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Manliness of main character (10 points) Camera work and production values (10 points) Usefulness of survival advice (10 points) Overall realism of show (20 points). Category 1: Manliness of main character Stroud comes out strong in the manliness department because in his show, he's in the wild for a full week rather than a mere 48 hours. He's also alone with no crew, making the ordeal that much more difficult. Grylls, on the other hand, is much more daring and balsy when it comes to what he decides to do on the show. He goes out of his way to eat absurdly disgusting foods, ascend and descend absurdly dangerous cliffs, and he also makes sure to involve large dead mammals as food and/or clothing in most of his episodes; a manly decision there is no greater. Digging deeper into their pre-show lives, we find that Grylls pulls ahead for manliness. According to Wikipedia, he's paramotored over the Himalayas (I don't know what that means but it soun...

Well, inspite of being a bit ill this weekend, I made it to the dentist for a checkup and cleaning. Only 60 bucks, x-ray included for good measure. I think the reason people hate the dentist is all the very small metal things... some are just a little bit too pointy, some a little bit too scrapey, and some spin around at uncomfortably fast speeds. And all of them go into your mouth. I know it's not a torture chamber, but if I wanted to own and operate a torture chamber, I'd just buy a dental office and add some straps to the chairs. It'd be a turnkey operation. And the good news is, the dental hygene streak continues! Looks like I'll make it to 25 without a single cavity. Brush and floss daily, kids. It'll save you a ton of money in the long run.

I think that I've lived in more places (I mean to say apartments/houses) than most people my age. Since I left home at the age of 21, it's been six. If you include my living spaces before that (my parents lived separately; they both moved around a fair bit and I was with my father on weekends/summers), you can add seven or eight more to the list. One thing that never fails to surprise me is that, when I move from one place to the next, I always have more stuff than I thought I did. You think it's going to be one car-load, maybe two. Then it's four. Things just tend to fill up boxes faster than you expect them to. One blanket and a couple of pillows; that's a box right there. A few books and a blender; there's the next box. Add to that your computer desk and modest CD collection, and the borrowed van is full already. But the older I got, the fewer things I wished to accompany me to the next apartment. Every time I moved, I moved fewer things and gave up mo...

Well, third time's the charm. My hike got rained out yet again... I was ready for a bit of the wet stuff, but then it started to pour down like Noah himself was ready to set sail on the morning of my departure from the park's nearby town. The town is called Gurye, and what I'm writing here now about it will probably contain more detail than any other (English) source you can find online. I ended up staying in Gurye for three days on account of my cancelled trip, and it was a pleasant time; the town had a few stories to tell, which added a silver lining to the disappointment of not being able to hike. When I first arrived early Friday afternoon, the weather was wonderful, and I hoped dearly that it would stick. The view from the motel window, facing Jirisan National Park But, it did not. It turned on Saturday, so I postponed the hike until Sunday morning. Come sunday it was even worse, so I stayed in town snapping photos and trying to have a good time amid the on-and-off ra...

Well, I'm off to Jirisan, for take two. There are clouds in the sky, but I'm taking my shot anyway... loosely prepared for rain this time. I'm hoping, it being november now, that it might just be cold enough to snow instead of rain up on the ridge (5000ft) where my hike takes place. I'll be back on tuesday with photos. I'd like to give a shout-out to the swine flu outbreak and my school's alarmist policies, for making this 4-day trip possible. Additionally, here's an article for your reading pleasure while I'm away. I promise, it's pretty funny. Cracked is kindof my guilty pleasure in Korea, and this article is a good one. http://www.cracked.com/article/139_5-ridiculous-ancient-beliefs-that-thrive-internet/

Lately I've been having dreams nearly every night. Long ones... memorable ones. Last night I had a dream that I was near death, and chose to have my body frozen on the hopes that future technology could revive me and regenerate dead tissue. So, along came the future, and suddenly I "woke up" inside a clone of myself. Scientists explained to the clone that they'd used brain matter too make him, and duplicated hard-wired memory patterns to make the clone feel as though he was the same person. The thing was, somewhere in the process, the original "me" got transferred into the new body, but I was only able to experience the physical senses that the new body was experiencing. I wasn't able to have "his" emotions, or speak, control the body in any way. I could only think, listen, see, etc... as though the brain were supporting two separate inner "I's" and one of them was a mere observer. It was strange and melancholic as I watched...

