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I’m still quite busy with work. Although the new semester’s class workload seems to have settled down, I was offered a project, which I’ve been working on the last several days. I’ve been proofreading a rather long paper written in English by a couple of Chinese students here at the university, a paper about three early-20th century Chinese and Korean writers. I finally finished that today, though I may have to make a few other revisions to it.
The next few days I’ll be working on meeting the new requirements for English teachers to keep their visas (or in applying for new visas). Before, U.S. citizens used to be able to get a notarized criminal background check (cbc) from our home states. The law was changed a while back, so that now we have to get an FBI national cbc. Even though I’ve not been back to the ‘States since I arrived in Yeosu, I still have to get the FBI check. This involves getting a set of fingerprints, which I can do here, and sending those in with an application form to the FBI. They then send it back, at which time someone (the teacher, friends, or relatives) have to hand carry it to a State Department or Justice Department entity to get it notarized. Quite a process and one which I can’t easily do. Luckily, there are a few businesses that will do all the legwork in the U.S.; I’ll be using one of those.
The whole process takes anywhere from 3 to 4 months, and, since I’ll need the paperwork by the middle of August, I’d better complete my end of the procedure this week. I also need to have my diplomas from the University of Montana notarized. Luckily, the U of M offers this service, so I have to contact them for that stage of the process.
I also have to prepare my IRS tax form and send that in soon. Whew! I’m still fairly busy. Although rain is in the forecast for this coming weekend, I’m going to try to get down to the Expo site and shoot some photos of the ongoing progress.
The upshot is “Hang in there” while waiting for more posts on the blog. I’ll get ‘em going sooner or later.
If you know me well, you know that before I became a dashing, international English teacher, I was involved in ten-pin bowling for many, many years–25, to be exact. My main occupation was pin-spotting machine mechanic (and quite a good one, if I may so humbly say), and I also worked as manager (briefly) and co-owner of a 12-lane center in the small, but friendly town of Glendive, on the eastern prairie of Montana. Due to the circumstances of the occupation, I also became quite a good bowler, but I eventually tired of the job and decided to pursue what I’m doing now.
 My Favorite All-time Bowler, Dick Weber Although the only time I bowl nowadays is when I go back to Laos and Thailand (because I introduced my friend Nai to bowling), I still keep up an interest in the activity. So, I was quite attracted to the information that my friend and former bowling buddy, (let’s call him, umm, . . . Ken) from Great Falls, Montana, a member of the Montana Bowling Hall of Fame, (despite being left-handed) sent me this news about international bowling.
Go ahead and click on the link to get the details, but international bowling is coming to Daejeon, South Korea on June 16th this summer. “Ken” indicated that if I were interested in taking in the event, he might try to come to Korea (he’s been here before) to see it also (and to visit with me). Unfortunately, that’s the same day I start my summer vacation, and I’m flying back to Thailand on that very day. “Ken,” if it’s still gonna be here in 2013, I’ll definitely make arrangements to see it with you.
But, for everyone else, if you’re going to be attending the 2012 Expo here in Yeosu around that time, you might consider taking in the Daejeon international pro bowling tournament. More later.
I finished a previous post, Korea’s Online Gaming Woes, by stating that other things wake me in the middle of the night or morning. Actually, I think I have something that’s called sleep maintenance insomnia, wherein I wake up at the same time every morning, usually between 2 and 3 o’clock. Most of time, I fall back asleep in 10 or 15 minutes. Some nights, I toss and turn for half an hour to an hour before being able to sleep again. Then, there are the times, especially on weekend nights, that I finally decide that I’m wide awake and won’t be able to get back to sleep immediately, so I get up around 3 a.m., brew a pot of coffee and surf the Internet for an hour or two before going back to bed. This mainly happens on weekend nights (Friday and Saturday) because I know that I can sleep in later. It occasionally happens on a school night, too, but, so far, my work hasn’t been affected by this nocturnal oddity. I really cannot remember a night in at least the past several years where I have not awoken in the wee hours.
Should I see a doctor about this? Luckily, no. This may actually be a throwback, so to speak, to pre-Industrial sleep habits, when people would have segmented sleep, a first sleep, followed by a waking period or one or two hours, and then a second sleep until time to get up for the day. The BBC News Magazine has an informative article about History Professor A. Roger Ekirch‘s research on the subject of segmented sleep.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria
. . . these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.
And these hours weren’t entirely solitary – people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.
Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.
By the 1920s the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely from our social consciousness.
He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses – which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.
If you want to read more, Prof. Ekirch has a rather long, scholarly, but very interesting article on The American Historical Review.
So, I guess I’m experiencing an anachronistic type of sleep behavior. Should I get some medication for this, like sleeping pills? For me, that’s not an option–I hate medicine and I don’t even have aspirin in my apartment. And in another article written for the NY Times, entitled “Dreams Deferred,” Ekirch writes:
Remarkably, then, our pattern of consolidated sleep has been a relatively recent development, another product of the industrial age, while segmented sleep was long the natural form of our slumber, having a provenance as old as humankind. (Homer even invoked the term “first sleep” in “The Odyssey.”) For experts like Dr. Thomas Wehr, who conducted the experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health, some common sleep disorders may be nothing more than sleep’s older, primal pattern trying to reassert itself — “breaking through,” as Dr. Wehr has put it, into today’s “artificial world.”
