UPDATE (18 Sept 2008): As Charles notes in the comments, the website now loads in Firefox, and even in Linux! I suspect this is a result of my having emailed a brief comment about it to the convention director, who emailed me just now to check if it was working for me after the fix. :) In any case, it was fixed impressively quickly, though the PDFs apparently remain inaccessible to on a Windows installation without Korean language installed. I’ll post here if and when that gets fixed, and pull my mirror file below. Forecast: scattered posting ahead. I’ve got …
Category: KOREA
Korea Herald Essay — Published?
UPDATE (17 Sept 2008): Aha, I’ve just gotten an update and the series of which my article is a part will run from the 23rd-25th of September, that is, next weekend. Keep your eyes peeled, I guess! An edited version of these posts (mostly the first one) was supposed to appear in the Korea Herald around the end of last week. I check the editions for the dates I was told, and there was nothing. Anyone seen it? If you have a copy lying around, please don’t toss it. I’d love a copy. It was supposed to be in the …
Surface-to-Troll Smackdown
If you troll my site, I will delete your comment unreplied to, unless it’s worth posting in a post of its own for a little mockery and hack’n’slash, because heaven knows on a long day, that’s a great stress reliever. Frex, the following comment that showed up on this post. Anon | 98.218.151.45 | 2008/09/16 http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/10/62-knowing-whats-best-for-poor-people/?cp=46 I have a couple of things to say about that.
골프 영어 학원?
(Trans. “Golf English Cram School”?) It could have happened. Responding to protests, the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. announced Friday that it would back down on suspending golfers who do not speak adequate English, reversing a controversial decision that had thrown the organization smack into the nation’s long-running culture wars. The LPGA Tour had announced last month that it would suspend golfers who could not speak English in media interviews, acceptance speeches and tournaments by 2009, saying that language fluency was critical to the sport’s promotion and marketing efforts. The action occurred as foreigners have increasingly come to dominate women’s golf, …
A Few Words About the Unsayability of Things Most Worth Talking About.
I assigned the Nora Ephron essay “A Few Words About Breasts” to my essay-writing class (Bulgasari helpfully provided a link to that essay in this comment), and the reaction was quite interesting. Some of the students claimed they were so shocked that teenaged American girls are so anxious about breast development, claiming adolescent Korean girls aren’t. (Lime calls bullshit on that, however.) Others admitted they were — and in a couple of cases, still are — anxious about it. Others found the myths Ephron discusses amusing, like this one about her friend’s response to the failure of young Ms. Ephron’s …
Matt on Symmetry in The Host
For those into Korean cinema, Korean SF, or both: Matt’s written up a good post on The Host and the role of symmetry in the film, and linked my posts on the Host (starting here). I’ve commented to expand (slightly) on his observations. Check it out! As for me, I’m planning on working on a paper on the film and its political elements, somewhat expanding on my observations in the posts I’ve made here, and on the paper I’ll be presenting in a couple of weeks. I’ll be working on that sometime in the next couple of months, time permitting, …
Shepherds and Sheep
Those of you who knows your Canterbury Tales well don’t need the exact line I’m thinking of in that title, so I won’t give it here, since it would be overstatement. Or, well, no, not really, but it would be not-nice understatement, anyway. I’m struck, in reading the work of schoolteachers who are trying to write an English text for students of the level they teach — and trying is the word, indeed in a couple of senses — that maybe some of the content just shouldn’t be in there. The problem isn’t total incompetence on their part. A lot …
“Low Quality Foreigners” and Mockery Thereof
Right, so if you’ve been around the Korean expat blogosphere at all, you’ll have seen this image: Okay, so yes, this is a cartoon about a “low quality foreigner,” a creature which has been a bugbear in several different communities in Korea, not all of them Korean. Yes, mostly it’s Koreans who’re talking about it in terms of “low quality foreigners,” because that’s how the term gets translated and that’s the kind of terms Korean media would use to say what Westerners living here would call “total f*cking losers who don’t belong here.” But before I get into that, I …
Woah!
Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …
Yay For Vanilla
I decided the other day to install some kind of forum software for my students’ use, and I was looking for someone free, easy, and somewhat configurable. Given that I’ve never installed a forum, or maintained a board, I was a little nervous about how setting it up, but I went off and downloaded a copy of Vanilla and spent about five minutes setting it up, about half an hour grabbing some extensions and prepackaged themes and styles for it, and about ten minutes setting up those, and now I have a functional discussion board on my website. (Not this …