Phrases that only sound semi-threatening until you actually understand them

It also helps spread the user

Bleach can clean a lot of things, but not things your mind has seen.

*shiver*

"War Across The Nation!"

That would be a brilliant song by the semi-punk band Chelsea. Who none of you boy-band fans have ever bought a record of. Chelsea are only slightly related to the fact that my sainted mother asks the following question:

perhaps you could address the feelings in SK about the current situation with NK and its threat (and I know they threaten often) to go to war with SK.

As I read reactions back “home” I am stunned by how stupid they sound over here ( I completely accept that I might sound as stupid over there). North Korea (NK from now on) may be a 'rogue nation" (whatever that might mean), but as far as anyone in this hemisphere can tell, they are neither suicidal nor stupid. The overseas misunderstandings seem to focus on two Myths

Myth One: NK is ready to nuke SK (or Japan, or the US) without hesitation
Answer: If NK had "no hesitation to nuke anyone" it would have happened long ago. This is their second test.. they have nukes and boats. That's all it would take.

Myth Two: Kim Jong IL (KJI from now on) is some kind of crazy man
Answer: Crazy like a fox. What leader in the world has turned less (no economic base, no real power, starving citizens, an army that can't win) into more international status? He's smarter than the last Bush (by some multiplicative factor) and as sneaky as The Hustler. NK is a nothing country, going nowhere, that still manages to lead bigger countries around by their noses.

They do this kind of thing to BUILD SUPPORT INTERNALLY by representing themselves as always under attack. In a way, NK is the classic Orwellian “1984” country, except that they’ve actually “always been at war with EastAsia (the US)” since “always” in Korea is judged as just past the last war, unless one needs to go back further in order to malign the Japanese.

There may be a third myth in here somewhere (like the horse in the pile of shit) about NK being “ready to revolt” but that’s a different issue

I think KJI still likes cigars and whiskey (this is a metaphor and a fact). If he attacks SK in any meaningful way the Chinese will kill his ass (thus removing tobacco and booze) before the rest of the world gets a chance to. There is also the fact that North Korea is very small and we know exactly where KJI and his friends in power live. Check out this very good article on how even Google can find the apparatchik of North Korea if you think they believe they are invulnerable.

The only, ONLY way NK goes for it is if KJI actually is insane and thinks he can get it done under the radar, by which I mean so quickly that no one can stop it before KJI his bad self is kilt.

I don’t believe either condition is true. To be fair, I live in Seoul, so I might have a betting interest in how this all turns out. ;-)

NK only has just two cards, and they can’t be laid down in the same game.

• They can toast Seoul. That would be the last thing they did, of course, and I believe they know that.
• China loves them as a buffer (but, you know, toast Seoul and that’s gone).

This is a pretty weak hand that KJI has played well. He has to bluster and bluff and the bigger reaction he gets from idiots in the United States (I’m looking at you neo-conservatives. WTF, you can’t have sex unless we’re about to go to war? Go back to your roots, grab the whiskey jar, beat the three-legged dog, and work on that car that will never run) the better he plays outside of the US. And the better he plays in NK itself.

And now his personal stakes are raised. Look at the pictures of him. He’s dying. He wants his stupid Juche revolution to continue. So he’s gonna beat the drums, rally the troops, and line up the future. It’s unlikely he’s pulling the trigger.

If the trigger does get pulled it will unfortunately be one of those retarded but inexorable processes in which one stupid little thing is followed by successively larger ones until the largest stupidity is accomplished.

Human stupidity, not insanity, is the biggest threat here. Cause when it comes to stupidity? We're exponential (existential?) that way!

Here in Seoul, I’ll still be as dead. But it will reassure me that it was due to human stupidity and some slowly built inertial suicide. This kind of end adheres to the rules of physics; I can accept it. What the fuck.. I'm old enough to die for any stupid reason.

Still, most people I know come from that Greek rational tradition. Then the enlightenment supposedly taught us to think.

This is the West’s moment to not get butthurt, to not react, to realize that NK wouldn’t be acting like this at all if their leadership had the slightest notion that they were winning and were going to stay in control.

When NK acts like this it is a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength. And every time, every US administration plays it the other way.

Pat Moynihan got murdered for coming up with the notion of benign neglect. But guess what?

It's called for. Unbury that fat Irish fuck and put him in charge of all of this. Stat!

OTOH, I'd be interested to know if the NKCIA is as lame as the US CIA . If they are, who knows what stupidity they are feeding KJI? And what he might believe is actually possible. If KJI's "intelligence" guys are as retarded as the US ones have been in the last 10 years?

Fuck... I might still end up doing that futile dog-paddle one attempts in a lake of fire.

Whatever.

