As Stafford Notes, "It is funny because it's true."

An amusing piss-take on some Korean obsessions by someone who has an uncanny ability to channel Konglish..

Goggle-eyednesss, from the Goggle Eyes..

LOL...

here is oldage...

The subject-line had some bigass meaning for me (and it was surely about Carly Simon's "You're So Vain").

Now I close all the other windows I've been working in and it makes no sense to me at all...

Welcome to the sliiiiiiiide.. ;-)

It's like herding LOLcatz!

Reading "The English Teacher's Guide to Korea" (which is enough to make me love ATEK despite it's occasional problems) I see:

Don't be tempted to run in the subway station. If you miss your train, don't worry - there'll be another one along, in a minute or two; it's not worth risking your life for. Subway stations are made of hard and sometimes slippery stone floors, stairs, and sharp corners and if you fall down you man not be getting up again. (205)

LOL.. at least I did get back up, cracked rib notwithstanding...

but lesson learned..

Am I Science Yet?

Cause I think I explained something about the universe in an email.. er..

no.. in an email I explained something about the universe..

cause the universe being in an email is ridiculous.

Everyone knows how slow the universe is, so it is clearly in an old fashioned postal envelope.

QED...

Here is the unified field theory of work:

I posit (which I sometimes do when I am feeling philosophical; other times I get depressed and drink) a conservation field theory of work (and laziness). The physics, of course is trivial to polymaths such as my readers.

dW = ρ_i v_i A_i dt - ρ_o v_o A_o dt
where

dW = change of Work in the system (kegels)
ρ = density (bbbd -Bush Presidencies per decade)
v = speed (or any other semi-amphetamine)
A = area (m²)
dt = an increment of time (not including overtime)

Some of the implications of this are that:

1) Work can be neither created nor destroyed

a. Therefore doing any work is foolish, for it cannot affect the total amount of work in the universe

2) The form of work can be altered by container

a. Thus, although it can’t really be dealt with in any worthwhile way, it can be packaged differently and shifted around (I’m not sure I need to be explicit here and say I mean shifted to others?)

3) The density of work can be altered

a. Consequently I prefer to spread it out the maximum amount I can

I think, perhaps, that this was best summed up by that Great American Philosopher, Johnny Cash, when he croaked, “16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”

How I avoid work....

Farkstiferousness..

gotta finish these last 12 pages of editing for a book chapter about Korean religious history (which I am now pretty much of an expert on, for a layman) and instead it makes me wander off and write my blues song (though it seems all choruses and no verses) about my need for faith healing....

I really suck when addressed as a productivity vector...

I need an answer for a heel -
a stripper named Faith or Grace?
A red-wine benediction -
drawing a halo on my face?

Perhaps a charismatic minister
To bring me to my knees
To put his hand upon my head
And cure me of my disease

Baby I need faith healing,
or medical attention.
Cause I got a sickly feeling,
and no faith that I could mention.

No wings on my scuffed heels
Angels wouldn’t touch my shoes
And I can’t say exactly how it feels
Wishing I had a thing to lose.

I want me the healing tent
A white man in a white suit
Plastic chairs and plastic hair
The promise of God’s fruit

Baby I need faith healing,
or medical attention.
Cause I got a sickly feeling,
and no faith that I could mention.

fade ooot.....

Walking on these scuffed heels
I gotta get outta town…
Living here without faith
And no doctor hanging round..

No doctor hanging round…

LOL.. finally done with the edit... couldn't send until I fin.. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

Kneebone connected to the?

Bummer..

Woke up this morning crippled. Walked to work and back yesterday with nothing out of the ordinary. Got home and right knee began to ache. A drag, but not so intolerable I couldn't do my normal evening stretching routine.

Wake up this morning (at about 3 am) after a painful night and it won't support any weight (and baby, I got that!) or straighten out, and is incredibly painful.

Trying to figure out how I'm getting out of my third-story apartment. :-(

If there are no updates I am crumpled in the stairwell.

Lolcatz on Y E Yang

From a generally shitty poem (obviously and admittedly based on "The Mighty Casy") over at ESPN comes this last verse on the occasion of Yang beating Tiger..

Oh, somewhere in South Korea the sun is shining bright,
A band is playing somewhere, and there the hearts are light,
And in Seoul the men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there was no joy for Tiger as he meekly putted out.

Interruptus....

