well, that's a relief

Matt Van Volkenburg, who blogs at Gusts of Popular Feeling, has a new post out noting that, after ten years, the South Korean Justice Ministry has decided to drop the HIV-testing requirement for foreign English teachers. It was a stupid requirement when it was put into place, and a perfect example of governmental reaction to a "gust of popular feeling"—in this case, a gust of anti-foreigner resentment, which billows into the public sphere more often than we expats would like. But such gusts of xenophobia are part of South Korea's societal immune system, so maybe, from the Korean perspective, they serve a salutary function by keeping foreigners from feeling too welcome or too cozy, while also keeping them on notice that they are, at best, a tolerated presence and not really a welcomed minority that adds to the rich diversity of the peninsula. Diversity: that's how Amurricans think, not Koreans.

The HIV-test requirement never really affected me: by 2005, I had shifted from being a mere hagweon instructor to being a university professor, moving me from the title of gangsa (that's gang-sa, instructor, not "gangsta") to gyosu (i.e., professor). Not that my respectability went up any, but the type of paperwork I had to fill out to get a professor's position was different from the rigamarole that people applying for hagweon positions must go through. Also, when applying for uni work, I never had to submit FBI background-check paperwork, although for my Daegu Catholic job, I did have to go through a domestic background check (which failed to note my long history of pimping and drug-running, thank God). All the same, even though I personally was never under the HIV-testing microscope, I felt the burden of the ROK government's attempt to breathe down our necks a little more warmly and moistly, and I'm glad to hear that Sauron's eye has shifted away, even if only slightly.

l'éléphant dans la pièce

I haven't wanted to talk about the elephant in the room that's been dominating the current news cycle, but it's time to face facts: the hashtag #CNNBlackmail isn't going away anytime soon. This story has been evolving rapidly since it began with Donald Trump's CNN-takedown meme, a retweet of a GIF showing Trump, from ten years ago, tackling Vince McMahon, but with McMahon's head replaced by a CNN logo. CNN and other journalists have cried foul, insisting that Trump is inciting violence. The sordid tale has morphed, since then, to a renewed focus on CNN itself, which found the person who uploaded the original GIF to Reddit. CNN apparently contacted this person, after which the news agency published a statement that sounded an awful lot like blackmail, intimidation, etc.

I'll let Philip DeFranco take it away. His summary (up to about 8:08 in the video) is good enough to get you oriented:

Here's Paul Joseph Watson's contribution, which notes that the identity of the person contacted by CNN has changed from a 15-year-old to a middle-aged man. Watson then notes that the actual creator of the GIF may in fact be some dude out in Mexico, not the person CNN has been threatening. Warning: the following video includes the obnoxious Alex Jones, head honcho of InfoWars. I'm okay with Watson, who also works for InfoWars, but Jones is a loudmouth who risks damaging his own brand, if he hasn't done so already. Anyway, here's the video, which begins with a hilarious compilation of memes that have arisen in response to CNN's threats against the middle-aged man who goes by the goofy moniker HanAssholeSolo:


What you're seeing, with that GIF compilation, is a variant of "the Streisand Effect," in which an attempt to suppress/repress/oppress leads to explosive pushback. According to lore, Barbra Streisand once demanded that people take down images of one of her posh Malibu residences, so of course the Internet responded by shotgunning images of her ostentatious domicile everywhere, making a relatively unknown property into a widely known quantity. If CNN thought that its belligerent posturing could somehow intimidate other internautes (as the French call Netizens) into silence, that thinking has blown up in its face, and the memes, like a toilet explosion, are now everywhere. There's even the juicy possibility that CNN's threats have broken one or more laws, so we'll see how that pans out. What's obvious is that the media, for all their flailing, have become experts at shooting themselves in the face where President Trump is concerned, and this won't change anytime soon because, as Styx points out, the old "legacy" media don't have a blessed idea how to deal with the new alt-media.

Meanwhile, here's Roaming Millennial's take on the CNN flap:


You will, of course, watch Roaming Millennial's video because she's pretty.

