The Daily Roger

For about six years, I lived in the Gyeongridan area of Yongsan-gu in Seoul. When it was time to move out of my particular apartment, that meant moving to nearby Haebangchon, which I did.  By m-louis (a flickr user) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/m-louis/336988096/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1666698 I found myself noticing the tops of buildings in Haebangchon, particularly a middle school and high school complex, which had a brightly lit sign on the top of the building.  Then I noticed I was noticing them, which helped me to notice the tops of buildings in my old neighborhood, which I didn't notice so much when I was living there. Recently I went walking and noticed this time the top of the community center on the five-way intersection at the top of the hill. Again, I walked past that again and again, and never really noticed it. I think there is a connection to noticing the tops of buildings and the mental demeanor one is in. You're less l...

When Richard Wagner composed Das Reingold , he began his composition with a prelude that was four minutes of E flat major moreso than as a melody. For something that premiered in 1869, it may have come off to audiences as chaotic, the relentless playing off of the chord structure, seeming almost last-minute and improvisational. Eventually, the E flat opening moves into the Rheinmaidens singing up their own storm. A page from Wagner's autograph score of  Das Rheingold I've heard that the E flat opening was meant to be chaotic, the universe before laws of nature had become firm. For cosmology, that is very poor judgment on Wagner's part. The fact that something exists and possesses identity means that laws of nature and order will also occur. However, the order-from-chaos description can apply to the creative process. I thought of that E flat major beginning with regard to me doing a daily blog, something I never thought I would do. Taken as a whole so far, my entries lurch ...

Ladies and gentlemen, the handout itself:  As I said before, I don't believe I ever used this in the classroom, and I believe part of my reason to expound on this handout was to consider the functionality and potential of the ideas. See the other articles in this series,  the first one ,  the second one , the third one , and the fourth one , for breakdowns on these activities. They are described, nine at a time for all 36 of these activities.  My own evaluation is that many of these activities could be done separately away from the handout, and that the handout could be done as a review handout. The handout itself could be in color and designed to look even more like a soccer field, with the instruction to go faster than when these activities were encountered earlier. It's a bit of a kitchen-sink approach, having 36 prompts in one place, and it may be better to sprinkle these throughout a semester than to have them all in one place. In other words, this is at best an...

That's right, it's time for part four of my handout, given a bit of explanation for each. That's what happens when you make a handout denser than a white dwarf star.  See the other articles in this series, the first one , the second one , and the third one , for context. Or jump in with no context. You possess volition! Here are the last nine activities on that handout, each one sentence long, with a bit of explanation afterwards: Fast Boredom: Talk as quickly as possible about a very boring topic. Ideally, if you can discuss the benefits of aluminum at twice the speed of Ben Shapiro, then you have more than done your job. However, in the capacity of a warm-up, speaking faster than one might usually speak is probably good enough. Complete Weirdness: “You know what is weird about …?” Discuss. Ideally, this could be a topic that is not inherently weird. Puppies aren't normally thought of as weird, though chameleons might be. It's more interesting to pursue the weird i...

And now continues this five-part series on a single handout I have yet to use in class. It was conceived first for a PDF on learning comedy, then turned into a form to do comedy-activity questions and prompts as activities in a nonnative-English-speaking conversation class for adults. You can see the earlier installments in  the first post   and the second post  on this handout, which is dense and weird. And now continues this five-part series on a single handout I have yet to use in class. It was conceived first for a PDF on learning comedy, then turned into a form to do comedy-activity questions and prompts as activities in a nonnative-English-speaking conversation class for adults. You can see the earlier installments in the first post and the second post on this handout, which is dense and weird. Welcome to our third set of nine questions and prompts! Ahem: Role Change: Someone famous trades places with a family member or friend. What happens?  This would be more...

So now it’s time to do nine more activities for the classroom, meant to be warm-ups for native speakers trying to develop comedy skills, in a theoretical class on the subject. Yes, teachers do that – construct activities almost for the sake of constructing them. It may pay off later. So background here: I found a handout I made in the latter days of my time as a professor-like person at Sookmyung Women’s University. See https://thedailyroger.blogspot.com/2021/04/comedy-warm-up-tasks-part-1-of-5.html , a.k.a. Comedy Warm-Up Tasks: Part 1 of 5 , for the first installment of this what-if sort of series.  Never got used, but likely should get some use somewhere, somehow. This is especially true with students for whom the skill of producing humor and in being creative in general are important. I’d say some of these activities for nonnative speakers might need on-the-spot explanation for some classes and could be germs for larger activities. Others may need the context of the bits to...