That theory, of course, remains to be proved. In the meantime, rather than resort to excessive medication, Americans might try to remember that though they’re sleeping less, they’re sleeping better and more seamlessly than humans ever have in the past. We might, on occasion, even choose to emulate our ancestors, for whom the dead of night, rather than being a source of dread, often afforded a welcome refuge from the regimen of daily life.
So, waking up in the wee hours following a first sleep doesn’t seem to be a problem for me, at least. Unfortunately, though, many of my students seem to go into second sleep as soon as English class begins.
If you look at the right hand side bar, you might notice that there is a new category over there-Photos. If you click on it, you will, eventually, get access to many of the photos I’ve posted on the blog at one time or another. This is a new addition, NextGEN Gallery (which I think is pretty cool), that I’m still getting familiar with, so be patient if it doesn’t work correctly. The main Photo Gallery link is still there, but I’ll be eliminating it some day (or maybe not), since there are hundreds and hundreds of photos on it, some good, some bad, and some relevant to only a few people. On the new link, I want to put only the better photos that I’ve taken and eliminate some of the clutter. In addition, the old photo gallery doesn’t work for the various search engines, like Google, Bing, etc. to archive the photos. Hopefully, with the new gallery, I’ll get some more exposure (good and bad  ). At the moment, I’ve only got some old Andong Mask Dance photos from 2004 posted, for testing purposes, but I hope to get some more recent shots up soon. I’ll keep experimenting with it and adding new features, so go ahead and click on it and let me know what you think.
A few recent events to mention:
First, in a showdown of co-leaders in the AL East, the Yanks knocked off the Red Sox, 3-2, in the first game of their 3-game series. I got a bit nervous when the Bombers fell behind 2-0, but they came back and the bullpen, the best in baseball, in my opinion, held onto the lead. For the Sox, David Ortiz hit another homer against the Yanks. Jeez, I hate that guy. No, not really. I’m sure he’s a fine human; nothing personal. It’s just that he seems to really outdo himself against New York. I dread it when he comes up in a clutch situation, although the Great Mariano Rivera took care of him in the 9th. Yeah, it’s only the first part of August, a long ways to go yet, but it’s always great to beat the Sawx.
Also, we haven’t felt any effects from Typhoon Muifa, yet. Today was pretty nice, a bit cloudy, but mostly sunny and warm (and the usual high humidity). Tomorrow evening and Monday, though, we’re supposed to get a bunch of rain and gusty winds, but nothing terribly bad. I’ll let you know. More later.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to ask. Did any of you watch the wedding on Friday? With an estimated viewing audience of two billion, I’m sure a few of you must have. I watched it for, let’s see, about 5 hours. Yeah, I watched the whole thing, including pre- and post-wedding coverage. I switched channels between CNN and BBC. The BBC channel here had a much crisper picture, so I spent most of the time watching it there.
I really enjoy the pomp and pageantry of these types of events, and the British monarchy does them better than any other institution in the world. I love the music, the clothing (how about those fascinator hats?), the tradition, the horse guards, and the celebratory atmosphere. The world doesn’t seem to have too many fairy tale stories these days, so this was, in my opinion, a feel-good event. Bravo, Great Britain. Fascinating. Hats off to ya. I just hope I live long enough to see a coronation.
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention in my previous post that I’ll be signing on for another year here. Lots of reasons for doing that–familiarity with the job, pleasant people to work with, friendliness of the students and the people of the area, the beauty of the countryside, and, the biggest reason, the upcoming 2012 Expo next year, about which I’ve posted quite a few times. (Use the search box to find the relevant posts.) So, I’m pretty stoked about being here for at least another year.
The new contract begins at the end of August, so there’s still a bit of time to go before then. In the meantime, I’m heading down to Thailand and Laos in June. I purchased my ticket from Thai Air last week–I’d been logging onto their web site for about a month, waiting for their ticket prices to drop, which they do around this time of the year. Sure enough, prices went down about $100 for a round-trip ticket in June. Sweet!
I have a ton of frequent flier miles built up on the Star Alliance frequent flier program and they expire soon, so I probably could have used those for a free flight, if I’d been lucky enough to grab a freebie at that time. I’ve read that it’s very difficult to get a seat by using miles for free flights, and a more realistic scenario would have been to get an upgrade. However, I thought that wasn’t really the best way to go. I’ve decided to use the miles for a hotel room in Patong, Phuket, Thailand for a week for my friend Nai and myself. We’ve stayed at the Thara Patong Resort before, and we really enjoyed it, so I’m going to use the miles for that. It’s an upscale hotel, right across the street from the beach in Patong, with friendly staff, a very large swimming pool, and a pretty good inclusive breakfast in one of the restaurants. (I’m the early bird breakfast zombie–Nai usually sleeps in, lazy guy.