Roaming Millennial brings up a term that's been bouncing around a lot lately: "doxxing." This is slang for releasing another person's "documents" (hence "doxx") to the public—information like phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, actual home addresses, etc., in the hopes of inciting harassment against the person being doxxed.

Doxxing isn't a new phenomenon: here in Korea, everyone knows the story of the "dog-shit girl" (gaeddong-nyeo, 개똥녀), whose little dog took a watery shit inside a subway car way back in 2005. When offended riders demanded that she clean the mess up, the defiant woman ignored her fellows, collected her dog, and simply left the subway. Thanks to videos of the incident, the woman's face was splashed all over the internet, and it was only a matter of time before someone ID'ed the woman and found out her personal information. After that, the dog-shit girl was harassed by phone and at her home. Such is the power of online vigilantism, and I suppose we should be glad that things didn't escalate beyond that. So for my old-fogey readers, now you know what "doxxing" is: malicious exposure of private documents and information. (A variant spelling is "doxing," but the double-X spelling came first. Urban Dictionary suggests the term comes from the ".docx" file suffix.)

The #CNNBlackmail situation continues to evolve, and I'm coming to agree with savvier commenters that Trump is using Twitter the way an aikidoka employs an atemi, i.e., as a strike that isn't intended to do more than to distract and/or keep the opponent off-balance. Meanwhile, Trump is quietly enacting policy—a fact that's hard to notice if you've been reading only mainstream-media sources. Switch to alt-media for a comprehensive list of Trump's accomplishments since taking office. Everything else is fluff.

Oh, yeah: this.

Merry Fuckin' Christmas

Everyone's favorite plumpie, Kim Jeong-eun, jokes that he'll frequently send off "unpleasant gifts," i.e., longer and longer-range missiles, to America. That, or farts.

Ave, Steve!

My buddy Dr. Steve doCarmo writes a review of Episode 8 of the new "Twin Peaks" revival series, in which David Lynch picks up where he left off after two-and-a-half decades. I never watched the original "Twin Peaks," so I imagine that, were I to try to get in on the new show, I'd see nothing but a series of solipsistic in-jokes where "Twin Peaks" habitués would see profundity. I remember trying to sit through "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me" (the movie "sequel" to the canceled TV series) when it appeared on cable, but I had to change the channel after thirty or forty minutes. Too off-putting and disorienting. It's not that I hate David Lynch or despise his artistic vision: I sat through and appreciated both "Blue Velvet" and "Eraserhead," the latter being much more memorable than the former. (And before I forget: I also enjoyed "Wild at Heart.") But something kept me away from "Twin Peaks" during its 90s heyday, and "Fire Walk with Me" was just too much of a muchness. That said, Steve's well-written review was intriguing to me, and it almost made me want to watch the revived "Twin Peaks"... but then I realized I'd have to slog through the original series, plus "Fire Walk," to have the background to appreciate the new material.

Steve teaches English at a college out in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (the setting for the movie "Signs" by M. Night Shyamalan). He's a singer-songwriter, guitarist, composer, and all-around brain. He also leans waaaaay to the left, but don't let that stop you from reading good writing.

it's time we had that talk

Komerican comedian David So came into YouTube prominence when he posted a humorously angry response to the racist (and not very articulate) rant by white UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, who was upset about "Asian" behavior in one of UCLA's libraries. Wallace's tirade included the embarrassing string of Chinese-mimicking syllables "ching-chong ling-long ting-tong," for which she will always be remembered. If you haven't seen So's response, please click the above link—which is fairly timely, given that So jokingly incites violence against Wallace but—so far as I know—doesn't get in trouble for doing so.

So has his own YouTube channel, which boasts 1.4 million subscribers. In the "Carpool Confessions" video below, which is actually two unrelated videos spliced together, So converses with some Asian cuties while driving (in and around Los Angeles, I presume). The first conversation is about L.A. drivers and neighborhoods, but it's the second conversation, with Julie Zhan (ethnically Chinese, not Korean, as you can tell by the surname), that will take you back to sex-ed class in middle school and make you wish your teachers had talked about the things that David and Julie talk about while they're rolling along.

