Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Now's Your Chance to Help Your Fellow Man

I found out about this tragic accident on Facebook, through the group ("Save Bill Kapoun!") created to get funds to help this man out. It's not only a tragic case of an apparently bright, handsome man in the prime of his youth being given a huge heaping of horrible luck, but it highlights the vulnerable situation of a lot of us foreigners living over here, caught between a visa system that's so idiotic that I don't blame most small institutions for not wanting to go through the hoops, and often not having the means or will to get proper health insurance. (Still, HT to Marmot)

This happened at a really curious time for me, since I JUST GOT HEALTH INSURANCE, for the first time since leaving the paltry insurance I had back at grad school in 2002. I've been living uninsured most of this time, jumping from gig to gig. I could get insurance myself, but I would have to pay all the back months from the last time I entered the country.

So I went with a private insurer, set up by one of my cousins, who works at an insurance company. I'm getting older, and getting to the age to start thinking about such things. I was going to post about this once my cousin had figured everything out, since the regulations for foreigners are confusing and intricate.

Also, I believe I am signed up for some kind of accident insurance as a KEB customer, but I don't know much about that. Anyone else have info on that?

Let's keep each other safe, and let's help William pull through. Literally, his life depends on the goodwill of others; and since the foreigner community is as tight in many ways as it is large, I think we should be able to make a difference.

I don't know the guy, but I shouldn't have to – there, but for the grace of God, go we all.

So, let's pitch in and drop at least what would be the equivalent of a round of beers, a couple DVD's, or any other amount of petty cash we often drop without giving nary a thought and do something useful -- literally, help this guy MAKE IT.

From the Facebook page, I've copied and pasted both these pictures and information as to how you can help:

If you wish to donate visit: www.billkapoun.com

Make checks payable to Help Bill Fund and mail them to:

Help Bill Fund
P.O. Box 283
Bloomington, IN 47402

IF IN KOREA - direct transfer into this account
KB Bank
794002 04 03 1635
Warren Franklin-William Fund

Sometime later on, I'll talk about how I got some very decent private insurance (paying $70 a month) that I think would cover something like this, and hopefully I'll more information for you in general about being safe and covered while in Korea.

I Got YouTubed!

Well, YouTube got rolled out today, I got the welcome video done, and got to meet Funtwo, the Pachabel Canon guitar master of the universe, along with the Free Hugs Korea guy, both of whom were very cool.

[source]

I'm still reeling from the fact that they invited me out in the first place – but the guy who picked me out of the bunch did say that he thought this kind of media should be made, something that represents Korea and/or the foreign community in the particular way he thinks is positive, I surmised from our conversation. Surely it wasn't because of my hit counts: Funtwo the guitar master is on 35,000,000, while I was happy to see a SeoulGlow episode go over 10,000.

[source]

And if the authenticity of his guitar playing is even still in question, I saw him play in person and he hit the same notes with ease live, just like in the video. Kid's good.

But back to SeoulGlow – despite my feelings of hit count inadequacy, I was flattered and impressed that someone's paying attention to the work I've been doing, and got some real motivation to get back on the video production track and hook up all these strands of new media I've been experimenting in. Just hard to do alone, you know?

Overall, the YouTube people ran a tight press conference, as did their PR firm, Incomm-Brodeur. There are presently two SeoulGlow episodes on the front page of YouTube Korea, and I hope this will bring the show more to the attention of the Korean market.

Get Ready for the Next iThingie

Or whatever it'll be called. iPad. iTablet. iNote. iScribbler. Whatever. The name's not important.

The upcoming new "sub-notebook" from Apple, rumored to be coming in January's Macworld Expo, will not, I predict, be a super-slim notebook.

It just doesn't make sense, and I've been thinking on this ever since the iPhone and the iPod touch came out; and a little common sense combined with wishful thinking, as well as a bit of like-minded thinkers in the Apple fanboy world, make me really think that we'll be looking at a revolutionary product come January. Here's why:

1) IT WON'T BE A NOTEBOOK.
I just don't see Apple introducing a super-slim, compact notebook. Who cares? I certainly don't. Apple's style is leading the industry with cutting-edge new devices that are increasingly integrating new media, making new platforms for old devices. The iPod wasn't just a souped-up MP3 player, as the iPhone wasn't just a phone with an Apple brand on it, just as Apple TV, for better or worse, isn't just a computer you hook up to your TV. They're all defining new ways of integrating media, of allowing you to get media into different forms. Sub-compact laptops already exist; Apple's not just going to make such a not-fashion-forward, not-platform-forward product.

