Blearg

It turns out that my immune system of steel is no match for some combination of the following: cold weather, an entire new set of germs to be exposed to, contact with many many children, and new foods (including raw crab). You don't want to know the details, but here's a taste:

Symptoms of bird flu are very similar to normal human influenza and the disease cannot be diagnosed from bird flu symptoms alone, an oral or throat swab will be required to check for signs of the avian influenza virus. Human flu symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches, headache, conjunctivitis. Bird flu ultimately causes breathing difficulties, pneumonia and is potentially fatal.

Ok, my symptoms are not (quite) the same as those, and I'm not really worried at all. However, dating a hypochondriac is probably what allowed me to get my appendix out before it burst rather than afterwards, so I will pay attention.

Actually, I've been feeling a lot better since last night (4am to 8am were pretty damn miserable). I actually went to work today and (amusingly) to a health check (where they found me perfectly healthy because they are looking at long term stuff, though the nurse in radiology really didn't know what to make of my nipple piercing).

Update: I'm pretty much fine now (Jan 2nd).

Hiking

Today I had a few hours between observing classes and an end of the year dinner for the teachers, so I decided to explore Daejeon the Eurasian Hobo way: by walking. Part of why I chose Daejeon as the city to teach in was that it is surrounded by large hills (Mt. Tabor sized hills, which some of you non-Coloradans would probably call 'mountains'). It is nice that it only takes a few minutes to get from my school to a path through forested hills, that passes by what are either burial mounds and markers or boundry markers of some sort (I'll have to ask about them). I also walked through the main strip of the Noeun neighborhood (where both my school and hotel are) down to the World Cup Stadium. As they say in Pulp Fiction, it's the little differences that make life strange in other countries. I have plenty to say on that subject but I'll save it for when I have experienced more and when I have pictures for demonstration.

I took a plane, I took a train

I just heard an ad (I'm already guiltily addicted to video game TV because I'm fascinated by the way they treat video games the way Americans treat sports, with color commentary and hundreds of adoring, cheering fans) that used The New Pornographers' Myriad Harbor. I'm always shocked when I hear indie music in unexpected places. I was along for the ride at target for some of my mother's christmas shopping and heard them play a Sigur Ros song (again, at Target, in Colorado Springs!). I guess I really am a music snob if I assume that other people won't know and won't play the music I like.

Update: Add Rilo Kiley's Portions for Foxes to the songs I've heard on TV ads in Korea.

You Must Construct Additional Pylons

I'm pretty sure that there is a channel in Korea that shows Starcraft tournaments 24 hours a day. At any rate, that was what it was showing this morning and now, eight hours later.

Ok, the Ongamenet channel is probably video games all day, not just SC, though Koreans are (in)famously obsessed with that particular game.

Update: Actually, there are (at least) two such channels, both of which were showing Starcraft games last night.

Age in Korea, and other oddities.

I visited my school today and learned some about Korean culture in the process. One of the stranger things was that in Korea they count age differently. You turn one on the first January first of your life (I have no idea if what happens if your birthday is on January first), two on January first of the next year, etc. (On a related yet improbable note, two of my fellow teachers have birthdays on January 19th, and another shares my birthday of January 20th.)

I also found out that Koreans learning English to have an English name in addition to their Korean name. This explains the Koreans in my high school who tried to go by Andrew and Daniel, etc. We eventually convinced them that we were perfectly happy to learn their real names, but I didn't realize at the time that that was standard practice for any Korean learning English, not just something they did because they were living in an English speaking country. I feel like this says something about the laziness of Americans that no one even expects us to be able to learn names that are strange to us, but maybe people just think the name will help with the immersion in the language, or the practice started for reasons that I haven't yet considered.

[I am entirely too exhausted to try to use transition sentences to link the paragraphs. Sorry.] I had Korean food in Korea for the first time today as well, and liked it. I rather enjoyed kimchi (or at least, the types of kimchi that I had), which is good since it is something of a staple here. I have had people complain that they couldn't stand kimchi and hence hated Korean meals; I've also heard people say that the whole country smells like drying fish. I took these complaints (the latter of which is totally rediculous, which I thought when I first heard it) with a grain of salt since they came from some rather close minded and culturally insensitive people who were stationed here.

