unpublished

I had made several attempts to publish a definition of "Grexit" over at UrbanDictionary.com. The idea is that you write up a definition and submit it. Your definition is reviewed by a panel of unseen peers who vote your definition up or down, following whatever mysterious criteria they follow. If your definition is published or rejected, you receive an email with the happy or sad news. If it's happy news, your definition becomes part of the canon.

I tried submitting four different definitions; three were rejected, and one was published. I received my third and final rejection just today, and it was for a definition that I had crafted according to the advice that Urban Dictionary had given me regarding what the judges normally liked. Don't be too scholarly or pedantic was one piece of advice. Be funny was another. Don't go on and on was a third counsel. Strangely enough, the definition that got through the gauntlet was one of my more pedantic ones. My fourth attempt, the humorous one, didn't make the cut, which means the judgment criteria remain as mysterious as ever, and Urban Dictionary's advice on how to succeed is not to be trusted.

Anyway, for your entertainment, here's the failed-but-humorous dictionary entry for "Grexit":

GREXIT

\grɛgzɪt\ (n.)

A combination of "Greek" and "exit." Popularized late spring/early summer 2015. Refers to Greece's possible exit from the eurozone. Imagine it this way: if the eurozone is a butt and Greece is a turd, then the turd leaving the butt is a Grexit. Per this analogy, a turd can't be easily reinserted into a butt, and by the same token, if Greece left the eurozone, it would be hard for it to go back in.

While masturbating furiously, Gerald fantasized that the Grexit would be only the beginning: after Greece was gone, Spain and Portugal would leave the eurozone, and pretty soon the entire zone would collapse, with Europe going back to francs, pesos, lire, and Deutsche Mark again. Yeah.

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it's not all triumphs chez Kevin

My Korean buddy JW, having lived four years in India with his family, came back to Korea this past February. He had changed somewhat; India had changed him. His little kids had spent much of their lives in India, so they both spoke English—the older son to a greater degree than the younger daughter. JW's wife, BH (not Big Hominid), loaded me up with goodies after I had visited her home and cooked for the family. Among the goodies were two packages of Indian powder, one of which I decided to use Saturday night to make dinner. As you see in the photo below, the package called for paneer, a firm but crumbly Indian cheese that, as I mentioned in a previous post, can be made at home.

Devout Hindus will have nothing to do with the flesh of the cow, but they have no qualms about using milk: the Hindu religious diet isn't the same as a vegan regime. The powder package called for the addition of butter, milk, oil, and tomato puree. I bought the necessary reagents at the local grocery, pan-fried my halloumi, and put the whole thing together:


What you see above doesn't look much like what's shown on the package. My paneer makhanwala preparation was brown, not red, and although the pan-fried halloumi looked like paneer, it really wasn't. I suspect the dish would have been a lot better had I used actual paneer instead of halloumi, and had I added vegetables along with some chicken. The sauce turned out to be surprisingly bland; I dumped in a mess of sriracha to add some spice, and thought about eating some oi-kimchi along with it, but I was too lazy to fetch the oi-kimchi from out of the fridge. Conclusion: halloumi is an awesome cheese, but it's no substitute for paneer. I've learned my lesson.


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travelogues

1. Charles has put up some photos from his recent trip to Europe—a trip that combined vacation-y sightseeing with the serious business of attending and presenting at conferences. Note that, to view Charles's photos, you need to use your right/left arrows on your keyboard, i.e., scroll sideways. It took me a while to figure that out: I kept trying to scroll up and down, the way normal people do. Ahem. Cough. Harrumph.

2. Jeff Hodges is trapped somewhere in the wilds of Arkansas; he's still blogging, though, and rather amusingly. Give his site a visit and just keep on scrolling down.


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getting to know halloumi

Halloumi is not the name of Hillary Clinton's embattled assistant: it's the name of a type of Middle Eastern cheese that has an amusing property: you can cut a slice of it, flop that slice into a frying pan, then fry the hell out of it without the cheese's ever losing its shape. The Internet is full of porn-style shots of golden-fried halloumi. Take a look.

