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 …