revamping the vlog

As you (should) already know, I'm a blogger. What some of you may not know is that I attempted, for a embarrassingly short while, to keep a vlog as well. I've linked to it a couple of times, but I try to avoid saying too much about it, because it's incomplete and poorly-kept, with overlong and badly-edited videos. It's as underdone as chicken tenders at Chili's. 

Well. 

I'd like to change that. 

I need a decent microphone and some updated video-editing skills. But once I master those, I'm going to revamp that blog of mine. 

How?

Well, since I already cover everything related to travel, cocktails, flying, and writing on this here blog, I'm going to take a different route with my YouTube channel. Oh, of course I'll put up interesting travel videos (should be plenty of those coming from Southeast Asia). Once I move back to the USA, I'll also set up a camera in the kitchen and start making video cocktail reviews instead of just text. (Perhaps once I reach Cocktail Review No. 85 or 90 or 100, whenever that may be.) And when I get back stateside I'll resume my flying career, too: specifically my quest for a single-engine commercial pilot ticket with instrument, floatplane, taildragger, and high-performance ratings. I'm sure that'll make for some interesting video fodder too. I may even need to get a GoPro...

But all that's in the future. For now, while I'm here in Korea, I can definitely do better with the vlog. 

I've been watching a lot of vlogs on YouTube lately (specifically the QiRanger, KWOW, and HowTheWorldWorks), and I love 'em to death. Here are some things that they all do well:

• they supplement their speech with text, music, and hi-def images, artfully edited into the video as a whole
• they talk about pertinent, up-to-date, and interesting subjects
• their bedside manner is engaging and fun, and their speech is practiced, fluent, and clear

I can do all that stuff, easy. Might be a little rough once I first start out, but I'll get into the swing of it. 

So what kind of topics will I talk about, then?

Something that people keep telling me I'm great at discussing in an interesting, meaningful way: history and wordplay. 

Once per week, I'm thinking, I'll do an installment called 5-Minute History, where I'll talk about some obscure and little-known topic that nonetheless had far-reaching consequences on our civilization and society. As the title suggests, these videos will be about five minutes in length. 

On certain days of the week, I'll have shorter and supplementary columns: Slang Saturdays (wherein I discuss the origin of an idiom or colloquialism) and Word Wednesdays (wherein I discuss the etymology, cultural significance, and historical context of English words). In short, I am going to create a whole new world for me and others to play around in online. And maybe learn something along the way. 

Sound boring? It won't be, trust me. 

I'm not sure when all of this will get started. My first order of business is to create a neat channel trailer for this vlog and inform everyone of its revitalization. I need to get familiar with video editing and figure out how to insert music, voice-overs, images, video clips, and so on. But you guys here on the Sententious Vaunter will be the first to know when the new-and-improved Vaunter-vlog starts up. And who knows? This might be a nice segue into the world of radio, something I do on the side that could get me hired one day. 

Stay tuned, vlogsphere. Ex Post Facto is going to get a whole lot sexier. 

Nope, even sexier than that. 

birds, fish, and onomatopoeia

                                                                                     This image belongs to Adam Koford on Tumblr.

Sometimes I catch myself wishing that I had a cooler surname. (Sorry, Dad, but it's true.) "Post" seems kind of basic sometimes. It's a one-syllable word, for one thing. It sounds chunky and awkward. Post. Not much you can do with that. Whenever I get into these moods, I wish for a longer last name, one less bereft of imagination or dignity.

I've compiled a list, in case you're interested. Just so you can say them out loud and compare. Heck, I'll even give you my first name. Feel privileged: this is the first time I've shared it on this blog. It's Andrew.

So take Andrew and match it with some of these babies:

• Shackleton — as in Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer.
• Rackham — as in "Calico Jack" Rackham, the pirate; I'd suggest using my nickname "Andy" for this one.
• Livingstone — "Andrew Livingstone, I presume?"
• Sullivan — Ed Sullivan.
• Longstreet — James Longstreet, Confederate general.
• Minogue — I had to throw that one in there, 'cause my mom reads this blog and she'll get the joke. It refers to Kylie Minogue...
• Remington — after Eliphalet Remington, who founded E. Remington & Sons in 1816...yes, that Remington.
• Winchester — 'cause that wouldn't sound too bad either.
• Hightower — after quip-and-quote author Cullen Hightower.
• Hillary — Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest; and while we're on that subject, "Tenzing Norgay" is a pretty badass name too.
• Beckenbauer — nobody in particular, it just sounds cool.
• Faulkner — if you don't know who inspired this choice, I'll smack you.
• Fitzgerald — ditto; there's a film based on one of his books in theaters right now!
• Driscoll — Jack Driscoll from King Kong.

They sound so austere, don't they?

Then I remember that some of my favorite people in the world—particularly writers—have one-syllable last names. H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Howard Hughes, Gustav Holst, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Ringo Starr, Orville & Wilbur Wright, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Thomas Hobbes, Howard Hawks, James Burke, Dave Grohl, Mungo Park, Captain James Cook, and H. &  H. Fritz. (Those last two are my grandparents.) Every single one of my Korean students, past and present, has a one-syllable surname—be it Choi or Han or Lee or Kim. And there's a lot of fictional characters who are near and dear to my heart who have 'em, too: Martin Riggs, Arthur Dent, Bruce Wayne, and (of course) Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones.

I can't forget that Post is my parents' name, too. And my brother's. And all my ancestors, going back to Germany or the Netherlands or wherever the heck they're from. And that's all right by me. I guess "A.T. Post" wouldn't look too bad on a hardback cover in a bookstore.

Speaking of sounding more austere, I did something interesting in one of my free-talking classes yesterday. I have just one single student, whom I'll call Justine. (I always liked that name. I'm angling for it to be the name of my first daughter, but Miss H isn't budging.) We got to talking about animal names, somehow. If it's one thing I'm short on, it's Korean vocabulary. So we started swapping names. I'd come up with an animal and she'd tell me the Korean name. In this way I found out the words for cuckoo (ddak-dda-guri), owl (bu-eong-i), ostrich (tajo), flounder (gajami), eel (jang-eo), oyster (gul), stingray (gwang-eo), and jellyfish (haepari). This was partly for our enjoyment, partly for my education and partly so Justine would be able to impress her future employers with her English vocabulary.

We also talked about animal sounds. I discovered that the Koreans have quite a different set of these, and in many cases, the sound is more faithfully reproduced than they are in the Western lexicon. Over here, mice don't squeak, they say jjik-jjik. (To make this work properly, your Korean pronunciation has to be flawless. Speak the words rapidly in a high-pitched tone, pronouncing the double-j with a grin on your face and barely scraping over the k at the end. The result sounds remarkably like the cheep-cheep noise which mice actually do make. Now, please record yourself doing this and send it to me. Tee hee.)

Cats don't meow, they say na-ong. Try it. Nah-oh-ng. Roll it together with the same rising and falling inflection that you'd use to say "meow" if you were imitating a cat. NAONG! Crazy, eh?

Dogs don't growl, they say eu-reu-reong. (The "eu" vowel sound is manufactured by saying "oo" without making  your lips into an "o" shape. "Reong" sounds like the English word "rung." Blend it all together in a dog-like voice and you'll get the idea.)

