“The Orioles announced on their Web site that they have signed Kim Seong-min, a 17-year-old who pitched for Daegu Sangwon High School, about 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul. Dan Duquette, the team’s executive vice president of baseball operations, was quoted as saying Kim is ‘one of the top amateur left-handed pitchers in South Korea” who has “an excellent curveball and very good control.’”

Jesus, could someone tell this poor kid that the Orioles are an organization where young talent goes to die?

Girls’ Generation, “The Boys” live on Letterman

So here they are — South Korean superstars Girls’ Generation.  Whenever I leave my apartment or office this is what I hear pumping from cell phone stores, restaurants, beauty salons, and coffee shops.  I honestly don’t even notice it any more.  Sonic wallpaper.

And it’s not particularly offensive, just incredibly dull and uninspired.

The Atlantic has a thoughtful piece up on K-pop in general, and the desperate attempts for a South Korean act to break it big in the U.S.  The secret?  Marketing to tweens instead of teens.

Not a bad idea, but also one that won’t work.  All pop music is formulaic to some extent, but K-pop is never going to succeed in the States because the puppet-master’s strings are just too obvious.  The packaging is too visible.  Management’s fingerprints are just too flagrant.

Frankly, in a genre where silliness can actually be a strength (cf. Katie Perry shooting things out of her boobies) K-pop comes across as way too serious.  No doubt it’s hard to get those highly syncopated dance moves down but at the end of the day what we’re seeing in the Letterman clip is mere choreography, not a stirring pop performance.  It’s perfectly cheerful, but absolutely humorless at the same time.  Robotic, even.

Also, Koreans seem to like their girl- and boy-bands big, which amuses me to no end.  (You guys realize you have to split the checks depending on how many members you have, right?)

And yes, I do have a big bottle of Haterade on my desk in front of me, and some of it is dribbling down my chin.  Duly noted, thank you.

Nice article, but whither my personal favorite — hanged vs. hung?  (What can I say, I’m immature like that.)

Also, nonplussed.

Also, I had to take five years of Spanish before I could tell you the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs.  And this life-changing achievement has never once gotten me laid.

This is always a strange time for me.  My college classes have been over for weeks, but I’m still teaching the adult night classes.  So basically, I’m only teaching one or two hours a day until my “real” vacation starts for the month of February.

I’ve really come to enjoy my adult classes.  When I first started here my boss presented them as kind of an afterthought to the “real” college classes.  But the size of the adult classes has grown, and there are even some whispers that we’ll be hiring more foreign English teachers in the not-so-distant future.  I get along well with all of the adult students, and I’m happy to call many of them good friends.  (Also, they have cars and I don’t.  Bonus.)

Feeling strangely nostalgic for some reason.  I’m not one to get homesick too easily, but the extremely cold weather triggers that little part of my lizard brain that misses my family and friends back in the States, and wishes we could all hang out near a fireplace watching the Redskins lose.

In any event, I’ll be sitting on a beach/next to a pool by this time next week.  I’m definitely looking forward to it.  Dare I say, I deserve it.  It’s been a long semester.

Daegu, Korea.

“The huge salaries and bonuses, we are told, are essential if we are to prevent this tiny percentage of selfish, hoarding arseholes from moving overseas. Imagine if they flew to Singapore and started selfishly hoarding things over there instead. Drained of their expertise and reassuring presence, how would Britain cope? Within days we’d be walking on all fours and devouring our offspring for food.

I don’t want to panic you, but that’s the reality. Never mind weeping over the size of their bonuses: we should be dropping to our knees and giving them blowjobs, tearfully imploring them to remain seated each time we come up for air. Treble their wages. Form a human ring around Britain’s airports to prevent them from leaving. And for God’s sake don’t ask them to share anything. That kind of talk merely angers them.”

I shall shed no tears when the American newspaper industry finally implodes on itself in a cloud of outdated business models and a desperately obsequious drive to let people know that every time a Republican calls Obama a Kenyan socialist terrorist sympathizer, we must remember that Al Gore and Michael Moore are fat and so both sides do it.

Just let The Guardian and Al-jazeera and the BBC cover American politics and breaking news.  They already do a much better job of it.

Not to mention it’s barely a cut above prostitution in terms of how it exploits women.

That said, the piece does a good job of putting the entirety of the “Korean Wave” in a political context (e.g., it’s highly subsidized by the South Korean government itself as a form of regional “soft-power”).

(Also, don’t miss Korean Robert Smith at 24:00.)

“It’s dangerous to be an artist. That’s what we talk about in Naked Lunch — and it’s dangerous on many different levels. Politically it can be dangerous, but psychologically it can be quite dangerous too. You make yourself very vulnerable. You put yourself out there and of course you open yourself up to criticism and attack. And so you have to be strong if you’re going to make movies. But once you accept that movies can come from anywhere, that a movie can come from a dream or a conversation or a newspaper article, or it could be based on real people, you can expand that and say it could come from a work of art that someone has already done. It could be a play, it could be a novel, it could be a remake of another movie, and of course I’ve done all those things, and in each case the satisfaction comes from making a good movie; not from where the movie comes from. I don’t have to question it if I find the story interesting.”

Winter is not a season you associate with a port and beach town like Busan, but it was still relatively active for the Lunar New Year.

These eels weren’t too happy about the situation.

One of the bonuses about South Korea is that you’re never far from some sort of hot food.  Here’s, it’s twigim, the generic term for deep-fried snacks (similar to what the Japanese would call tempura).  It’s just about the least healthy type of Korean food in a cuisine that’s relatively low in fat.

There’s plenty of fresh (often still living) seafood, everywhere.  This is Busan, of course.

Yeah, I’m the kind of guy who could watch stuff like this all day.