America's Credulity Straining Challenge

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.

Dumbest idea of the week

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?

Ambient ephemera from America for all you guys in Korea

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.

A perfect chance to practice spotting logical fallacies

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

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:

1. Those tough ajummas.


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


3. Booking (nearly delved into every episode)


4. Dating Korean guys.


5. 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.

Happy Days are here again.

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

What is a chippy?

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'.

Who's riding who?

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.

A gallery of human failures

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!

Just a juxtaposition for all you Koreanized Americans out there

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.

Ignorance (even the fake kind) is no longer acceptable

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?

Or maybe a Hamlet reference?

Yes, this table was on the set of Cannonball Run, but I don't think that justifies the price.

Korean TV makers hate their viewers

Or think they are morons, or have terrible taste. And perhaps at times they are right. I a talking in particular about the excremental program entitled Zoozoo Club (주주클럽), in which animals are put in ridiculous staged situations with little regard for their welfare or that of the humans appearing on the show.

The other thing that I hate about this show is that it features Boom, Korea's most depressing TV personality. He is doubly blessed with the soju-addled puffy face of a middle-aged man and the asinine, childish haircut of an exceptionally impressionable teenager.

Having finished my new song and video, Living in Korea, I decided to spend some time away from the computer/mandolin/video camera axis of evil and spend some time with my wife. I sat down to watch the story of a borzoi who had given birth to puppies (you can see two of the puppies by following the link above). Then the owner's four year old daughter is 'alone' with the dogs (and the cameraman, and the producer . . .) and she starts carrying around the puppies by their necks and front limbs and basically freaking out the mother dog, who diplomatically jumps the girl to free her choking pup. This is played repeatedly in 'horror movie' slow motion and color correction.
Then the little girl is depicted 'saving' one of the puppies in a rain storm, which is clearly made by a garden hose pointed in an arc at the little girl and dog. There are copious images of the little girl really crying while being pelted by hurricane-force artificial rain.
Finally and most ridiculously, the mother and daughter are given potatoes by the producer, which they steam and then three-bearsishly go away while they cool. Naturally the mother borzoi is pushed in the house through a window and guided by the detached, noninterfering superpro cameraman to the potatoes, which she eats. She runs away and another little non-borzoi dog comes on the scene to find scraps of potato, at which point we see freeze-frame reaction shots of the mother and daughter angry at the little dog. Then they brutally corporal punish the little dog, even though they know full well what the deal is.
This would make sense if there were any pretense to fiction, but these events are portrayed as real, apparently under the impression that Koreans are still under the same sway of the magic of TV that they were when they first got a glimpse of it, fresh off the farm as they were at that point. Lazy lazy lazy.

A funny thing

I was just sitting here, passively consuming movie reviews by Outlaw Vern, who maintains a tone which I find fascinating and incredibly funny, when I read something that literally brought tears of joy to my eyes. I suspect that the buildup is important and so I will reprint the entire review, which I can't help but assume is some sort of crime. Let''s see if you're able to figure out at what point I started laughing out loud (i.e. L.O.L.-ing)

AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER

Well what this movie is about is Austin Powers is a spy from the '60s who likes to have sex and use different british slang, etc. He has bad teeth and a hairy chest and because the dude who plays him, Michael Meyers, wishes he were a rock star, he also has a band in one part. This is the third in a series of pictures thought to be parodies of James Bond but obviously more like homages to Derek Flint, but with dick jokes and one dude playing most of the roles.

The plot of the first one was about Mr. Powers being frozen cryogenically because his archnemesis Dr. Evil was frozen and sent into space. And then they both get revived in the '90s, and they have trouble catching up with the different changes. Also Mr. Powers has to pee really bad when he gets unfrozen, and that type of crap.

There are some good jokes in these movies and what makes them really work is the director Jay Roach really tries hard to capture the type of cartoony visuals of the movies these are a tribute to. So you got lots of nice lookin sets and devices and colorful costumes. And in the second one what they did to make it catch on, they copied one of the most brilliant ideas from the great underrated John Frankenheimer version of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, and had Dr. Evil have a midget lookalike as his sidekick. But then he thinks of him as a baby and starts ignoring his real son, even though the midget is some kind of freaked out monster that just says "eeeeeeek" all the time. The guy who plays "Mini-Me", Verne Troyer, is not nearly as small as Nelson de la Rosa in Dr. Moreau but he gives a great acting performance as a creepy little bastard who can seem like a cute little kitty and then all the sudden try to bite your dick off.