My friend Charles had mentioned halloumi once, long ago, immediately noting its fry-friendly properties, but it wasn't until today that I actually went out to the local Costco and bought myself a hunk. A large, loaf-like cylinder of halloumi costs about W18,000. It comes wrapped in a plastic seal that's tight, but which is still loose enough to contain a small amount of liquidy whey to preserve the cheese. When I palpated the still-wrapped halloumi with my thumb, it felt firm to the touch—more resistant than your typical mozzarella, but not as hard as, say, a Gruyère (which I also couldn't help buying today: it's my favorite cheese, after all).

When I got home, I cut open the wrapping without preamble, drained most of the whey, and placed the log of cheese onto a plate that I'd covered with a paper towel. I lifted the cheese off the towel, placed it reverently onto a different plate and, with mounting excitement, I cut off a half-inch-thick slice, mumbling that this, friends, was a true "cheese steak." I wanted to try the cheese in its pristine state first, so I broke a piece off, noting its robust texture, then popped the cheese into my mouth and chewed.

Almost immediately, the cheese squelched noisily under the pressure of my teeth, making a scaled-down version of the sound one might hear when a window washer drags his squeegee across the vitrine. At that same moment, the thought came to me: poutine! Halloumi would be perfect for making poutine! Pretty much all cheeses come from pressed and molded milk curds; the cheese used in Canadian poutine (humorously and/or affectionately known as Canada's national dish: fries and curds slathered in gravy) tends to be chewy, rubbery, and squeaky, just like this halloumi.

My second thought was that the time had come to fry this bastard up. I cut a second slice from the sacred loaf, fired up my frying pan, and dropped the halloumi onto it once the pan had gotten hot. There was an immediate sizzle; more whey bled out of the rubbery curd, caramelizing in the intense heat of the frying process. It didn't take long for the cheese to start browning; I browned both sides, then browned the edges, lowering the heat as I did so to allow the inside of the steak-sized slice to heat up before the outside burned too badly. By the time I finished, I had a perfectly golden-brown slice of halloumi heaven. I transferred it to a plate, shot the photo you see above, then drizzled the slice with honey and took another shot:


Halloumi has the bizarre trait of not looking like itself: it always reminds the observer of something else. To me, when I see the photos I took, the cheese reminds me of fried tofu, or French toast, or even broiled feta. The cheese's flavor is mild and slightly salty; the main reason why I bought it was to use it as a paneer surrogate: my Korean buddy JW, who had lived in India for four years, gave me a couple packages of Indian seasoning, including one meant to be used with paneer, an Indian cheese that can be made at home if one has the time and the equipment. I'm impatient to make this dish now.

So along with experiencing the glory that is bánh mì, I now know a lot about halloumi. My brother David suggested frying some up, then slathering it with apricot jam, as I've seen done with small wheels of brie as an hors d'oeuvre. Online, there are thousands of halloumi recipes, so I imagine the sky's the limit with this interesting, versatile cheese.


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depressing

The first major GOP debate to help determine the Republican nominee for president has come and gone. I didn't see the debate, and I probably wouldn't have wanted to watch it, anyway. I have, however, been desultorily reading both lefty and righty commentary on the debate, noting the de rigueur gap in perception. It's that very gap that I'd like to point out now. On the left, the New York Times, in an editorial by Frank Bruni, gushed that the Fox News moderators of the debate did a splendid job of grilling the candidates, keeping them off-balance by bringing up their flaws and inconsistencies. Later on, Bruni wrote:

And the questions that the moderators asked weren’t just discomfiting, humiliating ones. They were the right ones, starting with a brilliant opener: Was there any candidate who was unwilling to pledge support to the eventual Republican nominee and swear off a third-party run?