Many years ago, I made a handout entitled Comedy Warm-Up Soccer. I never used this, but made it anyway, as a tool for making people funnier. Essentially, these were tasks I had come up with long ago, and I just found it in a long-neglected folder. Perhaps I should de-neglect these folders because this looks interesting. These tasks could be used in a classroom that is meant to promote creativity in some way, such as a course of adult English learners that are intermediate or higher. I think for many students you might have to build a lesson around each task, depending on its complexity and linguistic or structural requirements. Let me explain each of these briefly. The entire list is 36 items, so perhaps these should be introduced slowly. There will be a fifth entry showing the handout itself with any bookending remarks I would need. Five Mismatched Guests for dinner are coming over. Who are they? Just list the guests. The idea here is that none of these would normally be toge...

In my entire life, I've never been able to buy into believing a Hell exists. It's quite a threat, that forever I would be punished, even after dying, if I do not behave according to someone's list of virtues and requirements. Medieval illustration of Hell in the  Hortus deliciarum  manuscript of  Herrad of Landsberg  (about 1180) Source: Wikipedia We all have heard the story, and we have all been reminded of the story. At least twice I've received religious literature from missionaries on the street. The brochures they distributed advertised Hell as the ultimate place of fire and torture.  It seems a pointless belief to have. Why can't they promise me just everlasting life, vs. no eternal soul if I don't? Why be so shocking if a softer sell would work? It always struck me as nudging me into accepting the Christian package of virtues and beliefs, or face negative consequences if I don't. It seemed like a false alternative meant to have me buy their preferred ...

 When my father was in the hospital for heart disease, a friend gave him a children’s book to brighten his spirits while in the hospital. This might have been an odd gift to give a 52-year-old, but if you knew my father, a fairly jovial and at times youthful man, it made sense. The family legend is that the woman who gave him the book was his mistress, adding to the allure of the book itself. What book would this hospital-bound man be reading? That book was McElligot’s Pool by Dr. Seuss, a fanciful what-if story, beautifully painted and cheekily rendered – and now under threat of expulsion from the Dr. Seuss canon. The book is basically a conversation between a boy fishing in a small pool. He is approached by a skeptic who points out that the pool is small and has no fish. The boy replies that maybe it is connected to a larger body of water. The book then describes in visuals and verse multiple and fanciful fish, whales, and other sea life that the boy could catch. In so doing, ...

Your eleven- or twelve-year-old child or student needs to read a good seven-page comic-book horror story. It contains no superheroes, has an intriguing hook, and lots of potential for the child to think about. It's called "The Demon Within" and it's a classic from the early 1970s.  DC Comics at that time had the best anthology titles for horror and humor, and House of Secrets was one of their titles. It was edited by Joe Orlando, an artist who got his start at EC Comics, considered the greatest publisher of horror comics. He came up with the plot for this story, which was featured in House of Secrets number 201, and gave it to John Albano to flesh out. The art -- the drawing, inking, and lettering -- was done by the very talented Jim Aparo, a versatile Batman artist from the 70s. House of Secrets stories were self-contained but connected by a host, who welcomed the reader in to the story at the beginning with a little narration. Cain was his name, a sort of Ichabod-Cr...

One of the ways I do these articles is I have a list of essay topics or essay questions I've made for every day of the year, February 29th included. To date, only the first Daily Roger blog was done this way. Other topics were generated by current events, thoughts on my mind, and more organic thinking around the time I needed to write the blog. The topics list was something I made ages ago as a teaching tool, and part of my reason to do this blog is to go through a chunk of those essay topics on my own. The suggested topics don't have to be essays, I should add, and the writing they inspire could take any form. It doesn't matter if the writing is a story, rap lyrics, a script for a commercial, a parody of a Nostradamus prediction -- whatever genre I think of, I can incorporate some element of that essay question as I please. The topic on April 2nd is exactly my area of incompetence: "If you were an employer, under what circumstances would you fire an employee?" I ...