We also talked about onomatopoeia. Once I'd conveyed the meaning of this bewildering word to her, she smiled and started ticking off sounds. It seems that, in Korea, old men don't grumble: they say "Jujeol-jujeol." This is what inarticulate kvetching sounds like—sort of what the word "jewel" would be if you replaced the "w" with another "j."

It's common practice, especially among poor male college students and young bachelors, to go down to the convenience store at night, buy a bowl of instant ramen, and prepare it and eat it right there in the store. Most shops and corner marts have a microwave oven and a small counter on-site. It doesn't surprise me anymore when I see a crowd of schoolboys (or even elderly couples on weekends) standing over matching bowls of steaming noodles in a 7-11 or a Mini-Stop, slurping them up contentedly.

The sound effect for slurping is hu-ru-ruk. Again, go real lightly over the k at the end. Don't think of it as a sound, but rather as the place where sound stops. Blur the syllables of the word all together, as fast as you can. Slur it. Better yet, don't use your voice: whisper it. Breathe it in. Try to make a slurping noise with your mouth as you say it, and you'll hear it.

As with other Asian nations, the Koreans have onomatopoeia for states and activities that normally don't even make a sound. I think I've mentioned on this blog that the Japanese (and likely the Koreans) have sound effects for staring (jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii), standing still (shakeen), jaws dropping (gabeen) and falling in love (mero-mero). A lot of these probably come from comic books and aren't in the general lexicon, but you never know. One of the ones that Justine told me about yesterday was kkeunjeok-kkeunjeok. It sounds like "goon-juck," if you say the g and the k REALLY QUIETLY. Bounce over them as if your tongue was a tennis ball oscillating between two rackets. Kkeunjeok-kkeunjeok.

This is the sound of stickiness.

I kid you not. For the full effect, place your spread fingers on a tabletop and retract them as if you were putting them in dried maple syrup, and say this sound. Kkeunjeok-kkeunjeok. You can just hear the sticky.

To me, these noises sound more accurate than the ones I was brought up with. Maybe that's just me, but it's undeniable and it's maddening. I don't know what to attribute the eerie accuracy of Korean onomatopoeia to: perhaps it's because the language is so full of glottal consonants and versatile vowels that they're naturally disposed toward making sounds with their mouths. Or perhaps it's just because the Koreans are an ancient Confucian people that take pride in actually listening to sounds and reproducing them accurately—and have had several thousand years to practice.

Anyway, I thought you might find that interesting.

A.T. Post, signing off.

what Gwangnaru means

One of the things I like to do whenever I visit (or move to) a new town in a different country is translate the name. Names tell you a lot about a place. In a nation as old, as storied and as historically rich as Korea, names give you a wealth of information about the origins and geopolitical importance of a place.

"Oh sure," you might scoff. "What can place names tell you in a country as small as Korea? It's all the same peninsula. The whole country's in a single time zone. It's a one-biome and one-climate country. Locations that are only 25 kilometers apart within it are going to have the same history."

Not true. Heck, you only have to travel 20 kilometers in Korea to hear dialectical differences in the language. Twenty kilometers! And I can confidently say that, in the culinary arena alone, Gwangnaru is worlds apart from Bucheon. I can only imagine the cultural, traditional and historical disparities that will come to light. I've already noticed that Gwangjin folk seem to prefer duck to chicken. Perhaps that has something to do with their proximity to the Han River...

But I digress. Let's talk about translating city names.

I started this tradition with Bucheon. Through a sinuous process of trial, error, ignorance, and liberal use of Google Translator, Miss H and I managed to figure it out. If we are correct (and we most likely aren't, since we haven't the knowledge or the resources to examine the name in Hanja, or Chinese characters), "Bucheon" translates to "Gold River."

Well, I kept this tradition up when Miss H and I moved across town to Gwangnaru, in the Gwangjang neighborhood of the Gwangjin ward.

Noticing a pattern here?

That's right. The syllable "gwang" appears in every one of those names.

Now, as with a lot of Korean words, gwang has its origins in Chinese. If I did my research correctly (and I probably didn't), "gwang" means "light" when written in Hanja. But like other languages that were adopted by other cultures and nations, however, Korean words' meanings and connotations have evolved from the mother tongue. The first and foremost definition that popped up in Bing Translate for "gwang" was "barn, shed, or granary."

Naru proved somewhat harder to translate. It's a fairly common word. It tends to show up a lot in business names: Gimbap Naru, or Sundae Naru. (Just so you know, "sundae" is not ice cream. It's bundles of Chinese vermicelli wrapped in cow or pig intestines. It's a popular snack food here.)

Thankfully the Internet is not my only source. I have the assistant director of the Sejong University's General English Program. At a meet-and-greet yesterday I asked him straight-out what the word "naru" meant. He's been living in Korea for more than a decade, and is married to a native Korean (they have two beautiful children). Rest assured that the A.D. is quite fluent in Hangeul. Without a moment's pause he informed me that "naru" is a ford or a ferry-landing.

Well, there you go. "Gwangnaru" translates to "Barn Ferry-Landing." For the sake of lingual aesthetics, let's shorthand it to "Granary Ford."

Hello, my name is (Professor) Post, and I live in Granary Ford, Snow Fence. (Gwangnaru, Seoul. Ha-ha.)

So from now on, if you hear me make a passing reference to "Granary Ford," don't be confounded. I'm referring to Gwangnaru. When the yellow dust clears up, I'll get you some pictures of the place. For now, enjoy your weekend...and this photo of my new building, Dongho Villa:

the sea in the sky

There was something new in the firmament as Dawg and I lifted off from Apple Valley: clouds.

I can't begin to fathom why—all that nonsensical blather about global warming notwithstanding—but the weather here in the Mojave Desert has acting strangely for months. First we had a winter that was unseasonably wet. Now we have a spring which is unseasonably long. Windy, too. Spring's only supposed to last about, oh, two weeks around here. Normally, you have winter, which lasts about two months, with temperatures in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, accompanied by that wet stuff that falls out of the sky. Rain, I think they call it. Then you have spring, which goes for a couple of weeks to a month, temperatures in the 60s and 70s, with sprightly breezes (read: howling gales).

Then comes summer, which lasts about eight months, and is characterized by the sun being directly overhead, blasting torrential amounts of blasphemous heat onto the heads of the insane people who willingly choose to live here. There's also a paltry amount of wind (usually in the afternoons), perhaps a few cotton-ball clouds, and plenty of dust devils. Temperatures usually range between 98 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit. To escape the heat, animals dive underground and pant heavily. People go inside, shut the doors and windows, snap on the A/C and watch godawful daytime TV. In the evening, when the temperatures go down into the low 90s, animals and humans alike emerge to eat, drink, play and procreate.

It's those precious few weeks of spring which are to be cherished. One can actually stay outdoors the whole day through without melting into a gelatinous puddle. Things may actually be accomplished outside, such as chores, gardening, and home improvement, as well as more recreational affairs like exercise, picnics, even the consumption of a good book or a glass of lemonade. The Mojave Spring of 2010 has been going on now for two months. It's May Frickin' 27th out there, and it's currently in the low 60s, with winds of 25 miles per hour, gusting to 35. If that doesn't sound bad to you, that's enough to rattle the frame of my sturdy hacienda and howl around the eaves like a ravening monster. Makes the old folks at the airport huddle into their fleece and grumble about it being "still winter."

