The world's last non-porn website

Well, I suppose it is resolution time again. How did that happen so quickly? It's weird, that the busier years seem to go by even more quickly. My sister is running and talking, my degree is hanging on a wall (or sitting in a drawer, or something), and I am in Korea for some reason. First, let's do a recap of last year's resolutions. I didn't write them here on the blog, and I think I wrote them on paper and left them back in Victoria in my desk or dresser. The only resolutions I can remember having made were to lose weight, write a blog every day when possible, and to continue my ongoing lifelong resolution to die of old age without having owned a cellular phone. It wasn't all that bad a year. I have lost a bit of weight, and I managed to write a blog every day until late August, which is pretty good. But, I did have to get a cell phone here. I tried not to, I really tried, but land lines are just out of fashion here in the world's most wireless country. The co...

I tell 'ya, if there's one thing religious people know how to do, it's sell their product. Every so often, I see a group of westerners, Mormons, roaming about town here in Seoul. They're always about my age, tall, good looking (men and women), well-dressed, clean-cut, smiling and chatting happily, and ready to spark a conversation with a willing stranger. And those aren't travel books they're holding! And I give them credit. I could never sell a religion the way religious people manage to, for two reasons. First, I'm a bad salesman in appearance (or, more specifically, well-kept-ness), and second, I tend to use reasons and evidence to convince people of things, rather than vacuous appeals to the baser elements of their emotions. --- Let me ask this: how long would Catholicism (or any other major faith) last if children weren't 'brought up Catholic'? I mean to ask, what would happen to the Church if only men and women over the age of majority cou...

The taller peaks off in the distance are my next project.

Christmas, historically, hasn't been any kind of big holiday here until just in the last half-century, with the rise of capitalism and christianity. Among the church-going population it is a family holiday, but among the secular it has yet to take on a family-oriented form. Instead, it is considered a romantic or fun day to spend with friends and/or significant others. There are still presents, but there is no established food tradition to be found. I spend the afternoon at a large palace downtown with my girlfriend, and had a fun dinner with the usual suspects later on. For more detailed photos of the palace, you can look at Jordan's site ( http://destinationseoulkorea.blogspot.com/ ), as he posted a lot more pictures from a trip last week and I don't want to be redundant about it. I was told that my '85 birthday signified me for the year of the ox. I went to wikipedia today to find out what that's supposed to mean, and stumbled across some additional information:...

I've been taking my camera to work lately, and I've fond that the kids are much less interested in smiling for it when I'm taking the pictures, but much more interested in smiling when they have control. So I handed the camera off to them with a stern warning to be careful with it, and then let them have all the fun they wanted. These are only some of my english classes, as I didn't get a chance to bring my camera to others. I deleted most of the photos, because they were blurry or otherwise not good at all, and here are the ones I kept. Enjoy: This is one of my grade six blue classes. Each full room is split into three groups for english time, red (best), yellow, and blue (there are three 6th grade homerooms, so 9 different english groups altogether). Usually the blue groups are badly behaved as well as bad at english. Interestingly, the red groups are also badly behaved, mainly because they've been studying so hard on the side that the texts are dead easy and not ...

Winter here is cold, surprisingly cold for a latitude considerably closer to the equator than Victoria is. One morning last week I woke up to find everything, including my wet clothes hanging on the balcony to dry, frozen solid. And last weekend, I found the time to check out one of Seoul's many remaining feudal palaces, most built about 400 years ago and most still well-maintained, albeit smaller than they once were due to various military occupations as well as urban growth. They are, on the whole, beautiful and especially serene places. The one I went to also had a lake that reminded me very much of home; there were ducks in the water and willows swaying in the wind along the edge: When a king was born, the placenta from the birth was kept and buried under a stone monument, and some kind of mythical birth story was inscribed on the stone. What an odd thing to monumentalize.... A traditional door knocker for palace entrances: One does get a sense of the history at the palaces, bu...

That's not to shabby, I think! Since I left university my political and ideological views have been swinging to the right in certain ways. If there is on thing I wish I'd done differently in those four years (aside from the one thing everybody wishes they'd done more of: studying), it is to have been more openly critical of my professors and peers when my intuitions or persuasions nagged me. Instead I often just went with the flow of things and accepted the overwhelmingly supported set of positions and beliefs held by people walking about campus. No thinking person could make a moral opposition to abortion, no thinking person could possibly support the regime change in Iraq, no thinking person could deny the persecution of women and ethnic minorities in Canada, no thinking person could support the military mission in Afghanistan, or the national Conservative Party, or any republican in the United States, and so on and so on. Only in a (so-named) Women's Studies c...