MAF sends the quote:

"if your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt."
- henry j. kaiser

and in her understated internet way asks the related question:

nice, eh?

yeah.. but really.. isn't that the "bitch question?"

everything interrupts and we have become a less interruption averse culture as shit like the telephone, intarwebs (as a social tool), and advertising have started fracturing everything.

Every once in a while I have this fantasy. It involves no people, because people are the interruptus.

In it I am transported to some kind of cabin (all the mod cons, of course) and stranded there. All I can do is read and write.

In some versions of this fantasy I have no coffee or booze, in others I have ample supplies of both.

But the main point is there is NO interruption unless an eagle dive-bombs the pad.

The fantasy ends there, of course, because I would have to then imagine doing something creative, and that is beyond the pale, suspension of disbelief, or even reality. ;-)

From Japan (Via Joe Seoulman)

Ah CRAP!

I forgot to say...

click here...

Letter of Application

Dear Hussein Obama,

I write this letter to express my interest in a position on one of the “Death Panels” that your proposed health-care program will institute. As a long-term employee of the Democratic National Committee I am acutely aware of the fact that many so-called “citizens” of the United States would do themselves, and our great country, a favor by going away (I am thinking, particularly, of free-market economists, AIG executives, anyone associate with Goldman Sachs, successful small businessmen fighting the taxman, and the three home-schooled girls in America who didn’t get pregnant in their first semester of community college!). As these selfish conservatives, many of them drug addicts, liars, and/or perverts who use falafels to satisfy their bizarre sexual urges (and that’s just O’Reilly and Rush), will not kill themselves, I believe it is necessary for the government to kill them.

And it will save money.

Toss in a handful of religious figures and we will also lower the child-molestation rate in this fine country.

My fiancee, although not a man (I am ashamed to admit I am not gay) is a fan of WWII literature and particularly that focusing on the holocaust, and I think that her study of Germany's WWII liberal, permissive, socialist, and pot-smoking regime will be of use to me should I attain a position on the Death Panel.

Although I am white and aging myself, I am no fan of the elderly, crippled, or Republicans. I think it is this overall attitude that makes me entirely suited to be on one of the Death Panels. Every pet I have ever had has died. Not all as young as I might have hoped, but I think in all cases it is fair to say that I hastened their demise. Also, my father died when I was thirteen. I am humiliated to admit that my mother seems likely to live to age 100, but if I am appointed to one of your death squads I will be certain to ensure that she is one of the first to stand, then slump, then collapse, before the bullet-pocked brick wall which represents victory!

Sincerely,

Charles Montgomery
Cold Blooded Killer and Fan of Universal Health Care

PS: Dear Hussein, please support my linkwhoring by clicking over to my other blog, which is currently in some kind of Korean (South!) contest.

Sweeter Than Honey!

Just back from being a panel discussant and presenter at ICAS 6 in Daejeon. 

It was a pretty good gig other than the fact that our presentation was at 8:30 AM on a Sunday, so virtually no one attended.  I got to hang with James from The Grand Narrative and meet Gomushin Girl as well as (the other) Charles from Liminality.

But the best part?

Getting back and realizing that I hadn't had time to do my Friday "Get Fuzzy" and "Comics Curmudgeon" rounds. And, hell yeah it has to be done in that order!

Aaah... sweet, sweet home!

Of course, you stupid idiots..

1959

I swear, it really is the year everything changed.

read more about why my birth will eventually require some kind of crucifixion, right here..

And get your shit right with dat reality..

word!

"War Across The Nation!"

That would be a brilliant song by the semi-punk band Chelsea. Who none of you boy-band fans have ever bought a record of. Chelsea are only slightly related to the fact that my sainted mother asks the following question:

perhaps you could address the feelings in SK about the current situation with NK and its threat (and I know they threaten often) to go to war with SK.

As I read reactions back “home” I am stunned by how stupid they sound over here ( I completely accept that I might sound as stupid over there). North Korea (NK from now on) may be a 'rogue nation" (whatever that might mean), but as far as anyone in this hemisphere can tell, they are neither suicidal nor stupid. The overseas misunderstandings seem to focus on two Myths

Myth One: NK is ready to nuke SK (or Japan, or the US) without hesitation
Answer: If NK had "no hesitation to nuke anyone" it would have happened long ago. This is their second test.. they have nukes and boats. That's all it would take.