I'm thinking about subscribing to So's YouTube channel; he's witty, vulgar, and hilarious. Check out his visit to Body Spec, a stats-gathering service that does a variety of biometric scans on you to determine your level of health and fitness (body fat, bone density, etc.).

Monday it is, then

I'm obsessed with the idea of having a post-Fourth burgers-and-dogs office party, but instead of doing it this coming Friday, I've elected to bring the food in this coming Monday, which is the day before we're currently* slated to move down the street to our new office. I talked with the boss about this, and he thinks Monday works fine. My coworker, who recently came back from a gut-stuffing trip to see relatives in the Philippines, isn't interested in a feast this week, but he might be interested next week.

The plan is simple: stuffed burgers (for reference, see this post from 2015) with trimmings, hot dogs with condiments, potato chips (probably of the kettle-chip variety), coleslaw, and maybe something for dessert—not sure what yet, but am leaning toward chocolate mousse/panna cotta, which is fairly light, if done right, and not bad for the summer.

---

*I say "currently" because we've already had one change of date, and I fully expect another. This is Korea, where you never take anything that anyone says literally. If you do that, you're a sucker. There's a reason why anthropologists refer to Korean society as "low-trust."

Ave, Jasmine!

Québecoise blogger Jasmine, whose foodblog Jasmine Cuisine is one I follow with interest, has a very interesting new recipe up: fake pulled pork with jackfruit. I've never eaten jackfruit before, but I've seen photos and videos of it. Jasmine's photos show fairly convincingly that, at the very least, the flesh of a jackfruit can look like pulled pork. As for the taste and mouth feel... I'd have to make this to know more. But I'm tempted, and I think there may be a store or two in Itaewon where I can find jackfruit (called "fruit du Jacquier" in French, Jasmine informs us—or just "jaque," according to one of Jasmine's photos). This particular fruit-for-meat substitute has apparently been trending for a while (go to YouTube and type "jackfruit pulled pork" into the search window), but it's the first I've heard of it.

Jasmine writes her recettes in French, so French knowledge is helpful.

Nimblewill Nomad: Gandalf of the paths

My freelance colleague Neil Armstrong (you read that right) sends me a link to this article about the man they call Nimblewill Nomad, whose real name is Meredith J. Eberhart. You can call him "Eb." From his 60s to his mid 70s, Eb has walked nearly 40,000 miles, i.e., more than 1.5 times the circumference of the earth, most of that in North America. His backpack has barely ten pounds of gear (4.5 kg), and he often relies on the charity of drive-by strangers to get him over a barren patch of Texan land alive.

In the abstract, at least, I'd love to spend my life doing what Eb is doing, but as you read further in the article, you realize that Eb is chasing, or being chased by, his own demons, and this is what drives him to remain on the road even after declaring that he's done walking. I'm not plagued by such demons (I'd say that my demons go by the names Sloth and Gluttony), and while I have a romantic attraction to life on the trail, I'm not at a point where I'm willing to shed everything to become an eternal nomad.

Go read the article and find out all about Eb. Incredible man.

At one point on our final day together, Eberhart paused at the intersection of a gravel road to show me the contents of his pack. He spread out his things in the dust. There was a tarp tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, the small bag of electronics, a hint of a medical kit, a plastic poncho, his maps, a pair of ultralight wind pants, and the pile of metal junk. All of the fabrics had the wispiness of gossamer; a strong wind could had taken most of his earthly possessions away.

Besides his truck and a few mementos he kept at his sister’s house, he didn’t own much more than this.

“I tell my friends: every year I’ve got less and less, and every year I’m a happier man. I just wonder what it’s going to be like when I don’t have anything. That’s the way we come, and that’s the way we go. I’m just preparing for that a little in advance, I guess.”

