Paint Roller Blog

리빙 인 코리아/Living in Korea

2008-08-15T10:27:00.000+09:00

안녕하세요. 리빙 인 코리아 MP3 다운 받으세요.

쩌우 먼델로 - 리빙 인 코리아

지난 4년반 동안 한국에서 잘살았습니다.
내가 한국에서 제일 즐긴것 중에 몇개 뽑아서 이 노래를 만들었습니다.

Download 'Living in Korea

Joe Mondello - Living in Korea

For the past four and a half years I have lived in Korea. This is a song about some of my favorite Korean things. Enjoy!

My Paint Roller runneth dry

2007-12-05T23:21:00.000+09:00

I've decided that it's time to move on to greener pastures. I have exported all my posts to their new home, The Joshing Gnome. I have also decided to abandon Blogger in favor of Wordpress, for many reasons, but one in particular: it is actually easier to export blog posts from Blogger to Wordpress than to a different blog within Blogger. Wordpress allowed me with one click to turn 316 Paint Roller posts into the Joshing Gnome archives.

Other reasons for the move include built-in stats and ease of applying tags and creating a header image at Wordpress. As for theme, I've opted for one almost identical to the white-on-black of Paint Roller.

And so from now on I will be posting to http://joshinggnome.wordpress.com/ Be sure to change your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

To: Metropolitician Re: Yr Proposal . . . I do!!

2007-12-05T12:20:00.000+09:00

Ah, Metropolitician! A passionate man with strong opinions, and I like that. I just read his proposal for a new 'elite visa' for long-time, well-behaved English teachers intended to increase demand for better teachers, improve the treatment of English teachers by school owners, and reward good teachers with more rights in order that they may 'take a bigger part in Korean life'. Since my comment is longer than eighty percent of my blog posts, I figured I'd reprint my comment here, for my own reference and yours.

Re: A Realistic Proposal

I find it highly unrealistic that anything will be made of this proposal for several reasons.

First of all, all your proposed system does is make life easier for foreign English teachers living long-term in Korea. It fails to address the supposed threats that foreign teachers pose to Korean students and Korean society. What good is making life easier for English teachers who've been in Korea for three or more years without doing anything about shorter-term teachers, transients with no ties to Korea? This is like reacting to a tainted beef scandal by introducing a new super-premium Grade Double-A beef designation. It simply doesn't address the problem at hand.
Second, the whole proposal's a crazy quilt of unrelated gripes that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. What Korean would want to read a constellation of complaints about topics as diverse as the Busan amateur theater bust, the guy from the Host getting deported, the way foreigners are treated like 'walking dictionaries', and the illegal black list. Few Koreans would have any idea what half of these incidents were about.
Third, your focus on yourself and F-4 visa holders in general as a standard of comparison is confusing. First of all, your mother is Korean, which, like it or not, matters in Korea and will continue to do so. It remains to you to explain to Koreans why any foreigners should have the luxury of choosing to quit and work multiple jobs at will, because the benefit to students is not as intuitive as you may think it is.
Finally, and most important, this proposal fails to make it clear why Koreans should care about the foreign teachers' legal status. From their point of view, English teachers have a pretty good deal. They are in the country to teach English and they are paid handsomely for it. This proposal describes the following benefits for Koreans should they choose to follow it:

Fewer foreigners will go back to their home countries with hagwon hell stories.
More poetry, art, and exhibitions in the foreigner community.
Foreigners taking a bigger part in Korean life.

This proposal fails to address:

Perceived crime and drug use by foreigners.
Unqualified teachers.

I would say that taken together, the strident tone, poorly reasoned premise, and ineffectualness of the proposal itself will probably turn off most of the people who read it.
Now if you could come up with a proposal for a visa reform which would provide tangible improvements for Korean English learners and Korean society as a whole while at the same time insuring better conditions for good teachers and weeding out the bad, then I would say you're on the right track.

Michael Savage's "The Savage Nation"

2007-12-03T11:20:00.000+09:00

I just started reading The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on our Borders, Language, and Culture. First of all, let me explain what I already know about Michael Savage. He is an intellectually dishonest flim flam man, a peddler of patent medicines who claims that he's cured cancer with "a special nutrition program" (page 12). He has written about improving children's IQ with food and so-called "holistic health", whatever that may be, in previous books. I see no difference between his current career as a fiery conservative radio host and his previous one as an ethnobotanist and seller of potions. The way I see it, he has no respect for his customers in either endeavor, and would just as soon feed his listeners a load of ire-raising rhetoric as he would convince his patients to treat cancer with a nutrition program.
Michael Savage's shtick can be summed up as follows: Savage, an New York Jew who lives in San Francisco, presents for his audience a demon-haunted world of anti-family, anti-American boogeymen. His message comes draped in nostalgia for a simpler, manlier time. Being an urban Jew, he allows his sub- and ex-urban Christian audience to focus their hatred more specifically on an urban liberal landscape often populated by Jews and homosexuals. Reading Savage's criticism of "the Dianne Feinsteins of the world, the Charlie Schumers, the subway senators" allows one to despise liberals without seeming to despise Jews.
The straw men that Savage constantly conjures up form the soul of the threat to "our borders, language, and culture". Here's a short list of the ones I could find in a quick perusal of the first chapter of the book:

"The liberal fools who can remember every law book they ever read, but they don't know what they're talking about or where they've dragged the nation."
"The teacher's union [which] has just about eliminated testing."
The fathers of today, who " if a kid brought home a record from a foreign nation . . . would have to be like Mr. Rogers: "Oh, son, that's just so sensitive of you. How multicultural of you, son." and say "Oh, look at that, dear, he smeared feces on the wall. That's modern art."
"The bums today whose hands are always out--you know the type. Those card-carrying 'victims' who only know how to suck the nipple of Aunt Sam."
"The greedy, legal profession, and those with fake handicaps who hide behind a charade to cover their laziness."
"Homosexualized, feminized America" where "women are afraid of angry men."
"Mr. Liberal", who "finds the man who gets furious and really wants to change things" and "tells him he's a psychotic and he needs anger management."
"Demagogues like Al Sharpton, Jesse Hijackson, and Tom Daschle"
The "liberal entitlement message being passed down in our society. Just sit on your fat behind, watch TV, swill another drink, and be sure to wait for your welfare check on Friday."
Ultraliberalism that is killing San Francisco and filling it with "a human plague". This ultraliberalism begets "Hatred for anything normal . . . law and order . . . decency . . . for mama and apple pie and the roses in your hand."
Democrats, libs, and Commu-Nazis who rule the courts, because of whom "America's meatballs are small, hard, and tasteless.

Next time, the nostalgia, or maybe more straw men. Or not. I'm taking a lazy, sloppy Michael Savage approach tonight.

Yakub and other amazing beliefs

2007-12-03T09:52:00.000+09:00

From Wikipedia:

According to the Nation of Islam (NOI), Yakub (also spelled Yacub or Yakob), was an evil scientist responsible for creating the white race — a race of devils, in their view. . . This was achieved under a despotic regime on the island of Patmos. The reasons for Yakub's actions are unclear. According to NOI doctrine, his progeny were destined to rule for 6,000 years before the original black peoples of the world regained dominance, a process that began in 1914.

Also:

According to Joseph Smith, what is now Jackson County, Missouri was the location of the Garden of Eden and will be the location of the future New Jerusalem, and God has led numerous groups to the western hemisphere in search of freedom, including several groups of ancestors to the Native Americans whose stories are told in the Book of Mormon.

And furthermore:

Concepts about deity are diverse among UUs. Some believe that there is no god (atheism); others believe in many gods (polytheism). Some believe that God is a metaphor for a transcendent reality. Some believe in a female god (goddess), a passive god (Deism), a Christian god, or a god manifested in nature or one which is the "ground of being". Some UUs reject the idea of deities and instead speak of "universal spirit" or "reverence of life". Unitarian Universalists support each person's search for truth and meaning in concepts of deity.

Gadzooks!

Why did I never hear this in Korea?

2007-12-03T05:17:00.000+09:00

This (courtesy of Slate) is the kind of factoid I came to expect in Korea:

[K]ids adopted from Korea outscored the U.S. average by two to 12 points, depending on their degree of malnutrition. In a third study, Korean kids adopted in Belgium outscored the Belgian average by at least 10 points, regardless of their adoptive parents' socioeconomic status.

Go read the whole unflinching article.

The attack of the 9/11 movies

2007-12-01T13:03:00.000+09:00

I saw The Mist tonight. Nobody told me it was all about 9/11. The previews included The Poughkeepsie Tapes (like a serial-killing Blair Witch, with video purported to have been filmed in September of 2001) and Cloverfield (another disaster movie with lots of superrealistic shaky-cam "Oh my God, I've got to capture the carnage of New York being destroyed for posterity"). It just hit me like a tin of bricks how 9/11 and War on Terror-soaked our culture has become.
Incidentally, imagine how much easier it would have been to make Starship Troopers and The Siege after 9/11. It would have required half of the imagination at most.
Here's a little list of the 9/11 inspired movies I've seen. Incidentally, in making this list I checked out Wikipedia's 2002 through 2007 in film pages, and was tickled to find that some patriotic Korean had gone through them all and put all the big Korean movies on the lists, which are otherwise almost completely filled with American and British movies.

2002

28 Days Later - Remember the "Have you seen my Timmy?" wall, soon to become the easiest, most emotionally resonant shorthand that lazy writers could use to relevance up their project.

2005

War of the Worlds - Features New York's destruction, followed by scenes of society breaking down. Relentlessly pessimistic in its view of mankind, the movie is typical of post-9/11 movies in that the characters are completely helpless to stop the events shaping their lives (see also the Final Destination, Hostel, and Saw series).

2006

Hostel - Helpless Americans killed in an unforgiving, non-understandable foreign world.
V for Vendetta - Fascism and plenty of it; terrorism grapples with and justified (see also Battlestar Galactica season 3)
Babel - More Americans misunderstanding foreigners and vice versa.
Children of Men - Civil liberties crushed, hysteria over foreigners, people everywhere adrift in a world that has spun out of their control, torture by intelligence services, terrorism, etc.

2007

300 - Didn't see it. I assume it is 9/11 influenced because it has Persians in it.
28 Weeks Later - Green zones, naughty military men, and more helpless people being terrorized.
Hostel: Part II - Helplessness!
The Mist - Disaster followed by helplessness, logical reactions confronted with an emotional/religious mindset, dissention and inability to form consensus on the proper response to the tragedy.

What does the future hold for us? Judging from the above list, the continued trend in torture-based horror movies, and the trailers for Cloverfield, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, and I Am Legend, plenty of desperate helplessness. Get ready to squirm!

Those Penny-pinching Admen

2007-11-26T13:10:00.000+09:00

I've noticed a new trend in television commercials. Take the Cadillac commercials. Initially they featured Kate Walsh and the awesome guitar part from Hum's classic song 'Stars'.
Now they feature Lance Reddick from the Wire and that one really awesome episode of the X-Files--and a clip with the same effect, the same atmosphere and general Hummishness, but a sound-alike clip nonetheless, that likely costs Cadillac none of the royalties they had to pay for the HUm clip.
Likewise a Walmart commercial features an instrumental from Badly Drawn Boy's great About A Boy soundtrack, and later broadcasts of the commercial run with a sound-alike, with the same twinkling glockenspiel as the original without any of the residuals to Badly Drawn Boy.
Way to thrift it up, Madison Avenue!

Dear Simpsons Writing Staff

2007-11-26T12:25:00.000+09:00

a). Anagrams are not funny.
b). Puns are not funny.
c). Cleverness is not, in and of itself, funny.
d). Guest stars that play themselves are, generally speaking, not funny.
e). Homer singing is not funny.
f). Long series of product names altered slightly from their originals (e.g. Sketch-n-Etch, Ravenous Ravenous Rhinos, Herschel's Smootches) are, pursuant to b), not funny.
g). Homer suffering brain damage is no longer funny.
h). Bart hinting at deep-seated emotional problems underpinning his behavior is still hilarious.

Teacher says every time a bell rings, daddy throws away my future

2007-11-26T04:04:00.001+09:00

You must read Kyle Smith's brilliant retelling of It's A Wonderful Life in Today's New York Post. Some highlights:

Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey accurately calls Bedford Falls “this crummy little town" and spends the movie trying to get away. He nearly kills himself because even suicide looks pretty good compared to upstate New York.

In the Pottersville scene, the movie stacks the decks by putting a cemetery in the place of the Bailey Park development. Sorry, George, but without you, people still would have died in Bedford Falls - of boredom.

Mary winds up in a place worse than the cemetery - “she's just about to close up the library!" - where she wears glasses and dresses like Paula Poundstone. It's an insult to working women.

Do yourself a favor and just go read the whole hilarious thing.

Inside vs Outside

2007-11-25T00:25:00.000+09:00

Here are two great quotes that go great together. The first is from an essay about Korean culture's propensity do define the world in terms of 'in' (friends and family, allies) versus 'out' (strangers)

It turns out that all sorts of things in Korean society are explained by this distinction between "in" and "out." . . . "In and out" explains why Korean students are so clean in their homes and so likely to throw trash in the campus streets - the street is outside their area, the territory of non-persons. The distinction is reinforced by taking off shoes in a house; the house is clean space, while "out" is for shoes, dirty.

Although the author, Yonsei University professor Horace Underwood, focuses specifically on students, the analysis extends to all aspects of Korean society. At the risk of offending some, I would say it makes Koreans excellent friends, only so-so citizens and, when you're walking down the streets of Korea, particularly aggressive obstacles. To extend Underwood's 'in and out' analysis, one has to go no further than the typical Korean home, the high-rise apartment building, which looks like this on the outside

and this on the inside.

Korean homes are typically very clean. The floors clean enough to eat off, unnecessary clutter usually banished to drawers and well-organized shelfs.

The outside of the typical Korean apartment block practically screams to the average American "Yes, we sell crack!", filthy and never ever cleaned, with rust stains streaking the walls and small cracks spackled over in white, emphasizing the building's age, (perhaps to drive down the apartment prices), never letting on the tidy little family lives going on therein.

Now here's a quote from a Slate article about the various re-edits of the Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

We see suburban Muncie as a sprawl of carefully arranged, nearly identical houses stretched out beneath a starry sky. But within those tidy houses, Spielberg finds chaos. Clutter piles on top of clutter in a family room that can barely contain its family. Conversations overlap but fail to drown out the television's blare. And at the center of it all is a man already half-mad from all the commotion, unable to focus on his toy trains and stuck with a family unable to appreciate the whimsy of Pinocchio.

According to Underwood, Spielberg's protagonists would be living inside out.

9 out of 10 top pages at Conservapedia homosexuality-related

2007-11-22T12:53:00.000+09:00

Chapeau doff to the Party Pooper. Excluding the main page of the conservative alternative to Wikipedia, every single page in the top ten is related to homosexuality. The list:

1. Main Page‎ [1,916,218]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,586,114]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [517,543]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [421,339]
5. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [396,018]
6. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [388,730]
7. Homosexual Couples and Domestic Violence‎ [373,363]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,743]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [292,841]
10. Homosexual Agenda‎ [271,023]

Gay Bowel Syndrome? Seriously, I can not imagine what use conservatives could possibly have for detailed information about the mechanics of gay sex.

Well I've done the legwork and read the page on Gay Bowel Syndrome just to see what these conservatives are so interested in. The first half of the page is a rather dry description of the syndrome (constellation of symptoms). The second half of the page is a description of the history of the term, the perception of the term as one carrying a negative bias by gay activists, and the efforts to have the term removed from med school textbooks. Nothing particularly titillating.

Still it is wierd that every single page in the top ten except the main page is about homosexuality.

I wish they included more statistics on their website. I would love to know what page 11-20 are.

An unbelievable travesty

2007-11-21T08:11:00.000+09:00

Courtesy of the most unpleasant Michael Savage. The military is asking wounded soldiers unable to serve out their commitment to give back a portion of their signing bonus. According to the article

[Jordan] Fox was seriously injured when a roadside bomb blew up his
vehicle. He was knocked unconscious. His back was injured and lost all vision in his right eye.
A few months later Fox was sent home. His injuries prohibited
him from fulfilling three months of his commitment. A few days ago, he received a letter from the military demanding nearly $3,000 of his signing bonus back.

That's $3,000 out of $10,000, by the way. I can only assume that this is some sort of a mix-up, because I would hate to think that this is actual policy.

Wars of Blood and Faith, condensed, part one

2007-11-20T13:36:00.000+09:00

I am printing here some of the more provocative and interesting passages from Ralph Peters' 2007 book Wars of Blood and Faith. I am a bit pressed for time, so here's part one.

Clausewitz had it Backwards
p. 39-40 [I]t may be our predilection for prolonging even the most wretched peace that ultimately makes our wars so bloody. After a century of Euro-American conflicts, it requires little effort to make the case that the quickest way to inspire a shooting was may be to cling to the dream of peace in our time. . .Idealistic American communists abetted Stalin's crimes while conservatives insisted that Hitler wasn't our problem. . .The massacres at Srebrenica can't be blamed on Serb militias alone--Europe's pacifists were the enablers. Darfur screams, while we stop up our ears.

p. 40 Along with our nibbling at Clausewitz, we also snack on a few crumbs from Sun Tzu, without any real comprehension, that "to win war without fighting is the highest form of victory." Our assumption is that the maxim has a pacific, if not a pacifist, sense: victory without bloodshed! Hurrah, hurrah! Such an interpretation is profoundly wrong. Sun Tzu's primary emphasis in that passage isn't on avoiding battle--that's secondary--but on winning by alternative means. The distinction is critical. Sun Tzu would have found Western peacekeeping operations incomprehensible: avoiding battle and losing.

p.41 The conundrum is that our military strength makes our policy-makers lazy. Neglectful of other instruments and means of national power, they inevitably find themselves forced to resort to military solutions.
The Chinese understand perfectly that policy is an extension of war beyond the crudities of the battlefield, and they act upon the insight skillfully. The Russians grasps it, too, if less coherently . . . (as with the depth-of-winter gas shut-offs to Ukraine and then Georgia). The French have acted as if engaged in comprehensive warfare with all other parties for four centuries, failing only because their means were never commensurate with their exaggerated ambitions.

p.43 Brilliantly, the Chinese have managed to harness the greed of influential elements within our own business community to prevent the implementation of policies by Washington that might reduce China's artificial trade advantages and limit our own self-inflicted vulnerabilities. By allowing a relative handful of American corporations to grow rich, the Chinese have paralyzed our government's ability to defend our workers, our industries, and our economy. We have reached the point where lobbying veers into treason. The Chinese view our relationship as a war conducted through nonmilitary means. Under such advantageous economic conditions, they are perfectly happy to refrain from shooting.

p44 Saudi Arabia, for example, has engaged in a merciless religious war against the West for more than three decades, yet it has not only done so while convincing our national leaders, Republican and Democrat, that we're "friends," but has managed to gain the protection of America's military on the cheap, even as it refuses meaningful cooperation with our forces. To preserve the profits of a handful of multinational oil companies, we protect a repellent, throwback regime that willfully created Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

p 45 The target of the suicide bomb isn't really flesh and blood--it's the video camera, that powerful, postmodern "other means" of securing a military advantage without possessing a military.
By refusing to instill a warlike spirit in other fields of our national policy, we only make "real war" inevitable.