Myth Two: Kim Jong IL (KJI from now on) is some kind of crazy man
Answer: Crazy like a fox. What leader in the world has turned less (no economic base, no real power, starving citizens, an army that can't win) into more international status? He's smarter than the last Bush (by some multiplicative factor) and as sneaky as The Hustler. NK is a nothing country, going nowhere, that still manages to lead bigger countries around by their noses.

They do this kind of thing to BUILD SUPPORT INTERNALLY by representing themselves as always under attack. In a way, NK is the classic Orwellian “1984” country, except that they’ve actually “always been at war with EastAsia (the US)” since “always” in Korea is judged as just past the last war, unless one needs to go back further in order to malign the Japanese.

There may be a third myth in here somewhere (like the horse in the pile of shit) about NK being “ready to revolt” but that’s a different issue

I think KJI still likes cigars and whiskey (this is a metaphor and a fact). If he attacks SK in any meaningful way the Chinese will kill his ass (thus removing tobacco and booze) before the rest of the world gets a chance to. There is also the fact that North Korea is very small and we know exactly where KJI and his friends in power live. Check out this very good article on how even Google can find the apparatchik of North Korea if you think they believe they are invulnerable.

The only, ONLY way NK goes for it is if KJI actually is insane and thinks he can get it done under the radar, by which I mean so quickly that no one can stop it before KJI his bad self is kilt.

I don’t believe either condition is true. To be fair, I live in Seoul, so I might have a betting interest in how this all turns out. ;-)

NK only has just two cards, and they can’t be laid down in the same game.

• They can toast Seoul. That would be the last thing they did, of course, and I believe they know that.
• China loves them as a buffer (but, you know, toast Seoul and that’s gone).

This is a pretty weak hand that KJI has played well. He has to bluster and bluff and the bigger reaction he gets from idiots in the United States (I’m looking at you neo-conservatives. WTF, you can’t have sex unless we’re about to go to war? Go back to your roots, grab the whiskey jar, beat the three-legged dog, and work on that car that will never run) the better he plays outside of the US. And the better he plays in NK itself.

And now his personal stakes are raised. Look at the pictures of him. He’s dying. He wants his stupid Juche revolution to continue. So he’s gonna beat the drums, rally the troops, and line up the future. It’s unlikely he’s pulling the trigger.

If the trigger does get pulled it will unfortunately be one of those retarded but inexorable processes in which one stupid little thing is followed by successively larger ones until the largest stupidity is accomplished.

Human stupidity, not insanity, is the biggest threat here. Cause when it comes to stupidity? We're exponential (existential?) that way!

Here in Seoul, I’ll still be as dead. But it will reassure me that it was due to human stupidity and some slowly built inertial suicide. This kind of end adheres to the rules of physics; I can accept it. What the fuck.. I'm old enough to die for any stupid reason.

Still, most people I know come from that Greek rational tradition. Then the enlightenment supposedly taught us to think.

This is the West’s moment to not get butthurt, to not react, to realize that NK wouldn’t be acting like this at all if their leadership had the slightest notion that they were winning and were going to stay in control.

When NK acts like this it is a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength. And every time, every US administration plays it the other way.

Pat Moynihan got murdered for coming up with the notion of benign neglect. But guess what?

It's called for. Unbury that fat Irish fuck and put him in charge of all of this. Stat!

OTOH, I'd be interested to know if the NKCIA is as lame as the US CIA . If they are, who knows what stupidity they are feeding KJI? And what he might believe is actually possible. If KJI's "intelligence" guys are as retarded as the US ones have been in the last 10 years?

Fuck... I might still end up doing that futile dog-paddle one attempts in a lake of fire.

Whatever.

I have enough soju for tonight. And the bibimbap at the place the cabbies go?

It was fucking brilliant.

Unexpected Responses from Google

So.. I realize I have not set my goals for this year and, given my essential laziness, this will hold me back.

So I started to work on them today.

Been looking at translation sites..

Thinking about my teaching....

Looking at conferences..

And trying to plan losing the next 30 pounds. In that effort I googled something I had heard, that modern soju was made from ethanol based on a chemical mash, and sugar. I just wanted to see how bad for me this could be, as Korean men consume soju at an industrial rate, yet still seem to stay slender.

In my eternal search for wisdom, I googled "soju and sugar"

See that picture thingy there at the top, left?

It was the first(!) result.

It's a goddamned dildo!

This result didn't help me at all in my particular search, but I've ordered two for some friends who need a little release. ;-)

Oh yeah.. and one for me!

