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September 30, 2005
And the Lord said, "Go to sleep, little grad students."
The problem with science has always been that each new discovery unleashes thousands of new questions and ambiguities. So really, the more we discover new stuff, the stupider we get. Clearly, that isn't working. [Intelligent Design] says we shouldn't bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning.
Why didn't I see it before? It's so obvious!
From Slate's Dahlia Lithwick's Modest Proposal in "favor" of intelligent design.
Posted by b-applegate at 4:41 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 19, 2005
Also...
I bought an LG Region 3 external DVD/CD burner drive. It's USB 2.0 so I was worried about speed but so far it has actually outpaced the crappy drive in my laptop at both reading and writing (it writes DVDs at 1.7 MB a second. A second! I'm probably broadcasting just how out of touch I am by being impressed by that).
So I bought a bunch of DVDs. Including, but not limited to:
Korean DVDs: Taegukgi, The Scarlet Letter (I had to see what a Korean contemporary version would look like), DMZ, Wonderful Days, another animated movie with a pig
Other: Minority Report, The Great Dictator, Apollo 13 Special Edition, Kung Fu Hustle, Kill Bill 1 & 2.
That last one was incredible. I watched them both over the weekend and I gotta say I didn't think it was possible for movies to be that much fun. At least, not for me, anymore. I loved every minute.
Posted by b-applegate at 12:47 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Chuseok
I realize that, despite my concerted efforts to be consistently late to class and never study, I am actually learning this language. Compare: I just had an incredibly stupid-sounding, elementary conversation about where my family is (London), how old I am (21) and how I studied in Japan in college and know Japanese (which I meant to make the other participants know that I'm not a total idiot, i.e., at least I know Japanese, but I think might have had an opposite effect). Whereas three months ago I could barely say hello.
The people at this cafe and in my hasuk have put up with me so wonderfully. I really have to bring holidays into their lives in the same way they bring theirs into mine. To wit: this last weekend was Chuseok (Korean thanksgiving) and I was pretty much the only tenant left in the building (everyone else had gone home to be with family, and I can only assume the two other foreigners have been here long enough to have somewhere to go). But the hasuk ajuma family gathered at the hasuk, which meant I got to see the two other daughters, their husbands and their kids.
This family is eerily similar to my Japanese host family-- three daughters, one my age and two others moved away and with kids. The only difference is that there's a dad and that, unthinkable as it is, Harumi is a pussycat compared with this mom.
The highlight for me was naturally the family member with whom there was no language barrier-- the three-year-old. We played peek-a-boo around corners and this jump up and down game that was instantly invented when I imitated him and made him laugh, and the pick-him-up-and-show-him-the-top-of-the-doorframe game. It made putting up with his crying in the middle of the night a miniscule price to pay for the kind of pure human connection I haven't had in a while.
The little kid's thirteen-year-old cousin interrogated me about American Chuseok (which I said was on Nov. 26-- I'm learning the language, but I don't yet know how to say third Thursday-- is it even the third Thursday?). I told him we ate turkey, and he didn't know what that is, so I made a thorough fool of myself strutting around making gobbling noises, which communicated to him precisely nothing, because, of course, he didn't know what a turkey was. So I just told him it was "chicken but not chicken" and left it at that.
The food was fantastic, as well it should be, since all the female family members were sitting around making it (I'm not kidding) all day for two days. I couldn't walk into the kitchen for most of the weekend because it was covered by cooking women. This is one of those things that foreigners find very amusing and Korean cultural expats (the ones who have moved away in all but spirit, like those I work with) find abhorrent. See this vivid description of Chuseok "dipped in boiling resentment" and this more newsy look at the crappiness of the holiday.
I had songpyeon, the little rice cakes, too, thanks to the ajuma at the Starlite (who I learned from her daughter, who is beautiful and interesting and likes Cowboy Bebop and computer games and hates pop music-- and is leaving for London tomorrow, where was I? Oh right, I found out from her that her mom is actually half-Japanese but her mother died when she was young and so she was raised Korean-- I didn't call this category streamofconsciousness for nothing), who gave me a dish of them for free, and, true to the spirit of the Filipino church ladies I remember loving as a kid, insisted I take a bag home too.
Well, I think I emptied the brain out pretty well there. Happy Chuseok, everyone!
Posted by b-applegate at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 13, 2005
Invasion!
The sky fell on Seoul today. At least if you think of the sky as made of water.
I was half-asleep when, at 12:17 p.m. (I looked at the clock), an enormous boom shook my room. My immediate thought was, "Holy crap, the North Koreans are coming!" Then, when further booms didn't materialize, I thought maybe the construction site next door had an explosion. It turned out to be the biggest thunderclap I've ever heard. And I've heard some doozies in Chicago. Crazy.
This week is Chuseok, which means Koreans go to their ancestral homes and eat stuff (apparantly a special rice cake is among them). Seoul, I'm told, totally empties. Looking forward to some "me time."