I have enough soju for tonight. And the bibimbap at the place the cabbies go?

It was fucking brilliant.

Unexpected Responses from Google

So.. I realize I have not set my goals for this year and, given my essential laziness, this will hold me back.

So I started to work on them today.

Been looking at translation sites..

Thinking about my teaching....

Looking at conferences..

And trying to plan losing the next 30 pounds. In that effort I googled something I had heard, that modern soju was made from ethanol based on a chemical mash, and sugar. I just wanted to see how bad for me this could be, as Korean men consume soju at an industrial rate, yet still seem to stay slender.

In my eternal search for wisdom, I googled "soju and sugar"

See that picture thingy there at the top, left?

It was the first(!) result.

It's a goddamned dildo!

This result didn't help me at all in my particular search, but I've ordered two for some friends who need a little release. ;-)

Oh yeah.. and one for me!

Stooopid Goooooogle!

Arbeit macht frei!

It looks like I might get some editing work from Ewha University. The last job I did for them was apparently good by their standards, and they sent me an email back asking if I would be willing to do more work.

Of course, I said yes. ;;-)

Team Building Weekend!

It started far too early – just after 6 am on a Saturday. Unless you are still grinding the surface off your teeth in a crank frenzy, this is a time to sleep. But the alarm clock comes without mercy, and so it did to me. I cleaned myself up as best I can, and grabbed a cab to the Uni. Got there a bit early, which was in fact spectacularly early, since the “departure time” had been calculated based on “Korean time” (which is something similar to “Mexican Time” if you live near the border). Everyone showed up, and we headed off just about 8:15.

I really could have used that extra hour of sleep, but made up for it the best I could by napping on the bus. Sleep was impossible after we stopped halfway through the trip and heard that ex-president Roh had killed himself, apparently on account of the corruption probe into his presidency and family.

We took a quick stop at a kind of shrine to a Korean Movie which showed North and South Korean troops living in peace in an imaginary semi-utopia.

We arrived in town and walked through the market, which was nice, but nothing really unusual for a Korean open market. Lunch was adventurous. Seundae (an intestine based sausage), So Mori kuk pap – which is Cow-head soup and rice, and some extra bits of cow head and liver (the only thing I didn’t touch, based on horrible memories from my childhood) and Makkeoli. Not a bad meal, if you forget what’s actually in the thing.

Then it was off to rafting. As we drove up the river, it looked pretty lame – flat and regular. But the rafting was quite fun – the river was very tame, tame enough so that the guides actually crashed us into things for fun. Two of the slenderer girls were on the verge of hypothermia by the end of the trip and the guide kept splashing them with water and pushing them into the river (this was part of the game), despite the fact he had given one of them a heat-blanket type thing, and had the other huddle in the bottom of the raft to get out of the wind. This didn’t make sense to me, but it must be one of those Yin versus Yang things that no occidental tourist can understand. It also began to rain on us, which added to the coldnessosity.

Then back to the bus and off to the hotel. Our lovely office planner snagged me a room with a bed – a giant room, for only 60k won, which I was happy to pay for the solitude and control of the TV!

Then a truly brilliant dinner. Fat-ass Sam Gyap Sal, real sausages, thick mushroom strips, bean soup, rice and beer and soju flowing like beer and soju. Lots of cool chatter with the students and the kind of public good feelings that Koreans are so splendid at. Some folks headed off to a casino after, but I retreated to my big fat Korean room and am watching TV and preparing to go to sleep early.

Word is we aren’t expected to leave until 10 tomorrow, so I also should get a bonus sleep-in type of thing.

Man, I love me some Bit-Torrent

Yeah.. I paid for the Ron Wood album when it came out.. but it is gone now... The intarwebs bring back a bit of prophecy:

Maybe I'm right
And you're wrong it doesn't matter
In the course of our lifetimes
You'll surely start running away
We'll wait and see about that

But if you don't stay with me, baby
Well, if you don't stay with me baby
I'll be right there in your mirror
When you get old
And we all get old

LOL..

talk about lack of buyers' regret!

And Keef on lead!

The Second Wave

Namsan is changing, as it does.

The bright blossom colors from this day have gone away.

Still, the greenosity is epic.

this




compares to this (click ya genius!) in that apples and oranges way.

And the once gnarled Rose of Sharon (click here, ok?) now looks like this:



meaning the field of ochre that was this link.. is now this field of green

And the blossoms be coming baby, the blossoms be coming!




One more pretty time before the heat killlessez...

Perhaps Someday I Can Become a Super-Jenius?

The Economist is now reporting that living overseas can make you more creative (if that is the same thing as smart).

20 more years here and I'll be comfortably above average intellectually!

"Teacher's Day," Last..