Trump alone wouldn’t make those promises, even though the moderator who asked that question, Bret Baier, pointed out that such a third-party run would likely hand the presidency to the Democratic nominee.

And thus, in the first minute of the debate, Trump was undressed and unmasked, and he stood there as the unprincipled, naked egomaniac that he is. He never quite recovered. His admission of political infidelity was the prism through which all of his subsequent bluster had to be viewed.

So Bruni's view is that Trump "never quite recovered" after failing to promise not to go rogue as a third-party candidate. But according to the righty hoi polloi, who won the debate? Drudge ran a poll, and here are the results as of this writing:


Assuming the poll's voters are mostly conservatives (and, who knows? the voters might all be Democrat pranksters!), the righty perception was that Trump trumped them all. A majority of poll voters—52 percent—saw Trump as the winner.

I'm at a loss to explain this. Intermittently humorous conservative commenter Andrew Klavan is no fan of Trump. "When I see Republicans following after Donald Trump, I despair. I mean, it really makes me upset, you know," he opined on a recent video. "This guy—he has been pro-abortion; now he says he's anti-abortion. He's pro-amnesty—he's always been pro-amnesty; he's pro-government health care—he believes there should be universal health care; he's a big Hillary Cl—he's given over a hundred thousand dollars to the Clinton Foundation; he supported Democrat candidates all over the place; and Republicans are going, 'Yeah! He said something nasty about Mexicans! I'm gonna vote for him!' That's depressing."

Klavan may be touching on a topic near and dear to the dark, cynical heart of people like Canadian conservative MJ Sheppard: the topic of the stupidity of the American voter. It's not just Sheppard, either: other bloggers in my circuit, like Malcolm Pollack, have been known to quote HL Mencken's line that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." We elect the leaders we deserve, and we deserve the leaders that we elect.

Donald Trump is our dildo in the ass, and some of us seem determined to shove that sucker as far up as possible.


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"Moneyball": review

Let's cut to the chase: I liked "Moneyball," but I didn't love it. Even without knowing the details of the true story—and the book about the true story—on which the movie was based, I could predict the movie's general arc and major beats with ease. The biggest problem with "Moneyball" is that its screenplay is co-written by Aaron Sorkin, who is perhaps best known for his work on TV's "The West Wing." Sorkin is a fine writer of dialogue, but no matter what project it is that he's working on, he tends to have his characters interact with each other the same way. The dynamic between "Moneyball" principals Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill has obvious parallels to interactions between Martin Sheen and either Dulé Hill or Richard Schiff on "The West Wing." Sorkin's fingerprints are all over "Moneyball," and that fact, along with the very telegraphed plot arc, means that I can see the puppet strings—never a good thing when you're a mature movie watcher. Put simply: "Moneyball" lacks suspense.

The story is about Billy Beane (Pitt), a former pro-baseball player and now general manager of the Oakland Athletics (a.k.a. the Oakland A's). The Athletics aren't as rich as teams like the Yankees; their performance in the Major League has been flaccid, and their best players are constantly being plucked by bigger, better teams that can offer enormously high-paying contracts to the players they're hunting for. Beane's round-table council of hoary old men must struggle with picking new players while facing the harsh reality of a limited budget. Year after year, the selection process works the same way, and Beane is now sick of the results. Beane meets Peter Brand (Hill, playing a fictional character); Brand is an adherent of the statistics-based "sabermetric" theories of Bill James: instead of using the old, supposedly "intuitive" ways of selecting baseball players for a team, Brand advocates gathering people based on their stats. This method, when adopted by Beane, produces unorthodox, counterintuitive, and thoroughly unpleasant results that upset the hoary old men in the conference room as well as the Athletics' manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is as old-school as the geriatric round table. But something happens after the A's experience a losing streak: they suddenly click onto a winning streak that goes on for twenty games, propelling them into the championship, and Beane's heretofore disparaged sabermetric method becomes the talk of Major League baseball.

