In a recent post, I made a disparaging comment about being talked to like some hakwon teacher: And it’s even worse when it’s nine at night and a couple of people come in wanting to sample the beer, just see what it’s like, and they’ve clearly just eaten dinner and tell you so, and you say, with the smarmiest look possible, “Well, I don’t sell draft beer without anju,” as if you’re talking to some hakwon teacher or something, and to top it all off, the anju on your menu is a ridiculously overpriced joke — even moreso than the …
Tag: KOREA
이끼 (Moss)
Well, it’s been a while since I saw a Korean film that I couldn’t quite understand with my limited Korean. (Of course some lines go over my head, but I usually get the gist.) This film, on the other hand, frustrated me like mad. I think part of the reason–probably because it’s based on a comic book–is that there is a lot of non-action action. What I mean by that is, there are a lot of sequences that serve the same function as action sequences, but which actually feature characters either standing still or movingly only a little. Frankly, the …
Last Weekend’s Jazz Festival… and Some Thoughts On Improving For Next Time
By the way, last weekend I also took in an evening of jazz with my friend Nick. It was, in some ways, a disappointment, though I always have a good time with Nick so all was not lost. As a brief summary: 정성죠 Big Band, well, we mostly missed them, arriving only in time to see them back some vocal jazz. Not my thing, and more depressingly, they played some charts that I myself played in high school and university big bands… and not as well as we played those charts, back in the day. The Nana Quartet came next, …
Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature
Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation …
Oriental Medicine Charlatanry
Someone in my Facebook friendslist (whatever it’s called there) posted a thing about acupuncture and how it actually works, at least as an analgesic. And, well, yeah. Done right, it can work as an analgesic. It can work as advertised. Unless of course the practitioner is a total quack asshole who advertises that acupuncture (or other oil-of-smoke medications) will cure cancer. Somewhere on the Korean internet is a web forum where doctors hang out and chat, something like Dave’s ESL Cafe, and one of the long-running topics of complaint is how often patients show up at the conventional doctor’s office, …