Normally I wouldn't mind this state of affairs. Sure, the wind dries out the eyeballs. Makes me look like I've been out on a bender the previous night. But hey, some days I really was out on a bender the previous night, so there's truth in advertising after all. However, wind is very bad for drones. Unmanned aerial vehicles don't fly so well in wind. Did I tell you that one of them went flipping off the runway at Victorville a few weeks back? Yep. Wind caught it just when it was landing. Knocked it into the dirt. Totaled it. That's three million dollars, shot. All because of a few fast-moving air particles.

Another thing we've been getting a lot of during this two-month spring is that wet stuff. Rain, is it? Yes. Showers of wet stuff, occurring every few weeks, have been falling out of the sky. There's been enough wet stuff to make an unprecedented amount of green stuff come up. Ordinarily the spring rains bring grass, some wildflowers, and turn the sagebrush and other shrubs green instead of brown or beige. This year's rains have worked miracles. I was out walking the other day (down by those high-tension lines I told you about). I actually saw lilies growing by the side of the track. Yes, real lilies: pale and somewhat desiccated, but lilies nonetheless, their green parts flapping in the "sprightly breeze."

This is exceedingly odd for a place that's only supposed to get 10 inches of rainfall a year. It's still cool, and it's not even all that dry. Why, I bet Death Valley barely got into the nineties yesterday. We actually had a fire in the wood stove a few days ago. Downright wacky, that. When it's windy, we don't fly, because Predators don't like too much wind beneath their wings. But winds weren't our only worry this morning. We also had clouds.

Now, I've never flown in clouds before. Not in, around, or near them. Clouds themselves are something unusual in the Mojave, down below 10,000 feet, anyway. I'm not qualified to fly in clouds yet, being only a student pilot, not having gotten my instrument rating. See, pilots who don't have an instrument rating are supposed to remain...let me see here, now...[consults the Federal Aviation Regulations, section 91.155, basic VFR weather minimums]...500 feet below, 1,000 feet above, and 2,000 feet horizontal, clear of clouds. ("VFR" stands for "Visual Flight Rules, and "IFR" stands for "Instrument Flight Rules," where you fly by using your instruments. Only pilots who've done an extra 40 hours of flight training and gotten their instrument ratings can fly IFR, but they can now fly through clouds, above 18,000 feet, and in poor visibility.)

So you may imagine, when Sierra Hotel lumbered off the runway, and I banked 'er left, into a climbing 180-degree turn, and the sun broke through the layers of clouds, lines and patches and streaks of them, all laying over the sky like a forest of cloud-trees cut down and strewn everywhere... Well, it was quite something. You know what it was like. Remember the first time you were in an airplane, and it climbed above the clouds, and the sun broke over the cloudscape, and all the multitudinous castles and skyscrapers and cliffs and buttes and towers and minarets, all inchoate white, spread themselves out beneath you like another world, an entire continent laid out in the heavens, a stormy sea in the sky? That's what it was like. Only I was flying myself through this white wonderland, and I had a much better view.

Dawg and I had gone up at the request of the Guard, so that we might ascertain the altitude of the cloud bases. This was because the Predator doesn't like clouds either, and the FAA doesn't like it when the Predators fly through clouds, particularly in civilian airspace. So our job was to determine whether we could escort the UAV through the clouds, up through the scattered cloud layer, through the holes and apertures, flank the lines of battle, make an end run around the puffy things. So it was that I, a student pilot, a greenhorn, a cloud virgin, got to fly above the clouds.

It was pure magic. It was not a single layer of clouds, not at first; they were scattered everywhere. It was more like an island chain than a continent: here there'd be a line of cotton balls; farther on some solid chains, cruising northeast, tall and proud, flags flying like battleships, the shortest of them easily 20 miles long; higher up the skies were streaked with cirrus and contrails. Everywhere were tiny wisps, huge buttressed watchtowers of cumulus, and odd-shaped clouds of no description which bridged gaps, hurried everywhere between their bigger brothers. The sky was turned into a patchwork quilt through which the sun shone, two horizons sparkling in the distance, one white and one brown, entrancing patterns of light and shadow dancing on the dusty ground below. I held the Mooney at a steady climb. Going 110 miles per hour, climbing 500 feet per minute, engine roaring at 2500 revolutions, we climbed ever higher. We reached the picket line, the first hurdle of clouds, and leaped over it, breaching the fortress walls. Then we were in the thick of it. We turned left to dodge a monster, a lumpy white beast with spikes along its back, its clawed limbs stretched out to the side; then we swung right again and headed for the mother ship. A solid, unbroken layer of clouds hovered over the Mojave River, 15 miles north of Victorville. It looked bad. The cloud base was down to about 8,000 feet. The restricted areas were capped with an inexhaustible supply of water and ice, suspended in the sky like a blanket.

Two hours later we went up to check again. This time conditions were good enough to bring the drone. Dawg piloted the Mooney like it was his old Navy jet, calmly relaying instructions to the drone driver. "Hold course 040." "Come right." "If you come ten degrees left, Grizzly, there's a nice big hole there you can probably make. Come left and give it your best climb." And so we went, following the drone as it clambered up an invisible ladder, turning right, turning left, dodging the extended arms of the clouds, which came from all sides and swiped at it like giant cat's paws. Up the drone leaped, straight it flew, curving through gaps, breaches in the cloud's defensive line, rabbit-holes in the sky. Once the gray ship ran straight into a cotton ball and disappeared entirely. It was a tense moment. Anything could happen. It was as if the clouds had opened up a maw in the middle of the blue and swallowed our charge whole.
"Keep your eyes open," Dawg said, tersely.
Seconds later, the Predator burst from the far side of the cloud, like a whale breaching in the breakers. It was a Nantucket sleigh ride at 8,000 feet. And then we'd made it. The skies cleared. The sun came down, and the cloud shadows danced. It was a clean shot to Four Corners. "That was great, chase," came the voice of the drone pilot. "But we just got word of severe turbulence, and we've been ordered to go home." A regretful grin lit up Dawg's face, the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

Another day on the job.

an F-bomb in K-Land

So, says the storyteller, sitting in a chair by the fireside, a whiskey sour in his hand, did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally dropped the F-bomb in front of my students?

It was 2008. I was 22 years old, and teaching English under contract in South Korea.

Now, as much as I try to deny it, I'm rather sensitive about my image. Not in regards to my appearance or personality, oh no. Knock on my door any given day and I'm liable to greet you in a pair of stained cargo pants and a ratty old T-shirt with a stretched collar. The hand I'll extend for you to shake will likely be the one I was picking my nose with five minutes earlier. Spending time with me is a crash-course in sexual innuendo, judgmental commentary, godawful puns and (consequently) social tolerance.