The Hearts and Minds Myth
p50 Self-righteous journalists love to claim that the first casualty of war is the truth, but that's a self-serving lie; the first casualty of any form of violence is reason, that weakest and most disappointing of learned human skills.
We are, indeed, engaged in religious wars--because our enemies have determined that these are religious wars. Our own refusal to understand them as such is just one more debilitating asymmetry.

p 51 We must get over out impossible dream of being loved as a nation, of winning hearts and minds in Iraq and elsewhere. If we can make ourselves liked through our successes, that's well and good. But the essential requirement for the security of the U.S. are that our nation is respected and our military feared.

p52 We need to be tough on ourselves. Begin by listing the number of religion-fueled uprisings throughout history that were quenched by reason and compromise--call me collect if you find a single one. Then list the ethnic civil wars that were solved by sensible treaties without significant bloodshed. Next, start asking the really ugly questions, such as: Hasn't ethic cleansing led to more durable conditions of peace than any more humane approach to settling power relations between bloodlines? Shouldn't we be glad when fanatics kill fanatics? Is there a historical precedent for coping with violent religious fanatics that does not include bloodshed to the point of extermination?

The Myth of Immaculate Warfare
p54 The siren song of techno-wars fought at standoff range makes military solutions more attractive to political leaders than would be the case were they warned about the war's costs at the outset.

p56 [T]he impressive -in-theory capabilities of the latest weapons cloud the vision of military planners, leading them to focus on what the systems can do instead of concentrating on what needs to be done. Rather than buying the weapons we really need, we twist the conflicts we face to conform to the weapons we want to buy. The resulsts are flawed war plans based on unrealistic expectations--in short, Iraq

Politically Correct War
p62 You can trust to kinds of officers: those who read a great deal and those who don't read at all. But beware the officer who reads just a little and falls in love with one book. A little education really is a danegrous thing.

A thought from Ralph Peters

2007-11-20T13:09:00.000+09:00

We may be impressed that terrorists ad criminals manage to use out technologies against us, but it is a parasitic use, imitative, not creative. A cell phone held to the ear does not mean a modern mind is at work on the other side of the eardrum.

from Peters' 2002 book Beyond Terror, page 13

A thought from J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-11-20T11:46:00.000+09:00

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their bulding material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

How to be creative, Gwen Stefani style

2007-11-20T01:21:00.000+09:00

According to the above Gwen Stefani ad for HP, these are the steps involved in creativity:
1. Like Kingston. Absorb its culture and bastardize it for an American audience, thereby becoming a celebrity.
2. Go to a hotel in a foreign country. Japan, let it be noted, is taken, so don't even think about trying to be inspired there. Look out the window at the glittering skyline. The less insight you have into the lives being lived in the city you're in, the more likely you are to be inspired.
3. Walk through a middle class neighborhood. Creativity can't be turned on and off like a faucet, despite what some might think, so just be open to everything you see.
4. Take what you've seen in the foreign country home. The less your countrymen know about the country you were in, the better.
5. Present what you've seen in the foreign country as a product of your own creative mind.
6. Sit back and wait for the call about an HP ad deal to come in.
7. Repeat

John Hodgman and the infinite mediocrity

2007-11-18T09:53:00.000+09:00

I have been ruminating on the continued existence of John Hodgman and the role he plays in contemporary pop culture. I have been able to sum up my impression of him in the following way.
At any point in time, the comfortable middle class with a smattering of liberal arts education look to satisfies their urge to be edified, either for legitimate reasons or as a class reinforcing exercise of their leisure time. They will put up with an amazing amount of boredom in the name of edification. This stems from the belief that unmitigated emotion is crass or base, and that pleasure in particular is a dish best served cold. Thus feelings like anger, embarrassment, and sadness are distrusted and must be intellectualized (see This American Life). While this level of staid introspection suits emotional experiences like anger which are well-served by deep thinking, it is ill-suited to comedy. The result is a dry, almost puritanical version of comedy, usually referred to as 'humor', in which attempts at easy laughs are eschewed as below the 'humorist, and are replaced by more gentle humorous observations or humorous conceits embedded in intellectual subject matter. The humor is received with chuckles and knowing groans. These are responses, rather than reactions, a way to show solidarity with the uniformly middle- and upper middle-class and overwhelmingly white audience or simply a means of giving the needy-seeming humorist what he or she seems to want. The latter is a very typical reason for the laughter, since the audience typically respects the humorist rather than genuinely being entertained by him or her, and wants to win their respect by 'getting it'. Humor as such is essentially a social signalling device, and the sad, hollow laughter of recognition that it evokes are like the nocturnal ululations of bullfrogs: ephemeral, annoying, and ultimately pointless.
Notable practitioners of 'humor' are The Firesign Theater, Lily Tomlin, and especially Garrison Keillor (born, wouldn't you know it, Gary Keillor). In our own time the hottest star on the rise on the Chortlin' Circuit (I coined this term in this here blog post, by the way; feel free to use it but do credit me) is John Hodgman. Like Dave Eggers (whom I have never read) and others involved in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (of which I know nearly nothing), John Hodgman's stock in trade is old-timey phraseology. It would appear that we have the Simpsons to blame for this unbelievably restricted subgenre of humor. His aggressively uncharismatic persona and wry, obscure comedic bailiwick flatters his fans by acknowledging their specialness and broad frame of reference. Hodgman's book, The Areas of my Expertise, features the following subtitle

An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of "Were You Aware of It?", John Hodgman's Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre

Now given what I've said above about humor, it is clear from the book title that, old-timeyness aside, Hodgman's book is relatively wacky and jokey compared to the work of the typical humorist. I submit that this is because, just as the majority of low-brow people gravitate towards the lowest of the low, so does the vast majority of middle-brow people gravitate toward the lowest of the middle. Hodgman represents the cachet of a McSweeney's without any of the challenging fonts, the feeling of superiority over belly-laughers that accompanies Garrison Keillor without the droning boredom. Hodgman's book is essentially the most respectable possible knockoff of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

America's Credulity Straining Challenge

2007-11-17T12:41:00.000+09:00

I am watching the inexcusable America's Psychic Challenge on Lifetime. It's about exactly what you think it is (to quote that guy from that irritating iPhone commercial), except the 'psychics' ride from psychic challenge to psychic challenge in a Cadillac Escalade. The most amazing thing about the show is the way that the participants couch their guesses and handle their failures. Before every challenge the psychics either offer caveats ("I'm not an empath, so I've never done this kind of challenge before."; "This is the first time I've tried remote viewing.") and afterwards they offer their excuses ("As soon as I started the challenge I got a really strong father figure coming through from the other side and he had a message to deliver, and really that's the most important thing."; "I initially got a message telling me to choose number one, but then I got interference from number five and I went with that one instead, but number one was calling to me the whole time.")
I strongly suggest this show to anyone who's interested in scientific skepticism. After all, you've got to know your enemy.

Talking away the pain

2007-11-16T22:38:00.000+09:00

Is there any semantic debate more silly and telling than the one that surrounds the question of how to describe the Al Qaeda operatives working in Iraq? Are they Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), or Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia? I hear the argument that the Bush administration unfairly refers to AQI as just Al Qaeda in order to unfairly exaggerate their importance.
According to the Weekly Standard

Al Qaeda In Iraq is part of the global al Qaeda movement. AQI, as the U.S. military calls it, is around 90 percent Iraqi. Foreign fighters, however, predominate in the leadership and among the suicide bombers, of whom they comprise up to 90 percent, U.S. commanders say. The leader of AQI is Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian. His predecessor, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was a Jordanian.

Wikipedia clarifies

The group is a direct successor of al-Zarqawi's previous organization, Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. Beginning with its official statement declaring allegiance to the Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network in October 2004, the group identifies itself as Tanzim Qaidat Al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (QJBR) ("Organization of Jihad's Base in the Country of the Two Rivers").

OK. So Al Qaeda in Iraq is a part of Al Qaeda, ideologically and structurally. Whether they have all the resources of the greater Al Qaeda body or not is unclear, but that they will fight for Al Qaeda proper's aims is not. Nobody complains when someone calls prostate cancer 'cancer' because prostate cancer is relatively treatable, as if they were trying to exaggerate the seriousness of the situation.

Great point well made

2007-11-14T10:43:00.000+09:00

From an article from the New York Times Magazine by Michael Lewis:

It is still O.K. for the analysts to lowball their estimates of corporate earnings and plug the stocks of the companies they take public so that they remain in the good graces of those companies. The S.E.C. would protest that the analysts don't actually own the stocks they plug, but that is a distinction without a difference: they profit mightily and directly from its rise.

Actually, the whole article is a great read, put it on your to-do list.

Aliens in America is good

2007-11-13T10:42:00.000+09:00

In my humble opinion. The characters are great and the comedic targets are unique. For example, straight-arrow Pakistani exchange student Raja doesn't usually break the rules, but naturally he accepts the necessity of vandalizing a locker in the name of his host-sister's honor. It is also the first prime-time network show that I've ever seen that featured an extended scene of someone getting ragged on in front of the whole school for 'wanting' his sister. Hilarious.

The worst television show in existence . . .

2007-11-12T12:56:00.001+09:00

. . . hands down, is Brothers and Sisters. Literally makes my skin crawl to watch it. I weep for all the people out there thinking they're watching something 1)relevant, 2)'smart', 3)topical, 4)genuine.
It's the smarmiest, most self-satisfied, juvenile and crass thing on television and the people who watch it are either too false or too invested in the show to acknowledge its aggressive idiocy.

Clinton can't win

2007-11-12T12:47:00.001+09:00

You've heard it before, a few times I bet. Well let my voice be one more in the choir saying that Hillary Clinton has got no shot at the White House, and that the worst thing that the Democrats could possibly do is put her up against a Republican candidate. Unless a right-leaning third party candidate appears to split up the conservative vote.
Hillary Clinton can not possibly win because she is unbelievably reviled. I've heard people, several people, tell me that they will only vote if they can vote against Clinton.
You've heard this, you know this. Just helping you let it sink in.

Desperate Housewives death watch

2007-11-12T11:14:00.001+09:00

First Gabrielle can't get rid of her slutty, penniless mother.
Then Brie can't get rid of her mother-in-law.
Then Gabrielle couldn't get rid of her mother-in-law.
Now Lynette can't get rid of her slutty, penniless mother.
Seems like there would be more than one possible relationships for these people to have with their parents, but, you know, who am I to say so?

Golden Girls movie fantasy cast

2007-11-11T09:37:00.000+09:00

I just got disc one of the Golden Girls season 1 from Netflix and watched the pilot.

It got me thinking about the Golden Girls movie. Naturally it would be about the late eighties Golden Girls anachronistically thrown into early twenty-first century Miami, and it would have a cameo from Mario Lopez, but who should star? Here's who I would cast.

Dorothy Zbornak - Nicole Kidman. I would say anyone would have to agree that she's the only actress out there right now with the gravitas to play Dorothy.

Sophia - Laura Linney. Think about it, Estelle Getty was only two years older than Bea Arthur, and yet she both resembled her and made a perfect mother to her. Have you seen Laura Linney lately? Total Nicole Kidman's withered mother material.

Rose - Renee Zellweger. Where would Bridget Jones wind up if she had been born and raised in Saint Olaf, married and subsequently outlived her husband? Miami, naturally.
Blanche Devereau - Tyler Perry. Nobody says 'oversexed southern older woman' like Tyler 'Madea's Family Reunion' Perry.

Stanley Zbornak - John Leguizamo. Oh Stanley, wasn't divorcing you enough to get you out of poor Dorothy's life? Apparently not. Plus die-hard Golden Girlsheads (or Geedgeheads, as they are sometimes called) would be up in arms if he didn't at least make an appearance.

I am now a licensed driver

2007-11-10T09:56:00.000+09:00

Please don't ask me to drive you to the airport.

When 'You're the man now, dog' isn't enough

2007-11-08T02:03:00.000+09:00

Mayor Bloomberg brought out his plan to reward low-income students in cash, cell phones, and minutes for doing well on a series of tests he was attacked on all sides. Some pointed out an apparent conflict with his previous city-wide ban on cell-phones in schools (hardy-har-har). Other gentle souls said that the plan undermines the message that education should be for education's own sake. I call these people out-of-touch bourgeois bleeding-heart fatcats, the same people that want to bring organic and slow foods to America's slums to combat the obesity epidemic and probably still believe that Mozart makes you smarter. Cart before the horse people, in other words.
Case in point: Diane Ravitch takes exception to the plan claiming that it

is insulting to poor kids and poor families. It assumes that they won't do the right thing for themselves unless the government pays them to do it.

This argument is emotional and faulty. The mayor's plan makes no such assumption. Clearly from their points of view education is useless, pointless, a waste of time and features no long-term benefit. What it does assume, with very good reason, is that people do things because they are rewarding in some way, i.e. people respond to incentives, not a radical position to take. Maybe chubby-cheeked suburban children have the luxury of looking at their prosperous parents or neighbors and seeing the tangible rewards that education can bring. I would argue that many of the poorest students have little idea of what value education can hold for them. Once the mayor gives them a tangible incentive to study, they may well find that studying is rewarding in other ways, financial as well as intellectual. After all, education, intellectually stimulating or not, is a form of work, whether one is paid in marketable skills or personal satisfaction. Ravitch goes on to say

This plan, moreover, is unethical and immoral. It makes the basest possible assumptions about human behavior and acts on the behaviorist view that people are motivated only by hard cash.

Not even a little bit is this unethical or immoral. Base or not, the assumption that people are motivated by potential gains (not mere cash) is a very solid assumption to make. Is it insulting to offer someone money for goods and services? Are we making base assumptions about carpenters and electricians when we assume that they've built houses motivated only by hard cash? Ravitch goes on

From the point of view of schooling, this plan is wrong because it tells kids that they should study only if they get extrinsic rewards. Yet what educators are supposed to do is teach kids to have a love of learning, to encourage them to improve their lives by enlarging their knowledge of the world. If they are going to study only if someone pays them, what happens when the payment ends?

Should one study something that offers no reward of any kind? Should one study, for example, the names of every cheese in existence without tasting said cheese or ever being able to use this cheese-name-knowledge to one's own gain? Standing among connoisseurs of cheese, this cheese-name scholar would be left saying "Mmm, Roquefort, I've heard of it. Sounds kind of hard, like a rock. Rock-fort, hahaha. What's that? It's moist and crumbly, with rich blue veins, you say? Hmm, food for thought, pun definitely intended."
Now what use could having a 'love of learning' possibly have to children who see absolutely no value in having an enlarged knowledge of a world that seems completely out of their reach. Why learn about the pyramids in Egypt, The Merchant of Venice and the ring-tailed lemur when you can scarcely afford a trip to the Bronx Zoo, let alone a plane ticket out of the country or a night at the theater. This line of argument is pure suburban brood-hen clucking and completely out of touch with the way real people actually think and act.
As unsavory as it may sound to many white-gloved cogitators, people are educated primarily so that they can perform jobs that will add to our nation's economy and hopefully allow them some form of upward mobility. Bloomberg sees a situation - parents and children who fail to see abstract value in the education being offered to them - and remedies the situation by making the rewards more tangible. Money that may have otherwise gone to fund English departments for kids who hate to read and history departments for kids who feel no connection with the past is instead used to lure kids into achieving more. It's like churches hosting bingo games. Come for the cash prizes, stay for the fellowship and eventually the religion.

Thomas Torquemada and the Ticking Timebomb

2007-11-07T23:39:00.000+09:00

The 'ticking timebomb' issue that gets brought up so much these days when discussing interrogation techniques is, to me, the late-term-rape-pregnancy-abortion hypothetical of the age. By focusing on this one special case, we've effectively lobotomized the debate on interrogation techniques. The circumstances stipulated - impending doom unless we get a piece of information from someone we have in custody - are so dire, so out of the ordinary and so remote from the vast majority of what intelligence gatherers actually do that any conclusion or stance that one could draw from thinking about them would, almost by definition, resist generalization to intelligence gathering as a whole. That's why I scrupulously avoided this hypothetical in my last post on defining torture: it is a red herring, a sort of reductio ad absurdum that distracts one from what intelligence gathering is actually about.

Besides, professional interrogators, now with years of experience under their belts, would be unlikely to use techniques that would be so likely to give bad intel. Unless they were under political pressure to do so, right? Like, for example, doctors in certain states being forced by law to make unscientific caveats about the after-effects of abortions before performing such procedures. I mean, a professional dedicated to performing their job well wouldn't do something so wreckless and counterproductive unless they were mandated to do so by the powers that be, right?
Right.

Torture and tortured verbiage

2007-11-06T00:19:00.000+09:00

There's been a lot of hot wind blowing around about waterboarding, 'simulated drowning', stress positions, and torture in general these days. Much of this talk seems to me to be as usual missing the whole point. People talk about the aptness of the name waterboarding. It seems to me that one reasonable definition of waterboarding would be 'the sensation of drowning without (normal) danger of dying'. That sounds very cruel and unusual to me.
Stress positions, as well, seem to be very uncomfortable and may have the potential to do lasting physical damage. I have heard the lasting physical damage complaint issued time and time again in the press, but I think that to even bring it up implied a definition of torture that includes as a necessary component lasting physical harm. While waterboarding may be done with no lasting permanent harm done, so can rape, but this does not make rape, even when done in controlled conditions and supervised by psychologists, an acceptable form of interrogation.
So we find ourselves with a concept, torture, that is ill-defined and murky in the public and legal imagination. People's immediate reaction is to go with their default reaction. Liberal hearts around the world gush in empathy with the hooded and besodden victims while eye-for-an-eye justice hungry conservatives feel a rush of hot vengeful blood to the head and rush to the defense of harsh interrogation techniques. Neither side gives a thought to whether these techniques are torture, why they are torture, or whether they work. People who view every morcel of information on the war with intense scrutiny seize upon memes like 'harsh interrogation tactics don't work' and blindly trumpet them without a second thought to their veracity. The other side points to successful results of harsh interrogation with the same blind faith in information that bolsters their own practically inborn opinions.
That's just weak. I equate the interrogation debate to the abortion debate, in that I think both are matters for professionals to figure out without letting politics get in the way. If harsh interrogation doesn't work, why would professional interrogators use such methods? Because know-nothing people in the administration are pushing them for intel that simply isn't there or isn't available, or because the administration wants to send some sort of method? For every mook on the street in America to have an opinion about something they know nothing about is nothing new, but in this case the amount of scrutiny given to a necessarily unsavory-looking task like intelligence gathering techniques is bringing a lot of very embarassing attention to our government. Honestly, it's not even a matter of knowing how the sausage is made anymore. If we open up the slaghterhouse doors to observation by every knucklehead in town we're going to wind up with no knockwurst at all.

