Back on the blog

This is the singer we have gone to see every night,. They are really good. Sort of Thai folk songs. At this point in the night I was worse for wear from whiskey, but was fun.

Earlier that day, we went to slide down these cables from tree to tree. I cannot say how amazing it was. I would do it ten times a day if I could. A little scary, though. Like I said, the videos do not show how high up it is.

Breakfast view.

Crazy moon. I have some better ones. Will try to post those later.

So, the thing is 35 meters up (although I could swear it was higher). You start out low and just practice. Then you go up a bit higher....you can see Nok climbing the ladder up one of the trees around 45 seconds. Where the ladder starts is already way up there, so you can imagine. Huge Elephants looked about the size of my cellphone, haha.

I was ok, I think especially after the rock climbing Scott and I did. But I just made sure that I was very mechanical in following what the guy said, since I really didn't want to plummet to my demise there. ^^ I thought Nok would be scared, but she said that after the roller coaster in Korea, this was nothing. So funny, all the Thai girls who she talked to before asked her if she wouldn't be scared. They wouldn't go.

The best thing was the second to last jump, where there is just this huge tree on the other side. It must be a hundred years old, and I remember looking at it supporting the cable. Amazing. Too bad the rides only last like 20 seconds.

Scoot, if you come here, we are getting a hotel next door to this place and going every day, hahaha.

Christmas Day Celebration

Here are some photos of what we were doing on Christmas Day. We received guests all day. So recent but so long ago. Work here we come.
Here is the food, which was delicious, thanks to Nok and her friend Gania. Of course, being that Nok planned everything, this is a very small sample of what was actually served.


And the traffic, but the lights make it better.

The Thais really got into the Christmas spirit, even though they had no idea about a lot of it. A lot of them knew what the gifts were ahead of time....Where is the surprise???? Anyway, as you can see, they jumped in head first.
Here is Nok (left) with Ba, a friend, in front of the Christmas tree. Nok filled it with Christmas presents. I supplied our new humidifier. So happy to have that.

This is Gania putting out the food that I am still eating a half week later. Really good and filling. Franzia provided by the military base. Oh yeah!

Even wrapping presents was no obstacle. Ba was pretty good at it, while Nok got somewhat frustrated with it.

HwaSeong Revisited

So, it has been about 5 years since I first went to the fortress in Suwon. We showed up late, but it was still nice. The walk up the wall was steeper than I remembered, but it is not that bad. I had forgotten it was a UNESCO world heritage site. Had some Dak Galbi, which put me in a good mood for the hike.
Enjoy.

This sign just says "Korea" but in a a nice, formal way. Just looks cool, especially as it is just placed in the middle of nowhere at the top of the wall next to a look-out (got to protect the king).

Here is Nok experimenting with Korean fashion....oh, what have I created.....



Us eating DakGalbi. Will be my parting meal here, I think (or one of them).

Where have all the liberators gone?

And funny, this from MSNBC (the 'liberal' media?):
[Muqtada] Al-Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran, was not at the protest [against the US-Iraq withdrawl withdrawl--oh no, surrender!], though he wrote a sermon read by his representative, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Mohammadawi, calling the United States "the enemy of Islam."
"The government must know that it is the people who help it in the good and the bad times. If it throws the occupier out all the Iraqi people will stand by it," the sermon read, using common rhetoric for the United States.
Did you spot it? Did you spot the funny, laugh-out-loud weasel phrase in this article? This is what people like Chomsky mean by 'biased media', although it is so subtle that a quick scan will usually miss this.
Will give you a second to go back and see....what part of this article could only have been written in the US or by a US proxy?
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING KEEP LOOKING
Ok, get it? And the answer is: "using common rhetoric for the United States".
That is so awesome. Implying that we would not relate the 'occupier' with the US? Even if we assumed that I approved of the invasion (oh, shit....it wasn't an invasion...maybe I should take a page from the Japanese....achem...the 'advance' into) Iraq, what would not make the US an occupational force.?
Recap: they went in, killed tons of people, hung the ex-leader (bastard though he may have been...sure Rumsfeld was sad) then took over every aspect of the society. They set up a government that cannot do anything without final approval from the US, via various channels.
Fair enough. If you are for all of this, that is your opinion. But don't try to convince us, however subtly, that it is not an occupation.

