Monday Koreafarts

Where to begin... where to begin...

How about with the stick-a-red-hot-poker-in-their-asshole antics of Kevin at IA? Kevin's rant about obnoxious adjummas who stare at-- and even rummage around in-- his shopping cart had me busting a gut. Kevin also lauds the perfect sandwich, goes into the question of America's influence on the South Korean political consciousness, and begs us not to allow Satan to cling to our genitals.

swinging safely from my balls
Satan laughs, Satan laughs
spraying dung upon the walls
Satan laughs, Satan laughs

scroties swing like a trapeze
Satan laughs, Satan laughs
powered by an anal breeze
Satan laughs, Satan laughs

Joel writes and speaks awesome and enviable Korean (give me your secret NOW-- no, lemme guess: it's that "get a Korean girlfriend" technique I keep hearing about), but he, too, knows what it means to be Whitey in Korea. And no matter how good your Korean gets, you will always be Whitey. I'll join the Marmot in praising Joel's photo entries. Joel's in Gunsan, like Andi.

The Marmot responds to IA Kevin's post here. Be sure to read the comments thread.

The Vulture tosses out a few links (gracias) and gives us the heads-up about another potential bloggers' night at his place or Drambuie's.

Do we let sleeping blogs lie? I'm beginning to think Mike's entrepreneurial efforts have turned into a quagmire, and now I'm losing hope that he'll ever return to his blog. Mike, hand your business aspirations over to the UN; they'll take care of everything. Get back to your blog, dammit.

The left-leaning Uri Party is in power, and so troop deployment to Iraq is once again thrown into question. See Oranckay for details here.

The Infidel blogs about his weekend in Seoul. He also comments on the IA/Marmot debate about American influence on SK voters.

The Yangban's been providing excellent election coverage and commentary. We're in the fallout ("what's next?") stage, and that's why the Yangban's wondering whether we might not see the political landscape simplify itself into three major parties. The Yangban's post on regionalism in Korean voting contains a graphic that shows how the leftists are literally on the left side of the map while the rightists are literally on the right. Very strange.

The KimcheeGI continues his reign of terror with another massive blog barrage. Check out his link buffet, for starters. His post "Temporary Furlough" gives us a clue as to why his blogging has been sparse of late. Move upward on Charlie's blog and you'll see a great post on the closing of an American firing range at Maehyang-ni. I was intrigued (and hopeful) to read about NK defectors who are starting their own radio broadcast, though without much SK help (and isn't that typical?).

Speaking of NK defectors getting shafted by SK, check out Rathbone Press on the subject. Very angry but very true, this post. The Chinese have shot NK defectors who were only looking for freedom, something SK could provide them, but will SK citizens get out in the thousands and demonstrate against the injustice of these killings? Fuck, no. The North are our harmless brothers! Never mind that we're allowing our harmless brothers to be killed by the Chinese, who are also harmless even if the Tibetans and Taiwanese don't think so!

I think SK gives NK a pass too much of the time. The public here is almost totally enslaved to the poisonous "one people" nonsense. As I've said before, NK's fucking government has made the "one people" meme into little more than a pious myth. The culture up north has changed too much. Where's the religion? Where are the family values? Where's the freedom and (relative) pluralism? Perhaps the Koreas can be one again, but as a practical reality, there's no oneness here right now. Cut the shit, folks. You're not one people.

Rathbone's also got an interesting article on a Russo-Korean footballer.

Jeff offers his own blog roundup and gives us some odds and ends.

Andi has some heartfelt thoughts on evanescence. Her followup clues us in on what is priceless.

Polymath has been getting back into the American groove with his Missus. He seems to be teetering on the edge of becoming something other than a Koreablogger; I asked him whether I should move him to another part of my blogroll, but he's advised me to wait on that a bit. Meantime, we'll note his sharp fisking of a sappily religious shotgun email he received.

Your resident Jedi python waxes rhapsodic about sandwiches, takes pics of obnoxious (and oh-so-American) SUVs, and gives us a peek at his Lebensraum (does anyone remember the Lebensraum moment with Kirk and General Chang in "Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country"?).

Neil Barker has a good book recommendation and shows us some pics from Children's Grand Park.

NK Zone (that new banner's way too big!) posts an evasive and unrevealing interview with a SK government official about SK's North Korea policy, now that elections are over.

The kind of thing you'd like to hear more about: a program to help disadvantaged youth over at Camp Page (courtesy Warrior News).

And now, some Hominid stankiness:

I'm off from SWU classes this week because the ladies have midterm exams-- all campus classes are cancelled, which means I'm teaching only my private classes through Friday (with Wednesday being totally free). I spent the day doing laundry and got pissed off when my formerly-trusty metal clothes rack collapsed under the weight of five wet shirts. Lessons learned, I guess: don't tax the cheap and crappy products too much, or you'll get burned.

Aside from that, I had a fun hour with Min-sung in the early evening, trying to figure out a wooden puzzle that was a 3D version of Tetris: in the end, you're supposed to build a large compound cube composed of 27 smaller cubes (i.e., a 3 x 3 x 3 arrangement), but the smaller cubes are fused into weird Tetris shapes, 3 or 4 cubes apiece, so you can't simply stack the little cubes to make one big cube. Instead, you have to figure out how to thread the cubes around and through each other. This would be an easy puzzle for my buddy who's an engineer, but Min-sung and I spent a good 40 minutes figuring the damn thing out. Once we got it (and it did take a cooperative effort), Min-sung painstakingly memorized the configuration, then we did drills to see how fast he could assemble the cube. His worst time was 22 seconds; his best time was half that at 11 seconds. His average was somewhere around 15 seconds. He's planning on shocking his math teacher tomorrow with his speed (yes, this cube was math homework). Min-sung's a nut.

In other news: I saw "The Passion of the Christ" on Sunday evening, and am drafting a long-ass essay on the subject, which will appear on Wednesday.

OK, I need to take a shit. Have fun.

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