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, was not a golden age for anyone but the elite yangban class (about 10% of the population for most of the era). Commoners (sang-in or yangmin), which made up about 50% of the population - farmers, merchants (generally considered to be the dregs of non-slave society, oddly enough, considering the intensely mercantile nature of modern Korea), craftsmen - were forbidden by law to use the language of the yangban. Peasants were, by law, forbidden from leaving their land, and required to carry identity papers at all times. The lowborn, chonmin, were those born to hereditary professions like tanning and butchery, gravedigging, bark-peelers and basketmakers, and also included entertainers, shamans and kisaeng, the Korean equivalent of the Japanese geisha.

All non-yangban men were required to perform forced labour as well as military service. It is estimated that during the Choson Dynasty (1392-1910), approximately 1/3 of the Korean population were slaves, either privately- or government-owned. Slaves did not have surnames, and lowborn women frequently were not even granted a forename. Torture as punitive punishment for infractions of the law was de riguer. Life was not pleasant for the vast majority of the population, a reality not surprisingly ignored by the multilingual signs posted around the village. (There was, however, a photograph of a man being tortured above the entrance to the recreated jail. Koreans seem to have different feelings will regard to cruelty and violence than I am accustomed to - this is something I'm still trying to figure out.)

The Folk Village was lovely, and relaxing, but even with the perpetual haze, the endless waves of concrete, the hell-bent bus drivers and their demonic taxi offsiders, even with the corruption and sexism of today's Korea, it's a better place out in the city than it was in the carefully preserved Good Old Days.

But we all love a little nostalgia for what never was, don't we?

Comments? comments.

2002-02-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, now I am so tempted to go white text on dark background, just to be a contrarian bastard. We'll see how the hangover treats me tomorrow...

2002-02-10T21:11:00.000-08:00

Suh-lal - Lunar New Year's has rolled around again, and as always, it signals the largest exodus of Koreans of the year. It's a tradition to return at this time of the year to your hometown, both to visit and pay respects to family and pay homage to your ancestors, echoing old animist practices. The government estimates that 33.4 million South Koreans will be on the move this weekend - this is out of a total population of 44 million!

Happy New Year! comments.

2002-02-09T07:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in my wanderings, in life and on this here inTaRweB, I get that shock of recognition, that feeling when, no matter how many times we've realized it before and promptly forgotten about it, we suddenly understand that there are other people out there who have lived through the same things as we have. They tell us stories that are intended to be about themselves, but after we hear them, they are tales about our selves too. Thanks, Jonathon.

Re-cognition... comments.

2002-02-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

(I've talked about related issues here and here and here, if you want the full story through the eyes of the wonderchicken...)

Anti-American sentiments are on the rise in Korea once again, on the heels of the 'axis of evil' script read recently by The Little President That Could. There is a real and legitimate fear that the ill-considered bad-cop posturings of the American speechwriters could push the peninsula into another war. These fears are not ameliorated by reports that the Pentagon believes that the most likely spot for a large-scale regional war in the near future is outside my window. (Aside : Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, isn't it? Considering the inroads made towards lasting detente, if not outright peace, by President Kim in the last 4 years, gains that have been systematically knocked back by the antics of W, it's interesting that this report has been released now. By 'interesting', I mean interesting in the sense of manipulative, pernicious and propagandistic, of course.)

Anti-American protests have been a feature of the political landscape for about 20 years here. The first real wave of them occurred in 1980 and lasted for over a decade, as a result of the widespread belief that the American government backed General Chun Doo Hwan in his military coup and in the massacre of civilians at Kwangju. Despite the clear need for such a presence, protests have also focussed around the presence of the 37,000 American troops stationed here, and more recently, new revelations from a BBC documentary eye-catchingly entitled "Kill 'em All : American War Crimes in Korea" about the incidents at Nogun-Ri during the Korean War, one occasion (at this point 61 separate incidents involving the killing of civilians by US forces have been registered with the South Korean government) on which American troops were ordered by their commanding officers to open fire on unarmed refugees. A quote from that report :

"There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill 'em all," recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman, "I didn't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all."

Coming at the same time as Shrubya's lumbering, hamhanded comments recently, which have already stirred up resentment about America's role in matters key to Korea's very survival, this new BBC documentary has not helped matters much.