I'm sensitive about my image as an American, though. One of the things I dread about traveling is being perceived as the "ugly American." You know, one of those strident, bulbous, glassy-eyed jingoists who came to Paris because they wanted to see "the LOOV-ruh," and spent the whole time complaining about how unfriendly the natives were and how weird and different everything was. These folks put up a stink if they can't find somebody who speaks English (fancy not finding an English speaker in a foreign country!). They never bother to read up on their destination's cultural and social mores, and therefore unknowingly and repeatedly commit crimes of etiquette. They mispronounce names so egregiously that passers-by are physically sickened. And they try to touch or carry away a piece of every monument or museum piece they see. These are the people who poke fun at the Queen's Guard standing outside the gates of Buckingham Palace; send sushi back and ask for it to be cooked longer; and spend their entire Mexican vacation in a deluxe resort and come away twittering about what a nice country it was. Loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric, as Wikipedia puts it.

Every red-blooded American is allowed to jones for a double cheeseburger with fries while they're overseas, but jeez, people, don't harp on it. Just because the United States is the greatest country in the world doesn't mean you have to remind everybody within earshot about it. I don't want to be one of those ugly Americans. I am sometimes, but I try not to be. Americans have acquired such a stigma that I fancy I can see a little twinge of displeasure come into foreigners' eyes when I tell them where I'm from. The old "Oh-God-he's-an-American-this-is-going-to-be-just-great" kind of twinge. Not that I care, of course. I'm busy thinking I'll bet you've never fired a gun in your life, sucker. Bet you wish your country had the balls to enact a Second Amendment, don't you? This didn't happen much in Korea, I'm glad to say. When I said, "Miguk saram imnida" ("I'm an American"), people's eyes usually lit up...as long as they were under 40.

I'm not apologizing for anybody. I'm proud of the country I was born in. It's a swell place. There are a lot of intelligent, worldly, culturally-aware people here. But as usual, a tiny contingent of dimwits is mucking things up for the rest of us. Not every American tourist is ugly. And that's what I've set out to prove, no matter where I go. It's my unofficial mission, when I'm wandering the globe, to show people that Americans aren't evil, stupid, obtuse or ethnocentric. Whatever foreigners I meet are going to scratch their heads afterward and say, "Hmmm...that bloke wasn't all bad."

Well, except for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If I meet that guy on the street, I'm going to give him the wedgie of his life.

With this promise in mind, I set out to learn the Korean language almost immediately upon arriving there. No, before. I was familiarizing myself with the alphabet and basic grammar before I'd even left Wyoming. I was only a few months into my tenure at my hagwon (academy) on Geoje Island, but I was already starting to get comfortable in the lingo. I had the alphabet down, the number system was beginning to coalesce, and I even had some rudimentary sentences under my belt.

I was so proud of what I'd accomplished that I thought I'd trot out some of my skills before my students. Impress 'em, you know. Let them see that I was getting comfortable in their language, even as I was acclimatizing them to mine. Fair trade, you see. It would make 'em feel like I was making an effort, and that I wasn't some overbearing, self-centered xenophobe.

So I started calling out the page numbers of our textbook in Korean. You know, instead of "twenty" I'd say "i-ship." "O-ship-gu" for "59," etc. "Sam-baek-chil" in place of "307," and so on. Then I'd stand up there in front of the whiteboard and bask in the smiles, widened eyes, and delighted gasps of the little ebon-haired tykes.

Then it happened. The time came to turn to page eighteen.

There's a rather interesting quirk of the Korean language involving the number eighteen. It's spelled like this: 십팔. However, the pronunciation, ship-pal, is EXTRAORDINARILY similar to the Korean F-word, shi-pal (시팔). It's almost exactly the same, in fact. 십팔 is pronounced SHEEP-pal, but you don't aspirate the "p" at the end of "sheep." You can't hardly hear it. The Korean F-bomb is pronounced SHEE-pal, without any "p" at the end of "shee." Unless you're a lifelong Korean speaker, it's very, very difficult to hear—let alone pronounce—the difference between the two.

Just my rotten luck, huh?

Wondering why my entire class burst into peals of raucous laughter whenever I said "eighteen," I went to my Korean colleagues and asked them what the deal was.

Charles asked me, "How are you pronouncing it? Say it for us."

I did.

Eyes bulged. Jaws dropped. Hands clamped over mouths. A universal gasp of horror went up. Charles, who had perhaps been expecting it, was laughing. He put a friendly hand on my shoulder and said, bracingly, "You are saying the F-word."

A frayed little piece of paper went spinning through the whorls and eddies of my mind and burst into flames, disappearing forever. I suppose it was the last forlorn shred of my dignity, self-assurance, and pride. For the rest of the day, I slunk around campus with my head between my shoelaces, while Korean kids and teachers alike snickered into their sleeves.
It took me ages to live this down. Charles was a lot gentler than I deserved; he only ragged me once or twice a month for the remainder of my sojourn. The kids, however, wouldn't let it rest. Any time I paused in my lecture for more than two seconds, Arthur and Edwin would pipe up: "Teacher! Say eighteen! Eighteen!"

There were no consequences; no parents were called, no disciplinary action taken. No fire-breathing ajuma showed up at my apartment door, out for scalps. I don't even know if word got back to the school director. But me pulling the rug out from under my own attempt at cultural awareness was punishment enough. My worst nightmare had come true. Not only had I been guilty of the most grievous linguistic impropriety, but I'd also negated the pains I'd taken to disprove the theory of widespread American unworldliness. I'd done the exact opposite of my intention. My vaunted assiduousness had been thwarted by ignorance.

Oh well. It made for a good story.

random travel destinations - Wales

Jeez, I've practically covered the entire U.K. before even doing a tenth of the EU. Oh well, the hell with it. This one's going out to Smithy, who's currently peddling his brand of awesomeness over in the Republic of South Korea, but will soon be whooping it up in Wales. Might as well tell you all what the old lad's in for.

Now, I don't know much about the place, myself. Here's a bullet list of what I do know:

• It's tacked onto the southwest corner of England somewhere.
• It's rather small.
• The spelling of the Welsh language in no way resembles its pronunciation.
• The eminent Terry Jones is from there.
• So is Catherine Zeta-Jones (please tell me you don't need a hyperlink for her).
• And Hugh Griffith, too (you know, the actor who played that Arab guy from Ben-Hur).
• And, truth be told, it's also where we get Mr. Fantastic. Or Horatio Hornblower, depending on what shows you watch.

Abandoning all pretense of assiduous research, here's a list of things I found out from Wikipedia:

• Wales has a population estimated at three million. This means that, if the entire population of Wales was teleported into Los Angeles, they could form their own street gang and still reasonably expect to compete with MS-13.
• The Welsh once had a king named "Llewelyn."
• The word Wales stems from the Germanic word for "foreigner" or "stranger."
• Wales didn't fall into anarchy after the Roman withdrawal in 410 A.D. In fact, a series of "successor states" sprang up and thrived, and battled with other English kingdoms for territorial control. One of these English kingdoms was Mercia, famous for being mentioned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. ("Where'd you get the coconuts?" "We found them." "FOUND them? In Mercia? The coconut's tropical!")
• In the Welsh devolution referendum of 1979, the majority of the Welsh population voted against a proposal by the U.K.'s Labour government to establish an Assembly of Wales.
• A popular Welsh national symbol is the Red Dragon (Y Ddraig Goch). That means that if the United States and Wales ever had drunk sex and spawned a love child, it'd look something like Quetzalcoatl. A reddish Quetzalcoatl. How cool is that?
• There's a rather neat clock tower by the city hall in Cardiff. This would explain why the British PM is constantly ringing up the First Minister of Wales and saying, "My clock is bigger than yours."
• Wales has its own set of seven wonders.