Well by the time they got to this third one they've lost all interest in telling a coherent story. I mean this is the plot: Dr. Evil has a plan to team up with the Dutch master criminal known as Goldmember, but then Austin Powers captures him and brings him to the world court where he is imprisoned. But then Austin's dad is kidnapped and Austin goes to Dr. Evil in prison to find out who it might've been that kidnapped his dad, and he says Goldmember. But Goldmember is hiding in the year 1975 using time travel. So Austin goes to 1975 and saves his dad and brings back his ex-girlfriend Foxxy Cleopatra who (if you do the math) must've been 12 when they were together. But then Dr. Evil escapes prison and teams up with Goldmember to try to flood the earth, but all Goldmember is good for is eating his own skin and painting people's dicks gold. But Dr. Evil's son Scott starts trying to be more evil so Mini-Me defects and helps Austin and Foxxy to come in and get Goldmember, or something. But then they all become friends.

So it's more of a collection of skits than a comedic spy movie, like the first one or IN LIKE FLINT was. If you like this movie really depends on if you laugh at any of the individual jokes. Dr. Evil does not get as much to do although I liked how he reacted to the freakiness of Goldmember. Mini-Me has some good shit in there in my opinion, Michael Caine (ON DEADLY GROUND) is a good choice for Austin's dad and Beyonce Knowles from MTV music videos is likable as a happy Foxy Brown type who calls everybody "suga". Most of the best jokes are silly riffs on different movie conventions. You gotta admire a movie with a whole scene based on how you can't read subtitles when there are white objects on the screen.

But the whole feel of the movie is kinda weird and forced. The extended celebrity cameo opening is amusing but plays like an opening to the MTV Movie Awards. Later there are scenes with improv between Dr. Evil and Goldmember and etc. and since these are played by the same guy it starts to get this weird pasted together feel like the "space ghost" talk show but without the same sense that the awkward timing is intentional. In fact even when it's all different actors in the conversation, they are obviously using different takes sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. They repeated the same scene from the second one that was a repeat from the first one, where Dr. Evil says something and his son says something back and then they start arguing and it is wacky. I have no clue what either of these jokers are saying though because it makes no god damn sense and it really isn't funny unless your idea of funny is recreating the same thing you thought was funny five years ago, like when they repeat the same line in every Saturday Nite Live skit and everybody goes "Ha ha, I know that line! 'Isn't that special!' Ha ha!"

And that is the whole problem with this comedian, Michael Meyers. Yes he is creative and talented but he gets into too much of a mathematical type formula with his humoring. All the characters have to have jokes that are reworkings of jokes they did before. The new character has to have a different nationality and accent, this time it's supposed to be dutch instead of scottish or british. I think arguably this one has more new material than the second one but it is still too much of a greatest hits type of sequel.

I will say this though, there is alot of dancing. I don't know why but it can be refreshing when people are just dancin all through their movies. DEATH TO THE SMOOCHY was pretty dumb but it had a couple gratuitous dance numbers in there that made it more enjoyable. This one has more. There are a couple of full fledged dance numbers and then there are several characters who do a little dance out of the blue for no reason. It is kind of infectious and actually before the movie was over a couple people in the theater got up and started dancing around. At first people tried to ignore them, then they started to laugh at them, then with them, then they started to join them one at a time. Before you know it everybody, even me, got up and started dancing together, all around the theater, over the chairs, down the halls and back. People were tossing their garbage around and into the garbage cans, passing around crumpled up popcorn buckets like a bucket brigade, working together to clean up the mess. The theater employees came in and started tap dancing, spinning their brooms and dustpans around, tipping the garbage cans sideways and spinning them around on their wheels. It was fuckin amazing. A genuine communal movie going experience.

