While I'm In Canada...

1. holy crap, tapwater tastes good.
2. my nieces and nephews are super cute
3. it's way different going around town with your siblings AND an infant, than going around town just with a sibling and their spouse. ("Can we do a drive-through instead of a sit-down meal? Silas is sleeping, and... you know")
4. Red Deer Alberta has the fastest, busiest drive-throughs I've ever seen in my life.
5. A month vacation in Canada is just enough time for Tim Horton's to lose its novelty.
[overshare warning:] 6. In Korea, I'm an XL waist when I buy underwear. In Canada, I'm an M. Yay, overweight North Americans making me feel normal again!
6. Though Korea's population is double Canada's, its make-up consumption is probably ten times.
7. Western Canada's mountains are just effing gorgeous. So lovely.
8. But the bugs on your windshield after doing the Crow's Nest Pass are hella tough to clean off.
9. Vancouver has a Hindi radio station... and it's awesome. Indian music is great for driving, and I love how Hindi is the same language, yet it sounds so totally different depending on whether it's a male or a female speaking it.
10. I love cooking spaghetti for my family.
11. I'm going way over my mileage limit on my rental car. Tough cookies.

That's it for now. Having a good vacation. Hope you're all well, too.

Ask me about Tilley Endurables...

Online Game as Competitive Sport

This post goes back a while, but I wanted to share it with you, before it's gone completely.

Back last August, I was bopping around Yongsan Station, and I decided to venture right up to the tippy top floor of the Yongsan Shopping center. I saw greeters at a table and attendants standing at the door of an auditorium. There didn't seem to be an admission fee, so I poked my head inside, and saw this.

It was an online gaming tournament.

Now, this is something that Korea doesn't often push when it starts getting into Korea promotions: the old Hanjeongshik stuff, Hanbok and Pansoori, that stuff gets a lot of press, and old ladies in ornamental robes singing folk-songs: that always finds a spot in the video, or on the brochure. Sure.

Then I came in here, and took a look around.

See, online gaming is not just a time-killer in Korea. It's an outright phenomenon.

tournaments attract big crowds, and the top players (like this guy) are legitimate stars.
The tournaments attract corporate sponsors, as do players, crowds turn out to watch the finals, and there are always a few channels on cable that are playing competitive Starcraft games.

those stands on the sides had huge posters of the different online games featured in the competition.
some other luminaries/star players:

I stuck around, and met a girl whose online handle was Peanut. She was Korean-American, from the East Coast, I believe, and totally excited about trying to popularize competitive Starcraft in America: she and some buds had this website called sc2gg where they took korean broadcasts of tournament games, and added English language commentary, and posted it on YouTube. Peanut was pretty nice, and we had an interesting chat about online gaming, and its potential for growth: seems she was bumping into a lot of naysayers in Korean promotion circles, but on the other hand, she was talking to some pretty high-up mucky-mucks about what could be done.

Here's peanut next to a display of game action figures.

The video cameras got some crowd shots... hey look! There were some foreigners there!

This is the golden Mouse hand of the superstar pictured above. He was the first guy to game in cool outfits and try to act like a star (plus he had the chops to win stuff) rather than just playing in sweatpants with greasy hair under a baseball cap: he really helped make online gaming into more than just a nerd-hobby.

We watched these guys compete in Guitar Hero:
but unfortunately I had to meet someone before the starcraft semifinal came on.

It was a neat experience, and one that people neglect in trying to get a handle on what Korea's young people do...but seriously, this online gaming stuff is a huge thing in Korea's modern culture, for whatever reason, and to really get a grasp of what Koreans do for fun, and how young people pass time, and how much gaming means to this subculture, I'd add "attend an online gaming tournament and/or a B-boy Competition" to the list of "things to see/do in Korea" before we all get tired of Hanbok.

Thank you for reading my essay.

The Unmentioned Social Problem

Yeah, there are a lot of different issues Korea's working on these days.

Many of you expats may have noticed the Chosun Ilbo just hired a member of Anti-English spectrum as an intern...

but here's one issue that doesn't get much airtime, but if you start noticing it, it's an absofreakinglute outrage.