Pretty neat, huh? Bet you didn't know about the whole "Llewelyn" thing.

Lesson to be learned here? Yes, Wales is actually a country. And it has its own unique culture, history, traditions, language, cuisine, natural attractions, landmarks, and...

...clock tower.

Don't you forget it.

from me to you

My valiant quest to win every award in the known Universe continues.


Now, I could offer you the usual excuses, self-deprecations, pleas of ignorance, but that'd be tedious. You've heard 'em all before.
"My gosh, I just don't know why I get all these awards."

"Who'd have suspected I would garner all this attention just for shamelessly pontificating?"

"Beats me where all this attention comes from. I just blog here, man."

Let's just skip that part. Suffice it to say, I am once again humbled, honored, and red-faced to receive this accolade. I believe it's called the "From Me To You" Award (didn't see that coming, did you?). Two exemplary bloggers bestowed it upon me: Jon Paul from Where Sky Meets Ground and Mia from My Literary Jam and Toast. I call these bloggers "exemplary" because they epitomize principles every blogger should aspire to:

If you're going to say something, say it well. And make yourself useful while you're at it.

Mia and JP not only write well (and humorously). They habitually promulgate tips and hints to help us poor benighted folk with the agonizing and soul-shaking process known as "writing." (Speaking of which, I need to get cracking. I should find out what that publisher back in Georgia is doing with my first three chapters, and keep editing my MS in the meantime. I might have found an alpha reader I can give it to when I finish the second edit, though. Even so, I'm falling into a stagnant, apathetic rut again. I hate myself sometimes. Come on, my conscience is niggling at me, do you want to be a writer or not? Roni over at Fiction Groupie just won an award with her novel manuscript, and the publication process has started! She's on the road to success! That could be you, chump. Thanks, brain, I needed that.)

Anyway, let's see about the rules of the FMTY Award: seven facts, seven bloggers. Or perhaps we should say "seven truths" because, as Indiana Jones will tell you, fact is not truth. Relate seven truths about yourself, and send the award on to seven worthy bloggers. That's not too shabby. I was hoping I'd get to do another award ceremony again, and mollify my enormous ego by deluging you with ceaseless talk about my favorite subject.

1. I could count the number of lies I've told in my lifetime on one hand. That's if I could remember how old I was when told the last one.
2. I hate asparagus. It is my absolute least favorite vegetable on this benighted green Earth. If every single spear of asparagus suddenly vanished out of existence, or was whisked away into another dimension, or was scorched and fried into oblivion...I wouldn't so much as blink.
3. Speaking of hating things, I once despised alcohol. Couldn't stand it. Liquor, cordials, even beer. The taste was abhorrent. Thank goodness I stuck to my guns and kept tasting it. Eventually it began to taste better. And now look!
4. Sneezing is one of the more under-appreciated bodily functions. It's so enjoyable! Scratches every itch in the nasal tract.
5. It's endlessly annoying when folks say "Here, here" instead of "hear, hear"; "without further adieu" instead of "without further ado"; and "hanger" instead of "hangar." ("Here" is an adverb, "hear" is a verb; and you are telling bystanders to "hear" what the speaker is saying when you proclaim "hear, hear." Adieu is French for "goodbye." "Ado" is bustle or fuss. And a "hanger" is either something you use to put up clothes or a short sword worn by British soldiers and sailors. A "hangar" is where you put your airplane. Are we clear?)
6. I love it when people refer to chimpanzees and other great apes as "monkeys," though. It makes me laugh.
7. I have an irrational fear of fiberglass.

Splendid. And now onto the nominees who have earned this prestigious award!

• Points of Claire-ification
• Writing in the Wilderness
• That Rebel with a Blog
• Murrmurrs
• Sometimes I Think...
• Views of a Star Child
• Sharp Pen/Dull Sword

From me to you, my pretties. Keep the quality coming, the juices flowing, and the Muses grinning. You're lucky I'm rather tired this evening. I was going to spin this post into a huge didactic tale of drone-spotting and novel-editing. But I ain't gonna do it now. I'll have to save it for later. I, my friend, am going to flop down and vegetate for a while. You have yourself a good evening.

adjusting for refraction, part I

re·frac·tion [rɪˈfrækʃən]. n.

1. Physics.

the change of direction of a ray of light, sound, heat, or the like, in passing obliquely from one medium into another in which its wave velocity is different.

2. Ophthalmology.

a. the ability of the eye to refract light that enters it so as to form an image on the retina. b. the determining of the refractive condition of the eye.

3. Astronomy.

a. Also called astronomical refraction. the amount, in angular measure, by which the altitude of a celestial body is increased by the refraction of its light in the earth's atmosphere, being zero at the zenith and a maximum at the horizon. b. the observed altered location, as seen from the earth, of another planet or the like due to diffraction by the atmosphere.

Here are some more tidbits about the job:

I have three bosses. They work and fly out of Apple Valley, but they all live elsewhere, like Nevada and southern Oregon. So they commute down here one week out of the month and fly with me, and rotate.

I'll call my first boss (the one I worked with last week) Mr. Mooney. That's not his real name, of course. It's the name of the plane we fly. His plane. It's a 1961 Mooney M20B. Doesn't look much different from any other small single-engine plane. Low wings, four seats, two-bladed propeller, and so on. It's radically different from the Cessna 172M I've been flying, though. There aren't any self-esteem issues among flying machines. Some airplanes are just better than others, period. And when they are, they say so, loudly. The Mooney M20 is what's known as a complex, high-performance airplane. In aviation parlance, "complex" equates with "bells 'n' whistles." Complex airplanes have extra goodies like retractable landing gear, specialized flaps, and variable-pitch propellers. If you want to know what a variable-pitch propeller is, you'll have to ask somebody else. I'm not really sure. I spent about 20 minutes this morning quizzing my second boss, Spud, what exactly the hell a variable-pitch propeller does. He explained it to me as best he could, he being a former Air Force jet pilot and me a dribbling halfwit student with only 40 flight-hours. I'm afraid I didn't understand most of it. The propeller hub is filled with oil, and has counterweights in it, which can be adjusted to tilt the blades about 30 degrees or so, to increase their efficiency in flight, which reduces unnecessary drag and saves fuel. That part I was okay with. But then we got into a big hairy discussion about mixture controls, and the vacuum pump, and manifold pressure...and visions of tiny dancing daisies began to spring unbidden to my mind. My brain, tired of jumping around trying to catch all the stuff that was flying over my head, was attempting to activate the screen saver. I found it most irritating, particularly when I was trying to comprehend how manifold pressure relates to throttle settings, and...

"High-performance" means that you have more than 150 horses under the cowl.