Korean phonotactics and American English

2007-10-26T06:50:00.000+09:00

I've occasionally wondered to myself at the process by with the Korean letter shieot (ㅅ) can be pronounced like a breathier version of an English s (삽 - sap - shovel), like an English sh (실 - shil - thread), like the t at the end of an English word (것 - geot - a thing) or like an English n (씻는다 - sshinneunda. This is because of the various rounds of sound changes that happen between the assembly of a Korean word and it's actual utterance. In the following examples, the capital letters represent the original or base pronunciation of the Korean letters (the phonemes); the lowercase letters represent the actual sounds produced.

삽 - SAB (shovel) >final consonant devoicing of B to p > sap

실 - SIL (thread) >S becomes sh before I and Y> shil

것 - GEOS (thing) > S becomes t at the end of a syllable > geot

씻는다 - SSIS-NEUN-DA (washing) >SS becomes ssh before I and Y > SSHISNEUNDA > S becomes t at the end of a syllable > SSHIT-NEUN-DA > T at the end of a syllable becomes N in front of a syllable beginning with N > sshinneunda

The first example shows the Korean letter shieot (ㅅ), which is basically pronounced like a breathy English s, coming out being pronounced like a breathy s (i.e. no overt sound change). The second to examples show shieot undergoing one sound change each, to sh and t, respectively. In the final example, the letter shieot first undergoes a sound change to t (as in example 3), and then undergoes a further change from t to n. Thus a letter which, in its most basic form is pronounced s comes to be pronounced n.

Fascinating, isn't it?

Yes, but what brings it to mind?
I recently heard two examples of spoken English that follow a similar sequence of sound changes, from s to d and from d to n.
The first one was uttered by Ginger from the reality real estate show "The Real Estate Pros".

She pronounced the word 'doesn't' as 'dudn't'.
The second example was a prisoner named Butch on an episode of This American Life entitled "Act V" who pronounces the words 'businessman' and 'business' as 'bidnessman and 'binness', respectively.
I guess the next step would be for this sound change to become generalized to similar environments. That would mean 'kiss me', 'Quiznos', 'his new business' and 'shiznit' coming to be pronounced 'kit me', Quidnos', 'hid new bidness' and of course 'shidnit'. I'll be on the lookout for this new pronunciations. If you hear any of them, be sure to let me know.

And, for those of you who don't speak Korean and those of you who've learned it and have begun to forget just what an accomplishment it is, here are a few other examples from the twisted world of Korean phonotactics.

N becomes l

관리 -GWANLI (control) > N becomes l before L > gwalli

L becomes r

바람 - BALAM (wind) > L becomes r between two vowels > baram

D becomes n

받는다 - BAD-NEUN-DA (getting) > D becomes n in front of N > banneunda

T becomes n

맡는다 - MAT-NEUN-DA (taking over) > T becomes n in front of N > banneunda

T becomes ch

같이 - GAT-I (together, alike) > T becomes ch in front of I > gachi

H becomes nothing

넣어 - NEOH-EO (put in) > H disappears between vowels > neoeo

B becomes p

겁 - GEOB (fear) > B becomes P at the end of a syllable > geob

B becomes M

겁나 - GEOB-NA (afraid) > B at the end of the syllable becomes M in front of N > geomna

GL becomes ngn

격려 - GYEOG-LYEO (encourage) > G at the end of the syllable becomes ng before L > GYEONG-LYEO > L becomes n after NG > gyeongnyeo

Newest American trend to hit Korea: calling dudes gay

2007-10-20T11:36:00.000+09:00

This blows my mind. Effeminate Korean singer Brian from duo Fly to the Sky

goes on Gag Concert, only to be ragged on by has-been singer Lee Sang-won

for being gay. My translations are based on this article from Sports Chosun.

Lee: Where did all the talk of you cross-dressing and dating [Fly to the
Sky bandmate Eru] come from?
Brian: It's a misunderstanding due to the fact that we're so close. And sometimes I go to hang out at Eru's house and
sleep over.
Lee: [Older entertainer] Tae Jin-a always says you're so pretty . . .
Brian: Of course. I think of myself as his son.
Lee: Do you think of yourself as his son or daughter-in-law?

Lee then ordered Brian to do push-ups to prove his manhood.

Now what I want to know is where Lee Sang-won got this homophobic gay-bashing attitude from. It's one of America's most unsavory distinguishing characteristics and I've long cited its absence from Korea as a definite point in its favor (Not that it means Korea's any more enlightened about homosexuality than the U.S.)

I suspect that the audience watching Gag Concert that night was very perplexed by the attack. I mean, Korea is the land of the pink shirt, and whether or not Korean men are more in touch with their feminine side because they don't believe in the existence of Korean homosexuals, it remains true that Korean men can act in a manner that would get them brutally teased in the U.S. without fear of recrimination.

I don't know whether Lee Sang-won learned to be made insecure by other men during years of has-been exile in America or what, but I sincerely hope that his nasty sniping doesn't rub off on any impressionable Korean kids.

A super-easy Korean side dish

2007-10-15T11:11:00.000+09:00

On Saturday my wife, mother and I went to Flushing, New York for my cousin's borthday. My Uncle and two cousins took us into Koreatown to go shopping. The two things Miyoung jumped at were cucumber kimchi and odeng.
Actually Eomuk. The Hanareum Mart that we went to had plenty of girls and ajummas giving out free samples, and the girl doling out the Busan Eomuk and I had a passionate discussion about the difference between odeng and eomuk and the proper English term for it. 'Is it fish paste?' Her sign said 'fish cake', which I know isn't technically correct but is much more appetizing. It seems to us that both fish paste and fish cake are misnomers, but what are the other options? Fish Roll-up? Fish sheets?
As you may well know, odeng is considered an import from Japan, while eomuk, associated most closely with Busan, is the 'original Korean article'. I would say in general eomuk is somewhat softer and spongy than odeng, but otherwise tastes the same.
Anyway, today I've got a nice easy recipe for fried odeng/eomuk.
First get your nice sheets of odeng/eomuk.

Slice it into whatever shape you like, rinse and soak it in hot water to release some of the grease and delicious saturated fat.

Slice up a nice onion.

Get out your soy sauce. I recommend Korean 'Jin' Soy Sauce (진간장) You'll need about a tablespoon.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and add the cut odeng/eomuk, the sliced onion, the soy sauce and about a tablespoon of sugar

Fry it up until it looks like this.

That'll last you about three days if you're Korean or, if you want to eat it American-ly, it won't be enough for one meal.
Enjoy.

Dumbest idea of the week

2007-10-15T10:26:00.000+09:00

Thank you, Yanek Mieczkowski, Chairman of the History department at Dowling College, for exposing me to the worst analogy I've heard in a while. In his October 14th editorial for Newsday, the paper of record, entitled "Ike would not have gotten us into Iraq", Yanek compares Eisenhower's reaction to Sputnik to Bush's rection to the September 11th attacks. His thesis:

Though the Sept. 11 attacks struck America harder than Sputnik in terms of death and destruction, the aftershocks of both events were similar. How the U.S. president reacted couldn't have been more different.

I say thesis because this piece couldn't be more of a sophist, ivory tower think piece and screams "I have never had a job outside of academia."
Here is the money shot.

Despite - perhaps because of - today's war on terror, it would be easy to envision Eisenhower pushing for joint Arab-American space activities, perhaps inviting the first Muslim astronaut to fly aboard the space shuttle, while also bolstering economic ties and trade with the Middle East.

Eisenhower would have reacted to September 11th by putting Muslims in space. Why didn't we think of that?

For those of you who know Maple Story . . .

2007-10-14T01:57:00.000+09:00

. . . as a game for Korean elementary school kids, check out this commercial

Don't think of it as a commercial

2007-10-09T11:06:00.000+09:00

Think of it as a piece of beautiful animation. Then drink some Smirnoff.

A Paint Roller moment in American identity politics

2007-10-09T09:05:00.000+09:00

Christopher Columbus is Italian.

Like me.

Ambient ephemera from America for all you guys in Korea

2007-10-07T04:48:00.001+09:00

If you're anything like me, you often wondered what kind of junk you're missing by choosing to live in America. To give you an idea of the kind of inane cultural junk that you'd be passively ingesting if you were sitting on your couch in America, here's a commercial for HeadOn.

What is HeadOn? Whatever you imagine it to be. Available at Walgreens.

Some Swiss have no love for chocolate

2007-10-07T04:31:00.001+09:00

As evidenced by this campaign poster by the Swiss nationalist party SVP
The black sheep, by the way, is an immigrant.

Is Bush a genocide denier?

2007-10-06T21:01:00.000+09:00

The headline of the Deutsche Welle article is "Bush denies Armenian genocide". The action which this article describes as denial is

rejecting a proposal by lawmakers to officially classify the massacre and displacement of Armenians between 1915 and 1918 as genocide.

Does this sound like a fair characterization to you?

My reaction to the new Inter-Korean Agreement in a nutshell

2007-10-06T05:02:00.000+09:00

a) Roh Moo-hyun and his predecessor Kim Dae-jung and cohorts have created, in the Sunshine Policy, an atmosphere in which South Korea expects to reconcile with North Korea through dialogue Advances are touted by astute politicians while setbacks are studiously ignored.

b) As the Marmot points out, likely next president Lee Myeong-bak will be politically bound to go through with the joint plans made by Roh and Kim Jong-il. To not do so would be seen as unacceptable provocation.

c) As much of the joint projects will be funded by private industry (hat tip to the Marmot again), Korea's corporations will have a vested interest in both the international perception that North Korea is making progress and the continued cooperation of the Kim regime.

d) With both politicians and corporations in South Korea heavily invested in the perception of progress on the North-South issue, advances both real and imagined will be touted more vigourously while setbacks will be swept so far under the linoleum that it'll take the ondol extra long to heat up.

e) As for North Korea, they now recognize that pointing missiles at Seoul and threatening to turn the city into a lake of fire is no longer a viable means of extorting aid. It is both cheaper and easier to demilitarize while allowing the placement of South Korea's public and private sector's cherished symbols of peninsular unity to be built, at South Korean expense, in North Korea. Now, all North Korea needs to put South Korea in appeasement mode is close a plant or, in a kind of reverse Gazprom maneuver, close the South Korea-China train line. A master stroke, I must say.

Reconciliation in the air

2007-10-06T04:43:00.000+09:00

You've got your Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il, your Aung San Suu Kyi and Than Shwe, your Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf, all trying to put the past behind them and make things work out.
For my money, I'm betting on the Burmyanmar Two to collapse first, followed by Bhutto and Musharraf, and finally Kim Jong-il and future president Lee Myeong-bak, in the most spectacular clash of all.

More of your pension in risky nations and currencies

2007-10-06T04:08:00.000+09:00

Xinhua News, of all places, reports that the World Bank is floating a US$5 billion bond denominated in the currencies of poor nations in order to

increase investment by Western pension funds and Asian nations with bulging reserves in countries that are considered relatively risky bets.

the ulterior motive of this bond issue is the hope that citizens of poorer nations will be more able to borrow funds in local currencies, for the baffling reason that it

would help reduce the risks developing nations face when there are large swings in the value of major currencies.

I mean, they specifically say that these currencies they're issuing the bonds in are risky, so how is encouraging poor people to borrow money in these currencies going to reduce risks of any kind?

Guess the headline

2007-10-06T03:57:00.000+09:00

Here is a series of events that happened in Afghanistan:

U.S. troops were searching a compound early on Friday when Taleban fighters opened fire and threw several grenades.
Two children died when a suicide bomber approaching an Afghan military compound blew himself up prematurely.
The bodies of a woman and child were found in a building that coalition forces destroyed because it was a Taleban hideout.
The coalition forces accused the Taleban of putting innocent people in danger by hiding among them.

Now which of the following do you think is the headline of this BBC News article?

a) U.S. troop wounded in grenade attack
b) Suicide bomber claims two child victims
c) Civilians die in Afghanistan raid
d) Taleban uses human shields

Answer here.

Let's thank our lucky stars that Korean parents don't care about sports

2007-10-04T23:44:00.000+09:00

In Yangban-influenced Korea, the greatest way to spend one's time is thought to be in frantic, often fruitless study. Kids increasingly raised on fried junk bought off stands in front of their cram schools are doughy and fact-laden.
In Jackie Chan and Yao Ming influenced, Olympics-crazed China, however, the greatest way to spend one's time is apparently thought to be forcing your children to become sports stars. First there was the little girl whose dad had her running from Hainan to Beijing, and now there's the dad who threw his daughter in icy cold water with her hands and feet bound for three hours so that she could someday achieve *ahem* her dream of swimming the English Channel.
Come on, ajeosshis, get your kids out there and spinning on their heads, so that Korea can maintain its B-Boy supremacy!

Photo tips for mediocre photographers like me

2007-10-04T02:30:00.000+09:00

OK, you're like me: you've got a ~$300 camera (I've got a Canon that I would recommend to anybody) and you want to take good pictures. You find yourself in Seaworld (probably the best park in Orlando, but more on that later) and you want to take a picture of your lovely wife in front of a twelve-foot manatee. Click.

It looks like she's standing in front of a mackerel.
You move on to the Hospitality Center and Clydesdale Corral. There's a chain blocking you off from the Clydesdale. Click.

The mighty steed looks like a squirrel. This time you refuse to leave well enough alone. How can you, a camera illiterate like me, make something in the background look big?
Back it up and zoom in. Click.

Keep backing up and zooming. Click.

If only I had known this back at the Manatee Preserve.

A little Korean Jew-baiting for you

2007-10-03T22:24:00.000+09:00

According to the Marmot, the Incheon residents who put up the banner

are upset about plans to develop their area into a tourism and leisure zone as part of the IFEZ project. Jack Rosen is reportedly a major player in the development project.

But lest you think this is a good old-fashioned Jewish conspiracy, rest assured that it is as Korean as aju-ma, baseball and giant/tasteless/mealy apple pie, the protesters' land was stolen from them and given to the foreign developer by (dun dun dunnn) the government.

It's a slightly less small world

2007-10-01T09:06:00.000+09:00

I'm on vacation in Florida right now, and on line for the It's A Small World ride at the Magic Kingdom I realized that there was an extremely high chance that either a) there are no Koreans on the ride or b) there were some Korean dolls awkwardly shoehorned into the ride.

Upon entering the Asia room, I was prepared to have my first guess confirmed as I saw a stylized Chinese backdrop with a stylized Japanese backdrop right next to it. I know the picture below is dark, but Japan is on the left, China on the right, and the only thing between the two is the yellow bridge.

Continuing on, I instead saw that my second guess was in fact correct. The two Korean dolls in the place were placed far off from anything identifiably Korean on their own little stage.
Now take a close look at the Chinese guy from the upper left hand corner of the above photo. He's very abstract and very typical of the Small World ride.
Now have a gander at the two Korean dolls, dressed in their intricately detailed hanbok.
They stick out like a sore thumb. These hanbok look like they're straight out of Dongdaemun Market. My wife says she saw two other Korean kids flying a kite, but I can't confirm that.
The last room the ride goes through has representatives of all the countries passed through wearing white and blue, angelic versions of their native garb. There there are no Korean dolls, although there are four Chinese dolls spinning plates and plenty of Japanese dolls too.
I suppose that, to make up for their sleight against Korea, Disney has included a sign in Korean among it's farewells (again, sorry so dark).
A little closer now.

r look at the Chinese doll

Enriched beer

2007-09-28T21:33:00.001+09:00

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has single-handedly made Korea, Korean barbecue, and Korea's famously delicious beer famous. Finally, Korea enters the ranks of developed parody-worthy nations. (See a woefully non-Korea-related clip here, and then go see if tv-links.co.uk has it up yet.)

Plaque bugs?

2007-09-28T12:18:00.000+09:00

The Oral-B Vitality protects against them, according to their commercial.

Plaque bugs?

Grey's Anatomy death watch

2007-09-28T10:14:00.001+09:00

Everyone's had affairs with everyone, Knight is gone, they're already in Cousin Oliver territory bringing in Meredith's half-sister for some more opportunities for infidelity, they are treating deer, for God's sake.
And Shonda Rhimes is clearly spreading herself too thin with Private Practice.

Ahmedinejad pulling a Chavez

2007-09-26T06:02:00.000+09:00

He's providing nuclear education to those nations that need it and offering a Coalition for Peace to the smaller nations who resent those nations with UN vetoes.
Plus he's claiming that all the problems in the world today are caused by an unfair settlement of World War 2 in favor of the winners. That means he's pulling a you-know-who.

Après le saut

2007-09-25T13:36:00.000+09:00

After the jump: you've seen it all over, you sort of know what it means. What you may not know, which I now find myself disappointed to know, is that 'After the jump' is not a Battlestar Galactica reference.

It's a holdover from newspaper lingo. The 'jump' in a newspaper article is the point where the article is interrupted on one page and continued at that point on another page, with a notation of where to go to continue the article.

That is lame.

The Hills

2007-09-25T12:55:00.000+09:00

I'm watching a show called The Hills on a channel called The N. It's about these girls in Southern California who work for Teen Vogue.

It's like watching beavers build a dam. I don't really get what they're all about, but I see them doing something, eating Japanese fusion food and dating humorously bland guys and organizing photo shoots and such and it's soothing to watch, like that plastic bag from American Beauty.

Monopoly money reaches parity with the dollar

2007-09-22T22:13:00.000+09:00

After two years of steady rises, the Monopoly$/US$ exchange rate has reached parity. This is naturally good news for any boots looking to take a short shopping-intense vacation to America. I recommend Tanger Outlets.

Stop claiming value, deodorant edition

2007-09-21T10:22:00.000+09:00

Secret deodorant and antiperspirant now comes in a 'Clinical Strength'.

The very dosage that you would be given at a world-class B.O. clinic.

Photos! (Chicago, Circle Line New York and a family party

2007-09-20T13:29:00.000+09:00

Here are my poorly organized photos of my trip to Chicago, my ride on the Circle Line with Miyoung and my dad, and our welcome home party. Enjoy.

Poor decision-making skills fuel booming business

2007-09-19T00:30:00.000+09:00

That was the first thing that leapt to mind when I saw the headline "Tattoo remorse fuels booming business" on CNN just now.

My American Diet

2007-09-12T23:05:00.000+09:00

Here's my diet plan for the remainder of my life in America.

No prepared food: that means no pudding cups, Campbell's soup, pre-breaded anything, frozen pizzas and nuggets of meat, etc.

Nothing that tastes at all salty or has any notable amount of sodium in it: since coming back to America I have been struck by how salty everything tastes to me now, including potato chips, french fries, steak at Boulder Creek, and even ketchup. From now on whenever I eat out I'll be asking for half the normal amount of salt.

Half the salad dressing: you don't need every lettuce leaf to be completely drenched to enjoy your salad, and if you do, you've probably blasted your taste buds with salt.

Observe fat people: last night at the airport I watched a fat woman count the hours until her plane was to arrive, then call someone at her destination and make sure there would be somewhere to eat when they got there, and then seconds later her fat husband arrive with some big big McDonald's hamburgers and fries and chow down lustily. It was disturbing.

Eat at McDonald's: Mickey D's has a couple of healthy, cheap and convenient options that I look forward to eating, including their salads and grilled chicken sandwiches.

