It’s quite a challenge to teach some of the stuff I’ve been covering in my Popular Cultures course this semester. We just finished with “The Warrior Archetype” section of the course, and it was funny how aware of World War II my students were, and how much less they knew about The Great War, aka World War I. We had a look at the first scene in the pilot episode of Rome — because I had a copy of it — and discussed the romanticization of warrior types in modern depictions of antiquity and the older verse depictions they’re mostly …
Month: May 2008
Welcome, Asimov’s Readers!
I guess some people might visit after reading my story in the July 2008 Asimov’s SF, which has gone out in the mail (though I’m sure it isn’t on newsstands yet) titled, “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues.” I hope you enjoyed it, though I guess if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have come here. Anyway, welcome to my site, and feel free to have a look around if you like. A lot of my recent posts here are about current Korean political stuff, but if you dig, you can find all kinds of other stuff. If you’re like to …
Mad Cow Update
As I’ve said before, it’s worth listening to what scientists say. I’m willing to listen when the Professors Kim of Hallim University say that their research findings have been wrongfully exaggerated by those who oppose US beef. Others online have pointed out how unfortunate (yes, truly) it is that Koreans aren’t (yet) up in arms about other issues that need serious attention, from traffic fatalities to avian influenza — which is true, and I really wish people were. We’ve got H5CN1 in the neighborhood now. (To that I’d add reforming police service, which right now is almost as useless as …
Free Speech? F*ck You, Citizens!
How is a democracy supposed to work when citizens can be criminally prosecuted for disagreeing with the government? It’s too bad that there’s nobody left outside Korea who can pressure the government here to actually allow criticism, differing opinions, and so on. But hey, when the major governments of the world are convinced they have God on their side… The national prosecution and police say they are going to criminally prosecute people involved in spreading so-called “mad cow horror stories” (gwangubyeong goedam) on the Internet, in addition to prosecuting the organizers of candlelight protests against imports of American beef. A …
Translations from the Maggot’s Lair Marmot’s Maggoty Comment Lair Hole
I wager most commenters over at Marmot’s don’t imagine this much attention is paid to what they say. (Then again, I can’t imagine most would care, but…) Someone out there seems to have translated the comments thread at Marmot’s Hole for the discussion on the beef import policy protests I’ve discussed in recent posts. (I guess this might explain some of the new traffic I’ve been getting from what, judging by the usernames, look like Korean users I’ve never met before. I was wondering how that happened, and thought it might be my new story that’s in the July issue …