My favorite religious song...

...it is the holiday season, after all. From the Concert for George:

Fuckin' USA

Some North Korean propaganda I stumbled upon:

I am Tom Wolfe

Subtitle: Author of a bloated, morally bankrupt waste of time entitled "I am Charlotte Simmons."

I just finished Tom Wolfe's latest, an 800 page diatribe against the moral weaknesses and self-centered nature of my generation. It was not a pleasant experience.

First off, the story just ain't that great. He's much more interested in exposing the realism of college life and 18-22 year old partying than he is in establishing dramatic tension. Things don't really get worrisome for the key players until we're 7/8ths through the novel. So unless you need someone to hold your hand through 700 pages of his expose on debauchery there's nothing compelling you to pick up the book.

But it also fails because the characters are all almost completely flawed, which isn't necessarily that bad, but the moral reckoning that does come for one of them doesn't feel genuine or important...it just feels random. He (the character who does lose something) suffers because of his self-idolatry but so too could have the 3 other vain characters who escape relatively unscathed. And how damning of my generation is it supposed to be that each character Wolfe creates from my demographic is completely self-absorbed, maniacal, devious, and only motivated by talking about or doing something completely for him or herself? There's no charity to be found in any of them.

Review over. Now let me post this on my blog.

Irony defined.

Election Day

It's election day here in the ROK, which means two things. 1st, and most importantly, I get the day off and don't have to work. 2nd, it means Koreans will almost certainly elect Lee Myung Bak, the man on the left in the following picture, as their next prez.


He's a former mayor of Seoul and a center-right kinda guy who already has a big scandal to his name before he's even sworn in, but he's probably not gonna rock the boat too much. Think of him as Dubya circa 2000, + kimchi.

Should you desire to read more about the election, you may do so here.

Lo Me Gusta

This Is Not How I Want To Go Out

I don't ride the subway that often, only on my (rarer and rarer) trips into Seoul for shopping / boozing / whatever. But whenever I do there's always that thought in the back of my head, especially when I'm first in line at my entrance, about accidentally slipping onto the tracks or, even more likely, accidentally being pushed onto them by some snub nosed ajjuma in a hurry.

Just the other day there was a massive backup on several of the Seoul lines because someone had been killed by an oncoming train. Now obviously that's a horrible thing to have happen, but it's not altogether unusual (I gather from what I see in the news that this happens once or twice a month in Seoul). What is interesting about this incident is who died, and why. You see it was someone who should've known better, and he died in what could be best described as a compromising position.

You see apparently the other day a subway conductor with diarrhea was working on one of the trains. Apparently his bowels had endured for as long as they could so when his train came to a stop he climbed out of his car, went down onto the tracks, and started to take a dump, when...BLAMMO! another train came along. Like I said, it's not the best way I can imagine to depart from this life.

For credulity's sake I'll link to this article about it. Unfortunately it's all in Korean, so you're gonna have to trust me on it. But here's how babelfish decided to render the first paragraph in translation, if you're interested:

"About it died in the electromotive car which the crew who falls from the subway which runs follows. This crew sees going to stool which is urgent becomes known that multi accident and the service environment improvement which the crew is inferior is coming out urgency is indication."

Today in Konglish

A Society Awash in Scandal

There's an interesting article in the Toronto Star about Korean culture. Some excerpts:

"And from the upper echelons of the art world to Buddhist temples, South Korean personalities are being ignominiously exposed for having faked their academic credentials.

...

Some blame the tendency to shave corners on a cutthroat mentality that developed in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which shook Koreans' faith in an ever-expanding economy. Others contend that South Korea has never shaken off the mutual back-scratching culture of a small society, where the establishment has tight personal connections forged by blood, school or regional ties.

Some suggest Korean society simply has an unhealthy obsession with success. "Living an ordinary life is not regarded as being successful, and staying still economically is seen as an unbearable retrogression," Kim says. "Korean society demands over-achievement."

Whatever the reason, Koreans picking up a newspaper or turning on TV news these days are confronted with seemingly endless stories of bribery and cheating, influence-peddling and corruption."

If you'll forgive a hung-over and anecdote-fueled rant, well, this is not surprising. I know it's wrong to generalize, and I don't mean to reduce anyone to a stereotype, but...Koreans love to cheat. Some (most) are honest, hard working folks, but I can just tell you from teaching and observing students that cheating is rampant here, and what's astonishing is how much it's tolerated.

Everyone cheats sometimes, and every culture has its cheaters. Koreans just do it more.

