Maybe it's hallucinating you!

Seoul

Coming back from Seoul, a city of 20 million frantics, a fair proportion of whom seem at any given time to be riding a motorbike on a footpath, to Umeå, a quiet town where after such a short and frequently interrupted residence as I've had here so far, I can randomly meet two friends in a five minute trip across the street to the supermarket on the afternoon of my arrival, is very calming.

I went to swedish class yesterday, and having missed a month I was swimming behind the curl a bit. But it did strike me that our teacher now speaks at her natural speed, rather than clearly separating each word, and I can understand almost all of it. I'm still slow to call up words as I speak, but I think a critical point has been passed. I can now watch the news, read the paper, listen to conversations with enough comprehension that the gaps are subconsciously filling up at an exponentially increasing rate. If this trend continues, within a finite time I'll be able to understand more swedish words than actually exist, which will be exciting!

While in Stockholm I bought Against the Day, as it was released the day I arrived, and I guessed it would be hard to find in Umeå. It's over a thousand pages long, and bigger than my first-year calculus textbook, and I actually struggled to fit it into my carry-on bag. Despite its length, it surprisingly easy to read, and so far I haven't got to any point where I'm unsure of which characters are present, or who is saying what, or what they (at least ostensibly) mean, which is a relief after Gravity's Rainbow. It seems to be mostly about anarchist bomb-throwers in the American mid-to-actual west in the late 19th century (surely at least partly as a metaphor for the terrorism craze currently sweeping the world). But it's the hilarious, wonderful style of writing that really gets me. As the spiel on Amazon says, "Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides". So far (in my reading) only Kerouac has matched his ability to knock me flat with amazement.

Trouble is, I have barely a second to devote to it, what with all the things I have to get done before I head back to San Diego for a conference at the end of next week. I've also had barely a second to think about what that trip holds in store, but there are three shining lights to look forward to (in order of appearance): diving with sea lions before the conference starts; talking to my old supervisor at the conference; canning on with KT and Mat in NYC on the way back home (will be strange without LB and Paul, but times change, people move).

Then its Christmas, bugger me, gotta send some presents. Rumours abound of a London soiree for the chrissy/NYE period, and beyond that numerous ski trips to different parts of Europe are already being imagined. Australia remains too far away for my exhausted bones to manage anytime soon.

Home Swede Home

Update: Mikey has put some pics up on his bloggy-type thing including this one of a corker of a Swede who was dressed up in traditional clothing, thus providing a convenient excuse for a pervy tourist to snap a pic.

I call her "The White Visitation"



I'm back home in Umeå, relaxed.

Just spent an awesome day and a half in Stockholm with Mikey. I arrived there after about 15 hours of travelling, of which perhaps two hours were spent not so much sleeping but let's say in a state of intermittent consciousness. When I checked into the hostel it was about 8am Korean time, and about 11pm Swedish time.

Miraculously, Mikey rocked up about 10 minutes after me (we hadn't really planned anything, all I knew about his arrival was the date) and we set out in search of a bar. As ever, the best cure for jetlag is to fight drowsiness with drunkenness. Both of us were quite buggered from travelling, though, and we only managed a few "teasers" as mikey calls them before we had to hit the hay, and check in for some solid sleepytime before the day ahead. Worked out well, because we slept through until about 10am, and voila, I'm back on Swedish time.

I'd like to express my thanks at this point to Canon Australia for paying for an hour and a half phone conversation from oz to sweden after we got up. We had a good chat with Paul, and some others camera-biz folks who I know to degrees varying from not-at-all to vaguely. (For those who don't know him, Mikey previously worked with Paul in the camera biz)

After wrapping that up and grabbing a feed, we felt some obligation to do some "real" sightseeing, aside from the more human-oriented sightseeing we couldn't avoid. So we visited the royal palace, which was a bit shit as half of it was closed that day, but I did pick out a good future wife, Princess Madeleine of Sweden:



Now that's what princesses are supposed to look like.

Of course, by mid afternoon it was time to hit the cans, so from then until about 2:30am we wandered all over the city, hopping from bar to bar to club to maccas to bar to club, tried some 10% "christmas beer", chatted to a few people but mostly just stared slackjawed at the continual stream of gorgeous blondes, and to add contrast the occaisional gorgeous brunette, who passed in front of our eyes, which, having popped from their sockets long before, were no longer under our control.

We all know that there are stereotypes about certain countries. In my experience, most of them are 100% true. The "Sweden is full of beautiful blondes" stereotype is 8 million percent true.

What can I say? No disrespect to the great nation of South Korea, I had a smashing time there, but it's good to be home!

You make me like charity, instead of paying enough taxes

Apo-logies for the radio silence. Last weekend I went to the mountains near the east coast of Korea with some colleagues, and we had some great seafood down at the coast. Now, I'm pretty good with chopsticks when the food stays still, but when it actively tries to get away, I have to resort to fingers. Here (if it works) is a video of me eating recently hacked up squid, which, in an impressive display of the "never say die" attitude still tries to escape:




For the last week I've been in Seoul, for a Sweden-Korea workshop on robotics, or "intelligent systems". Basically a chance for everyone from the two countries to meet and propose collaborations. Some progress made, but 90% of what was there didn't interest me in the slightest. On the plus side, my german mate from Sweden, Uwe, came over to Korea for it. He's always keen for a beverage. Also we were staying at a mega fancy-pants hotel (most expensive in Korea) all payed for by the Koreans.

