This is the latest hit single from what I believe is the most popular music group in Korea. K-Pop at its very best, it is. It's kindof catchy, and it'll give you a whole new definition of 'skinny' in celebrity culture. Western pop stars look like a bunch of manatees compared to "Girls Generation." Enjoy.
Posts
TOM
I've written about Tom before; he's the receptionist/liason/general stuff guy at the BCM office. But here at Hwarang Elementary, there's a constant and raging debate as to whether Tom is a good guy, and as to whether we should or should not like and/or respect him. Jordan and I (and Ty, but he doesn't work at Hwarang; only at the BCM office) like Tom; we think he's a bit of a mopey sad sack, but that in the end he's a generally good guy who can be relied upon to get the job done. He's taken Jordan to the hospital, and helped me with several random affairs relating to my visa, banking, learning to work the water heater at my apartment, and online shopping the Korean websites. He even came out with the three of us once and stood by watchfully as we got completely drunk and stumbled around the neighbourhood karaoke bars. The other foreign teachers here really, really dislike the guy. It's 7 to 2 here against Tom at the lunch table discussion. My cowor...
How far would you say is the peak from my vantage point in the below picture? Well, the sign thinks it's a little more than 300m. The signs are totally useless when I go hiking, because they only tell you how far something is if you were getting there by way of helicopter. Sometimes it takes me an hour to go 0.5k because it's all just twists and turns and stairs and rocks to climb. My part of town (it's a big city, and you can only see about a quarter of it here on account of the pollution). For Victoria readers, each one of the apartments in this photo is about the size of View Towers on Fort Street (that giant grey monstrosity, you know the one). When people move into condos, they don't bother with the elevators. All the buildings are pretty much the same, with large deck doors, so there is a huge market for these lift companies that run around town all day helping people move in and out of their apartments. Believe it or not, the service is only about 50 bucks, for o...
I generally enjoy the Harry Potter movies. The latest one was, in my own mind, the best of the lot to date, and I'm a bit PO'd about the producers choosing to make two more instead of one. I want to see how it all ends (honestly I have no idea), and they've surely got enough money already. Imagine if they'd tried to pull some kind of crap like "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Part 1 " on us. Anyway, my co-worker Jessica, a Harry Potter fan, said "You wouldn't have enjoyed the movie if you had read the book." She, obviously, didn't like the movie. What a curious statement, though. It was almost as though she thought the movie didn't deserve to be enjoyed by anyone because it didn't do justice to its source material. She didn't say that, to be clear, but I got that impression. Isn't a movie a whole different sort of medium? I fully expect an adaptation to emphasize some of the source's material and trash other parts. M...
Tom is the "Manager of General Affairs" guy at my employer's office building. That means he pretty much does everything that needs doing, that doesn't neatly fit into any other job category. Usually he's on reception, but I see him organizing schedules, wooing potential clients, handing out fliers, and so on. Another part of his job is to keep the foreign teachers set-up in terms of utilities, rent, visas, health, and so on. "Tom" is his English nickname BTW... he's Korean. Every time I order something online I have it sent to the office, because I'm not home during the day. Tom always sends me an email when it comes but he never just says I have mail, unless it is literally a letter. He always says what it is that's been delivered, as though I don't already know. Here's the most recent few: To: Jared (jsfaber@hotmail.com) Hi Jared, You've got a pack of Korea 6 years Insam (hongsam). Sincerely Yours, 이원옥 부장 배상 Tom Lee, The Manag...
Well, I planned my next hiking trip. It'll be to Jirisan National Park, hiking for 4 days, and spending three nights in the park itself. It looks to be something in the 50km distance this time. I wanted to reserve three shelter spots, but getting a shelter reservation is like getting to be the 9th caller on a radio show. The online reservations open up at 10am 15 days before the day of stay, and thousands of people click exactly at 10 to fill just a few hundred spots in 4 or 5 shelters. Anyway I got shelter spots at Nogodan (southeast) and Jangteomok (west side). Problem is the second night, where I have nowhere to stay since I can't get from one place to the next in a single day (looks to be about 30k), and I couldn't get a reservation in the middle-area shelters. So, I bought a tent online and I'm just going to sleep outside, bears be damned. They're supposed to be mostly vegetarian anyway. Technically, sleeping outside isn't legal at Jirisan but a number of p...
