blog-related
I was reading some Parker Palmer today, and something he said reminded me of Annie Dillard's weasel essay, found in Teaching a Stone to Talk. I read the essay again, and seeing as it is the inspiration for our blog's byline, I thought I would go ahead and post it here. It is one of my all-time favorite essays.
Click on the "continue reading" link to see the whole thing.
ANNIE DILLARD
LIVING LIKE WEASELS
A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Yep, Korea beats out Italy and every country in North Africa and the Middle East to be the world's largest consumer of garlic. They eat it by the chunks here (generally they cut each clove in half--once), and they eat lots of chunks.
Sources:
http://facts.trendstoday.info/food-and-drink/garlic
http://www.squidoo.com/seoul-korea-information-and-travel-guide
There are a few people amongst our readership who use us as their technology advisors. If you are such a person, this entry might be of interest to you. If you are interested in our goings and comings, then this may not be so thrilling.
I recently uploaded all our digital pictures to Flickr.com. You may have noticed that we use Flickr to host our Korea pictures, and you may be wondering why we have put them all there, as if you really wanted to look at that many pictures.
The truth is we did not upload them so you could look at them, but as a means of storage for ourselves. Unlike sites like Facebook, which compress your photos when you upload them, Flickr saves the actual photo, giant size and all. For $25 a year, Flickr gives us as much space as we can use (if you were to ask Jordan about this he would say, "it's a good deal"). So we no longer have to backup our photos on our external harddrive. They are in fact safer on Flickr, since they are about triple backed up on Flickr's servers (and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!) and you can't drop the internet or spill water on it.
The other main reason we put them on Flickr was to organize them. Think about how many pictures you have. Now think about how many pictures you'll have in 20 years. How will you find that one picture of me eating ice cream in San Francisco? The answer is: Flickr. Flickr gives you the best options for organizing and searching your pictures. There are a few offline programs that give similar options, but these can be frustrating to use because they utilize so much memory that they slow your computer down. And if your computer crashes, or you get a new one, you might lose all the organization you've done, if not the actual pictures.
So that's why we use Flickr. If you want to know how we use Flickr, you can watch this movie. I made it, and apparently I had a lot to say because it's really long. I found Flickr tricky to use when I was starting out, and so perhaps explain more than you need to know. I have made friends with it though, and once you go through the initial work of loading your old pictures, it will take very little work to maintain as long as you add your pictures as you take them.
Needless to say, we highly recommend this solution if you take more than 100 pictures a year. Because 100 pictures times 20 years is 2000 pictures. And who only takes 100 pictures a year?
Ahem. So Marisa's birthday is coming up (as she likes to say, this is her "birthday month"), and it turns out that what she would really like is ice cream from Baskin Robbins. So I'm trying to raise 24 scoops for her. If you would like to contribute one scoop towards that twenty four, please use the "chip in" widget to the right to donate $2.50 (the cost of one scoop -- yeah, let's not comment on that).
And remember, this is top secret (which is why I'm posting under my code name, "Jourdanais")
Donguri is, as most of you correctly guessed or discovered, a flying squirrel named after an acorn (donguri means acorn in Japanese), who appears in a single episode of the extremely wonderful, 2004 Japanese animated series, Windy Tales. That is all I am actually going to tell you, because further exposition would do little to clarify our motivation for naming our site after him. If you simply wanted to know where the name comes from, now you do.
If you want to try to understand something of our motivation, you will have to watch Windy Tales. The show has not yet been officially released in the United States, which means that the only way to get it with English subtitles is to download it. The easiest (and I think only) way to do that is via torrent files. If you don't know about torrents, don't panic, just read this tutorial.
Once you have read that tutorial and have installed one of the recommended torrent programs, you can download the entire 13-episode season of Windy Tales by clicking and opening this torrent. Each episode is only 20 minutes long; Donguri appears in episode 4.