Mr. Mooney's Mooney (hereafter referred to by its model, Mooney, and its call sign, 17) has about 180 horsepower, retractable landing gear, cowl flaps, a variable-pitch propeller, an electric fuel pump, and a whole bunch of add-ons. It's painted white, with gray and aqua stripes. (The previous owner was a dentist. I assumed the aqua was some kind of toothpaste pitch, but I was mistaken. His wife just liked the color. Mr. Mooney hates it. My other two bosses, Spud and Dawg, continuously rib him about how awful it looks.)

Between Mr. Mooney's ready narration and the mere act of sitting in the plane, I have become rather familiar with Mooneys. They have lots of endearing little quirks. They're much more idiosyncratic than my friendly old Cessna, that's for dang sure.

My workday starts when I drive into the airport and up to Hangar Five. We go in through the little door, unlatch the big door, and open it. Mr. Mooney attaches a towbar to the front wheel, and I get behind the right wing. He pulls and I push. We roll the plane out of the hangar. It's usually nippy in the mornings this time of year. Mr. Mooney manually rotates the propeller a few times, just to loosen up the engine's innards. He makes sure that the master switch in the cockpit is off, though, before he does this. Otherwise the plane could start up unexpectedly, and he could "wind up" without arms.

After we preflight M17, we climb in. We have to actually climb up on the wing to get inside. Mooneys, oddly, have only one door, on the right side. So Mr. Mooney gets in first, slides himself over into the left seat, and then I get in. It's a tight fit. Both of us are about six feet tall, and broad-shouldered. Mr. Mooney scoots up close to the controls, and I sit back. I close and latch the door. It's strange. Forward visibility is more restricted, thanks to the two-part windscreen. The Mooney is a low-wing aircraft, meaning I can't look out the side window and see the ground anymore. There are a few more knobs and switches in the Mooney than I'm used to: controls for the variable-pitch propeller, for example. There's also an enormous gray lever extending up from the middle of the floor, just underneath the control panel. It looks like a thick gearshift. It's called a Johnson bar, and it operates the landing gear. Instead of flipping a tiny switch, Mr. Mooney grasps this bar with his right hand and wrenches it backward and down, latching it to the floor between the seats. I have learned to scrunch myself against the door and keep my elbows and shoulders out of the way, or else. Then the gear goes up. To put it back down, Mr. Mooney reaches down, grabs the bar, and yanks it back up, locking it into place under the control panel. Gear down.

Needless to say, I was rather impressed with this mechanism. I've heard of hand-cranked landing gear, requiring 33 turns of a little metal wheel, but this Johnson bar takes the biscuit. Mr. Mooney tells me it's far more reliable than any switch or button. That's true, I reckon, but neither switches nor buttons require biceps to operate.

The Mooney is a zippy little plane, though, and has enough horsepower to stay well abreast of the UAV. In fact, the UAV doesn't go that fast. In the air, we have to weave behind it to keep ourselves from shooting past. Mr. Mooney starts the engines while I hook up the GPS and the TKAS systems. The GPS is a Garmin 396, a good basic mid-range navigational aid. "TKAS" stands for...um, stands for...uh...

It's a collision avoidance system. It's a squat gray box with a low-bit screen on the front. It's attached with Velcro to a little platform we've rigged up for it, and hooks up to the GPS with a cord. The data from the TKAS is displayed on the GPS as a small black screen, inset over the main display. It has two little concentric circles on it, representing one-mile and three-mile radii from the plane. As we fly, I keep my eyes glued to the GPS, the TKAS, the UAV and the skies nearby, to make sure nothing out there smacks into anything else. I'm an extra set of eyes. In fact, that is my technical job description. I am the observer.

Mr. Mooney and I take off from the Apple Valley airfield and swing west to head to Victorville, about ten miles away. Barely a minute in the air, and we're inside their airspace. Mr. Mooney swings north so we can get behind the UAV—a gray speck on taxiway B—as it takes off to the south.

On the first day, takeoff went perfectly. We followed the UAV out to the test site, a 20-minute flight or so. It was tough to see the little spindly-winged bird until it climbed above the horizon and was silhouetted against the bright sky. Mr. Mooney and I came back to Apple Valley and twiddled our thumbs for six hours until the afternoon flight, when we jumped back into M17, took off for the test site, and caught the UAV as it flew out. (I actually spotted it first; Mr. Mooney congratulated me heartily, saying "I'd earned my pay.") We escorted it back, handed it off to the ground controllers, landed at Apple Valley, and went home.

The second day was a bit weird. It was windy, which meant things were quite bumpy aloft. There were a few minor technical difficulties to sort out, which meant that Mr. Mooney and I had to land at Victorville and spend twenty minutes chilling in the FBO. (Fortunately, they had free popcorn and bottled water.) We flew a quick local mission and then went home.

This week I'm flying with Boss #2, Spud. Spud barely made it down from Nevada in the company Mooney, Sierra Hotel (a 1964 M20E, named for the last two letters of its call sign). There's a high-pressure system down the hill in the L.A. Basin. Conditions up here, then, are ridiculously blustery: 25-30 miles an hour sustained, gusting to 50. It's been that way for the last couple of days. Spud was getting severely tossed around, coming down through the Owens Valley. On top of that, the governor on the variable-pitch propeller was acting up, too. But he made it.

It's so windy, however, that flights have been canceled today and tomorrow. Spud and I spent the morning helping the mechanic down at the airport investigate that misbehaving governor. I'll tell you some more about that next time, I reckon. Let me fly an actual mission with Spud and then I'll get back to you. I can't wait until this spring weather clears up and we can start flying...

Oh yeah...and I'll tell you, in my usual roundabout way, why the word "refraction" is so important to what I'm writing about.

for lack of a better word...