"Moneyball" is different from other sports movies in that its point-of-view characters aren't the players: they're the management. There's also a great deal more theory and a lot less of your boilerplate, in-the-trenches action. This isn't a typical sports movie, then: it's more of a meta-sports movie, focusing on the rarefied realm of stats and what they imply about the actual nature of baseball as a game.

But if "Moneyball" holds no suspense for a baseball-indifferent person like me, it'll be even less suspenseful for any baseball enthusiast who knows anything about the Oakland Athletics' early-2000s history, and about Billy Beane in particular. I thought the movie was well acted; critics were right to highlight Brad Pitt's handling of the role of Beane. Jonah Hill, here a proxy for Dulé Hill, also does decent work as Peter Brand. Philip Seymour Hoffman easily incarnates a pudgy contrarian manager, and some of the supporting cast, like Chris Pratt, were a welcome sight. Kerris Dorsey plays Beane's daughter Casey with soulful tenderness. Spike Jonze makes a surprise cameo as the new husband of Sharon Beane (Robin Wright), Billy's ex-wife.

Overall, "Moneyball" was watchable—once. It's not a movie I'd be in any hurry to see again. I don't know what the critics were raving about, given the easily foreseeable plot and the utter lack of suspense. Perhaps the reviewers were concentrating purely on the quality of the acting, which was undeniably good, but not good enough to make this a gripping tale.


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two cherries popped today

I have a KMA gig in Ulsan next week, so I had to swing by the Yeouido office to pick up my train tickets (KMA is footing the bill) and hotel-reservation information. After visiting the office, I cabbed over to Itaewon to meet my buddy Tom, who was interested in hitting a few different shops, including some purveyors of Western herbs and spices that I'm going to need to start making homemade Italian and American breakfast sausage. Tom also wanted to hand off the armpit deodorant he had bought for me while he'd been vacationing in the Philippines with his wife and son. We did the handoff, like a drug deal, in a Starbucks.

One of our first stops was at a cell-phone shop because I had a question about what to do when my current two-year contract expires: does my contract renew itself automatically, or do I have to actually visit an office and do the renewal paperwork face-to-face? As it turned out, "face-to-face" was the correct answer, at least according to the woman I spoke with. Tom told me that he also needed to know what was going to happen, so I got an answer for both of us.

We were supposed to visit a particular shop called High Street Market, which carried all sorts of hard-to-find goodies that would be common in the West. For me and my future sausages, this meant finding things like sage, fennel seeds, and other herbs, spices, and seasonings. I was also curious as to whether the place would be stocking dill weed and cumin. Tom had never been to High Street before, and neither had I, so we both popped our High Street cherries the moment we walked into the store. I ran down my checklist, and happily, High Street had everything in stock. The only minus was that most of the magic flakes and powders that I wanted were being sold in tiny plastic bottles that cost W3,500 each.

Before Tom and I got to High Street, however, we stopped at another "international" market that was situated on Itaewon's infamous Hooker Hill. That place, run by South Asians, carried a wide variety of herbs and spices, but most of them skewed Indian. I noted with interest that, at this place, a large bag of jasmine rice cost W18,000, but a similarly sized bag of so-called "Thai rice" (I'm sure there has to be a more specific term than that) was only W7,500—a good value even by the standards of Korean sticky rice which, truth be told, isn't that cheap.

After meeting at Starbucks, hitting the South Asian place, visiting the cell-phone lady, and shopping at High Street, we trundled over to a sandwich shop called Rye Post. Tom had recommended this place based on good reports from some of his other friends and acquaintances. I was a bit on my guard; Tom and Charles are convinced that Itaewon, as a food destination, has markedly improved over the years, but I'm still getting over an instinctive mistrust of Itaewon in general. All the same, I trusted Tom, if not Itaewon, so we stepped into Rye Post to nab some sandwiches.

