Kim Yu-na, Yu-na Kim: Plato's Perfect Skate: 김연아 Rocks!

Proud uncle side-note: my sister-in-law caught my nephew's first steps on video. Yeh.


Now in other "Videos of awesome things" news: Kim Yu-na.
As you know, somewhere in every philosopher's mind is a little cave carved out by a cat named Plato, where the most perfect, flawless form of everything in the universe exists in its unsullied state.

Somewhere in there, there's a little, perfect TV playing this Figure Skating women's short program:

Watch it once: just watch it. Even the TV announcers realize they're watching something flippin' awesome, and shut up, about halfway through the program.

Kim Yu-na (the Korean way, with the family name first) or Yu-na Kim (the western way, with the family name last), is a teen-aged figure skating phenomenon out of Seoul. She's only eighteen years old now, and she's been kicking the crap out of the ladies' singles category for a few years already. She's telegenic and cute: she appears in TV commercials here in Korea and sells, better than most of Korea's other "Best in the world/Korea at X" stars, for example Park Ji-sung (family name Park), the Soccer (that's Football to the rest of the world) star who is holding his own impressively on Manchester United, but who's so ugly, and un-charismatic in front of the camera, that they can only make commercials like this: keep the camera at a distance, and show him kicking stuff, because that's the only time he looks impressive. (Notice at the end of the ad, when the close-up is as short as they can make it and still have him be recongnizable, as if the camera's afraid to get close to his face)



(Mind you, as a soccer player who DOESN'T have a face for advertising, he's certainly not alone.)

But Yu-na Kim is cute, holds the camera, and is carrying herself quite well for a young star under the microscope that is Korean celebrity-worship. She even sings pretty well.



Drink your milk.


For Nike Women


However, the thing she does best is skate. She traveled to Toronto a few years ago, and she and her mother camped out on Brian Orser's front door until he agreed to train her, they got themselves a really good choreographer, and little Yu-na's natural athleticism blossomed. The other best skater in the world is a Japanese lady named Mao Asada, who is the same age as Yu-na, and they've been vying with each other for world number one ranking, and despite the bitter, WWE-type rivalry some nationalist Korean netizens would probably love them to have, all reports say they're friends.

Yu-na Kim has won other world championships and major international competitions before - read more on her wikipedia page; I'm too lazy to copy it out here -- and this is a short program she's used before in competition, but this time, she comes in at full health, in Canada (she really likes Canada, girlfriendoseyo told me), in Vancouver -- on the rink where the Olympic skates will be next winter == and her first triple is absolutely perfect; from there, she gets more confidence, and lands her other two jumps perfectly as well, and ultimately sets a world record for the highest score ever in a women's short program (72.24). Her technical score is off the charts, because she got bonus points for each perfect jump, Girlfriendoseyo explained to me. Watch the video again, and let that sink in, and pay special attention to the look on her face at 3.29 in the video, just as she completes her skate: it's the pure bliss of someone who knows she just did something really, really special.



There it is.
And in a nice change, even the Korean announcers' heads do not explode when her world record is announced (unlike certain races during last year's Summer games, when you might have thought the Korean announcers were on speed. Follow this link, skip to 5.00 in, and watch the excitement build until the end of the race, or skip to 7.00 to just hear the announcers orgasm over their guy winning... yah At least some people realize it sounds a bit silly).

Way to go, Yuna! I haven't watched figure skating regularly since my sisters used to make me sit through it when I was a kid, back in the days when Elvis Stojko was turning the men's skating world on its ear by doing routines with songs that had beats, instead of all snoozers and string quartets, but even a rube like myself knows when something amazing just happened. The other reason I'm happy about Yuna's success is because she's an awesome role-model for all the young Korean girls who don't want to be popstars.

(Speaking of popstars, listen for the WonderGirls' "Nobody" playing in the background as the arena waits for her scores.)

Congrats, lady.

Quick Shots: Andong and a funny text message

The Dali Post is in the works, but it's gonna be long and full of photos.

If you'd like to hang out with me and some blog pals, I'm planning a trip to Andong to eat the best food in Korea: Andong JjimDalk. See here for more gushing about Andong jjimdalk's perfect-ness.

