UPDATE (16 March 2011): Well, at least someone’s finally talking about wind currents as if it’s worth considering. I’m a little dubious about how much to trust the specific claims, but at least people are now talking about it… a little. ORIGINAL POST: Well, here we are, a mere few weeks into the semester I think of as “the semester I ended up staying in Korea.” Last semester, North Korea began throwing a missile-fit (which is what happens when adult-children with missiles throw hissyfits) and bombed the crap out of a South Korean island, thereby elevating the tension in North-East …
Category: KOREA
Farewells, Hellos, And So It Goes, And So It Goes
One thing I hate having to do so much is say goodbye to people who’ve become an important part of my life. I find it’s a pretty recurring theme in the life of an expat–or of those who spend time with expats. (I remember a few Koreans back in Jeonju who seemed always to be heartbrokenly saying goodbye to people.) It’s probably harder when you’re staying, and even harder when you thought you, too, would be one of the people leaving and turned out not to be, as is my case. Two members of my writing critique group–well, a circle …
More About Korean SF, and Some Dougal Dixon Links
You might think that I’ve given up on the topic, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve been working on a few papers on the subject. I don’t know if they’ll ever see the light of day, but I’m sending them out, slowly. In the meantime, I’ve had a few discussions with Anselmo Quemot, a blogger over at Acheron LV-426. You can see the discussions in the comment threads to these two posts: Placing the Future in South Korea? An open letter to Gord Sellar about South Korean sci fi Acheron LV-426 is full of other interesting stuff, too; it was …
Everest in Yeongdeungpo
There’s a lot of Nepali/Indian food available in Seoul, but there’s one food I hadn’t been able to find, and had really wanted to find, until last night. I met Miss Jiwaku in Yeongdeungpo but we discovered that Times Square was crammed with people, and every restaurant had a wait of at least 15 tables ahead of us. So we decided to try our luck elsewhere, and by chance Miss Jiwaku remembered an Indian/Nepali restaurant by the station, called Everest. Honestly, I wasn’t blown away by most of the food: the naan was a little dry, the chicken dopiaza was …
Surely Not…
Surely it’s not easier to get a Japanese pickle press in the USA than it is in Korea? If anyone has any suggestions, short of my going and buying a kimchi pot and getting some smooth stones from a river, please do fire away. (I’m looking for something with a plastic screw-press, as opposed to something that depends on a metallic spring, as I would prefer not to have metal sitting in the salty brine.
Alley Kat, Screen Golf, and Hookers, All in One Place: Only? in Bucheon
Alley Kat Pale Ale is pretty much the only decently hoppy beer available on tap in most of Korea, and while I’m not really a hophead, I like a few glasses of it now and again. Well, earlier this evening Miss Jiwaku and I happened by a place in Yeokgok that had a big poster showing off the availability of this very fine brew, and we decided to mosey on in and try it. What we found was beyond our wildest imaginings. Miss Jiwaku described it as a “playground for ajeoshis” and that was a pretty fitting description of the …
Why South Korea is Considering a Gaming Curfew
My friend Florence Chee, who does smart-people theory about communications, mentioned on her twitter feed that there’s buzz in the air again about South Korea’s slow, loping movement toward a gaming curfew. The article she linked notes that it’s not just “extreme cases” (of the same kind that were routinely used to demonize Dungeons & Dragons back in the 1980s — guys kills his mom for being scolded to stop playing and then kills himself, for example) that justify the move, but also the more moderate example of kids who simply play all night, and therefore can’t concentrate when they …
Jah Wobble on Balance, Another Lovely Subway Encounter, and a Countdown
I was listening to Jah Wobble’s album of William Blake-inspired music, which starts with this track: Doing a little more investigation, I found a neat interview with Wobble from around the time he put that out. He talks a lot about the struggle to balance anger and integrity with the mental, emotional refreshment and grounding that one needs in order to be creative: He’s right: a certain degree of anger and honesty is energizing, but too much of it will just embitter you, and I know I’m certainly on the unbalanced side of it — and I know how it …
“Low-Quality English Teachers”
There’s a meme that’s floating about in Korea that “low quality English teachers” or “unqualified foreign English teachers” are multitude here. Well, and indeed, depending on what you consider a language teacher, and what you think the qualifications ought to be, they could be argued to be legion… but in Korea, “unqualified” or “low quality” is an ethical judgment: unqualified is often misused by Koreans discussing foreign teachers in English, as Matt points out here, and then misunderstood to mean something more like “dangerous” or “criminal” or “bad.” Of course, the facts of life in Korean society include a degree …
Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying
In the metaphysical sense, I am, anyway: Everyone knows, you shouldn’t just a book by its cover… but sometimes I think you can judge a city by its cabbies.