[I'm too tired to wrap this up properly either. The information overload is overwhelming my brain. I had to learn where I am staying, how to use the subway, the school's curriculum, Korean customs, the names of my co-teachers, how to read Korean letters faster, etc, etc, etc. Plus I'm probably jet lagged. Whatever the cause, my head is kind of fuzzy right now, so I'll sign off.]

Update: It seems (from the comments) that being assigned a name stereotypical of/common to the people of the language being learned is a common practice for learning any language. I only ever learned Latin, which is different from learning most languages because we didn't really speak it. We mostly translated existing texts rather than trying to learn how to interact with each other in Latin, so we never had Latin names. My incorrect assumption about English names is probably due to my ignorance of normal language classes and because of my guilt for feeling releaved when I learned that I would only be learning the kids' (and fellow teachers') English names, not their Korean names.

My hotel in Korea

So far, all I've seen of the country is the airport, the view from the bus, and the hotel I just woke up in. The airport is like any airport. The view from the bus window (during the times I remained conscious) alternated between landscape that could have been anywhere (it was night) and cityscapes that look like they come straight out of Blade Runner. The hotel is different from any I've been in, since it assumes that you have brought literally nothing with you (there is no space for baggage, they include all toiletries including a toothbrush, toothpaste, a condom vending machinge, etc), whereas most hotels assume that you packed enough for an expedition to the South Pole. Also, there is an entryway so that you can take off your shoes before entering a domestic area. This is going to be an adventure...

Update: The reason this hotel is so strange is that it is a 'love hotel', hence the condoms and porn and the assumption that you won't have any luggage. It's not for travelers, it's for couples in town.

Korea

I am safely in Daejeon. I will be in a motel until the teacher that I am replacing moves out on January 1st. I'm going to keep this short because I have no idea how much--if at all--using the computer in the hotel room costs per unit of time, since I can't read Korean. I'll update you more when I have slept some.

Pictures of the year

Here's my favorite from The Big Picture:















Yes, that's a lightning storm in a cloud of volcanic ash.

Reed and Torture

It is always nice to see Reed Profs in the paper, and this Washington Post article from Darius Rejali is well worth reading. It is just over a year old, but "Five Myths About Torture and Truth" contains information that undermines the very foundation of the debate about torture in America. The debate has been framed by politicians and the traditional media as a balancing act between keeping the country safe and keeping our principles. A moral debate would be perfectly reasonable if torture actually extracted accurate information, but makes no sense on this issue because torture is not effective. If fact, it is completely counterproductive, not only because it creates more enemies, but because informants giving actual information are much less likely to cooperate with torturers. The moral debate is a totally irrelevant because the very debate relies on a false premise, so don't use it when talking to Jack Bower lovers like Rudy Juliani; instead read Darius' article and make the unassailable pragmatic argument.

On a related note, I would love to hear either Cheney or Bush asked in one of their end-of-wrecking-the-country exit interviews whether the false confessions extracted under torture by the North Vietnamese from John McCain would have qualified as actionable intelligence for the North Vietnamese army, and if not how that would be at all different from our acting on the false statements that Iraq had active weapons programs and close ties to Al Qaeda, 'information' that the US received from waterboarding Abu Zubaida.

Curse you, Rupert Murdoch

The Wall Street Journal, once home to serious journalism, is now officially a branch of Fox 'News'.

Prank signage

Hilarious.

Mental health break of the year

You should all check out the amazing videos that Andrew Sullivan collected this year as mental health breaks. My favorites are the stop motion animations (food fight, muto, western spaghetti), but I have to say that shark surfing is probably the most bad-ass thing I've ever seen.

My posts today seem to mention all of my phobias (scorpions, fundamentalist religious zealots, sharks). Despite my fear, I would totally go shark surfing if I knew how to surf, whereas I can imagine someone putting a gun to my head and threatening to kill me if I didn't put a scorpion in my mouth, and me saying, "umm... let me think about it." You know the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith goes to Room 101 of the Ministry of Love and is subjected to the worst thing in the world (which for him happens to be rats)? For me, room 101 would be a tank of water with a great white shark in it, with the walls and ceilings above the tank covered in tiny translucent scorpions.

