Curses!

I have a valid excuse for the complete lack of posts lately: about a week ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that this blog had been identified as a potential spam blog. As a result, it was "locked" so that I couldn't make or edit posts and had to request someone to review the blog to "unlock" it. The good news, though, is that the blog is now again up and running, and, since it had to be reviewed by a staff member of blogger.com, I now know that at least one person has actually looked at it. :)

I suppose the spam filter arrested the blog because of the questionable use of profanity in its title. So I'll explain. The basic idea is that I have intellectually stagnated since college and this gives me a way to digest those and new thoughts into semi-interesting shit. I titled it the way I did so I didn't feel like each post had to be perfect or super-insightful, in which case I might never post anything. I also didn't want it to have a pretentious tone, which was something to consider since I wanted to write about Nietzsche. Those of you who know me, though, hopefully got that the title is mainly a joke on my name. Personally, it also reminds me of being in Korea, since, because of certain linguistics features of Korean, someone who pronounces my name with a thick Korean accent would get something vaguely towards that direction (though nobody here has actually pronounced that poorly so far). And because of how poorly I speak the language, I am kind of an idiot here, unable to understand the majority of conversation and needing help for a lot of basic tasks like figuring out how to get to an upper floor of a building or knowing which bus I should take.

Incidentally, I was shocked to discover that the most popular family name in Korea, which we all know as Lee, is not actually pronounced with the L in front. In fact, the "ㄹ" sound never begins a word in Korean except in adaptations of English words like "radio". The popular name Lee is actually "이" in Korean, which has no initial consonant sound; it's just "Ee". But I guess that just looks so weird in English letters that they decided to add an L. Likewise, names with the no-initial-consonant "Oo" sound (우) tend to have a W added to them when written in English. Since they are both weak consonants, the pronunciation doesn't change all that much when Western speakers mispronounce them as Lee and Woo, but it's still pretty strange.

At any rate, I've figured out how to type Korean characters using my laptop, so a possible post explaining Han-gul, the Korean alphabet, may be coming up for those who are curious.