The clipboard menu was simply laid out, which was a plus. Our server (does anyone say "waitress" anymore?), who also doubled as our food runner, was bright and cute, and she cooed at my Korean skills. I decided not to remark that she needed to raise her expectations of foreigners: many Koreans are startled when a foreigner speaks to them in Korean precisely because the Koreans' expectations are so low. Unfortunately, many foreigners still confirm those low expectations, making it harder for the rest of us to convince Koreans that, yes, Korean-speaking expats do exist outside of TV.

And this is where I popped my bánh mì cherry. I saw the Franco-Vietnamese fusion sandwich on the menu, and I wavered between that and the Cubano, neither of which I had ever tried before. I elected to go with the bánh mì, thinking to myself that, if it was good, I'd come back and try the Cubano later.

Tom refuses to eat vegetables, so he ordered what was essentially a nude cheesesteak, and we got the cheesesteak waffle fries to share—again, without veggies, on Tom's insistence. Alas, when the fries came out, they had been liberally sprinkled with minced green onion. Tom shrugged and used a tiny plastic fork to scoop out the onions before digging into the fries.

Bad points about my sandwich and the restaurant's service first: the drinks were canned, which meant no free refills—a major minus. My bánh mì was rather small, and it wasn't made with a proper French baguette. Like other hot sandwiches I've had in Itaewon, it had obviously been run through a panini press. I don't know what the Korean obsession with panini presses is all about, but it's ruining some otherwise decent sandwiches (I wrote a bit about this last year: my boss had a Reuben that had also been run through a panini press).

That was it as far the negatives went. As I mentioned before, we had good, friendly, cute service from our server. My bánh mì, though disappointingly small, was nevertheless rib-sticking; once I supplemented the sandwich with several steak-y waffle chips, I was mostly satisfied with my meal. I did immediately begin thinking of ways to improve upon the bánh mì I'd received, but the sandwich was very tasty on its own terms, despite not having been made with a proper baguette. Tom's sandwich looked a bit meager, but he's much smaller than I am, so I'm going to assume his meal filled him up more than mine filled me. The true surprise, though, was the side: those cheesesteak waffle fries were amazing—easily better, in terms of taste and price—than the kimchi fries sold at Vatos Urban Tacos up the street.

Here are three pics of our meal: the two sandwiches and those miraculous, sainted fries. Verdict: I'll definitely be going back to Rye Post again, and next time I'll be ordering the Cuban. Or maybe two, if that sandwich is similar in size to today's bánh mì. Click on the second image to enlarge it. Enlarge it further, after clicking, by right-clicking and doing an "open in new tab" command. Enjoy the visuals.

First up, those fries:

Click the following image of my bánh mì to enlarge:

Tom's scrawny sandwich:


All in all, today was an excellent reconnaissance day for me. I'll be hitting High Street again sometime soon, and will also very likely invade Rye Post one more time to try out their Cubano. Maybe I'll order a Cubano and bánh mì at the same time. Mmmmm.


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interspecies relations

In the esprit taquin of the old Alien Loves Predator cartoons:

image found here




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hiring news

A joyous development: I may be hired in as little as a week or two, depending on when the Golden Goose's wayward CEO comes back from vacation. According to my immediate boss, all the paperwork for me is done, and the only thing left is for the CEO to drag his big, fat, hairy John Hancock across the page, leaving a glistening, pearlescent signature. I still haven't seen my contract, though, so there's that issue. I had once asked how much of a voice I would have in drawing up my own contract, and I never got a straight answer. I suspect that the contract will be boilerplate, and what will matter more is what actually happens in the office, not an abstract set of terms and conditions. That's how it often works with contracts in Korea. We'll see. I hope the terms won't look too crazy; there's even a chance, according to scuttlebutt, that I might end up signing a teacher's contract, even though I won't be going anywhere near a classroom. If that's the case, the contract will be effectively meaningless because it'll be irrelevant to what I'm actually going to be doing at the company.