Actually that is kind of exaggerated, what really happened was during the credits everybody got up and started to leave, even though obviously there was gonna be outtakes. Then the outtake started and they stood there confused, then some of them sat back down. Then the outtake ended so they started to leave again but then a different one came on. These fuckers can't figure it out. Either stay for the credits, don't stay for the credits, or learn to recognize the patterns of what types of movies will have shit during the credits. Or dance. Those are your choices assholes.

thanks

I know this guy . . .

He's a Korean guy and he speaks English really well but not perfectly. Anyway, he has this really weird tendency to over-misunderstand any favor that I ask of him. This leaves me backpedaling, and him thinking I am incredibly presumptuous. The first time it happened like this:

Me: You know I am looking for jobs and I have started applying to a couple stock brokerage houses in New York. Do you think I could put you down for a reference? I don't know whether they'll actually call you or not.
Him: (Stunned silence) . . . Well, I suppose I could make a few calls to all the Korean stock brokerage houses in New York and put in a good word for you, but I don't really know what you'd do there. They usually only hire Koreans. I will do what I can.
Me: Oh, no, no, I'd never ask all that, all I need is . . .

The next time (today) was like this:

Me: So I got two interviews at brokerage houses, and they will expect me to intelligently talk about the stock market and stock trading in Korean, so can you recommend any good basic books that would give me all the vocabulary I need to discuss the field?
Him: (Thoughtful contemplation) . . . Well, I suppose I can give you a few books on the Korean stock market, but I must say that there are major differences between the Korean stock market and the New York Stock Exchange, People spend their whole lives learning about the different systems used at each market, I really don't think there are any basic books that can teach you everything about the Korean stock market.
Me: Oh.

Sometimes it's fun to hate on people

Like in this article that the Marmot linked to about why Pyeongchang, South Korea's Winter Olympics bid is a laughable joke. In the interest of hwapuri (화풀이, stress relief), here are all the hatin'est parts:

I quit skiing in South Korea a year ago, frustrated with the mediocre slopes and poor quality snow.

Just before the IOC team arrived in PyeongChang last February, they luckily got the snow they prayed for. If the IOC team had arrived a week earlier, they would have laughed and returned to the plane.

Nobody gets on an airplane to ski man-made snow, but there is one exception: Southeast Asians who have never seen snow before and don't know the difference between good powder and man-made ice slicks. Part of PyeongChang's promotional theme was of spreading winter sports throughout Asia and the only way they can attract foreign skiers is to market to the clueless beginners that live in the tropics.

The lift lines are long and the slopes are severely overcrowded. You have to ask, if serious skiers do not fly here to go skiing, why should anyone else, including Olympic athletes?

Ha, overcrowded with know-nothings!

Once a year the diplomatic community is rounded up for the "Foreigners International Ski Festival". They are fed with booze and sent off skiing for the day. The Korean media capitalize on this weekend for photo ops of foreign skiers to use in brochures and promotional material to portray this place as a vibrant international scene, which of course it is not.

One of the hallmarks of a great mountain town is an apres-ski scene and the surrounding amenities of good restaurants, bars and entertainment. At PyeongChang's two resorts the apres-ski scene involves a K-pop discotheque, karaoke sing-a-longs and poorly rendered versions of overpriced Western cuisine. The architecture and ambience is as if Joseph Stalin designed the resort with a Hello Kitty motif.

So you drive back into the actual town of PyeongChang . . . what is most stunning is the lack of any cosmopolitan feel, or even a sense of style or identity and except for the "Yes! PyeongChang," signs, one could be transported to any other small Korean town and not know the difference. There is a complete absence of any rustic mountain town charm.

Ha, even 'any other small Korean town' lacks rustic mountain charm!

Your only options for accommodation are a few love hotels. Your options for dining are standard Korean fare (including dog soup, always a controversy when Korea hosts a large sporting event), Koreanized Chinese food and a take-out chicken joint. Your options for drinks are three brands of watery lagers, or soju- a cheap liquor that is used to get drunk fast. Entertainment is nil other than basement karaoke rooms hosted by feel-up girls.

Once you wake up with a soju-hangover, a good cup of coffee is impossible to find, along with breakfast. South Korea isn't a breakfast culture and hunting down any restaurant open at seven in the morning is a gruesome task.

