Politics! On The Internet! Part II!

All you need to know about the right-wing blogosphere via Sadly, No!

Cultural Understanding Chuseyo?

My new favorite blog is Ask a Korean!

Korean mafia?  Major league ball players with hangul neck tatoos?  How to learn Korean faster?  It’s all there.

Repetition Does Not Breed Contempt

Battles, “Atlas”:

This is a great song for a 20 minute walk to work in the rain.  It’s the future, and the future still has a place for analog.

“A Serious Problem”

Kim Jong-Il is very sick, apparently: “The report in the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper cited an unnamed government official in saying intelligence obtained Sunday suggested ‘a serious problem’ with Kim’s health. The report did not elaborate, and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service and Unification Ministry said Wednesday they could not confirm it.”

A nice mefi post on the subject.

I mentioned the news to a Korean co-worker and she didn’t say much.  This is definitely not a subject many South Koreans are comfortable speaking with wayguk-in (foreigners) about.  And while you might expect people to be happy to think that Kim Jong-Il will be raped with pitchforks soon, it’s important to remember nobody has a clue as to what’s going on with the DPRK’s military regime.  Will we get a bloodless transfer of power to one of his sons, who could quite possibly be even more murderous and megalomaniacal than his father?  Will a general decide it’s his chance to take the glorious reigns of Juche to the next level and stage a neat little “accident” for the sons?  Will another general decide his fellow despots are going soft and that the only way to prove himself to the ghost of Kim Il-Sung is to launch a suicidal but devastating attack on the capitalist swine to the South?

Me?  I’ll be stocking a little extra soju in my apartment just in case armageddon comes.

Birth, School, Work, Death

Public sculpture in downtown Seoul, across from Gyeonghuigung (Gyeonghui Palace).

Big Gulp Chuseyo?

Convenience store near Dongdaemun Market.

Vote

An 86 year-old Obama supporter tells us about himself and why he’s voting Democrat this November:

Voting from abroad is easier than you might think, but you need to act fast!

Rained Out

Folk dancers near Gwanghwamun Station.

“Chop Up Baby Brains” Instead? You Betcha!

I’m sorry, but there’s no polite way to tip-toe around the obvious: Sarah Palin is a moron.  Here she is advocating higher Federal spending for parents who have children with disabilities (something I agree with actually, but something that’s also the very definition of a “socialist” program) while at the same time bashing the actual science that allows for potential breakthroughs in dealing with almost every known birth defect:

“And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France, or a public policy center named for the guy who got the earmark. In our administration, we’re going to reform and refocus. We’re going to get our federal priorities straight, and fulfill our country’s commitment to give every child opportunity and hope in life.”

So we’ll make this socialist program work by taking away research grants from actual scientists some of whom, god forbid, weren’t lucky enough to be born in America, and give them to, I dunno, churches that pray against witchcraft instead? (yt)

Talking Shop

I met a Canadian ex-pat English teacher Friday night and we talked about how our jobs were going.  It sounds like we both ended up at pretty good hagwon (private schools), but it was interesting to hear him talk about life at a much larger and well established school.  He teaches 11 year-olds who are basically fluent in English, and now working on perfecting things like accent and advanced grammatical constructions.  A few times a week he does forensics (debate) with them over topical but relatively complex international issues.