CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

Caveat: Quatrain #114

Most people seem alarmed to learn
I rarely feel alone.
They ask me why, insist I must
spend time with those I've known.

- a quatrain in ballad meter.

Caveat: Glorious Days of the Internet, Episode 235,654,534

The scene and the problem:

We are doing last-minute prep for our talent show. Grace is doing some stage practicing with a group of her students, and she tells me, "I really need a fart sound for this play."

The play she's doing, the "Farting Lady," is a Korean classic tale adapted to grade-school EF, with songs, too. I may have mentioned it before on this blog - it's a perennial favorite of Korean students, because they know the story already, and because elementary children have fundamentally scatalogical senses of humor.

I can't use my laptop, because it's been repurposed as the main computer for all the projections, sound and powerpoint slides for the show. 

The solution:

So I take my little USB memory stick and I go to one of the computers in the computer lab. I go to google, and I type in "free download fart sounds." I have a plethora of choices. First choice, try out some sounds, and download a half dozen.

I save them onto my USB, and return to the seminar room where Grace is practicing. I hand her the USB. "The internet is a great thing," I say.

"It is," she agrees, as she tries out the files, to the entertained giggles of 15 or so elementary kids.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrain #113

I stepped out today feeling rushed -
forgot my metaphors.
So things were dull, like dirt or jobs.
My words waged pointless wars.

- a quatrain in ballad meter.

Caveat: Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids

Today is our big day, the annual Karma English Academy talent show. As is typical, I feel utterly unprepared. But thus it goes - that's life in the Karmic Korean Kingdom of Chaotic Quasi-Confucian Contingency.

---

Meanwhile, what I'm listening to right now.

Elton John, "Rocket Man." The video is brand new, but has been declared "official." I found the video, by Iranian refugee Majid Adin, quite stunningly beautiful and sad, and it manages to take a melancholic, classic song almost half a century old, now, like John's "Rocket Man," and imbue it with intense new meaning vis-a-vis the contemporary, never-ending global refugee crisis.

Lyrics.

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine AM
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
'Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
'Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
'Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
'Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
And I think it's gonna be a long long time

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

Caveat: Quatrain #112

I didn't mean to keep writing
these droll, clichéd quatrains,
but time stole my initiative
and now I'm lacking brains.

- a quatrain in ballad meter.

Caveat: Where to go from here?

"Self-driving cars" are all the rage in certain Silicon Valley circles as an up-and-coming technology.

A conceptual artist explores the shortcomings of relying on not-so-smart robot-minds to try to drive a car. He has actually engineered his own self-driving car, using bits and pieces of existing technology. Then he proceeded to "trap" the car by exploiting its reliance on highway markings to decide where it is OK to drive.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrains #109-111

Three simple songs were sung among
the faces going by.
I knew these songs in passing, then,
though all the years did fly.

A song of patient worrying
came first, a princess true.
The second song had deep kindness,
but understandings, few.

The third song had the boldest heart,
but passions rather wild.
These songs departed. But today,
a song returned... and smiled.

- three quatrains in ballad meter. This poem is not just a hallucination or metaphor, unlike as is the normal case with most of my poetry. Rather, it has a fairly important and specific subtext, which will make the meaning quite clear.

Caveat: nervously loquacious at the edge of an abyss

"...there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.‎" - Kenneth Burke.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrain #108

Parts of the world declaim to others
by means of movements small
and large, that spiral and conspire
to etch scars on us all.

- a quatrain in ballad meter.

Caveat: The Karma Professor Explains the Mpemba Effect

I had a class last night with my highest-level students, the TOEFL 8th graders, that was close to an ideal type of class, in my opinion.

Nominally, we were working on the TOEFL speaking questions. But before class, one of the students, Sumin, had asked me if I knew anything about the "Mpemba Effect" (see wikipedia - I'll not try to replicate the explanation found there). She had to make a speech about it, in Korean, for her Korean-language class. In researching it online, she'd found more materials in English than Korean, and, being an ambitious and motivated English student, she decided these were legitimate sources for putting together her speech. She was checking with me mostly to make sure she understood some of the technical aspects and the fairly specialized vocabulary of chemistry and physics involved. 

