Interesting

Take the What's your Tori POWER song? quiz at reallydeepthoughts.com.

This does sum me up, I suppose--"everybody knows I'm her man" must have done it. Pity I don't actually like the song.

Maybe Sauron was the good guy, after all

J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress
"The Lord of the Rings" is lovingly crafted, seductive -- and profoundly backward-looking. Why not look at things through the Dark Lord's eye for a change?

By David Brin

Procrastination, Terror, and Other Fun Stuff

I procrastinate, a lot. I don't know why it surprises people to find out that I do. (Classic example: Mom saying to me, wonderingly, this past July that surely I don't need to do that much more work on my Honours, since I got a lot down over the spring. Me, replying that actually, I did next to nothing because I was so concerned about being bi. Mom saying, "oh.") That example, and others I can remember, pretty much explains why people could be surprised that I procrastinate: I put up an excellent front. Or, to be more accurate, I've usually been so withdrawn into myself that no one ever could grasp a clue

(Question to LJ and other lurking friends who saw me last spring: Did you have any suspicion that anything was wrong with me last semester, that anything was bothering me?)

I just don't like submitting things, because I'm always afraid that I'll be proven spectacularly insufficient, and so, I prefer not to risk it. For example: I've never applied for a scholarship. It isn't because, objectively considered, I wouldn't qualify to win a scholarship because I think I could win one--my first year at UPEI, I won an honorarium for earning the highest marks of all first-year Arts students. It's just that I've always been afraid, I guess of some sort of humiliation, that once I make any kind of commitment on paper, I'll be revealed as a fraud and fail horrifically and publically.

But then, if I don't risk failure consistently, it'll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Argh--I hate being a fucking coward.

I'm beginning to feel a brutal mood coming on, which is usually good for my work since that gets me done, bad for my personality but then who gives a fuck about that? société de spectacle, that's all any society is.

Trying to print off a John Glassco essay, to submit to Dr. Innes-Parker for an upcoming undergrad English conference, but WordPerfect keeps crashing. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

I had a vision I could turn you right/a stupid mission and a lethal fight
I should have seen it when my hope was new/my heart is black and my body is blue
and I'm losing my favourite game/you're losing your mind again
I'm losing my favourite game/I've tried but you're still the same

Curriculum Vitæ

Here is the scanty official data of my life on two pages of a word processor file.

Can anyone who reads it tell me if this is good enough to accompany an application for grad school?

( Thus follows the scanty official-type record of my life )

Korean Facets

I found an interesting webpage: Koryo Saram: The Koreans of Central Asia. This page, this page, here, an interesting comparative essay on ethnic Korean writings in the Soviet era and in the United States, and this Microsoft Word document. There may be a half-million Koreans in the former Soviet Union, still concentrated mainly in Central Asia but with a substantial community on Sakhalin island in the Russian Far East and a growing North Korean immigrant/refugee population in the area of Vladivostok.

And I've just come from watching, on CNN, a CNN/People biography of Margaret Cho.

Oh: Anne of Green Gables and Montgomeryiana is apparently quite popular</A in South Korea.

Habitable planets may be common

Habitable planets may be common

10:18 03 January 03

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition

One in four of the planetary systems identified to date outside the Solar System are capable of harbouring other Earths, say astrophysicists, a much higher proportion than anyone expected.

The researchers decided the race to detect an extrasolar Earth-like planet is taking too long. So, instead of scanning the skies, they modelled all the planetary systems known so far to work out which could be hiding habitable planets.

( Read more )

This is almost as cool as potential life on Venus.