my deadline for work is finally FINISHED and i'm wholly enjoying my first free time. i'll start by catching up on some music news: cat stevens recording: Mr. Islam is working on his first pop album since 1978. It is expected in the fall, though there is no indication as to whether it will be released under that name or the one by which he first became famous, Cat Stevens. also, paul simon's new album was produced by brian eno. interesting. also worth mentioning is the recent announcement of the end of what was indisputably one of the greatest tori amos websites ever, thedent.com. this news is a particular shock to me b/c i have literally checked this site almost every day since i first came across it, prob. sometime just a few months after it began (in 1996). congrats to the dent for ten years of feeding my and countless other fans' tori love. you have been much, much appreciated and you will be greatly missed.

this nytimes article about american regional accents is interesting. as a louisvillian there have been times i've had people give me "where the heck are you from?" looks b/c of isolated, random words that somehow got into my pronunciation (and have since been somewhat smoothed over). off the top of my head: - "crayon": used to pronounce as "crown" - "sentence": inexplicably, used to pronounce as a very hillbilly-sounding "sint-ince" - "Iraq": not sure how people pronounce this, but I used to pronunce it as "EYE-rack" which I think is more hillbilly than the pronunciation "Ih-rack" - "Louisville": and of course everyone knows that natives pronounce this not as "Loo-ee-vill" but as "Loo-uh-vuhl".

i wasn't too good about taking a lot of pics while in seoul, but here are a few. building at deoksugung, one of several palaces: at inwangsan, a buddhist shrine: street food: deokbokki along with (from near to far): fried gimbap (korea's version of sushi, here mostly just rice noodles wrapped in gim, korea's version of nori), some fried seafood i think and mandu (korean wontons), and fried carrots/scallions i think and fried sweet potatoes. the sweet potatoes there are yellow and soo good. various kinds of fried doughnuts/rice cakes (ddeok). the ones on the left have red bean in them. the ones at the top of the picture are called hoddeok and are soo good. they have brown sugar in them, which gets nice and gooey. i craved them the whole time i was there, but unfortunately only had them once. am def. going to have to go back for more.