This Thursday in (DINOSAUR!!!) Pictures

Yeah, that's right, it's perfectly fine for a 23-year-old to get excited about Dinosaurs.

Today we went to the Natural History Museum in Seoul.


The biggest hit was the T-Rex slide above.


I thought this was a good picture, so I photo-shopped the happiest kid on earth out of the picture and put this unhappy fake kid in his place. Wink, wink.


The museum had a super awesome balcony with a super awesome view.


And oh yeah, the kids think I'm really strong... Please don't tell them the truth.

Tim loves his Aunt Carrol

Thanks to a package filled with salt water taffy recieved in the mail yesterday, Tim has added his Aunt Carrol to the following list:

People I'll still be talking to
when I return to Canada
---

1. Tatiana
2. Noelle
3. Grandma
4. Aunt Carrol

If he hadn't forgotten his camera at school, Tim also would have made a picture of himself passed out from eating too much taffy...

Instead, you'll have to make do with this photoshopped imitation of said picture:

Ten months to go...

It's August 28th, so that means I've been here for two months.

Yeah, it's definitely starting to feel like a job. I'd say two days a week are kind of boring and slow while the other three are amusing enough to keep me from jumping off the roof for the first two.

I still don't miss home, so stop asking. The job would have to get a lot worse before I'd actually look forward to setting foot in Canada again.

The crappiest part right now is that the Korean currency has been slowly crawling downward since I got here. From my estimate of what I'll make in total for the year, I've essentially lost about $1500 in two months, so I guess I'll have to start believing in God and pray that it goes back up before I smuggle all the cash home in my backpack.

LAME!

Hmm, what else. I had a good/bad weekend where I spent the first day watching the last season of Six Feet Under, and then the next day being upset about it being over. I think I watched the final montage about 15 times.

Oops. I guess I should be working.... No, boss, I'm writing up a quiz for the kids.... LET GO OF MY EAR!!!!

You learn something new every day

Can't sleep. Browsing random entries on wikipedia, which always provides great useless information, and here's some of the best I've ever found:

First, the wonderful Bob Vila has a journalism degree (!!!), which actually isn't surprising. The wikipedia entry isn't too concise, but I can remember reading or seeing on TV that Vila has no credentials as a real carpenter or handyman of any sort... The entry does state that he was first given a role on a home-improvement show after winning an award for a home renovation he had done, so this is unclear.

Also, he's Cuban-American!!!


And now for the best of all: Remember the cute little kid from Hook, Dick Tracy and What About Bob?

His name was Charlie Korsmo and he only did a few movies before dissapearing to focus on school and being normal in the early-90's.

And what is he now? A genius, of course. And better yet - a REPUBLICAN genius. It turns out that Korsmo, along with Winnie Cooper from the Wonder Years, is a real math whiz. He has a physics degree from M.I.T. and a Law degree from Yale.

And of course, the Republican part. He was an esteemed member of the Federalist Club at Yale, which is noted for its rampant conservatism. (His name is on a club letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Comittee asking for a swift confirmation of Samuel Alito.)

He also worked (works?) for the federal government in the notorious missile defence program!

Wow, that's totally awesome. I'm so glad I can't sleep.

This Week in (leftover) Pictures

Q: What do you get when you mix dried ice with water?.


A: Tim taking a dozen pictures of it with his camera.

Q: Where did Tim get dried ice?


A: Baskin Robbins, silly... They package take-out containers with it here and Tim has students with parents who like to give him ice cream.

Q: What semi-disturbing habit has Tim picked up in recent days?


A: Spying on the Poly School shuttlebuses as they come and go from the school...

Q: What was the best payoff from Tim's spying so far?


A: Catching one of the shuttlebus drivers shaving in his reflection.

And yes, the question-and-answer charade has gone on long enough... Here we have a wonderful picture of me by a student in his picture diary:


Apparently that's what I look like when I read out vocabulary words in blue sneakers and nothing else.

(Also, do you think the single line on my forehead is a dig at my receding hairline? Some of these kindergarteners are clever, so I wouldn't be too surprised.)

Side note: The way children here draw pictures is hilarious. Everyone looks like anime characters because they do the curved-lines-for-eyes thing.


It rained like a grandmother today and the student in the middle had to borrow another teacher's shirt, so that's why he looks like he's in a dress.