Instead of a toothbrush, he carried a wooden toothpick. He did not carry a stove. He did not carry a spare change of socks, a spare set of shoes, nor any other spare clothes. He did not carry reading material, nor even a notebook. He did not carry toilet paper. His med-kit contained little more than a few bandaids, a pile of aspirin, and a sliver of a surgical blade.

Shaving down one’s pack weight, he said, was a process of sloughing off one’s fears.

Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. The “last vestige” of fear that even the most minimalist hikers have trouble shedding, he said, was starvation. As a result, most people ended up carrying “way the hell too much food”. He did not even carry so much as an emergency candy bar.

Yeah, I can relate to "way the hell too much food." Goddamn MREs.

enjoy the fireworks, Amurrica

I wanted to celebrate the Fourth this week with my boss and coworker, but because we were slated to move offices this week, I decided to hold off on the cooking until a better, calmer time. This morning, I heard that we wouldn't be moving until early next week, so maybe I'll do something this coming Friday. Today, though, will be a fairly quiet Fourth.

My favorite way to celebrate the Fourth came to me by accident while I was living in Front Royal, Virginia: one year, on the night of the Fourth, I took the car over to Shenandoah National Park's Skyline Drive, enjoying the nighttime quiet and stopping at random overlooks that gave marvelous views down into the wide, shallow bowl of Shenandoah Valley. While at one overlook, I saw a tiny, far-off sparkle of fireworks, then I heard the long-delayed pop of the fireworks going off. Waiting for more, I saw fireworks going off in other parts of the valley—humble, scattershot celebrations of our country's independence. It was a marvelous sight, simultaneously beautiful and defiant: diminutive bursts of light punctuating the vast terrestrial darkness. There was no coordination among the fireworks displays; I had no way to predict when and where a burst might appear. But the overall effect was enchanting, and observing these fireworks was the polar opposite of how our family used to like celebrating the Fourth: by driving into crowded Washington, DC, fighting for a parking space, then slogging onto the Capitol grounds to lay out a picnic spot and defend it from all interlopers. True, the city's musical gala was always a delight: Barry Bostwick was normally the host, and there would be guest appearances by the likes of Aretha Franklin and/or Ray Charles, who would sing his version of "America the Beautiful" and his classic "Georgia." But the crowds and the drunkenness and the garbage and the long lines for the porta-potties were never pleasant, so I viewed our DC outings with overall distaste. Give me a quiet Fourth, or give me death!

It's not the season for fireworks here in Korea; at times like this, I'm very conscious of being an expat. But my thoughts turn to my home country, and I wish all my fellow Americans a happy and mindful Fourth of July. Cherish your freedoms.

seen on Gab

More precisely, this is why proper punctuation is important.

"Humor. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical."

My Kiwi buddy John once told me a joke that went something like this:

"How's that motor running?"
"Like a raped goat!"

Humor is an interesting phenomenon that often follows its own bizarre associative logic. The above exchange is a prime example of this, so let's get nerdy and do a bit of discursive analysis.

The joke is an exchange between two blokes, and the humor relies on a punny misunderstanding by the answerer that is, in truth, a correct understanding of the intentions of the questioner.

The pun hinges on two senses of the participle "running." When the questioner asks how the motor is running, he's asking about how the motor is functioning. The answerer deliberately misunderstands the word to mean "travel quickly on foot." He employs the simile "like a raped goat!" to evoke, on one level, the speed and fervor of a desperate farm animal fleeing the scene of its sexual violation. But on a deeper level, what the answerer is truly saying is that the motor is indeed running (i.e., functioning) at a high level of efficiency. So: what seems at first blush to be a misapprehension is shown to be a correct apprehension. The answerer, despite seemingly misinterpreting the questioner's meaning, has in fact directly answered the questioner in a humorously vivid way.

This simple exchange is fascinating for what it reveals about the layers of meaning and intent that are possible when at least one interlocutor is in a humorous frame of mind. The joke, of course, is ruined by over-explaining it in this way, but every now and again, a little discourse analysis is good for the mind.

