I saw Transformers (non-plot-related spoilers)

First of all, I was somewhat surprised to see an (alien robot) airplane fly into a building. Too soon?
Second of all there's this great timely speech from Optimus Prime, which I will paraphrase thusly

Why should we help the humans? They are a weak and violent race, but they are a young race full of hope, and I see something of ourselves in them. Everybody deserves the abiity to determine their own future and we must insure that they may do so . . .

At this point I'm going "Ooh, shoehorned Iraq War message, deep."

. . . by finding the Cube and preventing Megatron from getting the Allspark.

Subtexty.

A proper review and analysis to come, but let me be the (fifty) first to tell you to go to the theater early in the morning and buy one matinee ticket and one evening ticket, because you will want to see it again.

I love Mika Brzezinski

Although this seems like it could be really staged.

I blew off TV

Today I got a call from Arirang TV, Korea's internationally broadcast English-language TV channel, and they wanted me to appear on some segment on Korea Today being interviewed about what I thought about Korea. I told them I was busy and, rather than making time for them, told them to call me in August. "But you're an extremely minor internet celebrity now!" they said. "Yeah, but I'll still say the same things in a month." I replied.
I didn't give it much thought at the time but isn't it funny that I didn't consider the TV channel even worth a canceled class, I wouldn't pass up $50 or so for the chance to be on TV, but I've been working on my next attempted viral Korean video for the past several days. Surely this is a small sign of the times.

Dr. Rockso, the rock and roll clown

I really love Metalocalypse, Brendan Small's Cartoon Network show. Of all the great things I've seen on that fine program, by far the best is the episode Dethclown, in which Toki of the heavy metal band Dethklok befriends 'the rock and roll clown' Dr. Rockso.

The rest of the band, which hates clowns and Dr. Rockso, even though clowns are statistically the most hated of all creatures and therefore 'metal', subjects Rockso to a brutal beating. Dr. Rockso becomes an agent for whoever those guys who hate Dethklok are and attempts to infiltrate the Dethklok compound while showing Dethklok his video 'I'm just a rock and roll clown'. This is one of the greatest ever distillations of why fun is bad.

By which I mean that fun, the distillation of that which makes human beings happy, is, in inappropriate doses, not good for us. And by which I also mean that we modern human beings can only access fun in doses which border on inappropriately large.

Why does Rockso constantly talk about cocaine and yet when asked (it would seem) why his nose is bleeding he says "I fell down." It's all about sheer childish self-indulgence, the Rockso raison d'etre.

The brilliant thing about the introduction of this character is that it allows us to see something that both Dethklok and the shadowy conspiracy that is out to destroy them hate equally: frivolous, childish self indulgence. Dethklok may be a ridiculous heavy metal band, but at least they have visions and values. All Rockso has is his cocaine and the eyes of others judging him.

Some thoughts

I have been highly occupied with a)desperately looking for teachers to replace me and the other teacher at my school and b)actually getting a job. I don't think there is much of an apparatus for hiring foreigners who become minor internet celebrities in Korea's tradition-bound banks. So I have been unable to really get anything done at all except a lot of thinking, none of it fruitful. In short:

• 'Interweb', 'intertubes', and any kind of willfully ignorant misnomenclature for the internet are not funny. Please stop.
• I was hasty to dub America's painfully unfunny anticomedy as 'Adult Swim Comedy'. Both the Venture Brothers and Metalocalypse are great and not anticomedy.
• 'How to Win Friends' and Influence People' is a great, hilarious and interesting book. Written in the 1930s and brimming with stories about Prussian noblemen, dowagers, Rudolph Valentino and farmboys-turned-magnates, it basically seems to be the first non-religious book to ever come up with a reasonable reason to be nice to people.
  

Make that 20,000 people

That's the number of people who saw my Korean video resume in the last three days. It has essentially petered out to a trickle since it was taken off the main page of Daum TVpod, but I'd say that's enough for now. The comments, about 120 so far, were almost all positive, with a few people pointing out the fact that my speaking was a little but stilted (it's not easy to memorize things in a foreign tongue) and one guy calling shenanigans on my age (why, how old do I look for crying out loud?). My appearance was compared to this guy:
and this guy:

and that's why I thoroughly endorse Sony handicams, the only handicam that really can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
I got a few job offers relatively quickly, but I'm still looking. I also got a few emails from middle and high school kids who were stressing out about studying English by themselves. I emailed them all recommending that they just focus on one piece of the language at a time, experiment with making new sentences whenever they can, and keep a notebook of things they can't say. Sound advice, I would say.
anyway, I'm already planning my second video attempt, a how-to video for people in Korea studying English. Sounds like a real crowd pleaser, no?

12,000 people have seen my Korean video resume

I don't know what to say about that. The comments have been very supportive, but I am totally speechless.