Other than that, click on the picture to zoom in and see what kids have written... They were suppossed to write a letter to me and at least one of them says they love me.

Maybe two.

Sexism....Was it ever out of style?

"Don't marry a career woman," says Forbes Magazine.

They're less likely to bear children, more likely to leave you for someone better, and in a general sense, they're more likely to give you a "rocky marriage."

Well, duhhhh. Isn't this the kind of thing we all think and know, but don't say, especially since the 1950's when some of us decided to give women a fair shake.

Forbes is taking quite a lot of heat about this one. They posted the sexist article by itself, then took it down for a while, and eventually re-posted it as a point/counter-point.

At least the magazine is out of the closet about who they want in the boardrooms in America.

"Vicky! You spilt breast milk all over my assistant's notepad again!"

To be honest, I'm not all that offended. This is pretty obvious stuff, and I'm all for free speech, even if it's sexist and a touch ignorant and totally pisses off everyone that reads it outside of South Carolina.

If you marry a woman who's a career-climber and makes a lot of money, of course she's going to be less likely to have children (she's busy, stupid) and more likely to leave you if you don't keep up with her (she has her own money, stupid).

"You mean I can't treat her like property?" says Forbes. "You know, like the Koreans do."

The choice is whether you want a pushover who'll clean your underwear or a climber who'll double your income towards a retirement villa in Italy.

I know what I'll choose with my vote! (That is, if I were attractive to career-climbers and had a vote in the first place... )

Another Poly School first...

One of our students peed in class for the first time today, but it wasn't in mine!

If it weren't for the inevitability of it happening to me too, I'd probably think it was a lot funnier.

So far, this is the current tally of incidents where teachers had to clean up pee (or worse):

Gordon Teacher 1
Tim Teacher 0

Also, I found out today that I get to go on a field trip next week...

I'm going to see Dinosaur bones!!! SUPER AWESOME WICKED!!!! I can't wait to post pictures on my website!!!

Survivor goes Racist

Is this for real? The next Survivor will separate contestants by race. Black, white, asian and hispanic.

I'd call it a spoof if it weren't actually Jeff Probst talking about it on a national morning show.



Oh well, it'll definitely be fun to watch as it plays out, either in the news or in the show itself.

This Tuesday in Pictures (of other people's birthday parties)

Today at school we had our monthly birthday party for all the August babies, and as you can see above, some of the students are more happy to celebrate than others... Each month, there's at least one kid who sits there and frowns the whole time.


One upshot to the birthday day - the kids are tiny and the cake is huge, so guess who eats the rest of it for the rest of the day?


Hoorah, hoorah. I get no love for two months and all of a sudden I get TWO packages in the mail.

For those who haven't sent packages filled with junk from home yet. It's been noticed.

As clear as it gets here

Holy Jesus, I just realized I'm the kind of person that talks about weather on his website, so no more comments on that.

Here's a picture of Daniella on a Korean diet...


My first question when I got here was "how do people eat this much and stay 4'10".... I've never been able to finish one of these huge but still-somehow-cheap meals. Apparently there's very little fat in the diet, and as it goes, I've only seen one or two obese people since I've been here.

"Fatties! Go back to America!" I screamed.

Democrats are idiots

Republican's just won the 2008 election, two years in advance.

The Democrats seem to think it's a good idea to stuff together a bunch of primaries and caucauses into January of 2007, essentially picking a front-runner a half-year ahead of their convention to pick a candidate for President....

Considering that these early primaries are completely driven by name-recognition, Hillary Clinton will have a huge advantage. Not to mention John Kerry if he runs again.

And this is horrible, horrible, horrible, because both of those candidates stand to take a huge ass-kicking from the other side, because they have huge holes in their political records and the Democrats have absolutely no way to defend themselves against slanderous attacks, as we saw in the last election with that Swift Boat crap.

By allowing a candidate to get slandered and lied about and kicked in the ass for a half year before the convention, and even then three months before the election, the Democrats are screwed, as always. It doesn't matter if George W. Bush starts killing Iraqi children with his own hands at press conferences, we're going to have another Republican as President.

President Jeb Bush in 2008? George Allen? Bill Frist?

(I'm sorry. I usually avoid my own opinion on here, because I know nobody cares, but this was so bone-headed that I couldn't help.)