Feeling a bit better today, and back at work. The doctor's note I was ordered to get on threat of a pay-dock penalty stated I needed 5 days off. That completely backfired on my bosses, but they just insisted I come to work after one day anyway, making the same threat. They also won't pay for the doctor's note, so I'm out 20 bucks either way. Let me repeat: They forced me to go to the doctor on my own dime, and then ignored the doctor's recommendation. I explained to my boss that teachers in my part of Canada get (I believe) 10 paid sick days each year, with no bullying, no innuendo, no suspicion, and a general level of adult respect. This seems pretty normal and reasonable in my mind. My boss looked at me like I came to Korea from Pluto. This is all very typical of how english teachers (and most of the workforce) are treated in Korea. I'm not saying it's a bad gig here, but if anyone is considering ESL teaching in this country, I'd advise them t...
Sick.
I'm a big fellow, but I'm a lot healthier than people think. I can hike with the best of them, run farther than probably almost anyone per-pound :P, and I never call in sick. But today I called in sick (for tomorrow... they want 12hours notice). I'm burning up, I look like a god-damn tomato, and my head is thumping with every heart beat. The (best) girlfriend (in the known universe) is coming to the rescue later this evening with meds and a hug. Honestly folks, I can tell you two things from the heart: 1: The last time I took a (real) sick day was in the first week of September, and that was on account of jetlag. That's 40-odd days short of a year. 2: there are few tormets I've experienced that are worse than having a burning fever in muggy, windless, 30-degree weather. In the mean time, I'm lying here in my lucky underpants (calm down, ladies) with an ice pack on my head and the AC cranked up to "You might jump off a building when you see your electric bil...
CNN ran an article asking what the world's greatest achievement is. People posted the computer, fire, internet, printing, getting to the moon, the airplane, music, and more. I'd have to go with language, and representative government (a.k.a. by the people, for the people, of the people) as the close second, and evolutionary theory as third. The second is in a sense more genuine, because theorists are arguing more and more convincingly that language structures are in fact innate. Language emancipated us from the rest of the animal kingdom; It changed everything, as it allowed for communication, trade, barter, and of course the recording of history. Representative government emancipated us from Hobbes' state of nature, and it is the single greatest leap of selflessness and co-operation in the history of a terribly violent species; included in this leap is the abolishment of slavery, a worldwide practice until very recently in our hsitory. Evolutionary theory emancipat...
Want to join the pen15 club?
It was in grade nine math that my friends and I played a game called "penis." Basically, you take turns saying 'penis' out loud in the middle of class. The first person starts with a whisper, and the next person and bit louder, and so on. The winner is the person whom nobody is willing to try to top, volume-wise.
I was fully four hours early for work today. There was a mix up with the schedule, and while my boss swears she told me, I don't believe her. I came at 8, and I could have come at half past 12. BAH. I thought about going back home, but honestly the less driving I do in this city the better. I'm doing very well these days at chess on facebook. Out of 45,000 users I'm in the 92nd percentile (ranked about 3300th right now), and since probably half of the people who are higher cheat with chess programs, that's a pretty good rank for an honest player. I play people sometimes and I know they're cheating. The game gets tough and their position tight, and suddenly their moves become extremely intelligent and heavily abstract. Especially at amateur level chess, it's not difficult to see when moves make a dramatic increase in quality. So I think in January after work ends in Korea, I'm going to travel a bit. I'm looking at two particular ideas, the first ...
Rain
- From my balcony It's been like this, completely non-stop, for about 15 hours now. The streets are starting to flood, and the river bed near my house that's usually either dry or a creek, is raging up to the brim of the embankments. I have never in my life seen this kind of rain. Even my Korean friends say it's remarkable for Seoul as monsoon rains go.
More cops in the alley the other day. This time the resident crazy old lady was trying to stop a fight between a drunk man and a small but rather burly housewife. Korean men, you see, don't have big statures; most adult men are relatively skinny and not usually much over 5'9. The housewives are also small but they've had a lot of, how shall I say, life experience (i.e. abuse and thankless motherhood and really tough times all-around). So the man and woman got into it pretty good, and as I was getting my shoes on to help the old crazy lady break it up, the housewife began to get the upper hand. By the end of it, the man had pulled out a few fistfuls of hair but the woman had delivered him a pretty decent beating. I don't want to be sexist here, so I figured it was a fair fight and didn't intervene. The man was clearly the aggressor, but the woman was kindof egging him on too, in order i think to get him in more trouble when the cops came. The cops did come and as usu...