Today, I found out something interesting. The Golden Goose doesn't just run language schools and a publishing company: it also runs two upscale restaurants and a norae-bang (literally a "singing room," which is mostly like karaoke). I laughed out loud when my boss mentioned this fact, then I told him I had to visit both restaurants. He said he'd take me to them for lunch whenever I liked. What a wacky company, eh?

And in the spirit of that wackiness—as I already mentioned privately to Charles—I'm officially renaming the Golden Goose. No longer will it be the Golden Goose on this blog! Given the wackiness and occasional dysfunction inherent in this company, as in so many others, I hereby re-dub my future full-time place of work Arkham, after the well-known insane asylum in Batman's Gotham City. Let the follies commence!


ADDENDUM: Let's think out loud about the timing of all this.

1. I'm days away from USCIS being finished with processing my forms and—I hope—sending my brother David the documents I'd requested. Assuming everything is done by next Tuesday, August 11, it'll take about three days for the paperwork to reach my brother. David receives the paperwork on the 14th; he emails the PDF documents to me; I print them out and also burn a CD here instead of asking him to mail the CD to me (this was David's suggestion just a few minutes ago). I'm ready to go that very weekend.

2. With the paperwork ready to go by the 15th, I can storm Immigration on Monday, August 17th, filling out an application that morning and starting the three-week clock. Now, when Korean Immigration says "three weeks to process" for a visa, they mean three actual calendar weeks, i.e., 21 days, not 21 business days, which is how the stupid US government reckons processing time. So if I turn in my paperwork on August 17 (I might have to take the morning off from Arkham, then work late), then 17 + 21 = 38, i.e., September 7. I could have my F-4 visa as early as September 7, which would leave me giddier than Scrooge on Christmas morn.

3. Another issue is how to coordinate moving with hiring. If I'm hired too early, I won't be able to move out of Goyang until after I've dealt with Goyang's Immigration Office. (I really don't want to face Mokdong Immigration.) That's going to mean commuting five hours a day, back and forth between southeastern Seoul and Goyang City, way to the northwest, possibly for a couple of weeks. I think the perfect date to be hired would be after August 20—sometime during the final ten or eleven days of August.

4. The date I get hired—or, more precisely, the start date of my contract—affects when I move, so I need to consider when I'm going to have to start prepping. Right now, I think the safest thing to do is to start prepping right away. Luckily for me, the huge apartment complex right across the street from me has various designated garbage-dumping areas, many of which contain a neverending supply of large cardboard boxes. Tant mieux pour moi. I had my eye on those boxes the very day I moved to Goyang, knowing that this day would come.

Several things are going to happen all at once before things get calm again. It's a bit like being a juggler who has nothing to do for long periods, until suddenly twenty of his fellow performers all simultaneously decide to toss him objects to juggle. Fun but scary.

As always, life in Korea is never boring.


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the climb

Ever since I got my control number from USCIS to track the progress of my paperwork, I've been checking that progress faithfully, marking everything on a slip of paper that I've taped to the side of my laptop's screen.

The term "progress" refers to one's paperwork's position in the queue, not to how many pages of one's paperwork have been combed through. With that in mind, then: one's inquiry results will take the form of "XXXX of XXXX," where the first "XXXX" refers to how far down one is from the top, and the second "XXXX" refers to how many applications are in the queue. The second number is always changing, and for our purposes, it's irrelevant. What matters is how far one's paperwork is from the Number 1 position. I'm happy to say that I've been climbing fairly steadily. Here's what my progress looks like according to my notes:

7/20/15: 1346 of 1645
7/22/15: 1344 of 1669 (up 2 places in the queue)
7/24/15: 1266 of 1678 (up 78 places)
7/29/15: 1050 of 1764 (up 216 places)
7/31/15: 858 of 1665 (up 192 places)
8/3/15: 625 of 1547 (up 233 places)

Progress seems to be accelerating, so I'm hoping my paperwork gets done in a few more business days—perhaps as early as August 10. If I can get Mom's naturalization papers sent to me by August 17 or so, I can have my F-4 visa by early to mid-September—almost a month earlier than the currently anticipated October date.