This Friday in (non-litigious) Pictures

I've been asked to take pictures of my students to send home, so here you go:


In order to protect myself against lawsuits, you might look close to notice that I've used high-tech imaging software to distort the faces of my actual students.

As you can tell, they're quite cute and they love "Where's Waldo".... I should also mention that I totally kicked their asses when it came to finding him first.


Reading "Are you there God? It's me Margaret," by Judy Blume, has completely changed my perception of spirituality.

I now think it's more lame than before.

I also couldn't help but notice that I'm 23-years-old and still waiting for my period, which Margaret finally gets in the last chapter.


Another piece of fine Korean cuisine from Dunkin' Donuts.


Yeah, I have a video phone! Everyone seems to think this is totally gangster when they see it or hear about it, so I thought I'd show everyone.

For me, it's only an intercom - but only is not a word you use with video intercoms. This is yet another step in my life-long plan to live in the apartment that Bruce Willis has in The Fifth Element.

And that's this Friday in pictures.

Waiting to retire

Looking back a few years, I can remember that at this time of the year, me and my brother would do nothing all day but sit in our partially air-conditioned home and watch game shows like the Price is Right.

There was one summer where him and I watched Rosie O'Donnell nearly every day for the entire summer.

It was so good, I'm about to tear up.

So you're a big star in Korea....

At work, we started making fun of pop stars and actors that are only famous in Korea, and then I realized that this would actually be better - and possibly more lucrative - than being famous only in Canada.

Argument calculus:
South Korea
population: 47,817,000
GDP: $20,590 /per person

Canada
population: 32,601,000
GDP: $34,273

Well, OK, maybe not as lucrative, but still just as lame... Not to mention, it's quite possible that if I were at home, I would not be making my own per-annum share of Canada's GDP, which is also quite lame.

------
P.S. Ben Mulroney needs an entire post dedicated to his notoriety as Canada's worst celebrity... Anybody interested? Have any ideas?

In Defense of Korean Cuisine

It turns out I'm getting slandered in the MSN gossip-o-sphere because I'm honest about liking KFC in Korea... and believe me, I like it a lot.

One former classmate who is dropping his career to become a chef is especially upset.

Well, I'm here to defend the name and cuisine of the Korean people, who are sick and tired of being associated with gross spicy kimchi and, well, rice and dog.

For the record, the preparation of fast food in Korea is head and shoulders above that of the United States and other Western countries. At KFC, when you order take out, they charge you an extra couple of cents and package everything so there's no way it could spill, including strips of tape around the drink cups.

At McDonalds, for once in your life, you'll actually get a burger that looks something like the picture. In fact, it will look a lot like the picture.

The workers at these restauraunts obviously take their jobs very seriously, so let's stop insulting them from our culinary schools in Prince Edward Island or the Annex in Toronto, or wherever else we think we know everything about food and "culture."

Appreciating American fast food in Korea is nothing less than an appreciation for the hard work and dedication of the Korean people in general. They've taken a good and popular product and made it even better, once again.

Don't worry Koreans, this Canadian respects you, unlike the others who insult your KFCs and Pizza Huts from their perches of pretention across the world.

-------- P.S. Pretension is actually spelled with an s, according to my friend Simon, who otherwise has no connection to this post at all.

The true story of the Blatchford name change

People keep asking, so here's the super exciting story... I closed my eyes and sent off an e-mail to the real Blatchford to see if she would visit my site. Amazingly, she did, but didn't like that I was using her picture, so I said I wouldn't use it anymore.

(No comment on the fact that she's the biggest name in Canadian journalism, so I imagined she would be used to seeing her face. Oh well, it was a tired reference that nobody seemed to get anyways. I guess nobody I know reads newspapers, especially the boring ones like the Globe.)

And since I wasn't using the picture anymore, I figured I should change my fake name as well. When a student mispelled my name Kornzer, I thought about using that, but it seemed more obvious to just use Holden. Get it? Judge Holden! Hahaha, I'm so clever.

DJ Premier is finally getting rich!!!

Thank God, it took enough time.

It turns out the greatest hip-hop DJ of all-time has produced a chunk of Christina Aguilera's new album, slated for release on August 16th, including the following lead single, "Ain't no other man:"



Not bad work, I should say. I hope the album is a mondo-success so Premier can finally afford his own private island in the Dominican.