I'm not going to get much editing done on my novel tonight, I can already tell. I've gotten through Chapter 6, and I'm pleased to report that (to my eyes) Chapters 2 and 3 look largely all right. Chapter 4 might need a little maturation, like bourbon in a cask, plus some trimming and cleaning, like an oil lamp. Chapters 5 and 6 are holding my interest nicely. Perhaps I need to make the foreshadowing and inferences within them a tad more subtle. We'll see what that nice editor says. Like I said, I'm scared of that manuscript. It's like a hedge animal in a topiary that's still a bit rough around the edges, and I'm the gardener. Only the hedge animal is alive, like in The Shining. If I do it wrong, it'll tear me to pieces. Maybe I'll get to it after I finish this post. Yeah, maybe. Anyway, on with my story: I would not hesitate to assert that my brain is my most precious possession. Why, I couldn't do a thing without it. I've painstakingly trained it over the past 23 years to recognize obscure words, create fictive universes out of thin air, process abstract thought, make complex plans (and duly disregard them), precisely order my every thought and action, and conjure up vivid images of naked women at my command. However, I've lately become concerned that my vaunted mind has reached the peak of its performance, and is beginning to backslide. It appears, due to some disturbingly frequent occurrences, that my brain is no longer developing or smartening. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of these disquieting phenomena is my increasing inability to remember an appropriate word. When I'm speaking in an erudite manner (as I usually do), I will suddenly discover that the ten-dollar word I desperately need to bring the whole thing off eludes me. I've come up against these situations before, and my mind has never failed to supply me with a suitable and almost-as-erudite substitute. These days, I'm afraid, my brain merely fills the verbal gap with the first word to come to mind. And that word, usually, is anything but suitable. Consider the following example. Some months ago, before I left Korea, I was over at my friends' apartment. Adam and Elaine were my two English coworkers, and we'd often get together after work for dinner and a beer. I readily admit to being a little buzzed that evening. Somehow or other, we got to talking about plant sex. That is, botanical reproduction. Specifically, flowers. (I must've introduced this topic by saying something like 'You know why [wind-pollinated] flowers are so cool? Because they reproduce by spraying their genetic material all over creation.') Having successfully tripped through an entire lecture on anthers, and stamens, and sporangia, and pistils, and all that horticultural pornography, I was nearing the climax. I was in fine form, too. "So the male flowers open up, and if the wind is right, then all of the—" It was at this point that my mind failed me. I faltered suddenly. I couldn't remember the word "pollen." It utterly escaped me. This was infuriating. I desperately needed that word to finish what I was saying. But that mattered little to my stumbling synapses. So while my brain was fumbling with an ulterior way of expressing the idea of male genetic material, my mouth prudently opened and said "—jizz—" Two things happened in the next split-second which I don't need to tell you about. A & E burst out laughing and I, though chuckling good-naturedly, went red. I'd never said the word "jizz" before in my life. I hated it. As a rule, I dislike any crass slang term for biological processes or material. (Watch, everybody's going to post one in the comment box now.) Sometimes I have difficulty saying the word "sperm," even as it relates to whales. So to up and say a word like that, out of the blue, when my brain knew at least five other ways to say it which were more intelligent and highbrow...that was disconcerting. This happens to me more frequently than I care to admit. I'm not sure what I can attribute it to. It's a bit early for Alzheimer's to be setting in, and I wouldn't have thought the relatively small amount of drunkenness I've dabbled in would do the trick. It's exasperating, whatever the reason. And puzzling. Dumbfounding. Nonplussing. Bemusing. Befuddling. Confusing. Confounding, even. Well, maybe I haven't lost the synonym game yet.

cocktail review no. 17 - Whiskey and Soda

Somebody's screwed the pooch somewhere. Nobody ever took the time to inform me about Black Velvet. In case they committed the same atrocity against you, dear reader, I shall relate to you what it inexplicably took me 23 years of my life to find out. Black Velvet is a blended Canadian whisky, aged three years, supposedly made from Rocky Mountain water and the finest grains. Whether that's true or not is up for grabs. I have to say, though, this stuff is the perfect blend of inexpensiveness and taste. It's reasonably priced and reasonably yummy. First, the ingredient list. Hmmm, now what do you reckon is swimming around in a whiskey and soda, anyway?

• 1½ ounces whiskey
• 3-4 ounces club soda

Or, if you're the adventurous type, you can make it a double (as my father habitually does) with three whole ounces of whiskey. If you're a weenie, you can have a "tall" whiskey and soda. Those are served in collins glasses, I believe, and contain the same amount of liquor but a greater percentage of club soda...just in case you can't abide the taste of whiskey, you pantywaist. Oh, and one more thing: I know this is another exceedingly simple highball, just like the vodka and tonic, but hey. If I'm going to go out on a limb with drinks like the Gates of Hell and Roger Swims a Mile, I might as well bring things back down to earth with a few classics once in a while. But the point I'm trying to make here is that a whiskey and soda is GOOD with Black Velvet. I don't know exactly what to attribute this to. This whisky's got some flavor to it, sure, but it had almost a sweetish sort of finish to back up an insane amount of smoothness. (I had a shot of it later just to be sure.) I know club soda's flavorless, but it's possible that the fizz might have tickled my taste buds in some odd manner. I can't account for the slight sweetness any way else. But irrespective of that insignificant aberration, this was (and is, in general) a DANG... ...GOOD... ...DRINK. Assay it sometime if you don't believe me. P.S. If you're wondering why I've been jumping back and forth between spellings ("whiskey" vs. "whisky"), I'll elaborate for you. Due to some influential vagaries of quality and competitive marketing, Irish and American whiskey is spelled with an "e" and Scotch, Canadian and Japanese whisky is spelled without one. This is because, back in the day, the reputation of Scotch whisky was (if you can believe it) very poor. There were some low-grade stills in use, and the Scotch turned out was more than a little inferior. So Irish and American distilleries added the "e" to their products' labels to distinguish their higher caliber. So, hence, when I'm referring to Black Velvet or other Canadian whisky, I'm omitting the "e." When I'm referring to whiskey in general, I'm using the "e." (Personally, I think the word "whiskey" looks a lot better with an "e.") Are we clear? Now excuse me, I have to comb back through all my cocktail reviews and make sure I've been spelling everything right.

un-disclaimer

I've been reading some other people's (admirably incisive) blogs lately, and reading back over some of mine, and I've noticed some discrepancies between my intention and what comes out on the page. That is to say, some of you might have formed an impression of me and my personality that, while it makes sense in the context of this blog, belies my true nature.

For starters, I have a tendency to wax namby-pamby in my scribblings. I almost never do that in person, or in conversation. I try to uphold the standard set by my stalwart, stoic, upstanding father, who never talks about all those "girly" things like feelings, and impressions, and beauty, and soul-massage stimuli. I attempt to; sometimes I fail. Show me a sunset and you're going to hear my best shot at first-draft poetry. Give me a cool day in fall and I'm going to stumble about spewing complimentary meteorological platitudes. Give me a girlfriend and you might hear me whisper some of the mushiest stuff imaginable in her ear. Be that as it may, I tend to get a lot more philosophical (or just plain sentimental) when I write. Be aware of that.

Second, despite the self-enforced lack of swearing in this blog, I actually am—and have been for some time—violently profane. I was once a lingual teetotaler, never daring to say anything worse than "dang" or even the second "b-word" (synonymous with "illegitimate son"). In college and after, I loosened up. I now have no compunction about spouting obscenities. I'm still a little leery of the c-word (The Big One, as it were) but I'll use it in quotes without any fuss. Everything else (f-bombs to b-words to s-h-dash-dash to h-e double toothpicks) is all up for grabs.

Finally, because this is neither a political nor a religious blog and I haven't really mentioned many of my personal beliefs in detail anywhere, I think I ought to delineate for you my political and religious affiliations. I am a slightly liberal conservative (registered as an Independent), and have been an atheist for half my life. I see no reason to quit being either. I hope that clears up a few things around here.

the Halloween cocktail party

I had a deplorable amount of difficulty coming up with a name for this post. Even now, I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. "Halloween cocktail party" implies that all we drank were Halloween-themed cocktails, which most certainly wasn't true. I could've called it a "costume cocktail party" but that (a) leaves All Hallow's Eve right out of the picture and (b) weakly implies that we only drank costume-themed cocktails, whatever the hell those are. So in the end, I elected to stick the words "Halloween" and "cocktail" into the title somewhere and let the grammar go whistle. Now that we've got the stew sorted from the dumplings, let's get to the meat of the matter. Last Friday I hosted a Halloween cocktail party at my parents' house in Apple Valley, California, in celebration of the upcoming holiday and in recognition of the fact that all of us need to get blind drunk more often. 'Twas a good party. About ten people came, there was nonalcoholic punch (limeade), plenty of cocktails, oodles of snacks (Costco pizza, a fruit bowl, Cheez-Its, Chex mix, Halloween candy, some creative costumes (a few too many girls came dressed as "sexy" somethings; sexy referees, or sexy gun molls, or sexy firefighters...but oh, heck, it's a party), and lots of fellowship and good cheer. I hauled out some Halloween-y drinks, we played games like Taboo and Apples to Apples, there was music on the stereo and Pirates of the Caribbean playing silently on the TV, and it was fun. We all got a little tipsy (except for the designated drivers, of course) and broke up about 1:00 a.m. Now if somebody would only invite me to a party...

a zucchini by any other name

My English friend Adam and I used to have the most outrageous arguments over terminology—you know, typical Anglo-American clashes over the names of animals, foods and sports. The debates began shortly after we met.