The worst smell in the world.
Koreans recycle nearly everything. There are different pick-up services for cardboards, plastics, compost, and garbage. Generally, people produce almost no landfill-destined household garbage; it's quite something. Most of the pickup services are privately operated... people take the plastics and sell them in bulk to processsors, and so forth. I could and should devote an entry to the ultra-poor recycling pick-up people, many of whom literally pull their entire inventory by hand in metal/wood rickshaws. Anyway, about the worst smell in thr world: the compost guy in my neighbourhood runs a three-wheel modified motorcycle with 6 large open compost buckets in tow. If you are unfortunate enough to get behind this thing, it's hard to believe. The first time I did, I nearly lost my dinner, and my korean neighbours had a good laugh sitting on the side of the alley. Let's keep in mind that the compost guy collects every form of week-old putrid food waste in a several-block radius. ...
Third blog in a single day. I was just about to leave school, on the front step tying my shoes, when the rain just fell out of the sky like the gods turned their shower on. It's monsoon season here and you never know when it's going to go from sunny to incredibly rainy in a matter of hours. I really don't like driving my scooter in that kind of rain, because it is a genuinely dangerous thing to do. It rains so hard that, when I'm driving in it, I can open my mouth and get a pretty good drink. I know they say motorcycles (and scooters to a smaller extent) are for crazy people; just look at the injury and death statistics, right? Well yes, but I think those statistics reflect to a degree the kind of people who are inclined to buy motorcycles in the first place. In other words, if motorcycles didn't exist, people who would otherwise have bought them are probably the same people who will get into more car accidents on average anyway. Motorcycles get into more accid...
It's almost time for another photo dump. In the next couple of days, once I find the time, I'll get a bunch of pics together and make a good entry of it all. In the mean time, I wonder if our genetic code prevents us from being happy, or satisfied, with our lives. It makes sense to say that an individual constantly unsatisfied, constantly seeking to fill his belly and get more power and more money and more procreative opportunities will likely live longer and procreate more - i.e. dominate the gene pool on average. If we were so easily contented by our actions as we wish we could be, we'd probaby never have made it as hunter-gatherers, when there really wasn't much spare time or energy available for us to sit about and enjoy ourselves. It is said, after all, that Ghengis Kahn probably fathered children in the thousands. His Y chromosome, according to genetic researchers, still exists today all over Asia and even in Europe. One can't say so much about history...
Kim Yu-Na is the famous Korean figure skater, currently the reigning world champion and record holder for high scores at the world championships. Since I don't watch figure skating, the only place I have the privlege of seeing this national hero is in the Lotte Mart (box store) coupon book, smiling with brand-name yogurt in hand. No joke. Very nearly every commercial on television, nearly every poster advertizement and internet pop-up, features a celebrity of some sort, ranging from movie stars to TV personalities to athletes. The west's celebrity worship doesn't hold a candle to South Korea's. And the interesting thing: celebrities don't even think not to go commercial and hawk every product imaginable. From cars to food to booze to air conditioners to medicine, there's a celebrity-centered commercial for it on TV right now. And these people are as famous for their advertisements as they are for their career skill-set. Music videos double up as ad jingl...
Bobby Hill: "I just wanted to say, you don't have to worry about me because I'm never going to have sex." Hank Hill: "Woah now Bobby, don't say that!" Bobby Hill: "But I thought that's what you wanted." Hank Hill: "Well, yes, if you were my daughter. But you're my son!" Bobby Hill: "... Why is it not okay for girls but it's ok for boys?" Hank Hill: "It's called the double standard, don't knock it. We got the long end of the stick on that one."
Man have it bad. I've spent the better part of my life being told about how good men have it today in the industrialized world, and how women make less money, have less power, and live under more pressure to conform to certain images and stereotypes. I've been told that life as a women is harder, more burdenous, and more thankless than that of a man. And the longer I walk this planet, the less I believe any of it. Look at all the worst, most back-breaking, least social, most mind-numbing jobs: they're filled by men most of the time. We sneer at the society in which nurses and teachers are mostly women, but aren't those jobs (these days) very well-paid, as well as highly rewarding and a great contribution to society? Women also, statistically, have shorter working hours than men in developed countries. Lately, women have been dominating western universities in both grade point averages and in total enrollment numbers. Men face huge pressures when it comes to meeting wome...