I was on the elevator today and an ajumma reached out and suddenly felt the fabric of my shirt thoughtfully.
This was an... interesting experience. I never had occasion to go to a Pentecostal service in the U.S., so this was my first experience with them. All through the first half it seemed like a pretty average harmless-Methodisty-rock-music type service. The pastor started his sermon talking humorously about his vacation in Thailand with the other pastors in the denomination. Some funny/ironic, depending on your perspective, things about how fearsome it is to handle God's money were said.
Then he said for the potential fornicators and adulterers to come on up to the altar. He asked people to keep their eyes to themselves, and I was going to do that, until I realized that a) I was supposed to be reporting on this and b) no one else was.
I kind of regret not going up there myself. After all, you can't really judge something if you haven't experienced it, and this, though definitely weird and probably deceptive over the long term, was pretty harmless. As it is I was just perplexed by the whole thing.
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September 10, 2005
New Orleans
I'm reading "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, and came across this part today, which seemed rather chilling in the context of recent events:
The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
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September 6, 2005
Pics from the Neighborhood
I won't buy Capri Sun. I would buy this.
On the way to a dinner celebrating the Slovakian national day, I found out Euljiro 3-ga station is a very scary place. I felt like I was in some kind of freaky undergroundworld. I hope they're renovating it and it isn't always like this.
I think this guy was the chef at the Slovak thing. No, he is not wearing a hairnet. And yes, that is an ice sculpture in the background.
The Slovakian ambassador clinked glasses with an Interesting Hatman. This might be decent photojournalism if I had been able to figure out who the guy was. Curse my pitiful Korean and lack of shoving-other-reporters-out-of-the-way skills.
The party had good beer. And apple strudel! Though I did not like the sauerkraut much.
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Beethovenman
I hope Koizumi wins the election, just because whoever replaces him will definitely not be able to measure up in the hair department. I mean, look at him.
He's cuddly.
Posted by b-applegate at 7:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
A Sempai (Upperclassman) Moment
I was burning some incense I bought in Kyoto in my room yesterday, and it occurred to me to post how I got it. Last month, on my ultimately unsuccessful visa run to Japan (another long story I should tell someday) I was wandering around my old neighborhood in Uji and finally went into this antique shop that I'd never been in before because it always looked too expensive for me. I found out that it was, but that it also carried incense. Seemed like a good omiyage idea, so I had the guy show it to me. While we were making chatter, he asked me why I was in Uji (the area I was in is kinda off the tourist path) and I explained that I had studied at the Stanford University center in Kyoto. When he didn't know what Stanford was I mentioned that it was connected to Kyoto University and he lit up, saying he'd gone there too (I forget for what). And when I bought two little things of incense, he told me to wait and puttered around for a while, coming back with a plastic bag containing a little incense burner and seven or eight plugs of different kinds of incense, for free. It was enough to make me wish I'd spent more time at Kyodai. At least the next generation of KCJSers will get a center located on the Kyodai campus.
Korean language update: I understood a complete sentence from my ajuma when I came back from my (successful) visa trip to Nagoya, and answered in a comprehensible way!
The exchange in question:
어�애�어�?
�본애서친구를만났어�.
Corrections are welcome as I'm sure there are some mistakes in my written Korean. I just wish I had more time to study.
And Mom, I bought a bed. But I left my towel in Japan and am using a dishcloth. I will buy another towel tomorrow, though. Really.
I figured out how to get the hot water to work. The Chinese ajuma showed me the hot water panel in the kitchen, which luckily I recognized as similar to the one at my host family's house in Japan (otherwise I would have thought she was showing me the air conditioning or something). But even with it on, the water is not that warm and the hot water pressure is horrid, so I think I'm just going to keep doing the cold shower thing. It shocks me into waking up and it guarantees I shower quickly. Though I anticipate problems as the winter approaches.
Anyone who knows a good public bath in the Sinchon area, please let me know.
Breakfast is getting more palatable day by day. I am actually eager to eat the kim chee now that I've sampled the other stuff on hand, which includes some sort of grape leaf squishy thing and assorted things that I can just barely get down when the ajumma points at them insistently.
But it's still cool to be able to eat healthy in the morning. The boiled potatoes aren't so bad, plus I actually like the little fishies. And every once in a while (if I'm extra good, I imagine) Chinajumma makes me a fried egg. ^-^
Posted by b-applegate at 6:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 2, 2005
Columns
This week provides an example of a good column, by one of the people who reviewed the recently released papers regarding the Japan-South Korea normalization treaty of 1965, a pretty darn bad one that is totally disconnected from reality (and from any concept of structure) and an utterly hilarious one (you have to keep reading until the end).
These are probably fairly typical. The JoongAng editorial writers usually just fart out something that fits the space, but most of the guests are more interesting. But on balance I'm glad I'm reading them. Even the bad ones can be instructive.
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