Get in touch with me if you'd like to come; if you live in Seoul, and are willing to meet me on Saturday morning, I'll even reserve train tickets for you (you'll be paying me back though. Got it?).

If enough people want to come, we'll see what we can do about lodging, too.

Next:

I was feeling down a few days ago: end-of-vacation blues, plus grey skies, plus not accomplishing much this week, plus cracking my coffee pot, rendering my coffee-maker with its specially fitted and difficult to replace pot useless, does that for a fella.

So I sent a text message to a few pals, saying, "Hey. I feel blue. Tell me something to cheer me up." I got a pretty good response, but the best one was from my pal Evan, who is proving himself over and over again:

"An anagram for your name is Nude Hobo War."

And he's right. How he thought running my name through an anagram generator would cheer me up, I don't know, but that mental picture still makes me laugh.

So here: now you can find anagrams for your name, too. I don't know if they have a "sort results from funniest to least funny" option, but you can give it a shot.

Hope you get a few as funny as mine.


(ps: the only anagram that came up for Roboseyo was "Rosy oboe," but "Doucheburns" turned up "Crude hub, son" and "Sun bred. Ouch.")

Golden Klogs

the Golden Klog Final Results are up at The Hub Of Sparkle. It was great taking part in the discussions, and now, it's finished. Roboseyo won "Best Personal/Diary Blog" and my collaboration with Gord Sellar, The Korean and others tied for "Best Post or Series," but Eat Your Kimchi beat me out for "Happiest K-Blogger".

Now that the creator of the survey can no longer skew results with his own opinions, a few last thoughts:

I'm sad that The Grand Narrative and ROK Drop didn't take home any awards: those are two of my favorite blogs, and I'm sad they were shut out. Gord Sellar is another favorite, but it's less surprising he got shut out, because less than half of his posts are about Korea; the others are about his mounting success as a Science Fiction writer.

I think that Brian in Jeollanam-do winning "Angriest Blogger" does a disservice to the excellent coverage he's given to life, festivals, travel, and other such business in Jeollanam-do. He would have been my vote for most misunderstood K-blogger.

While it's hard to argue with Korea Beat, Brian might have also been my vote for "Most Current and Timely Blog," especially for his Coreana coverage early in the year, and his tireless work promoting the causes of Bill Kapoun, Mike White, and Nerine Viljoen.

Favorite New Blogs I found out about through this:
Eat Your Kimchi
White Man in Korea,
Korean Class 101
Korean Food Blog
Big White Barbie Does Busan

The conversations on the comment boards were also really interesting, especially James Turnbull's treatise on how to get your blog noticed.

Finally, I would have been happy if some of the multiple-award winners had only gotten one award, in order to make room for some of the other worthy blogs: Ask A Korean!, Korea Beat, Brian in Jeollanam-do, FatMan Seoul, Roboseyo, and Mike Hurt/The Metropolitician, and Eat Your Kimchi all got two awards (or more) and while I'm not saying any of them didn't deserve the awards they won, I'll also say I would have been happy to see even more blogs win a Golden Klog Award.

OK. Enough Meta-Blogging. Back to normal life again...

China Triposeyo: Yangshuo

Good news out of North Korea: newly released photos show that Kim Jong-il is alive and well.

And up to some healthy pasttimes, just to show off his excellent condition.
In China, I took this picture:
Plugs like this were in all kinds of guest houses around South China: they're weird-looking, but they'll take any, but ANY plug, whatever shape, whatever country. Howzat?

A horrible, "He's white. He'll do" model selling some kind of product. He was everywhere: billboards, sides of buses, and everthing, tantalizing us with his eyebrow like that.

Every year, at Christmas or New Years, my mom had a tradition of going from one family member to the other, asking us what made us thankful that year. Now, Christmas Eve was a travel day, but on Christmas, we sat in Shire Hobbiton coffee shop, and I asked Matt and Heyjin what they were thankful about, then they turned the camera on me.

Here's a shortened version of the video I sent to my family, of some of the things I was thankful for in 2008: 2008 ROCKED!