So the man in the street here in Korea is angry about what he sees as the American government arbitrarily derailing more than 4 years of work toward peace and reunification by President Kim, for which (I reiterate again for the benefit of the new-to-Waeguk) he was given the Nobel Peace prize in 2000, believing the motivation to be Bushy self-aggrandizement mixed with an unhealthy swath of darker, more colonial purposes. This resentment dovetails nicely with the anger Koreans feel at outside interference in their internal matters of state and culture, and the flames are being fanned by things like the recent controversies over dogmeat and the new revelations about Nogun-Ri. (I talked about the roots of that resentment in the context of the dog-meat 'controversy' here - long story short : Japanese occupation and more than 900 invasions in Korea's recorded history).

Signs of hope are there, though. The North Koreans are reacting cautiously, and seem to be willing to resume dialog. Interestingly, during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics today, when the president of the Salt Lake committee mentioned at beginning of his speech the '9-year old boy in Seoul, Korea', that was the only part of the speech which was not simultaneously subtitled in Korean. It would seem to be have been a last minute addition, a small, politically-motivated olive branch perhaps, but a charmingly American one, for what it's worth.

Kill 'em all... comments.

2002-02-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

After puking up a hairball about how little value I place in links without commentary, I exercise my right to be annoyingly inconsistent : I have nothing more to say about this.

Update : Or this - "If there were to be a war on the Korean peninsula, we would win but at a horrendous cost. It would be a classic pyrrhic victory. We could devastate North Korea, but we would lose hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese allies in the first few days."

2002-02-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

One of the dominant facts in a young Korean man's life, perhaps the biggest one, is the inevitability of military service. All able-bodied young men (although exceptions are sometimes made for those with enough money, or the right connections, as with everything else here) are required to do a minimum of 26 months of military service (ranging up to thirty months in the Air Force). The callup usually comes about midway through university.

I often wonder if this single fact goes a long way toward explaining some of the enormous differences in attitudes between Korean men and, for example, us Canucks, as much as culture and language and other factors. I've talked before about the infantilization of the youth here. Almost every 20-year-old I meet here seems to have the emotional maturity of, say, a 15 year-old in the west. This despite (or perhaps as a result of) the fact that during their high school years, they are driven to succeed, with students who hope to go on to university often sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night or less for years on end, and attending private evening schools for every subject they study, including english, after the normal school day. This kind of grinding 7 am to midnight schedule is the only way, they believe (or more significantly, their parents believe), for them to score reasonably well on the national university entrance exam. Their performance on that exam will decide the caliber of university they attend (at least if their parents are not wealthy, or do not know the right people), and thus the shape of the remainders of their lives. Not attending one of the first-rank (in name if not nature) universities guarantees that you will never reach the top of your chosen profession. The doors will simply not be open to you.

By the time young people reach university age, they may have had very little contact with the opposite sex, as single-gender schools are still very common for teenages, and the long hours they put in preclude much in the way of socialization. With the boys in particular (and boys they still are), the culture has molded them, their mothers have explicity taught and trained them, that they are the absolute center of the universe, and everything is secondary to their will and whim, and amongst other things, that throwing a tantrum is a perfectly acceptable way to react to being thwarted. A first-born male is the shining, much-beloved center of any family, and this is communicated (both to the boy and to his female siblings if any) throughout their young lives.

Suddenly, though, these spoiled, pampered young men are required to join the military. Stories that Korean friends have told me indicate that the treatment of new recruits is uniformly brutal by their 'seniors', and random beatings and abuse are the norm. It is, by all accounts, a hellish experience, made more so by the fact that it requires a fundamental shift in how these young men must view their world. It is during military service that most young men start the serious drinking and smoking that characterizes so many Korean men, and during this time as well that most of them lose both their virginity and their innocence. Any pretence they held about equality and fairness is systematically stripped from them, and they are taught that the rules for adult life can be summed up adequately by the phrase 'fuck or be fucked'. This, it often seems, becomes the mantra that they carry with them into business dealings in later life.

So I sympathize to an extent with Yoo Seung-jun, a singer who recently took full US citizenship, primarily to avoid the draft. He has been barred from re-entering Korea, and there's a fair bit of controversy swirling around this decision. At this point, though, with Bush-created fears of a new war on the peninsula running higher than in recent memory, there is little sympathy amongst the general population, and little concern about the interesting precendent that this government decision has created.

What would you do if your country were demand military service, or institute a wartime draft? I'm still not certain, but then I haven't really lived there for more than a decade...

