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?

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.

Reification in action

I was just watching Korea's 'know-nothing celebrities try to guess whether there is legal recourse for something' show Solomon's Choice, and the situation in question was a child whose mother starts sending her to hours and hours of after-school classes, giving the child so much stress that she starts to bite her fingers until they bleed and wet her pants in class. The mother-in-law forces the status-hungry mother to take the daughter to a doctor, who diagnoses her with stress (if you know anything about Korea you knew that was coming) and (get ready) juvenile depression (소아 우울증), and the term was done in a different font and color and fairly slapped in your face as if to say "Yes, that's a thing now." And I could feel the Koreasphere whirling around me, suddenly faced with a term they hadn't known they needed but they will soon be unable imagining a world without. Stay tuned for more sightings of this little charmer.

A hackneyed cliche in the making

'That sound you just heard was <inaudible action'>

e.g.
That sound you just heard was me rolling my eyes
That sound you just heard was Donald Rumsfeld rolling over in his grave
That sound you just heard was Michael Moore <something salty>'

Next time you hear this phrase, think of me and smile. The sound you'll hear will be me smugly nodding in recognition.

It had to be told

So the peopele who bought the English school where I work originally came from an art school background, meaning that they are both art teachers and their first business was an art school. That means that they basically put all their effort into the interior decorating at the English school and none of it into, say, the listening lab they had promised everyone. This is the problem with being incredibly proficient at your job, my wife and I are totally taken for granted. It will be a sad day for them when we leave and they find that your average English teacher/manager will not stay late, will not do any unnecessary planning, and will not basically do their job for them, and, most worryingly, will likely not be a very good teacher.
Anyway, I am confronted with daily reminders that management care much more about what's on the walls than what's on the white board. Every day I come in to find a new piece of amateur-y artwork up on the wall and no work done on the listening lab. I tell you when I see schoolrooms in Afghanistan where there is nothing but a black board and a teacher I totally understand what it's like.
Anyway, the other day I came in to find what is certainly the most amateurish piece of work, but also the most disturbing, in a 'Who made this and why is it hanging on the wall?' kind of way.

Yeah, it's a picture of someone getting an injection in the can. Now that in itself is a little bit weird. First off many of the details are different from an actual injection room. Injection rooms typically don't have huge windows. I have rarely seen a bed in an injection room, and never been asked to lie fully face down to receive an injection. Typically the order is 'Lower your pants', the nurse gives you a few sharp slaps and shoves the needle in, pumps out its contents and you're done, and you didn't feel a thing.

This doctor is giving an injection while sticking his hand up the recipient's shorts. Just stop and look at it, like I am forced to every time I need to sharpen a pencil. Also note that someone has written the Korean word for 'whatevs', jeul (즐, or, if your can't read that, the English letters KIN turned 90 degrees clockwise) on top of the butt. With all of these glaring problems, how did this thing make the cut to go on the wall?

An unsettling thing in my morning paper

I was riding the bus from my first job of the day to my second, and I had read and reread my paper, having recently allowed my iPod to be run over by a bus (yes, really), and being extremely bored, I went through all my old newspapers doing the crosswords. And then when I got really desperate I did the Jumble. I was that bored. And then between ARRAY and LIMIT, something caught my eye.

Yeah, Ernie's got Bert eyebrows. and Elmo does too. and something funny is going on with Grover. So I put on my bifocals and swooped in for a closer look.
Elmo's got a handgun, Cookie Monster has a machine gun of some kind, Grover is smoking, and Ernie has a knife. I instantly came up with two theories.
"Ha, some clever smart-ass is having a laugh, as Ricky Gervaise would say."
"No, some lazy dumb-ass has searched the internet for a picture of the cast of Sesame Street, found this parody and been too lazy to even look at it."
Hmm, I'm still on the fence. Incidentally, here's an original, easily found through Google image search.