No drinks: This is the most important rule, I think, because it puts you in a different state of mind. I am talking no juices, soft drinks and diet beverages. Even diet cola has a lot of salt in it, which is important to avoid, even though you can't taste it. I only drink water, black coffee, tea, and occasional alcoholic beverages.
When my wife and I go to restaurants, we order one meal and one salad: we have literally not been able to finish a single meal at any restaurant since arriving, except McDonald's, where the servings are very reasonable.

Dress smartly: That means clothes that fit well, shirts tucked in, etc. A lot of people let themselves get sloppy fat because they disregard their personal appearance and let the 'It's what's inside that counts' message go to their heads (and gut, and butt . . .)

Don't take escalators if you can avoid it: You may be thinking this is something that is too insignificant to make a difference. What, is walking one or two flights of stairs going to help me stay healthy? No, but it is a first step to putting yourself in the right state of mind, and that's the really important thing.

I was lucky, because living in Korea forced me to discover some of these ideas. I had no idea that American food was so salty. When I lived in Korea my mother-in-law would let me taste the soup that she made. If I said it needed salt, she knew it was just right, and if I said it was just right, she knew it was too salty. I still eat my food a little saltier than the average Korean, but I bought a bag of Ruffles Sour Cream and Onion potato chips the other day and I had to throw them out because I could not handle the saltiness.

Other things I found out by watching my own self take Korean eating habits too far. Go to any office or house in Korea and you are likely to find lots of juice, honey water, ginseng essence, and rice milk, both in 1.5 liter containers and little personal-sized bottles.

I used to drink three or four of the little bottles in a day, defeating the purpose of putting them in little bottles.
Hey folks, take care of yourself and live a long time.

Chicago

2007-09-11T02:05:00.000+09:00

What a town! Coming in on Southwest (very good) we had an amazing view of the whole city. The downtown area bunched around the coast of Lake Michigan, the water blue like nothing I've seen outside of posters in travel agencies. We hit some of the sites; the Sears Tower (get your tickets online to save time, it's worth the $2 convenience fee), The Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue (it's billed as a shopping area but it's a spectacular museum of architecture as well), and the promenade around the river.
Then we went up to the North side on the Brown Line. I was really impressed with the striking mix of residential buildings from different periods in different styles, the beautiful little backyards, huge trees, and massive wooden decks. Looks like a fantastic place to live.
The people here are incredibly friendly and helpful, kindly answering all my questions about how to get around.
The city is a bit different from what I expected. It's not possible to get a taxi everywhere, as I had expected, leaving Miyoung and I to take the bus from an Orange Line train to our Chinatown Hotel. The Koreatown has as many signs in Arabic and Spanish as it does in Korean.
All told, I am incredibly impressed with Chicago.

Super secret immigrant loophole discovered!

2007-09-08T21:24:00.000+09:00

Several years ago I lost my Social Security card along with my wallet getting out of a cab in Seoul, so I went to the Social Security Administration office in Riverhead, New York yesterday and applied for a replacement with my wife Miyoung. Because Miyoung and I had been married for over two years when she got her immigrant visa her Social Security card process automatically went through, but she was told at immigration control at Kennedy Airport that her Social Security card would arrive in three to six months. I was shocked that it would take so long.
Knowing that Miyoung would need either a Social Security card or a document of some kind from the SS office to get a New York State driver's license, I asked the clerk when she could do about the long wait. She was very helpful and surprised to hear about the long wait, skeptical that it would take three months to process, and ran Miyoung's information through the system and found that her SSN had been issued. All we had to do was fill out a form, take a number and wait in line again (not in Korea!) and the three to six month wait went down to five to ten business days.
Awesome.

Reactions of a returning American

2007-09-06T21:30:00.000+09:00

Well, I'm finally safe at home on Long Island. It's been a great couple of days, but there's been a lot of adjusting and a lot of things that take some re-getting used to. Here are some of the things that have stood out to me, a long time resident of the Seoul metro area.

The trees here are so tall - Korea was pretty much deforested at one point and so the trees in many areas especially in Gyeonggi province were planted deliberately in the last forty years. The trees here in Rocky Point are old growth and they must be six stories tall at least, dwarfing even most of the trees that I saw even in the rural areas of Korea that I've seen.

The commercials - Nonstop commercials for the Army and prescription drugs, plus over the counter unproven hogwash pills available at Walgreens. Who am I to criticize Oriental medicine and its believers when the same thing goes on in America under a different name? Plus once the sun goes down basic cable has some of the most shocking commericals imaginable. Ben Stiller's got a new movie out and there's a scene in the commercial of him and his wife having rough sex. What the hell? And a full infomercial for Girls Gone Wild? Unnecessary.
So much personal space. I certainly can't complain about that.
So much of the food is so much saltier than I remember.
All the foods I missed - Cantaloupe, artichoke, cold cuts and Levy's Jewish Rye, Dutch Country Potato Bread and mom's breaded chicken cutlets with spaghetti and Hershey's Ice Cream.
My family have got every DVD ever - Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, Arrested Development all on DVD, plus practically every movie I haven't seen in the last four and a half years.
A Wii with no controllers - My family've got Wii but my brother in Boston's got both controllers. Thanks Rich.
My accent is back - I think the second I got out of the arrivals gate my Long Island accent came back somehow strawnger than it's ever been.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

2007-09-03T09:56:00.000+09:00

It's back. September 13th. I know where I'll be.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
And incidentally, if you like things a bit more NSFW (Danny DeVito with his shirt off NSFW) then by all means click here.

More on the Wonmisan gash

2007-09-03T08:15:00.000+09:00

I found an article from the June 26th edition of the Bucheon Herald (for some reason their website doesn't allow you to directly link to individual articles) which identifies the excavation on Wonmisan as the creation of an embankment for the extension of the Meolmoe Street (멀뫼로). These pictures tell the story as well.

Here's a map with the current location of Meolmoe Road (멀뫼길) marked in red. I can only assume that Meolmoe Street will be an upgrade of this road, which goes under the name Meolloe from Sosa Station to the intersection at Bucheon Stadium. It continues on at both ends, Southward uder the name Buil Street (부일로) and Northward as Yeowol Street, I believe. It would seem natural that this stretch of road between two streets get an upgrade.

Wonmisan unmasked

2007-09-02T22:43:00.000+09:00

Hey Wonmisan fans. As you may or may not know, there has been a flurry of crane and bulldozer shenanigans up on the south-southwest face of old Wonmisan (원미산) in the last few months. This is not new. But last week I noticed a particularly good view of it from Holy Family Hospital (성가 병원) when I was visiting my father-in-law after his cataract surgery. The next time I went visiting I brought my camera and snapped this photo. I'm too lazy and tired to delve into the Korean internet and attempt to find out what's up, so I figured I'd post the pic and give myself a nice rest before attempting what promises to be an unrewarding slog through Daum and Naver. Anyway, enjoy.

Perry DeAngelis is dead

2007-09-02T20:44:00.000+09:00

I am way behind on this, but I have not been listening to many podcasts these days. I went on iTunes today to fill up my iPod for my flight home when I found that Perry DeAngelis, one of the voices of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast has died. He was ill, but I didn't know how ill. I was really looking forward to his triumphant return to the show after the last two weeks' absence due to illness.
Perry was the irreverent member of the skeptical rogues on the podcast. Imagine what it takes to be 'the irreverent one' in a skeptical organization.
Perry was not a scientist, and he provided a perfect counterpoint to host Dr. Steve Novella's steely scientific view of skepticism, showing that there's a passion to skepticism that persists side by side with it's logic.

Here are some choice quotes from Perry.

Listen to this audio clip of Perry reacting to a question about bacteria and birds. Perry will always be remembered for his staunch support of monkeys in the age-old 'monkeys versus birds' debate.

'The amount of years that she will live longer than us because of her [vegetarian] diet is directly proportional to the horror of her life.'

'Astrology is as vacuous as the space it worships.'

'And remember, "chi" spelled backwards is "crap"'

'How can two mathematicians come to two different conclusions? Well, one of them's a dick.'

From an essay Perry wrote about an illness induced hallucination:

'Stemming, I suppose now, from the dance number that had been on the television, there were two alien woman that haunted me during this time. One was a tall slender Latin woman in a pink body suit, and the other was shorter and heavier. They ridiculed me endlessly because I knew they were aliens, but since I was Executive Director of a Skeptical Society, I couldn’t tell anyone! It was like they were trying to upset me to illicit a reaction. I tried to remain stoic, but I think eventually I broke down and cried.'

I strongly recommend that you go to the iTunes store, search for the words 'Skeptic's Guide' and subscribe to the show or subscribe from their website, and just start at the beginning and work your way up to the present. I have only recently started writing about logical fallacies specifically, but I've been listening to the skeptical rogues gallery talking about them since last April, and it has invaluably enriched my life. And all that time Perry has been a big part of that.

A perfect chance to practice spotting logical fallacies

2007-08-29T17:14:00.000+09:00

Thanks, Alex Lee, for your incredible logically fallacious article in the Korea Times!

My problem is with willfully ignorant people who embrace myths like "color-blind love transcends racial inequalities" and "all Asian men are sexist while white men are not." Of course, any couple can "fall in love." It's naive, however, to ignore the reality of white privilege.

False dichotomy. One can believe in love conquering all without ignoring white privilege.

I'm well aware that my attractiveness to native Korean women over native Korean men has a lot to do with my privilege as an American gyopo man. But this advantage doesn't exist outside of Asia like it does for white men. That's the difference. "Sorry, I don't date Asian guys because they're too sexist or nerdy" is a refrain I've heard a lot from Asian American girls.

Appeal to pity

Hollywood has been selling the same stereotype of Asian men forever. For every Pitt, Clooney, and Damon the world sees in Oceans 11, 12, and 13, Asian men get the same mute Chinese acrobat who fits into boxes. Globally, Western white men are allowed to be everything Asian men are not, sexy and nonsexist. They even speak.

Confusing causation with correlation. Who's to say whether Hollywood caused perceptions or reflects them. Also, that Chinese acrobat wasn't sexist.

In the U.S., Asian American women married white spouses at nearly twice the rate as Asian American men, according to the 2000 Census. Korean American women had the second highest outmarriage (marriage to whites) rate of all Asian American women at 24.3 percent of all marriages compared to Korean American men at only 3.9 percent. In Korea, Korean women surveyed by Bien-Aller, a Seoul-based matchmaking company, preferred white spouses over other races at 32.9 percent compared to Korean men at only 14.4 percent. Numerous studies contend this discrepancy is unique to Asian Americans since in other racial groups men outmarry more than women. (Outmarriage statistics for black women with white men, interestingly, were nearly the same statistical inverse of the Asian female situation. Coincidence? Last time I checked, black women were dissed by the global media almost as much as Asian men--save Beyonce).

Confusing correlation with causation and straw man. Who knows if outmarriage rates among black women is related to 'dissing by the global media'?

So, why the gender gap? A popular explanation is the overt patriarchy in Asian culture, like the sexist preference of sons over daughters to preserve the family name. But equally important is the West's wartime legacy in Asia, like U.S. servicemen, camptown-centered brothels and Asian war brides.

Total lack of evidence. How do we know if it's 'equally important' or if there's any impact at all without evidence? Also somewhat of a non-sequitur, I mean, why would the existence of brothels in the past make women want to marry foreigners?

Sorry, but a white man's earnest claim that he is "nice" and not like other perverted white guys addicted to Asian porn isn't enough to erase history. The West is smug in thinking it’s so liberal.

Ad hominem attacks. the West is 'smug'. A white guy naively thinks he's 'nice' when he himself doesn't know what's in his own nature.

Most interracial couples speak the man’s native language, English.

Non-sequitur

Many "liberal” white men don’t seek equally "liberal” Western white woman.

Non-sequitur

And white "feminists” leave the home but hire non-white women to replace them.

Non-Sequitur

Furthermore, feminist history in Asia is, in fact, strong. In Korea, women were largely in control of their own lives during the Koryo period before Confucianism was introduced. Patrilineage was uncommon, inheritance was equally divided among sons and daughters, and widows were known to remarry. A long time
ago, yes. But sexism is clearly not "inherent" to Asian culture despite
the hype.

Straw man. Nobody thinks that the 'inherentness' of Asian sexism matters, only its existence. Would proving that Korean anti-black racism was not inherent to Korean culture make it a non-issue?

Introducing these points usually mean being personally attacked on my masculinity and sense of self-worth, a classic example of how the culture of power places the burden of proof on those with less power. Meanwhile, those with more power have the luxury to brand my arguments as mere "complaints." This is known as hypocrisy, folks.
A parallel example would be me blaming Asian women for being vain and appearance-obsessed without questioning my own complicity in sexism. I can act calm and collected because my self-worth isn't reduced to my waistline.

Non-sequitur false analogy combo.

Ask a white man to switch places with an Asian man and he'll feel the difference in power quick.

I think this is special pleading. You can't feel this very real thing, but if you were to become Asian you would be able to.

Not to mention, they'd probably do more than just complain, like legally ban Asians from entering their country for decades, create "anti-miscegenation" laws that would prohibit interracial marriage, encourage state-wide sterilization programs for non-white women, and kill non-white men for just looking at white women _ all in the name of "science" and "pure" white nationhood. Oh wait, they already did.

Ad hominem attack and argument from prior error.

Meanwhile, tales about marriage between an indigenous woman of color and white men _ think Pocahontas _ have long been staples of European-American culture, says George Lipsitz. The native woman's love for the white man serves to establish the moral superiority of the conqueror's culture. These stories turn the brutality and sadism of conquest into a voluntary romance. That's why people who argue Asian women are resisting Asian sexism by marrying white men
are mistaken.

False dichotomy. Why can't there be both 'push' and 'pull' factors?

If white feminists didn't marry Asian men to combat Western sexism, why would the opposite be true?

I struggled with this one before realizing it's a false continuum. Asian women who marry Western men and move to the West in order to escape sexism in their own societies will become subject to Western sexism. This argument simply denies the possibility that one variety of sexism may be more or less desirable than the other.

It's easy to criticize someone like me as defending native Asian men because I'm Asian. But I'm also American, an irony lost on most white Western men who brand me as some sort of Korean nationalist.

All fallacy-noticing aside, I recognize the writer of this piece as one of the most American people around. Only an American could string together this much Anthro 101 this angrily. Also, there's no irony to be lost, dingus, you're criticizing white Westerners, not Americans.

I have no problem criticizing Asia, like how East Asian men exploit South East Asian women but still use marriages between the two as proof of how "cultural understanding" they are. Here, the power dynamics are clear. So, what makes white men with Asian women that different?

False analogy (except in the case of mail-order brides)

Ultimately, it's not about arguing who's "worse" or shallowly emphasizing that we're all sexist and racist. It's about taking the issue less personally, enough to see that there are larger forces at play. I love my parents but still find it important to criticize the ridiculously classist system they came from.

Appeal to sincerity

Consequently, the current state of interracial relationships doesn't equal "racial harmony" as much as some people would like to believe. After all, it's called "color-blind love" for a reason. It blinds you to the truth.

The 'shitty writing' fallacy.

Goodwill Ambassador of the Week

2007-08-29T14:51:00.001+09:00

This week's Goodwill Ambassador of the Week is none other than Beauty's Chatterbox star panelist Bronwyn!
We here at the Paint Roller Blog would like to thank Bronwyn for her contribution to international understanding. On the August 27th episode of Beauty's Chatterbox, or 미녀들의 수다, or 미수다, or Misuda, or whatever you call it, Bronwyn helped bridge the gap separating Koreans from foreigners by explaining that she never goes to Hongdae because of the smell. The foreign men there, explained Bronwyn, drink too much and throw up so much that you literally have to gingerly tiptoe down the street to avoid the nearly blanket coverage of vomit. To drive home the point, the outgoing South African then stood up and demonstrated what it is like to walk down the streets in front of Hongik University. Way to go, Bronwyn!
This show, for those of you who don't know, is a panel show in which pretty foreign girls who speak Korean discuss Korea and talk about how it is different from their own country, what surprises them, what they like and dislike etc. When the show began the women on the panel were mostly old hands, Korea-wise, in particular American Leslie ~~Benson~~ Bensfield, who's spent 11 years in Korea and speaks fluent Korean. The show was mostly people who know Korea well telling Koreans about their own country, gently pointing out some of Korea's less proud aspects, in particular, its sexism.
There was also plenty of laughs for all. Common topics of the show included:

Those tough ajummas.

Eating dog, fermented skate (홍어), and spicy food.

Booking (nearly delved into every episode)

Dating Korean guys.

Korean drinking culture

Well after plodding these well-worn boards for a long time, these topics have ceased to be interesting. Anybody out there who watches this program will notice that in an effort to maintain the interest of basically talking about in-your-face old ladies, drinking soju and eating dog meat, they have changed the format from 'knowledgeable foreigners discuss their experiences in Korea thoughtfully' to 'buckwild foreign chicks who don't know anything about Korea and can barely speak Korean say shocking, uninformed things in barely understandable Korean'
And somebody please tell me what's up with this?

I imagine that the next step when this concep' has run out of steam will be to have some models and sorority girls come to Korea for the first time, take them out for a night of drinking, booking, and dog meat and then ask them about it the next day while they model Andre Kim teddies. I propose a title change to 미녀들이 서툴다.

Seoul Drama Awards, desperate self promotion

2007-08-29T00:32:00.000+09:00

Desperate self promotion for desperate self promoters. I am in the middle of watching the 2007 Seoul Drama Awards, and boy are they a piece of work.

First of all, the logo for the awards ceremony is an abstract three legged bird/samjogo/삼족오, which happens to look like the logo for Jumong, one of the Korean dramas in competition.

Oh wait, the logo in the video from their website is exactly the same.

Second, the use of English is comically spotty. The Japanese winners all give at least part of their speech in English, but not a single Korean has uttered a word of English, except one of the hosts, who told an Australian winner who had his acceptance speech in his hands "We would like you to say a few words, please."
Third, the hosts (The guy from the Capentech commercials and the hostess of one of Korea's many exploitative news magazine shows) take time out between every award to point out that Korean dramas are now in international competition with dramas from all the top countries. A Korean miniseries beat out a British miniseries with Helen Mirren in it, and this fact was explicitly pointed out.
One of my favorite parts is when Lee Hyori and some dude present the nominees for some award, one of which is The Tudors, and Hyori just went off on how she totally loved the Tudors, but as for the rest of the nominees . . . dunno. The camera went to a Japanese "Hallyu star" in the audience in what appeared to be the Japanese section, and both he and the woman behind him had a sort of shocked, 'we are not amused' look on their faces.
Also, when they introduced 'foreign dramas' and 'Korean dramas' and every single example of a foreign drama they showed during that montage (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break) was an American show, and yet ~~I don't think any~~ none of those shows were even up for any awards.
To be fair, when the award show started I was convinced that every single award would be won by the Korean nominee, and they haven't gone that far. Way to show restraint. I guess its enough that now Jumong, Hwangjini, and all the other big dramas this year can honestly say that they've won awards in international competition.

Happy Days are here again.