Nobody's really talking about this one. And Girlfriendoseyo's mom comes from a different city in Korea, and reports that overpackaging is not NEARLY as egregious there as it is here... but overpackaging here can be pretty extreme sometimes.

That's all for today.

Be happy, my readers.

Random Canada Trip Notes:

Judging from how carefully I read OTHER K-bloggers' accounts of their travels off-topic (that is, outside of Korea), I'll spare you the pages of journalling about the old friend I haven't met since high school and all that stuff, and I'll leave you with a few combinations that have struck me lately:

1. pecan pie + coffee (americano was the kind I used) = one of the best flavor combinations I've stumbled across so far. It helped that it was at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul, so it was real crackin' good pie, and real crackin' good americano...but why didn't anybody tell me that pecan pie and coffee is as awesome a combination as soy chai latte and coffee cake, black tea and clover honey, chocolate and mint, or coke and dalk galbi? WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME? So anyway, now I'm telling you.

2. Night driving: nice
driving in rain: fun
driving on mountain roads in, say, the Rocky Mountains: awesome
driving in areas with road signs saying "watch for wildlife" = cool: maybe I'll see an elk!
driving in rain at night = NOT fun
driving from Banff to Red Deer Alberta at night in the rain when there's a risk of a deer crossing your car's path (deer will mess up your car... and I saw two on the roadside near Cochran) = NOT FUN AT ALL

3. toast + peanut butter + sliced bananas = a whole bucket of awesome. Seriously, I never got on board that whole PB&J thing -- peanut butter's good, jam's good, but I never quite dug the two together. However, peanut butter and sliced bananas is SO FLIPPIN' GOOD! (also try: toasted white bread, sliced tomatoes, lots of mayonnaise, and a bit of salt and pepper. You'll keep making more until you run out of either tomatoes or bread)

4. My brother and brother-in-law + fatherhood and my sister and sister-in-law + motherhood = sweet.

5. Girlfriendoseyo + my family = AWESOME! They really liked her. That's good. Girlfriendoseyo + bestfriendMelfromCanada = ALSO AWESOME. You have no idea how happy it makes me when people who are important to me get along. Girlfriendoseyo + My Surrogate Family S. in Agassiz = Girlfriendoseyo gets mauled with hugs! Also super special, and super important.

Yep. I don't talk about my deep, personally-personal stuff on the blog TOOO much anymore (with a few exceptions), but I WILL tell you that I was lucky enough to have Girlfriendoseyo join me in Canada for part of my vacation, and we had hella fun, and she loved it, and "gets" some things about me that can only come of meeting my family and seeing my country. It was great.

I was eating dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Banff yesterday when suddenly a lady at the next table just right passed out and fell off her chair. I saw her face as she went down and she was right out of it. That was strange. It's funny how a human being in rough shape suddenly pulls all the people around into his/her matrix of need, and nobody can look away. We are intensely social creatures who instinctively look out for each other. I do think we are, despite the evidence to the contrary that comes up here and there. It's good when we recognize this.

Catch the Corean Commie!

The Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service) has published an online game to help you spot North Korean spies.

It includes things like people covering their mouths with their hands when they talk (holy crap! every Korean woman with a cellphone is a North Korean spy!)

People who bring weapons to protests, people who leave PC rooms quickly after posting "impure" articles, and people who wear "I love Kim Il-sung" pins are among suspects for North Korean Spy-iness.

What about people who raise funds to buy weapons to assault the police?

Go play!

And don't forget, if you see a person wearing a Kim Il Sung t-shirt, talking with his hand over his mouth as he grabs his stick and furtively leaves the PC Room after posting messages to corrupt Korea's youth, and heads for a protest to hand out tracts and incite violence while photographing sensitive government compounds, the number to call is 111: Korea's spy hotline.

Ooch! Forget Zombie movies...

I've just fallen in love with bollywood.