I mentioned a website earlier that would allow you to get email updates from our blog, but I am not sure if that site is working correctly... if you have not been getting our blog posts by email, but would like to, you can sign up for email updates now using this form (or at any time with the new form in the sidebar):
Note: you will be able to unsubscribe at any time should you desire to.
When we said we wanted you to sign the guestbook, we meant YOU!
We've created a guestbook for our site, which you can access here (or by clicking the link up at the top). Everyone should post an entry, letting us know who you are, and where you're from!
We're still working on getting this blog fully set up, and are experiencing various technical difficulties off and on... if you notice anything strange or ugly, that's probably the reason, and you should probably check back later. Thanks for your patience!
Overview
Marisa thought I should write up a little something for those of you who may not be familiar with blogs, or how they "work." The truth is, there's nothing really fancy or complicated about it: open your web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox), type in our web address (which is www.chasingdonguri.com), and hit "Enter." That will take you to our mail blog page, where you can read all of our incredibly interesting updates. You will see that each blog "post" has a headline, and a date to the right which indicates when the post was made in Korean time (which is GMT + 9, 14 hours ahead of Central US time). Each blog post also shows a picture of either myself or Marisa under the date, which indicates which of us made the post in question. You can see that this post has my picture displayed, because I posted it.
Photos
Anything that we write in terms of updates will be posted to the top of the front page of our blog, so new posts will be readily visible when you come to our webpage. We will also post some pictures on the front page to go with the updates; however, we will not post ALL of our pictures to the front page. If you want to browse through all of our pictures, you will need to click on the "photos" link at the very top of the page (There's a row that says "Blog, Scrapbook, Photos, Videos, About Us" -> click on the "Photos" link). That link will take you to a page which displays all of our photo albums: click on an album, and you can browse through the pictures in that album. So any time we upload new pictures, they will into an album on our photos page. Like with the photos, any videos we take will be present on the "Videos" page, but these will usually be posted to the front page of our blog as well.
Scrapbook
The "Scrapbook" link will let you browse through Marisa's scrapbook, as she adds pages to it: currently she doesn't have any scrapbook pages completed, so there is nothing there.
Commenting
At the bottom of each blog post there will be a link that says "Add a comment"; clicking on that link will allow you to say something in response to the post, like "really cool post," or "I also like pink giraffes." If someone has already made a comment, the link will say something like "2 comments" -> you can still click on the link to add your own comment.
Getting Email Updates
If you would like to be updated by email when we post something new to our blog (so that you don't have to keep coming to the webpage to check), there is a cool service called RSS Forward that will allow you to do just that: simply go to www.rssfwd.com and enter the website address of our blog into the form on the front page, then click "Submit," and follow the instructions to enter your email address. Once you have subscribed to our blog via RSS Forward you will receive any new posts you make in your email inbox. Images and videos will be removed, however, so I recommend visiting our site any time you get an email about an update.
That's It!
That's basically it. There are a variety of other little features that you can discover and explore for yourself (or maybe I'll post about some of them later on), but that's it for the basics.
Appendix A: Why Blog?
Okay, okay, so some of you may be wondering what all of this hoopla is about: what is it with us young people anyway? Why can't we just send out email updates the old-fashioned way? After all, email was good enough for our grandparents, right? Here are a few of the benefits of blogging, from our perspective:
1. A blog allows us to update everyone at once about our general experience: we can then use email for the personal notes and such.
2. A blog allows information to be better organized and more accessible than email. Fancy things like archiving, tagging, and searching can be implemented easily.
3. A blog allows us to update you with pictures, videos, and scrapbooks, rather than with text alone.
4. A blog allows freedom of choice: if you don't want to be bombarded with what's happening in our lives, you can simply stop visiting the site, rather than having to resort to an embarassing email explaining how you want to be taken off our list because we're boring.
5. A blog allows for a larger audience: should someone outside of our circle of family and friends be searching the internet hoping to find a few stories from people teaching English in Korea, they might be lucky enough to stumble upon our site.
Appendix B: What's With the Name?
A couple of you will understand the name, and if you've read Annie Dillard you might get the byline... I'll explain them later on.