I was poking around in Bananaloft, a website devoted to Asian-Canadian goofing-off and fun, and found an article on several, er, conditions that seem to be culture-bound to Korean society, as they say. Well, I would actually say it’s two mental conditions, and one folk-belief. Fear of Fan Death, absurd though it is, seems mainly to be the result of media talking crap; we don’t consider the belief in a higher suicide rate around Christmastime — or fear of the same — a “mental illness” but it’s quite disconnected from reality — a similar folk myth in the Western sphere. …
Tag: Korean culture
Genes and Culture: Ear Rice, Light Sweat, Red Faces, Drinking Places
There’s a few neat fact most people seem not to know, regarding genetic differentiations between East Asians and everyone else, and it they’re neat enough to post the going theories about… One particular trait that came into the news a few years ago (2006) is related to sweat and ear wax. (That there was the layperson’s link, but if you want the hard science and have access to Nature, look here.) Which one’s grosser? Ear wax? Okay. Well, there are two kinds of ear wax in humans: brown, wet, waxy stuff, and yellowish-white, drier, flaky stuff. If you’re a Northeast …
B.A.R.F….For Your Dog’s Health!
Found this image while cleaning out the drive for the videocamera I’m sending off to Miss Jiwaku. It was something I saw in, I think, Emart a year ago.The quality isn’t so great, but I can’t not post it: Yes, the Ultimate Diet for your dog. But it’s not what you might think… did you spot it? Yep, that logo, to the bottom left of the Ultimate Diet image packaging: Wow, I am sure someone out there thinks himself very, very clever! Of course, I can’t see myself buying that for any dog, myself, even if the bones and ambiguously …
Oxytocin and Social Networking
This article is interesting, though its title, “Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love,” should have a question mark at the end, since the experiment (with Twitter) was a simple one-off. I’d be very curious to see studies of people who use Social Media professionally. (Like, say, someone like pro SF authors twittering like mad at a science fiction convention, or low-level political candidates using Twitter.) I’d also be very curious to see how mediated interaction works compared to non-mediated interaction — how much difference in oxytocin do we see in couples talking on the phone a few hours …
Random Linkage
I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …
Do You Have the “Drunken Rice”?
I don’t tend to read food blogs, but in the past year or so, there seems to have arrived a meme spreading around Korea that Korean food must be popularized in the West, as Japanese food has been. I suspect this is not just because Japanese food being popular irks your average nationalist in Korea — Japan’s international popularity in general does, after all — but also because, if you go to some places in North America, you’ll see Koreans running many of the “Japanese” restaurants. (In such places, side dishes of kimchi are often available in far greater occurrence …
How Much Does 빨리빨리 Cost?
A metaphor, for what it would be unwise to simply relay, and now a new tag for my blog — “allegories from life”: Torjan rose from the desk and went to the door of his workchamber, about to make his way to one of the lecture halls. The room was enormous, and he had finally figured out how to open the magical windgate to bring a cooling breeze into the room that had grown steadily warmer with each passing month. But when he reached the chamber door, and stepped out, he made a strange discovery. That was: the lock refused …
You Do Realize That You’re Baring Your Soul To Me, Right?
I’d heard from others that teaching Creative Writing to undergrads, one tends to see things that those students don’t or can’t express anywhere else. In Canada, I recall hearing classes tended to have to wade through story after story of students’ first sexual experiences, of their best or worst sexual experiences, of imagined sexual experiences, and of course the perennial fantasies of sexual violence (mostly by male students). Well, I am happy to report that this isn’t my experience in Korea.
Bluepill
I get an email from my workplace, and what’s the first image in the content? Yup, it’s a scattering of blue pills. Of course, for someone who hasn’t seen or didn’t care for The Matrix, this has no real symbolic significance at all. It’s an appropriate image for the link to an article about the impending launch of a College of Pharmacy at our campus. But for someone who’s seen The Matrix, the Blue Pill has a rather ominous meaning, for Morpheus tells Neo that if you take the Blue Pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed …
Question for Y’All , and a Little Manifesto
Is it just my imagination, or do administrative bureaucrats at institutions of higher education in Korea seem to be the sort of people who, through sheer incompetence, simply got shuffled from position to position until they ended up behind a desk? Sometimes the people sorting bottles in community centers, working jobs created especially for people with special needs come to min, actually. Test For Theorem: Step 1: Submit an abstract for a conference. Step 2: In the process of writing the paper, realize you had it wrong in your abstract, and change the scope, content, and thrust of the paper. …