Fried Fast Food on a Full Moon

Not a good idea!  I should know better -- I do know better -- but something about the holiday season makes judgement fly out the window like a lot of reindeer on a mission, driven by a rotund guy in a funny hat shouldering a big bag of Jack in the Box...and I don't mean the archaic toys. My digestion last night was eclipsed even more profoundly than the actual eclipse of the night before, of which I did manage to catch the waning portion at 4:30 a.m.  It can't be that cold if I can stand naked on the lanai in the moonlight without shivering, although I didn't linger that long.

Last night I should have left my warm bed to sit upright while contemplating the full moon, trying a Moon Cream Meditation that was demonstrated last spring in Wudang, but I was tormented restless with excess stomach acid and vivid dreams, if I really was asleep, of Dickensian England and medieval Korea.  I'd just finished the 8th and final episode of Bleak House, Dickens's tale of an interminable lawsuit which pretty much consumes all the plaintiffs up to the point where the final will is discovered.  Simultaneously discovered is that the lawyers have consumed the estate, so there's nothing left to distribute anyway. The adaptation does have a positive, if not completely happy, ending (and reminds me that there is one last element in my father's estate, latent over five years, which could possibly pay for a trip to China...Resolution for Year of Dragon: must call lawyer.)  I don't think I could have endured actually reading Bleak House; the screenplay with the marvelous late Denholm Elliot and Diana Rigg, was compelling and sufficient, though I could tell there was probably a lot left out in the 8-hour 1985 BBC rendering: quantity, if not quality. (Dickens was a paid-by-the-word writer...where do I get a gig like that?) 

I thought I might try another piece from the BBC collection, but The Pickwick Papers failed to grab me; I succumbed to revisiting a favorite Korean drama, Emperor of the Sea.  I needed a Song Il-guk fix and though he doesn't appear until the fourth Korean hour of the 51-episode drama, when he does, it's worth it.  Just as savvy as Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow, but more sinister, and less Keith Richards grubby, not BBC but KBS, the Pirate of the Yellow Sea may see me through the holidays, even though a new Korean Drama, a birthday present, waits to be opened up.

Song Il-guk as the delectable Yum Moon

How ironic to recall on this morning after serious lunar events and indigestion that SIG's character is named Yum Moon!