So we carried on our conversation about it into the start of class. The other students overheard and were curious, and so I started explaining. And then I said, "Actually, this is exactly the kind of topic that they put into a Type 6 TOEFL speaking question." You listen to some complicated lecture on a difficult topic, and then you have to summarize.

Somewhat jokingly, I asked them if they wanted to do a speaking question practice on the Mpemba Effect. To my surprise, they were enthusiastic about this idea. So I pulled up the wikipedia article, scanned through it to make sure I understood it, and then proceeded to give a 10 minute lecture, more or less, on the Mpemba Effect. This included digressions to explain concepts such as convection, insulation, dissolved gases, crystallization and "seeding" crystals (i.e. catalysts), and several other things that occurred to me. Then their job was to give a one minute summary, in the TOEFL style, of my lecture.

In his summary, David even included the expression, "The Karma professor explains...," a joking reference to my sometimes being identified by both students and coworkers as a "professor." It's a moniker that seems to follow me regardless of career. 

The class was ideal. We covered what we needed to cover - which is to say, we did TOEFL speaking practice on a particular instance of what are always essentially random topics. Yet the students themselves selected the topic, out of interest, and they more or less led the class in terms of what was expected of them. I was just a kind of resource, an on-call "professor" that they could hit "play" on for various aspects of the topic in question.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrain #107

Is there a gothic style, in how
we look at abstraction?
Is there some kind of reader's gloom
that gives a soul traction?

- a quatrain in ballad meter.

Caveat: wasting something

Sometimes I think about economics and philosophy, but I don't make much progress.

I have some thoughts about what you might term a "marxian analysis" of the modern post-manufacturing economy, and about what, exactly, the tech behemoths like google, facebook, etc., are doing, in the "modes of production" sense. These companies seem to traffic in the commodification not of products but rather the commodification of wants and needs for other commodities. This is a kind of "meta-commodification," where instead of exploiting consumer desires in order to generate surpluses, instead they operate entirely within the streams of surpluses, manufacturing consumer desires which they can sell to others to exploit. It's really a logical step in the succession of the economic modes of production, when viewed this way, just as credit is a logical extension of money, which is in turn a logical extension of exchange. But it seems to be something genuinely different from what came before, and certainly it is not classically marxian.

Having said all that, these thoughts seem to be merely a kind of epiphanic brainstorm, and thus I have nothing of substance to report.

So then I just have to post some song or something, instead, which likely is only related to the preceding if you're really good at apophenia.

---

What I'm listening to right now.

Cassadee Pope, "Wasting All These Tears."

Lyrics

I tried to find you at the bottom of a bottle
Laying down on the bathroom floor
My loneliness was a rattle in the windows
You said you don't want me anymore

And you left me
Standing on a corner crying,
Feeling like a fool for trying
I don't even remember
Why I'm wasting all these tears on you
I wish I could erase our memory
Cause you didn't give a damn about me
Oh, finally I'm through
Wasting all these tears on you
These tears on you

You ain't worth another sleepless night
And I'll do everything I gotta do to get you off my mind
Cause what you wanted I couldn't get
What you did, boy I'll never forget

And you left me
Standing on a corner crying
Feeling like a fool for trying
I don't even remember
Why I'm wasting all these tears on you
I wish I could erase our memory
Cause you didn't give a damn about me
Oh, finally I'm through
Wasting all these tears on you
These tears on you

And you left me
Standing on a corner crying
Feeling like a fool for trying
I don't even remember
Why I'm wasting all these tears on you
I wish I could erase our memory
Cause you didn't give a damn about me
Oh finally I'm through
Wasting all these tears on you
Oh these tears on you

I tried to find you at the bottom of a bottle
Laying down on the bathroom floor

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Quatrain #106

Words, decontextualized, seep
across his consciousness
till they begin to congeal and
their meanings cause duress.

- a quatrain in ballad meter.