Here’s a quick snap of the pool from our hotel room, back in 2007.
So, as of now, my tentative plans are to fly into Bangkok on June 11th, take the overnight train to Nongkhai, Thailand on the 12th, arriving the next day, then goofing around in Nongkhai and Vientiane (Laos) with Nai until the 19th. We’ll then take the train back to Bangkok and fly out of the City of Angels on the 22nd for Phuket, returning on the 29th. Back to Korea on July 1st. Too short. But, it’ll do.
So, long term–another year in Yeosu. Mid term–the trip to Thailand in June. Short term–get in beach shape. I’ve taken off 5 kilograms (about 11 pounds) since the beginning of the semester in March, and I’ve got a long ways to go. I’ve been working out at the gym on the weight machines, so I’m trying to develop the physique, along with losing the weight. This recent illness has slowed my progress, but I’ve got a couple of months to go yet, so I’m hopeful that I’ll look like this guy. More later.
Not kidding about the physique. Jack LaLanne at 95 years old. Fantastic.
After a year-long struggle, my friend Nai’s mother succumbed to an illness last Friday night. I posted last May that the doctor had given her just a few months to live, but she held on this long, although she was often in great pain.
I still don’t know what took her life, but I suspect cancer or emphysema. I visited them last June, and it was very apparent how much she had wasted away. I’m heartbroken for Nai and his family. He told me that today he would “make fire” for her, meaning a traditional Buddhist cremation. He was practically inconsolable when I talked to him Saturday afternoon, but yesterday he was so busy cooking food for all the friends and family that were paying their respects that I think his mind was temporarily taken off his sadness. I imagine today will be quite sorrowful.
Below is a photo of her that I took back in August of 2006. She’s on the right, of course, with her youngest son Pui, Nai’s brother, on the left and one of her daughter’s girls in the middle. Rest in peace, Mer.
I just finished phoning my friend Nai in Laos and he breathlessly reported that Vientiane experienced an earthquake last night. I had trouble understanding him at first, but he told me, with his sometimes-bad pronunciation and his humorous, but creative, fracturing of English, that:
Last night we have same-same NieuwZhelind (it took a few repetitions for me to understand he was talking about the recent earthquake in New Zealand) and my house dancing (shaking) too much.
So, I searched the Internet, and, sure enough, there was a 4.6 magnitude ‘quake in the region last night. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but he said, in so many words, that some buildings had been damaged in the capital.
Strange and unusual, I thought, but a more powerful, 6.1 temblor struck in May of 2007 that rattled windows as far south as Bangkok, and again, fortunately, no deaths were reported. I’ve never thought of Laos as an earthquake-prone area, but I guess it happens every so often.
Wow, talk about an oxymoron. Peace – Bomb. They don’t quite go together. But, in a great example of making lemonade when life gives you lemons, there is an organization in Laos that is doing just that. They are making bracelets of the scrap metal of unexploded bombs left over from the incredibly intense and atrocious (and probably illegal) U.S. bombing of the country during the Vietnam War. The peaceBOMB project is selling the bracelets, which are made by local artisans in Laos.
Here’s a description from the website:
All sorts of amazing products give back, but the peaceBOMB bracelet is in a category of its own. Crafted by local artisans in Laos—the world’s most-bombarded country—these beautiful bracelets are made out of bomb materials and scrap metal from America’s secret war in Laos, which was waged alongside the conflict in Vietnam. A product of the peaceBOMB Project, each purchase supports the artisan families in Naphia Village where the bracelets are made. Your purchase also includes a donation to the locally run Village Development Fund, which provides loans to poor families.
Be sure to watch the video.
When I go back to Laos this summer, I’m going to see if I can buy a bracelet there. If not, I’ll order one. It would make a great gift (hint, hint). Please try to support this worthy project.
I know I’m REALLY dating myself here, but when I was a bit younger (ok, a LOT younger), my favorite weekly TV program was The Untouchables, which aired from 1959-1963. It starred Robert Stack as Eliot Ness, the Prohibition Era federal agent who helped put Al Capone behind bars, and was narrated by Walter Winchell, a popular and controversial gossip columnist of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. The series was very popular at the time and was a kind of film-noir of televison. It featured many great actors of that time and future stars, also. One of my favorite characters was the villain, Frank Nitti, Capone’s henchman, who was portrayed by Bruce Gordon.
I was recently able to get a copy of the series, and I just watched the first episode, The Empty Chair. Very nostalgic. The Nelson Riddle theme music, Winchell’s narration, the action and the atmospheric sets brought back many memories. While I was watching the episode, I kept interrupting it to look on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for information on the stars and for other tidbits. According to the IMDB, Gordon, surprisingly, died only recently, on January 20th, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 94, a couple weeks shy of 95. I was surprised that he had still been alive as recently as last month. RIP Mr. Gordon, a.k.a. Frank Nitti.
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