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 dial 911, but rather 119. (Which is how it is in a lot of other countries, so I’ll resist the urge to make a joke that it is simply “backwards” to us North Americans — like so many other things in Korea.) However, things have changed. …
Category: KOREA
Is it Too Much to Ask For…
… 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 Kim Jong Il, in full North Korean military-leisure suit regalia, and that Hitchens turns around and strides up to him confidently, and bitchslaps the unliving crap out of Kim until his ghostly body collapses in the pile of useless feces that the man always truly was? …
A Society Without Debate
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 had happened. So read the following with a grain of salt, and see the comments — especially that by Charles — afterwards. I’m going to leave the post as is, as a reminder to me to get the facts straight before I go off on my …
Wonder Indeed…
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 a decent wage for honest work. Unfortunately, the organization offering the job — a Korean TV network tasked with making Korea look nice and plain and innocuous abroad, in English — did not offer her a decent wage. The wage was, well, laughable. One imagines maybe …
Student Brew
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, we met up and I pulled a bunch of samples of different styles for them to try, including a Belgian Dubbel, a pretty hoppy American Pale Ale, a hoppier-than-style Belgian Pale Ale, a bottle of Leffe (for a proper BPA), an ESB (commercial bottle of London …
Korean Girl Groups as a Window to the Industrialization of Culture
EDIT (5 Sept 2001): I goofed on the dating of the video I used as historical evidence, as one commenter pointed out. What can I say? Duh! See the comments section for more. (But I don’t think it kills my argument… there’s other evidence for that.) ORIGINAL POST: When I arrived in Korea, people were using the word “talent” in a way I really didn’t understand: it was synonymous with “performer”… even performers who quite obviously had no talent. And believe me, there were lots of those on TVs in those days. I’m sure some people out there would say that …
And by the way…
School has started again. Apparently the start date was changed from Sept. 1st (which is what is has been for the last however many years) to the week of Sept. 1st, which this year began on August 29th. For some reason, not one of the foreign teachers I know (except one) was told about this, so when we got the text message on Friday — yeah, on Friday — we were all shocked. I’m sure it was on a calendar somewhere — in fact, I’m told it was — but as for actually communicating the change, well: communication is not …
This is Your Own Foot, In Which You Have Just Shot Yourself — or, Why TEFL Teachers Should Read The Inner Game of Music
Not long ago, I was riding the escalator up to the local subway station when I saw an ironic — but not very surprising — sight. I don’t know if it’s common outside of Korea, but around here, women who are wearing skirts — not even necessarily short ones — tend to hold their purse behind their legs, to hold the skirt down and, presumably, to fend off perverts trying to shoot upskirt images. (Yeah, it’s an issue here.) Well, on this particular day, a young woman doubtless acting on habit did exactly this. She slipped her purse behind her, …
On Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones’ Tongue Surgery
I must admit, as someone who’s been teaching Koreans English for a decade now (more, if you include the Koreans in my classes at Concordia University in Montreal). I’m extremely dubious about this: Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country. But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn’t pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet. Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum …
Chocolat (쇼콜라) — The Mixed-Race Girl Group
Miss Jiwaku recently complained on her blog of how the whole musical trend of girl groups and boy bands has “ruined everything” in Korea, especially advertising. I’ve noted a few times on my Twitter feed how when actual girl groups aren’t being used to advertise water parks, girl group-like collections of women have been created for advertising. For one park, she informed me, a “girl group” was actually formed — the “Ocean Girls”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIg46YFuqIU This, she assures me, was not the case a decade ago, when water park ads featured… you know, kids playing and families enjoying themselves together, and …