Going to Canada Tomorrow. Expect Light Posting

I still have lots to say... but I'll be saying it to my friends and family while I'm on vacation in Canada. Expect light posting on non-controversial topics, because I don't like moderating comment threads while I'm on freaking vacation. Unlike Christmas break, I've been just plain too durn busy putting out fires, slogging things out, negotiating crazy crap, and handling a few personal-life earthquakes, to set up a bunch of "future posts" that will come up in my absence. There's a restrospective on what's been a totally insane semester somewhere inside me, but right now, I'm quite nearly a wreck from weathering storms on numerous fronts... so you'll have to wait until I'm good and ready to talk about it.

Until then... an entire year of riding the subways, sitting beside weirdos or soju-and-squid-reeking drunks, and dealing with other people's bulgogi farts, is made up for by a suit like this.

ajosshi's a pimp!

Took this picture on a recent rainy day. Like.
enjoy the hot weather.

Thunder and Lightning

When I was a little kid, I lived in Southern Ontario, where summer evening thundershowers are a common occurrence. After bedtime, which was when they happened, the thunder used to wake me up, and I'd stand on the bed headboard, poke my head under the curtains, and look out at the skyline and empty land behind our house (before it all got developed into suburbs) and watch the lightning flash on the farmland on the other side of the lake.

To this day I love thunder and lightning storms, almost as much as they frighten one clan of my cousins, who inherited a pretty sharp fear of thunder from their mom.


we been having thunder and lightning storms in the early morning around Seoul this week, and I've been tempted to get out of bed and point my camera out the window, in hopes of getting something like this. Yeh. Supercool.

Heppy Kamaba Day my Kamabian Friends

Yep, it's july 1st, and you know what that means.

Hope you get to see this


but not this

from the golden age of MJ:

billie jean, baby. 1983, Motown: the first moonwalk (by MJ)





Yep. I said the first moonwalk by MJ. hang on to the end of this video:

that's bill bailey, in 1955.

one of my biggest annoyances about proprietary rights and such is that, while a lot of other artists see how making their stuff available on Youtube is good, free publicity which could increase your exposure, Michael Jackson's videos are all embedding disabled, and Prince (maybe my favorite artist of the '80s) won't share.

A few links:

Concerned as he is with gender perception in Korea, and the mechanics of females in society and gender relationships, I wonder if James Turnbull would be interested in this article, service, or treatment of topic:

from the Korea Times:
Is 'Substitute Man' Modern White Knight?
it's an article about a quick service enterprise gaining momentum these days where, basically, (for example, in the case of a business called "Any Man," if a single woman has a "man" issue to deal with -- say, a bookshelf to move, a bug to kill, or, I suppose, a swoon to revive, she can thumb up the service on her speed-dial, and a "white knight" on a scooter will arrive at her house within ten minutes to put his thumb on the ribbon for the gift-wrapped present, properly operate the plumbing snake, or open that darn pickle-jar. It's written up as if it's exclusively women who use the service, and exclusively men who are employed as such.

In other news:

My friend's recent experience with a bank's slap-in-the-face credit card acquisition policy for foreigners seems to put the lie to this one, but the article says banks are looking at expat customers as their next big customer demographic: Banks See Expatriates as Gold Mine

Korean Historical Films

Now, Korea's film industry has been pumping out about a film a year of important moments in Korea's history: now that the industry has the skill and money to tell stories a little better than they could in the '90s, and the freedom to do so that they didn't have during the dictatorial censorship of the '80s, it's time for some historical filmmaking! The movies made in the name of this sort of historical record keeping have been uneven, at best, and whether they are even mildly accurate to the actual events is not mine to discuss.

A quick rundown of a few:

Shilmido was quite good -- it was about a bunch of Korean men who were recruited by the South Korean military, pulled out of headed-nowhere lives to be trained into a bloodthirsty assassination squad with a mission to raid (I can't remember if it was Kim Jong-il or Kim Il-sung) the North Korean president's house and cut his throat -- in response to an attack on South Korea's president by North Korean assassins that led to a three day shootout between North Korean commandoes and the South's national guard, around the blue house.