Comments? comments.

2002-02-07T00:51:00.000-08:00

I've been scratching my head, not so much due to insect infestation or any of my collection of amusingly rare skin conditions, no - I've been doing it all afternoon because I was in Deep Thought about how I could somehow tangentially, tenously tie the stuff that I've been pondering to the self-proclaimed theme of this blog, which is, in case you hadn't noticed :

Why I Love Korea Even Though It Turns Me Apoplectic With Fury
or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

At this task, I have failed miserably. Thus the lovely background to this post. Entirely too many colored rectangles around here lately, which means that either I'd better start exercising a little self-restraint, or I'd better start thinking about moving the goddamn goalposts. I put 'em up in the first place, after all.

So my little screed for today came to me whilst I was doing my almost daily rounds. There's a list of blogs (over there to the right, you see 'em? The ones labelled 'Voices sweet to my eye' are the ones I'm talking about here, although there are also a goodly number amongst the Metafilter gang and the Blogrolling list further down) that, after I finish reading, I've either had a good laugh, or feel like a marginally better person, or feel like 'Damn - there's what I oughta be shooting for here', or some combination of the three.

The rare ones are the ones that give me the Full Treatment. And this is the point of my little sermon today. You see, I've found that I most enjoy reading people, at least in blogland, that I feel like I could be friends with. This is hardly a world-shattering revelation, I know, but bear with me. Some of the Voices Sweet To My Eye are serious. Urbane. Frighteningly intelligent. They give the impression that they will brook no silliness, not from a wonderchicken, not from nobody! I come away from their blogs feeling like a better person. I've learned something. Spent some time with someone who knows a helluva lot more than me about quite a few things, and can synthesize entirely new ways of looking at those things while having a crap. There are others in the list who make me laugh, make me smile, make me feel that I'm having a virtual drink or two with them, and the cares of the day pale to insignificance. There are still others that, through their elegance and light touch, through the way they deftly and apparently effortlessly turn a phrase, make me want to work harder at this writing thing, or at design, or coding, or whatever. I love all these folks, and I am grateful each and every day for the existence of this medium that has allowed me to share in their creativity and passion.

But there are very few, and this is the crux of my point, that combine those qualities. What I mean to say is that I am a firm believer in both the value of granular analysis of semantics, for example, and in the ineluctable modality of the fart joke, for another. Preferably simultaneously. And I find that the people I enjoy most in real life are able to exist, and in fact revel in living on both of these planes simultaneously. It's these madcap philosophers to which I am most drawn. This may be in large part because I try to be that very thing, and of course we often love that in our friends which most closely mirrors what we perceive ourselves to be. Which is why most of my pals are inveterate boozers and reprobates.

I'm not going to list the few voices I've found in my travels that give me that 'Here's a person I wish I knew in real life' feeling, which at the end of the day, all the crap I was talking above is about. People who challenge me, educate me, make me laugh until I involuntarily pee - who can do all of those things. I can't and won't list them, because you always end up leaving someone out, and besides, there are more out there I haven't found yet. There are a lot out there, though, and one of the great joys of recent months for me is that some of them, even in this rarefied bloggy air, are talking back to me.

Although it's slightly embarrassing to do so, I offer you this obvious snippet of good ol' Jack Kerouac as a coda of sorts :

"...and I shambled after them as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

Afterthought : You can infer how impressed I am by the idea that the most important thing about a weblog is the links. Pfft. They merely add torque to the engine of the brain behind the words.

Talk to me! comments.

2002-02-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

New! Improved! Less taste, more filling! I've decided to flag meta-posts (ie stuff that's not about life in Korea) with a nice colorful box, and a pretty dashed line, 'cause I'm nothing if not flavour-of-the-moment. Starting now. Offer may be terminated without notice. Void where prohibited by good sense.

Do any of my loyal readers (all three of you!) have any recommendations for cheap-ass hosting? Something with a bit of space to host some images, something that I can maybe run Moveable Type on, or just continue with Blogger - the usual. Any assistance and advice would be most graciously accepted. Still pondering a domain name...

Let me know...and thanks. comments.

