Good Weekend, plus, Remember This Video?

Well, I'm getting grief for being unable to top my "Come on Toshi" video from back in the day, so here's another just brilliant one. Yeah, it's been around before, but it's just so awesome, I thought I'd re-post it:

How's that, Jason?


Meanwhile, I had a good weekend.

Saw Bobby Kim on White Day/St. Patrick's day, and had the third-worst sangria so far on my mission to find the best sangria in Seoul, and bummed around a bunch with Girlfriendoseyo. Then on Sunday, I took her to Wolfhound for the first time, and got to enjoy watching her experience her first taste of the fantastic Wolfhound burger.

Now, I love Wolfhound, but I do have one gripe:

Dear Wolfhound Pub:

I like your place. I like your food. I like your beer. Your breakfast ain't too bad, either. However, I'm asking you to do one of three things:

Either
1. serve your coffee in a smaller mug, so that I don't feel ripped off by getting a coffee mug that's 40% full
2. fill your flurbing coffee mugs to the top, or at least near the top
3. charge less than three thousand won for four mouthfuls of coffee, when down the street, Rocky Mountain Tavern gives free coffee refills with all their breakfasts, and Starbucks gives nearly a PINT of coffee for a tiny bit more than the price of your tiny coffee puddle.

I like your food a lot, Wolfhound, but the paltry amount of coffee you serve to your poor, hung over customers on Sunday mornings, for THREE FREAKING THOUSAND WON, is, frankly, insulting, and every time I order a coffee from Wolfhound, I hate the place for a while, until my hamburger comes out. And it wouldn't take much to fix this problem. Just do it, and I'll love you forever.

Some pictures from a while back that I wanted to share:

Hey? Wanna get paid to be really good looking? VIOP has hired live people to model their little thingys instead of having them holler into microphones and do sexy dances... it was a bit surprising, but it sure gathered a crowd.

Mustve been boring as heck.

So the Seoul City Tour Bus got some sponsors... it's kind of bad planning, though, to have a poster on the side of the bus which obscures the view.
Yeah, you can see through it, but, uh, still...isn't this getting the priorities wrong for a tour bus trying to put Seoul on display as well as possible?

Other than that...

It's official. Girlfriendoseyo was asking me about the Canadian health-care system, and I couldn't answer her questions. I have been in Korea too long to be up on stuff back in Canada. Which is awkward when I'm regularly asked to speak for Canadian culture, as well as Western culture at large (jeez. What do I know about Denmark? How can I answer for all of "THE WEST"?)

also...
Get your hands on the old Hong Kong Movie "Master of the Flying Guillotine". Just do it.

The UCC Music Video Thing

I'd be interested to know which song started this whole fan music video imitating choreography thing... but it's sure fun.

You might know the Beyonce song "Single Ladies" which is everywhere right now, and the video's getting about a bajillion hits. Well the song, and the dance, is so catchy, that a bajillion MORE people are making their own versions of the song.

Here's the original.


Here's the fan version I like the best so far.


And let's not forget Justin Timberlake going wild on SNL.



This is not the first fan ucc video craze: just here in Korea, there was the "tell me" dance -- one of the genius moves of the WonderGirls' producer, the spectacularly not-handsome JYP (seen here with his face in a backup dancer's crotch) is coming up with dances that are cool and distinctive, but also easy enough for people to try to learn.

Here's the Wondergirls' Tell Me, for any of you who have forgotten.


And there were a zillion imitations of this one, too, among them...this one.


Which leads to horrific train wrecks like these.


Girls' Generation had to get in on the action, and I like the self-awareness of this video's intro, where they start out as indistinguishable mannequins before they come to life as indistinguishable mannequins that can dance. The song's catchy, with a driving beat, and another cute but not-too-hard dance that people can learn in their jazz-dance class at the health club -- kind of the choreographer's equivalent of the way many modern church praise songs are written to be played with simple chords, so that near-novice guitarists can still play them competently (see also: the vocal difficulty of every Korean Trot song ever written).


