For a long time I believed what the employees at local little cell phone shops always claimed when I asked: that a foreigner cannot get a regular phone with a regular phone plan under his or her name in Korea. They always claimed that I had to have the phone under someone else’s name. So it went, and my phone was under my friend Seong Hwan’s name. Seong Hwan generously allowed me to get a phone with himself signed up as my guarantor. He also let another co-worker of mine do the same. It always struck me as odd that …

For all you guys out there who are into RPG gaming and would like to get a few of your geekiest Korean friends, students, and others into the hobby, here’s a link to GURPS Lite in Korean, sent to me by my friend Adam. Out here in Jeonju, most people think RPG means some kind of online computer game. I’d love for that misperception to change. Maybe sometime I’ll actually run an RPG game for Korean players, if I can find a few interested people. But I’m a bit busy for it right now. Anyway, the Korean version of Gurps …

Here are some great Korean Recipes. They look as if they’ve been modified somewhat, calling for ingredients easier to find outside of Korea, but those of you who’ve cooked Korean before can probably substitute things at will. There are literally months’ worth of recipes to explore here. I’m making 닭도리탕 (d’ak dori tang) tonight.

Some English Teachers have all the luck. Actually, I had a student once flash her chest at me. Not really flash, but she leaned forward and gave me a good view of what was going on down the front of her shirt (admittedly not much was going on) before sitting back with a big grin on her face. I remained calm, and said, “You still have to do the conversation exercise. Go!” Still, it beats fighting your hakwon director to get your passport back, wouldn’t you say?

You probably know about this article if you’re into Korea stuff at all, but anyway, here’s a link to where Kushibo writes about the ridiculous debate on Korea versus Corea. No, the Japanese did NOT change it to a K to humiliate the colony alphabetically. They did some really bad things, but this was not one of them. It’s one of the more dismissable, insane complaints that people who want to sound political, but don’t know anything, wave around whenever they get a chance. Kushibo demonstrates this devastatingly, and then asks the question, what exactly does Corea hearken back to? …

There are so many ways this could go wrong. Courtesy of Gyre.org : The South Korean Defense Security Command has announced that they intend to set up 250 armed, robotic guards to defend the 252-kilometer-long DMZ between North and South Korea. And to think I dismissed C. Douglas Lummis when he brought up that silly film Robocop in his text Radical Democracy. He wasn’t underestimating governments at all. Sigh. Here’s the Free North Korea post on the same subject, and another from The Security Watchtower. Looks like the newspaper articles they’re referring to are gone into the archives, sadly. Oh, …

I swear, there’s a punchline to this post, but it comes right at the end. The other day at work, some people were complaining about how some Korean taxi drivers sometimes have nudie pictures (sometimes attached to a calendar) up in their cab. This is an extremely rare phenomenon, though. What I encounter far more often is the evangelical cabbie. The taxi driver who has sticks of gum set out, on a donation basis, with the cash going to charity. With laminated religious tracts attached to the backs of the front seats in the cab. With an electronically lit-up picture …

Gord: Good morning! Class: Good morning! Gord: How are you? Class: Fine, thank you, and you? Gord: I’m good. It’s a nice day! One Student: Yes, it is! It’s a warm! Gord: Yes, it’s warm. Hey, everybody! Look out the window. Class: (looking out the window) Gord: Do you know what those flowers are called? Another Student: The butt flower? Heh heh. Class: (laughs) Gord: (gesturing at his butt) The butt flower? No, no. It’s called a cherry flower. Class (scatteredly): Cher-ry flower. Gord: Those flowers are beautiful, aren’t they? Majority of the Class: Yes! One Student: No! It’s ugly. …

Peter from Oranckay recently commented, over at Marmot’s blog, about his approval of the now increasingly common term “unqualified foreign [English] teachers”. It’s a term that’s bandied about whenever troublesome foreign English teachers get arrested, advertise their sexual adventures with Korean girls online, and so on. Oranckay’s (er, Peter’s) interpretation of the term is that “the implication is that there are those who are qualified,” he says, and I am not sure whether I’m in any position to disagree, not having the ability to read the articles using the term in the original Korean. However, I would like to ask …

A while back at The Marmot I remember some fellow who, in some kind of weird show of Korean nationalism, decided he would use Hangeul Romanization to represent the English name of Korea, ie. writing Gorea. I thought, at least at the time when I saw his comments in a meandering thread, that was what he was up to. Now, thanks to a totally random link from The Random Eclectic I know the truth. From the BDSM – Art of living webpage, no less! Heh.