2002-02-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

Pretzelboy, in his State of the Union address last week, named North Korea as part of his fanciful 'axis of evil'. This has gotten the government here worried enough that the president has publicly announced "We should not let our 70 million people face the threat of war...We should ease the tension through dialogue with North Korea, and we should keep [the United States and the North] from drumming up a war atmosphere." Living, as I do, less than 100 km from the DMZ, this concerns me a bit. I've talked about this before, but this 'axis of evil' thing takes it to a new level, and the sheer white hot rage of a thousand suns that I feel when I contemplate the things that the American government is doing prevents me at this moment from commenting cogently (not that anyone who frequents this place expects cogent commentary from me, I know).

I will note, however, that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is quoted in the above Korea Times article referring to the North as "the world's number one merchant for ballistic missiles." To that I would reply that in the year 2000, the US was responsible for more than 50% of global arms trading, and the wackjob up in Pyongyang was responsible for 0.4%.

'World's #1 merchant' indeed.

Update : This "Critical Analysis of the 2002 State of the Union Address" was helpful to me in fine-tuning my fury.

Comments? comments.

2002-02-05T18:37:00.000-08:00

A recent report on the Korean news has reminded me that I may never really understand the workings of people's minds here. What am I saying - ''may never'? I can't even understand the workings of the minds of the people I grew up with....

Seems this guy bought a car at a Hyundai dealership, and it was a lemon. Despite the reputation that Hyundai cars have in some quarters, this is actually a rarity these days. All sorts of things were wrong with the car apparently, and it was basically undriveable. Within two weeks of purchasing it, he took it back to the dealership and demanded that the salesman who flogged it to him replace the car. The salesman spoke to Hyundai, and they basically came back with "We'll fix it, but we won't replace it. Not our problem."

The guy who bought the car was irate, and demanded a replacement. The salesman, caught between his bosses, with whom he couldn't possibly argue, and the irate customer, who wouldn't take no for an answer, stonewalled.

The guy went away, came back with a container of gasoline, flung it onto the salesman and himself, and set it alight. He set himself on fire, apparently in protest.

My sympathies are with the car salesman, of course. He didn't have much of a choice in the little drama. The bit I find incomprehensible is why the irate customer set himself on fire over a car. A fucking car. I just can't get my head around the self-immolation thing. Even if someone snaps in Canada, they'll go on a murderous rampage with a firearm or something, rather than set themselves alight. Or was this guy just a nutjob unrepresentative of his peers? I don't know.

Both survived the episode, apparently, and are recovering in hospital. Hyundai, of course, is denying all responsibility and refusing to assist in the salesman's hospital bills.

Thoughts?

2002-02-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

'Kim chic'. The popularity of Korean pop culture, appropriately enough, is soaring in East Asia. This is not surprising, as Korean fashion, television shows, films, music and video, and software are all slick and modern in the extreme, if not often precisely my cup of corn tea. Corn tea isn't even my cup of tea.

The TV shows are invariably concerned with love and matters familial, and seem to reach their zenith in stories of love made untenable by the iron-willed, set-jawed glare of the disapproving mother. The music, as I've discussed before, is boyband pap taken to its logical extremes, even with the few 'street gang' type groups, who always make me giggle with their hollow posturings. The game software tends to be variations on the theme of the real-time strategy, owing to an odd national obsession with Starcraft ('Stah-crapuhtuh') that is perennially made fun of in the gaming community. On the other hand, I'll admit that the few Korean films I've seen have actually been quite good, and hard to generalize about.

I would argue that South Korean pop culture is seen as fresh and edgy but non-threatening not because "they're Asian and they look like us," as quoted in the linked article, but because it is non-threatening. Designed that way. Even more blatantly than in the west, pop-culture output is targetted at teenagers here, and it shows. The infantilization of Korean youth continuing right up into their university years, which I've touched on before here, virtually guarantees that any truly confrontational or countercultural elements are thoroughly avoided, or sanitized and co-opted, if they appear. This is beginning to change, but slowly. Any sort of 'adult alternative', in music or otherwise, is very thin on the ground. [thanks y2karl!]

Pop goes the world!

2002-02-04T04:08:00.000-08:00

I'm messing with my template here, going all-css and stuff. I love a project!
Things might look a wee bit strange for a while. Bear with me.. If it looks utterly broken for more than a couple of minutes at a time on your browser, please drop a comment in the usual commenty place. Thankee.

Update : Well, completely new code under the template-hood, and after all that work it looks basically the same. Sheesh. But it'll be a lot easier to fiddle with now, and possibly go ORANGE. Or not...

The usual commenty place.