Taegukki was the Korean equivalent of Top Gun, to me:insofar as it was the worst good movie Korea's ever made, or the best bad movie. I saw it with my dad when he came here in 2006, and it's about two brothers who end up getting ensnared in the Korean war, and the whole "brother against brother" thing gets examined, poked, exploited, and then beaten into the ground in slow-motion as machine guns fire in the background, the world grows silent, and a character shoutes, "NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" and holds its head in his lap while it breathes its last. Frankly, I thought it was awful, manipulative and gory and about an hour too long (and that last hour took the melodrama over the top, into "so bad it's good" territory, and then BACK into "so bad it's bad again" territory.)

There was a movie about the May 18th Gwangju Massagre of 1979 (maybe 1978; too lazy to fact check) that featured a line up of more top Korean stars than you could shake a stick at, and a lot of violins and slow-motion in the preview, that got tapioca reviews (at best), and that I decided not to see until somebody I knew said something good about it, and encouraged me to see it. Let's leave it at, I still haven't seen it: the most enthusiastic review I've heard so far prompted me to teach my class the phrase "damn with faint praise".

Movies to come: it should be noted that a number of these historical figures have been given the historical drama (TV Series category) treatment, but have not yet (to my limited knowledge) been given the full historical (film category) treatment. On second thought, in some cases, it might be better that way. Who'd want to see Yu Gwan-sun get the "Pearl Harbor" treatment...but then, if she got the "The Pianist" treatment instead, it might fly.

An epic about Yi Sunshin's naval battles with the Japanese.
A biopic of Yu Gwan-sun (a student, and independence martyr tortured to death for protesting Japan's colonization of Korea)
Something about the 1987 Democratization movement
Was the assassination of Park Chung-hee covered in that barber movie? I haven't seen it.
A biopic of Kim Gu
Possibly an epic about Goguryeo's King Gwang-Gye-to, Korea's greatest expansionist king, who conquered Manchuria and large portions of China's eastern coast, and who, like T.S. Eliot, who appears in both English AND American poetry anthologies, is claimed by both Korea and China as one of their own, but he's had a TV series made about him already.
Hopefully, a story about King Sejong, the greatest Korean, and one of the greatest leaders in history . . . though his life doesn't make as good copy as the others, because he was a scholar and a scientist, rather than an asskicker. The story of how he came to the throne is pretty cool, though.

R.I.P. Michael.

yeah, that's two posts in a row not about Korea. deal with it. The song's "Fan Letter to Michael Jackson" by the Rheostatics - sorry about the quality. It's the only version on Youtube, and it's a cool song I remember from the '90s, and have always wanted to hear again.

I like the "It feels good to be alive" refrain near the end.

A Prayer for Iran.

Things are getting bad over there.

Here.

Movie Franchise Tagline...

Just saw Terminator 4, and rewatched Terminator 1 on my computer. The first one is a really nice, taut action movie, though one of the new retro-pleasures of watching these old '80s action movies is snickering at the action effects that were so riveting/revolutionary/terrifying in the '80s.

(My favorite this month: Tarman, from the Return of the Living Dead movies. Awful movies, as zombie films go: they seem more based on Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video than anything scary, but Tarman's pretty cool...almost scary, and pretty awesome for '80s effects. The way he moves is occasionally really cool.)

Here's Tarman. Warning: tarman.



But The Terminator films have one thing going for them:

A super-de-duper great movie catchphrase.
"Come with me if you want to live"


(Yes, I know "I'll be back" is in there, too, but that's an Arnold line, not an exclusively Terminator line, so it doesn't count.)

And the question is:

Is there any better movie franchise catchphrase?

Here are the candidates I can think of:

1. "Yippiekiyay, Mother#*@&er!" (Die Hard)
2. either "Use the force" (a bit cheesy) or "I have a bad feeling about this" (Star Wars)
3. "Come with me if you want to live" (Terminator)
4. (are we including comedy here?) "Yeeah, baby!" (Austin Powers)
5. "What're you looking at, butthead?" (Back to the Future)
6. (maybe too short, but...) "Whoa" (Matrix)

Any others I'm missing? Help me out here, readers.

Greetings, Korea Herald Readers.

Soundtrack: hit play and start reading.