Trump the body-slammer

Donald Trump recently retweeted a ten-year-old video of himself at a WWE event slamming Vince McMahon to the floor, then getting up and walking away triumphantly. But the video in question had been retooled so that McMahon's head had been replaced by a CNN logo, and below was the hashtag #FraudNewsCNN. The media are, predictably, up in arms about what they decry as "incitement to violence." By that standard, of course, the media themselves are guilty of such incitement: cf. Kathy Griffin and the severed head. My own stance regarding Griffin was, as you recall, that what she had done was not incitement to violence by any sane interpretation of her gesture. Sure, it was crude, inappropriate, etc.—but it wasn't incitement, especially coming from a comedian.

In his reaction to the Trump retweet, Stefan Molyneux lists occasions in which the media have committed similar sins:

• months and months of comparing Trump to the literal second coming of Adolf Hitler
• CNN's portrayal of the individual who rushed the stage to attack Trump as "an activist, a hero"
• CNN's openly pondering Trump's assassination prior to his inauguration
• [the media's] pic of Steve Bannon, framed in crosshairs
• a CNN commentator's pondering on air whether Jared Kushner was "maybe one of the people who has to die"

About that last sin, Molyneux notes, "Trump is Hitler, but very Jewish Jared Kushner, well, maybe he's just one of the people who has to die!"

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit notes several other media hypocrisies and includes a tweeted quote from Molyneux: "After weeks of hearing how assassination plays and holding up a severed head [were] just ‘art’—the leftist response to [Trump’s] tweet is precious."

My take is that Trump's slamming of a CNN logo is no more an incitement to violence against reporters than Kathy Griffin's head-in-effigy moment was an incitement to go out and saw off the president's head.

We really are turning into North Korea, aren't we—a land where symbols are conflated with the things they symbolize. This would be a good time to remember George Carlin's gibe that "I leave symbols to the symbol-minded."

Styx weighs in here.

The flip side of all this is that the right needs to go back to Kathy Griffin and Julius Caesar (a Shakespeare-in-the-Park play in which a Trump-like figure is stabbed to death) and recognize that these instances of free expression aren't incitement to violence, either. Certain people on both sides need to drop their double standards, let go of their hypocrisy, and just relax. I'd much rather have a goofy war of words and symbols than a real war of blades and bullets.

must be the weekend

Ave, Charles!

Charles presents an interesting meditation on "long process" bread-making. The photos are especially appetizing.

CNN: American voters = "stupid as shit"

Project Veritas continues its "American Pravda" onslaught against CNN. In the latest hidden-camera video released by James O'Keefe, a CNN associate producer, Jimmy Carr, is caught saying that American voters are "stupid as shit," thus supporting the rightie suspicion that modern leftism amounts to coastal elitism and is no longer the champion of the average working man living in "flyover country." Carr also avers that Donald Trump is "hilariously unqualified" to be president and is "fucking crazy."

Andrew Klavan, meanwhile, has a short video on fake news.

A note about Van Jones, the prominent and outspoken CNN commentator who was caught saying the Trump-Russia narrative is a big "nothingburger": Philip DeFranco notes that O'Keefe's gotcha moment with Van Jones isn't really much of a gotcha, given that Jones is on record previously as saying, quite openly, that he doesn't expect anything to come of CNN's pursuit of the Trump-Russia angle. DeFranco shows the older footage of Van Jones, so it does indeed look as though Jones isn't privately revealing some new, previously unaired opinion. That said, I still think it's curious that Jones feels as he does, but the higher-ups at CNN wish to continue to beat this particular drum.

No matter the details, it's all about impressions, and CNN is losing the PR war here. The channel has lamely attempted to refocus attention on Trump's latest salvo of "lookist" tweets (Trump huffily tweeted about an MSNBC anchor, Mika Brzezinski, who had allegedly been "bleeding badly from a facelift"), which CNN, et al., are deeming sexist, but the right is pushing back by noting the media's hypocrisy in being faux-outraged now after having constantly and mercilessly lambasted Trump for his looks.