HAL is watching me (us)

Oh, yes, HAL is right here in my building. I see HAL everyday on the way to my apartment. It can actually be pretty creepy, depending on the lighting at any given moment. Why is HAL in my building and what purpose does he serve, you might be asking. Actually, he is just the superfluous eye ball of the fire extinguisher stand:

Well, here's to old HAL, and that I never have to disarm my HAL, although watching that scene makes me want to watch all of 2001 again.

Leave Me Alone

This character trait of mine has been slowly developing under the radar. I hope it doesn't make me an asshole, although I half think it does.
The first time I really noticed it was during a trip to Chicago to see Hoops. Waiting for my (now beloved) Megabus from Chicago to St. Louis, when I a trechcoat-clad gentleman rambled up to me selling copies of the FREE satire magazine, the Onion. Now, I buy socks, lighters, photos and loads of other junk from homeless/fell-on-hard-times people. But, my reaction to this guy, after a second's glance at the Onion copies he was hawking, was so instant and second nature that it shocked me. Even this guy, a tougher character than I, looked taken aback by my immediate and jaded hand wave without a nanosecond of eye contact.
I have to say, I didn't feel bad at that second, but while running back and forth from Union Station and the actual bus, I realized that I had been pretty mean. This was placed in high relief when the next guy approached quickly forked out a buck to acquire a copy of the free mag. Is he naive or have I simply internalized my wall to a horryfying extent?
Now, I am still nice to people I meet and feel like I have time for any person that has a genuine heart. So, on that note, I feel fine. However, this trend does make me slightly edgy, as it seems to indicate that my dismissiveness has reached new hights, which brings me to today.
Sitting on the Seoul subway, which I rarely ride since I live 2 minutes from work, I saw a middle-aged white man get on the train (which is not too hard to spot here). For the next five minutes, he fumbled around with a variety of knickknacks: first, an apparently new set of keys and a bunch of coins; he later moved on to papers, dropping several pieces of paper while doing so. He looked utterly echausted, based on how he put up his bag on the rack, and I felt a little sorry for him, for what reason I don't know.
Then, just under a minute from my destination, he came over to me, thrust a pamphlet my direction and told me, in Korean, to please take a look at the literature. Sure that it was another Morman or other religious wacko, I glanced at him sideways and said "no". He assured me that it wasn't religious, but again-another snap judgement, free from any detectable reasoning process- I told him no.
At this point, it got sticky, as there was a whole lot of Koreans watching the two foreigners going through a relatively unpleasant dance--he being more assertive than most Koreans would stomach, and me being more hostile in return than most Koreans would want to be. Whatever his cause was, I didn't look long enough to see. I just immediately brushed him of. And, at this point, he pushed the paper/pamphlet in my direction, assuming I would take it (had he been trained to believe the generally true rule of thumb that people will instinctively take something handed to them?). Instead, I continued to brush off the request, but inadvertently knocked the paper down, while simultaneously saying I didn't want to see it.
"Why?" he asked, in a slightly damaged voice.
"I'm getting off now," I responded with a coldness and detachment worthy of HAL in his better days. I didn't really look at anyone after that, but I could feel the tension in the body language of everyone on the train (and what a sight for them! Foreigners in conflict! Even better than regular foreigners!).
Leaving the train, I felt no remorse, but after a scolding by the wife, I wondered if I had been a little harsh. Half of me thinks that there is nothing a random person on the subway is going to give me that I will want (something that has proven to be true 99.9 percent of the time). The other half wonders if guy will think about this as much as I am.

What Hoops has been waiting for....

Stone Temple Pilots Reunite for Tour

Hooray world

Free Tibet and Out of the Fertile Crescent.

Thai movie-Tongpan 1977

100,000 Protesters Now

Update. Now to 100,000+ protesters. Keep following this.

Go Monks

Finally a protest that seems to have caught the country by surprise and might do something in Burma (Myanmar). We will have to wait and see if this turns into a much wider national movement or if the junta feels so powerful that it can slaughter monks as it has been slaughtering its people slowly (and less slowly in other cases).

