A Gothic Tale of Feral Cats...

My neighborhood is plagued with feral cats; many neighborhoods of this country are, as pet abandonment is as prevalent as rice over here.  My house is sort of a magnet for the roving cat gangs, since I have nice balcony ledges which make nice launching/landing pads for inter-house leaps.
The other night I came home, actually it was just pre-dusk, but a little bit darkish, and while climbing the steep stairs that lead out of the darkened garden up to my top-floor of the 3 story house, when out of the corner of my eye I spy what seems to be a squashed rat.  Not wanting to directly 'see' this horror, I kept moving, but as I entered my house, my brain continued to churn the image over and over; it seemed like there had definately been squiggly guts all over, and the creature was splayed out like a dead dog.
Now all I could think about was that, how I was looking at a major cleanup job, and that I had no shovel, only a one-foot midget broom, that would probably need itself to be cleaned or thrown away.  Plus there would be gore and the smell, depending on how long I procrastinated.
I decided to put it out of my mind.  I would find a way, somehow.  Maybe the neighbors whose door it was closer to would man up and do the job.  But no, I'd seen dogshit right in front of their door and they did nothing.  They were hopeless.  But maybe a rapacious cat, not necessarily the mother, would eat the damn thing...it was meat, after all.  Don't cats eat weird shit like dogs do?
So after just letting all these thoughts fester in my mind for a while, and trying to busy myself to keep those images out, I had to go out again for shopping.  This time I assiduously avoided any direct gaze, but again, in order to avoid stepping on the thing, I had to catch at least a part of it out of the corner of my eye.
Hurrying out of my house, my mind began reprocessing the eyecorner image, like Nasa scientists poring over the latest shots of Mars...actually my incessantly morbid mind was now coming to a new conclusion; those squiggly bits were not guts splayed, but actually it was a stillborn cat fetus, and the squiggly thing was umbilical cord, and the non squiggly bit must have been a placenta.  I'm not sure the idea of a stillborn fetus was any less unsettling than a squashed rat, but somehow at least the idea of cleanup began to appear more cheerful.
I stayed out shopping an unusually long time, not wanting to have to go home and deal with the fetal removal by cruelly short broom implement....Somehow in the back of my mind I kept clinging to the 'roving scavenger' theory- although in all my time in Seoul I had never witnessed an eagle or a hawk, I was never more ready to witness a raptor swooping in than now, sort of like people in North Dakota waiting to see the UFO's....
So on the way back in my house it was dark, and I had to get my little red keychain light out, had to be very careful not to squash the fetus, or I would be back to square one on the cleanup nightmare.  So I stepped gingerly through the garden, and this time it was almost impossible not to look directly at the pile of meat on my step, if I wanted to be sure to avoid stepping on it, plus the spotlight effect of the light in the dark, and then i shit my pants.....

THE THING WAS MOVING!  A little head reared in the red light like a demon from hell....

I rushed back upstairs to pour myself a whiskey.  Now I really had a mess- I have to 'put it out of its misery AND clean it up! I sat there for an hour, thinking hard about how NOT to think about this...maybe a nighttime scavenger would still come and eat the thing, but I really hoped it didn't make a mess or even a horrorific sound as it did so....

About an hour later, I stumbled down the stairs to re-assess the situation, prepared for the worst, and the kitten was gone!  Apparently the mother had just chosen the WORLD'S WORST NEWBORN PARKING spot while she recovered from partum- I remembered that cats are always doing that, moving their babies all over Shit-dom.

Later after the second whiskey back in my house, I realized I had missed my chance....now there was one more feral cat in my neighborhood....

NAKED Breakfast Experiment.

I remember learning, a long time ago in school of some sort, that the difference between Naked and Nude was that Nude meant you had intended to be seen naked, as in Nude beaches, Nude art, etc.  Naked was a synonym of unprotected where the viewer's gaze was unwelcome and even uninvited.
I found little evidence of this distinction remaining in my breakfast experiment this morning, where a recent news blurb from wacky Florida  got me thinking:  Is there a gender distinction when we say Naked Man/Naked Woman or Nude Man/Nude Woman?
As is often the case with Breakfast Experiments, asking the question simply opened up deeper questions :
Experimental Proceedure:
Coffee:  100 g. of Panama 'Boquete' green beans was open flame-roasted in a skillet three days prior to the experiment and set aside.  On the morning of the experiment, an aliquot of the same beans were ground and extracted with boiling H2O using a crude beaker/filter arrangement.  Milk and sugar were titrated generously in preparation for the next phase.
Data:  A web portal-search engine service known as "Google" was consulted for the four combinations of phrases, both with and without quotation marks to act as controls.
Perusal of the headlines often led to some amusing/ironic examples such as
"Man Caught Making Coffee Naked in His Home." (wait, can they see me through internet?), as well as some disturbing examples, such as:
"Naked Sultan Woman Waving Severed Dog's Head Arrested and..." -in such instances as the latter, coffee was diluted with single-malt whiskey to help assimilate the information.  The author will leave it to the reader to fill in the ellipsis.