Religious Bob Sang:

"When you gonna wake up?" There's a terrificly terrible Bob Dylan religious-era song entitled "When you gonna wake up?" Of course he was singing about those of us lost in the darkness of secularism who'd rejected the Lord, but it's an apt question to post to American voters, IMO.

Keith Olbermann addressed the latest lie/outrage from the Bush White House the other night, and as usual, he speaks for me:

Living Reflection From A Dream

Below is a befuddling excerpt from a conversation I had with one of my co-teachers today. She had needed to use my room for a test, causing me to have to make some changes in my schedule, and she was apologizing/thanking me for that.

Co-teacher: Thank you one more time. I like your tenderness.

Our Hero: My what?

Co-teacher: Tend rance?

Our Hero: Oh...ok, thank you.

Co-teacher: Do you like Tetris?

Our Hero: Tetris? Of course, I love Tetris!

Co-teacher: I sent you some Tetris.

Our Hero: Oh, thank you, I guess.

When I got back to my office I figured the whole thing out. She had sent me a gift, and was asking if I liked it. It was a box full of tangerines.

I'm pretty good at getting through the accent, but sometimes it's just too much.

2 girls + 1 cup = the worst thing ever

I just watched this video. Do not search for it. Do not try to watch it. You will retch. It is the worst thing I have ever seen. It is impossibly bad.

Ok, ok, now go look for it losers, I know you can't resist.

But I warned you.

Boshintang Jim

Funny story.

And no, that's not my new nickname. "Boshintang Jim" is "dog soup," in Korean, and the following is a true story.

I was having my adult conversation class today. Once a week for two hours me and a few of the braver non-English teaching...er...teachers at my school sit down for what can sometimes be an excruciating, sometimes an enjoyable, but always an enlightening experience. We started off 6 months ago* with basic stuff like "tell me about your family" and "what kind of books do you like?" and have now progressed into more focused topics such as the environment, Korean history, etc etc, and in so doing we (I) have whittled down a once thriving, if incoherent, class of ~10 or so into a more manageable and more cogent group of 4 reasonably literate ladies.

Anyway, today the topic was pets and animals. I asked each of the attendees if they'd ever had a pet as a child, and if so, what was its story. Unfortunately most of them had not, and so it looked as if this was going to be one of those days of death on which getting them to talk is like squeezing blood out of a turnip. But one lady chimed in.

She had never had a pet, she said, but as a child her brother had. He'd found him in the street, adopted him, and loved him generally as children love dogs for over two years.

But their mother couldn't stand the dog. She connived to dispose of the mangy mutt in all of the usual ways, but nothing worked. Until one day, when the young boy was away from the home and the proprietress of the local boshintang joint sauntered on by. She offered to take the dog off of the mother's hands, and for a good price. The mother agreed.

And so it came to pass that the young boy's beloved pet, whom he had loved and protected and cared for, departed from his company and shuffled off this mortal coil in one of the most horrible ways possible. Naturally, the young boy was devastated and cried for days.

Now, it's not only that the dog was slain and consumed. You see, it's not as if they knock the dog on the head with a hammer and go about their business. That would be humane. But you see, in preparing boshintang, it's apparently necessary to torture the dogs. By whipping them. Until they die. It brings out the proper juices, or something.

So, the little boy's pet was stolen from him, hung from a meat hook, whipped to death and then flayed.

Like I said, funny story.

*Has it been 6 months? Wow.

Today in Konglish

I actually attended this event, but alas, I didn't score one of these cool Konglishy vests:

"Let's set people on fire!"

Apparently ~2500 years ago a Jewish prophet foresaw, in Isaiah 35:8, "the way of holiness" would be an American superhighway, called, fortuitously enough, I-35. A bunch of moonies have become convinced it's their destiny to camp out all up and down the American interstate and remind abortionists, homosexuals, and the other typical sinners that they're gonna burn eternally in hell.

How do they know this is the right thing to do? Well there's the typically opaque reference to "dreams and visions" which I suppose might be accurate if by "dreams" we mean some hard-up pastor's daydreams about getting on TV, and if by "visions" we mean the visions of all the greenbacks in the collection plates.

I suppose it also helps that I-35 and Isaiah 35 seem to go well together, unless of course one recalls that the book of Isaiah wasn't written in English, and there was nary an "I" to be found in its original text.

It's batshit crazies like these folks that make the heartland such a fucking laughingstock. When is this shit gonna end?

Anyway you can watch Pat Robertson's gleeful report here: