Long Live Russia

***
Finally, with what was now open disrespect, the colonel from headquarters started questioning the Corps Commander about his plan for the next day.

Plan! There was something so un-Russian about the word. What plan?
***
--from Solzhenitsyn's August 1914

Bonus Question: Anybody know why chapter 22 was removed by the author? I know what the chapter is about and where it is now, but why was it taken out in the first place? You have too much time on your hands or you know your Russian emigre authors too well if you can answer this. ^^

MANGOSTEEN

Quit wasting your time with that damn stank ass Durian and get on the Mangosteen train. . . also make sure you get to an island before you leave Thailand. . . don't make me hurt you. . .

Current reading flurry

Just read a pretty cool book called Deep Survival, which is an interesting look at who survives and how the human brain functions in crisis. Read an autobiography of Gandhi "My Experiements in Truth". Pretty good, although I need to read a true history of it. Sticking with the biography phase (why??? It all started with Einstein in Korea)I am reading the biography of Richard Feynman, who is someone I've always wanted to know more about. Hopefully I will finish this monster up and then read the other, more famous one Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. Anyway, it is good to read this one, because it explains a good deal of the science he was doing.
A little quote that made me laugh regarding the religious beliefs of different physicists of the 30's and 40's:
"Einstein's piety was sincere but neutral, acceptable even to the vehemently antireligious Dirac, of whom Wolfgang Pauli once complained, 'Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is 'There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.'"
If you don't find this funny, maybe I am spending a little too much time in my own mind. Anyway, I laughed histerically at it. Enjoy.

The frooeets that started it all

This one is for Hoops, and will almost surely provoke a retaliation in the form of a post. I ate the fruit, Durien, the mother of all huge, spikey, stinky fruits, and it is a strange one. For one, it is SUPPOSED to stink. Of course, after opening it, I realized that it smells much the same way a mango does when opened. Not exactly a stink, but a slightly less-than-pleasant smell that doesn't tell you anything about the taste.
Strangely enough, the Durien is creamy. It reminds me of Boston Cream, like the kind they put in those donuts. A creamy fruit. Apparently it is not to be eaten if you plan on imbibing large amounts of alcohol, as it will kill you or something. Have to do more research on that.
See if you can dig one up and try it. Hoops, you to, second time is the charm.

now you can watch the video over and over and over again. . . . thanks for reminding me of that shitty song. . .

The Tooth with the Bamboo Stuffing

Well, I know everyone (except me, of course) is sick of looking at my teeth. I swear I cannot get enough, and I will be glad to have them on the site to gaze at from time to time. In an effort to be done with all this, I post for you the x-rays and some root canal photos. Make sure you look at the last one. It is so trippy looking, like they stuck bamboo shoots up the hole in my tooth. I cannot stare at it too long. Any theories about that? I think it is making room for the posts you will see in the x-ray, but that's just a guess. Meanwhile, gaze away.


















Here are the best of the x-rays. I am too lazy to format this, so just look ^^.

Reconstructing My Tooth

Well, this one should be pretty self-explanitory, so I will leave the pictures to speak for themselves. I just could not believe that from that massive hole, a tooth was just remade (and I mean it looked real!) That was accomplished in about 45 minutes. Pretty amazing what modern dentistry can do. Enjoy.

Weak Stomachs Refrain

Well, this is not really how it happened. Unfortunately I did not get them all, but here they go, with the commentary I have time to put up right now.

This is the top left side, molar (g14, I believe) with a temporary filling.

This is after the temporary filing had been removed to continue the root canal. Here, I am all strapped up, so you see the plastic making an impression of sorts over my other tooth.

Here we continue with the same molar, stripped of its filling, staring you in the face. Well, it feels better now than before. This is actually during the root canal that they took these shots. They have a tiny camera, about the size of a pen, and you get to see this stuff on a flat screen TV in front of you!

These next two show the cement that holds in the medication and coagulant that keep you from bleeding all over the place and clean the infection (which is a big part of the root canal). I have no idea what the little brace there on the bottom is.

TOMORROW! The rebuilding of a tooth....my personal favorite.

Muy Thai

Well, these are photos of the one and only Muy Thai match. Was pretty good, I will leave it at that. Yours truly imbibed some beers and ate a papaya salad. The kicks were hard and the blood ran freely (not really, about the blood). I do not understand why some of the flash pictures came out so well and others were blurry, when I was trying to use the same settings in the situiation...well, I am sure Harris will tell me.
Here they go--the two blurries. (More coming soon).

****************

Guy on the left was the Thai section of the last, and main, fight. He loved posing and he was tough.
Above are the gamblers, following the action closely.

MATADOR TRAVEL

I am going to be writing for this site, and it seems great. Definitely go there qand stick in your email address to get on the mailing list, and with any luck, you will see an article or two of mine in the coming months. The site's creators seem to have a great philosophy on travel and the world, so the articles and content should be cool. And, just by the looks of the front page, it is just going to be a fun site to be on. www.MatadorTravel.com

Also, spread the word around to those who like travel.

Hopefully I will have some pics to show soon.

Songkhran, at last

Traipsing through the pasty streets, overrun with smears of white faces and bodies, buckets of water, super-soakers, music and yells from vendors and participants alike, I am taken aback. This is inconsistent with the info I gained from my cursory glances at the tourist propaganda and my friend's passing mention of "Songkhran". After a few swipes of paste on the cheek and a thorough soaking, I realize that my detour to the dentist is going to take longer than expected.
I don't travel like this. Usually, research, a little language study, reading up on history and the like are half of my travel experience. This time, however, I have just finished a stint in Seoul, South Korea, my teeth are rotting out of my head (not to mention the pain) and I am late for a deadline. My research ended about 5 minutes after I booked my flight from Seoul.
Songkran is the Thai New Year, celebrated by parading through the streets applying paste to people's faces and bodies andthen washing it away with water. As I am told, this symbolizes the washing away of sins for the New Year. Fear not, the Buddha gets his fair washing from passers-by in tiny stalls set next to the road.
By looking at the tourist brochures, I see reserved Thais in traditional dress, whisking water onto each other out of small pails in idyllic village settings. Comforting and quaint as that may be, the Thais have a more interesting way of celebrating it, at least in Bangkok.
A six-block square swath of Bangkok is crammed with souls from around noon until two in the morning ensuring that no one stay dry or paste free. Many a small entrepreneur has endeavored to facilitate this goal by setting up roadside paste and water vending tables. At around 5 baht a pop, who can miss out on the fun? The government even chips in on the effort by providing large tanks of water, in case you happen to not see or not have money for the thousands of vendors.
This being my third time ringing in the New Year, I feel thoroughly entrenched in 2006. This fact does not deter me from joining the moistened, plastered masses in celebration.
What in most Western countries would be extremely restricted in time and scope and cause widespread chaos, flows freely in Thailand. Bodies cramming and rubbing up against each other cause no emotional friction. WHile some participants seem slgihtly traumatized by the event, the vast majority smile warmly and continur pasting, dousing and repasting the absolute strangers among them.
Only at one point do I see anything violent: gleefully squished between thousands of people, a board flies in the air, smacking its intended recipient. A brawl of sorts ensues and the crowd tries, unsuccessfully, to shuffle off the street. Sticks and fists hurle through the damp air. Suddenly they cease. In the distance, I see the police. Commotion. Yelling. A few figures just in sight are on the ground in handcuffs. Cheers. Applause. The proud Thai people continue marching through the mist.
After three days of this, I have chafed thighs, a rebruised foot and a residual alcohol hangover energized by adrenaline. I took a day, Sunday, to rest and get ready for my 6 AM train to Chiang Mai.
Finally dry, if still partially covered in crusty white paste, I head out to the train street toward the train station. A few partyers from the night before linger quietly drinking on mats on the sidewalks. Swirls of creamy pink float slowly toward the gutters, ushering some of the trash with them. Buildings that had been invisible through the hoards became visible for the first time. Then, it started to rain, drenching me once more, Mother Nature's final touch on the festival.

Make me a T-shirt of this

Here is to Kyrgyzstan, the land I love. Never been there physically, but mentally I spend half of my time there.
Just couldn't live without posting this.

The Babe Theory of Political Movements

Well, haven't been posting, but this is worth putting up in case you have time to look at it. It is outstanding.
Have fun. Sounds good to me.

Joining the club, and bearing the flag (whether you like it or not)

Posted here, an idealized image of a Korean "talent" ( a singer or actor, or, just wonder celeb) with an admonition below telling us "No Korean Wave".

As I am sure most of you DON'T know, there is a "Korean Wave" going through Asia. As of late, it has seen resistance in China and Japan. It seems that the market for Korean love ballads, slapstick comedies and post-op movie stars is about saturated.

In and of itself, this is not so interesting, especially for an American, who is accustomed to going around the world and being the receptacle for everyone's love/angst for the supposed representatives of my culture, or, what's worse, me.

The interesting part is the reaction of Koreans. While some have been stoic, maintaining that the Korean Wave must continue, despite all the recent negativity (anyone heard that in the US press?), other people have expressed sadness, anger and complete befuddlement. It has been wildly reported in the press here, and most people are shocked to hear that this cultural export can possibly produce almost as much antipathy as it does sympathy.

