Just got back from Tokyo where I spent the Korea’s Lunar New Year holiday walking around the vibrant city streets eating sushi, drinking saki, and just generally taking it all in. Since they say a picture is worth a thousand words, here are a few of my favorite snaps from the trip.
What Tokyo Looked Like.
What Tokyo Felt Like.
We arrived at the sumo stadium just as some of the wrestlers were making their enterences. It’s hard to tell the magnatude of these people from pictures or television, but trust me, they are HUGE!
Tokyo has an absolutely ginormous subway system. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but with a little practice you soon find that it’s the best way to travel through the city, especially since a 5 minute cab ride costs about 12 dollars.
I’m not sure, but I think this guy just lost his match at the sumo competition and was buying subway tickets to head home, or maybe to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Fresh fish at the Tsukiji Fish Market
Sunset in Tokyo’s Pond District
Akihabara Electric City. If you can’t find it here, you can’t find it anywhere.
Ok, that’s all I got for today. I’ll post a few more tomorrow. For now, here’s one of my favorite Tom Wait’s songs to tide you over.
The topic of Fan Death first came up back in the summer months when my boss asked me how I was getting along in the heat of the season. I told her I was managing quite well thanks to a large rotary fan I bought for 30 bucks. I also mentioned that I kept it on all night and that I didn’t need to use my air conditioning because the fan did the trick. As soon as I mentioned this last part, she shot me a look of sheer horror – as if I had just told her I enjoyed playing Russian Roulette with friends on the weekends. I didn’t know why my remark elicited such a reaction, but then she calmly told me about Fan Death, an occurrence that she said happens when a fan is left on all night, thereby giving it enough time to chop up all the air particles in a room and causing death by suffocation. I was blown away when she told me this (haha, see what I did there? Fans…Air…blown away…No? Ok nevermind), but then I stopped and thought about for a second and realized that her theory was complete crap. I could only sit there, slowly moving my head to the left, and then slowly, ever slowly, back again to the right, in a sign of disagreement. Despite my protests such a demise was impossible, she would not waver in her stance.
Well now, thanks to the Answer Fella at Esquire Magazine, the whole Fan Death debate can be put to rest. As I suspected, the phenomenon is nothing more than a bunch of hot air.
So far as AF is able to determine, no scientific literature exists to support the existence of fan death, nor does it seem to be a perceived threat in any other country but Korea. File it — like the faith of the French in the healing power of Rochebaron cheese smeared on the testicles — under “Urban Myths, Foreign Dolts.”
Here’s a link to some amazing photographs of Obama’s historic inauguration, courtesy of Boston.com’s amazing photo blog, The Big Picture. My two favorite snaps are above.
Was killing time online yesterday when I came across an interesting article on Reddit about the phenomenon that occurs when you repeat a word over and over until it eventually loses all meaning. Turns out this actually has a special name: Semantic Satiation.
semantic satiation – where rapid seeing/saying repetition of a word, like canoe-canoe-canoe… produces a loss of meaningfulness, but repetition of a nonsense overt response having the same shape, nuka-nuka-nuka…does not.
As an English language teacher I run into this occurrence all the time. One minute you’re slowly helping a group of 1st graders navigate a word like “butterfly” and then, after about 100 corrections, it is suddenly just a sound; a noise arbitrarily assigned to a meaning. While this experience doesn’t really impact me in any way besides being kind of weird, it does help me better understand the plight of my students by putting me in their position, if only for a fleeting second or two. Where the word ends for me, it is really just beginning for them, as little more than a strange sound - a shapeless tone that might as well mean nothing at all. As my understanding of the word melts away, for my students, it slowly solidifies. In the end, semantic satiation stands as further proof that language is not a rigid thing at all, but rather a fluid entity that can shift forms, like ice into water into vapor.
Watching this collection of Bushisms is oh so bittersweet. On the one hand Bush’s presidency was, by all accounts, a complete and utter disaster. On the other hand, he did manage to give us some of the most delightfully cringe worthy sound bites of any president, and now they shall be no more. Watching Bush speak is like watching a poor swimmer slip and fall into the deep end – which is probably why you get a sinking feeling every time you see him standing at a podium. He stands there and does his best to keep his head afloat, but eventually he succumbs to the unrelenting current of grammar and and syntax. What bubbles up afterward is both hilarious (because you can’t believe what he just said) and depressing (because the guy who just said that is also the President of the United States of America). Honestly, Bush seems like a pretty down to earth, laid back and likable kinda guy – the kinda guy you’d want to sit down and have a beer with, but certainly not the kinda guy you’d want to hold the most powerful office on the planet.