Amen, brother. Eat some freakin' pancakes, Korea! and not as a damned snack in the middle of the day with your damn hands! Drunkies!

With flagging inbound tourists, South Korea now is focusing on "forced tourism", that is, making people visit the country because they have to through sporting events, conventions or conferences; not because visitors are coming on their own initiative.

Like when Grandma has a birthday party for the cat because she's lonely.

I think of the estimated 5,000 athletes and coaches and thousands more staffers, spectators, general tourists, journalists and thousands of Korean spectators that would pour into the PyeongChang area if the Games were held here. Many of them would stay and eat at the two nearby resorts. Once those rooms are booked out, the spectators and others would end up in PyeongChang proper at the love hotels. The rest would be roaming the countryside looking for guest-stay rooms at dilapidated farmhouses called "min-baks."

Dilapidated! God, Korea, burn down those dilapidated old farmhouses and put up some rustic ones already!

Much of the hype PyeongChang put forth was that it is a world-class winter sports "mecca".

Oh, ho, quotes, I know what that means!

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bam, money shot!

Although Korea excels in short-track speed skating, other winter sports are nearly non-existent. Telemark and cross-country skiing is rare, snowshoe trekking is unheard of, and biathlon is only performed by the government-sponsored team since rifle ownership is restricted. The only snowmobiles around are ones used by the ski patrols at the resorts and you can pay a few dollars to let them take you for a joy ride. There is one ski jump in the country, at Muju, the largest ski resort in the country located a few hours south. It stands creaking and unused. Dogsled racing is nonexistent except for one entrepreneur who lashes together a few mutts and charges little kids for rides at festivals.

Oh, well, actually this is a well reasoned argument against Korea hosting the games. Ha!

Korean children go sledding, but at commercialized pay-to-enter hills that are totalitarian in nature. The kids are not free to run around and sled on their own. They obediently line up with plastic sleds at the top of the hill at numbered gates and wait for the whistle of a lifeguard-type fellow before cruising down the slope.

In all seriousness, I have done this, and it is depressing. They could halt the next round, put a gas chamber at the bottom of the hill and blow the whistle, and everyone would go right in just like they're told, because Korea is soooo totalitarian.

Winning the hosting of the Winter Olympics is forced investment in winter sports in which currently Korea has no interest and zero experience. Reluctant to invest in a bobsled track, there will never be a bobsled track in Korea unless the Olympics come to town. If the Olympics were won, Korean engineers would visit the bobsled tracks of other countries "benchmarking" (a popular euphemism in corporate Korea for copying another's ideas) how one goes about building a bobsled track.

Benchmarking, ha! Those damn Koreans wouldn't even try to build bobsled tracks without finding out how other countries do it, even though they have zero experience. God, it's almost like they don't want to fail. That's so totalitarian. Guh!

In the end, South Korea would get facilities to train its winter sports athletes that it would not otherwise build for them.

What fiends!

It was often mentioned in the Korean media that an IOC report indicated that PyeongChang had the support of 96%. The secret to the high number is that PyeongChang residents have nothing to lose and much to gain.

It's not a secret anymore! Yeah, crusading journalist!

The Olympic spirit of South Koreans was most on display during the 2002 Winter Olympics when short-track speed skater Kim Dong-sung was disqualified for a gold medal for blocking (cross-tracking) American skater Apolo Anton Ohno. The South Korean Olympic team threatened to boycott the closing ceremony, boycott Athens in 2004, and sue the chief referee, despite the foul being obvious on film. A wave of anti-Americanism and conspiracy theories swept over Korea. Ohno received thousands of threatening emails and Korean "netizens" crashed the US Olympic Committee server. A year later, when Korea hosted a World Cup skating event, the US team had to withdraw because the hate mail and death threats continued.

Those crafty Koreans, with their spirit and their death threats. Preach on, truth master! Bludgeon us all to death with the ugly truth!

The bid presenters worked on the theme that if the Winter Olympics were held in PyeongChang, it would somehow create better relations between the North and South. There was no explanation of exactly how or why that would happen or why it is pertinent to the rest of the world.

