Buddy Guy - Baby Please Don't Leave Me

I recently re-watched Hustle and Flow.  If you haven't watched it yet, do it today, mayn!  The flic opens to this song, a perfect song if there ever was one.
  I've never had a shittier cold than the one I have at this moment.  Fuckballs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6tdlmx_GO4

furder is murder

Taking my soresickself north to play street hockey.  Car!

Radioaction!

Cower!

Hide!

There are differing accounts as to just how much radiation was in today's rain, but I stayed out of it either way.  I haven't turned into a godzilla yet.  Or grown a prehensile tail.
  Actually,  I find mass-hysteria exciting.  I remember how excited Resolute and I were for Y2K-mageddon.  We sat around drinking Red Bull (the 7.1% beer, not the energy drink) making Y2K death prediction lists.  There were maybe six different death categories, and if I remember correctly, Resolute predicted about 400,000 people would perish in the Y2K-strophe, mostly from riots and falling satellites.
  Someone bought him a 'Y2K Countdown Clock' for his birthday in the summer of 1999, and for months we'd look at the little digital countdown with giddy anticipation.  We brought it out for the frigid Dec.31st festivities, wondering what the clock would do at midnight.  Right before midnight, the batteries fell out. And there were no mass fatalities.  What a terrible disappointment.
  What we need is a good old fashioned ice storm.  My theory is that all people are four missed meals away from cracking open their neighbor's skulls and feasting on the brains within.  Cavemen!  Blood-smeared faces!

Purple Rain

Ain't really all that bad...

Friendly Fresh Fun

Soooo, 'they' are saying that we may get hit with 1/3 of our 'allowed annual dose' of radiation by Thursday morning, and it's gonna hit Seogwipo head on. Wrap yourselves in tinfoil!  The testes, especially.  It's gonna be raining radiation! Hoard bottled water and canned goods!  Seriously though, it's nothing to go nuts about, buuut, I'm gonna be staying in on Thursday morning anyways.
Plumecast

Power of Beer

A glass of golden sHite!

I think I'm gonna do a 'Parched April'.  Parched March went great, and then April 1st hit, and kicked my arse.  Yep, Parched April.  Slept away Saturday tragically, no more of that shite.
  I've entirely expended my vast reserves of patience when it comes to Korean nonsensery.

Lifeofdog

This way I can sniff your butt while we sleep.

These filthy beasts hang outside my apt, flopping in the sun.  They're dirty little scamps.  A friend has trained the stumpy one to get into the elevator for the ride up, then ride back down on its own and let itself out.  Absurde!
  The major waves of migrating birds still haven't hit Jeju yet.  I've been checking every day, we'll see.  Any day now.

Eurasian Hoopoe

The ultimate rock n roll bird.  I've run into these pretty rarely over the years, and I've never been able to get a decent picture.  I secured this picture by doing a ridiculous special forces power roll onto my belly to get a clear shot.  I am strange.  This Hoopoe made my day (easily amused), and it's another good sign that spring migration is under way.  Hoops!

A solid morning

One thing I'll dearly miss about Seogwipo is sitting around on her hexagonal basalt column cliffs, fishing for melt-away hours.  The water is clean, and my nose is red.

Withered Mermaids

The Haenyo are Jeju's rapidly-disappearing female divers.  Most of them are over the age of 60, and no one will likely replace them.  I've seen them diving in the dead of winter - they're made of rebar and rawhide.  Apparently a Great White took a bite of one in 2005 and spat her out.  I bet she barely noticed.
  And they're not to be trifled with either - a friend of mine (who happened to be illegally spearfishing) was bombarded with rocks by a crew of pissed-off Haenyo.  He wisely withdrew.  I've seen them freedive for about 2 minutes at a time.  This one was hooking for Octopi under the rocks.  See them now, before they're gone.

Yellow-throated Bunting, the sequel

The female this time.  I can almost hear her...never mind.  G'nite.

Two dead frogs

One shriveled, one bloated.  Stupid frogs.
Also, 1,000th post.  I'm high-fiving myself, but really I shouldn't.  I probably should've jumped ship 500 posts or so ago.  One fine day soon, the winds of migration will help to dislodge a stagnating owl's ass-anchor.  Adrift to always greener grass.  Away from the land of the world's biggest inferiority/superiority complex ('We're the best in the world, but everyone's attacking us, and we make such great whiny victims, wa-wah-waaaah!')
  But don't worry, I'm an equal opportunity ranter.  I've no doubt I'll have way more rants about my homeland than I ever did about this place.  Plop!  Splash!