It seems an unspoken maxim that you haven't really partied in Seoul unless you've partied until the subways start running again in the morning. See the thing is, most of the residential areas are a very expensive cab ride away from the clubbing districts, so on a night out one must choose between taking the late train around 11:30, emptying every pocket for a cab, or taking the morning train at 6AM. And the choice really is a difficult one, because unlike in Canada, Korea has no (enforced) laws regarding liquor service and venue closure limitations. Popular joints just stay open until the sun breaks and people clear out on their own. Anyway, I figured I should have at it at least once. And it was an alright time. Apparently I'm a good dancer (that's an opinion from two real no-foolin' females, though one of them might have been saying "I like your red vest" instead of "I like your dancing"), and our social gang got up the pace at a club for a sol...

Well, I'm about to go downtown partying in full costume, in a country where Halloween isn't celebrated. Should be interesting, if anything. Now, I've seen a lot of useless junk at stores in my life (especially in Korea), but I think the most useless junk ever produced has to be Halloween stuff. It's literally designed to stay intact(masks, shirts, everything really) for three or four hours. The vest I bought for tonight (old-timey stage performer get-up) doesn't even have washing instructions on it. Anyway, happy Halloween everyone!

For the second time this semester, two of my grade 2 students started fighting about evolution. We were on about monkeys and one kid says "Humans come from monkeys." Then the next kid says "No! Humans come from God!" The two looked like they were about to come to fists. So I calmly explained that they were both wrong. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor; one doesn't come from the other. Parental calls be damned, Christian elementary school be damned. This is 2009, and I can't in good conscience nod and smile while some poor kid tries to convince me that humans don't share a biological history with the rest of the animal kingdom. "God didn't make people. Your church is honestly wrong about that," I said. What would you have done? Was that a bad idea? I'm supposed to be a teacher and I don't want to use my authority to re-inforce (even tacitly) that kind of thing.

It's official; two children have caught it at my school, so far. There are also dozens of absences today, partially because of a large number of sick kids and partially, I think, because of freaked-out parents. There's a law in Korea that if a school has 5 or more confirmed cases of H1N1, it must close for a week (AKA an unscheduled week-long paid vacation for yours truly). I don't know if this is some kind of moral deficiency, but a significant portion of my soul wants three small children to contract a potentially deadly illness so I can have a vacation. A kinder phrasing might be that I want the school to close for everyone's safety! :P Additionally, I've taken my own personal precautions against the virus. First, I've been including in my classes basic hygiene pointers (eg. "Stop putting all your school supplies in your mouth," "Don't sneeze into your hands then touch everything and everyone around you," and so forth). Second, I...

I'm giving up the 10k dream for now. I've been jogging probably 40 times in the last few months and I simply don't like it. In fact, I really hate jogging. And my progress in terms of distance has been minimal. So, I booked my Jirisan hike for two weeks from now. It'll be nice to be up in the mountains while the leaves are changing colour in Korea's intensely seasonal climate. But then, what of the new year's hike?? Well, I may go back to Jirisan again for new years, OR, if I really want to be ambitious, I might find my way to the only higher mountain in Korea.

Remember back in the day, when a pencil was just made of wood and had an eraser on the end? Well not these days. Now, the geniuses at the stationary companies decided to make pencils plastic and clickable, with erasers sold separately (as well as lead refills). So now parents have to buy three things instead of one to do the exact same job (which is, of course, to write wrong answers on paper and erase them by teacher demand). ADDITIONALLY, these new pencils are equipped with designs, holograms, comic characters, and all kinds of little stupid adjustable grip things. When did it happen? When did the day come that stationary became the enemy of the teacher? It takes about 5 seconds to see that all this stuff is designed so that kids have more to eff around with in class. You know how many pens actually survive until the ink runs out? You know how many pencil "refills" actually get used, compared to the number that get dropped on the floor and crushed? You know how ma...