2) IT WILL BE A 'NEXT-STEP' PRODUCT.
Related to that is the Touch interface. From iPhone to Ipod Touch, there seems to be a logical next step taken to allow Touch computing, meet the needs of the sub-compact buyer who wants an Apple computer that isn't a bulky laptop. And Microsoft already has its cool-ass Surface computer. The future is already here, and the writing's on the...screen.

3) THE TIME HAS COME FOR PRINT MEDIA TO DIE.
Or at least start to wither before eventually dying. And I'm not saying that The New York Times is going anywhere or anything, but just that we won't be killing trees anymore to read it. The new device will meet the needs of the emerging eBook/online publishing market that IS the next area of battle, as we move from primarily paper to primarily screen-based, portable, and vastly more flexible, screen-based reading. It's never been a matter of if, but of when the easy-on-the-eyes nature of reading from paper would be paralleled by a screen that can do the same. And look at Amazon's Kindle, or the ongoing online publishing revolution that is so obvious it might not be so apparent. Yes, I agree that within 5 years, most reading will not be done on paper. Amazon knows this. And so does Apple. And the first killer device that can be comfortable screen reader, as well as computer, as well as PDA, and nice size for watching videos, and can communicate seamlessly with your home computer/iPod/iPhone and detach you from being anchored to any one place in terms of content – that's gonna be killer. Download the NYT, or your local paper, or your blog, or what have you – the technologies are there, from RSS to podcasting to iTunes pay store to whatever else will pop up with a device that can put whatever you want into one place. And who already has the only tried-and-tested, fully-operational paid media delivery system? Apple. Just add more eBooks to the podcasts, movies, TV shows, and songs you can download. As Steve Jobs is surely saying: "Mo' money, mo' money, mo' money!"

4) THE PATENT APPLICATION DRAWING JUST MAKES SENSE.

[Source]

I may be wrong, and Apple has a way of surprising everybody, even if it's just a little bit. But I think that's this has got to be Apple's move, looking at the way online publishing and media are going, the move into new computing interfaces, and the fact that major players are lining up along the lines of a vast new market that hasn't been tamed yet.

To me, it just seems like Apple is going to try to do in the new territory of text-based media what the iPod did for music and then video content, what the iPhone is doing to the mobile phone industry, or what Apple TV hasn't quite done much of yet in the home video realm.

This new device will do it while integrating text with pre-existing text, photo, audio, and video mediums (which a glance at any web-based newspaper, "pro blog", or online magazine will show you has already happened), while also giving you the power of a portable computer, to boot.

If Apple makes a device like that, who ain't gonna buy it? Computer, iPod, PDA, calendar, big-ass screen for watching movies/podcasts/TV on the train, and a place to read a trashy romance novels writ LARGE across the screen, or your favorite blogs, all downloaded in the morning through RSS and sitting for you on the subway ride...

That's the killer move that will focus all of Apple's power as a computer and media company into the true killer device.

Sure, I'm just being hopeful, as anyone making guesses at this stage is, but damn – would that not make a whole lotta sense?

A TRUE notebook that can do - everything. Who isn't going to sell their left kidney for that kind of integration, ease, and load off one's back? I'm sure it'll sport a pop-up keyboard onscreen, but for the diehards, I can see a huge peripherals market for mini-mice and cute keyboards, the usefulness of this device in the education market, where this will become THE new way of taking notes (and surfing the web in class), and could open up whole new doors as a device in the medical field, as a means scratchpad for artists and other creative types, and as a "base unit" of some type for people who already have iPods and iPhones, which could be used to integrate with the new device and offer a new kind of function or increased usability.

Who knows? Possibilties are endless, with a wireless and Bluetooth-enabled super-device that can be anything software can make it be.

I'd buy that for a dollar. Or 2000. Hopes are that it will be priced at somewhere in between, priced to move.