Fingers and tentacles crossed.


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"Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation": review

[No major spoilers in this review. Read without fear.]

Fresh from watching "Kingsman" (reviewed here), I just saw "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation" this past Sunday. It occurred to me, while watching "Rogue Nation," that the Impossible Mission Force, or IMF, is analogous to Kingsman in that both are independent agencies that perform all manner of covert, espionage-related operations.* But once the IMF/Kingsman parallel arose in my head, I became confused by this film's implication that the IMF wasn't independent at all, but was in fact a sanctioned arm of the US government, thus making it subject to restrictions and even to dissolution.

"Rogue Nation" also shares a major trait with an old Bruce Lee film: "Enter the Dragon." What "Nation" and "Dragon" have in common is that there's no ticking time bomb driving the action: the main antagonist in "Nation" is a shadowy agency called the Syndicate, an "anti-IMF" as Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) puts it, led by rogue operative Solomon Lane (the extremely unpleasant-looking Sean Harris, whom you might remember as the unfortunate crewman who turns into a mutant zombie in "Prometheus"), but I don't think we ever find out what Lane's master plan is, aside from trying to access British funds to finance global terrorism. Unlike with super-antagonist Kurt Hendricks in the previous film (reviewed here), there's no immediate, obvious, and globally catastrophic threat to humanity. Basically, "Rogue Nation" is about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his attempt to root out and destroy the Syndicate, an organization whose existence even the CIA doubts.

Despite the lack of a ticking time bomb, though, "Rogue Nation" moves nimbly from action set piece to action set piece. Chris McQuarrie, who also directed Cruise in "Jack Reacher" (reviewed here), does a good job with pacing and visuals. While I wouldn't rate "Rogue Nation" as highly as the delirious ocular feast that was "Mad Max: Fury Road" (see review here), I'd say it manages to be pulse-pounding on its own terms. Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson as possibly rogue British agent Ilsa Faust is both a lively and a lovely addition to the cast; some critics have argued that she's playing a better version of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. I can see their point. As with the previous film, "Rogue Nation" ably shoehorns in the requisite expository dialogue to prevent us from being too confused by the plot, which keeps the audience in the game.

If you've seen the preview trailer for this movie, then you've seen the massive airplane stunt that occurs at the very beginning of the film. Cruise apparently really did get pulled 5,000 feet into the air to perform that stunt, and later on, he really did film his lung-bursting underwater scene in a single long take. (In the movie, suspense is created when Ethan Hunt is told he will have to hold his breath for three minutes while under water; in real life, Tom Cruise trained to hold his breath for six minutes, or so claims Wikipedia. While this piece of trivia tends to deflate the suspense of that scene in the film, it has the effect of bolstering my respect for Mr. Cruise's insane commitment to his craft.)

Two issues are worth discussing. First is the way the movie fleshes out the friendship between Ethan Hunt and Benji Dunn. By the time we reach the third reel, it's obvious that Ethan is willing to die alongside Benji in a gamble to save Benji's life. You couldn't ask for a more sincere expression of friendship than a willingness to die with your friend. That scene, plus much of the Ethan/Benji dialogue that came before it, serves to cement a relationship that had never been quite so fleshed out in any of the previous films (Pegg's Benji didn't become part of the cast until the third movie in the franchise). The second issue is how the movie handles Ethan himself. Although the narrative style is third-person omniscient, Ethan's teammates are given reason to believe that he might merely be chasing shadows: it could well be that the Syndicate doesn't exist, and that Ethan is just a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist piecing together random events and attributing them all to some sinister, underlying cause. As was the case in the previous film, the tension caused by this problem is most obvious between Ethan and William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, affably bug-eyed), with Brandt being the loudest skeptic in the room. The movie could have made more of Ethan's mental state by making the Syndicate even more shadowy, but it was still good to see the film casting some doubt on, and thereby humanizing, its hero.