2007-08-28T21:09:00.001+09:00

There is a new krappy Korean sitcom riding the coattails of Geochim eopsi Highkick (거침 없이 하이킥, English name? Perhaps "Highkick Without Hesitation"?) called Kimchi Cheese Smile (김치 치즈 스마일, known to anyone who lives in Korea as the three ways to tell someone to smile when taking their picture). The theme song to this show is the original theme song to the American sitcom Happy Days (not 'Rock around the clock', the other one).
Now here's something you Korea scholars out there may not know. While Happy Days was popular in Korea, broadcast under the title 폰지와의 즐거운 하루 ('A happy day with Ponzie), The debut of the spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi, broadcast here under the title 죠니가 자지를 되게 좋아하네! holds the record for most watched half hour of television in Korea's history

This ought to raise eyebrows . . . oh, I guess not

2007-08-27T19:26:00.000+09:00

I have a game for you. Watch this video of my favorite old man with sadly childish hairstyle and clothing, Boom (붐), interviewing 'singing' sensation Ivy (아이비). Now here's the game: count the number of times that Ivy's eyebrows move.

That's right, exactly once, at the 2:13 point. Once you notice that her forehead is huge and almost immobile, it becomes unavoidable to ask the following question. Is that her real forehead?

I have no idea, and I don't care. What I am interested in is these forms of plastic surgery focused on the face that are moving the Korean beauty ideal further and further away from what the majority of Koreans actually look like. I would say the best treatment of this topic in a blog can be found over at the Metropolitician's site. He shows how the Korean beauty ideal has changed over time, from realistic to elfin, Asian to Hyrulian.

I chose Hong Su-a as an example of the new standard of beauty in Korea (slender face, surprisingly big nose), but doing so is probably understating the situation, as she is one of the only female mainstream entertainment figures who hasn't had eyelid surgery

First off, yes, forehead implants are real. Here are some before-and-after photos.

Next on the chopping block are prominent cheekbones, a very common feature in Korea that many here find unattractive. I've even had people explain to me seriously that they are a result of malnourishment, which is why they are more common in older generations and in North Korea than in younger South Koreans. I don't know if malnutrition causes the condition, but I know what cures it: hot steel.

Here's the commercial that popularized the phrase "V line face", which refers to a narrow, V-shaped jawline.

The commercial states "V-line is fashion, the future, envy, V-line is Gwangdong Corn Silk Tea" (yes, it's really a commercial for tea made of an agricultural ~~waste~~ bi-product.) Here are the before-and-after photos of some clairvoyant women.

The future (right). Left: the past

And here's one woman who's totally stuck in the past
Jes' joshin', Kyoung-lim Nuna.

I blame the simple economics of supply and demand to some extent. There are plenty of girls with strong jawlines and not so prominent foreheads. but it seems to me that in this case the very lack of supply creates the demand. Truth be told, I'm just spit-balling here, because I don't want to go and say something that's completely off the wall.

When will the hurting stop?

2007-08-27T14:37:00.000+09:00

I have a bit of a theory about Korean culture that I would like to elaborate on. I doubt that I am the first person to come up with this concept, but I am beginning to find it an inescapable conclusion, which means that I am perhaps becoming too biased to judge whether my own idea actually makes sense. So let me know if you think it's all wrong.

The concept came to me when I was reading about gang initiations. Many gangs initiate their new members by making them commit a crime. The initiate subsequently feels a bond of shared guilt with his fellow gang members, who have commited the same crime. This shared guilt bonds gang members together tightly.

Now what I'm saying is that Korean society acts in a similar fashion, but instead of a bond of shared guilt, I believe that Koreans are brought together by a bond of shared discomfort.

Where did this theory come from? I noticed that, while people in Korea do a lot of things that are pleasurable, there is usually some extra something thrown into the mix that is unpleasant. Communally unpleasant. When you eat Korean food, the first thing that you are struck by is the spiciness. You ask yourself "Why must everything we eat be spicy?" and even if, like many non-Koreans, you like spicy food, you are confronted with the basket on the table containing carrots, cucumbers and green peppers. You eat the carrots, eat the cucumbers, and then someone tastes the pepper, gingerly at first but then quicker. "It's ok, they're not spicy!" that person reassures you, so you grab the other pepper and bite into it. It must be from a different batch, because it is burning the enamel off your teeth. It's like Russian roulette with food.

Or you can go in for the guaranteed torture that is buldak (fire chicken).

Buldak is another shared adventure in masochism. You and your friends go to the buldak restaurant to suffer through a painful chemical burn together, with the added bonus of a vaguely charcoal-y scent and a chicken-y chew. There is nothing to recommend buldak except the oft-repeated claim that 'spicy food is addictive.'

Do you know what happens if you blow your ear drums out listening to your headphones? Or if you develop a dependency on a drug? You require an increasing amount of these inputs to feel satisfied, because you've dulled your senses. Imagine how much a lifetime of eating spicy food dulls your senses.

It is a well known fact that Korean workers go home only when their bosses go home. If the boss stays till 9pm, that pretty much means that everybody is staying till 9:01. I usually hear people explain this in terms of the boss. "Oh, you mustn't leave before your boss." I disagree. I believe the true point of everybody waiting for the boss is everybody waiting together. Everybody missing dinner with their families and knowing that that's what everybody in every office in Korea is doing has a real effect on the national psychology. How can you help but think 'We are a hardcore nation.'

Drinking alcohol is commonly agreed upon in most cultures to be an agreeable recreational experience. Those who drink alcohol typically do it to loosen up and relax, to let their guards down, and to facilitate socialization.

Koreans are no different, in intent, however it is the degree to which the drinking takes place that makes it, for many, a painful experience. Most of the participants in drinking sessions are not in control of the amount that they wind up drinking. That is decided by whoever is running the party, usually a boss or the oldest person at the table. Blacking out and vomiting are common experiences for some. What should be a fun activity becomes a brutal slog mandated from above. Everyone in the drinking party is bound by the will of the senior member to drink, sing and be merry or else face ostracism.

Some office girls, chugging as though their jobs depended on it

Again, we see singing, at times a pleasurable experience, turned into a painful social tool, like a hammer. Public singing becomes another bond, this time one of shared humiliation. Bear your soul or else. Again, this is not always the case, but it takes on this unpleasant dimension in the context of forced socializing.

What's next? Why it's on to stage 3, for some real bonding through shared guilt. This time the guilt of adultery. What could create more convivial feelings than sullying your marriage vows with some guys from work? Some whiskey, women and song will guarantee that you and Team Leader Choi will remain close business contacts forever!

Finally, what form do the most popular Korean television shows take? Celebrity humiliation, in which Korea's most famous TV personalities have to suffer hilarious indignities. In the show shown below, celebrities have to memorize a song and sing it perfectly, at the risk of having a pan dropped on their head (HT to James at The Grand Narrative for finding the Youtube clip).

Although the most popular current incarnation of bonding through shared suffering theater is Old Time TV (옛날TV), in which entertainers must perform such feats as pulling the tablecloth out from under a stack of bowls at the risk of having 100 liters of water dropped on them and having to memorize and sing a song while trapped inside a sauna, being allowed out only if they can sing the song perfectly.

Is the community supported agriculture movement inevitable?

2007-08-27T11:31:00.000+09:00

I was just listening to a group of food scientists and activists advocating a return to smaller-scale agriculture on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and I was struck by the number of times I have heard this exact same message, especially on NPR. I believe this goes hand in hand with the slow food movement, and a concept which I have dubbed time porn.
In an industrial society the price of most any 'luxury' item is cut down to affordable proportions. Most people can afford a stereo system, a fast car, a computer with relatively fast internet connection, a comfortable house and almost any food they could possibly want. A large portion of the luxury aspect of, say, a decadent piece of New York cheese cake is lost when anybody in Tulsa can go down to Von's and pull one out of the freezer. The physical pleasure of these things remains, but the exquisite exclusiveness of them is lost.
The people with money to spend face a challenge. How can they get added value if they already have everything they want? And what's worse, there's nothing special about having it. What is the one thing that is most valuable to hard-working modern people? In a world of increasingly busy people, the ultimate luxury and object of desire is the time to do things in inefficient but seemingly more satisfying ways. Let's say everyone has a warm factory-made wool sweater. A hand-made sweater has the warm coziness of any other sweater, plus it has the added value of all the labor that went into it. Super bonus points if it was made by either someone in America or Europe or at a humane, well marketed factory where all the women working there get to take courses for free.
The same thing is true of the small-scale agriculture movement and its proponents among the relatively well-off NPR crowd. In a world where everyone's going to Von's for that New York cheese cake, they want to go out to the country, where a rosy-cheeked farmer's wife will hand-make them a New York cheese cake with illegal raw milk and an extra helping of love. They leave with a 'superior' cheese cake, a story to tell, and the warm feeling in their hearts that they've helped support sustainable, environmentally friendly agriculture and America's rural culture. That's so much added value.
Not to say that the people behind this are wrong. If I were a farmer and I were concerned about the quality of my product, I would probably do exactly what these farmers do, organizing Community Supported Agriculture groups in which local people buy into the farmer's crop and then receive produce throughout the year directly from the farmer. I would, like the existing farmers, target exactly the NPR crowd, with their money and their desperate search for their next fix of added value. I have to say that I quite admire these farmers and their quest for excellence.
My qualms come when I hear people saying that this is a sustainable model for the entire food system. To reject large scale agriculture on the whole and expect the alternative to support the nation's or the world's food demands is naive at best and dangerous at worst. While it is clearly an important marketing point that these farmers and supporters claim that this system is viable for everyone, I fail to see how it can ever be more than the privilege of the well-off. It's like saying "People need to stop buying shoes from the big corporate shoe companies and start supporting local shoemakers. By doing so, we can meet the nation's demand for shoes in a cleaner, more environmentally friendly way, reducing the need for long-distance shoe shipping and at the same time supporting our local shoemaking community." Super bonus added value.

Logical Fallacies

2007-08-26T15:03:00.000+09:00

The invaluable New England Skeptical Society has a great article on their website that innumerates the logical fallacies that people, all people, are liable to hear and make. In my attempt to commit all of them to memory and internalize them, I am going to provide them here, each on with an example that I have actually heard in real life or, in the absence of such, a common example. Enjoy them and think of these fallacies the next time some poor misguided person tries to make you believe something that makes no sense.

Non-Sequitur

My face looks puffy today because I went to sleep with the fan on.

Magical Thinking

This root/stem/noodle will make you live a long time because it is
long.

Argument from Authority

Why would the Korean government restrict/ban US beef imports if there were nothing wrong with them?

Appeal to Common Belief

Everybody knows hot spices make greasy food less greasy and kill bacteria.

Appeal to Impending Acceptance

American corporation Lone Star Funds bought Korea Exchange Bank after the Asian Economic Crisis when the bank was in serious risk of going bankrupt. They turned it around and sold it for a large profit. Some in the Korean Assembly and the Prosecutor's office were incensed by the thought of foreigners making profits on Korea's misfortunes, and attempted to prosecute the company on stock manipulation charges. Frequently throughout this period people would defend the investigation by saying "They're under investigation, soon they'll be prosecuted, so of course they're guilty." (see also Argument from authority, Appeal to emotion, Argument from Conspiracy, Argument from benefit)

Appeal to Virtue or Sincerity

She means well and just wants to help, so why don't you let her give you acupuncture on the tips of your fingers and the incredibly sensitive areas right behind your cuticles?

Argument from Conspiracy or Anti-authority

The Korean government recently closed government offices to media, which had previously had free run of all government buildings, roaming the halls with cameras and demanding interviews on the spot. They also consolidated the forty-odd press rooms they operated into a few big ones. The media reported this as a bid by the government to destroy the fourth estate and return Korea to dictatorship-like state where the government has a stranglehold on the press. the government, for its part, claims that the exorbitant price of having press rooms in every government building was prohibitive and they want to save money by consolidating those rooms.

Appeal to Emotion

People are inherently good, because it would be a horrible world to live in if that weren't so.

Argument from Final Outcome or Consequences

Oriental Medicine is real because it handles all the things that Western Medicine can't do anything about, like back pain and fatigue.

Argument from Benefit

The Bush administration must be responsible for the September 11th attacks because it allowed them to seize unprecedented power.

Appeal to Fear

Korean farmers often use the fear of disease and contamination to justify trade barriers that allow them to uneconomically persist in their vocations. Note, however, that some of these fears (i.e. fear of contaminated food from China) turn out to have been well grounded.

Appeal to Flattery

People who drive hybrid cars are smarter or better than other, more polluting people.

Appeal to Pity

The clearest large-scale example of the appeal to pity is applied to the comfort women who were enlisted to sexually service Japanese soldiers during World War II. Any serious enquiry into the question of whether they were forced into servitude or whether they went willingly is effectively shut off through appeals to pity.

Post-hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (A preceded B, therefore A caused B)

I took Oriental medicine, had acupuncture, and after a month my chronic stress-related sluggishness went away. Oriental medicine cured me.

Confusing Correlation with Causation

"Long ago we lived in homes of red earth and we didn't have skin conditions, so if you use sheets dyed with red earth, you won't get skin problems."

One of the most interesting correlation/causation arguments I've heard is the one against the book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". We don't know whether the habits are causing the effectiveness or if both phenomena are by-products of some root cause.

Special Pleading, or Ad-hoc Reasoning

Well of course that wish didn't come true, you didn't believe in it
enough. You gotta believe!

This is a special favorite of John Edward and other psychic mediums, who claim all sorts of 'interferences', 'static' and communications difficulties as the reasons for inaccurate readings.

Argument from Prior Error

Scientists used to think that pesticides were healthy when in fact they held health risks, therefore we shouldn't trust what they say about genetically modified foods.

Ad Hominem

Al Gore is stiff and boring. Michael Moore/Rush Limbaugh are fat. George Bush is dumb. Dick Cheney is oily and cold. Lynn Cheney is married to Dick Cheney. All the Republican presidential candidates are divorced. Joh Edwards gets expensive haircuts.

Tu Quoque

America is not without sin, so it is inappropriate for America's congress to condemn Japan for refusing to cop to its wartime offenses.

This is also used by Oriental Medicine proponents a lot.

Ad Ignorantum (Something is true because we don't know that it's not true)

Dog meat gives you vitality because it has good protein. What, it
doesn't? It's still awesome, I can feel it.

Confusing Absence of Evidence with Evidence of Absence

The galling thing about this fallacy is that many times the people using it are claiming an absence of evidence when evidence in fact exists. The best example I can think of is "There are no transitional fossils from dinosaurs to birds/apes to man/fish to land dwelling creatures." Creationists use this argument all the time in conjunction with the moving goalpost ("Show me the transitional fossil between ape and that transitional fossil!")

Argument from Personal Incredulity

Evolution is impossible. I can't see how a monkey could turn into a
person.

Appeal to Ridicule

You're telling me that cow flatulence could somehow produce enough methane to contribute to global warming? Cow farts?! Yuk yuk yuk!

Confusing Currently Unexplained with Unexplainable

This is also known as the 'God of the Gaps' fallacy, i.e. whatever is
unexplained is the province of God. What happens after we die? Must be heaven, because science provides no answers to this question.

False Dichotomy

The Goguryeo kingdom is either part of Chinese history or part of Korean history. It can not be included in both, because to allow the other side to claim it as their own would imply that it is not one's own.

False Continuum

Everybody has an opinion and all opinions are equally valid in all situations, and so we have to respect people whose opinions are different from our own, even in issues such as science in which opinions matter less than testable hypotheses and established facts.

The Moving Goalpost

You're saying that you have proof that sleeping with a fan in the room will not eat all the oxygen and kill you, nor will it 'supermix' the air so that you consume the oxygen too fast and suffocate? Well, it still can give you hypothermia, even in the summer. Oh, it can't? Well, it'll give you a sore throat. And make your body swell. (See also special pleading)

(I realize this is a little different from the original meaning of the moving
goalpost, in which increasingly elaborate proof is demanded, but in this case
the thing proved is moving, so it seems to me the term should still be
applicable)

Reductio Ad Absurdum

If we allow gay marriage, we will have to allow people to marry anyone or thing, resulting in marriage to animals and inanimate objects.

False Analogy

Vietnam and Iraq often form a false analogy for many reasons. The
different natures of the civil wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the way that
America got involved in each conflict, and of course the number of parties involved, the stakes, and the global climate at each time are substantially different. That's not to say that the analogy must always be false, as it may actually be fairly accurate in terms of the political climate in the US, in reference to which the Vietnam-Iraq War analogy may be useful.

Incidentally, there are many other lists of logical fallacies available on the web. This one is incredibly extensive and has lots of nifty latinisms, like argumentam ad misericordiam for appeal to pity, as well as a few that are not included here, such as the appeal to nature (natural things are inherently good) and red herring (introduction of irrelevent facts).
I encourage you strongly to check out the full article by Dr. Steven Novella. He is a very smart man (argument from authority) doing a lot of good work for the skeptical movement (appeal to virtue) and I know a smart person like you will be able to get the most out of these tools for rational thought (appeal to flattery).

The other Korean hostage crisis, day 7

2007-08-23T00:31:00.000+09:00

All told, being trapped in Korea has been going quite well.
I had dog soup today with my mother-in-law and my wife's aunts. As always, it depends on the quality of the meat, and this was exceptionally good meat in an exceptionally dingy restaurant. The timing for this stranding was quite good, as my father in law is currently in the hospital undergoing surgery for cataracts, so the presence of my wife and me is valuable for everyone.
But it's not all Korean delicacies for me. I also had the worst pizza I've ever had in my life tonight, Pizza Hut's Whole Shrimp Cheese Bite Pizza.
The actual pizza portion of this pile of shrimp, sweet potato mash and dough is pushed into the center so that it comprises no more than half of the actual thing, which I hesitate to call a pizza. Also, the sauce that's supposed to go with this thing costs an extra buck. Pizza Hut Korea is the ultimate in inconvenience. They have an expensive salad bar, but the entire table has to share a single small bowl which they will not replace with a clean one unless you beg. There are myriad other ways in which Pizza Hut Korea makes your dining experience unnecessarily uncomfortable, but this is not a post about all that.
The real news is that Miyoung's uncle's friend's daughter, who works for Asiana Airlines, called today to tell us that she pushed up our reservation from September 13th (an unimaginable 28 days after our intended departure date) to September 4th (a reasonable 19 days). It's less than two weeks away! That means I have to hurry up and get good at my new hobby, dorodango making. A dorodango is a ball of mud meticulously built up, methodically dried out and rubbed to a shine like so.

Mine so far look equally round, but orders of magnitude less shiny. Wish me luck!
But it hasn't all been a mud-ball making waste of time, I also had a chance to write a few blog posts that I've been meaning to get around to, catch up on my movie watching and learn everything there is to know about money markets. Good for me.

What is a chippy?

2007-08-21T13:32:00.000+09:00

I heard it on the Simpsons episode where Homer becomes the Beer Baron. The narrator says "Wasting no time, Rex Banner tore into the bootleggers like a chippy tearing into a lobster." A quick search turned up an amazing website, http://www.sex-lexis.com/, which gives the following definition:

chippy:or: chippie, a disparaging term, possibly derived from cheap / cheaply / cheapy, for:
1. A wild or delinquent young girl , usually sexually active or promiscuous . See playgirl for synonyms.
2. A prostitute . See prostitute for synonyms.
3. A cheap woman .