Of course we had to get the big one out of the way first: "football" vs. "soccer." When I or any other American hears football, it's safe to assume that we think of first downs, and end zones, and touchdowns, and passes, and field goals, and running backs and quarterbacks and tight ends and wide receivers. When we hear soccer, we think of dribbling, and passing, and goal kicks, and the offside rule, and handballs, and throw-ins, and midfielders and defenders and goalies and forwards (or strikers or whatever).

Americans sometimes fail to realize that the United States is the only country in the world (except for maybe Armenia) that refers to "soccer" as "soccer." Almost everybody else in the English-speaking world—and the Spanish-speaking world, for that matter—refers to "soccer" as "football." What we know as "football," they know as "gridiron."

I fought Adam valiantly on this point, but was eventually forced to concede. "Football" is the correct term for "soccer." England did invent soccer—heh heh, I mean football—after all. The word soccer is actually abbreviated slang for "association football," which is what soccer—I mean football—was originally named. I lost that first pivotal battle. But there are some English-isms that I refuse to give ground on, which Adam and I have debated and still debate hotly.

By "debate hotly," I essentially mean that we get drunk and rag on each other. Any opportunity we can take to sneakily "correct" one another's diction—even though we both know that there's nothing wrong with the terms we're using, and it's what we were respectively raised with—we seize, with much immature giggling.

Take zucchini, for example.

Did you know that English folk—and, apparently, South Africans and New Zealanders—have a different word for zucchini than we North Americans do? Well, they do. They call it "courgette." From the French, you know. Odd, isn't it? It's hard to step back, think objectively, and realize that there is another name for zucchini than "zucchini." I lived the first 22 years of my life without hearing any other word for zucchini than "zucchini." It never occurred to me that other people in the world would have another name for zucchini than "zucchini." I like the word "zucchini." It seemed to pair very well with the thing itself—a tasteless, crunchy, cigar-shaped vegetable used for bludgeoning younger siblings. And now, suddenly, here was hard evidence that there was, indeed, another word for zucchini than "zucchini." And it wasn't a zucchini-ish word at all. I had to rearrange my worldview to encompass this new idea of contested zucchini primacy.

Of course, I didn't learn this right away. It took a while for me to find out. And in the meantime, things were mighty peculiar. You may well imagine the confusion that occurred when the three of us (Adam, his fiancée Elaine, and I) would meet up at the corner grocery store in Korea.

"Alreet mate?"

"Hey guys! What's up?"

"Oh, not much. Just stopping by to get some courgette."

"Ah! Okay. I'm just here to get some zucchini myself. See you 'round!"

And then we'd bump into each other again in the same corner of the produce section and wonder what we were doing there. It took us about a month or so to realize that we were all talking about the same vegetable. Even then, the revelation strained credulity.

"What do you call it?" they asked me, incredulously. They asked me that question.

"Zucchini, of course! What the heck do you guys call it?" I replied, in similar tones.

"Courgette...?" Elaine said, with a bemused smile on her face.

"What?!"

I found out later (under similar circumstances) that English people have a different name for eggplant, too. They call it aubergine (OH-buh-zheen). Oh, for crying out loud.

And then there was the extreme confusion surrounding tic-tac-toe and "naughts and crosses," as Adam and Elaine called it. Turns out there is none. It's the same game. "Naught" (pronounced almost like "note" in Adam and Elaine's North-of-England accent) is another word for nothing, nada, zilch, zero. Crosses are just X's turned sideways. Hence, naughts and crosses: X's and O's (well, okay, technically O's and X's). I have to admit, naughts and crosses is a better name for the game than tic-tac-toe. Better by far.

But all the game-related conversations that we had up until the point of revelation were mystifying in the extreme. I couldn't figure out what the heck they were talking about. The feeling, I'm sure, was mutual. Jeff, a mutual Canadian friend of ours, often sides with me in these battles. Canada's heart may lie with England, but it can't escape its North American bailiwick. Jeff also refuses to think of zucchini in any other terms than "zucchini." He's also stymied by the oddity of "aubergine." He actually knows the rules for baseball and basketball, thank God.

But sometimes Jeff turns on me. He took Adam and Elaine's side in the "zee" versus "zed" debacle, leaving me outvoted by a three-quarters majority. I'm sorry; I refuse to budge on that one, either.

It's worth adding here that Jeff and I get into the most stupendous debates about the superiority of the metric system to the standard (American) system, too. It's fortunate that Adam and Elaine are Geordies (the slang term for folks from the Tyne River region of Northeastern England, on the coast of the North Sea in Northumbria—the ones who stayed loyal to King George even when Scotland was rebelling and invading). Geordies are commonsense, salt-of-the-earth people. They don't cotton to the high-flown verbal fancies of Southerners. Be it otherwise, Adam and I would probably be arguing about whether trucks are actually lorries, the difference between raincoats and Macintoshes, or, heaven forbid, the similarities between baseball and rounders.

I'm not outnumbered, but I'm outgunned. England's been around a lot longer than the States, and lent the States its language, which renders most of my etymological arguments null and void. I have to push the practicality of the American word in question, which can be a subjectively slippery business. Jeff and I are united in the belief that "zucchini" is a better word than "courgette" because, mainly, it's easier to say. (Same thing with eggplant...I mean, aubergine? Really?)

All facetiousness aside, I truly enjoy Geordie lingo. There are some words and phrases that are not only refreshingly direct, but downright charming, particularly given the cultural attitude they reveal. It also behooves me to mention that hearing these phrases delivered in a Geordie accent, reputed to be the coolest English accent of all time, is a real kick. Peruse these Geordie favorites, if you will:

• me head's battered - what you say when you're confused or unsure about something.
• proper lush - really good
• Bobby Dazzler - really, really good...awesome, in fact
• a good craic - a splendid party, get-together, festival, etc.; sounds like "a good crack"
• Alreet mate? - hello
• Alreet bonny lad? - hello (first meeting)

I have placed Newcastle-upon-Tyne (and its environs, including Elaine's home village) highest upon my list of places to see in England. I love Adam and Elaine to death (they're very nice and lovely people, full of fun and friendliness). The thought that there may be a whole town of people like that somewhere is intoxicating. (Plus, I'd just like to see the place. I've never been there; that's good enough for me.) I only hope Adam can teach my bumbling brain enough Geordie beforehand so I can impress the locals when I get there. But just what the heck is a "stoat," anyway?