If my darkest desires come true, two positives that might come out of this. One, the broader Korean public might come to understand how fun, freaky and disturbing it is to see random, nonsensical English printed on clothing and signs all over a foreign country. A Korean friend who recently went to China observed Chinese people donning meaningless jumbles of Hangeul on clothing and only commented "I had a very strange feeling". The second area of light is that, one day, Koreans may come to see that all the crap that comes out of a country does not necessarily represent each individual of that country.

In the meantime, the next time I hear someone ranting about the cross-country consipiracy to rig the Olympics for Anton Ohno's (check out the death threats) benefit, Oprah's plastic K-girl crusade or the stereotypes in that one James Bond movie, I will know what to say:

HANRYU GEUMJI!!!! (한류금지!)

Self-Immolation

"Self-immolation is not only the act of setting yourself on fire, but also of sacrificing yourself this way. Though self-immolations are quite rare, they are almost always carried out in public, to point out your discontent with a current (political) situation and how sure you are about your point of view. Most self-immolations in modern history happened between 1963 and 1979. Here's a list of the most memorable and important ones:

• June 11, 1963: Thich Quang Duc (66), a buddhist monk, burnt himself in Saigon to protest against the persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam at that time. Though violence against oneself is strongly discouraged in buddhism his act was followed by a few other monks.
• Between 1965 and 1970, the Americans Norman Morrison (in front of the Pentagon), Roger Allen LaPorte (22, in front of the United Nations building in New York City) and George Winne Jr. (20, in his dorm room at the University of California, San Diego) burnt themselves in order to protest against the Vietnam War.
• January 16, 1969: Czech philosophy student Jan Palach (20) burnt himself on Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague to protest against the dictatorship of the USSR.
• February 25, 1969: Jan Zajíc (18) immolated himself only one month later near to the spot where Palach died.
• August 18, 1976: Pastor Oskar Brüsewitz (47) burnt himself in Halle, Germany to protest against the political situation in East Germany.
• Mai 23, 1989: German hacker Karl Koch (23), famous because of the so-called KGB Hack burnt himself in a forest near Hannover. Reasons for this are unknown, as well as whether it really happened without external influence.
• Following the imprisonment of Abdullah Öcalan on November 15, 1999 there was a wave of self-immolations among Kurds.

Though self-immolation is a very painful and slow process it is sometimes also used to commit suicide without any form of political protest (suicide itself is always a protest)."

Source:

diesterne. self-immolation. 28 Feb 2005. 31 Oct 2005.
http://everything2.com.

You may be sorry you gave me access to your blog.

I am positive Mr. Bedell could add some true weight to the social origins of SI, and it's importance in Korean culture.

What I want to see is the korean characters for it. A little project for you.

Bring it, SI. Come on.

SI

bring the self-immolation already. . . . the natives are restless. . .

Endangered Languages

So, to explain something I am thinking of doing, next year or the year after next, I have attached an explainer from the school I would like to attend, in London, called SOAS. Don't know if they will have me, but if they do, and I come up with the cash, should work out ok.

Anyway, below is a sort of intro to the topic, which should explain it better than I would.

BACKGROUND

It is widely agreed that about half of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world today are endangered to some degree. Due to the impact of urbanisation, the spread of global communications, migration, government policies, and people’s negative evaluations of their languages and traditions, an increasing number of languages are no longer being learnt by children.
Today 96% of the worlds population speaks just 4% of the languages, meaning that the vast bulk of languages have small and diminishing speech communities. If nothing is done, most of these languages will become extinct within this century.
The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) has been established to study, document and archive aspects of the world’s linguistic heritage. Sponsored bythe Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, HRELP comprises three elements:
• A documentation programme, which awards grants annually through an international panel for research and documentation worldwide (ELDP)
• An archive programme, which provides a digital record of languages for the future(ELAR)

Resigned to Being a Resident of Seoul

Ok, today is the beginning of me giving up. For one, I am, at least temporarily giving up fighting the fact that I actually do live in Seoul. I have spent the last three years viewing it as a place I just stop by to work, but now I am submitting to its power over me and calling my self a long-termer. Hopefully this will last only until February, but it has its ways of bringing me back.
Also, I am giving up on my fight against starting a blog.....Have thought about it before and resisted. Blogs piss me off, and I usually cannot stand reading them (even the "good" ones). Now, thinking of all the emails that I would love to send and never do, at least not to everyone I want, I decided to make this and you all can come by and check it when you are wondering what I am up to. Supposedly.
So, we shall see if this really works. I have a little time this weekend, so maybe it will take off, maybe it will die.
Since I refuse to write anymore tonight, I leave you with some lemurs, which are always good to start a new thing off on the right path, and a komodo dragon, which is always good for finishing things.
tijax