4th

Happy Birthday America!  I’ll probably go catch a baseball game today or tomorrow to celebrate.  Then again, I’m pretty frazzled from teaching as of late, so maybe just some beers over in Sinchon.

Dinner II

It’s a bag-full of octopus, and it tastes real good on top of some rice.

Vittles

Tonight I had my best meal so far in Korea, and of course I forgot to take my camera.  My Korean friend Jay took me and another hagwon jockey out for “cheap, good” dinner, and it was more like “cheap, what heaven must taste like” dinner.  We went to Gongdeok Station and down a back alley for a series of different jokbal joints (pic here, not mine).  We dined on/devoured a huge plate of roasted pork (from the leg, not the fattier belly of samgyeopsal), sundae (Korean pork blood sausage), and sundaeguk (blood sausage stew), along with, of course, kimchi and soju.

And it was cheap.

Bureaucracy

I’ve had tourist visas before (no biggie).  And I had a student visa in college to spend a semester in Japan (also a breeze, but with an AIDS test required).  The whole work visa thing is new to me, however, and the amount of paperwork involved is a little intimidating.

Not that any of the requirements are particularly unfair or demanding; it’s just something that requires a lot of attention to detail.  In triplicate, usually.

Radio

To celebrate Father’s Day, NPR’s Scott Simon had a really moving piece last weekend based on his receiving a 1962 recording of his father’s own radio show.  Kind of hard to explain, but worth a few minutes if you have the time.

Department of Bad Ideas

Some recent chatter about a Clinton veep run: Bob Beckel, NPR. She’s certainly earned some leverage in a closely fought primary, but that and four bucks will get you a mocha latte these days.

Let’s try a hypothetical — if Clinton was going to win the nomination with as slim a margin of elected (i.e., non-”super”) delegates as Obama currently has over her, would there be so much talk regarding the need for an Obama vice-presidency?  Probably some, but certainly not as much.

The fact is, having an African American and a woman on the same ticket, while bolstering base support among Dems, would simply be painting a larger bullseye for the Republican smear machine to work off of.  And while Obama certainly needs to pick a running mate who shares his core values and positions on Iraq and the economy, he has every right to pick someone towards the center as he enters the national race.  (Let’s face it — a white male governor).

And this simply isn’t negotiable, however much Mario Cuomo would like to see it happen.

And to put it a bit more bluntly — Obama, or any future party nominee for that matter, shouldn’t have to deal with sharing the White House with Bill Clinton.  Simple as that.

Shmaturity

The NY Times gives GTA4 a glowing review — “cultural satire disguised as fun.”

Along with surprisingly deep superhero flicks and the continued success of Judd Apatow in making prolonged male adolescence seem more charming than it is creepy, I think it’s safe to say that American males are no longer expected to grow up.  Evar.

(I don’t happen to own a third gen console, I’ll have you know.  But man, I’ll be bummed if GTA4 takes more than 12 months to get ported to the PC.)

End of the Line

The Pennsylvania primary looms, and as much as I’m pro-Obama, I do think Hillary has every right to see this thing out.  Maybe not quite until the bitter end of the convention, but at least through the state voting.

As has been pointed out by others, however, you’d have to be quite the egomaniac to think that a “Superdelegate win” that alienated half of your own party, particularly the young and more energetic half, could be described as anything but a Pyrrhic victory.

Right?  I mean, she’s got somebody around her who can tell her this, doesn’t she?  Oh.  Then I guess we might be screwed.

(Mark Penn is too busy being fired by the nation of Colombia to tell her, I imagine.)

PS Exclusive

I think it should be mandatory that all great broken-up bands have a Myspace page, as Life Without Buildings do (wiki).

Healing

Best wishes for the community of Blacksburg, VA. A lot of questions remain, and most of them will probably be answered. Nobody is saying much about the two-hour gap between the first and second waves of violence, but it deserves to be looked into.

While it’s overly macabre, it’s also worth considering how the shooter was able to re-load as many times as he did. It sounds as if the students and faculty, once they knew what was going on, barricaded a number of doors and room entrances, which shows some quick thinking on their part. One professor in particular, Liviu Lebrescu, apparently sacrificed himself to save lives. He was a holocaust survivor as well.

Unfortunately, out come the ghouls, right on schedule.