They say the toughest times are yet to come, but if we can survive eight years with Dubya at our country’s helm, than I’m certain we can handle whatever else might lie ahead. And that, my friends, is a sentiment that shouldn’t be misunderestimated.
Sometimes when I’m bored out here in Seosan I like to go on walks and try to find stores with poorly-worded signage. Hey, you have your hobbies, I have mine. With so many small shops lining the tiny little streets and back alleys, there’s guaranteed to be something absolutely crazy to spot. It’s kind of like bird watching, except without all the finches and high powered binoculars. Some days you come up empty handed, and some days you come home with two signs that seem to urge shoppers to commit unspeakable acts of violence upon the youths of the city. The best part about these killer duds is that kids at my school find these brands quite fashionable (or at least the mothers who dress them do). I always find it funny to see them sport the clothes completely oblivious to the unintended homicidal undertones of the logos splashed across their shirts and jackets. I suppose when it comes to fashion, ignorance truly is bliss.
For some inexplicable reason, my Korean cable provider decided to break its streak of playing crappy action movies and actually played a film worth watching, The Big Lebowski. I have seen this movie many times before, especially when I went through my awkward bowling phase back in high school, but something strange still managed to catch my eye as I watched it again last night. Is it just me, or does Mr. Lebowski look exactly like puppet master vice president Dick Cheney? The snowy white hair, the jowly cheeks, the thin-rimmed glasses, the bulging foreheads, the beady little eyes – it’s like they were separated at birth! And the similarities go beyond looks. Both are multi-millionaires, both are wrapped up in scenarios that have spiraled out of their control (Lebowski in a ransom payment gone awry,Cheney in the Iraq War) and both have absolutely no use for anyone who refers to themselves as “Dude.” There are so many reasons to dislike Mr. Lebowski’s character in the movie, the fact that he seems to be Dick Cheney’s long lost brother is just another one to add to the list.
Just in time for next week’s historic inauguration, here comes the Obamicon, a cool app that lets you create your own Shepard Fairey-style campaign poster. Simply upload a picture, lob it into the program, wait a hot second, and BOOM! You’re damn near presidential. For added authenticity, try to upload a picture of yourself gazing knowingly into the distance. If you’ve ever wanted to see your face emblazoned on a political poster (who hasn’t?), now’s your chance.
Tristan de Cuhna: an island in the sun, and little else
Sometimes I feel like I’m out in the middle of nowhere out here in Seosan. With no family to ground you and very little English to go around, this place can sometimes feel like a whole different planet. So yes, from time to time I do get a little lonely here in South Korea, but probably never as lonely as the people on Tristan de Cuhna, the world’s most remote inhabited island.
With a population of 270, this little island smack dab in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean is so small it doesn’t show up on most maps, and it’s so remote that the next closest landmass is 2430 kilometers (1,510 miles) away. That’s the same distance between Chicago and Cuba. In other words: it’s quiet out there. One more thing – the place is also one big active active volcano.
The island now boasts a convenience store, a radio station (broadcasting the World Service four days a week), a cafe, a video shop and a swimming pool. Tristan is now connected to the world by one telephone and a fax machine in the Administrator’s office, and is visited once a year by the only mail ship in the world, the RMS St. Helena. This ship brings not only mail, but canned food, videos, books and magazines, medical items, and the occasional visitor.
Woah, a fax machine?! They’re really coming up in the world. What’s next, an overhead projector? This place sounds like the perfect spot to escape to if you like yourself some good ol’ peace and quiet, or if you’re a fraudulant financial advisor looking to hold up in after trying to fake your own death. Either way, Tristan de Cuhna makes Seosan look practically metropolitan.
Ok so I lied. I know that I said that yesterday’s post would be my last regarding China, but this sign was just too good to pass up. I’m not sure what translating service this company used to decide on it’s name, but whatever it was they should probably find another one — quick. The term “pinko” is, last I checked, a derogatory term for Communist sympathizers, and China being the Communist country that it is, one might think better before riling up the cadres. If you really stop and think about it, Pinko Marketing is really an oxymoron. After all, marketing is an inherently capitalist venture, and communism is, well, quite the opposite.
Oh yeah, let that sink in. I just blew your mind didn’t I? No? No I didn’t?… I guess the lesson here is: I should probably get outside more.