Lest my talk of the worst thing in the world frighten you off, I should say that these videos aren't at all scary--there's just one that features a shark, which is what got me off on the fear tangent. Watch the videos; they will make your day.

Et tu, Orson?

Andrew Sullivan has started the voting on the Daily Dish Awards in journalism (or lack thereof in supposed journalists). One nominee that stuck out was author Orson Scott Card:

Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

I just reread the Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow series, and I have trouble reconciling the author of those books, who clearly understands the atheistic world view, with the author of the Mormon Times op-ed piece, who clearly has no comprehension of the fact that there could even be any view other than his own. I know better than most how much people can change, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. RIP old Orson. Shut up new Orson.

Update of sorts: It isn't as surprising when Pope Palpatine is as disgustingly bigoted:

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

Shudder

From the BBC's Day In Pictures: " ...in a shopping mall in Thailand, Nong Na sets a new world record by holding a scorpion in her mouth for over two minutes."

Words cannot describe how much the thought of a live scorpion in my mouth disturbs me. And here I thought that people eating scorpions at the bug eating contest at Renn Fayre was upsetting...

Musical families

I often underestimate Colorado Springs. On Sunday night I saw a fantastic concert in an art gallery. It opened with a quality Colorado Springs indie band (!?!) named Edith Makes a Paper Chain, which was a lot of fun. You would never guess that they were based in a city with no music scene. The lead singer/guitarist's young daughter played clarinet and did background vocals, and the whole band seemed like one family (in the good way). Oh, and her even younger daughter (on the far right of the picture) sung some of her original songs, one of which she said started up as a christmas song but ended up as a Halloween song (Decemberween, anyone?) that begins sounding like an invocation of the Virgin Mary but is actually about a girl named Mary who is haunted by another girl that she pushed down a well.

The next act was Akida Dawson, who apparently started writing songs and playing guitar at the same time as his sister but doesn't like to perform or record his music. He was wonderful: his songs were funny yet touching, and his guitar playing was impressive (his singing and guitar playing are stylistically similar to Kimya's faster paced songs). He had lines like "no one has time for names, we only exchange fluids." Kimya said that this was only his fourth or fifth concert (I'm pretty sure this is a major exaggeration), and you could tell that he seldom gives concerts because he kept making self-deprecating jokes and getting really self-conscious when he made mistakes, but really that just made it all the more endearing and special since it was obviously a rare occurrence. Thanks to their family in Castle Rock, Colorado for getting them to visit the area, and thanks to Kimya for getting to get her brother to play.

Kimya Dawson herself was a joy. I especially enjoyed the songs I hadn't heard before, some of which were very powerful, especially her recovery song (she's about to celebrate ten years of sobriety). Clearly she puts herself into her songs; she seemed near tears at many points during the show (she was especially emotional when talking about a family in Portland, OR that is being torn apart by the bureaucracy of the state of Virgina. I'm sure she'd want me to pass along the info on how to help.). All in all, a night of music well worth the half hour in six degree weather I spent waiting for the doors to open.

Korea

South Korea sure has been in the news a lot this week.

On politics

I've been making a lot of posts about politics recently, and I think I should offer some caveats. Mostly, I should say that if pressed I don't actually believe any of the political arguments I make. I don't believe in rights (I have no idea what the basis for rights would be), if I were to design a community it would be unspeakably intrusive and repressive by our standards, and I think democracy is a terrible idea because people are stupid. Yet I get upset by stolen elections and violations of 'human rights' and government intrusion and repression. Basically, I don't believe that there are any right or wrong answers to political questions (or any other questions, for that matter), just answers that are right or wrong in my community. Politically, I happen to be a part of the liberal community. I (grudgingly) attribute this to my upbringing in a moderately liberal household in an uber-conservative city rather than my superior reasoning skills. I like John Rawls not because his ideas are actually derived from pure reason but because my community values reason and so I like that he attempts such a reason-based justification (though of course that is impossible) and because his conclusions happen to largely coincide with the values that I was taught. When I am honest with myself (and I usually am to an unhealthy degree) I acknowledge that my political positions are based on emotion rather than reason, and are in fact at odds with my beliefs. However, I like politics and enjoy a good argument, even if I know the core premises of the entire debate are faulty (If it weren't for assumptions for the sake of argument I'd have no assumptions at all... and no beliefs). Therefore, I'm going to keep ranting about politics, but feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. Thankfully I didn't have this blog during the election...