Yes, I get a vivid image of a ravenous chippy diving full bore into a lobster while her cultured, mustachioed benefactor genteelly eats his own, bemused at her uncouth behavior. Sort of like the entire movie 'Pretty Woman'.

How to Win Friends & Influence People, Condensed

2007-08-21T11:21:00.000+09:00

I've long been a fan of Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends & Influence People, which I categorize as the best secular elaboration of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount I have ever seen. The great sin is that, from the title, the book seems like a callous manual for soulless cold fish to learn to take advantage of strangers. Quite to the contrary, the secret to winning friends and influencing people, according to Carnegie, is caring about them, empathy and sincere kindness. He also believes that this is the secret to a rewarding and satisfying life, and thus a sort of limited version of karma. He repeatedly warns against attempting to use the techniques in the book disingenuously, stating correctly that people are very good at seeing through that sort of thing.

Since I am now trapped in Korea for a month with nothing to do, I finally have time to do all the things that were impossible in the last few busy years. One of the things on the top of that list was condensing all the best parts of this great book into one huge blog post. Here goes.

Part One: Fundamental techniques in handling people

Chapter One: Don't criticize, condemn or complain

Human nature in action, the wrong-doer blaming everybody but himself.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

Chapter Two: Give honest, sincere appreciation

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.

People sometimes become invalids in order to win sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance. For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of importance by forcing her husband, the President of the United States, to neglect important affairs of state while he reclined on the bed beside her for hours at a time, his arms about her soothing her to sleep.

Emerson said: "Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him."

Chapter Three: Arouse in the other person an eager want

Bait the hook to suit the fish.

The world is full of people like that: grabbing, self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.

Part Two: Six ways to make people like you

Chapter One: Become genuinely interested in other people

If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true sincere friends. Friends, real friends, are not made that way. Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: "Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the world on whom I can rely." And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulty in life and provides the greatest injury to otheres. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.

Chapter Two: Smile

The ancient Chinese are a wise lot: wise in the ways of the world; and they have a proverb that you and I ought to cut out and paste inside our hats. It goes like this: "A man without a smiling face must not open a shop."

Chapter Three: Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language.

When [Andrew Carnegie] was a boy back in Scotland, he got a hold of a rabbit, a mother rabbit. Presto! He soon had a whole nest of little rabbits - and nothing to feed them. But he had a brilliant idea. He told the boys in the neighborhood that if they would go out and pull enough clover and dandelions to feed the rabbits, he would name the bunnies in their honor. The plan worked like magic; and Carnegie never forgot it. Years later, he made millions by using that same psychology in business. For example, he wanted to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad. J. Edgar Thomson was the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad then. So Andrew Carnegie built a huge steel mill in Pittsburgh and called is the "Edgar Thomson Steel Works."
Here is a riddle. See if you can guess it. When the Pennsylvania Railroad needed steel rails, where do you suppose J. Edgar Thomson bought them? From Sears Roebuck? No. No. You're wrong. Guess again.

Two hundred years ago, rich men used to pay authors to dedicate their books to them.

Most people don't remember names for the simple reason that they don't take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds.

Chapter Four: Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

She didn't want to hear about my travels. All she wanted was an interested listener, so she could expand her ego and tell me about where she had been.
Was she unusual? No. Many people are like that.

What is the secret, the mystery, of a successful business interview? Well, according to that genial scholar Charles W. Eliot, "there is no mystery about successful business intercourse . . . Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that."
Self-evident, isn't it? You don't have to study for four years in Harvard to discover that. Yet I know and you know merchants who will rent expensive space, buy their goods economically, dress their windows appealingly, spend hundreds of dollars in advertising, and then hire clerks who haven't the sense to be good listeners - clerks who interrupt customers, contradict them, irritate them, and all but drive them from the store.

"The first salesman questioned my honesty. The second one intimated that I had purchased a second-rate article. I boiled. I was on the point of telling them to take their suit and go to hell, when suddenly the head of the department strolled by. He knew his business. He changed my attitude completely. He turned an angry man into a satisfied customer. How did he do it? By three things:
"First, he listened to my story from beginnning to end without saying a word.
"Second, when I had finished and the salesmen again started to air their views, he argued with them from my point of view . . .
"Third, he admitted he didn't know the cause of the trouble and said to me very simply 'What would you like me to do with the suit? I'll do anything you say.'
" Only a few minutes before I had been ready to tell them to keep their confounded suit But now I answered, 'I want only your advice."

The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener - a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.

Many people will call a doctor when all they want is an audience.

The man who talks only of himself, thinks only of himself. And "the man who thinks only of himself," says Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, "is hopelessly uneducated . . . no matter how instructed he may be."

Remember that the man you are talking to is a hundred times more interested in himself and his problems than he is in you and your problems. His toothache means more to him thatn a famine in China that kills a million people. A boil on his neck interests him more than forty earthquakes in Africa Think of that the next time you start a conversation.

Chapter Five: Talk in terms of the other man's interests

"Whether it was a cowboy or a Rough Rider, a New York politician or a dipomat, Roosevelt knew what to say to him." And how was it done? The answer is simple. Whenever Roosevelt expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested.

"A middle-aged man called one evening, and after a political skirmish with my aunt, he devoted his attention to me. At that time, I happened to be excited about boats, and the visitor discussed the subject in a way that seemed to me particularly interesting. After he left, I spoke of him with enthusiasm. What a man! And how tremendously interested in boats! My aunt informed me he was a New York lawyer; that he cared nothing whatever about boats - took not the slightest interest in the subject. 'But why then did he talk all the time about boats?'
"'Because he is a gentleman. He saw you were interested in boats, and e talked abut the things he knew would interest and please you. He made himself agreeable.'"

Chapter Six: Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely

I was waiting in line to register a letter in the Post Office. I noticed that the registry clerk was bored with his job - the same monotonous grind year after year. So I said to myself: "I am going to try to make that chap like me." Obviously to make him like me, I must say something nice, not about myself, but about him. So I asked myself, "What is there about him that I can honestly admire?" That is sometimes a hard question to answer, especially with strangers; but in this case, it happened to be easy. I instantly saw something I admired to no end. So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm: "I certainly wish I had your head of hair."
He looked up, half startled, his face beaming with smiles, "Well, it isn't as good as it used to be," he said modestly. I assured him that although it might have lost some of its pristine glory, nevertheless it was still magnificent. He was immensely pleased. We carried on a pleasant conversation and the last thing he said to me was: "Many people have admired my hair."
I told this story once in public; and a man asked me afterwards: "What did you want to get out of him?"
What was I trying to get out of him!!! What was I trying to get out of him!!!
If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can't radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to screw something out of the other person in return - if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.

Philosophers have been speculating on the rules of human relationships for thousands of years and out of all the speculation, there has evolved only one important precept. It is not new. It is as old as history. Zoroaster taught it to his fire-worshipers in Persia three thousand years ago. Confucius preached it in China twenty-four centuries ago. Lao-Tse, the founder of Taoism, taught it to his disciples in the Valley of the Han. Buddha preached it on the banks of the Holy Ganges five hundred years before Christ. The sacred books of Hinduism taught it a thousand years before that. Jesus taught it among the stony hills of Judea nineteen centuries ago. Jesus summed it up in one thought - probably the most important rule in the world: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
You want the approval of those with whom you come in contact. You want recognition of your true worth. You want a feeling that you are important in your little world. You don't want to listen to cheap, insincere flattery but you do crave sincere appreciation. You want your friends and associates to be, as Charles Schwab puts it, "Hearty in their approbation and lavish in their praise." All of us want that.

Little phrases such as "I'm sorry to trouble you," "Would you be so kind as to-," "Won't you please," "Would you mind," "Thank you" - little courtesies like that oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life - and, incidentally, they are the hallmarks of good breeding.
Do you feel that you are superior to the Japanese? The truth is that the Japanese consider themselves far superior to you. A conservative Japanese, for example, is infuriated at the sight of a white man dancing with a Japanese lady.
Do you consider yourself superior to the Hindus of India? That is your privilege; but a million Hindus feel so infinitely superior to you that they wouldn't befoul themselves by condescending to touch food that your heathen shadow had fallen across and contaminated.
Do you feel you are superior to the Eskimos? Again, that is your privilege; but would you really like to know what the Eskimo thinks of you? Well, there are a few native hobos among the Eskimos, worthless bums who refuse to work. The Eskimos call them "white men" - that being their utmost term of contempt.
Each nation feels superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism - and wars.

And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their inner feeling of inadequacy by an outward shouting and tumult of conceit that are offensive and truly nauseating.

Tonight, or tomorrow night, bring her some flowers or a box of candy. Don't merely say, "Yes, I
ought to do it." Do it! And bring a smile in addition, and some warm words of affection. If more
wives and more husbands did that I wonder if we should still have one marriage out of six shattered on the rocks of Reno?

Said Disraeli, one of the shrewdest men who ever ruled the British Empire, "Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours."

Part Three: Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking

Chapter One: The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

"We were guests at a festive occasion, my dear Dale. Why prove to a man he is wrong? Is that going to make him like you? Why not let him save his face? He didn't ask for your opinion. He didn't want it. Why argue with him? Always avoid the acute angle.

"Here lies the body of William Jay,
Who died maintaining his right of way-
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he's just as dead as if he were wrong."

"No man who is resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take the consequences, including personal vitiation of his temper and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you show no more than equal rights; and yield lesser ones though clearly your own. Better to give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." -Abraham Lincoln

Chapter Two: Show respect for the other man's opinions. Never tell a man he is wrong.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street, make a million dollars a day, buy a yacht, and marry a chorus girl. And if you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

Never begin by announcing, "I am going to prove to you so and so." That's bad. That's tantamount to saying: "I'm smarter than you are. I'm going to tell you a thing or two and make you change your mind." That's a challenge. That arouses opposition, and makes the listener want to battle with you before you even start.

Be wiser than other people, if you can; but do not tell them so.

I believe now hardly anything that I believed twenty years ago - except the multiplication table, and I begin to doubt even that when I read about Einstein. In another twenty years, I may not believe what I have said in this book. I am not so sure now of anything as I used to be. Socrates said repeatedly to his followers in Athens: "One thing only I know; and that is that I know nothing."

There's magic, positive magic, in such phrases as" I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts." That is what a scientist does.
I once interviewed Stefansson, the famous explorer and scientist who spent eleven years up beyond the Arctic Circle and who lived on absolutely nothing but meat and water for six years. He told me of a certain experiment he had conducted and I asked him what he tried to prove by it. I shall never forget his reply. He said: "A scientist never tries to prove anything. He attempts only to find the facts."

You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. It will make [the other fellow] want to admit that he, too, may be wrong.

Few people are logical. Most of us are prejudiced and biased. Most of us are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy, and pride. And most citizens don't want to change their minds about their religion or their hair cut or Communism of Clark Gable.

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

When we are wrong, we may admit it to ourselves. And if we are handled gently and tactfully, we may admit it to others and even take pride in our frankness and broad-mindedness.

"I even forbade myself the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fix'd opinion, such as 'certainly', 'undoubtedly', etc., and I adopted, instead of them, 'I conceive,' "I apprehend,' or 'I imagine,' a thing to be so or so; or 'it so appears to me at the present.' When
another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny'd myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition: and in answering I began observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear'd or seem'd to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag'd in went more pleasantly." -Benjamin Franklin

Chapter Three: If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

That policeman, being human, wanted a feeling of importance; so when I began to condemn myself, the only way he could nourish his self-esteem, was to take the magnanimous attitude of showing mercy. But suppose I had tried to defend myself - well, did you ever try to argue with a policeman?

I said "Mr. So-and-so, if what you say is true, I am at fault and there is absolutely no excuse for my blunder. I have been doing drawings for you long enough to know better. I am ashamed of myself."
Immediately he started to defend me. "Yes, you're right, but after all, this isn't a serious mistake. It is only-"
I interrupted him. "Any mistake," I said, "may be costly and they are all irritating." For the first time in my life I was criticizing myself - and I loved it.

Any fool can try to defend his mistakes - and most fools do - but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one's mistakes.

Remember the old proverb: "by fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected."

Chapter Four: Begin in a friendly way.

Remember what Lincoln said: "A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall."

Chapter Five: Get the other person saying "yes, yes" immediately.

When a person has said 'No,' all his pride of personality demands that he remains consistent with himself. He may later feel that the 'No,' was ill-advised; nevertheless, there is his precious pride to consider. The skillful speaker gets at the outset a number of yes responses. He has thereby set the psychological processes of his listeners moving in an affirmative direction.

It doesn't pay to argue, it is much more profitable and much more interesting to look at things from the other man's viewpoint and try to get him saying 'yes, yes.'

The Chinese have a proverb pregnant with the age-old wisdom of the changeless East: "He who treads softly goes far."

Chapter Six: Let the other man do a great deal of the talking.

Let the other man talk himself out. He knows more about his business and his problems than you do. So ask him a few questions. Let him tell you a few things.

The truth is even our friends would rather talk to us about their achievements than listen to us boast about ours.
La Rochefoucauld, the French philosopher, said: "If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you."

The Germans have a proverb: "Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude," which, being interpreted, goes something like this: "The purest joy is the malicious joy we take in the misfortunes of those we have envied."

We ought to be modest, for neither you nor I amount to mush. Both of us will pass on and be completely forgotten a century from now.

Come to think about it, you haven't much to brag about anyhow. Do you know what keeps you from becoming an idiot? Not much. Only a nickel's worth of iodine in you thyroid glands. If a physician were to open the thyroid gland on your neck and take out a little iodine, you would become an idiot. A little iodine that can be bought at a corner drug store for five cents is all that stands between you and an institution for the mentally ill. A nickel's worth of iodine! That isn't much to be boasting about, is it?

Chapter Seven: Let the other man feel that the idea is his.

Isn't it bad judgment to try to ram your opinions down the throats of other people? Wouldn't it be wiser to make suggestions - and let the other man think out the conclusion for himself?

No man likes to feel that he is being sold something or told to do a thing. We much prefer to feel that we are buying of our own accord or acting on our own ideas.

When Theodore Roosevelt was Governor of New York, he accomplished an extraordinary feat. He kept on good terms with the political bosses and yet he forced through reforms which they bitterly disliked.
When an important office was to be filled, he invited the political bosses to make recommendations.
"At first," said Roosevelt, "they might propose a broken down party hack, the sort of man who has to be 'taken care of.' I would tell them that to appoint such a man would not be good politics, as the public would not approve it.
"Then they would bring me the name of another party hack, a persistent office holder. I would tell them that this man would not measure up to the expectations of the public.
"Their third suggestion would be a man who was almost good enough, but not quite. Then I would thank them, asking them to try once more, and their fourth suggestion would be acceptable; they would name just the sort of man I should have picked out myself. I would appoint this man - and I would let them take the credit for the appointment . . . I would tell them that I had done these things to please them and now it was their turn to please me."

"The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them. Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams. So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them. Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury" - Lao Tse

Chapter Eight: Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.

I should rather walk the sidewalk in front of a man's office for two hours before an interview, than step into his office without a perfectly clear idea of what I am going to say and what he - from my knowledge of his interest and motives - is likely to answer.
If, as a result of reading this book you get only one thing - an increased tendency to think always in terms of the other person's point of view, and see things from his angle as well as your own - if you get only that one thing from this book, it may easily prove to be one of the milestones of your career.

Chapter Nine: Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.

You deserve very little credit for being what you are - and remember, the man who comes to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserves very little discredit for being what he is. Feel sorry for the poor devil. Pity him. Sympathize with him. Say to yourself "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

"Sympathy the human species universally craves. The child eagerly displays his injury; or even inflicts a cut or bruise in order to reap abundant sympathy. For the same purpose adults show their bruises, relate their accidents, illnesses, especially details of surgical operations. 'Self-pity' for misfortunes real or imaginary is, in some measures, practically a universal practice.

Chapter Ten: Appeal to the nobler motives.

A man usually has two reasons for doing a thing: the one that sounds good and the real one.

When John D. Rockefeller, Hr. wished to stop newspaper photographers from snapping pictures of his children, he too appealed to [photographers'] nobler motives. He said: " You know how it is, boys. You've got children yourselves, some of you. And you know it's not good for youngsters to get too much publicity.

I am convinced that individuals who are inclined to chisel will in most cases react favorably if you make him feel that you consider him honest, upright and fair.

Chapter Eleven: Dramatize your ideas.

The element of curiosity holds the prospects' attention.
Experts in window displays know the trenchant power of dramatization.

Chapter Twelve: Throw down a challenge.

The desire to excel! The challenge! Throwing down the gauntlet! An infallible way of appealing to men of spirit.
"I have never foiund that pay and pay alone would either bring together or hold good men. I think it was the game itself." - Harvey Firestone
If you want to win men - spirited men, men of mettle - to your way of thinking, throw down a challenge.

Part Four: Nine ways to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment

Chapter One: Begin with praise and honest appreciation

It's always easier to listen to unpleasant things after we have heard some praise of our good points.

A barber lathers a man before he shaves him.

Chapter Two: Call attention to people's mistakes indirectly

Charles Schwab was passing through one of his steel mills one day at noon when he came across some of his employees smoking. Immediately above their heads was a sign which said "No Smoking".
Did Schwab point to the sign and say, "Can't you read?" Oh no, not Schwab. He walked over to the men, handed each one a cigar, and said, "I'll appreciate it, boys, if you will smoke these on the outside." They knew they had broken a rule - and they admired him because he said nothing about it and gave them a little present and made them feel important.

Chapter Three: Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person

Chapter Four: Ask questions instead of giving direct orders

He always gave suggestions, not orders. He never said, for example "Do this or do that," or "Don't do this or don't do that." He would say, "You might consider this," or "do you think that would work?"

Chapter Five: Let the other person save face

Mustapha Kemal made a Napoleonic speech to his soldiers, saying "Your goal is the Mediterranean," and one of the bitterest wars in modern history was on. The Turks won; and when the two Greek generals, Tricoupis and Dionis, made their way to Kemal's headquarters to surrender, the Turkish people called down curses of heaven upon their vanquished foes.
But Kemal's attitude was free from triumph.
"Sit down, gentlemen," he said, grasping their hands. "You must be tired." Then, after discussing the campaign in detail, he softened the blow of their defeat. "War," he said, as one soldier to another, "is a game in which the best men are sometimes worsted."

Chapter Six: Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."

Chapter Seven: Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to

The average person can be lead readily if you have his respect and if you show that you respect him for some kind of ability.

Give him a fine reputation to live up to and he will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.

There is an old saying: "Give a dog a bad name and you may as well hang him." But give him a good name - and see what happens!

If you must deal with a crook, there is only one possible way of getting the better of him - treat him as if he were an honorable gentleman. Take it for granted he is on the level. He will be so flattered by such treatment that he may answer to it, and be proud that someone trusts him.

Chapter Eight: Use encouragement. Make a fault seem easy to correct.

She kept praising the things I did right and minimizing my errors. "You have a natural sense of rhythm," "You really are a natural born dancer." Now common sense tells me that I always have been and always will be a fourth-rate dancer; yet, deep in my heart, I still like to think that maybe she meant it. To be sure, I was paying her to say it; but why bring that up?