Um, salient point.

Yet through a huge amount of aid, South Korea continues to keep one of the world's worst tyrants in power. North Korean defectors continue to be turned away; South Korea abstained five times on United Nations North Korean human-rights resolution votes and uses the Gaeseong factory in North Korea as a source of cheap labor for South Korean manufacturers under the guise of progression towards peace.

Yeah, that's all true. Damn you South Korea, and your puppet, Kim Jong-Il!

South Korea fantasizes about the ultimate sport events trifecta: Korea could become the sixth country in the world to host all the three major sports events. . . The prestige factor is heavy and in the eyes of Koreans, this will be another indicator that they finally made it to the big leagues.

Those assholes.

But North Korea is always a bit jealous of southern success. In 1987, North Korean terrorists planted a bomb on Korean Air flight 858, killing all 115 on board. During the 2002 World Cup, a North Korean gunboat ambushed a South Korea ship. Not a good track record for hosting the Big Three.

Damn, we've gotta keep the Olympics out of South Korea, or the terrorists will win!

Fanciful ambitions can get in the way of tough realities. Just before the announcement of the 2010 bid results, the Korea Times prematurely published an article online stating PyeongChang had won. "PyeongChang works a miracle in Prague" read the headline, and in a manufactured quote: "It's a miracle. This is a miracle of PyeongChang. We defeated the two cities that are famous for their winter sports programs," said Kim Jin-sun, in a fictional, futuristic way.

It's funny because it's true. This is a great time to bring it up.

Like the premature and fraudulent Korea Times article, PyeongChang's bid was based on hopefulness and snowflake whitewash and not on hard facts or the self-introspection of what it takes to be a mountain town worthy of world-class recognition.

I think you would have to be pretty ignorant of South Korea to disagree with the main idea of this final paragraph. Korea is a kind of 'If you build it, they will come' kind of place. Get real, Korea, or this reporter will make fun of you and hurl accusations at you some more

Oh, kooky mix-ups

You know what two Korean words I used to always mix up back when I first learned them?

Ishimjeonshim (이심전심) - telepathy, mind-to-mind communication
and
Imshinjungjeol (임신 중절) - abortion, interruption of pregnancy

To hilarious effect.

Some thoughts

I have been highly occupied with a)desperately looking for teachers to replace me and the other teacher at my school and b)actually getting a job. I don't think there is much of an apparatus for hiring foreigners who become minor internet celebrities in Korea's tradition-bound banks. So I have been unable to really get anything done at all except a lot of thinking, none of it fruitful. In short:

• 'Interweb', 'intertubes', and any kind of willfully ignorant misnomenclature for the internet are not funny. Please stop.
• I was hasty to dub America's painfully unfunny anticomedy as 'Adult Swim Comedy'. Both the Venture Brothers and Metalocalypse are great and not anticomedy.
• 'How to Win Friends' and Influence People' is a great, hilarious and interesting book. Written in the 1930s and brimming with stories about Prussian noblemen, dowagers, Rudolph Valentino and farmboys-turned-magnates, it basically seems to be the first non-religious book to ever come up with a reasonable reason to be nice to people.
  

More Asperger's!

It is now clear to me that despite my efforts to stem the tide, Asperger's Syndrome is now the most pretend-diagnosed disease in America. Michelle Collins wrote in the Best Week Ever blog

Two days ago, we brought you footage of the Spelling Bee winner Evan O'Dorney's extreeeemely awkward interview on CNN, where many of you criticized us for posting a clip of a boy who clearly has Asperberger's Syndrome.

Yeah, the kid is awkward, but do we now live in a world where people can 'clearly have Asperger's syndrome'? Is this such a self-evident thing now that people no longer have the luxury of chalking up awkwardness to mere stage fright or being a weird teenage homeschooled kid? If only I had grown up in a world where people would have told my parents I clearly have Asperger's syndrome instead of politely saying nothing about all my weird behaviors.

Lolcats: apparently that's a thing now.

Slate says so. Here's my own attempt at a Lolthing, featuring my nephew June-young.


The syntax is not Lolcatty, it's actually super-Konglishy.