And this way, no matter what you buy it for, Apple is building new users of OS X, more subscribers to and users of the iTunes Store, and many more ways to convince more people to buy Apple stuff.

And if it can run Windoze, too – who's gonna buy a sub-notebook or Tablet PC?

Damn, Apple. Am I going to have to start being scared o' you?

"I See Brown People!"

Sort of reminds me of Sally Strothers' eyes, which would cry into the camera during the 80's. Except that her career was over and she seemed sincere. Unlike the recent habit of getting good PR by hanging out with the brown folks for a few minutes and posing for the camera. (HT to the Marmot, of course.)

[From the 한국경제.]

That shot with Kim Tae-heeis so posed, and this while interaction so contrived and self-interested. Look, brown man! Smile for the camera and for your food. At least Hyori actually WENT to Africa to see brown and black people. The caption on the news story page (linked above) reads "Kim Tae-hee serves food to a foreign laborer." Nice. Usually, when Koreans' faces are shown, especially juxtaposed with such a famous face in the picture, it would read something like, "Middle school student Kim Yu-mi gets a thrill by posing with her favorite star, Kim Tae-hee" or some such. I'll bet dollars for donuts the reporter didn't even take the guy's name. Which, as a photojournalist working for a paper, should be a given, as this is standard practice in the field of journalism. Except if you're brown.

Truly another chapter in what I like to call "the alms race" for PR points.

P.S. I once got my picture taken at an anti-war rally and published by psueudo-news outlet OhMyNews, in which my face was prominently featured adjusting my camera, and the caption read something like "Foreign journalist covers our rally" or something that made it seem like I was being sympathetic to their cause. I don't remember clearly, but I do remember being pretty irritated, since a journalist taking a picture of me as the main focus and attributing to me specific motives or actions should have taken my name and asked me what I was doing. I'd love it is someone could find that picture in the morass of OMN coverage around 2002-2003. My picture'd be pretty obvious.

You've Got to Be Kidding Me – A Real Life 괴물?

Now, anyone who reads this blog regularly must know my deep love for the movie "The Host." Regardless of what you think of the movie, though, you have to be surprised to see it coming true.

Did this fish (whale shark, apparently) really eat people? Holy sheet.

I didn't see human remains in there from the site – but I do see an awfully big piece of fish filet in the final picture. The original site remains skeptical as to whether this guy actually snagged any human food, but...would you want to know that a beast like this was in the water with you? And if it did decide it was hungry and interested in settling some scores for the many of fishkind we've eaten...what are YOU gonna do about it?

Hope you're a fast swimmer.

"Dick in a Box" (Korean)

Sorry, Mongdori! Had it last year!

But this begs the question: which translation works best?

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Racy Performance Art, Anyone?

Now THIS is an interesting thing being passed around the expat blogosphere.

Jesus. I mean...holy heels...I mean... Well, you know what I mean. Any comments from those familiar with the performance art scene?

Here's the original site this vid's coming from. If you can't see it here, you can probably see it over there. I've been having trouble with the Daum player. Don't like it much.

"This Time in Seoul"

There's a new photographer loose on the streets of Seoul. Her name's Felicia, and she's snappin' people and takin' names. Her blog's called, as you might have surmised from the title above, "This Time in Seoul" and is off to a stellar start!

Well, there are a lot of new blogs these days, right? And in the age of Flickr, everyone's a photographer. But there aren't so many with a natural eye, a background in fashion and the arts, and an instinctive knack for meeting people – interesting and influential folks, who are the best kind. And such is a perfect combination for good bloggin'.

Felicia is relatively new to Seoul, and this is an assist to her eye, rather than a hindrance. And that freshness is not just limited to her choice of subject or framing, but also in the fact that she is constantly just out there, in the streets, shooting interesting stuff in equally interesting places.

For all that can be said about the technical aspects of photography, 90% of it is "just showing up," to paraphrase a popular quip about success. Indeed, as a photographer, 90% is simply having your camera with you at all times. And of course, it's important to keep your eyes open as well. All in all, you're just "on" all the time, which can be exhausting.

But Felicia – who has worked for Gerald Marie in Paris at the Elite Model Management agency, and already inked herself into a book project with someone prominent enough that she asked me not to mention his name yet – is already making great use of her time here in Seoul, and is lighting a fire under this Metropolitician's butt.

