The World's Greatest Intellectuals

Foreign Policy magazine is conducting a readers' poll which I just participated in, asking who are your 5 favorite public intellectuals (iow: smart people who go on TV and get published in something with the word "Times" in its name). I basically voted for the people I knew something about and liked, not that there's anything wrong with that - that's the basic idea, unfortunately of the 100 options listed I only knew who about 20 of them were. Well, that's the problem with democracy after all, that the ignorant get to vote alongside the educated. The five I selected all happen to be minor heroes of mine (the last being the only living man I'd call "my" hero) so I thought it was blog-worthy.

Anyway, my list, in no particular order:

Umberto Eco - author of one of my favorite novels (Foucault's Pendulum) and a linguistics/literature/history essayist
Gary Kasparov - the greatest chess player who ever lived who's currently a liberal activist/politician in Russia
Noam Chomsky - basically the one man who speaks truth to power in American politics
Richard Dawkins - author of the amazing "The God Delusion" and the best public atheist out there
Christopher Hitchens - my personal hero, atheist, ex-Trotskyist, damned neo-conservative/Iraq war supporter, scathing wit

Erection Day Kraziness

One thing I will definitely miss about Korea is the random drunken (usually) craziness of the place. This is a country where piss-drunk old guy is a legitimate and substantial demographic subset.

Which brings me to a story. I had yesterday, Wednesday, off because of, as one of my co-teachers put it, "Big Assembly Erection Day." Ok so I added the "big" there, but the rest is true. Koreans and their troubles with "r," another thing I'll miss.

Anyway I went into Seoul with Joey and we wound up at Hooters in Gangnam, then eventually returned to Bucheon and shared a pint or six at the local speak easy over a chessboard. Us two and the two bar-gals were the only ones there for most of the evening, until 10ish or so when in came a solitary drunken adjoshi of about 60 or so.

I knew he was trouble as soon as I saw him because he was "walking" like one of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. He more or less ignored us and approached Spung Jee, the owner of the bar. He started saying something weird and loud which we later figured out was meant to be "what's up?" but which sounded sort of like "wherz op?" Anyway she eventually started talking to him in Korean and asked him to leave. Of course he wouldn't.

By this point he was trying to get our attention and kept asking us over and over again "wherz op?" and "djyu speech Engarish?" We ignored him. So he started trying other languages. All he really knew how to do apparently was count in four or five languages, most of them I couldn't really figure what they were but I did catch it when he counted to five in Spanish and French. Why of course he felt compelled to do this I can't say.

Eventually the police were called and they were surprisingly punctual and effective. They confronted him, asked him to leave, and when he refused they escorted him out, but not before he surprisingly made an attempt to lunge at me for some reason. I can't say why, as I'd ignored him during his whole multilingual tirade, but maybe that's the reason why. I dunno.

Anyway, I'm gonna miss that kind of shit.