Woof!

This one seems to have passed me by so far; strange as it's such a fine example of how fast and how far television quality control has fallen.
Some time ago, in the TV series, Jonathan Creek there was a brief gag where Creek's boss, a minor celebrity magician, was appearing in a reality TV show where he and the other celebrities had to live in a sty, with pigs, as pigs. It was a satire on the idea of celebrity reality shows and was, presumably, the dumbest idea that the writer could come up with.
So imagine my surprise to discover that "My Life As An Animal" was commissioned as a real program. There are clearly no ideas so stupid, so ridiculous, so downright crass that they won't get commissioned by some channel or other.

Personally I want to see some of these ideas (end of the clip). Can't wait for the Monkey Tennis.

DPRK: Korean Lessons

After dinner, and a quick shower, I went in search of the bar and found a couple of our group in a room that didn't look much like a bar at all. There was a bar and a fridge tucked away in a corner and there was a pool table on which two of them were playing a very long and remarkably strange game, apparently inventing new rules as they went along. The rest of us were playing a different game - charades.
This started because we were trying to communicate with the young Korean woman at the bar and after a few false starts we developed the game as follows.
I had bought a phrase book in the Pyongyang Hotel. This is a quite startling publication called "Let Us Learn Korean". In addition to the usual "Hello", "Goodbye", "How are you" stuff, and the slightly more unusual "It is very Juche-oriented" and "Here is really a people's paradise" it includes such useful phrases as "Four seasons in Korea are relatively distinct from each other", "I don't eat pork, give me pheasant", "With the death of Comrade Kim Il Sung mankind has lost a legendary hero" and "It is of high artistic and ideological quality."
There are also no fewer than ten different variations on the theme of "Reunify Korea now!"

The way our game worked was that the barmaid would read through the Korean phrase and pick one and show it to one of us. That person would then mime the English phrase for the others to guess. Once it was guessed we tried to say the Korean and she tried to say the English. After a few false starts it went very well and we had a pleasant hour or so playing. Then the rest of the group decided to go off and do Karaoke. I would rather eat my own liver than do Karaoke so I stayed where I was and bought another beer. With just me and the barmaid left charades clearly wasn't going to work so we tried other English lessons of pointing at and naming things. I learned the Korean for hand, arm, face, hair, leg, eye, nose, mouth, ear, finger, chair, beer, glass, bottle and a few other words and remarkably I can actually remember them now. (son, pal, ulgul, mori karak, taree, dun, ko, ib, kwee, son-kara, kol-sang, maekju, cupu*, byong since you ask).
Then she got out her vocabulary book and I helped her with her pronunciation of various words in English.
Finally I noticed that it was almost one O'clock and went off to bed. It had been an odd day and a very mixed one starting with that bizarre visit to the Memorial Palace and finishing with an English lesson. Tomorrow also had a mixed itinerary planned, and one of similar extremes.

*This might be a local or slang version. I can find no independent verification of it.

In memory of an internet friend

There's a popular theory that friends from the internet aren't really friends at all. I subscribe to it myself. I've been heard to make disparaging remarks along the lines of "Anyone who says he has a thousand facebook friends means he has no real ones."
And I believe it, really I do. I mean those people I know by cryptic screen names from message boards and chatrooms, they aren't real people, are they? For them to be real you have to have met them. Self-penned profiles notwithstanding, they could be anybody.
The trouble is that I've had to do a bit of reassessment. Someone I have corresponded with on the internet, that I know solely through interacting with him through message boards and chatrooms, died a few days ago.
I found out about his death because a mutual friend, a friend who has actually met both of us in real life, was concerned that we hadn't heard from him recently and went to a lot of trouble to find out if he was OK. He wasn't. He was in hospital with terminal cancer. And then in a hospice. And then dead. And I felt just as much a sense of loss as if someone I see every day had died. But that isn't possible, is it? As I said internet friends aren't real. Obviously some of them are.
I've corresponded on and off with Jerry for a couple of years. I've found him to be, by turns, witty, wise, a great writer, a shameless recycler of old jokes and utterly incomprehensible. He's sent me some of his writings to read, and then, because I badgered him endlessly about it, some more. They had the style of a true raconteur, a man who knew who to pace an anecdote to perfection. He was also kind enough to say that he very much enjoyed my writing. I don't know if he ever actually finished reading the book that I made available on the internet but I know he'd read most of it, and commented kindly about it.
Of his life I know very little other than that he felt it had been full. He was widely-travelled, though now living in Hawaii. He had a great (if sometimes rather weird) sense of humour.

He was a friend. Just one I'd never met. And though it feels a little strange to be saying it about someone I knew only from the internet, I'm going to miss our chats. I guess internet friends can be as real as real ones after all.

Alices In Wonderland: Part 44

Some time ago in this series of posts I mentioned that I had intended to post an illustration from the edition illustrated by June Goulding but that her web site indicated that she'd rather I didn't. This week, to my surprise and delight, June contacted me and said that I could go ahead, that use of an illustration in a review should be OK.

The edition is from Parragon, published in 2003. (ISBN 1-40541-670-X) It's a nice hard back edition of the two books printed on glossy paper and absolutely packed full of illustrations. The text, thank goodness, is the standard Lewis Carroll version and the illustrations are bright, cheerful and colourful. It's one of my favourite modern editions. (My own favourite illustration? The feast scene at the end of Looking Glass.)

So. It's been a few weeks. Where were we in the story?

Alice had rushed off to the court for the trial. In the court she finds that the King and Queen are the judges, various other characters are the jury and the White Rabbit is the court herald, reading the charges and calling the witnesses.