Hey, something I’ve been harping on for years is finally in the news!
Safety… Last?
Tag: Nonfunctional Systems
Armed Cinema Drone Needed, and Also Warm Bodies
Attention preservation notice: This post is mostly about assholes in a cinema. A little bit about the film Warm Bodies, but mostly about the morons who sat beside me. These morons:
If You Wanna Be My 형…
Yeah, sung to the tune of that horrible Spice Girls song. Ugh. Miss Jiwaku and I talked after she got back from her film program meeting today, about her frustrations. To what do her frustrations mostly connect? Older people who insist on “respect” and special treatment on account of their age, regardless of incompetence, rudeness, or plain stupidity. There’s an older person in her film program who is particularly useless, who apparently was constantly rude to her, who finally warmed up to her… why? Because she poured him soju with two hands and used the magic “term of respect” address …
What I’ve Learned About Crises, or How My Vaguest Shadow of a Doubt Died Today…
It’s been snowing heavily the last couple of days in my area. The thing about snowstorms–like other crises–is that they reveal a lot. It’s difficult to gauge the stability of a system in normal times, though of course you can guess. But a crisis, that lays bare a lot. Now, when I say it’s been snowing “heavily” allow me to adjust that comment: I don’t know what’s fallen so far, but the prediction for was 10cm, which just barely qualifies as heavy. (And today’s snow certainly was not heavy, though it was constant.) So… why did one of my colleagues (wisely) …
Celebrity Suicides, Netizen Trolling, and the “Success” of the Real Name System
In 2006, when I moved from where I used to live to the place I live now, I changed jobs, and suddenly I was able to understand what my students were trying to say about current events in classes. I taught a lot of conversational English and composition-type courses at the time, which meant I began to pick up on news and online memes in Korean society, because students would be repeating claims, arguments, and points almost verbatim. One of the earliest of these memes that I encountered was related to the “Real-Name System,” a then-proposed (and since-implemented) method for …
Fair Coverage: Rude Canadians in Korea
A funny memory hit me today, in the light of the comments to my post yesterday. I mentioned how there are rude people everywhere, but I feel I must give fair coverage to some Canadians I’ve known who were living as expats in Korea. It’s a memory from my first year in Korea. Now, that first year, I experienced a lot of strange, bizarre crap. Not all of it was from Koreans; in fact, most of the weirdness was from expats teaching in Iksan. One of the more interesting was seeing how young men who left Canada for Korea suddenly, …
Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger
The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are less powerful, in my opinion, in part because of the way Zielenziger presents the social problems he chooses to tackle. Many, such as the falling birth rate, the lingering (relative) conservativism among men, the precipitously-declined birth rate, and the national obsession with conspicuous consumption of brand …
I’m the Dojisa of Kyeonggi-do! (Stoop Before Me, Mere Civilian!)
Caveat: I’m not fluent in Korean. I got help with this, but there may be small errors. And now, another edition of Korean politicians making asses of themselves, and embarrassing their nation! When I first arrived in Korea, I was cautioned to remember that here, in the case of an emergency, one does not dial 911, but rather 119. (Which is how it is in a lot of other countries, so I’ll resist the urge to make a joke that it is simply “backwards” to us North Americans — like so many other things in Korea.) However, things have changed. …
Fukushima Radiation Detected in Kangwon-do
UPDATE: An English-langauge article on it is up now at Joongang Daily. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, so… don’t panic. (Yet.) But yeah, they’re detecting the first traces of radioactive xenon from Fukushima in Korea. (Source article, in Korean.) It’s been detected in the Eastern province of Kangwon, which is to the west of Seoul and over some mountains — that is, on the coast facing Japan. One claim is that the radiation circulated down into Korea after passing over Siberia/Kamchatka, which sets up a disturbing (to me) bit of evidence that, hope as we might, not everything is blowing eastward and …
What Have We Done?
UPDATE (16 March 2011): Well, at least someone’s finally talking about wind currents as if it’s worth considering. I’m a little dubious about how much to trust the specific claims, but at least people are now talking about it… a little. ORIGINAL POST: Well, here we are, a mere few weeks into the semester I think of as “the semester I ended up staying in Korea.” Last semester, North Korea began throwing a missile-fit (which is what happens when adult-children with missiles throw hissyfits) and bombed the crap out of a South Korean island, thereby elevating the tension in North-East …