Her blog is definitely one to watch – for cool places to go and fresh points of view exposed – for both brand nubians to the Seoul scene, as well as jaded expats. It is very much a breath of fresh air.

Burn Fertility Clinics, Too!

I originally wrote this back in April of this year, but didn't want to post, since the idea was to try to lighten up the blog a bit. (Ha!) But after watching Michael J Fox make this exact point – far more convincingly than I ever could – I thought it time to post this, since it was a pretty well-fleshed out post.

Here's the post:

--------------

From The Boston Globe:

For all those interested in the moral implications of stem cell research and why equating a human with a multi-cell blastocyst not even the size of the period at the end of this sentence, you should take a read here.

Forget stem banning stem cell research, which could save countless actual human lives – if destroying a blastocyst is "murder," then why isn't the religious right shutting down fertility clinics, which destroy them (the unused fertilized eggs made for couples trying to conceive) every day, at the tune of 400,000 per year?

Basically, because people are too stupid and dogmatic to even be consistent in what they fight for. Basically, these things are flushed down the toilet (well, as biowaste, I'm sure they are not actually flushed down toilets, but...) every day, but there are people who think the Hammer of God will fall upon our nation if one actually uses these cells to help people.

Also, the article makes a really good analogy: all oak trees were acorns, but all acorns are not oak trees. One does not think the same about a squirrel with its mouth full of these little seeds as a fire that rips through a forest, or big corporation stripping a hill of good, strong trees.

Because they are totally different things. Yes, one can debate about the point at which point an embryo or a fetus becomes human being, when the cells differentiate and become organs and becomes undeniably a person; but a blastocyst is not much more than sperm and ovum meeting, and the fact that this happens all the time in a test tube and we keep them on ice as a rule and destroy most of the ones created as a rule means that they are essentially not people in reality.

And what God thinks? Well, I think I shouldn't have to remind anyone that for a human to profess to know the will of God is pretty damned arrogant (and I do mean "damned!") and is at least open for interpretation, because even that very idea itself is a human interpretation.

Does life begin at contraception? If it does, then there are hundreds of thousands of frozen souls on ice right now, thousand of which will be thrown away today. Now is someone going to start bombing fertility clinics now, places that are actually trying to make babies?

Lord have mercy – sometimes it's really obvious that America was indeed founded by political extremists; they were called "Puritans" (a derogatory term at the time, by the way, for those on the fringe of the Anglican Church who didn't think that the church had gone far enough Protestant, hence not being "pure" of Catholic corruption and evil) for a reason.

Well, it's been a long time since then. Even if one wants to deny the evolutionary model (I don't tend to use the term "theory of evolution" because that word is unfortunately misunderstood as "it's just a theory" and don't get that a "theory" is actually a complex hypothesis that has been proven through empirical observation, ahem – proof), I hope no one is actually out there arguing that cells don't exist, or that we don't come from, ahem, come and an egg.

I don't understand the need to take a strict interpretation of Genesis; even the Catholic Church doesn't. Do hardcore Scripturalists deny that cells exist? They weren't mentioned in the Bible. Nor were dinosaurs. Or the planet Pluto – wait, it's not a planet anymore.

Here's the problem – the lack of basic science education and the idiots who think that learning a scientific model actually means one has to accept it. Even if one were to accept the ridiculous assertion that Darwinian evolutionary theory is a "religion," its teachings do not have to be followed.

Funny thing was that I always thought that even the broadest interpretation of "religion" usually had involved some sort of deity. Well, I guess that would disqualify "intelligent design" from being science then, huh?

People don't have to agree, nor believe in each others' religions; but I wish that the Christian Right would at least be honest in admitting that they have no interest in respecting even the lines that separate science from religion, or infringing on the rights of others to either not believe in the Christian God, or to believe in others.

Hence, the Christian Right is as fanatic in using politics to proselytize and disrespect other religions and ways of life as any other groups we call "fanatic." These are people who have advocated violence to stop the "murder" in abortion clinics; well, if they applied the flawed logic of "blastocyst=embryo=fetus=human", then they would be murdering fertility doctors, who are busy helping create life.