We took a boat trip to a town called Yangshuo, which was full of people, including a really annoying guy trying to sell his photos. He stood right beside us and barked into the ship microphone for ten minutes, and then came back for ANOTHER round. Matt cut the annoyance by daring me to punch him...somewhere.

Mwahahaha!

Yangshuo was a pretty nice little riverfront village, and all it took was a bike rental to go out and see stuff like this:


Or climb a mountain and see this:
Guarded by this sign:


Or take a cave tour and see this:
and this:and this:

and this: (wacky)
I don't know how, but people were endlessly clever in finding new places or ways to sell things.

This was nice if you wanted to, you know, buy stuff, all day long, but if you DIDN'T want people to follow you around, saying, "Hello? Hello? Postcard. Buy Postcard. Hello? Hello?" it was a bit annoying after a while.

Anyway, that was a jewelry shop in a cave under the ground. Blew my mind.

They must have had trouble getting foot traffic before the cave tour opened. These vacationers (and many others) had silly plastic red flower-wreaths around their heads, which just goes to show, people on vacation will buy anything.
There were lots of shops like this in Yangshuo, too.
This one made me smile when I saw this:
Buddha and Chairman Mao, right next to each other.

We played around with putting motion into a long-exposure photo in a restaurant one evening.

This one's my favorite.
Meanwhile, if you ever wanted an Osama Bin Laden or an Adolph Hitler t-shirt, this was the artist for you.
He wasn't even the only one.

Yangshuo's main stretch was full of shopping, a bit noisy, but kind of pretty if you like shiny things.I do. Hong Kong was fun at night, too.

You could buy things like hand-made Santa Buddhas (that threw me off)
Yangshuo was probably the peak of the silliness in our trip: the initial "Hey! We're travelling!" excitement hadn't quite warn out (would soon), and the second wind wouldn't wind up until Beijing, but we got these two videos taken one goofy night.



And what china trip would be complete without two Canadians singing the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme with the word "Beer"? None, I say. None.

heh heh.

The two biggest downers of the Yangshuo were...
1. The second day we rented bikes, we were TIRED: we'd biked about 18km. the first day, and then did another 14 or so the next day, including a break to climb a mountain. We needed to stop riding, so we pulled over at a little corner in the road and, after getting a bit tired of being razzed for a bamboo boat ride, a postcard purchase, a scarf or a dumb, wooden toy everywhere we went, an old lady materialized out of nowhere, and robo-hawker hassled us to buy something, ruining yet another lovely lookout point. That took us from tired to completely beat -- hawkers are worse than crowds, because crowds are in your space, but hawkers are in your face.

2. The first day in Yangshuo, we wandered into the local produce market, which was really dark, dank, and fresh.
We saw this (warning: dead dog):We got another picture that was worse... if you want to be convinced not to eat dog meat any more, click here.

And I've decided I'm not eating dogs anymore. Nope. Not cool anymore. I did it once, but, uh, no. New Year's Eve was in Yangshuo, and we had a silly time that night in a bar run by a Canadian guy who was pretty cool.

Yangshuo was nice. We met a few funny and/or cool people there, had trouble staying warm (my guest house room's heater died -- but the super-warm sleeping bag saved the day).

Better yet, this coffee that we discovered on a menu in Shenzen, called "Blue Mountain," which I had heard of on one of those "foods to eat before you die" lists -- it turns out this coffee was in vogue a few years ago, it's a bit pricey, but it's a deep, lovely coffee that has a really complex, yet beautifully balanced flavor, right from beginning to end.

This was in Shenzen...But the star of the Yangshuo trip was not the brick oven-baked pizza (unfortunately), but the apple tarts at a place called "Drifters' Bar" -- you should go there if you visit Yangshuo. You had to wait 25 or 30 minutes for it to be ready, but once it came out, it was sweet and rich, with just enough crumble and just enough thickness, the apples were roasted and lovely with cinnamon, and I spent a good long time writing in my travel diary, waiting for it to come out. Happy, easy days on the China trip, dear readers.

That's it for now; next travelogue, Dali.

Also...

Go vote for my blog!

Today is the last day of Golden Klog voting.

Click Here to take Part One
Click Here to take Part Two