Why do people keep saying Lee Myung Bak won with a “landslide” or “overwhelming” majority? (Example here, but I’ve seen it time and time again all over the Korexpat blogosphere.) Is Wikipedia’s entry on Lee wrong? Lee won the presidential election in December 2007 with 48.7% of the vote… and Voter turnout was one of the lowest ever for a presidential election in South Korea. Or is is a “landslide victory” now less than a majority of an apathetic voter turnout? I mean, even the examples in Canada (for example, which has a consistently multiparty election system) only include cases …
Tag: KOREA
The Mountain’s Just Not Enough Anymore
As I’ve recently mentioned, I’m saving my protests-related observations for an article, but Matt has a great post up here. And I say that not just because he links to my comments, either. Gusts of Popular Feeling is one of those kinds of sites I’d aspire to run something like if I wasn’t just so completely worn out with/by/about Korea these days. This post has been, in part, inspired indirectly by things he and Joe Mondello have had to say of late, for their interest, engagement, and apparent happiness here. The contrast has shocked me into reflection, and the reflection …
Why SF Has Failed to Put Down Roots in Korea, Part I: To Start With, Questions…
I had a post I was going to write, about fantasy, SF, and the demonstrations going on in Seoul these days, but I decided to pitch it as an article idea. The editor to whom I pitched it liked the concept, so I’m binning that post to keep the juice for my article. That leaves me with two things to write this summer about SF and Korea. The article on the protests is a theme I’m putting off limits, but the paper on the general failure of the SF genre to take root in Korea in is something I can, …
I Am Not the Only Asimov’s SF Subscriber in South Korea!
Today the most surprising thing happened! I’m ending off my Anglophone Popular Cultures course with a discussion of SF and its role in (and effect on) Western popular culture. Last week, we watched Blade Runner and there was a panel discussion on The Fifth Element and Brazil. Today, my lecture focused on getting students not to think of SF as an attempt to literally depict the future, and instead to focus on the symbolism or metonymy in SF. (For example, working off Thomas Disch’s wonderful statement, “The car is the hidden meaning of the rocket ship.” (Rough paraphrase, but he …
Fsck It
One nice thing about using Ubuntu is that even when things go a little haywire, it’s usually possible to back up all the important files and then just reinstall. Reinstallation is so fast — at least, compared to the plodding installation process on Windows — that it almost always is like visiting the dentist: great dread before, not so bad once you’re there.
Creeping Specs
I first learned the expression “creeping specs” while I was living in Montreal. Someone who was then a friend of mine got me a tech-writing job. Well, sort of a tech-writing job, but with more graphics stuff, something I was not then, and am not now, qualified to do. (I could bitch about how the “learning curve” was one I was not interested in climbing, but the honest truth is I needed the money, and didn’t turn the work away. I am only bitter because, while he extended the job for as long as he could, he also didn’t warn …
Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Non-Schitzophenic Media?
Oh yes, I’m thinking of Brad DeLong’s posts about the American newsmedia. Screenshot from someone browsing Daum today. One side reports that a protester was half-blinded by a water cannon used by police, and on the other side, the headline underlined in red suggests (roughly) that “claims of injuries from water cannons are lies.” (I know, I know, it’s the internet, but this really is what it’s like in the print media too. No wonder nobody I know here who actually thinks on a daily basis trusts the news, especially the mainstream news, and no wonder demonstrators have been ejecting …
The Day the Ruling Party’s Website Went Offline
Why was this image placed on the website of the ruling political party’s website? Why was some hacker logged on there as an admin, and responding to all commenter’s complaints with the same phrase: “Myung Bak is asleep!” What could possess anyone to do something so foolhardy? That’s the question I’m trying to answer in this post. It takes a while to get to, but I hope the read is worth it.
Bracing Myself for Evisceration, But At Least I’ll Probably Still Have All My Horrid Teeth
Well, Fukuoka here I come. I guess my SF-writer credentials maybe came in handy this time, for one of my proposed papers — “Another Undiscovered Country: Understanding the Particularities of Reception and Adoption of the Science Fiction Genre in South Korea Through The Examination of 21st Century Korean SF Cinema” — got accepted for the 4th World Congress of Korean Studies (the site seems not to work in Firefox/Linux… I suspect you need Internet Explorer & Windows to load it, as I was able to get at it on my dual boot) which is happening late this September in Fukuoka, …
Big Surprises and Random News
For Inner Circle Members, only! So, let’s see: One of our department assistants suddenly quit without notifying any members of our department, yesterday afternoon at 4pm. Though I was one of the people who defended her and helped keep her in her position this semester, she decided to stick me with the crappiest class assignment possible — Monday and Friday night, as late as possible. That’s been fixed, as there was no way in hell, but it’s all a mystery. (She also stuck someone in the other English department in an unfeasible course assignment, too.) That someone else is a …