He's admitted in the past that he isn't very good with his money, and he's finally come around to saving and investing it would seem, not to mention the brilliant career move of producing for starlets like Aguilera... I hope this is a long and drawn out trend that sees him producing for all the young and sale-able stars, from Britney's inevitable comeback to Dakota Fanning's attempt at jazz fusion.

Premo has been the top producer in hip-hop for nearly two decades, rivalled only by Dr. Dre, who was much less consistent with better mainstream results.

For a clip from a documentary about DJs, here's the segment on Premier if you're interested.

Also, it should be noted that Premier is at least partially responsible for my career as an aimless slacker... If it weren't for listening to his records over and over in high school, I might have gotten better marks and become a successful engineer like my brother.

For those looking to be slackers too, here's a sample of his best work:

KRS-One - Outta Here
Gangstarr - Mass Appeal
Nas - Nas is Like
Crooklyn Dodgers - Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers
Common Sense - The Sixth Sense
Rakim - When I be on the Mic (2nd verse tribute to Premo)
Gangstarr - Full Clip

This Saturday in Pictures (featuring Daniella and a special guest)

My friend Daniella is here, and today I was nice enough to actually visit her.


This is her apartment, which is similar to mine in a town on the outskirts of Seoul. One of the perks of her job is that she actually has numerous co-worker friends to pick from, unlike me. The one above is named Cathy and comes from the faraway land of New York State.

And oh yeah, their subway station is called Beomgye (pronounced: BUMGAY).


I was so happy to see Daniella that I made silly faces, including the one directly above, which looks eerily like my grandfather laughing at a newfie joke.


We went to a Korean barbecue place where you can save money by cooking the food yourselves.

Rover or Patches? The waitress couldn't remember the name of this animal, but she assured us it was very cute.

(Disclaimer for those who take this website literally, including my mother: No, I did not actually eat dog.)

This Week in (not many) Pictures

So I actually had something to do this week. I recieved a random e-mail from friends who just happened to be in Korea for a while on their way to China.


I was very happy to see them.


This is Nick. He is happy, too. We are hanging out by the high-tech creek near my apartment... For some reason, people hang out there with children until midnight when it's just us and a few leftover drunks.


This is Nick's wife Jodi when we did some sight-seeing. She is happy, too, although she doesn't believe in smiling due to religion (or something).

Behind them is the biggest semi-Ancient Gate in Korea. I can't remember much of the history, so read this instead.

Also, I was the one who introduced Nick and Jodi in my first year of university when they were both introverted hermits in residence. I was the ultra-friendly nerd who got to know everybody and somehow got them to look each other in the eye.

They've been in Japan for the last year while Nick taught English in an impoverished fishing village where a house can be rented for $150 a month and the fisherman beat their children mercilessly.

Jodi spent two months last Christmas volunteering at a school for poor girls in India so that they could learn to read and write and increase their dowry. She also saw people go number two on the streets.

Yesterday (Friday), they took a ferry boat to China where they plan to waste the rest of their money before returning to Canada or America or, most likely, France - the only country they can both legally work with Nick's citizenship, despite the fact that they're married.

The End.

You learn something new (and useless) every day

"No, you don't know anyone who has tipped me. You're a liar."

I just found the best wikipedia entry of all-time about cow-tipping, of all things.

You probably have numerous friends who "know someone who has tipped cows." Well, too bad, but apparently they're liars. According to wikipedia, there is no actual evidence that any cow has been tipped in the recorded history of man.

It turns out that cows don't sleep standing up, nor do they lock their legs while sleeping. They also don't tilt with the wind while doing this standing-up--while-sleeping thing, as many would have you believe. They also have intense senses of hearing and wide-array-vision that allows them to see frat boys coming toward them with giddy drunken smiles on their faces... They sleep lying down in short intervals throughout the day.

No comment on wikipedia about whether cows die or break ribs when you tip them over... I guess those two rumours were also wrong, although I'm sure it isn't comfortable to be tipped, if in fact it has ever actually happened.

Also, it turns out that raising small breed cows in your backyard is now a trend, as officially declared by a news source I've never heard of. The article says that families with large backyards are raising the cows as pets and selling them off when they grow big enough.

(P.S. I hope my Mom asks her farming friends about this so that she can give me more juicy gossip about cow-tipping. What a great topic.)