Koreans have a day for everything. For instance, today was "finally old enough to be seduced day," a day on which Korea finally frees its innocent young maidens up to be preyed upon by Hagwon English Teachers.

Well, actually, it's "Coming of Age Day," but still.

Last Friday was "Teacher's Day" and that note over there on the left was the best of the three notes I got, as it was the least formal. I also got a decorative cup and saucer, a rose, a box full of bakery treats, and a cake.

The respect Korean students have for instructors (although the students are work-avoiding missiles, just as in any other country) is just another reason it is a good deal to work in a University here.

THE SEOUL INTERNATIONAL BOOKFAIR

This started out rather lamely, but ended surprisingly well. Yvonne and I got up early and headed to Noksapyeong for coffee at the new coffee-shop that has inexplicably been placed inside the fare-gates. I swear, sometimes I wonder about the marketing guys here.

But the coffee was good (as it gets) and cheap, and the Noksapyeong subway station is an amazing thing. It is three stories high with a glass geodesic dome on the surface, and could easily handle 20 times the traffic it handles on an average day. You look at it and wonder what the designers were expecting when they built it.

My only theory is that it is right next to Yongsan Army base, which will go away in a couple of years. At that point Seoul will have an enormous chunk of empty property in downtown (northern) Seoul, and they may be planning something grand.

Anyway, we eventually headed off to the COEX and got to the fair. It was in two rooms, and the first room was rather uninspiring. Basically a bunch of kids books, and nothing that could fairly earn the title “international.”

The second room was better, with reps from Saudi Arabia, The Philippines, the US, Japan, etc.. Nothing that I was personally interested in, but undeniably international. Later, talking to a man who has had a booth at this convention for many years, I heard that the global economic splash had greatly reduced the number of North American and European booths. Surely something the organizers cannot be held accountable for except, perhaps, on Dave's ESL Cafe.

I quickly canvassed the entire place and was kind of unimpressed, but when I went back and spent more time (duh!) it turned out much better than I had initially judged. The Korean Literature Translation Institute was there, with many books I have read or own, and my one attempt to communicate with the woman running the booth was so traumatizing that she basically ran to hide.

Only to return in about 10 minutes with a raft of free stuff in English, which included 3 copies a seasonal magazine on translation, an annual (this is the first one) book of “new” Korean fiction and poetry translated by the KLTI, and a book listing ALL known translations of Korean fiction from 1980 to the present. The last thing will be very useful for my kiddies who are studying the penetration of Korean literature in the West, in Europe this summer. There is also an associated website.

On a more amusing note, the folks from Urantia were at the conference. I imagine they were downplaying, somewhat, their argument that people with blue-eyes are descended from the “smarter” planet of space aliens from which we all originated.

Some Dao-ists (a kind of splinter sect of them, to be exact) were there, and I spent some time talking to a Korean guy with amazingly perfect English. Obviously, he would like to convert me, but there also seems to be some slight chance that he will have editing work for me. As I had been researching religious structures in Asia for an upcoming photo-essay, I was able to gracefully drop into the conversation the question, “oh, there’s an important Daoist temple in Manila, isn’t there?” This surprised him and I got pulled into the booth for a one-on-one chat that I hope will lead to some work, or even just an introduction to the Daoists in the Philippines. He also gave me a bilingual copy of “The Cosmic Autumn Approaches” which is some kind of distillation of their essential doctrine of Millenial Daoism.

How those two thoughts are supposed to work together is unclear to me, but if I attend their workshop, I am sure they will lay it out for me.

Not quite as ironically amusing as the Cool Urantian Dressing mentioned above, but still funny, was the 'save the world' poster that was apparently begging the polar bears to go all Terry Schavio, dye their fur, or.. well do something to the planet that ends with "ave"

rave

lave

pave (no, wait, not likely with the hippie thing going on here)

have

wave..

oh... "save!"

The idea of the confused and mismanaged (and apparently doomed) whitey-bears was amusing to me, but I was frankly terrified by the little insert on the lower left (click on it an a bigger version will magically appear by the magic of the intarweb's magical magic) in which a bird has clearly pulled the thumb-tip off of its owner, and is consuming said delicacy whilst still perched on the owners immobile wrist.

The only way this could be possibly happen is if du Maurier/Hitchcock's ugly avian fantasy had come true and the owner was already deceased, eyeballs an appetizer for the hideous ruler-seagulls of the aerial future.

Yeah well, who cares about other people?

The point here is that the books and magazines I snatched up for free (beyond what I scored by obviously being white, both Yvonne and I looted the free magazines at the US Embassy exhibit) will go into filling that bookcase in my school office, so the kiddies think I am a legit instructor.

Back home to a chill night with Yvonne and a trip to see Star Trek this morning...