Miss Jiwaku told me about a news report regarding a Canadian who had murdered his girlfriend three years ago (but had pretended she’d drowned accidentally, pursuing a tennis ball), fled the country, gotten religion, but finally returned to Korea to turn himself in. He claimed he’d murdered her because he was afraid she was going to kill him. Okay, so…? “Do you know him?” she asked, and mentioned that he’d been in Korea from 2001 until the time of the murder (in 2009), and had worked as an instructor at “a university in Jeolla Province.” I arrived in Jeolla Province …
Tag: KOREA
Gobble-Gobble
Yeah, for you Errol Morris fans, that’s a double-gobble: Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later: I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way …
쓰레기 같은 학생, or, Why You Might Need Pepperspray
“Grabage-Like Student” is the title I’ve written in Korean. But a better translation is, “Asshole Student,” I suppose. It’s a reference to the guy who threatened Jihyun today, when she took the city bus that passes by the front of campus. To make a long story short, she (very politely) asked him to stop cursing and complain to the bus driver about the change in route, if he was so annoyed. (After something like ten minutes of his cursing in the nastiest tone.) It ended with him standing over her at the bus stop, his friend in tow, calling her …
Happy New Year
I’m told that not long ago, Koreans tended to reserve the phrase “Saehae bok manhi baedusaeyo!”1 for Seollal, the Lunar New Year (or what we in the West call Chinese New Year). However, people tend to say it a lot more now for January 1st, so that’s what I’m wishing you all out there. For Miss Jiwaku and myself, it was a quiet New Year’s, and a busy week before it. Well, quiet compared to some, I suppose, but we had a lot of running around to do, things to get done, and so on. That cooking at home thing …
Is it Too Much to Ask For…
… that, despite the nonexistence of an afterlife, despite all odds, somewhere out there a bunch of recently-departed souls are caught in a lineup, the processing of the world’s dead being backlogged, and Christopher Hitchens has just looked back and noticed that, lo and behold, amid many bedraggled, starved people stands the ghost of Kim Jong Il, in full North Korean military-leisure suit regalia, and that Hitchens turns around and strides up to him confidently, and bitchslaps the unliving crap out of Kim until his ghostly body collapses in the pile of useless feces that the man always truly was? …
A Society Without Debate
UPDATE (25 Nov. 2011): So, I got some of my facts wrong. I first heard the news about the FTA vote verbally, in the form of a couple of rants about how it went down. When I read the article, the wording was such that it didn’t contradict what I’d been led to believe had happened. So read the following with a grain of salt, and see the comments — especially that by Charles — afterwards. I’m going to leave the post as is, as a reminder to me to get the facts straight before I go off on my …
Wonder Indeed…
Miss Jiwaku was once offered a job to travel to Indonesia, accompanying K-pop groups like Wonder Girls and translating for them. She was not, I must note, impressed with the fact she would be traveling with a pop group she considers a blight on Korea’s international reputation; for her, it was about getting paid a decent wage for honest work. Unfortunately, the organization offering the job — a Korean TV network tasked with making Korea look nice and plain and innocuous abroad, in English — did not offer her a decent wage. The wage was, well, laughable. One imagines maybe …
On Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones’ Tongue Surgery
I must admit, as someone who’s been teaching Koreans English for a decade now (more, if you include the Koreans in my classes at Concordia University in Montreal). I’m extremely dubious about this: Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country. But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn’t pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet. Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum …
At my local Homeplus Express
There’s been a riot of complaint about the trend in Korea of little local mini-marts run by the big chain stores, like Homeplus/TESCO and Emart. These little shops set up in plain-jane neighborhoods that have, well, not much in the way of mini-marts, and because of the name value and a slightly higher diversity of products, they seem to win out among those who either aren’t grocery shopping online, or who happen to need something right away. (As we did this morning.) The complaints are mostly that these shops are hurting the mom’n’pop stores, and, well, they are. Of course, …
Put Your Mouth Where Your Money Is
There’s an expression in English about following in action what one says: “Put your money where your mouth is.” This need not have anything to do with money, which in this expression is a metaphor for “action.” (It might include donating money, if one is advocating such behavior, but it need not be limited to that meaning. For example, one could exhort another to put his money where his mouth is in terms of, for example, following through on a claim or a professed belief.) When I was younger, I admired this concept: I liked to suggest people put their …