A Bargeful of Pictures, March and April, Gyeong-ju, Cherry Blossoms, Last Day of Classes

I got a 2GB stick for my camera, so now I've been taking billions of pictures.


Here are some last day of class photos. First one is with me and my Korean mother, Sue, who has been in a few of my classes. She's a great lady. Everyday for class she brings me food because she was a teacher once and knows how hungry we get. Here we are at our favorite restaurant, eating ssambap (not shown, but is on video somewhere.) Afterwards we went to coffee, treated by Ji-Young, shown two pictures down.



This was later that night. I met Jong-min and company for a few or four drinks. They thought I was a brave man, but my boss was in the other wing of this bar and I suddenly became paranoid and nervous. I was a disappointment. Anyhow, the blurry guy, Jongmin, helped me set up the trip to Gyeong-ju. Nice guy. Ernest and strange.

Jongmin, Hye-won, and Ju-hyun, my 7 o'clock am 1B class.

The following were my writing classes. No matter how boring it got, they always came. (By the way, the "peace" sign is not a peace sign, it is a "V" for victory. Koreans are quite competitive folk.)



Both want your bucks, but this one's cheaper:

Here's a random assortment of Gyeong-ju pictures. Gyeong-ju is about 5 hours away from Seoul on bus, and a sort of the tourist-must-go of Korea. This was the first real touristing I've done. I went with some Pagoda teachers, Estella from Indiana and a lot of other places, Amy from I forget where, Eric from NY (along with his boyfriend from Kazakstan, Roman,) Steve from South England, along with Estella's student Claire acting as our half-interested guide. (She's the one kissing the golden pig. I have footage of myself kissing the pig. I have to put it into a video.) The first shot is from the night we rented little motorbikes and terrorized the locals with our blind speed. There are few photos from that because it was hard to steer and take photos at the same time.






Steve and I got existential at a coffee bar while the girls were climbing mountains.



Blurry shot of archetypal "Ajumma." Ajumma means middle-aged woman in Korea. They are referred to as "the third sex."

Burial mound:



Oldest astrological observatory in the Far East:








A few of the fellows that greet you at the Bulguksa Buddhist temple (Sir Steve the Knihilist Knight is to be found in the lower right):











Here's downtown Gyeon-Ju. I stayed an extra night while the everyone else went back to Seoul (they aren't on vacation like I am Ha-ha.)



We stayed at an enduring, mustily magnificent relic of the 70's, the Hotel Concorde. I loved this hotel, from the must to the carpet, to the abandoned discotheque to the abandoned singing room, to the abandoned souvenir shops, to the spider-infested scale model of Bulgaksi temple, including its parking lot. I took a lot of video of it, very few pictures. Someday I'll cobble together a video tribute.

Cherry blossoms were out in full.

Horses

Why I will never go to the races again. This is crazy. Crazy enough to make me angry. Who would create such a device? To shoot darts from underneath some harmless horses for financial gain is just sick and wrong. This is mystery worth solving. I smell a good movie here. If you know something about this incident I suggest you contact the local Honk Kong authorities at once.





In other news-- I was surfing the net and found this wonderful Crop Circle from 1996. The crop circle appeared one night in the British countryside around the same time I was hitching around England. I was in Glastonbury at the time (the Heart Chakra of the world, some claim. Others say it was the birth place of Christianity and it is also known as the famed Isle of Avalon where Excalibur appeared from its waters. Oh, the holy grail is supposed to be buried there as well.) and when word got out a "magical crop circle unlike any that have come before" I decided I had to see it. I hitched out to the crop circle and when I arrived there was man from the Royal Air force there dong "survey work" Or so he said. When I began to ask him questions about the circle he took off. I then realized I had no way home and spent the night in the circle with a fellow hitcher. The other hiker played a didge and I had some some small drum and we jammed all night, digging the celestial energy that was all around. Other people appeared throughout the night, creeping out of the stalks like monsters. One woman claimed she had seen a UFO over the area the night before.

Portnoy's non-complaint

These days our intergalactic friends are a lot closer than we think. Trouble began two months ago when a scheduled space shuttle landing was cancelled due to a UFO sighting, near the Shuttle’s base. Following proper protocol from Chapter 9 article 1.7 paragraph three in NASA’s standard of conduct manual on the day of landing (SOCODOL) the mission was delayed.
“If by chance an unidentified flying object (UFO) is acknowledged within 500 miles of shuttle on day of landing and if the US air force is unable to handle the situation by force, the preceding landing shall be postponed until the situation is investigated and the skies are clear of any activities that would other wise lead to any kind of danger towards a successful mission.”

The SOCODOL goes on further to suggest proper ways in misleading the press into the actual occurrences of UFOs near the Kennedy space center.
“Sleet, snow, rain, hurricanes, and attempted kidnappings by past astronauts are all acceptable headlines worthy of necessary diversions.”
“I have never seen anything so close to one of our bases since the great battle of 1992,” said NASA engineer Mary Portnoy.

When asked about the great battle of 1992, Mrs. Portnoy gave a response straight out of the SOCODOL manual, “Have you heard about the kidnapping attempt last month?”

Something is up. My connections with the Alien Black Market (ABM) tell me that the great hexagon at the center of Saturn's northern pole is not a sign of things to come but of things that have past...

Sleep!

Get Some!

Secret Police Synchonicity

Someone you trust is one of us. (via atrion elemental particulates.)

Korea: Land of Mystical Elephants

Kosik the talking Elephant:


What is this creature communicating to us?!?!?!? Witness this amazing video:




Also there was an elephant stampede a few years ago. I think a bbq placed was trashed or something.

Shady Mammoth Deals

Little did I know:

"Do you know how hard it is to secure four or five animal ovaries at butcher shops? You need to keep the workers there happy."

In an attempt to clone a prehistoric animal, disgraced Korean biologist Hwang Woo-Suk tried to buy mammoth tissue from the Russian Mafia.

A gift for my brother(s)

in the form of a very large snack.

Sarcasm and The UFO's

I use sarcasm to put a barrier between me and the aliens.

Simulacra

Don't know why, but this morning it occurred to me that

Dave Thomas,




and Gene Rodenberry,



Would get along real well...





...and I hope that they do.

Cyborg Language Institute

I shouldn't tell other people my ideas. But what the hell. Somebody should start a language institute called Cyborg Language Learning Lab. C triple L. It's like connecting a computer up to your brain and learning the language automatically.



That's all I got.



Except I've been watching lots of movies and listening to lots of music. I have been torrenting like a madman. I'm obsessed with torrenting. I have so much music now that I'll never be able to listen to it all. It's insane. I've downloaded the discographies of Bjork, Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan--every bootleg, every re-mix, every everything.



I'll have to get a iPod cyborg chip so I can just listen to everything sped up but with my brain cycle sped up too. Come on iPod, you have to come up with the eVerything-pod for your brain so I can listen to all 30 re-mixes of Everyday is Exactly the Same.

The team calculated that if all the numbers were written out in small type, they would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

What I wonder is if there is a subset of mathematicians who specialize solely in making these sorts of comparisons?