Bev, Gandhi, and Chinese Drivers

The other day, I posted this video on Facebook: The responses on Facebook were interesting: https://www.facebook.com/gord.sellar/posts/10152490693171070 Note that it was in the second response that the discussion suddenly focused on stupid things Koreans say to white people, like, “Wow, you can use chopsticks!” or “Please marry someone from your own country.” The second comment. It’s interesting because, as outsiders in a culture, people often tend to try fit their experiences into an understanding of that culture. Which, you know, is skewed by the fact that people tend to remember most clearly, the most offensive and idiotic exchanges they’ve experienced.1 In …

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Anti-English Spectrum vs. the Asiatic Exclusion League

For those who think that the Anti-English Spectrum fanatics are bad, well, I agree. I personally think they’re a significant part of the reason why Korean society, which used to be pretty positive towards Westerners on a one-on-one level, has gotten increasingly hostile with every passing year I’ve spent here. (And yes, I’ll stand by that statement, in terms of my subjective experience, though I’ll also admit some of that has to do with my neighborhood and personal disenchantment.) I’d also say it’s part of the reason a video like this one (yes, it’s the MBC “Shocking Truth About Relationships With Foreigners” …

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Rikki-Tikki-Tavi & Stephen Harper’s Unceremonious Assrape of Toronto

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com As I mentioned to some friends, my dad once let me stay up late to watch this on CBC. I have no idea why it aired so late, though I suspect we were getting shows on Toronto time — thus an hour or two later in our timezone, which was a constant annoyance. I wasn’t supposed to tell my sisters, as they had gone to bed and would be mad if they knew I was allowed to stay up… even though I was older than them. But I figure after recounting so many of Kipling’s …

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How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 4

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series How to Kill Your Business in Five Easy Steps

For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 4: When the Money Gets Tight, Screw Your Workers (Or Try Your Darnedest) or, Kick Morale in the Teeth Even Harder I’ve already traced through the process of bringing a company to the doorstep of ruin financially, and damaging morale irreparably. Now, the next step is much easier to pull off if your staff is easily divided in some arbitrary way — by race, for example, or sex. Another …

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How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 5

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series How to Kill Your Business in Five Easy Steps

For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 5: Maintain Your Deathgrip Till The Bitter End There’s something to be said for the person who says, “Honey, I don’t think this is going to work out.” For the member of the garage band who says, “I’m tired of playing these songs, and you aren’t, so I think it’s time I quit.” For the hairdresser who admits that she has fantasies of setting clients hair on fire, she’s so …

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How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 3

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series How to Kill Your Business in Five Easy Steps

For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 3: Kick Morale In The Teeth When times get tough, the tough get going. But actually, as a worker, when times get tough ion a way that looks like they’re not going to get better, it doesn’t matter what the tough do: it’s the smart that you want to keep an eye on. And when times get irrevocably tough, the smart invest their energies on where it will pay …

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How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 2

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series How to Kill Your Business in Five Easy Steps

For those just joining us, this is a series. There’s a series of links at the bottom of this post, so you can start at the beginning if you like. Step 2: Be Irrational About Diversification A week or so later, word came down that the top that the XP Office tutorial was to be set aside, and instead I was to think up a new project. There were all kinds of big project proposals being pitched –including one to the US government, to make their websites “accessible” as per a legal mandate of around that time. In retrospect, I …

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How to Kill Your Successful Business In Five Easy Steps: Step 1

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series How to Kill Your Business in Five Easy Steps

Recently, I posted about the fact that someone needn’t come to Korea to experience being held at arm’s length in a group, regardless of what one does to assimilate or join. Working in a family business is a great way to experience this. Also, sometimes people ask me what I did before I came to Korea. If it seems like an idle question, then I just say, I went to grad school, and taught at Concordia University while I was studying there. Also, some tech writing. And I leave it at that. The fact of the matter is, whatever I …

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Student Culture & Student Expectations

I recently posted about student expectations with regard to course difficulty. Students — the same ones — have been mentioning, again, how difficult my two content courses are. This is not surprising, really, since in one we’ve been discussing the contribution of African-American popular culture to mainstream American (and really, global) popular culture — in terms not just of tangible contributions like to the musical language, to language itself, to style, to abstract ideas like “cool,” but also how African-American culture (or certain understandings [and misunderstandings] of aspects of it) got taken up consciously by, say, the beats, as an …

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