2002-01-31T19:29:00.000-08:00

Time, at the end of the day, as a person's most limited, unrenewable resource, is precious to me. Time to think, slowly, langorously, time to drink a bit when I feel like it and then enjoy the cushioned-by-clouds-of-cotton feeling the next day. Time to pay attention to what I do in my work, examine it, and find ways to do it better. Time to type self-absorbed crap like this into my blog, even.

Time that is not beholden to anyone, my own, privately-owned moments and hours and days and weeks, is one of the reasons I came back to Korea in August 2000. This week I've been presented with the opportunity to return to Australia again, to quadruple my salary back to what it was, get back into IT, work with some old friends, and lose all this glorious free time that I so enjoy. Wrestling with the decision is hurting my brain. Thanks I suppose to the (granted, reluctant) work-ethic of my stepfather, I do sometimes feel guilty about the months of paid holiday I enjoy in my current employment, and the four-day work-weeks. I can hear his ghostly voice saying in a loving but ungentle way - "You fink! Get off your ass and do something!"

I'm really not sure what to do, but this article (via rebeccablood) certainly helped me put my thoughts in order. It's worth reading.

Update : Some interesting meta-commentary from Jonathon.

All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

2002-01-30T21:53:00.000-08:00

It must be mail day : traffic has soared the last two days, due mostly to the "Google Instant Messaging" meme that Shelley at Burningbird is spreading, I'd imagine, and I've had a few questions via email about why someone who would otherwise appear to be a rational adult calls himself 'stavrosthewonderchicken'. Click, and you shall receive.

Shrouded in the mists of history...

2002-01-30T21:39:00.000-08:00

Image : Cartoon dog, yapping viciously, running at the source of its frustration, all a-slaver, until - glurk! - it's hauled up by the tether it forgot about, and sails into the air, landing on its back with a mighty whoomp! Little birdies commence to tweet around its head, in circles.

It's a novel and fascinating facet of this new medium (to me at least) that people can immediately call you on your shit, either with kindness or rancour, and force you to think more carefully about your offhanded rants and screeds. I called the guy I linked to in my last post a 'cretin' and opined that he represented the worst of what his country has to offer. Joanne sent me an email and asked a few good questions about why I said those things, and I'll try to respond in public, at a little more length.

Joanne points out that the main thrust of the professor's article is that Koreans should not be ashamed of eating dog, and that criticism from the west shouldn't make Koreans feel ashamed of their culture, and that these points, based on things I've said before, are very much in line with the wonderchicken take on the whole issue.

True.

She also says, in my opinion correctly, that every culture has things of which to be proud and things of which to be ashamed, and that eating dog meat is neither, if one ignores the cruelty that is often employed in their slaughter. In this I also agree with Joanne, but the last point is an important one, which I'll touch on in a minute.

So where do I get off calling the professor such horrible names? It actually has little to do with the point he's arguing. I tend to agree with him that Koreans should eat what they wish, and let the west take care of their own backyard. I believe my suggestion to Koreans was to say "Kiss our hairy asses!". My primary problem with the good professor's essay lies in the politicizing of the issue, something that not only annoys the hell out of me, but happens constantly in Korea, for complicated historical reasons. He pulls out old chestnuts like the sovereignity and submissiveness ones quoted below, like (to paraphrase) "it's a conspiracy against to Korea to make us import beef", like "the attitude of feeling shame by eating dog meat, of humbly lowering ourselves, shifts the cause of the problem and only hinders the solution, spoiling our pride", and "in many ways, Korea is historically and culturally among the top in the world, but it lacks not only in a firm pride and belief in a traditional culture, but also in a strong will to make it known worldwide" to quote a few examples.

It may well be because I have heard things like this about "Korea's magnificent culture" so many times that each further repetition becomes an annoyance. When people tell me (as they do, all the damn time) that Korea is unique in that it has four seasons, I nod sagely. When I'm told that kimchi (which I love) is the greatest health food ever invented, I smile in wonderment. When someone insists that Hangul (the Korean alphabet, which may truly be one of Korea's greatest achievements, I admit) is the greatest alphabet ever created, I agree that that may be possible. When a colleague insists that Cheju island is more beautiful than Hawaii and Tahiti combined, I murmur my amazement quietly to myself.