Homosexuality laws

I'm glad that in the US the major issues when it comes to gay rights are adoption and marriage. While I think it is sad that the private lives of consenting adults depends upon public laws, it is way better than, say, Saudi Arabia, where sex between men is punishable by death.

Unfortunately, the US isn't even willing to ask nicely for Saudi Arabia and other repressive countries to stop. The US was the only 'Western' country not to sign a non-binding UN declaration decriminalizing homosexuality. Note, not homosexual marriage, but simply not being straight is a crime in more than 80 countries. France and The Netherlands are trying to stop that using the UN, and good luck to them. This time around the vote was 66 for the declaration, 60 against (mostly in Middle Eastern and African countries) and 66 abstaining. It is incredibly depressing that not even a non-binding declaration could pass, when what we really need is for the UN to prevent countries for imprisoning and killing people for their sexual orientation.

Maybe Obama will support the measure the next time around. He certainly owes the GLBT community.

That's not change. That's more of the same.

Most of the time I love Obama, but sometimes he utterly disgusts me (see in particular his voting for the inexcusable FISA bill after vowing to filibuster it). Sadly, today is one of the latter times. Obama has invited christianist mega-church paster and homophobe Rick Warren to give the invocation to the inauguration. I'm not naive enough to expect the secular ceremony that I would prefer, but this is unacceptable. Warren has compared gay marriage to statutory rape (among other things) and most recently has said that he opposes gay marriage because allowing it would violate the first amendment, demonstrating that Warren is not only bigoted but also has a grasp of the US constitution that rivals Sarah Palin's for sheer ignorance (clearly neither of them have any idea what the first amendment means). Just when I thought my January 20th birthday would be a good thing for once, Obama had to go and ruin it by giving a big Fuck You to anyone who supports equal rights. I hope a good portion of the millions who show up for the inauguration boo when Warren gets on stage.

Update: on a tangentially related note, google chat and blogger need to learn that 'Obama' is not a mispelling of 'Alabama,' 'mamba,' or 'bamboo.'

Later Update: Obama's rebuttal, courtesy of Talking Points Memo:



My response is that there's no way Obama would simply disagree without being disagreeable if Warren also opposed racially mixed marriages on religious grounds. By giving Warren a position of prominence at the inauguration, Obama is signaling that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is more acceptable than discrimination on the basis of race. Sadly, this is probably a view shared by the majority of americans. However, we didn't elect Obama so that he could do whatever the polls say people prefer (we could have chosen Clinton if that's what we wanted), we elected him because we wanted him to lead, and to inspire americans to do the right thing in spite of themselves.

Even Later Update: Sarah Posner of The Nation says it better than me:

Warren represents the absolute worst of the Democrats' religious outreach, a right-winger masquerading as a do-gooder anointed as the arbiter of what it means to be faithful. Obama's religious outreach was intended, supposedly, to make religious voters more comfortable with him and feel included in the Democratic Party. But that outreach now has come at the expense of other people's comfort and inclusion, at an event meant to mark a turning point away from divisive politics.

Absolutely Last Update, I Swear: Here's Jon Stewart vs. Mike Huckabee on gay marriage (see the comments to understand why this is here):

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Oregon and Colorado politics

Oregon was the least corrupt state over the last ten years.
[graph created by Lee Sigelman and John Sides, acquired via Ylesias]

Ok, I don't really think this is a perfect indicator of corruption since plenty of corrupt politicians never get caught (and arguably the most corrupt states are the ones where prosecuters and judges are bought and unwilling to charge or convict their partners in crime), but I expect that there is a positive correlation between corruption conviction and corruption, and this is probably the best data we are going to get. Regardless, this is yet another reason to love Oregon politics. Not only do opposing candidate each have better policies than anyone in other states--making it a joy to vote there--but those candidates are also honest (for politicians).