Personally, I'm not sure that Trump does himself any favors by shooting from the hip with his often poorly edited tweets. Others disagree, of course: some supporters think Trump is a mad genius, given his tweets' power to distract, and to drive to distraction, thereby allowing Trump a measure of control over the media narrative, as well as the freedom to move around behind the smoke screens he creates. Note, for example, that Trump's attack on Ms. Brzezinski (whom he also called "low IQ") is diverting people from the multi-front war going on right now with the continued planning of the border wall, the success of Kate's Law in the House of Representatives, various Obamacare rollbacks, the kicking-in of the travel "ban" (it's more of a moratorium than a ban), the quiet retooling of campus sexual-assault policy, etc.

Is Trump a mad genius? I don't think I'm smart enough to judge. I am, however, reminded of King Joyse from Stephen R. Donaldson's Mordant's Need fantasy novels. When our protagonist Terisa meets King Joyse, he is an old and possibly senile dodderer who seems oblivious to the fact that he's surrounded by enemies both within and without his kingdom, all of whom wish to do him in and take his kingdom over. By the middle of the second novel, though, we learn that Joyse's weak appearance has been a ruse to bring his many enemies within easy striking distance, and that Joyse has relied on his remaining loyal servants to keep the kingdom together while Joyse himself passively allows his master plan to coalesce. In a sense, Joyse's enemies end up doing themselves irreparable harm, much the way we see CNN currently flailing desperately, lashing out and making itself look increasingly worse. So while I can't say for certain whether Donald Trump is indeed the 4D chess master that some make him out to be, I can at least entertain the possibility that he's a hell of a lot more adept than he looks (and sounds).

fanboying

Mine! Finally mine!

the constant pain

My recent cross-country walk changed my life. I've been unable to stop thinking about those beautiful riverlands ever since I got back to Seoul, and I now find myself wondering what I can do to change my life so that I'm spending most of my time out on the trails, walking all over this beautiful country. As I recently wrote to a friend, I was happier and healthier out there, and office life just isn't for me, however much I like my job and my current boss.

You might remember this old joke about the nunnery:

There was once a cloistered order at which the nuns were allowed to speak only two words to the Mother Superior every ten years. Sister Clara entered as a novice and spent her first ten years in utter silence. When she finally came before the Mother Superior, she said, "Bed hard." Another ten years passed; Sister Clara appeared before the Mother Superior and said, "Food cold." And after thirty years at the cloister, Sister Clara stood before the Mother Superior and said, "I quit." As Clara stalked out of the room, the Mother Superior stood and shouted after her, "Right—go, then! All you ever do is complain, complain, complain!"

In my case, those two words would be: feet hurt.

Like it or not, this appears to be one of the dubious gifts I received from walking 550 kilometers: my feet constantly ache. Sometimes, the pain goes away, but the moment I put any weight on my feet, the pain comes right back. After ten or twenty steps, I'm usually fine: it's an ache, not anything acute or debilitating. But it's a reminder to me of That Thing I Did, so I don't mind it that much. It helps me remember.

And it helps me look forward to the next such walk.

is Jackie Chan a martial artist?

Before I discuss Jackie Chan, I need to discuss David Carradine. Carradine was what I'd call a martial actor, not a true martial artist. By his own admission, he didn't begin studying kung fu in earnest until he had already been doing the series "Kung Fu" for at least a season. Carradine was a dancer by training, and it's well known that dancers can often transition to martial-arts performance for cinematic purposes because they already possess the requisite strength, speed, flexibility, and balance. But this doesn't mean that every dancer is a secret martial artist (not unless he or she is trained in capoeira), and Carradine, while he may have begun training in actual kung fu much later in life than most dedicated practitioners, never really became the real deal. This makes him the perfect example of a martial actor versus someone like Chuck Norris, who was and is an actual martial artist (Norris's background is mainly in Korean martial arts like tangsudo).

