January 10, 2005

"Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle..."

Be sure to view the slide show of images from one of TV series discussed in this article about a North Korean crackdown on long hair.

Excerpt:

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.


It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.


This via Dave Bug, who, as you might imagine, would like to see a tape, or a translated transcript, of the program. He asks if I have any North Korean tape-dubbing connections. Sadly, I do not. Anyone?

Posted by Dr. Frank at 05:49 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

Found in the Street

Computer-printed in huge, bold, Times New Roman, filling an entire sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper:

RULES:

1 - At the end of the game, each team member will get to eat all the almonds that he or she has amassed.

2 - Each team member needs to take at least one almond per round to be sustained.

3 - At the end of each round, the resource will be replenished by one-half of its existing amount.

Posted by Dr. Frank at 05:29 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Oh well, oh well, I feel real good today...

Well, maybe I wouldn't go quite that far. But I am back in the USA. England was fine: lots of relatives, quaint customs, rickety telecommunications infrastructure, heavy, stodgy, greasy, delicious food, strong beer, five TV channels, one of which never quite comes in; Agatha Christie's Marple; University Challenge; Little Britain; sheep, ponies, cows and pigs; a bizarre New Years sing-along of English music hall and American show tunes at a rural pub; mild anti-Americanism tempered by an equal and mildly opposite reaction of Americaphilia; Wheat Crunchies (a crunchy, wheaty eaty.) Among old friends, last year's theme was that everyone seemed to be in the process of buying homes (astonishing, inconceivable from where I sit); this year, it's the process of having kids, in theory and even in practice.

I spent some time working on the third version (second revision) of my book, though not nearly enough time as it turns out, as I still have a lot of work to do on it. So I'm not sure how much blogging will happen. I really need to wrap this up. Amazingly, I'm told that I do this pretty quickly compared to the average, though I don't see how that's possible, to be honest.

If I didn't have a deadline, I could probably just keep rewriting it forever till I die. Songs are like that, too, except that once they're officially recorded, several months before they "come out," you're supposed to stop working on them all of a sudden. I'm new to the book-writing process, but I imagine it's a bit like the song-writing. I mean, you "finish" it, it gets published a year later, even though you're already thinking about everything you'd have done differently before anyone even reads it. So you start drinking heavily, change things around a bit and eventually get back to rewriting it as before, except that you're calling it another book. Is that how it is? I'll let you know either way.

In the meantime, Norm is conducting a poll of readers for the ten "greatest songs of rock and pop music," so, if you feel like it, go over there and make your voice heard. Here's the list I sent him. Not The Greatest of All Time, necessarily, but the ones I've felt like hearing recently. A lot of them are referenced by the book's narrator, in fact, and I chose them from the "25 most-played" list on my iPod:

1. Waterloo Sunset - the Kinks

2. Does Your Mother Know? - ABBA

3. Fox on the Run - The Sweet

4. Roll Away the Stone - Moot the Hoople

5. Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo - Rick Derringer

6. Queen of Eyes - The Soft Boys

7. Makin' Time - The Creation

8. You Should Never Have Opened that Door - The Ramones

9. See Emily Play - Pink Floyd

10. My Baby Loves Lovin' - White Plains


See ya when I see ya.

Posted by Dr. Frank at 05:19 PM | Comments (34) | TrackBack