Korea will be in the rear mirror in less than three month's time. How can I now develop the things that can't be carried over? Is it worth building sand castles before a rising tide? But I'm careful not to take this line of thought too far, because it leads very quickly to the thought that death is inevitable and every moment is, in a way, a priceless investment with diminishing returns as we age. I really, really don't want to be caught thinking about the future that way! So the Buddha said that there are three sorts of people with respect to their responses to hardship and insult. The first are like stones for whom the anger is engraved upon them permanently. The second are those like sand for whom anger is only drawn for a short time, and the third are like flowing rivers for whom the anger's shape is washed away into the flow almost instantaneously. I'm not angry about a thing, but I like that little parable.

So what do you do after you've experienced one of your greatest dreams? How do you come down from it? What happens the next morning? Do you try to have the experience again? If you know me, you know I love food. I really do. More than most people. And I love a buffet. So yesterday I went to what can only be described as the single greatest place with four walls and a ceiling in the world. It was a very swanky restaurant; one of those three-forks-next-to-your-plate kind of places, and it was a buffet. It was VERY expensive, and I should thank my mom for picking up the tab on my three-months-early birthday dinner. In roughly the following order this is what I had at the buffet over the course of two hours (I wrote it all down on an old recipt at the restaurant): king crab ahi tuna sashimi sushi rolls (made on the spot) raw beef jumbo shrimp corned beef salad spare ribs pan pizza softshell crab dim sum lamb chops spring roll bread & butter rib eye steak escargot (snails!)...

With the world's current population and technologies, pretty much every Earthly adventure has been done, and done again, and done to death. Getting to the top of Mt. Everest isn't even remarkable. Crossing Antarctica is a walk in the park. It seems the only way to make these so rts of feats worthy of, say, publication, is to be part of some identity group (ranging from nationalities to disabilities) which hasn't yet had a member make the feat. For example, if I were a one-legged, blind, pregnant Japanese woman, climbing Everest would still be worth a newspaper article. The other way, if I'm just a plain old physically able white guy, is to impose upon myself some kind of arbitrary limitation to make the feat a lot harder than it needs to be. Like, if I try to cross the Atlantic on a row boat, or climb K2 in my underpants, or run with the bulls in Pamplona on a pogo stick. You read ridiculous stories like that a lot these days. I suppose the third way to make ...

One of the worst decisions that a group of ants can possibly make is to set up a colony on the grounds of an elementary school. I can only imagine what they'd think of human nature if they were able to think about such things.

Well, I'm signing up for a 10k event that's being held just over a month from now in Seoul. This was one of my new years resulations, and it's time to make good. At the moment I can run a little over half that distance without dying, so there's some work left to do. It'll be jogging every day and a renewal of my diet (which has been on hiatus this month) until the big race. As for my other new-years resolutions: "Figure out a career path"; well, I've figured out the next step anyway (music!), and with luck it will become a career path. As for hiking Korea's tallest peaks, I've done one of the two, and my attempt to get to the highest one at Jirisan got rained out. I'm planning to take a second and final shot in the dead of winter, immediately after Christmas. This is the only time I can get the 4 days to take the trip to the South of the Korean peninsula to the park!, and it's going to be really f-ing cold up there. At least shelter r...

Whenever a website tells me something is "free," it usually isn't. We all know this already. But it's become so bad now that the word itself has reversed in meaning in my mind. When I hear "free" in any context now, I assume I'm going to be asked for money in a moment. And that's the thing about the lack of regulation on internet advertising: as we adapt to the lies we're told, the advertisers have to tell increasingly preposterous lies and invent even more deceptive schemes. I get emails now telling me I've suddenly won tens of millions of dollars, with absolutely no catch, in a European lottery. I'm told that I can have free ipods and cell phones and computers and software products and all I have to do is "click yes." It's this lottery mentality they capitalize on. Like trying to imagine millions of stars in the galaxy, or millions of molecules in a drop of water, we're inadequate thinkers to conceptualize millio...

Breaking routines is difficult. Even more difficult is dealing with a routine that is broken for you against your will. Every week on thursday I've got lunch one hour later than the other days. At the 11:40 buzzer, I suddenly get hungry like one of Pavlov's dogs salivating to the little jingling bell. But on Thursday lunch isn't until 12:30. Imagine running in a marathon, but right when the finish line is just in sight, some officials grab the tape and move it back another mile or two. It's a sick and twisted social experiment, I say.