Pig guts soup

I'm normally a fan of hearty Korean working-class soups, but this one, not so much.  I mostly ate around the wobbling piggy gut bits.  The sides were good.  Been birding a lot lately, spring migrants are moments away.

Wolfmother - Woman

Rock out of Australia, to me at least, seems simple and naive (and more than a bit derivative), in the best possible way.  This one brings me back to a carefree and irie time when I was Tokyo-drifting in a van at Uluru, drinking champagne from a dixie cup.
Headin' out ultra-early to look for early spring migrants with my Korean birding buddy.  I would have guessed we'd be heading to the southwest coast, but he wants to go northeast.  I hope he doesn't just want to look for late winter ducks and migrating waders at Hado, because everyone knows that rare passerines are way sexier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzqTz_i1NXQ

A grubby wildcat

Found this beast hanging out, quietly waiting for birds where I usually do.

The Wreck of the Man Sok

Hey!  I found a pen down here!

While I was fishing with my Brit bud last weekend, a ship (the Geum Sok) pulled into the harbor, heeled over, towing something.  We were like 'What's that red thing?', and soon figured out it was the hull of an inverted ship.  As they brought the ship in, we saw that it was a pretty big ship.  The busy little Koreans that had gathered on the dock got their backs into it and helped pull it in.  Two divers went down and attached rigging to the ship, and a crane slowly flipped it over.  It was entertaining.  The ship itself, the Man Sok, was the newest I've seen, with her sleek all-metal hull and embarrassing array of radar gear.  We couldn't see any damage to the hull, and I'm guessing that 'Titanic Syndrome' had something to do with the ship's sinking.  That or the typical Korean habit of doing everything quickly, cheaply, and half-assedly.

Malachai - Snowflake

Korea creates strange bedfellows.  Groups of foreigners here hang out that wouldn't necessarily be pals in the 'real world'.  My English ex told me this with a laugh when we first started dating, ages and effing ages ago : "I would never hang out with you back home."  Talk about starting things off well.  Also, talk about a back-handed compliment.  Actually, maybe that's not technically a back-handed compliment.

  Here's a better one, a back-handed invite.  A diminutive South Afican once said this to me: "Hey bru, can you come out on a double-date with me tonight?  I need a non-threatening wingman."  He was far too clever for me, I never picked up on that one.  Where is that lil guy now?  Oh yeah, no one gives a shit, because he was a little arsehole.  Zing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDTrg3viaTM

Drunk Korean man relieving himself in public

...on a sunny Sunday afternoon.  I wish I could say that I didn't see this on a regular basis, but I can't.  I see it a few times a week.  The streets of Seogwipo look like the aftermath of the Incheon Landings most Saturday mornings, littered with immobile Korean men. Soju is a hell of a drug.  Stay classy!

Eurasian Curlew

Spotted this guy at Hwasun Beach.  First lifer of spring for me, super-cool.  I still need that Far Eastern Curlew that Cobain spotted without me last year.  I'll get it.  Hwasun Beach, by the way, has been thrashed by bullshit construction.  I'll rant about it soon.  I'm gonna bird every day of the week this spring.  Birdwatching is the new punk rock.

Surf-Dolphins of Bomok

That would be a great title for a sci-fi movie!  I've seen dolphins on the west coast a few times, but I spotted these guys just east of Soggy, near Bomok.  They were surfing, bru!  My Jeju surfing bud has seen plenty of dolphins on Jeju, but he's never seen them surfing.  It's meant to be good luck.
  I told my 514 homeslice the story of how I shit my snowpants when I was 5, and he laughed so hard, I thought we needed to call 119.  The story was that I'd eaten a frog-shaped pastry, which I suspect was filled with liquor, or was rotten.  So 20 minutes later, I'm all bundled up, watching my dad and his friends play street hockey in the schoolyard.  Suddenly, I shit my pants - super-runs.  Ashamed, I kept this terrible fact to myself all day, and suffered in silence.  My mom wasn't too impressed when she unzipped my snowpants, hours later.  I seem to remember that my legs and ass were pretty burned up.

Fishing in Containertown

I went fishing yesterday with a seasoned Brit fisherman.  His favorite spot is back behind my apartment, in a quiet corner of the harbor, deep within Containertown.  We got one bite all day, but that's not really the point.