Wanted to acknowledge at the outset that before I ever got to S. Korea and Camp Humphreys, my daughter Lauren found the official web site for this place.
Here it is now: http://humphreys.korea.army.mil/
I’m passing it on because, thanks to Lauren, next to this site, my blog is starting to look like great literature.
Or, not.
In fairness, I should say that I haven’t actually spent much time browsing the site because, well, I’m doing it non-virtually, as it were.
Like, I’m here, man.
Far off!
Anyway, I forget that EVERYTHING, EVERYBODY, and EVERY PLACE is on the internet. Just the other day I found out how to make all the programs that were now being encrypted in Korean, including Google I might add, go back to good old English, and not just that, but American English, not that British version either.
I typed the question, “how do I get my programs…etc.”, and guessed at the “enter” button which was now designated in Korean.
Miraculously, I got onto some site which was a chat about other people having the same issue in other non-English speaking places like Holland and Amsterdam and the Bronx. Someone had the “fix”.
Here it is should this ever happen to your computer:
- Go to www.blogger.com/language.gt
- Click on Settings (third option from the left, in case they are written in the foreign language).
- Click on Formatting (6th option down)
- Click on the desired language.
- Click on apply.
- Read: Pray, Burp, Fart (the book).
Somehow, this not only fixed BlogSpot but Google as well.
Or else I figured that out separately and am getting confused again which happens any time I get more than one or two clicks away from Start.
I wonder if I try http://www. findGarysmemory.huh.what.gone, I might just discover a whole lifetime that I spent doing something or other which, until now, only my sister(s) and children remember,
far better than I.
Maybe it would be like the www version of the old TV Show, This Is Your Life. As it is, my current show is on only sporadically and it’s often unclear who’s memories I’m actually having.
It’s as if I was channeling a past life and got someone with Alzheimer’s?
The title for today’s entry is part of a quote from a book I was reading by Terry Pratchett, entitled, Only You Can Save Mankind.
It’s about kids playing a computer game and find that the game is really happening to some real aliens when one of the kids begins to get messages from the enemy and then begins to enter into the game, and sees it through the aliens’ eyes, through his dreams.
It was written back during the “first” Gulf War when the nightly news was showing all the game-like footage of smart bombs being dropped down the chimneys of the enemy of the time.
It was still pretty new, this often real-time presentation flickering across the screens from CNN, et. al.
Anyway, at one point, the nerdy hero kid who has been contacted by the aliens, is asked by the woman alien in charge of the mother ship,
“How do you think like a human?” Meaning, how can I understand human thinking.
The kid’s response, “Go into madness first, probably, and then out the other side.”
See, the alien has surrendered her entire fleet to him but he can’t get the other game players to stop shooting them anyhow.
So, later, he says to the brilliant uppity nerdy girl who gets pulled into the drama through messages on her computer, commenting on how confusing and crazy feeling it is to see things from the enemy’s side, from inside their reality (i.e. being the objects of a game in which they are merely targets),
“See, that’s what I mean. Games look real. Real things look like games. And…and…it all kind of runs together in my head.”
Nerdy girl responds, “That’s not crazy, that’s shamanism.”
She adds a little later, “There was an African tribe that I read about who’s closest word for enemy meant “a friend we haven’t met yet.”
I find I appreciate and am tickled by finding unexpected gems for thought lying around in unexpected places. They usually turn out to be related to and reflective of current aspects of my life that are paradoxical or perplexing in nature. And I can’t tell if these gems are all around all the time and I’m just noticing them now because of what I’m thinking about. Or, am I just reading meaning into things that really don’t have anything to do with anything.
Perplexing and paradoxical and amusing. Being the mental health helper on a military base in a foreign country that, in my childhood, was associated with the image of an evil giant (Joseph Stalin) floating above a huge “Iron Curtain” somehow suspended across the sky just waiting to engulf and enslave everyone good in the world.
It would be like the scary movie The Manchurian Candidate that came out in the fifties (I think) where the evil North Koreans tortured people (or was it the Chinese egged on by the Russians, or…never mind) and did something to their brains with water called “brain washing”, etc.
Something that the good guys would never think of doing.
Childhood in the early 50’s started from there and ended up under a desk in the classroom during Atomic Bomb attack practice.
I rest my case.
The one about why we turned out to be a little jumpy from time to time about communism, Koreans, Russians, and the under-side of desks.
It has seemed odd to me that over here in Korea and Vietnam, we determined that the baddies were in the north and the good guys lived in the south. The arbitrary line kinda like the magical line in airplanes and restaurants that kept the cigarette smoke from drifting into the non-smoking areas.
I’ve wondered in past about why the south side of many cities (thinking here, for example, of South Philly, South Side Chicago) are the bad part of town – Bad, bad, Leroy Brown.
Oh, yeah. And that tribe mentioned above.
They were attacked by a neighbors who killed and ate many of the tribe before they could get to know them.
The rest eventually were captured and sold into slavery.
Talk about paradoxical.
I didn’t see that one coming either!
That’s just wrong!
Question for god: What the…?!?
Now for something completely different, e.g. hopeful: http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html
No comments:
Post a Comment