Sometimes, when the students did well in class, I allow them to any clip on YouTube. As long as it is not pornographic I will allow it. One class today asked for Lollipop by Big Bang(빅뱅).
For those of you who don’t know them yet, Big Bang is a Korean pop group, a mix of boys and girls. My students tell me they are all boys, but I don’t see how that can be true. In this Music Video they are joined by a group that I have not heard from before. Apparently they are called 2NT1(투애니 원)
You know how your life just goes on to a useless direction every now and then? For various reasons mine did just that. For the last few months I was just lost in Korea. My apartment was a pig sty for weeks at a time so that I could hardly take a step without breaking something. Just try to keep things clean when it is that untidy.
The untidy room was just the most visible evidence, but the problem with that was it put you in a mindset of not wanting to do other things. Who would want to DO anything IN such a mess? It was my excuse for not studying in that I would clean for five minutes instead of study and then get bored. In I room like that I didn’t feel like keeping track of my photos, never mind editing them, and lost quite a few of the originals. At least I still have the edits. I didn’t want to cook and washing my clothes in a timely fashion was just not happening.
My health took a hit as well. For the last two weeks I was constantly tired. During the last two weeks I would get home from school and sleep for three hours, missing about half of the Hapkido classes for the period. I didn’t have any food for breakfast for almost a week and consequently I was not eating breakfast for that whole time. Needless to say, I didn’t have food for dinner either, so I ended up eating rubbish at various restaurants.
For no apparent reason, somewhere around Wednesday, I realized I really had to make a choice or things were just going to get worse. Since Wednesday I’ve been cleaning my apartment a little bit every day, packing things away to get it off the floor and where it belongs, vacuuming constantly to get rid of all the little bits that fall out of the stuff that was strewn on said floor and constantly taking out the full bags of junk.
I went shopping for fruit and other breakfast to make sure I get a good start to the day. I started going through my Korean every day. I even installed a decent TODO program on my iPod to keep track of all those things I tend to forget. This morning I went as far as doing a bunch of push-ups, sit-ups and back extensions to get the blood going.
With some direction in my life again, I seem to be getting four times as much done now and I feel the energy flowing again. For a bit if proof of how I am getting things back on track, just have a look at all the photos I uploaded on to Facebook lately. Now to see if I can get the blogging back on track again. If I can keep the photo editing up then I might start using the blog to display them.
New Facebook Uploads:
Korea, Hub of Pia (Three new)
Icheon - Part Two (A few towards the end)
Icheon Ceramics Festival (New Album)
Korea All Over (Rugby at the end)
Seoul Motor Show 2009 (Older, but still new-ish)
I was looking at the Wikipedia article about the current Sick Piggy problem and saw a few interesting things
Source of the virus
Growing evidences are pointing to a US-owned industrial pig farm in the central Mexican state of Veracruz as a likely source of the virus. The virus is derived in part from a North American swine flu virus that originated on a farm in North Carolina in 1998, possibly due to the increase in the number of pigs per farm over the past 40 years from 50 to 1000. La Jornada, one of Mexico City's leading daily newspapers, reported in an article on April 6, the statements of municipal and national authorities, which traced the virus to a massive feces lagoon at a factory farm owned at 50% by Smithfield Foods, world’s largest pork producer.
That is disturbing.
Government actions against pigs and pork
Main article: 2009 swine flu outbreak action against pigs
Although there is no evidence that the virus is transmitted by food, and influenza A viruses are generally killed by heating, some countries banned import and sale of pork products "as a precaution against swine flu".
Several countries, including Serbia, China and Russia banned the import of pork products from North America in general as a response to the outbreak, despite assurances from the WHO that the disease is not spread through pork. On April 29, the Egyptian Government decided to kill all 300,000 pigs in Egypt, despite a lack of evidence that the pigs had, or were even suspected of having, the virus. This led to clashes between pig owners and the police in Cairo.
It smacks of a cleric taking advantage of the situation, don’t you think?
Prevention and treatment
Further information: Influenza: Prevention and Influenza treatment
Recommendations to prevent infection by the virus consist of the standard personal precautions against influenza. This includes frequent washing of hands with soap and water or with alcohol-based hand sanitizers, especially after being out in public. The CDC advises not touching the mouth, nose or eyes, as these are primary modes of transmission. When coughing, they recommend coughing into a tissue and disposing of the tissue, then immediately washing the hands.
Troubling thought in Korea, where adults find it OK to cough over a table with open food, never mind with other people at the table.
Airborne transmission
There is so far little data available on the risk of airborne transmission of this particular virus. Mexican authorities are distributing surgical masks to the general public. The UK Health Protection Agency considers facial masks unnecessary for the general public.[165] Many authorities recommend the use of respirators by health-care workers in the vicinity of pandemic flu patients, in particular during aerosol generating procedures (e.g. intubation, chest physiotherapy, bronchoscopy).
For a bit more general overview of the problem, have a look at this entry.