And then there were UCC versions like this: not that skilled, but must have taken those boys a lot of work and time.


or the rock version, the (actually pretty good) traditional instruments arrangement or the most common: the either inept, or mechanical living room webcam.

I wonder about the origins of this fancam music video thing, and where it all started...

I've been wrong before, but I think it might have started (or at least become cool outside Korea) with Michael Jackson's Thriller dance, which still pops up from time to time, in increasingly clever/random ways.

There was the just plain weird Bollywood thriller.


Prison Thriller


A couple of wedding thrillers.

And my personal favorite: the Tube Thriller.

Imagine being on this car.


And wait for it... how about this one. So nerdy it flips back and becomes epically cool. Imagine having the story of winning a Star Wars Dance-off by doing The Thriller as Darth Vader in your pocket: nobody'd know whether to give you a wedgie or buy you a beer.


Anyway, post your favorite Girls Generation, Wondergirls, or Thriller fan version in the comments. See if you can top Darth Vader.

Have a good day, my lovely readers.

WTF? A Korea Times Cartoonist Capable of Irony? Oh. Unintentional.

source
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the comic portraying Obama supposedly casting ideology out of the realm of science, chooses to portray the archaic and anti-scientific ideologues as a dinosaur...


when one of their biggest ideological flash-points was the teaching of creation and evolution in school, along with the denial of dinosaurs' existence by some?

Portraying anti-scientific ideologues as dinosaurs would be kind of like portraying Salem's Puritans as warlocks, wouldn't it?

Korean fusion food. A-MAyonnaiZ-ING!

Now, anybody who spends long enough here knows about Korean restaurants' tendency to put (sometimes a lot of) mayonnaise or sweet mustard sauce on just about any food that is not considered "Korean". It's one of those funny quirks that keeps you on your toes anytime you're in a fusion or foreign restaurant here.

Well, if you read Zenkimchi's Andong post, you'll know that my new favorite thing is complaining to restauranteurs in pidgin Korean.

You'll be happy to know that while there is tons of good food to be eaten in Seoul, there are also ample opportunities to practice my new hobby.

Today I went to a restaurant and ordered a seafood salad. Wanted something fresh, you know?

Dear readers, the thing came swimming in so much sweet mustard/mayonnaise sauce that I couldn't even taste the shredded cabbage. (And you know, you could read that sentence and probably guess that I was in Korea, even if you knew nothing about this blog whatsoever). I actually got out the tissues and dabbed away the excess sauce, because it was so egregiously over-sauced, and built up no small mountain of sopping, saccharine napkins in doing so. (Photos when I get home and download them off my crappy cameraphone). Even so, there was still a puddle of sauce in the bottom of the bowl. It made me feel a bit nauseous looking at how much mayonnaise I could have consumed.

Thanks to crappy cameraphone the second, it's hard to see the veritable pool of sauce still in the bottom of the bowl.

And that was after removing this many napkins' worth of sauce, already.




This was a restaurant I used to like, too, until a few bad choices in background music (speed techno doesn't help me relax and enjoy my food, as awesome as Lee Jung Hyun is in other contexts), and this mayonnaise debacle left, um, a sour taste in my mouth.

Lee Jung Hyun: Wah. Try tucking in to a nice california roll with this on in the background.


However, not to be deterred, I got out my cellphone dictionary (after taking some gross-out pictures of the mayonnaise soup in the bottom of my bowl), and finally looked up the word "taste" and the structure "could/couldn't taste". When I went to pay, I was very proud of myself for saying, in broken Korean, "Too much sauce. I couldn't taste the vegetables."

Yep. After all that talk about complaining expats, I'm learning to complain in Korean.

Look out, world!

The Andong Trip at Zenkimchi

For those of you who can't wait for me to finish writing it up, Joe at Zenkimchi has written a nice account of the Andong Trip that's loaded with details about Joe's bowels pictures. Go check it out if you like.