A lot of the people there are involved in "home robotics", like those robot vacuum cleaners etc. They are selling like hotcakes, not because they are any good at cleaning (they're not), but because people buy them as pets. You can get faces wih whiskers to put on them, and so on.

Apparently, during the design phase, there were two navigation algorithms proposed: one which went back and forth in an orderly pattern across the room, and guaranteed every point would be cleaned, and another which just moved about randomly, in a brownian motion, and might clean the same spot 20,000 times. But in marketing focus groups, the second one was universally preferred, because the robot seemed "alive".

Finally, and continuing this post's general theme of liveness and deadness, and the porous membrane separating them: last night Uwe and I had dinner at a BBQ restaurant which offered "Dead Horse" in the menu... I'm pretty sure they didn't mean tomato sauce.

Back to Sweden tomorrow...

Reswedeifcation av denna bloggen

For the last couple of weeks, this blog has been way too Korean, and not nearly Swedish enough. Eller: Som senast två veckor denna bloggen har vara mycket för Koreansk, och inte Svensk nog.

Full Swedish programming will not return for little while yet, but in the mean time I suggest you all check out the Swedish Mixtape from Triple J. One of the members of the first band featured lives near me. Pop 77 listeners will recognise quite a few songs in there.

Most radio in Sweden is pretty crap. Strangely enough, I've heard more good Swedish songs through the J's than any Swedish station.

Some other good mixtapes there too, e.g. Danger Mouse.

Get it? Got it. Set it!

Sorry for the lack of updates this week, been hectic. In fact, hectic doesn't even begin to describe it, because he has too many other things to do. For my part, I've even taken to setting an alarm clock in the morning, which can't be healthy.

Since I've been working on not-very-bloggable stuff, I'll just use this post to rant about something that's been gnawing on a nerve ending somewhere inside of me for a while now.

Namely: what is the deal with the "blogs" on major newspaper websites?

As far as I understand, blogs are basically a way to publish a "column" type thing on the web, with text and pictures, without the vast expense for printing and distribution that column-publishing required before the internets, or any effort with html or hosting or whatnot that web-publishing required in the early days of the interwebs.

I can think of three types of people who benefit from this:
1) travellers who want to keep their peeps informed of what they're up to and/or generally talk shit, as a substitute for the old nights at the pub;
2) very very niche markets not warranting a real magazine, such as moss collecting, or collecting Ian Moss albums;
3) people who wish they were journalists but lack the talent and/or connections to get a paying job as one.

None of these are held to particularly high standards of writing or content by anyone. To do so would be unrealistic.

But now all sorts of newspapers are publishing "blogs" on their websites. Obviously, they don't lack the resources to publish real columns, so whats it all about? My opinion: its just an excuse to lower editorial/writing standards, which they've been doing bit by bit for years. I think it has been a dream of newspapers for a long time now to slump to internet levels of quality and story-research, and they've finally found the perfect excuse. It's not an article, it's a blog!

Remember the old joke that asks what's black and white and re(a)d all over? Champagne comedy in its time, I'm sure you'll all agree. But is it just a hilarious joke? or is there something more? Is it any coincidence that now that newspapers are published in colour, they're not worth reading at all? Hmmm....?

Case in point in all this is, of course, the Sydney Morning Herald, which has turned into the Daily Telegraph so gradually that we barely noticed it happening.

Suwon market district

Today I wandered around Suwon markets. Eight bajillion dodgy shoe and handbag stores, dried tentacles of god knows what, little korean kids excitedly yelling "hello!" (I taught a couple to say "G'Day"), teenage girls exploding into giggles if I smile hello, probably mistook me for brad pitt or george negus or someone, happens all the time.

I'm really getting into Korean food. The standard side dish to everything is "kimchi", which is fermented cabbage in a hot pepper sauce. Found it pretty optional at first, but now I'm a big fan.

In my wanderings I came across a little buddhist temple nestled in a little forrested hill in the middle of the busy market district. Inside, a cool little monk dude taught me how to pray like a buddhist (turns out I'm not flexible enough to do it properly) and then we shelled some peanuts and conversed about the deeper things. We had zero language in common, but I'm pretty sure that what he told me was extraordinarily profound, and he seemed to respond when I said "Australia" and "Sydney". I kept expecting him to break into some wikid kung fu moves.

I've uploaded a few photos here.

KT - all this time you never told me you were a Korean telecommunications mogul!

As I type this, Gus and Liz's wedding reception must be getting underway... I'll see if I can make a phone call later...

Update: shortly after the above was written, I learnt the following useful fact: If you order take-out, and bring it back to your hotel room only find that they neglected to include chop-sticks, and your hotel room is seemingly empty of utensils, then a comb* does an admirable job. It can be used horizontally to scoop up goop, or spikes-down to stab chunks of meat and lift them to your mouth. I may never have thought of it were it not for Manny.

*- The comb was brand new, and had not touched a human hair in its short life. Unless there were human hairs in my take-out, which is possible.

Today I had

a serious conversation on a certain area of robotics with a European colleague. At one point he, in all seriousness, in a thick accent, used the phrase "mass distribution of the mechanical trousers". I so nearly lost it.

The Wallace and Grommit images, and the general inexplicable hilarity of the word "trousers", and somehow "mass distribution" becomes funny by association.... I was grinning, jamming my tounge in my cheeck so hard it developed a cramp. For the rest of the conversation, the phrase kept forcing its way back into my mind, and I kept trying to hold down bouts of uncontrollable laughter, little grins escaping from my control here and there. I think he must have thought I was deranged.