Television shows:

Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Trailer Park Boys

Party Down

Peep Show

That Mitchell & Webb Look

The Mighty Boosh

30 Rock

Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place

Nathan Barley

Children’s Hospital

Wainy Days

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Daily Show

Colbert Report

Mad Men

Jumong

The Wire

The Shield (yeah I know…)

Seinfeld

The Simpsons (seasons 2-9)

Podcasts:

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe

WTF with Marc Maron

The Adam Carolla Podcast

The Bugle (John Oliver)

Real Time with Bill Maher

Astronomy Cast

Skepticality

The Dana Gould Hour

The Todd Glass Show

Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend

The Bible Geek

The Human Bible

Point of Inquiry

The Infidel Guy (long gone but GREAT!)

The History of Rome

A History of the World in 100 Objects

Start The Week w/ Andrew Mahr

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg

BBC History Magazine

The Nature Podcast

Conversations With History

NPR Fresh Air

Democracy Now!

Doug Loves Movies

How Did This Get Made

The News Quiz from BBC 4

The Now Show (BBC 4)

Once a month I drive an hour and a half out to Yamhill, Oregon to and  spar with 6-10 awesome fighters.

I usually limp away. It’s great continuing education for me. It is inspiring, therapeutic, educational, and humbling.

There are all manner of stylists who attend this event. Punchers, kickers, and grapplers mix it up for a couple hours. If i’m not the smallest person there, I’m usually number 2 or number 3.

Last night I got thrown, kneed in the charlie horse, and armbarred.

Professor Tim Gagnier is very gracious and generous to invite me and include me.

Furthermore, I feel very safe and able to fight at whatever level I need to feel safe and remain uninjured.

My old singing partner Nichole Cooper, who left to pursue stardom in Nashville, returned recently to shoot a video for her new single Light My Fuse, produced by David Norris of Norrisong Productions and directed by Andrew Rozario.

There were solid gold dancing girls, go go dancers, the coolest band ever, a smoke machine, green screen filming in fancy downtown studios, and freshly felled elk cooked to perfection by Missy Cooper!

It was so much fun to be part of it. Even the boring downtime was just as exciting and fulfilling as could be!

I can’t wait to see the finished product and share it with you!

The Chinese language is tonal. Tone makes a meaning difference in a word. In English tone only affects the meaning of a sentence. Example: “You have the cat” vs. “You have the cat?!?!?!” Read them aloud. One is a statement one is a question, in the written form delineated by punctuation, in the spoken by tone. Say the word “cat” in any register and it means “cat”. Not so in Chinese. Saying “feng” in a level tone in Chinese and it can mean, “wind”. Say it sharply with a falling tone and it can mean “phoenix”. There is meaning change.

Homophony is rampant in Chinese. In English we spell “led” and the metal “lead” differently but they are pronounced the same. I am counting some 10 “feng” in the first tone each with a different “spelling” (character) and a completely different meaning. That is not counting “feng” in the other 3 tones.

I asked Dr. Jonathan Pease, head of the Chinese Department at Portland State University in Portland Oregon how one would say “funk” in Chinese. First he informed me that his slang was not current, and that it is probable that there is a word for the American music known as “funk” but that he did not know it. Dr. Pease’s specialty is literature and poetry, and suggested a way to construct what he called a “perfect pun”. He took the word “feng” in the first tone, meaning wind, and drew the “sickness radical” around the character for “wind”. The pronunciation remained the same, but now it means “crazy”. He was visibly pleased with himself for the humble man I knew him to be. Our “feng shui” means “crazy water”, which is descriptive of our sick rockin’ funk.

“But Shag, what about the ‘k’?”

Modern Standard Chinese, widely described as “Mandarin” has no syllable finals p, t, or k. Whenever you see a syllable final p, t or k, you are seeing Cantonese or one of several regional dialects. The standard dialect of the humungous China has undergone radical pronunciation changes over the centuries. Although there are no recordings, and the phonetic elements of Chinese are vague, there are ancient surviving rhyming dictionaries and similar reference materials. The rhyming dictionaries are arranged such that one can track ancient pronunciations by noting what words are grouped together that today have no rhyme. Once upon a time the p, t and k was a standard final in the “ru sheng” category. Those finals disappeared and became absorbed by the other tone categories. Short story long, it is POSSIBLE that “feng” was once pronounced, “funk”.

The name of my band is FUNK SHUI. It is based on a Chinese language pun, and has specific characters with a specific comedic meaning. It also has a possible ancient pronunciation connection to the English language pun. If you know of another band named Funk Shui and they are still together by this time next year, please to ask them what characters they have transliterated to arrive at their name and what meaning it translates to.

Here are some preliminary results from a recent photoshoot at the studio of Jared Seger.

The man knows his trade.

What a difference a year makes. Round the sun again y’all!

This Black Friday is last Friday, so Funk Shui is at Biddy’s.

We got Chelsea Luker on sax, Whityn Owen on drums, and Fred Stevenson back on lead guitar.

I was also honored to play numerous shows over the last year in cool places like on a boat and down town in Pioneer Courthouse Square at LUNCHTIME!!

So apparently 70% of the internet is Facebook. I’m the last holdout. I had one back in the day, and I recently started a Treefrogs Facebook page that Tracy admins (that’s a verb? Why not?).

Since I’m not on Facebook, I don’t exist. But in typical Sean fashion, i’ll choose obscurity on principle, and make this place my daily feed.

I think I have not posted a blog in long enough that anyone still visiting has probably given up. I guess we’ll see.

I have just noticed that the more connectivity there is the less actual communication there seems to be. People with Facebook pages send messages to me through other people with Facebook pages, even though they have my email, phone number, website etc. Folk with smart phones, the majority I’m sure at this point, seem to be the least likely to return a call, email, or text. It’s a gut feeling. I haven’t collected the data. Could be confirmation bias.

Maybe it’s because of the overwhelming volume of communication they now receive.

So seannowland.com/blog is the new Facebook…for me anyway.

And now…I’m having a nice cup of coffee with breakfast….