A Journey, Not A Destination

Yesterday I learned that liquid dish soap is an effective lubricant for when a six year-old pushes his foot through the small opening in the back of his plastic chair and can’t pull it back out.

Good Times

It amazed me that a formerly great paper like The Washington Post would pay actual money to a guy as perpetually deluded as Bill Kristol.  What’s more amazing?  That they actually allow comments on his blog.  It’s a symphony of Post readers tearing the guy apart, seemingly with no end.

But at least we can all agree that Specter’s defection is good news for John McCain.

Nelson Muntz Voice

Arlen Specter switches to the Democratic Party.

There’d been rumors of this happening for a while and I’d written them off as wishful thinking.  But it’s clear Specter wasn’t going to win a primary in PA with the Republican base getting nuttier and more isolated from the American mainstream by the day.

This circumspect analysis from DailyKos says all that really needs to be said.

The Border

“Peering into North Korea” is an amazing set of photos taken along the Chinese/North Korean border and compiled by The Boston Globe.  This female DPRK soldier was snapped by AP photographer Andy Wong.

Photo of North Korean children by AP photographer Ng Han Guan.

Full Circle

The new Bob Mould is great.  It’s warmer and more straightforward (i.e., guitar-based) than his last (also quite good) District Line.

And I actually like the electronic direction he’s taken over the past ten years.  But it’s still nice to hear work closer to his first solo stuff after Husker Du.

Super Not Good

Via Mefi, a post about how the Mexican “swine flu” is potentially phase three of a six-phase build-up to a 1918-style pandemic.

Happy Sunday!

Institutions

I headed over to a friendly foreigner bar in Itaewon to watch the Caps avoid elimination, at least for another night.

Was that really Robin Ficker getting thrown out for heckling the Rangers’ bench?

Brother Can You Spare An ESL Job?

Andrew Sullivan has been running an interesting series entitled “The View From Your Recession,” where he solicits updates on life in the economic downturn.  His latest entry is from a woman doing the ex-pat teaching thing, although in Japan rather than Korea.   She likes the work (and the government provided health care, which I can’t complain about here in Korea either) but she’s going home to the States:

I am a 26-year old college graduate currently working as an assistant English teacher in Tottori, Japan.  My job mostly consists of entertaining junior high school students, for which I get paid almost 40k a year. Even though the recession has hit Japan pretty hard, it hasn’t affected us too much out here in “inaka” (the countryside.)  I have it far better out here in Japan than many of my friends back home in the States.

Bapocalypse

No self-respecting K-blogger worth his kimchi goes for too long without making a broad generalization based on the thinnest  of anecdotal evidence, so here goes:

Korean mothers are the worst bakers on the entire planet.

It’s the end of the month here, so today my class celebrated two April birthdays.  One of the birthday kids brought in a cake made by his mom and it was the most godawful miscarriage of flour, chocolate, and heat that you could ever imagine.  My co-teacher got frustrated  trying to cut it into smaller pieces, so she basically just  put random chunks of it in front of pairs of kids.  They impotently poked at the detritus with their plastic forks, incapable of making a dent in the Kevlar-like outer walls.

She sent in some cookies as well, and those were even worse.

Words and Things

Upcoming parent meetings.  Polishing off the May syllabi.  I’m feeling overwhelmed by the the.  I drink deep from the well of youtube and Rorty.