Bryan Kay’s article, “South Korea’s Racism Debate,” amuses me mostly because I don’t think there’s really all that much of a debate going on at all. When Miss Jiwaku has tried, with some of her Korean friends and acquaintances, to talk about the issue, she’s had a pretty disappointing success rate: when trying to...
Read more →During my first few years in Korea, I asked Koreans I knew what was the best South Korean-made TV show they’d ever seen. I would hear different answers from different people, but one consistent answer I got from people who cared about and consumed a lot of movies, films, and books, was the recommendation...
Read more →Miss Jiwaku told me about a news report regarding a Canadian who had murdered his girlfriend three years ago (but had pretended she’d drowned accidentally, pursuing a tennis ball), fled the country, gotten religion, but finally returned to Korea to turn himself in. He claimed he’d murdered her because he was afraid she was...
Read more →Caveat: I’m not fluent in Korean. I got help with this, but there may be small errors. And now, another edition of Korean politicians making asses of themselves, and embarrassing their nation! When I first arrived in Korea, I was cautioned to remember that here, in the case of an emergency, one does not...
Read more →… that, despite the nonexistence of an afterlife, despite all odds, somewhere out there a bunch of recently-departed souls are caught in a lineup, the processing of the world’s dead being backlogged, and Christopher Hitchens has just looked back and noticed that, lo and behold, amid many bedraggled, starved people stands the ghost of...
Read more →UPDATE (25 Nov. 2011): So, I got some of my facts wrong. I first heard the news about the FTA vote verbally, in the form of a couple of rants about how it went down. When I read the article, the wording was such that it didn’t contradict what I’d been led to believe...
Read more →Miss Jiwaku was once offered a job to travel to Indonesia, accompanying K-pop groups like Wonder Girls and translating for them. She was not, I must note, impressed with the fact she would be traveling with a pop group she considers a blight on Korea’s international reputation; for her, it was about getting paid...
Read more →Note: I wrote this last night, but fell asleep before posting it. *** So I mentioned a while back how I’d be hosting a learn-to-brew session with some of my students, with the goal of producing two (approximately 5-gallon) batches of beer for a cocktail party being held later this semester. On Wednesday night,...
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