Chapter Nine: Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest

Napoleon was criticized for giving 'toys' to war-hardened veterans, and Napoleon replied, "Men are ruled by toys."

Part Five: Letters that produced results

Almost all the progress ever made in human thought has been made by the Doubting Thomases, the questioners, the challengers, the show-me crowd.
Note that Ken Dyke doesn't waste time talking about how important his company is. Instead, he immediately shows the other fellow how much he has to lean on him.
Benjamin Franklin asked his enemy to fo him a favor. A favor that
pleased the other man, a favor that touched his vanity, a favor that gave him recognition, a favor that subtly expressed Franklin's admiration for his knowledge and achievements.

Part Six: Seven rules for making your home life happier

Chapter One: Don't, don't nag!

The great tragedy of Lincoln's life also was his marriage. Not his assassination, mind you, but his marriage. When Booth fired, Lincoln never realized he had been shot; but he reaped almost daily, for twenty-three years, "the bitter harvest of conjugal infelicity." "Conjugal Infelicity?" That's putting in mildly. For almost a quarter of a century, Mrs. Lincoln nagged and harassed the life out of him.

Chapter Two: Don't try to make your partner over

Chapter Three: Don't criticize

Chapter Four: Give honest appreciation

Chapter Five: Pay little attentions

From time immemorial, flowers have been considered the language of love . . . Yet considering the rarity with which the average husband takes home a bunch of daffodils, you might suppose them to be as expensive as orchids and as hard to come by as the edelweiss which flowers on the cloud-swept cliffs of the Alps.

Chapter Six: Be courteous

We wouldn't dream of interupting strangers to say, "Good heavens, are you going to tell that old story again!" We wouldn't dream of opening our friends' mail without permission,, or prying into their personal secrets. And it's only the members of our own family, those who are nearest and dearest to us, that we dare insult for their trivial faults.
Many men who wouldn't dream of speaking sharply to a customer, or even to their partners in business, think nothing of barking at their wives. Yet, for their personal happines, marriage is far more important to them, far more vital, than business.
Compared with marriage, beaing born is a mere episode in our careers, and dying a trivial incident.

Chapter Seven: Read a good book on the sexual side of marriage

Happy marriages are rarely the product of chance: they are architectural in that they are intelligently and deliberately planned.
Sentimental reticence must be replaced by an ability to discuss objectively and with detachment attitudes and practices of married life.

If the UN says so . . .

2007-08-21T10:17:00.000+09:00

The UN has told Korea it ought to drop its cherished self-identification as a pure-blooded race.

Meeting in Geneva from July 30 until Aug. 17, the 71st UNCERD reviewed national reports on Costa Rica, New Zealand, Mozambique, Indonesia, and South Korea and released recommendations for them. On Aug. 9-10, it looked into reports submitted by the South Korean government. In the recommendations, UNCERD expressed discomfort about a prevalent notion in Korean culture of "pure-bloodedness," saying, "The whole concept came very close to ideas of racial superiority."

This is, of course, one of these stupid old ideas created for nationalist purposes that people in Korea carry on without thinking about whether or not they make any sense. While many Koreans do believe this to be true, most of the smart people I know know it to be ridiculous, and I have often heard the opposite "Korea is a rich purée of other groups that has simply had the lumps blended out" view, citing ancient immigrantion from countries as far afield as India and Vietnam, and of course Mongolia, whence Korean babies are said to get their famed 'Mongol spot'.

Which many Koreans will tell you only occurs in Mongolians and their close cousins, the Koreans, although this is patently false.
Anyway, yeah, can the pure-bloodedness fairytale, Korea.

Update: The Marmot has a detailed breakdown of exactly the information I have heard about immigrants throughout Korea's history

Who's riding who?

2007-08-18T14:43:00.001+09:00

For my money, there is no fashion statement in the world (with the possible exception of pre-aged jeans) that says "I am an ignorant, attention-seeking social climber" better than the Ralph Lauren 'Big Pony' line of shirts with giant logos on them.

Here, Big Pony is being modeled by good breasted terrible actress Han Yeseul

I am not the type of person who cares a great deal about fashion. I have a simple aesthetic. I don't like clothes with logos or words on them and I don't like non-functional things (decorative belts, buttons with no buttoning function) and I hate false aging of clothes. These last two peeves fall under the basic category of decadence. What moves me about the Big Pony thing is that it cuts to the heart of what people want out of brands like Ralph Lauren. They want to tell the world that they are the type of person that likes/wears/can afford Ralph Lauren clothing. These huge logos allow them to broadcast this message in a more efficient, desperate way. I imagine that the wealthy people who wear clothing more expensive than Ralph Lauren snicker to themselves when they see one of these tacky logos bouncing towards them, thinking 'Who does this K-Mart shopper think she is?' but to me the real folly is in the tastelessness of the striving, the form it takes. The same goes for the Burberry tartan

And the abominable rainbow-colored Louis Vuitton bags
The thing is that the item itself is nothing, only the logo and the cache that goes with affixing that famous name to your totem pole. Here's an illustrative story. My mother knows that Korean ladies love brand name luxury items, so she went shopping in America for some gifts for my wife. She bought her a Coach handbag that was made of the same leather as the photo below
I read the advertising copy that came with it and was surprised to discover the history of Coach, that the leather was patterned after baseball glove leather etc. Anyway, my wife loved the bag but was surprised that it was Coach. Every Coach item she had ever seen sold in Korea had the Coach logo all over it thusly.
It's not even about the social climbing, because that's no sin. It's the tackiness that gets me. If you want to social climb, why not do it tastefully, at least that way you might actually social climb up, instead of climbing all over the bars of your cage like a monkey in a zoo.

Two pompous heels with no perspective

2007-08-18T13:40:00.001+09:00

That's how I feel compelled to describe both the subject and author of the Slate article 'Worst Op-ed Ever Written'. Author Ron Rosenbaum browbeats out of touch Professor Stanley Fish for his New York Times op-ed "Getting Coffee Is Hard To Do" in which he reports the bewildering experience of going to Starbucks, which he seems to consider a pretty low-to-middle brow, uncouth sort of place, where you are forced to rub shoulders with the masses, use all sorts of silly faux-fancy words that are supposed to make you sound sophisticated, and finally are forced to add sugar to your own coffee. Rosenbaum considers Fish's deprecating detachment from the experience insulting. Both come off as unlikeable people whom I would not like to meet.
The thing that got to me though are Fish's reaction to the Starbucks fixin's bar and Rosenbaum's reaction to that reaction. Fish says that, by paying $3 and up for a coffee

what you're paying for is the privilege of doing the work that should be done by
those who take your money.

This is patently false. You are paying so much for coffee because a) you can and b) you want to.
Rosenbaum takes great offense at Fish's demand for good service, and particularly

the growing practice of shifting the burden of labor to the consumer—gas
stations, grocery and drug stores, bagel shops (why should I put on my own cream
cheese?), airline check-ins, parking lots.

The brunt of Rosenbaum's thougthless, ideology-driven resentment is directed at Fish's use of the phrase "those we pay to serve us". Rosenbaum says

Is it just me, or is there something grating in that phrase: "those we pay to serve us"? So distasteful, the life of the servant class, compared with the life of the mind.
But at least in the old days the servant class hopped to it and got professor Fish his coffee and Danish in "20 seconds, tops" and worked themselves to the point of exhaustion all day for less than a minimum wage to make sure he would have something to consume with his "sports page."

First of all, I think it would be an exagerration to claim the existence of a servant class among the people who work at Starbucks. One of the features of having such a hugely mobilized workforce as America does is that many of the people doing the serving are young and destined for jobs in other fields. Starbucks workers by and large don't belong to a servant class.
The real issue is that Rosenbaum resents Fish, a professor, mildly disdaining a mainstrem middle-class experience that likely makes Rosenbaum feel at least a little sophisticated. Rosenbaum even tries to inject a little working-class anti-intellectual spirit into his article with the moldy old chestnut

As multidegreed as he is, I have a feeling that it would be an invaluable addition to his education if professor Fish spent a week "serving" as a barista. You know: For someone who believes in perspectives rather than foundations (except when it comes to grants), it would seem like a useful additional perspective on the whole coffee-servant question.

Well I'll go ahead and call you both dumb. Professor Fish, the trend of increased do-it-yourselfness in America is a direct result of rising wages and standards of living. You'd be paying a lot more than $3 for coffee if you were getting any better service, because people aren't cheap. If you would like better service, you do still have the option of going to a diner where a waitress will serve you, but you'll pay for that service and get cheap coffee instead. Rosenbaum, stop acting like we're doing more things for ourselves because we're anti-elitist and somehow in touch with the working class. We do it because we have to. Both of you, with your hoary old rationales for your beliefs and actions, are delusional, because the things you're discussing as if they are some sort of cultural issues are purely products of economics. As are both of you. Deal with it.

Why budget brands have ugly packaging

2007-08-18T13:28:00.001+09:00

From an article about the superior, unadvertised Starbucks short cappucino on Slate. The author claims that the short cappucino is the best one, because it has the highest espresso-to-milk ratio, yet it is not even on the menu and if you order it the cashier will not yell it to the barista:

The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound unattractive, or, in the case of Starbucks, making the cheap product invisible. The British supermarket Tesco has a "value" line of products with infamously ugly packaging, not because good designers are unavailable but because the supermarket wants to scare away customers who would willingly spend more. "The bottom end of any market tends to get distorted," says McManus. "The more market power firms have, the less attractive they make the cheaper products."

Interesting and effective. While some people will never buy value brands, there are those, like me, my wife and much of my family, who will only buy value brands of certain products, mostly commodities and non-foodstuffs. The article continues, doozily

The practice is hundreds of years old. The French economist Emile Dupuit wrote about the early days of the railways, when third-class carriages were built without roofs, even though roofs were cheap: "What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich."

The most fascinating thing I've read all day

2007-08-17T18:10:00.000+09:00

I'm settling down for a long period of inactivity, which means lots of blogging, studying and sweating in Korea. Here's the most interesting thing I've learned all day from Salon, about collateralized debt obligations or CDOs:

The CDO takes a pool of risky mortgage loans and divides it into slices. For simplicity's sake, let's say that a mortgage-backed security gets divided into two slices when it is transformed into a CDO -- a senior slice and a junior slice. Let's say that the senior slice gets rated AAA+ and the junior slice gets rated BBB-. But if anything goes wrong -- if the homeowners whose loans are part of this security start missing their payments -- the investors in the junior slice have to lose all of their money before the investors in the senior slice start feeling any pain. That's the beauty of the scheme. You take a bunch of bad loans and turn some of them into high-rated gold and some into lower-rated bronze. You sell the gold to the cautious and the bronze to the bold. If a few loans go kaput, the bronze investors suffer. If all the loans go kaput, everybody gets hurt. Unless there's a total financial meltdown, everyone is happily making money.

Kind of reminds me of the bulkheads on the Titanic. "If we start to take on water, close the bulkheads and sail the first class passengers the rest of the way with a hull full of pickled Irishmen!" (chomps cigar)

The other Korean hostage drama, day 2

2007-08-17T18:08:00.001+09:00

The difference between coming home sooner and later all comes down to money. And I am talking a little bit sooner, much later (like shockingly so), and a lot of money. What do you think, anybody want to chip in? Should I start taking PayPal?

Hey American Embassy in Seoul

2007-08-16T22:57:00.000+09:00

Fuck you for ruining my travel plans.

Here's what happened. We get to the airport and check in. Bags go through, boarding passes come out, and then there's a holdup. My wife's visa has a problem. The date of issue is right but the expiration date says July 19 2006. Now I had seen this, but it doesn't say 'date of expiry', it says 'IV expires on'. I assumed that since all of this stuff is done on computers and I've seen it written a million times in a hundred places that the visa is valid for six months after issuance that this referred to something else, like perhaps an InterView (hey, give me a break, okay, I've had a rough day). I assure them that that is merely referring to some other date, like perhaps the date our visa application initially expired on. They told us to wait. They had to call New York immigration and find out what to do because if they sent my wife and she got deported they have to pay a $3000 fine. We waited and they called. It seemed that they were bound by some rule to constantly call until they got an answer or final boarding call. We went and had ice cream. My wife leafed through her previous passport and figured out what the date was. It was the date that her first health check (she applied for the visa twice over a one year period) expired. How this expiration date got on her visa we had no idea but we went to explain it to the clerk. When we found her she sort of yelled at us about being 'frustrated' (답답해) about having to keep calling continuously for two hours, which was not a very nice thing to say. We waited until 7:20, at which point the New York immigration office told them that they shouldn't send my wife because they are bound to accept the information on the visa.
I know I know, I was a fool to not look into that date, but what can I say, I was home free.
Any way, I'm over it now. We'll both be there soon, so keep your pants on and think happy thoughts. Tomorrow we will be going to the aforementioned fuckuppy embassy to raise bloody hell and then it's on to the travel agent to try to get a new ticket. That will be the hard part, there's no telling when we'll be able to fly.

I would like to thank the following people and institutions

2007-08-16T08:05:00.001+09:00

for making my time in Korea what it was

My first boss in Korea, for giving me money that he knew he didn't owe me when I quit my job at his school because of the breach of contract that I believed he was responsible for. I later learned that he had been treating his teachers better than the average boss by far.
Kim Eunjung from Jangseungbaegi station and her mother, who let me stay in her house until I got a new job.
Beomjeong, for introducing me to my wife.
The Korean education system, for being woefully inadequite and creating the system in which I worked.
The makers of Bbungeobbang ice cream.
My wife's family, for treating me so well.
The fine people of Bucheon city.
Greg, for introducing me to my first job in Bucheon, and for later coming to work part time at our school.
The good folks down at the Financial Supervisory Service, whom I taught and from whom I learned a lot.
Confucius

Getting sick of fear

2007-08-15T01:03:00.000+09:00

I had my last wisdom tooth out yesterday. Injections (very deep) in four spots, a five minute wait and then an attempt. I halted the procedure due to unendurable pain and the dentist gave me shots in two more spots. Another five minutes and he had me in a headlock again with a glorified pair of pliers clamped onto my upper right wisdom tooth, or love tooth (사랑니) as the Koreans call them. He pulled and it hurt nearly as much as it did the first time, but I had a sense that another injection woulld do no good, as I was numb from my nostrils to my throat except the area around my wisdom tooth. I knew from the other ones that my upper teeth were straight shots, easy to pull out, unlike my lowers, which had hooked roots and had to be decapitated and then have each root individually pulled out. I just closed my eyes and waited for the pain to pass. It was excruciating, but it did pass, amazingly fast, and the dentist was sticking a huge piece of gauze in my mouth before I knew it. He beckoned me over to look. "This is infection. This is why the anaesthesia didn't work" he would have said if he didn't speak such awful English. Drink milk in a half hour, take the gauze out in an hour, and here's a two-day prescription for pain killers, only take them if you experience pain. Boom, I was done inside of twenty minutes.
I imagined upon leaving that this must be what it's like to give birth to your fourth baby.

I may never be hungry again

2007-08-11T07:41:00.000+09:00

I wake up in the morning and, far from wanting breakfast, I steel my already full stomach for another day of eating too much. Why, you ask?
Why, because I have to go out to eat with everybody I've ever met in Korea. And since they're not going anywhere, they want to go somewhere special. I literally haven't eaten anything normal in a week. Here's a partial list of the foods I've eaten and the places I've eaten them in.

Grilled duck, acorn muk (jelly), and a giant octopus pancake next to a waterfall
spicy grilled octopus (낙지 볶음) with another giant octopus pancake
All you can eat tuna sashimi and a ton of beer with my brother in law
Giant katsu (deep fried pork, fish, and chicken cutlets) and cold spicy noodles (냉면)
Heaps of fancy Chinese food
Rice cooked in a segment of a bamboo tree with about a million side dishes
VIPs (buffet)
Blue Ocean (buffet)
Dijon Euro (fusion-style buffet) twice
About a million patbingsu (sweet bean and shaved ice treats)
About a million free Starbucks coffees

It's like a Twilight Zone episode. I was excited about eating a lot of special things before leaving Korea for what promises to be a long time, and yet now, when someone says "We're going out for Seolleongtang (bone soup), which I actually love, I'm like 'Is there a size smaller than children's that I can order?' Damn lamely ironic twist!

By the way, my plans for today? Lunch with friends followed by dinner and drinks with other friends. Wincing? Consider it a certainty.

A gallery of human failures

2007-08-09T07:29:00.000+09:00

The Smoking Gun has a delightful gallery of mugshots where the people are wearing T-shirts with funny words on them. While many of the people appear to have been ravaged by years of drug and alcohol abuse, many of them are fresh-faced young kids. I don't know where this guy would fall.
But I like his shirt the most.
This sort of thing fills me with sweet sadness. Thinking about the kinds of things these people likely did to get arrested makes me wish i had enough money to personally send every man, woman and child in America to military school. Stop having fun, dummies!

I am leaving Korea in a week

2007-08-09T00:00:00.000+09:00

And I can honestly say that I will miss it much more than I ever missed America. Why?
I suppose the reason is that I have America inside me. If I had to I could probably make America over again, but Korea will forever be an outside influence on me, no matter how much I've internalized.
Perfect example, I just wrote 'nomatter' as a single word, apparently my subconscious brain's translation from one Korean word (아무리) to English.
There are so many things to worry about. I lost 180 pounds in Korea. Will returning to America put me back on my diet for death? Will I forget massive amounts of my hard-won Korean? Will I lose touch with the culture? Will I forget all the important lessons about people that I learned here?
And then there are the regrets. There are those who've spent their time in Korea mining its history for wisdom. There are those who've spent it having fun, blissfully unaware of the world going on around them. There are those who've spent their time in Korea viciously poking holes in the hypocrisy, the illogic, the foolishness that one finds here. I have spent my small time here trying to really understand the world as modern Koreans see it. I effectively walled myself off from the non-Korean world. In 2006 I spoke face-to-face with non-Koreans less than 10 times. The Japanese colonial period, the Yangbans and the early Christian missionaries are as far from me as they are to the average Korean man on the street, but it is a rare trend or buzzword that I have not heard about.
I believe in secular humanism, a world without a god in which people have been created in the forge of evolution for no particular purpose and culture is a mere element of our extended phenotype. To the extent that I believe the past effects the present, I don't think things systematically forgotten or dumbed down to a nub have any bearing on the present and thus I am not a huge fan of history as a window on the present. When I view the Koreans of today I see them as products of their environment, and that environment a product of history, a crucial distinction. When I came here I wanted to feel what Koreans feel and know what Koreans know, unhampered by half-baked connections to the past. Korea is often a country of pure emotion,and to approach it on any other level seemed and still seems foolish to me. To try to use facts in a way in which they are not used in Korea seems silly and almost (gulp) imperialistic. Now is a time for me to look back and think seriously about whether I have made the right decision, whether I have seen what I wanted to see and taken away what I wanted to take away.
I have managed in my time here to stretch my mind more than I ever thought possible. I have come to understand mindsets that I once ridiculed and among those I have even found those that I accept. Through it all I have not lost my own perspective, not become like putty that can take any form and has none to call its own. I have been able to call a spade a spade and to see when I was wrong.
Coming to Korea was the best thing that ever happened to me. Anyone that knew me will tell you so, and yet when I came here I had no idea that it would wind up this way. How much of this is Korea and how much of this is the natural process of an arrested adolescent becoming a man? This is impossible to answer and perhaps doesn't deserve one. Had I gone to China would I now be extolling the great reformative effect of Chinese culture on me? Impossible to say.
What I can say with some certainty is that I have learned far more in Korea than I ever set out to or even knew to set out to. I learned to suffer fools, and as much as that would enrage the high school, OK Computer-listening boy I once was, that is a valuable skill. I learned both the power of being on the outside and exempt from society's rules and the power that comes from being an insider and being bound to those rules. I learned how to function in a society I never thought I would have more than a fleeting relationship and I learned respect for people whose lives are as different from those I grew up around as possible.
So did I make the right choice? Should I have been visiting historical sites, dabbling in some University arts scene or hunting girls in Itaewon? Would I have better spent my time snowboarding, studying Joseon-period documents or lecturing every Korean that I met about what's wrong with their country? Or might I have been better off just cocooning myself off from the country altogether, meeting my foreigner friends every night of the week and otherwise behaving like a jolly colonial git?
I honestly don't know, although I have a strong suspicion that I have made the right decision. Every kind of expat in Korea that I have described is a real person and I would love to hear what they think, but with this blog's readership I don't see that happening.
Korea is a complicated place. It is so easy to peg it as any one thing that it is not, and to paint roll it with any label that you want. It's like Ireland. It's like Italy. It's like Cold War-era Germany, it's an agrarian blah blah but the people all blahed, It's the best example of American nation building, it's whatever your heart desires.
But it's not any of those things. I won't even attempt to say what it is. That's a fool's errand, and since coming to Korea one of the things I've learned is not to answer every question that's put to me.