Hi there. I'm Rob. I write a blog. (this is the other blog I contribute to)

If you're a Korea Herald reader, you may have found your way here by way of the URL at the bottom of my article, "News firms of questionable quality abound". This article was a response to these two articles, which basically accused English teachers of being unfit, unprofessional, vulgar, and sex-crazed. The Pressian Article- "We are Vampires" (the original Korean) The Yonhap News article (the original Korean). Here is the original blog post I wrote about Yonhap: it's stated a little more strongly than what I put in The Herald. Here's an article in the Korea Times about the same Yonhap piece. (Yay Jason Lim)

If you are annoyed that foreigners are criticizing Korea's media, then ask yourself why we have to do it: why aren't KOREANS holding their journalists to a higher degree of accountability? If you're here to tell me Koreans ARE, great! Good for you! Keep fighting the good fight, and don't give up! Get your friends to join in. If you're here to tell me it's only the right-wing papers that do it, or only the left-wing papers that attack English papers, check out the links below: they go right across the political spectrum. (p.s.: why do newspapers all have positions on the political spectrum? isn't that weird to other people, too?)

The article I wrote is about the ugly pattern of racist journalism promoting stereotypes of English teachers: often they are stereotypes based on rumors, with no statistical proof. For some actual statistics on foreigner crime, check pages 16 and 20 in the report embedded on this page.

If you don't believe what I say about the Korean media's anti-English teacher bias, check out a more in-depth look at the way Korea's media has been systematically dragging down the reputation of English teachers in this post at a friend's blog: "A History of Scapegoating English Teachers"
and also pages 9-13 of the report here.

If you're annoyed that I named your news outlet (those would be The Chosun, the Joongang, the Hankooki), here are the links to articles where your news outlets treated English teachers in an unbalanced or sensationalist way.

Chosun Ilbo: http://www.rjkoehler.com/2007/05/29/oh-those-naughty-aids-threatening-skirt-chasing-aussie-english-teachers/
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200705/200705280029.html

Joongang Daily: http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2889573

This article talks about the Joongang daily's reporting on the playboy party: http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LPOD&mid=sec&sid1=001&sid2=119&oid=044&aid=0000048618
and this article talks about how Joongang's coverage of the playboy party was biased and selective:
http://news.naver.com/hotissue/popular_read.php?date=2005-01-14&section_id=000&office_id=117&article_id=0000001963&seq=2
This one does too.
http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=102&oid=047&aid=0000057135

here's the hangooki on unqualified English teachers
http://weekly.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200706/wk2007061113024637070.htm#_blank

I'd recommend linking Matt's blog post, "A brief history of scapegoating English Teachers," which gathers most of these sources in one place. http://populargusts.blogspot.com/2007/09/brief-history-of-scapegoating-english.html

"Beware the Ugly White English Teacher" http://sports.chosun.com/news/ntype2.htm?ut=1&name=/news/life/200705/20070528/75827008.htm

English Joongang Daily: connects English teachers to a group of pedophiles who never tried to become English teachers, and many of whom had never even visited Korea. http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2889573

If you really, really agree with me, and want to help hold the Korean Media to a higher standard, check out this brand-new site created to do exactly that, and contact this guy about how you can help contribute to the site. It's a worthwhile project that needs people power to become all that it could be.

I know that not every Korean is a racist. I'm not stupid. I also know that not every Korean journalist is a racist. As I said: I'm not stupid. I also know that English teachers are not all angels in white, living like monks in Korea. (Not stupid, remember?) however, I wish news outlets were responsible and balanced in the way they reported minorities, especially when those reports DO cause our lives to be more difficult. I've been told to my face by students that after Christopher Paul Neil's arrest, they didn't trust Canadians for a while. To my face. I do not like being held responsible for the actions of other people who share nothing with me except the country of birth, and if I AM to be associated with my birth country, I wish it would be for the positives and the high water marks, not the low points. Associate Canada with socialized health care, Tommy Douglas, Terry Fox, Wayne Gretzky and Michael Oondaatje, not Robert William Pickton and Clifford Olsen and Christopher Paul Neil, in the same way I'm sure you'd rather I thought of King Sejong, Shin Saimdang and Yi Sunshin than Kim Jong-il, Cho Seung-hee, Park Han-se, and Woo Bum-kon when I think of Korea.

