This is a follow-up to a series I started last week, which begins here but is not for the faint of heart. This post as well is not for the faint of heart. The series, if you’re interested, began here. Okay, I know it’s an old headline, but how does it happen that a Catholic Cardinal and the Mormon church agree on something… especially on this? Okay, so, as a non-American… how does gay marriage threaten religious freedom in America? Seriously. Set the histrionics aside, the screaming and shouting and wild eyes, and explain it. Because, frankly, unless “religious freedom” …
Tag: popculture
More Nigerian 419-Scam-Related Pop Songs
I posted yesterday about 419 scams and a pop song related to the topic, and after a little more poking around, I found a talk discussed here, in which a few more 419 scam-related songs are mentioned. Here they are: and: The first song “Yahoozee,” by Olu Maintain, while the second is “No More Yahoozee [The Reply],” by Harri Best Moradiyo. Both songs seem to be related to the travails and legalities of being a 419-scammer, in roughly the same way that being a business exec is glamorized, or criticized, in the American media. Which gives me an idea for some deep-future …
An EMP in Lagos
UPDATE: More here. ORIGINAL POST: Seriously, I get this weird feeling someday people might just be willing to support something like a sequestration of Lagos from the Internet, or some sort of EMP that would knock out all the computers there, creating a hardware shortage and making it difficult for Nigerians to replace their computers… maybe even getting other nations to forbid export of computers to Nigeria. Then again, how much spam comes from Korea? No, really. Maybe that EMP was a bad suggestion. The other night, some Nigerian scam artist like the kid mentioned in this article hacked the …
GBH and Unknown Famous Koreans
Be warned: this tune is slightly addictive. Not because Kylie Minogue is prancing about in a space-kimono getup, which is amusing the first time through, but because it has one hell of a groove. Not bad for 20th century music (of a relatively obscure sort — it has a poor release history, this track does). So is Towa Tei well known in Korea? Is it widely known that he’s a Zainichi Korean, or do most Koreans who hear of him assume (as does most of the West, I guess, and understandably) that he’s Japanese? It fascinates me which Koreans outside Korea …
The First Album I Ever Bought For Myself
It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …
Cosplay’d
Bizarre photo, I know. Miss Jiwaku suggested I pose with these two, probably because she found it amusing to see Koreans dressed this way; we were both quite surprised to see a costume like the woman on the left is wearing being used at all in Seoul, much less for a commercial property,on a Friday afternoon, in a mall. Cosplay is not a common thing in Korea — at least, not if you mean cosplay as in the costumes associated with manga or other superhero/SF/fantasy stuff. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, and this, the second time, it …
Why I Think Korea’s “Not Really Confucian” (And That Saying It Is Doesn’t Help Things…)
UPDATE (20 min after posting): Okay, the title of this post is probably a cheat for something much more complex I’m trying to say. This is a blog. Sue me. ORIGINAL POST: Today a student dropped by my office to discuss an academic project she’s working on, and we got into a discussion of whether we can lay blame for various patriarchal ills in modern Korea at the feet of Confucianism. During this discussion, I confessed that I don’t think we can. Or, rather, that I think blaming Confucianism is, like blaming Christianity, simply a lazy shorthand. This is not …
More Random Pop Culture Stuff
The more times I teach this American Pop Culture course, the more I begin to find other ways it could be taught. One way I’m thinking is that I could simply take seminal films — The Godfather, Annie, Tootsie, Do the Right Thing, King Kong — and then explore all the various cultural dimensions that wouldn’t be apparent to students coming at them from outside Western culture. But I like the way I’m teaching it now, with lots of readings and so on. I have a very interesting observation on one of the books I’m reading for the course, but …
Stuff of Interest (From Papers I’m Grading)
While grading essays, I always encounter things that are interesting. I’ve decided to make note of a few of them, for a record if nothing else. In my English & American Popular Culture course, we’ve been focused on early-20th century American pop culture, but the students have written essays about late-20th century pop culture. (This is a way of giving them a chance to attack issues we haven’t discussed, as well as a way of giving them more time to research what they want to discuss in their final papers.) Anyway, some of the interesting moments, ideas, and thoughts that …
The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rule Breakers of the Harlem Renaissance by Carole Marks and Diana Edkins
This is a book I purchased a while back in the hopes of writing some SF set during the Harlem Renaissance, but which came in handy for my course Understanding English and American Popular Culture. (The first half of which has been pretty much devoted to African-Americans’ role in building the foundation of American popular culture.) The strength of the book is that it builds up a picture — and one that is honestly critical without stooping to being demeaning — of the world in which the Harlem Renaissance occurred, and a number of the major figures of the Renaissance. …