Super Sweet Day

1) I got to see Jodi and Nick last night, my favourite married couple from Toronto, including a trip to Pizza Hut - the finest in Korean cuisine.

2) My friend Daniella is here, so hopefully I can see her on the weekend. It sounds like she might live in a more user-friendly part of Korea, meaning access to food, etc, so I'm kind of jealous... However, it sounds like she's doing a lot of crying about missing home, so maybe I'll avoid her for a few months.

3) This site is getting a ridiculous number of hits because of my Lonelygirl15 post. Two hundred visitors a day is more hits than I've ever gotten on any website I've had, so I sort of feel special.... You know what's worse? The most successful website any of my friends ever had was a poetry site! That's right, my friend Cindy Wells had a poetry website in high school that had 10,000 visitors a day... My friend Lee Mellor had a very successful serial killers site,too. (They could have made a mint these days with google adsense. )

4) People are reminiscing about Willow, the greatest movie ever made by George Lucas.

5) I get paid tomorrow! My first full paycheque, so I can't wait to see whether the contract I signed was actually legally binding or whether the fine print has put me in poverty in a region of the world I know nothing about.

6) I have a new fake name - Timothy Kornzer. I'll probably get into more detail later about why I dropped the "Blatchford" (including disapproval from the REAL Blatchford). I got the new name from a mispelling of my name by a student, and I thought it had a nice ring to it... Either Kornzer or Korzner, I'm not sure what sounds better. Doesn't it sound Jewish? Could that be a postive or negative? All commentary welcome .

Writing about Youtube starlets really pays off AND What's Tim reading today?

So writing about Ms. Lonelygirl15 has gotten me my first day of 200+ hits... You think I'll be writing about Youtube again soon? You were right! Forget about my "family" and "friends" who want to see "pictures of their loved ones."

As for what I'm reading... A novelization of the greatest film of all time. WILLOW!!!

My friend Daniella COULD be in Korea by now...

Unless, of course, she chickened out... which I honestly held (and still hold) as a possibility.

If she is here, I wish her a merry trip. I hope she hasn't noticed the rampant air pollution yet. It's a real downer when you first get here.

UPDATE: Yeah, she's here, alive and everything. I guess I was wrong.

Why don't Africans like me?

The best part about having a webpage that attacts a few people (but not too many) is that you can have an awesome hit counter that shows you a dozen different details about everyone that visits.

So, looking at this world map with the last 100 people that saw my site, where the hell are the Africans and South Americans? Do I not have enough respect for the more impoverished parts of the world? Am I not doing enough to promote myself in Kinshasha and Lima?

From now on, I'm going to try my darndest to attract more visitors from these places... Not to mention Iraq. Where's the love? Isn't the power back on in Baghdad yet? It's been four years.

This Sunday in Pictures (and a tribute to the great Ben Johnson!!!)

Since it wasn't as hot as usual today, I actually ventured out of my apartment to find these kids playing in a water fountain.


They told me to "F.O.," so I told them, it's not even their fountain in the first place. It belongs to Wooribank, which I have an account at! They didn't seem to care.


So I bumped around on the subway line and ended up at a park on the south side of the Han River, made famous by the phrase, "Miracle of the Han River," whereby South Korea became a very rich country and was able to afford buildings like the tall one on the right, a 63-story building called, imaginatively enough, 63 Building. I'm not kidding.


Unfortunately, to be able to make all that money, South Korea had to dump a lot of crap in their nice river. Not pretty.


A closeup of 63 Building. This was the tallest building in Asia for a few months prior to the 1988 Olympics. I assume that was a reason for building it, because it has a memorial to the Olympics in front of it...

Remember, 1988 was the Olympics of Canadian superstar Ben Johnson - still a hero of mine after all these years, especially after its been proven that everybody in that race was on 'roids.

(And yes, thanks to youtube, that's a video of Ben Johnson's record breaking race. And boy oh boy does he dominate. That record stood until only a few years ago, broken by Tim Montgomery and then Justin Gatlin, BOTH proven to be 'roids users.)


As you might have seen above, not many people are outside on such a crappy hot day... They're all inside where they can take bad arty blue-tinted pictures like this one.


Lastly, an apartment tower with the least obvious name of all-time... What could they possibly be suggesting about themselves, with a name like RICHensia?