Audience Participation Required

Now that we're in rainy season, all I want to do is lay on the couch, eat soup, and watch TV. Unfortunately, we only have Korean satellite service, so my English-language options are limited (although there is an English channel that seems to play only CSI and Fear Factor). We can get DVDs and download shows, but we have to know what shows to get. On the advice of a radio show we also download, we recently discovered It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, already in its second season. It's so good that I was angry I missed it for so long.
So, I am wondering what else is on? I need something to tide me over the summer until The Office is back. Help, America!

Two Dumb Links as an Excuse for a Post

Hi. I'm lazy and pressed for time. Here's two dumb links of stuff I've been peeping lately.

First off is my latest toy, the Nike+ iPod gimmick. I've heard that my own brother has given me some guff about this, but he can go screw. This is a tiny transmitter set made in a partnership between Apple and Nike. One piece goes into a special Nike+ shoe and the other one clips into the bottom of your iPod nano. Then you start running and it records your time, distance, speed, calories burned, etc. Data is stored until you hook the iPod up to your computer, then you can download the info and send it to Nike.com. There you can track all your runs, set goals, challenge others, etc. Here's what my screen looks like when I sign in.



At first, I thought this was a neat gimmick and that's what drew me to it. But I've been using it for a couple of runs now and there's really a lot of functionality to it. Something about seeing your run analyzed like that and then trying to improve on your time and speed is a motivator. Plus, you can look at other people's run times from around the world. I say neat-o!

My second dumb link I stumbled on while writing a reply to my dear friend, Tab O'maley. It's the Bazooka Joe Shrine!! Some kid from Caltech has made an incredibly informative, if starkly designed, web page about Bazooka Joe comics. Plus, he's got scans of all the old comics to boot! With each one, he does what I can only describe as a literature review of the dialogue. How much critical analysis can one derive from a two frame comic? Turns out, quite a bit.

Cheers!

Korean-French manicure

I speak three words in Korean, and even those I pronounce poorly. So, it is no surprise that there is often a failure to communicate when I try to express myself to Koreans who also have a limited grasp of a second language.
The other day I was getting a pedicure and the girl doing it asked if I wanted pink. I said, "no, french." This was the result:

Surprisingly, this did not seem unusual to any Koreans- they often get this in blue, green, even a tiny rainbow stripe. I kept it like this for a few days, until my friend Tyler said it looked like I was bleeding out through my nails. That's hot!

Jessica's Birthday

Yesterday was Jessica's birthday. We had a couple of friends over and ate some ice cream cake. But the real fun happened when Aidan decided to put on this uncanny penguin performance using one of the birthday hats. Behold, Penguin Boy!

The Long Wall

On our recent trip to China, we visited the Great Wall. Our guide informed us that the Chinese refer to it as the "Long Wall". I guess they're both accurate.

We didn't have the best weather for the trip there. Cloudy with rain. Not the sunny clear skies that I hoped would give us the best pictures of the wall. But when you have lemons...

This pillar is a quote from Chairman Mao, "You're not a hero until you've climbed the Great Wall." I guess I can check that block.



The section of wall that we climbed spanned a strategic valley that the Chinese were trying to protect. We started our climb in the low point of the valley and climbed up from there. In retrospect, I think we climbed up the wrong side. The other route was longer, but definitely not as steep. Here's the path we took:



And it goes on up from there. Once we were at the top (or at least as far up as we were willing to go) we had the obligatory family photo done by a passing Briton. It was fortunate that he was in the area. Believe it or not, most of the Chinese and Japanese tourists that we asked to take our picture had an uncommonly hard time operating our camera. They could never get the "press halfway, then press all the way" concept right, even though every digital camera that I've ever used has that same operation. Go figure. Regardless, here we are from the top of the mountain:



Finally, I've been having a lot of fun with the "panorama" mode on the camera, and this was yet another opportunity to play around with it. It was still a little cloudy when I took this, but the sky was clearing up and I brightened it up with some help from Photoshop. Click here to bring up the whole shot in all it's glory.




While I'm here, I wanted to see if anyone knew who I gotta know to get placed on the "Blogs of Note" on the front page of Blogger. Christ, if bluepulseblog and Budak in Berlin can get there, why not me? My content's just as good as those two hacks. Tell your friends about Fillet of Seoul and get me a mention.