I understand, as much as it is possible for a waeguk-in to grasp, perhaps, that the Japanese colonial occupation in the first half of this century was one of the cruelest things done to a people, ever. The Korean language was banned, Koreans (for whom family ties are perhaps the single most significant things in their lives) were forced to take and use Japanese surnames, cultural treasures and temples were destroyed wholesale, tens of thousands of young women were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers, the litany of evil goes on and on. I understand how that, coupled with the devastation and horror of the Korean war, a scant few years after the Japanese were driven out, has resulted in a people that, considering they were dubbed the Hermit Kingdom before any of this happened, are still painfully sensitive about both domination and cultural meddling from outside. I understand that the slightly pathetic assertions of Korea's uniqueness and marvellousness, perennially overplayed as they are, come at least in part from the pathologies that grew from the rape of the country at the hands of outsiders like myself.

But it's time to let that go. Korea and its people are truly one of the wonders of this age, and talking Korea up in a whiny, wheedling voice like this professor does, smacks of the same tired, masturbatory self-justification that has allowed all that is bad about Korea to poison all that is good. The country is being held back by people like him, and it annoys me.

The last point I feel like I need to make is that every time on Metafilter or Plastic or even gotta-love-em lowbrow Fark that the dogmeat issue comes up, it is invariably the consensus that "Koreans should eat whatever they want," with the proviso that the preference would be for the practice of beating the dogs to death to end. Now.

Koreans like this professor entirely miss the point here. The vast majority of people in the west don't care much about the issue, except when it comes to outright cruelty. By glossing this, and by defending the entire practice of eating dog, which I and many others are fine with, he is implicity defending the abhorrent and evil practice of beating animals to death before cooking them. This practice, where it occurs, happens because the belief that the adrenaline released into the flesh of the fear-crazed animal as it is beaten to death tenderizes and adds more of the mysterious healthful properties the meat is said to possess.

This I can't accept. And I can't accept that all the defenders of dogmeat in Korea so far miss the point so badly - that this cruelty is the only thing most people in the West object to.

Comments?

2002-01-30T04:29:00.000-08:00

You know, I love Korea. I really do, in a tangled-up, possibly unhealthy way, and it drives me up the wall when cretins like this, who represent the worst that the place has to offer, somehow end up being noticed. I have a strong suspicion that reading badly-written, speciously-argued tripe like this will push more people to blindly condemn something they might not have cared much about in the first place.

"Giving in to pressure from mostly foreign dissenters, Korea has banned the use of dog meat. [wonderchicken interjection : No, they haven't. Nor should they] In doing so, this has reduced the sovereignty of Korea and what it stands for. That is the revelation of submissive idea under the influence of foreign country to lower ourselves down, having a negative view on dog meat."

How about a steaming cup of shut the fuck up? For the sake of your country, at least.

Nonetheless, here I am, linking the little essay. Short version for those who can't be bothered to click through : it's another episode in the Dog Meat story. I've talked about this issue here and here and here and here and here and here.

This time I'll just let you draw your own conclusions, I think. Read this too, before you do.

Two all-dog patties, special sauce...

2002-01-29T05:16:00.000-08:00

Further to a comment I made here:

It's being reported in today's Korea Times that the government has decided that its incredibly successful rollout of DSL and cable, that has effectively given Korea pervasive broadband access, is just the beginning (I pay about US$17 per month for my 4 MB DSL, uncapped). It plans to have 5 Gb fiber pipes into homes by 2006. Judging by the success of the first wave of broadband rollout, I think they'll do it.

The doomsayers in America who have recently offered the opinion that 'everyone who wants broadband internet access already has it' ought to visit Korea, and see the impact pervasive fast access has had here, and how the technology, once it reached critical mass, has begun to snowball, economic crisis or no economic crisis. One small but significant effect is that all the major TV networks have video-on-demand services, which allow you to stream past episodes of pretty much every show they air, or watch whatever is on the station at the moment. Think of that, and think about the endless verbiage and millions upon millions of dollars that have been wasted on failed video-on-demand schemes in North America. The Korean stations just went ahead and did it, without fanfare or IPOs or launch parties. And the services are heavily used...when the provision of data as a service reaches the level of a utility (that is, cheap and pervasive enough not to really be noticed anymore), thinking about what is possible, or necessary, begins to change, I think.

In four years or so, when the current 3G wireless network has been replaced by whatever's next, and I can get a 5 Gb datapipe into my home for the price of a pizza, the mind boggles at the potential uses. Even beyond pr0n!

I hope by then I speak Korean well enough to take advantage of it.

Comments?