Still, thousands of monks out marching through the rain to protest the gvernement it pretty tough to put down. Yesterday they even stopped by to see Aung San Suu Kyi, who is still under house arrest. Anyone who has been to SE Asia knows how revered the monks are. Burma is no exception, so let's keep our hopes up that this might be the stimulus for a larger change. Some pretty dramatic statements by some groups who seem ready to stand up to this government once and for all.

Here are some photos I snatched from the web. Check out these and more on <http://www.mizzima.com/>, an opposition site based in India.

How Bored Are We?

Ran into an article about virtual rape through a serious combination of click, clik, clicks on various websites. Hyperlinks are surely of the dark one, but they are fun. More random knowledge from there than from anywhere.
I guess these things could be happening on more visually impressive multi-player games, but I am still not sure how. The players on World of Warcraft (WoW) occaasionally copulate, but it is something that is akin to dancing together or a woman squatting on a man. Does not seem that real or that fun to me, but ok, the virtual world is something to wonder about.
Here is an article that boggles the mind, and it seems that it is way overdone. These are some seriously deluded people. I love games, but the blur between reality and fiction has come to a head with these folks.
Can a 'rape' online be a rape in real life? Well, there are certainly parties out there searching for more serious cyber crime. Most of us would agree that approaching young children online would definitely require law enforcement intervention. As for a virtual rape in one of these virtual worlds, it seems that the psychological part of the entanglement is what is getting these folks. They are so involved that they feel the same trauma that they would if they were raped (or so they claim). I have never had this happen to me online (not a player), so I cannot claim to know how they felt, but it seems that the excessive dependence on the online world leads to their mental anguish. Cut the one, cut the other.
Still, as games become more realistic, this will be more and more of an issue. So, it is worth taking a blast to the past and revisiting the black and white world of MOOs and MOGs and MUDs and...I forget the acronyms. This is the revised version of an online rape and its consequences, from the early 90s.
Abridged Version Please try to remember this was all virtual, no graphics:


The time was a Monday night in March, and the place, as I've said, was the living room -- which, due largely to the centrality of its location and to a certain warmth of decor, is so invariably packed with chitchatters as to be roughly synonymous among LambdaMOOers with a party. So strong, indeed, is the sense of convivial common ground invested in the living room that a cruel mind could hardly imagine a better place in which to stage a violation of LambdaMOO's communal spirit. And there was cruelty enough lurking in the appearance Mr. Bungle presented to the virtual world -- he was at the time a fat, oleaginous, Bisquick-faced clown dressed in cum-stained harlequin garb and girdled with a mistletoe-and-hemlock belt whose buckle bore the quaint inscription KISS ME UNDER THIS, BITCH! But whether cruelty motivated his choice of crime scene is not among the established facts of the case. It is a fact only that he did choose the living room.
He commenced his assault entirely unprovoked, at or about 10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. That he began by using his voodoo doll to force one of the room's occupants to sexually service him in a variety of more or less conventional ways. That this victim was exu, a Haitian trickster spirit of indeterminate gender, brown-skinned and wearing an expensive pearl gray suit, top hat, and dark glasses. That exu heaped vicious imprecations on him all the while and that he was soon ejected bodily from the room. That he hid himself away then in his private chambers somewhere on the mansion grounds and continued the attacks without interruption, since the voodoo doll worked just as well at a distance as in proximity. That he turned his attentions now to Moondreamer, a rather pointedly nondescript female character, tall, stout, and brown-haired, forcing her into unwanted liaisons with other individuals present in the room, among them exu, Kropotkin (the well-known radical), and Snugberry (the squirrel). That his actions grew progressively violent. That he made exu eat his/her own pubic hair. That he caused Moondreamer to violate herself with a piece of kitchen cutlery. That his distant laughter echoed evilly in the living room with every successive outrage. That he could not be stopped until at last someone summoned Iggy, a wise and trusted old-timer who brought with him a gun of near wizardly powers, a gun that didn't kill but enveloped its targets in a cage impermeable even to a voodoo doll's powers. That Iggy fired this gun at Mr. Bungle, thwarting the doll at last and silencing the evil, distant laughter.
He (Mr. B) entered sadistic fantasies into the "voodoo doll," a subprogram that served the not-exactly kosher purpose of attributing actions to other characters that their users did not actually write. And thus a woman in Haverford, Pennsylvania, whose account on the MOO attached her to a character she called Moondreamer, was given the unasked-for opportunity to read the words As if against her will, Moondreamer jabs a steak knife up her ass, causing immense joy. You hear Mr._Bungle laughing evilly in the distance. And thus the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called exu, with a view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which exu, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of degradation all-too-customarily reserved for the embodied female.
Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere fiction. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that exu and Moondreamer were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim exu scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of "civility." Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player exu issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of exu's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.
But it wasn't until the evening of the second day after the incident that exu (the virtual rapee), finally and rather solemnly, gave it voice:
"I am requesting that Mr. Bungle be toaded for raping Moondreamer and I. I have never done this before, and have thought about it for days. He hurt us both."