Animal Husbandry?

I bought a shirt while we were in Thailand in May. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a knock-off of another brand of shirt, or just something that they came up with in Thailand. It's non-descriptive green polo shirt with a small embroidered symbol on the left breast. It shows a chicken and a rabbit doing... something. Maybe I should just show you and let you make your own judgment:

A View From the Top

Before we left for our China trip, Jessica and I had been trying to take my parents on a trip up to Seoul Tower for a view of the city. We had been hit with a couple days of bad weather and the visibility from the tower would have been terrible. As luck would have it, the weather cleared up a bit the day before we left and we had one of those rare clear nights. We hurried up to the tower after I got off work and took our camera. Everything came together and I took these panorama shots of the Seoul skyline at dusk and night.

These are both pretty large pictures. If you click on them, you'll be able to open up the whole shot and get to see all the gritty details. Let me know what you think!

Back from China

Arrived back today from our latest oriental adventure in China. Jessica stayed one day later and will be back tomorrow. She kept the camera with her, so for now I'll just have to whet your palette with a list of blog teasers. Stay tuned for pictures and video describing:

• Visiting the Forbidden City
• Climbing the Great Wall
• Eating Peking Duck
• Seeing the Kung-Fu show
• Shopping at the markets
• And much, much more!!

In the meantime, let me relay to you a little "slice of life" from my ride back from the airport. I had to take the commercial bus from the airport to my house. Ticket cost me $13 instead of the usual free Army shuttle that I take, but the bus was nicer and the driver was a lot less cautious than the military driver and made the trip in about 3/4 the time.

On the flip side, the clientele wasn't the usual mix of clean-cut military types and dependents. It was a mélange of Koreans and Caucasian hippies. One in particular sat directly across from me and was happily watching a show on his Mac laptop (totally hippy). I won't go into detail about how he was constantly pulling at his unusually long and curly hair; putting it up into a pony tail, only to take it down a minute later and run his oily fingers through it. Or the smell that was coming off of him, which was something between incense and someone who just finished a particularly rigorous workout. Let's just say that he was a iconic hippy: slightly overweight, smelly, with little-to-no personal hygiene.

Anyway, he's watching this lame British sitcom that he's TiVo'd on his laptop that I'm sure he thinks is hilarious but is positive that most people don't get it because they don't have the developed sense of "humour" that he possesses. While he's watching it, he's digging through a shopping bag of things that he bought at where ever it is that he came from. He pulls out a DVD, unwraps it and opens it up to see the liner notes. He doesn't put it in the laptop. Instead, he puts it back into the bag and brings out a second DVD. He repeats the same process of opening it up, reading liner notes, putting it back into the bag. Noting too unusual about that, right?

No, nothing at all. What was unusual was what these two movies were and the fact that the same individual would buy them. The first one was an Australian movie called "Feed", about a criminal who force feeds women to death. The other was called "Ladies in Lavender", about two sisters who befriend a mysterious stranger that washes up on the beach in the 1930's Cornish seaside village. I've linked both films to their IMDB page, and I strongly encourage you to read both thoroughly to really get the feeling for just how far apart on the spectrum these two films are. One features hard core sex scenes with morbidly obese women; the other stars Dame Judi Dench. I don't think I need to illustrate their differences any more than that.

The point of the story? A hippy's taste in movies rivals that of his own revolting personal aroma. Or put another way: a smelly bohemian cinema enema.

Taste of Thai

Leaving for China today. I'm sure we'll have lots to show when we come back. In the meantime, here's a short clip from our resent Thailand trip. I'm not sure what these two queens are fighting over. Hairspray?

A Taste of Cambodia

Soooo... we went to Cambodia in April and saw the ruins at Ankgor Wat. It was an amazing thing to see and Jessica and I would like to go back someday, maybe sans baby. Anyway, we posted some pictures a while back (I think) but no video. I shot maybe two hours of video while we were there and have been very lazy about editing it down into something watchable and not two hours of shaky-cam and back commentary.

I've been working on it this week and last and uploaded a short clip from a temple that was used in one of the "Tomb Raider" movies. It's the one that has all the trees growing up and through the stones. Be forewarned: it's a short clip and the quality is low because I had to make it fit on Photobucket. That said, enjoy.