"You know, Video Games are Big with the Kids!" says clueless multiculturalist..

Really... the kids are gonna dig it..

"ICED! I Can End Deportation" is a downloadable, interactive, 3D
role-playing-game that focuses on the brutalizing effects of 1996 US
immigration policies. The game seeks to challenge contemporary media
portrayals by exposing the realities of immigration policies.

Or get stoned..

You know.. one or the other..

The.. uh.. the "3D?"

That's some cutting edge 1970's graphics...

I May Just Have to Vote for This Guy

That my friend, is some orating!

Sir William Hatcher? Now Heath Ledger's death stings!

It's just not right that Sir Ulrich von Lichtenstein of Gelderland should go out like this..

Plus.. he worked next to that hot Julia Stiles in "Ten Things I Hate About You."

Damn you death, for now, NOW, I feel your sting.

Swamp Valley College Predictions Swathed in Mystery! (With an "I'm Stoopid" PS)

So..

As one of my last duties at SVC I am hooking us up with a very prestigious exhibit with an institution we shall just call "The Ones With Lindbergh's Plane."

A ton of work has gone into this and now that SVC has it coming.. the chancellor of the Lesser Carcinogenic Plateau Community College District has now stepped in. Chancellor sends mysterious and semi-oracular emails (I suspect she is chewing laurel leaves as she types).

My predictions are..

1) Chancellor leads off ALL events around this exhibit.

2) As I will be gone, my work will not be mentioned once (This is Chancellorian Rule #1 - those who aren't in sight, don't exist). The corollary is Chancellorian Rule #1a - even those who are in sight and did the work, don't exist. These rules fall under "The Basic Rule of All Administration" - Administrate too long and you forget that there are anything but orders.. and orders must be followed because there is no process to doing any job, just an order to do it.

3) The DO will absorb little budget but will take most credit

4) Chancellor gets "Vietnamese" feather in hat and this, along with her long and legit record of working with the Hispanic Wave, gets her that position in Sactown that she's always been plumping for. This, BTW, is a good thing. For all my bitching, this is the best Chancellor I've worked for.

Time will tell.. blessedly, I will be out of the game....

PS - LOL...

My years in previous institutions have jaded me... I've already had two emails from my Chancellor that make my predictions here... well, not so much unlikely, as nothing to do with this Chancellor... I always forget that she is trapped in the same bad machine as I am...

Going In...

Got up and made it to the continental breakfast in time to pick through some rather rotted bananas and instead settle for coffee, and some bagelish thing. Off to the UPS store to print the thing out. I was driving even more grandfatherly than usual. A, it is raining and B, the nice lady at the car checkout counter really put the hard sell on me to get the insurance. Three times she rattled off a list of things from which it would protect me and each time she slowed down, leered and put heavy emphasis on “vandals.” She knew I was going to Hilton Head and I supposed that she was warning me of 9-iron wielding seniors all hopped up on Geritol n’ Juice. As it happened, no vandals have attacked me yet, but I will remain vigilant.

Also, as traditional, I got hopelessly lost on the way to the conference venue. I made the same horrible mistake I made last night, I trusted in mapquest directions. Compare these directions (from Savannah to the hotel) from mapquest with the quite simple directions I found on the conference site:

And then these leading me from the hotel to the conference:

What the Hell is mapquest smoking?

I got in and dropped 80 bucks on the conference and another 75 on two books on Korean economic history that I will read on the plane (or in the airport, since the Atlanta Airport is currently experiencing 4 hour delays) and by the time I return to Big City I will be an ultra-expert!

I’m in the presentation room, making sure everything works and timing my presentation.. looks to be good for 18-20 minutes which is right in the cabin. Everyone else is upstairs eating, but I never eat before a presentation for fear it might turn into a warm and cozy nap. Unaccountably this ultra-expensive hotel does not have wireless, so I am hopelessly trapped, trapped I tell you, in this air-conditioned room watching the rain and wind lash the palm fronds. A perfect time to start drinking adult-beverages based on rum, but that would lead to a presentation failure of an entirely different sort.

Vaseline Alley Redux

Continued from three days ago.. The drug/health/HIV tests are, oddly enough, done once you are in Korea. This suggests a certain lack of faith in Western doctors. All of this stuff was added to the requirements for foreigner entry to Korea after it was discovered that a relatively famous pedophile (the guy whose identity was revealed by “anti-swirl photoshop technology”) was discovered to have taught in Korea. This became an election issue and in order to protect the innocent youth of Korea from HIV-positive drug-addled rapists (by which they mean me) the new laws were enacted. This whole security check and health check is, in some ways, classically Korean. They really don’t like the outsider and this is reflected in their love/hate relationship with the English instructor. Korea is always looking for an excuse to love or hate the outsider.