Jackie Chan is actually a graduate of the Beijing Opera (well, technically, the China Drama Academy, which is directly descended from the Beijing Opera). He's famous for having developed his skills alongside other martial-arts stars like Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. The school has traditionally taught elements of theater, acrobatics, and martial arts in an integrated syllabus, but training at the school is not the same as singular dedication to a martial art with a tough master. There's no doubt that Chan has proved, again and again on film, his physical prowess, but what we see is mostly acrobatics, and video evidence of Chan's martial prowess is fairly rare. So I've had my doubts that Jackie Chan can really be called a bona fide martial artist. He's a far superior performer compared to David Carradine, whose movements were graceful but generally lacking in strength and power. To my mind, the difference between Carradine and Chan is one of degree, not kind: both were/are martial performers, not actual martial artists.

But I'm open to being convinced otherwise, and I just stumbled across a YouTube video that shows a very interesting demonstration. The video is a clip from a German TV show in which a lovely young German lass—a taekwondo practitioner—attempts to break four bricks with her fist while holding an egg, which she must not break. Performing such a stunt requires a high level of comfort with what Koreans call kigong and the Chinese call qigong or qigung, i.e., harmonious manipulation of vital energy. Jackie Chan is on stage but off to the side, sitting with an interpreter and another guest, no doubt adding to whatever nervousness or pressure the poor girl must be feeling. The girl expertly breaks two sets of four bricks, but in both cases, she also breaks the egg inside her fist, thus failing to perform the stunt. At this point, the host calls Jackie over to help out; Jackie comically breaks an egg seemingly by accident when he fumbles with the egg carton, then he switches his second egg for a third egg, thus adding to the humor. What happens next is nothing short of incredible: Chan casually breaks three stacks of four bricks apiece, one after another in rapid succession, and the egg emerges from this series of strikes utterly unscathed.

I was floored. This was a real demonstration of kigong, and in my mind, I had no choice but to recognize Jackie Chan as more than a mere martial actor. Here—watch the video for yourself:

Wikipedia tells me that Chan did more than study at the Beijing Opera: he has studied other martial arts on the side, including certain varieties of Chinese kung fu and Korean hapkido. I've long respected Chan as a performer, and but after having watched this humbling video demonstration, I can now also call him the real deal.

impressive

Remember that terrorist attack in London (yeah—which one, right?) where that one Chinese-looking guy got stabbed in the throat and was walked to safety by the police? Turns out the guy's name is Geoff Ho, and he's a martial artist who, in the heat of the moment, rushed to help out a bouncer who was being double-teamed by two of the knife-wielders. As Ho put it: "Don’t know whether it was stupid or noble to jump in and break up the fight outside the Southwark Tavern, but two [assholes] trying to do over the lone bouncer on the door isn’t happening on my watch."

Story here and here. Ho is also a journalist. He's got bigger balls than most of his ilk.

In other happy news: a father and teenaged son managed to overpower and shoot a man who had tried to rob them at gunpoint. Bravo to these two. The would-be robber is dead.

office assholes

Every now and then, I'll come back from a trip to the restroom to discover that some dumb motherfucker has entered our office and turned off the light, probably in a preachy attempt to get us to save energy. I'm gone for a few minutes, and that's wasting energy? And what the fuck are you doing, coming into our office and manipulating our stuff to begin with?

This morning, I arrived at the office to discover the light was already on. I thought my boss had gotten here before I did (which happens on occasion), but no one else is here.

So we've got two kinds of asshole: (1) those who self-righteously turn our office lights off, and (2) those who peek in and negligently leave our lights on.

I'd make a "DO NOT TURN OUR LIGHTS ON OR OFF" sign, but we're moving down the street to a new office in a few weeks, so there seems little point in venting. What I'd love to do is install a pinhole camera to see which motherfuckers are doing this, then go after the guilty parties with a baseball bat. Fucking annoying.

UPDATE: the boss called and told me he'd been to the office very early and had kept the light on when he left. "I was wondering who the asshole was who had come into our room and left the light on!" I groused. It's nice to have an American boss who understands my sense of humor; I doubt I'd have been able to joke that way with a Korean boss.