Denied and Victory!

I was in the bank learning another truly odd (stupid to my mind, but who knows) thing about Korea: You can't pay a "partial" bill. I paid a gas bill before I left for the US, but received a new bill that did not reflect the payment.. after much to-ing and fro-ing (which probably added four or five phrases to my Korean), they accepted payment for the part still owed...

And then.. about 15 seconds later, paid me back for it and said without a bill with the correct amount owed, I couldn't pay any of it. Weird... bordering on stupid....

But.. on the TV in the bank, just at the time I came in, Yu-na was stomping the living crap out of her long performance. When it ended, you could see she knew she nailed it, and her coach did also. Coincidentally, I saw that Yu-na was being followed by her rival from Japan, Mao Asada. So I just hung out in the bank lobby with all the other customers who had wandered in. Asada seemed spooked to have to follow Yu-na, and wibbled and wobbled out her performance.

Yu-na for the gold!

PS.. ESPN is still, idiotically, struggling to find a decent picture of Yu-na to put on their splash page. Odd, for one of the prettiest ice-skaters out there..

Whoa.. Back in Korea, Married, Ill, and looking for some ballot stuffing

Been on vacation...
must have got too drunk, as I came back married...
Regular blogging will resume this weekend...

In the meantime, go to Asia 10 Magazine and vote for Korean Modern Literature in Translation
which would be my blog!

Great Contrapuntally Rotating Monkey Tits!

It is cold here... How cold? I'm having to develop a scale for coldness and I think we are currently somewhere between

"spray a cat with a hose and it freezes in place" cold

and

"threat to external genitalia" cold...

To be honest, I'm not sure which is worse....

Why was I out in all of this frigidity? Remembrance of girlfriends past? Suicidal ideation?

Visa extension.

And, did I find the place to do it. At the Omogyko immigration building they have a special room for professors and other special people. It's like.. like ... well, I never was a fan of strip-clubs, specially since my genitalia froze off in the "Big Seoul Cold" of 2010, but it's like the champagne room.

It has a TV with a remote control, couches, a FREE computer and fax machine, and staff who speak nearly flawless English. Even better? When I came in they were on #26 and my ticket was #28. I sat down, read the English newspaper they provided, and was in and out in about a half an hour, including some social yammer with my immigration representative.

Just amazing how being a professor changes the treatment you get... and you can look right across the lobby and see the laborers/hagwon teachers/Canadian dope-smokers struggling with the enormous queue.

Brilliant!

LOL.. no Korea hate....

Immigration is where every country sends the employees it doesn't want to deal with itself.

And some truly special people (I've always loved em, but I'm dead white)

We will find the right person...

The Wedding that Fate Hated!

LOL..

now immigration is fucking with Yvonne..... she can't change her visa status until the 15th... ooh.. sorry.. the 16th as the 15th is Seollal....

because they are afraid if they change it before her contract expires she will work in Daejeon all day until 6:30 pm.. then hop on the KTX at 25 bux both ways.. and race up to Seoul at about 9 and..

and...

teach classes at Dongguk, which doesn't even offer classes for this month....

stupid petty officials...

so tomorrow I get to go the the Immigration "Champagne Room" for E1 folks, and they will tell me if Yvonne actually has to surrender her passport after she applies for visa change...

if she does...

no wedding...

Which is why, today, I love Korea. ;-P

The Limits of Psycho-Lonerness?

Living up here alone may have tested the limits of my psycho-lonerness. I'm listening to podcasts in the background just to hear English language spoken!

Morning Calm Moves!

To completely avoid all the hassles of the upcoming wedding, I spent all day today setting up a new website, Wordpress, and then migrating Morning Calm to the new site. The old site was visually fine, but because of the way it was set up it did not get well searched by Google, and its internal search function was also asploded. It also had a pretty gnarly URL and I want to be able to say the URL and have people remember it....

For all these reasons I moved it to www.ktlit.com, which should be easy enough to remember. In the course of all this I discovered that the nitwits at Wells Fargo had blocked my credit card, apparently having forgot that I moved to Korea. This would have come up inconvenient when it was time for me to buy my ticket back to The Empire.

Oh well.. got the site up, did the export/import from Blogger to Wordpress, then dorked around figuring out how to change the templates. The last bit was to go to Feedburner and Google Analytics and get them hooked up... it seems to have worked, although there is a lot more I'd like to do to the template....

Tomorrow I'll have to find the sites with hard-coded links to my page and email them with the changes...

But for now.. go take a look and give me feedback.... www.ktlit.com,

Some People are Too easily Bored

Registration is now open for the 20th World Conference of GLBT Jews

so.. yeah.. a majority likely can be bored, in one sense or another...

But the best thing about that site is the vanilla stock photos they chose...

nut... er.. uterus up!

the page begins:

Welcome to Los Angeles 2010, the 20th World Conference of GLBT Jews!

and thank god you get past the rainbow and the bad stock photos...

to bad photos...

still.. that's real..

l

y

bad...

Dear Blue Oyster Cult...

You were right, and my view was skewed....

by all the hippies that surrounded me at the time.

love,

Charles...

Anti-LOLZ ... our Wedding Hall decclared seismically unsafe..

Nice, eh...

With just less than a month to go, the wedding hall is shut down for seismic re-fitting.

Scramble is officially in the "ON" position....