… because too many people in this world are moron, and those morons seem to be the ones tasked with making sure things don’t fall apart. Yes, my closet is still subject to a huge water leak from the floor above, the Housing Office people remain idiots — and potentially larcenous idiots, given how they went through the apartment above looking for loot to steal (to the point of unwrapping a present left on the counter), the old, junky washing machine ruined a shirt I’d just gotten and had worn twice — because it’s so old and crappy that the …
Tag: KOREA
“Low Quality Foreigners” and Mockery Thereof
Right, so if you’ve been around the Korean expat blogosphere at all, you’ll have seen this image: Okay, so yes, this is a cartoon about a “low quality foreigner,” a creature which has been a bugbear in several different communities in Korea, not all of them Korean. Yes, mostly it’s Koreans who’re talking about it in terms of “low quality foreigners,” because that’s how the term gets translated and that’s the kind of terms Korean media would use to say what Westerners living here would call “total f*cking losers who don’t belong here.” But before I get into that, I …
Woah!
Left Flank linked to the excellent opinion piece on the state of Korean society by a Korean correspondent who spent almost five years abroad, titled “Koreans Need to Learn Life Skills.” She spells it out, asking essentially what kind of adults do you get in a society where children are shuffled between cram schools and have no childhood? A society with poor time-management skills, poor creativity, inflexibility when it comes to adapting to the massive changes that are doubtless ahead of us in this already future-shocked century, and… well, go read it. As I’ve said before, Lime is a fan …
What is the Sound of a Tail Wagging a Dog?
Last night, Lime and I watched a film I’d requested last semester for my Anglophone Popular Culture course, Wag the Dog (1997), and a couple of things hit me. See, the thing is, all this watching Korean SF movies and thinking in terms of the Korean adaptation of foreign genres or narratives to a Korean context has impacted how I watch American and other foreign films now, and I was asking myself how or even whether Wag the Dog could be retold in a Korean context. I haven’t seen many political films here, I’ll admit; The Host (2006) doesn’t feature …
Summer’s End, Essay’s End…
Totally personal update. I imagine many casual readers won’t be interested. If you are, well, there’s a link, and you’re free to click it.