Here is a picture of Grandpa Aboji with his family. To his right is his older sister. This was taken when Aboji went back to Korea for the first time in close to 20 years.
Aboji reunion with his family
My grandfather is in the middle foreground. He was recently commemorated on a postage stamp in South Korea.
한국의 과학 두 번째
The artist messed up. There is no reason for my grandfather to be wearing a sweater under his suit. 😉
Edit: Letter from my cousin
Oh man I love your blog posts. I scrolled quickly to the one on grandpa and thought you should know… he did frequently wear a sweater under his suit! I have strong memories of a camel colored one and sometimes a soft burgundy cardigan worn almost like a suit vest. To me, it was an extra suave, climate-prepared, and eccentric detail I was glad got captured in the stamp.
“Let me tell you why I want to visit the bookstore. The next thing I’m supposed to draw is a green pepper. But because of its shape, I’m having trouble getting started. I thought maybe I could find a different drawing book to distract myself until I can get the energy.”
“So that’s why you have that on our dining room table,” she noted. “You know it’s gotten to the point where the pepper has acne.”
“Heck, it’s much worse than just acne,” I observe.
“But, green peppers have a Scoville rating of zero. Ghost peppers are supposed to be hot.”
“Well then not that. It’s a special pepper though.”
“The only thing special about that pepper is it has pepper leprosy. Maybe what makes it special is it’s got Pepprosy.”
I didn’t get a different book, but I finally got unstuck enough to finish the drawing. As I was dropping it into the compost bin, she informed me that it was actually a gypsy pepper .
Her: Let me finish the episode of this Korean drama.
Me: Why you watching that? You have Korean drama right here! *points at self*
She laughed, so I had to tweet it. 🙂
I think the drama was Scarlet Heart: Ryeo, which she described as, “Kdrama version of Outlander.” All I could tell was everyone looks like a girl, and since all asians look alike to me, I wasn’t going to get my head in a knot watching it.
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My aunt started an e-mail thread in my family. I’ll include excerpts here periodically.
I am cleaning the house of more pictures — so many. In the album Grandma Omma left, I found some pictures your mom. I will send another email of your mom and dad’s wedding that you probably have seen already.
Teresa so young
My mom, like her father before her, loved science. She started in physical chemistry like her father but her heart condition caused by rheumatic fever led her to work in biophysics studying the neural network of the heart and heart arrhythmias.
Hitler, in addition to his oratorical and organizing abilities, has another positive asset—he is a man of the “common people”…
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch messes of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
—The New York Times, November 21, 1922
Stephen E. Ambrose’s supposed thesis of Band of Brothers was that American citizen solders were better than the Germans because uniquely “American” autonomy and attitudes in lower officer corp gave them battlefield superiority due to flexibility in tactics and decision-making. This thesis is refuted in the same book by fact that it mentions that after soldiers were in combat for more than six months, they started to fall apart. The Germans, by this point, had been at war for six years.
An interesting side note was who the American servicemen found it easiest to relate to: not the English they trained and fought with, nor the French or the Dutch they freed at Normandy and Arnhem, but the German soldiers they fought at Bastogne and who surrendered to them at Berchtesgaden.
In the end, the real lesson of that book is a far deeper one: when Easy Company rolled into Dachau concentration camp, they were staring at a human horror that none of us are above because we are no different then our enemies.
Someone recently tweeted that if you ever wondered what you would do in 1930’s Germany, now you get to find out.
When we were looking for a some coffee for Marie near Mendocino, we drove by a gamestore, and I had an urge which comes up every couple years to start playing Dungeons and Dragons again. We’ll see how that goes. If you start seeing more posts about D&D, then this time it finally stuck.
A couple days ago, I went to a high school friend’s birthday party. I hadn’t seen him in 12 years almost to the day, but we started to talk about our times being nerds playing RPGs and not giving a crap about it, when he pulled out a copy of a pamplet he and K— were given back then in the 80’s. It was titled, “Dungeons and Dragons: Only a game?”
For those who don’t know, this sort of conspiracy theory started with James Dallas Egbert III in 1979 and reached its peak in the mid-80’s with the B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and a 60 Minutes episode my mom told me about. Thankfully, I started playing D&D two years before William Dear manufactured the conspiracy theory out of whole cloth, so I didn’t have much explaining to do by then, but there was enough a hysteria to clue me in to how the political and religious extremists operate today with nearly everything.
In any case, hide your kids, hide your wife, cuz D&D be Satanin’ errbody out there. Without further ado, here is the the text of the pamphlet in full (PDF scan):
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
When a non-techie friend of mine moved to San Francisco, she overheard two guys talking next to her.
“What are you up to,” one of them asks?
The other replied, “Oh, I’m trying to learn Python.”
“Excuse me,” my friend interrupted them. “But I believe it’s called Parseltongue.”
(After living here for a while longer, she became very embarrassed. And though it wasn’t exactly what he meant, I still think Mr. Clarke would approve.)
Transamerica
North Beach, San Francisco, California
Panasonic DMC-LX1
1/500 sec at f/4.0, iso 80, 15.6mm (70mm)
Part of the same photo roll as this photograph, I ended up processing it also before I noticed the error.
It’s a “tourist snapshot” of the Transamerica Pyramid. From a photographic standpoint there is nothing to write about because I took it the same way any tourist might. Even though the camera shoots RAW, the dynamic range of small camera CCDs back then were just not up to the task of recording anything useable in the shadows. All I could do is use the “pump the blues” trick that any nature photographer knows to do for outdoor photos.
…
Even though Transamerica has long since moved to the East Coast, because it was built by them and its still in their logo, it’s still called the Transamerica Building and has been a the salient fixture of the San Francisco skyline for my entire life. I read somewhere that when it was built it was considered the ugliest building in the city until the Mariott “Jukebox” was built in 1989. I guess after that the One RinconTower Fan were built, San Franciscans were like, “You know, the Transamerica pyramid actually looks kind of nice.”
I snapped this photo outside my favorite sandwich shop at the time, Giordano Bros, which, like Transamerica, has moved to a different location.
A lot of people don’t “get” the All-in-One sandwich because they didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh, but putting french fries and coleslaw in a sandwich seems the most natural thing to do. Before I even ate at Primati’s I used to put Snyders of Berlin BBQ potato chips in my chipped ham sandwiches when I ran out of Isaly’s BBQ sauce.
Ever wonder why it took a Pittsburgh franchise to popularize the Bob’s Big Boysandwich as the McDonald’s Big Mac? Go eat an All-In-One and then go eat a Big Mac and your culinary mind will be blown.
I may not have the tastebuds of a foodie, but to make up for it when I eat, with a single bite into a sandwich, my mind can travel trans-america from San Francisco, to Oak Brook, to Pittsburgh, to Los Angeles and back again. And that’s why my favorite sandwich in San Francisco when I snapped this photo was Giordano Bros’s Coppa All-in-One.