And honestly, though I don't know why my motivation should matter, I write this stuff because I care about Korea, and I'd like to see Korea become a better place. Not out of some kind of smug, colonial arrogance, but because my Korean friends are just as frustrated as I am that Korea isn't always what it wished it could be, and writing about the gap between what Korea is and what Korea wants to be, is the beginning step to closing that gap. If I didn't care about Korea, I'd drink more, finish my contract, pack my bags, say "I'm tired of this shit. Fuck it." and leave. And a lot of people do, but telling me to go home isn't helpful.

To know more about why I, and other expats complain about Korea, I recommend this series: Why do Expats (in Korea) Complain So Much?

And to see how I really feel about Korea, I recommend the links in the sidebar to the right.

Thanks for stopping by!

PimatGoodbye, Pimatgol. Redevelopment at a great loss

Photos from here
here.
here
here

Pimatgol: one of the loveliest little side-alley tangles in Seoul, is being razed.

Soon, this:

Will be replaced with more of this:
and this: the La Meilleur building, and one of the more eyesorey eyesores in downtown Seoul,
and this: tossing a bone to the destroyed pimatgol with this mockery of the original back-alley (600 year history?...needs a 7-11)
I hate when Seoul's cool neighbourhoods get ruined by redevelopment or gentrification... in Dali (and that CHINA, folks, freakin' CHINA!) the municipal government has laws about certain neighborhoods, requiring new buildings to match the style of the old buildings, in order to maintain the local feeling, and a city that wants to be a world hub of everything can't even preserve one of the coolest alley networks in the city, and the kind of area that COULD BE MARKETED. Dumbasses.

Seoul is poorer for the loss of pimatgol. It was such a lovely area, and really should have been cleaned up rather than razed. I lived around here for 16 months, and it was one of my favorite times in Korea, and pimatgol is like a maze of wonders, but now it's been cleared right out, and if those homey, bustling little alleyways with their awesome hole-in-the-wall restaurants get replaced with another glass-and-steel abomination. I hate, hate, hate, how the local color gets bleached out for steel-and-glass, and I rue the fact Seoul was hyper-developed during the steel-and-glass era, which remains to my mind the ugliest architectural aesthetic out there.

Matt from Popular Gusts has written a lovely elegy for pimatgol: the kind of place where you might accidentaly have a bowl of makkeolli with a poet. At La Meilleur, you're more likely to accidentally brush shoulders with a social climber or a made-up gold digger.

King Baeksu, who connects with Pimatgol in a very personal way, has more.

And Korea is poorer.

Korean Mental Illness Treatment: So Bad it's Tantamount to Persecution? Refugee Says Yes

Hat tip to BiJnD

Holy crap. This is one of the stories so embarrassing that Korean Tourism should suspend operations and send all its people over to work in Korean mental health programs to improve them, before they continue promoting Korea in conventional ways.

Canada just awarded refugee status to a paranoid-schizophrenic Korean woman, not because her church was out to get her, as her original complaint went, but because Korean mental health care is so poor that it amounts to persecution.

Yep. You read that right. Korean health care is so poor that Canada awarded refugee status to a Korean woman. Vancouver Sun reports.

from the article:

South Koreans with mental illness are treated as an extreme underclass, with one hospital room sleeping 100 women with just 15 mats and no room for personal belongings, according to a letter submitted to the board and written by Daniel Fisher, executive director the National Empowerment Center in Lawrence, Mass.

However, before we get too high on Canada as the greatest country in the world...read some of the comments below the article. Sure, it's no Korea Times comment board, and some of the people might be right about Canada's ability to care for its own mental illness patients, but it's still pretty bad.

Happy longest day of the year.

Image source
That's all. Have a good one, dear readers.

New Game at Roboseyo: weirdest "please hold until a customer care clerk becomes available" music

Rules are simple:

What would be the weirdest song to hear while waiting for a call-center clerk to become available?

Put your answer in the comments. You can go weird: (Bela Lugosi is Dead) or ironic (like playing "Alive" as an in-flight movie), or whatever you like.

Bonus points if you include a link to a youtube clip of the song.

My first submission: not too out there or anything, but a great video: "Pick Up The Phone" by Notwist.