***Long and drawn out debate about governance and its difficulties in the virtual world. Mr. B makes an appearance and pisses everyone off for not talking, except to make sarcastic remarks, etc. Then, sort of collectively, though in the end, through the unilateral action of a wizard, they wack him (don't stress, just his character....the spiritof Mr. B lives on in all of us.....er.... I mean, it wasn't a real guy***

Yet the continued dependence on extermination as the ultimate keeper of the peace suggested that this new MOO order was perhaps not built on the most solid of foundations. For if life on LambdaMOO began to acquire more coherence in the wake of the toading (killing), death retained all the fuzziness of pre-Bungle days. This truth was rather dramatically borne out, not too many days after Bungle departed, by the arrival of a strange new character named Dr. Jest. There was a forceful eccentricity to the newcomer's manner, but the oddest thing about his style was its striking yet unnameable familiarity. And when he developed the annoying habit of stuffing fellow players into a jar containing a tiny simulacrum of a certain deceased rapist, the source of this familiarity became obvious:

Mr. Bungle had risen from the grave.

In itself, Bungle's reincarnation as Dr. Jest was a remarkable turn of events, but perhaps even more remarkable was the utter lack of amazement with which the LambdaMOO public took note of it. To be sure, many residents were appalled by the brazenness of Bungle's return. In fact, one of the first petitions circulated under the new voting system was a request for Dr. Jest's toading that almost immediately gathered several dozen signatures (but failed in the end to reach ballot status). Yet few were unaware of the ease with which the toad proscription could be circumvented -- all the toadee had to do (all the ur- Bungle at NYU presumably had done) was to go to the minor hassle of acquiring a new Internet account, and LambdaMOO's character registration program would then simply treat the known felon as an entirely new and innocent person.

(Personal note: give them a break. It was the early 90s, and they didn't really get the internet, so this freaked them out.)

***Writer tries to talk to the newly renamed Dr. Jest, but fails and ponders the significance of said failure***

For reasons known only to himself, Dr. Jest had stopped logging in. Maybe he'd grown bored with the MOO. Maybe the loneliness of ostracism had gotten to him. Maybe a psycho whim had carried him far away or maybe he'd quietly acquired a third character and started life over with a cleaner slate.

Wherever he'd gone, though, he left behind the room he'd created for himself -- a treehouse tastefully decorated with rare-book shelves, an operating table, and a life-size William S. Burroughs doll -- and he left it unlocked. So I took to checking in there occasionally, heading out of my own cozy nook (inside a TV set inside the little red hotel inside the Monopoly board inside the dining room of LambdaMOO) and teleporting on over to the treehouse, where the room description always told me Dr. Jest was present but asleep, in the conventional depiction for disconnected characters. The not-quite-emptiness of the abandoned room invariably instilled in me an uncomfortable mix of melancholy and the creeps, and I would stick around only on the off chance that Dr. Jest might wake up, say hello, and share his understanding of the future with me.