So the good Christian soldiers who spit on women going into Planned Parenthood should be spitting on couples coming out of fertility clinics, no? I mean, the "abortion doctors" only take one human life per woman, whereas multiple human lives destroyed by even attempting to make one baby.

Doesn't this define the ultimate irony? A new form of Holocaust? And how do we save these children-to-be? Since we can't destroy them, that means we'd have to implant them all. So we mustn't we make a policy to somehow bring all these blastocysts to term? And for the couples who make them, shouldn't we pass a Blastocyst Responsibility Act, requiring couples to carry all their cell clusters to full term?

Perhaps the time has come, and to avoid all the messy questions and keep things a convenient black-and-white, let's just close our eyes and destroy all the fertility clinics now. It's for a good cause. Like the death camps in the Holocaust, we have a moral responsibility to destroy the factories of death while we have the chance, to stop the machinery of systematic slaughter!

Right?

That's if we're going to stick to that "logic." Come on. We have people supported by a government who say that using stem cells is "murder." Yet we throw blastocysts, where the stem cells come from, in the figurative trash bin every single day, to the tune of thousands at a time, all in the effort to CREATE babies – not destroy them. More "lives" are destroyed every year at fertility clinics than at one that perform abortions, according to this "life begins at conception" argument.

And we could be saving people from horrible disease by using cells that are far closer to the sperm that hundreds of millions of men jizz away daily than anything even closely resembling a human being, even if you define that in the embryonic stage.

I'm not trying to stomp on anyone's religious beliefs. I'm just saying that we live in a universe that involves separating between Augustine's City of God from the City of Man; Thomas Aquinas solved that problem at the end of the Middle frickin' Ages. Whether you believe in God or not, people living in Judeo-Christian societies separate the activities of Man and God according to an Augustinian/Aquinian logic; I'm just asking that the so-called "Religious Right" just apply that separation consistently. And regardless of belief/disbelief in God, we should at least be able to navigate that separation better than people who still believed in magic, or that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Haven't we progressed a little since then?

Even Thomas Aquinas argued that the realms of Man and God did not lie in apparent contradiction to one another. So what's with the sudden Know-Nothing attitude of a certain stripe of American Christians and other fringe people who simply want to reject the entire the actual existence of the entire city of Man because it superficially appears to contradict with the literal text of one of the books of the Bible? Even the Catholic Church dealt with these questions better in the Middle Ages – it at least tried to reconcile them. And even the Church gets a bad rep; it was never in fact hostile to "science" itself, but rather to overt and public challenges to Church authority (which is what got old Galileo in trouble, for example, not his theory itself).

Basic. Logic. Applied. 21st-century. Hello?

"Mike the Mad Biologist" has a use for all those blastocysts, one that is right up my alley:

Now, that's a blastocyst!

They Chose the Icky Boy

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggh!!!!!!!!!!

Well, obviously, we can't say we weren't totally biased and partial to Soyeon getting to picked as the final candidate, but those who know her were also definitely pulling for her smarts, pluckiness, and personableness in front of the camera. And she even looks better than the boy in a suit.

Damn!

For those of you reading the news, you'll know that Soyeon didn't get picked as the final candidate, although she'll be completing the same full training as the backup in case something happens to the main man.

Now, this is a case where I can wish slight ill upon another seemingly very nice person, since I'm not wanting him to be hit by a meteorite or attacked by starved wildebeasts or anything. All he has to do is come down with a cold or something right before the mission.

That's not so bad, is it?

Anyways, I think Soyeon took it with aplomb.

[The Korean caption reported Soyeong said, "I'm OK!"]

Still, she's gotta be disappointed a bit, although I'm sure it'll be a relief now that all this waiting is over. She was saying that the last week of waiting was killing her. Now, I think at least the butterflies can be released from her stomach and she can get on with life.

Oh, and by the way – she's done with her doctoral preparation, so it's Dr. Lee to us all now!

So, there be some congratulations to be given here, in addition to our consolations. In the end, she's made it to where 35,000 others did not, and is helping make her country make really positive history.

But that doesn't mean I'll won't be hoping the other guy gets the sniffles just before launch day.

Keep your head up, Soyeon!