I seriously miss Oregon. Right now I'm in Colorado, where Senator Ken Salazar has just been tapped for Secretary of the Interior, which I think was one of Obama's few bad choices in his appointment picks. Salazar is on my shit list for being one of the biggest advocates for giving Joe Lieberman everything despite his being incompetent and essentially a Republican. Further, Salazar was a choice for interior that oil companies like, which is a terrible sign. The interior department is in terrible shape (remember that department officials were found to have been bribed with money sex and drugs by oil companies, and that they have been ignoring, distorting, and sabotaging scientists concerning energy, endangered species, etc.) and will need someone impeccable to rehabilitate it. Oh well. Actually, Salazar is generally good about environmental and interior issues (he stopped Bush and the oil companies from exploiting areas in Western states), except that he's for off-shore drilling and farm subsidies (he voted against a bill that would have reformed farm subsidies and used the saved money for conservation). The real reason Colorado sucks politically is the fact that Salazar is one of the best representatives we've had in my lifetime. The Republican most likely to run against his appointed successor is Tom Tancredo, the guy from the 2008 primaries who hates Mexicans so much that he wants to stop all legal immigration (on the bright side, CO is getting bluer and Tancredo has a very slim chance of winning). Colorado has had representatives who on national television told the black host that gay people aren't obviously different from good normal people the way blacks are. Also, Colorado is home to extremist conservatives (I have seen a yard sign that says 'Fight terrorism: vote Republican' and a billboard that says "Help end terrorism: get the US out of the UN' [which I desperately wanted to spray paint to change 'UN' to 'Iraq']). In particular, my hometown of Colorado Springs is the central location of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Again, I miss Oregon.

Strict

A South Korean actress was sentenced to eight months in jail (after two years of a suspended sentence) for adultery. I assume they define adultery as extra-marital sex committed by married persons, as opposed to any extra-marital sex including pre-marital sex, in which case I'm in trouble.

In general, South Korea has very little crime, probably due in part to the serious and strictly enforced laws. Good thing I am a law-abiding person...

Blogging from the deep

I'm ripping off Andrew Sullivan again, but this is awesome.

It's official

I now have a visa to Korea for a year in my passport and tickets to Seoul for Saturday, December 27th. Presumably I'll take the train to Daejeon.

The whole thing seems less surreal than it did earlier, but it still hasn't really sunk in that I'll be leaving in less than two weeks.

The View From My Window

Colorado Springs, CO, USA, 10:50am

(This post is a blatent rip off of Andrew Sullivan)

Meta-meta-blogging

I'm amused but not surprised to see that I'm not the only Reedie who uses the label 'metablog' for posts pertaining to blogs. I'm a big fan of the prefix and concept meta-, at least when it is used in the epistemological sense of 'an X about X'. For example, the strongest section of my thesis was meta-ontology, i.e. an inventory of all the possible ways to inventory existence. Other fun metas are metalanguage (Tarski!), metafiction (David Foster Wallace!), metaphilosophy (Wittgenstein!), and metajoke:

A performative poet of Hibernia
Rhymed himself into a hernia
He became quite adept
At this practise, except
For the occasional non-sequitur.

~Tom Stoppard, Travesties

On the flip side of this, I hate it when people misuse the word ("that's so meta" which is probably intended to mean so postmodern; 'metaphysics' as 'beyond physics', a mistranslation that has soiled the word 'metaphysics' by making it synonymous with 'whatever mystical bullshit people make up'; etc). I am indifferent towards the prefix when it means simply 'after', as in the word 'metaphysics' as used in philosophy, which originated from a book by Aristotle which was so titled because it was the book that came after his book of physics, and has nothing to do with aliens or angels or auras or other laughable nonsense.