***The Best Part***

That is all quite another story, of course. Yet as I said before, it begins where Mr. Bungle's ends, and there remains now only a very little of his to tell. Dr. Jest did finally reawaken, it's true, one late-December day -- but he didn't even make it to January before he decided, for no apparent reason but old times' sake, to go on a late-night Bungle-grade rampage through the living room, thus all but formally requesting to be hauled before an official mediator and toaded with a vengeance. The new MOO polity promptly obliged, and I, still busily contriving to loosen those RL ties in preparation for my full-time residency, missed by days my last chance to hear the doctor's story from his own virtual mouth.

Me again....Not the moo-crazed grad student. Anyway, while this thing gets more insane the more you read (if the ins and outs fascinate you, give it a read), Basically, at this point she realizes that hse has to get out and continue life (I think??!!%#Q$@$*???) She goes on to say that she thinks it was a group of NYU students, apparently acting separately in their computer lounge, cheering each other on. Whil this seems to be a decent way to redeem your sense of the goodness of humanity, it is doubtful that this is the case.
She actually hit on the possible cause for the whole thing. "Dr. Jest did finally reawaken, it's true, one late-December day -- but he didn't even make it to January before he decided, for no apparent reason but old times' sake, to go on a late-night Bungle-grade rampage through the living room..."
Yes, sometimes life is that simple. It is funny, and so you do it again. It pisses people off in a land of no consequences. Seriously, that someone might cry about their virtual identity is not something one takes into consideration when slaying the character, defaming it, stealing from it or any number of acts that would be despicable in the real world. But, in a world that does not have contraints, and where no real physical harm is done PEOPLE DO THINGS LIKE THIS FOR FUN. Why? BECAUSE IT DOES NOT DO PHYSICAL HARM AND IS THEREFORE FUNNY. Seeing people angry about it only makes it more hilarious. The guy (the same one, not some dorm mates) probably attended the meeting about the incident over a beer, cracking up during the proceedings. And for old times' sake, you do it again.

Man vs Stupid

On a friend's suggestion, I watched a show called Man vs Wild. The show features an ex-SS guy who climbed Everest at 23, led an expidition through the Arctic and a whole buncg of other stuff. It is a pretty cool show where he shows you what you could do in certain situations that most of us will never be in. He builds elevsated sleeping quarters on trees in the Everglades, eats little frogs and drinks elephant poop juice.
Apparently, there is a big scandal now that he is a fraud because some of his crew sleep in hotels on the way, some things were planned out beforehand, etc. This is more of a comment on the level of stupidity in society these days than anything else. People actually thought he was risking his life here (at least more than he is by hanging out around aligators and other dangerous critters and environments). There is a camera crew there, which is hilarious. Some people are so plugged into the tube that they didn't know there were other people there, hahaa.....
What I love more is that, on a few bulliten boards, the defenders were citing Everest. Now the funny thing about that is that no one could talk back to that. Funny, don't they feel cheated that the sherpas carry all the stuff and set up the courses ahead of time. Somehow the rich dude going up with all that help is herioc, but having a crew and planning things out is not.
I still think the show is cool. Give it a watch. Also, while he does eat many animals, he does not piss animals off and then let them go back home angry, a la Steve Erwin.

A Special Way to Look at Ads

This is something that I ran across at Slate, and I ended up using it in a class where I was supposed to show ads to the kids. They were supposed to mimic them and produce their own. Well, I love ads, and buying stuff is alright by me, even though I hardly do any of it, but this seemed like pimping myself out on a larger scale than I am comfortable with. So, I ran these 12 types of ads off to the kids, they took notes, and we had a jam session with it. It turned out really well. By the end of the class, they were categorizing the different ads and thinking about them in a more analytical way. They were shocked and awed by the different strategies. This gave my ad-based class a much more critical edge, and I am glad I did it. You should take a look at it, too.

Great Wall

A few pics from the great wall and around. Not sure what I am doing in the last pic, but it doesn't bode well.

ohhh. Laos...nok is happier than she looks

More Laos

A nice pic of Nok and our "tour guide". She informed us that she was ther eto guide us--to the "ticket booth" as it turned out. Anyway, she was cute.
Here is a cave pic, but doesn't do the caves justice. They were beautiful...Probably need some mad Harrissimo skills to take a photo in there.
Outside of the cave.

Nok during our river floating trip. Beautiful water and Beer Laos everywhere.