(Port) Coquitlam Odysseus

Over at the Marmot’s Hole, Robert Koehler, drawing on a the work of GI Korea has just published ground-breaking survey of foreign English teachers arrested in Korea for drug offenses. Among the highlights: “As of August 2006, there were 4,598 Canadian E-2 visa holders. Even if we were to round the number of Canadians up [...]

Yesterday my immediate family members and their spouses decided to surprise my mother with a beautifully-carved (currently non-functioning) pump organ dating to the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was on sale in the antique store where I had bought Chae Young her end-tables. In fact, it was Chae Young who had taken my [...]

On Christmas Day my wife kindly acquiesced in going to Chilliwack to visit my grandparents for my mother’s clan’s traditional dinner. (Our anniversary celebration will be later.) We came back at 12:30am, but I nevertheless managed to wake up at 5:30am for the discount carnival that has come to usurp and define the meaning of [...]

Chae Young and I went shopping in our local mall several times after we moved. In one of them, there is an antique store that is moving out into the Fraser Valley. Accordingly, almost all their stock was on sales of 20%-50% off. The timing of the store’s move–which coincided with our own–was fortuitous. Chae [...]

Amidst a contemplated move into the banking industry (I had one interview last week), I find that my time at UBC will continue for another three months. I got the banking call on a Saturday, but UBC’s ESL wing had called me up the previous day to ask me to return for another three months [...]

Today is Chae Young’s and my second wedding anniversary! This last year was in many respects our most difficult, but we persevered, grew together, and changed–and now both of us are happier than ever.

This is something I’ve been feeling quite strongly about for some time, now. Now I have the Consumer’s Association of Canada to back me up. Interesting tidbit: between the two of them, Best Buy and Limited Brands recently recorded profits of over 70 million dollars from unused gift cards. I know how some people feel [...]

As someone who once converted from an iconoclastic stream of Protestantism to Catholicism, I have a certain amount of empathy for Tony Blair, who has just done the same. Some people may wonder how a supporter of abortion and gay rights could make a move like this; I can only say that I assume Blair’s [...]

I see from a posting on the Classics-L listerv that Cardiff University has decided to make its new “Journal of Late Antique Religion and Culture” publicly available on the internet.

You can read all about it here. My only bone with the article, besides the fact that there is a major grammatical infelicity (or at least what I would regard as a major grammatical infelicity), is that–contra the article–the figure of Abraham actually divides, rather than unites, Christians and Jews and Muslims. This is counter-intuitive, [...]