Anyway, step two was initiated yesterday when I finally figured out that the FBI needed a different set of fingerprints. Oddly, the FBI wants them on the old-fashioned paper forms, so it was off to another odd hole-in-the wall joint which sold bulk cigarettes and fingerprint checks.

An odd combo, but the guy at this place knew how to take fingerprints and had a bit of a line in English, so the process went much more smoothly. With luck I will be able to send these prints off to Quantico tomorrow, since my presentation doesn’t begin until 2.

Now, I am in the air between Big City and Atllanta, GA on my way to the SECAAS conference. Delta airlines evilly switched my seats back into the middle row, but then more than made up for that by grabbing the guy in the aisle-seat and moving him up to First Class. Thus I now have an aisle seat and an empty one beside.

Beauty.

Breakfast at about 1 (I was running around pre-flight) and a glass of wine and it may be getting close to time to take a nap.

Idly looking at the conference paper and really not seeing that much to change. My discussant was also published in Acta Koreana, so I look forward to meeting him. This thing is pretty much in the bag and I might try to move my flight on Sunday up a couple of hours. The thing is now in size 18 font with red indications where the slide transitions are, so I think it is done?

Education in Asia, and my resume

As it turns out.. my photo-essay for "Education in Asia" has been accepted and, after a few changes suggested by their local expert on Korean marriage. Will run in their next issue.

This has been quite a streak of luck. I haven't had a conference proposal or manuscript refused in five straight goes.

I should run for president.

If these stories are related, it's a very bad day!

The MonkeySphere (The Most Sensible Thing you will read This Year)

Two representative quotes from the best philosophical treatise of this year:

A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies (a woman showed her boob at the Super Bowl! We want a boob and football ban immediately!)

let me assure you that if you don't feel sympathy for your fellow man at $6.00 an hour, you won't feel anything at $600,000 a year.

Down In Vaseline Alley, Where I Come From....

Today was “begin the security check” time.

Korea now requires that anyone who comes to work there pass drug/health/HIV tests and provide a criminal record check. I’ll talk about the why of this, soon. These aren’t particularly onerous requirements – anyone trying to teach in the United States from Korea will undergo a much more grueling visa process (US Embassies are routinely trashed in overseas riots, primarily because they are hotbeds of shitheaded bureaucrats, not because of their small, but obvious staff of CIA spies). But these requirements are brand new. This means that it is difficult to decipher what exactly is required. The government hasn’t figured it out completely, and the colleges are working from impenetrable texts on .gov websites.

A vague, but menacing email, from BPU gave me some hints and two websites to look at. I did look and discovered that I needed some special new kind of fingerprinting. Lo and behold (a pair closely elated to Frankincense and Myrhh, but not implicated in the two-by-four lynching of our Lord and Saviour) there was a gummint certified fingerprint joint right by my house. This is more synchronous than it might seem, as there are only a few of these joints per county.

So I head down there, with my vague email written by a Korean guy who speaks English as a second language. And the woman behind the counter is, of course, Indian (cow lover not buffalo killer) and cain't speak her a lick of English. We use a sort of pidgin communication system consisting of 7 shared words of English, gestures, threatening posture, and two actual pigeons, only one of which endured the ordeal. No communication ensued.

But I can point at the sign that says “fingerprint scans” and this works. Indira pulls out a laptop and what looks like a scanner for playing cards. The fingerprint scan begins with my two thumbs. Gunga Dinette rasps loudly, “fingers.. dry.”

At last! We have communicated.

I also now have an explanation of my increasingly delayed ejaculation when I masturbate.

In any case. Ms. Mumtaz Mahal then pulls out a vat of some kind of glop that even the most cracked out gay dude at The Ramrod wouldn’t use on a straight chick’s asshole. She peers into it’s septic center, scoops some out (with an instrument, because you can see there’s no way in Hell she’s gonna touch the stuff) and smears it over my hands.

We then spend 15 minutes trying to get fingerprints that don’t look like on oil-coated duck.

When, finally, the fingerprints are done. We have another non- conversation in which I randomly point at things on the screen (I chose “DOJ” and “Visa”) and then sent the form and my fingerprints off.

I suspect I have just enrolled in the National Guard and will shortly be deployed to Iraq.