Also from The Party Pooper: Andre Kim scares the living hell out of me, too. Look at his face, man! Brrrr.

The Party Pooper posts, somewhat angrily, about a recent pop music video by the Korean band Jaurim. He interprets the video as outright racist, another example of a pop culture chock full of anti-American (read: anti-white) stereotypes. Of course, you can see the video here, and ought to before commenting on it. The rest of my thoughts will be in the extended section of this post. Click the link if you’re interested…

I have not much to say about the whole Dokto/Takeshima row that’s on, but I must heartily recommend Marmot’s coverage. (Here, here, and here, but check yourself for newer posts as well.) Nora Park expresses my own misgivings about the argument well: Mr. Ban, are we going to go to war over a stamp or a small town assembly’s vote? Let me know so I can be sure to pack. I don’t want to pack, I’m not about to leave, but good grief, how far is either side willing to go?

This is a rant. You may wish to skip it, unless you want to see yet another example of a ranting, furious foreign who was offended by a widely accepted practice in Korea.

The first Korean music video that showed up on the Korean MSN page that loads automatically in Windows Media Player because I am in Korea. This isn’t an ecxample of a good video, it’s absolute cheese, but for those friends of mine abroad, it’s a pretty encyclopedic index of gestures, stock facial expressions, plot moments in romance movies, clichéd actions, locations (the comic book shop, the stationery store, the whorehouse…), stock characters—the whore with the heart of gold, the young, sweet man who nonetheless kinda has a thing for screwing hookers, but changes his ways, the radio announcer who is …

When my little angelic students were calling me Gollum teacher, I sure hope they weren’t thinking of this.

As many of you know by now, there’s a segment of the Korean population that is, or at one time was, crazy about the computer game Starcraft. So crazy about it, in fact, that you see all kinds of kitschy stuff floating around online centered on it. First, I posted a a Starcraft story sung/told in the venerable Korean pansori tradition. This time, it’s a Starcraft cartoon that you can view over at ConnectKorea. I have no idea what most of the song is about, beyond the experience of this poor little alien whose fighting ability is almost nil, but …

Over at Korean Media Watch there’s a post from a while back, that I’ve run across again since I’m adapting my bookmarks to the del.icio.us format. It’s an interesting debunking of the allegation that a photo proves the story that the Japanese colonials spiked the mountains of Korea in an attempt to geomantically ruin the Korean spirit. Actually, if you ask me, it doesn’t sound so far-fetched, whether or not it happened—Japan’s geomantic superstitions were certainly still extant at the time! I have no compunction using this legendary project (true or not) in a short fiction story I’m now working …

There’s a story out there which may or may not be an Urban Legend, and I’m wondering if anyone knows either way. It’s been claimed that the TV show “Joanie Loves Chachi” was one of the top-rated American TV shows on Korean TV, and that I was popular because the names of the characters were Koreanised in such a way that the name of the character Chachi sounded more like 조지, the kiddie term for penis. Now, Chachi doesn’t sound like 조지 to me, but sometimes English gets transliterated into Hangeul in ways that mystify me, so I can’t be …