The exquisite pain of Korean victimhood

2007-08-07T11:06:00.000+09:00

Here is a short list of ways in which Korea's obsession with victimhood manifests itself

In daytime dramas which center around a woman with a dopey victim-y hairstyle being cruelly mistreated and suffering through it passively (문희, 금순이).
In historical films in which the main characters are helpless victims of historical circumstances passively tossed about by the viscissitudes of the time.
In hysterical news reports about foreign English teachers come to Korea to have sex with Korean women.
In hysterical news reports about foreign investors carting off steamer trunks full of money while leaving nothing behind for the Koreans.
In Korean American antisemitism.
In hysterical news reports about foreign companies (Mercedes, Starbucks) selling their products at high prices in Korea.

Feel free to add your own.

Jeolla Province Trip day 1 of 4 (Bogil Island)

2007-08-06T09:27:00.000+09:00

Miyoung and I just got back from our four day trip to Jeolla Province. It was a fantastic time, and there are a lot of beutiful things down there that I definitely recommend you see if you get a chance.
A lot of people bag on package tours. I consider this a form of time snobbery. Having enough time to just go and traipse around on your own and 'discover' things is always talked up like some kind of trailblazing heroic thing to do. The fact is that in most places, if you go there to wander around and discover new surprises around every corner you're going to spend a lot of time doing things that aren't that great. Miyoung and I only had two weeks left in Korea, so we didn't have the luxury of time, so Miyoung put together three local tours into one super-tour, and I have to say that it was great.

Thursday
Left home at 7:00, took a taxi to Bucheon station and caught the rapid train to Yongsan station. The DMB television that Miyoung's sister lent us for the trip was cool, but it repeatedly lost the signal on the subway ride. When we arrived at Yongsan we couldn't turn it off and had to reset it, at which point it mercifully died and we were free of it for the rest of the trip.
Took the 8:30 KTX to Mokpo station (목포역). KTX is Korea's version of the high speed train. It was my first time going to Mokpo but it still seemed to me that 3 and a half hours was on the long side for the trip. At Mokpo station we met up with our bus and went to a big old neighborhood restaurant near the station and had a kimchi jjigae (김치찌개). This was my first taste of Jeolla-do's famous food, which was in this case not that great; the kimchi was extremely salty and everything else was as it would be back at home.
Full of salt, we were ready to move on to Bogil Island (보길도 or Bogildo). That meant going to Land's End (땅끝), the place where South Jeolla Province goes from continuous landmass to archipelago. We had a smooth hour ride until we got to the area around Land's End Town (땅끝마을) which was fairly swarming with tourists. Dirty tourists. For all the talk of love for their country, Koreans by and large have little concept of their actual impact on it. To quote my mother-in-law as she watched a news report about dirty tourists "Koreans are dirty." There, see, I didn't say it, I quoted a Korean who said it. Anyway, the entire landscape of Land's End is encrusted with ice cream wrappers, beer bottles, overturned barbecues, etc. My wife would not have me taking pictures of people's garbage, but I think you get the drift just from my description.
After a 40 minute traffic snarl on the mountain road around Land's End (the retaining wall next to the road is covered with 'Jinuk wuz here'-style graffiti, leading me to believe that such traffic jams are not uncommon) we got to the ferry to Bogil Island. The weather was hot but magically not that hot, and I managed to stay miraculously sweat free even as we waited for the ferry about 20 minutes on te shade-free pier.

This is the view from the back of the ferry of one of the many islands making up Dadohe (다도해 or 多島海, The Sea of Many Islands, to put it somewhat inartfully). The weather remained similarly foggy throughout the entire trip

On our approach to the island I was shocked to see mile after mile of sea farms raising abalone and various forms of seaweed.

Just to give you some perspective, the ferry was flying along at a pretty fast clip, and I took the above and below photos about 10 minutes apart. In other words, the waters around the island are cultivated as far as the eye can see.

This bridge, which is not completed, connects the Bogil Island of leatherneck fisherman with the Bogil Island of pretty beaches, scenic spots, raw fish restaurants, and lily white Seoulites with pink T-shirts and old rural-to-urban transplants trying to reconnect with their roots.

The aforementioned Bogil town, where the restaurants serve kimbab, Chinese food, and spaghetti.

Tourist Bogildo, where the restaurants exclusively serve the frutti of the mare. Except this one Chinese restaurant that Miyoung went to once when she was a poor backpacker and had jajangmyun.

Upon arrival, unloading of our bus, reboarding of said bus we proceeded ten minutes along the shore to Jungri beach. There are other beaches on Bogil Island but this one, our guide says, is the best, and why would he lie?

The consistency of the beach was fantastic. The sand was so fine that the waves picked it up and got clouded with it, but the beach was also covered with seashells of all kinds, smashed to smithereens, presumably by the duel forces of nature and time or perhaps by seagulls. However while scrounging around the beach I found something I had never seen on a beach before: a shell that had somehow managed to not be completely picked clean by scavengers, still containing traces of its former occupants. This place is so laid back even the seagulls half-ass it.

We spent the night in a nice little guest house (민박). I was struck by the children of the owners who were lounging around enjoying their summer vacation. they had all the cards, comic books and other junk that my kids back in Bucheon had, plus super soakers, which they didn't have back in Bucheon, plus the beach and the mountains, plus they didn't seem to go to hagwons all summer, plus they didn't seem to be burdened by countrified accents that would someday serve to hold them back. And this was where they were spending their summer vacation.

The rooms, by the way, were made of red earth (황토). This is believed by many (not me) to be good for you, and I heard more than once the bullshit detector needle burying, correlation and causation confounding statement "Long ago we lived in houses of red earth and we had no atopy (a kind of eczema), so buy this bottle of dirt/shirt dyed in dirt/makeup made of dirt/dirt cake/etc."
Anyway, after getting settled we went out to take some pictures at some scenic spots. The first one was some kind of promontory from which you could actually see Jeju Island on clear day. Of course this was a very very foggy day, so I just took pictures of my wife.
Wife and island

Wife and cliff face

Then we went to Dinosaur Egg Beach, which, despite being burdened with a stupid name, is one of the most interesting places we visited. Essentially a horseshoe-shaped beach with a round island in the middle, the shoreline is made up of large dinosaur egg-shaped rocks that make a satisfying sound when trod upon.

To the right of the beach is a beautiful bald hill.

After taking pictures and having our feet scurried over by giant rock-dwelling bugs, it was time to go down to tourist town for a raw fish dinner. When the bus stopped, the tour guide said in a very off-hand way 'This is a good restaurant' while waving his hand in the general direction of the restaurant that the bus stopped directly in front of. I was shocked to see almost everyone on the bus dutifully file into the restaurant, and, ever the trailblazing package tourist, I insisted to Miyoung that we go to another restaurant. The result: just okay. The restaurant we wound up going to seemed very expensive, and the side dishes were nothing special. The fish, as was to be expected, was excellent, and included fresh raw wriggling octopus, sea cucumber and sea anemone (not wriggling, of course).

Oh, and potatoes. Jeolla Province seems pretty big on small potatoes.

Next Time: Adventure (and napping) on the high seas, grand temples, man-eating fish and more!

Well aware of how but not why

2007-08-01T07:59:00.000+09:00

In an article from Korea's Yonhap news agency about the steps being taken by the Korean government in response to the Taliban taking 23 Korean hostages and killing two of them, Presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon says

The government is well aware of how the international community deals with these kinds of abduction cases. But it also believes that it would be worthwhile to use flexibility in the cause of saving the precious lives of those still in captivity and is appealing the international community to do so.

He then goes on to state that the kidnappers' demands are well outside of Korea's abilities and that the government opposes any military actions until the last minute.
I realize Korea is not the world's strongest nation, but I have to question whether this insistence on rescuing the hostages has anything to do with the fact that the President, Roh Mu-hyun, is a Christian, just like the missionary aid workers currently being held in Afghanistan.
It seems to me that the only people here legitimately behind the hostages are other Christians. While I am most certainly oversimplifying this issue, I prefer to think that I am speeding up the process of rounding all the edges off history.
But seriously, military intervention completely ruled out? Using flexibility, that's just another way to say appeasement, right?

The Great Approximator

2007-07-30T18:28:00.000+09:00

I was on the bus yesterday morning trying to think up a new song. I had a particular thought in my head, about how all human culture, no matter how noble and unnatural it may seem, was completely determined by physics and evolution. We are not adding machines, nor are we computers; we are animals honed by the blind processes of natural and sexual selection to have what seems to be an amount of self-awareness and intellectual ability that exceeds that which we might need to live. Some (I'm looking at you, Vonnegut) might even say that we've become peacocks in a hedge-maze: our sexually selected cleverness is becoming a serious threat to our continued survival.
This all comes back to Jeff's recent post in which he called himself a 'cynical optimist'. Short term cynicism and long-term optimism is something that I've long held to, but riding the bus I came up with a sort of framework for this set of beliefs.

This is what cynical optimists believe, illustrated

Do you know how an alligator stalks its prey? It eyeballs it, submerges and heads towards the prey, surfaces and repeats the process, zig-zagging its way inexorably towards murder. That's how our magic stock market ends up zoning in on the near-perfect values for so many companies, by the blind actions of millions of investors buying and selling, zig-zagging towards proper valuation, the same way a drunk wends his way to the door.
It just occurred to me today that that's the way humans go about a lot of things. When we set out to learn something the path is soften bumpy and the journey marked by extended periods of inactivity. The process of growing up is a long series of small successes, hopefully leading ever upward. It's just a thought, albeit a powerful one.
Anyway, that's why the title of the song is The Great Approximator, and true to form I have been able to write the lyrics but it seems I will have to wait for the music to come to me.
(Update: I'm just going to use the ever-"save as draft"ing Blogger window to write the music in. Clever, eh?)

The Great Approximator

C
I've got my little plan written I'm an itinerarian
lo-F
I've got my little book, I'm a librarian
C
Got an idea where I'm going where I've been
G
I know a lot about something only sometimes worth knowing
C Am
Know a little bit about how the world works
F G
Carving a little piece, for whatever it's worth
C G
I'm looking at a landscape that I'm not equipped to savvy
Am A#
I'm a little artifact of a billion years of history
F G C Am
I may have missed the point in fact consider it a certainty
G
Sooner or later everything you know erodes
F C
I'm the great approximator and I'm never alone
C Am F G

C Am
I'm trying to overlay a bullseye on everything I see
F G
aware of the limitations constantly proscribing me
hi-C A#
I like to draw my lay lines make my little calculations
Am G
Choo choo, I'm the Great Approximation
C
duh duh dun dun dun

C
I like to make it seem like I'm making something happen
lo-F
Oh, something just happened, oh oh something just happened
C
I'm an active participant, somewhat inconsistent
G
I'm a little scientific I'm a lot shamanic mystic
C Am
Know a little bit about how the world works
F G
Carving a little piece, for whatever it's worth
C G
I'm looking at a landscape that I'm not equipped to savvy
Am A#
I'm a little artifact of a billion years of history
F G C Am
I may have missed the point in fact consider it a certainty
G
Wouldn't be surprised if everything I know was wrong
F C
I'm the Great Approximator fairly barreling along
C Am F G

G
As an educated guesser I just barely qualify
F C
I'm the Great Approximator and I will be till I die

What

2007-07-29T10:07:00.000+09:00

Just a juxtaposition for all you Koreanized Americans out there

2007-07-28T19:12:00.000+09:00

Cheri Oteri as Collette Reardon, prescription drug addict on Saturday Night Live circa 2000

Lee Nayoung with a ridiculous lop-sided perm and a dress that resembles a canvas garbage bag in the Paris Baguette ad campaign currently running on Korean TV.

Contributing to the comparison is Ms. Lee's goofy postures and weird druggy behavior in the ads.

Let's think about opium

2007-07-28T17:43:00.000+09:00

And opium dens.

New York's Chinatown, 1925

I wonder how cool these people thought they were.

TV, loneliness and suicide

2007-07-28T17:17:00.000+09:00

Yes, this post is about the three sisters of modern life. I was just watching the ultra-broad Korean sketch show Hey Hey Hey, in which one of the regular cast busts into a normal-seeming situation dressed in insane costumes, usually with one or more teeth blacked out wildly dancing and/or screaming. After writing that last sentence I went to youtube to find a good example of the above and immediately hit the jackpot. Watch the first 10 seconds of this clip.

Now one thing you're gonna notice in this clip is the sound of people 'reacting' to the hilariousness that you are seeing. Most Korean sketch comedy shows are set up this way, where the sketches are produced and then shown to a studio audience and a panel of celebrity reactors, who say dumb things and point out how ridiculous/'funny' the sketches are.
So I was watching this horrifyingly dumb show when I suddenly recalled Mildred, Guy Montag's wife from Fahrenheit 451. Her sole pleasure in life was watching the family TV show, which was basically an interactive soap opera projected on the walls of the house. And yet she still frequently attempted suicide. And her futuristic society had fast acting response teams set up to deal with what is implied to be a steady epidemic of suicide attempts.
South Korea's suicide rate, incidentally, has gone in the last twenty years from about 9 per 100,000 people to 23. While many cite economic pressure as the cause of the rise, I suspect loneliness may be a significant contributing factor. I'm not going to reference anything to back up that assertion, but to compensate I am calling myself out for my own logical leap, so there you go. Granted, Koreans are to my eye more social than the Americans I grew up around. Still, the fact that even a laugh track isn't enough for people and they have to pipe in actual reactions from 'real' seeming celebrities tells me that people who are watching these terribly unfunny programs are doing so for reasons other than their love of comedy.
Whatever the reason, I consider this more proof of my pet theory that Korean comedy is not funny because it's created for social purposes and not for laughing.

Ignorance (even the fake kind) is no longer acceptable

2007-07-25T07:31:00.000+09:00

I was just listening to an interview on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe with a Brian Trent, who wrote a book about the cultural ramifications of immortality. I found it an interesting topic.
Then he mentioned the passage in Gulliver's Travels about the people who were immortal but never ceased aging. He called them 'The Struldbrugs or Struldbugs or something like that', stating that it had been some time since he read the book but that he 'did recall that very vividly.'
Maybe I'm alone on this, but to me in a world with Wikipedia and Google and any kind of information, particularly this kind, basically at your fingertips at all times, this kind of ignorance, especially in a writer who uses this as an example in a book that he wrote, bespeaks a real intellectual laziness. It led me to immediately write off the guy. Usually the people the Skeptic's Guide has on are not the type who do a lot of interviews but they certainly know their topics.
Lack of attention to detail in a world where the details are now the easy part will, I think, become increasingly unacceptable.
Incidentally, after a quick Wikipedia search, I can confirm that they are called Struldbrugs. Perhaps fault here lies not with lazy scholarship, but rather with that other great vice of our time, feigned lack of specific knowledge. Too often do we hear 'or something' appended to a statement with the express purpose of trying not to sound like a knowitall?

This just in: The heart wants what it wants

2007-07-24T08:20:00.000+09:00

There is a ridiculous article in Chosun Ilbo Online from July 18th entitled "Obscenity Turns English Students Off Skype", about English students who go in Skype looking to practice their English with people who have clearly gone on for the duel purpose of sex chat and making fun of earnest foreigners. Here is a comment ironically more insightful than the speaker may know.

"Most foreigners using the Skype chat service seem to just want to meet girls and make filthy jokes. So I felt bad and deleted the program just two days after installing it."

Yes. What is the response?

"It’s impossible to monitor every Internet conversation. We are aware of the problems, but we can't take responsibility for them. In the future, we will discuss possible solutions to the problems such as word filtering, throwing abusive people out of chat rooms or making a blacklist.”

It's times like this that I wish all web-based programs were designed in Korea.
But the best part of the article is the illustration of just how lewd and debased the users on Skype are.
First of all, it is not apparent that 'Sperm for Girls' initiated this conversation. Furthermore, 'Jiyoung' herself is without a doubt a tease.
I would say what we have here is a clash of objective, in which you have a group of young Koreans single-mindedly thinking about improving their English without a thought given to the actual person on the other end of the internet connection and a group of young English speakers looking for cheap laughs and sex chat without a thought to the actual person on the other end of the internet connection. No one would blink if an ajeosshi went to a soldier bar in Itaewon on a Friday night and complained later that no one was interested in improving his English. There is likely no place, on the internet or otherwise, where foreigners who don't do some kind of martial art are willing to sit and listen to broken English for free.
Also, damn, get yourself together Chosun, it's spelled 'foreign'. You are a news organization for crying out loud, not some blogger.

From the helipad of the Financial Supervisory Service building, Yeouido

2007-07-23T05:58:00.000+09:00

I've put up pictures from the top of this building before, but I wasn't able to get up on the helipad until last week. This afforded me a better view of the west than I'd had before.
Here's Mokdong, in all her glory. Immediately recognizable are the Hyperion buildings at Omokkyo station in the middle.

Panning to the right, the Assembly building, the Han River, and Yangpyeong-dong, with that I believe to be the Yanghwa bridge in the back.

Yeouido Park

A better shot just of Mokdong, with those same familiar towers

The Assembly building again, with, what is that, Olympic Stadium?

Gangnam and South-Central, residential Yeouido

Can't take my eyes off of that lush urban greenspace!

Namsan Tower, Han River, and name-that-construction.

Bukhan Mountain et al.

The FSS building smoking lounge.

Ol' Shiny, aka the 63 building.