The results are shown in Table 3, below:

Gender	“Man”	“Woman”	Ratio
Naked X arrested	4,600,000	1,800,000	39%
Nude X arrested	6,320,000	1,630,000	25%
“Naked X arrested” (with quotes)	1,410,000	416,000	29.5%
“Nude X arrested”(with quotes)	268,000	93,400	34%

What is interesting is that, consistently, there are about 3 to 4 Naked or Nude Men for every Naked/Nude woman.  Curiously, this confirms the author's casual observations on nude beaches at various locations around the world.  The question that it arouses, however, is whether this gender differential is more of a language, cultural, social, or biological function.  That is, are there actually more Nude/Naked men arrested because they are naked, or because they are men? Another way of phrasing this is, Do more men than women get naked in public in the first place, or is it more illegal for a man to be naked in public?


Any thoughts on the reasons behind this phenom? or is it just an artifact?

another WTF moment from Google maps....swimming pools IN the DMZ?

recently while looking at North Korea on Google, I found what appears to be not one, but two giant swimming pools on the South Korean side of the DMZ....they look nicer (e.g. emptier) than anything else in the republic....maybe I should sign up for the army so I don't have to bump elbows in the pool all the time...
Google gave the address as San 168 Jajak-ri, Jangnam-myeon, Yeoncheon-gun, Gyeonggi-do but I think you'll have better luck with the coordinates. (37.991794,126.840302 )  The two pools are literally 'across the street' from the DMZ (that denuded border running along the north of them is the southern limit of the 'strip' aka The No Man Zone, which also allegedly has deer and other mammalian fauna pretty much extinct in the two Koreas...

Non zero sum games, Relativity, and other ramblings....

I haven't posted in some time, but the recent rumblings of warmongering in the north (Yong Pyeong Island, 2 minutes by artillery shell from my house) have given me some momenti mori, and reminded me that it might be my last chance to blog (I know, it's a waste of one's last moments)....
Recently in class we were covering a chapter about the environment (titled "Carbon Footprint"), which was actually a lot of fun to do with Chemistry and Engineering majors, since they actually are studying Thermodynamics and Entropy in English and actually 'understand' that our options are severely limited as we pass into the period of Peak Oil...it boils down to that the best battery we've ever known, millions of years of solar energy built into Carbon single and double bonds in the form of dead flora/dinosaurs trapped under the earth, is running out.
If the age of Industrialism and Post Modernism could be said to be limited only by imagination, increasingly we must concede that we are being limited by resources; space, energy, water, etc. These sorts of limitations naturally lend themselves to the stringent qualities of the Prisoner's dilemma, The Peace-War game, the dilemma of the Commons, and so forth. While I don't want to go into the nitty gritty of the P. dilemma here, what interests me is that precisely it becomes more relevant as we run into resource limitations here on this planet.
How does Relativity come into all of this? Well, it seemed to me that just as two people cannot observe the same phenomenon in exactly the same way unless they are in the same reference frame, so we humans seem unable to observe the world from another person's viewpoint, or more importantly, from the external viewpoint of what is best for the human race, namely to avert a self-created climate change disaster scenario. This larger dilemma is repeated in so many micro dilemmas, such as the one which confronts this country and their more aggressive brothers to the north.

Best case scenario 1: nothing significant will happen. North Korea will achieve its mysterious goals of either garnering the West's attention, achieving greater internal solidarity, or the successful coronation of a new prince (Kim Jong Eun)in the dynasty. Or, they will attack in a similar manner a few weeks or months down the road. (I give this one more than 80% probability)
Best case scenario 2 (from a Hollywood film, actually Moon Over Parador):
Kim Jong Eun will take the helm and lead the country in an unexpected direction of openness to the West and democracy. (I give this about 1% probability, like most Hollywood plots)

Worst case scenario 1: nothing significant will happen....minor escalation in the form of iterated, isolated attacks and counter attacks from North and South, or in the form of increased sanctioning. I give this one about 18%
Worst case scenario 2: (from a Video Game plotline): North Korea goes balls-out for invasion and ultimately their own extermination, including a possible scene involving the first-since 1945 use of nuclear devices on a battlefield. (this one gets the other 1% probability). I also find this one interesting considering the most recent history of sneak attacks:

1. Serb separatist assasinates Archduke Ferdinand- (Semi-Fail!) Greater Serbia did become a reality (e.g. Yugoslavia) only forty years later, but look at it now....still messed up...)
2. Hitler invades Russia (Uber-Fail!)
3. Pearl Harbor (won the battle, lost the war)
4. 9-11 (garnered enormous sympathy for the US in Europe and elsewhere, goodwill soon squandered by George W.) - but ultimately too soon to decide if this sneak attack was successful - far more successful than the actual attack has been the reaction of the US to label a priori all of its own citizens as terrorists (AQ FTW so far).

So if Kim Jeong Eun decides to start lobbing shells at us in the wee hours when I'm watching Boardwalk Empire, well, then, I have to say, you got me there...but it seems rather improbable statistically, so I'll stick to the big killers here, and by way of comparison:

Traffic: (2 friends killed in last ten years)
North Korea: (1 cousin once removed killed in the last sixty years)
Pollution: (ongoing, statistics murky)

aint she beautiful?

happening in our town....

Would you ride this?

So far, Ive had nothing but positive experiences riding the low- cost carriers. But when I saw this Pegasus Airlines plane I had a few....hesitations shall we say?