You know those little static shocks you get every now and then on doorknobs and whatnot? I swear to the heavens I've been consistently getting at least 10 per day, every day, for the last two weeks. It's too the point where I dread opening doors or touching metal things in general. The shocks, as you know, are just painful enough to be really irritating. Anyway, is this a medical problem? Is there an illness for which an excessive bodily static charge is a symptom? I'm baffled by this one... Some have suggested to me that it is the dry weather, and others think it may be my new socks for some reason... I just don't know. ------- Do you ever think that people spend more time worrying about what words to use in description of their romances than they spend actually enjoying their time together? Why all this pressure to move from 'dating' to 'seeing' to 'relationship', and to declare 'love'? What does it change? How is one to define the...

What a fun process... I'm still just beginning to get a sense of the culture around here in all its nuances. And I've re-negotiated my contract such that I'll be getting a lot more free time in the new year, not a mention a month's vacation in January, albeit not paid. But that's ok, I'm not just here to save money or pay off loans, as it turns out thousands of other western recent university graduates are. The language barrier - and it is a big one - is invigorating in the sense that I feel less and less obliged to bother with the thoughts of others, because even if I knew what they were thinking, I'm unable to ask, or understand any answer. Not that I'm not polite, in fact quite the opposite. If anything I've become more polite in a culture that, while containing the same rowdy drunks and idiot teenagers as any other, is on the whole very value-driven and respectful. It sounds odd, but I enjoy the isolation provided by not speaking the language. Th...

The Top Seven Losing Ways, inspired by John McCain: 7. Disillusion your base: Make sure that the right-wing evangelicals who elected your party's presidential predecessor by voting in droves have virtually no interest in you as a candidate. A good way to do this is to take a relatively middle-ground stance on all their biggest cultural hot button issues like abortion and religious rhetoric. 6. Be very, very old: Make sure to run for president while on the verge of losing mental capacity. 5. Offer contradictory political messages: Use logically self-contradictory phrases like 'conservative reformer' and 'maverick with republican values' to describe yourself. Make sure to keep your potential voters very, very confused. 4. Tell people things are going great when they clearly aren't: If the economy is facing a worldwide depression, be sure to proclaim its fundamentals are strong anyway. Offer no apparent reason or justification for the statement. 3. Spend much less ...

I just finished "Into the Wild" today, the book by Jon Krakauer which motivated the recent movie of the same title. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone, purely as an in-depth study of a truly unusual and extraordinary character who happens to be real; for some readers it will be much more. Next on the docket is Tolstoy's "War and Peace." It's certainly a large book, with over 500 characters according to the editors notes. Just 15 pages in, I've discovered that my vocabulary with respect to character traits is terrible. This is certainly on account of the relatively small qualtity of fiction I've read, in exchange for a lot of non-fiction. I've been taking pause as I read to write down words whose meanings I'm not sure of. The below words are all ones I've heard, but couldn't actually define or explain adequately if asked, until now: Affected Languid Self-Abnegation Impetuousity Pensive Vexatious Gaily Magnanimous Ingrat...

A new moral maxim came to me in the shower this morning: "Treat others as though you are at their funeral."

In light of recent political events in the USA, I decided to copy/paste my entry from April 17th of this year, for your reading pleasure. I think I've been just about smack on thus far with the predictions, though the evangelical conservative McCain picked as his running mate wasn't the one I expected. I still stand by the rest of the entry though... it'll all happen I swear!: ----------- I wouldn't be faithful to the spirit of internet blogging if I didn't do at least one entry predicting who I think will win the presidency come november in the USA. I am absolutely positive the democratic nominee will be Obama. He will beat Hillary without any trouble; he simply is too far ahead with the delegates, and has too much money and influential support. I suspect the lady will bow out after the next batch of primaries. Hillary will not be his vice president pick. She's in the race, I can only presume, because she wants to stay prominent for some reason other than getti...

I thought this evening I'd share a few thoughts on why people in Korea differ in size and health so noticably from people in North America. The reasons are in my opinion rather complex and fascinating: 1. More food variety: each meal has multiple dishes, and every meal includes at least one or two vegetable dishes. Interestingly, Koreans don't eat a low fat diet most of the time, and nor do they eat a low-carbohydrate diet. Most pork and beef dishes leave the fat on in layers! But variety is key. 2. More water: Korean food is very watery, compared to normal western food. Most meals include soups, stews, and so forth. Most notably, water is the accompanying drink for virtually every meal (other than alcohol). People don't really drink pop or juice or other sugary things during meals. These factors make for people who can feel full on fewer calories. 3. Communitarian eating habits: Meals are always shared, often without even individual plates. People will simply have at a mai...