Stooopid Goooooogle!

Kwanzaa begins today...

So I thought I'd share my thoughts on the African-American experience...

All Ice Cube movies are worth watching.
If I were Halle Berry I would spend all my time nude
All movies should include Dan Cheadle
No one has replaced Sammy Davis Jr.

That will be all..

Letter from the Empire

Hallelujah and O My God...

I finally received a letter from someone back in the States.

Technically, I paid $1,000 dollars for someone to send me a letter from the States, but it is just as meaningful for me on two levels.

1) Now I know what I have to do to get people to correspond with me. To be honest, I won't pay most of you that much for anything short of a sex act, but at least I now know what is required.

2) Hey, it was my first letter while here!

I have included the pic (with some slight blurring) for three reasons.

The first is to prove to some skeptics that all you have to do is actually send me a letter and I will receive it.

The second is to reinforce what the address is without entirely giving my ID away to the random and evil innartubes.

And the third is to suggest that the person who sent me this letter is probably a dangerous psychopath of some kind as suggested by relatively random handwriting/font approach they take to something as simple and brief as an address.

1) My name in a savage and jagged script which suggests great anger and barely controlled desires to violence.

2) The name of the Institute in tightly controlled and universally sized capital letters.

3) The remainder of the address in the "large cap/small cap" format, semi-randomly applied across words.

If I happened to be the husband of this correspondent (and you know who you are!), I'd take a long, long hunting trip. And ask to get letters, lots of letters.

And not come back until some of this letterary evidence of insanity is reduced.

FINAL POINT (or, as correspondent might write it FINAL POINT): I showed this to the TSR and his response was:

"As someone who is not an expert at handwriting, it looks like this person might be a relative of yours."

Prima facie evidence of instability!

Teaching English in Japan: "Spare Me My Life!"

This is.. uh.... odd?

Just Wrong

Well, I suppose it's a good thing that whoever did this is

a) Barren
b) Unlovable

or both...

Screwy in St. Louis...

Well...

it's fixed now. I have lodgings at the lovely Chesire Lodge and my flight is cleverly planned so that I need not wake up early on either departure date.

The lovely discussant promises her feedback on my paper by Saturday. The BAG fulminates darkly about how Koreans always "love to hold me up." Hey, sometimes I stagger baby, sometimes I stagger! And I think a six day turn-around on a conference paper, for a post-doc who is reading several others, is just fine. As far as I'm concerned it means I don't have to do any more work on the thing this week...

Work itself is oddly under control... all these events are unfurling as planned and I seem to be marginally better at planning them. One community event and one Major Conference Entertainment to go, but with luck these will be the last for a very long time.

On a more (less?) amusing note, one of the previous wives of the "Just Married Uncle" has had a stroke pursuant to surgery. The surgery had been scheduled on the same day as the JMU's wedding, which led to some speculation that it was a sort of dramatic "fuck you" to the whole day.

As I noted to my BS, if this were true, the ex-wife clearly hadn't thought her brilliant plan all the way through. A death the day before would have had some swing, now it becomes a very sad footnote. I wonder how the JMU feels? If this has any impact any longer...

Oh well... as I sit at the bar waiting for

1) My laundry to dry
2) The BAG to get here
3) Total Consciousness..

I don't wonder all that much.

Because I'm selfish.

And all I really need is a good reason. ;-)

I felt kind of let down...

When the rather promising "Medium size Cat o"


Turned into this:


And not the S&M implement I had been hoping for

alas...

My Blog is rated...

Mingle² - Blog Rate-iation

So all you kiddies get outta here..

Suggestions from the Great Unwashed

Apparently in response to my post on the absence of Korean books at Borders, the BAG suggests that I am cranky because I don't get enough sleep (she forgets she slept over last night and it is her lumberjack level snoring that makes this so) and that I should not be Grumpy Old Dude (GOD) and instead should be Dude of Grumpiness (DOG).

On a similar note of intarwebular love, a reader who is apparently my sister suggests that I call myself "BOTBAG (boyfriend of the bizzarre alien girlfriend)." But this has the unfortunate sound of something frat-boys would do to each other during a hazing gone wrong ("We could give him the shocker, purple nurple, or botbag the son-of-a-bitch." Later the police come, and shortly after that, the coroner).

I accept both of these suggestions in the spirit in which they were offered, scorn and derision, and will remain GOD around here.