There were also some scenes and plot points that didn't quite make sense to me, but I can't delve into those issues without heading into spoiler territory. It could also be that a second viewing might clear up some of my confusion, but I doubt I'll be seeing this movie again anytime soon. All in all, "Rogue Nation" was the summertime action movie that "Terminator Genisys" (review here) should have been. The plot was spare but just convoluted enough to keep us grown-ups interested; the action scenes were often amazing and impressive (and after not having fired a gun at all in the previous picture, Ethan Hunt was back to using firearms in this film); and while the film wasn't particularly profound, there was just enough character development to keep picky people like yours truly more or less happy.

Some final remarks: there's a screen capture of a moment from "Rogue Nation" that shows Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust shooting over Ethan Hunt's shoulder. When I first saw this picture, I thought, "Huh. It looks as though she's using Hunt as a shield." I was more right than I knew, and this action sequence is rather crucial to the film's climax. I won't examine the scene any further than that so as not to spoil the plot for you.

That said, "Rogue Nation" is great summer entertainment. See it before it leaves theaters.

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*The usual curmudgeons will note that the Mission Impossible series came first, so it would be more apropos to say that Kingsman is analogous to the IMF.

watch this space

Had a great time meeting up with a lady friend, watching "Mission Impossible," and eating an Italian-ish dinner. I'll have a review of the movie up very soon.


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Burger Bay and the Hongdae campus adventure

I met my two former Sookmyung students, Yeon-ji and Da-jeong (I've written about them before here), today at Hongdae-ipgu Station, right by Hongik University (abbreviated Hongdae in colloquial Korean, from Hongik Daehakgyo; ipgu means "entrance"). Da-jeong had told me about a place called Burger Bay, which served massive burgers. I met her in the small street next to Exit 9 of Hongdae-ipgu Station, then Yeon-ji joined us at the burger joint.

Here's a first look at Burger Bay. Click to enlarge:

Burger Bay is located on the second floor of the building it's in, but there's a street-level display with plastic models of the burgers that BB serves. I asked Da-jeong to pose beside them for scale; she did so gamely. Again, click to enlarge:

The place was empty when we came in despite the fact that it was lunchtime on a Saturday in Hongdae, the party/restaurant district—not the best sign. I kind of suspected something was up when I saw a Korean blog that talked about Burger Bay; the blog offered pictures, and the pictures were not very impressive: the burgers looked to be made mostly of bread, with only a stingy amount of meat inside the buns. Sadness.

Below is a pic of the bacon cheeseburger that we ordered. Big enough for three, or so it was claimed. To make serving the burger easier, it was cut into wedges, like a pizza. Also, as you see in the picture below, drinks were canned, so there were no free refills.

Another strike against Burger Bay, alas.

Below, I offer my hand for scale:

In the next photo, below, Da-jeong gets weird, and my finger gets in the way.

Click the next pic, below, to enlarge. I had attempted a close-up shot of the burger's cross section, but the result was an awful, unfocused mess. To see the photo even larger, after you do the initial enlargement, right-click the picture and "open in another tab." It'll be huge.

The burger wasn't bad, but it also wasn't great. I probably could have eaten the entire thing myself had I chosen to be a barbarian. The bun made the burger fluffy, which isn't the best adjective to associate with burgers. The bacon, too, was tough and not a bit crunchy. As Joe McPherson once observed, crispy bacon is nearly impossible to find in Korea unless you're willing to crisp it yourself.

With Hongik's campus so close by, I thought we should adjourn and traipse over to an on-campus art museum. Hongik is famous for its art and design majors, and the surrounding district long ago took on the freewheeling, unconventional flavor of the campus, morphing into a much-sought-after night spot and restaurant district. Sookmyung University students often told me that, instead of being loyal to their own campus, they would skip over to the Hongdae neighborhood on Friday and Saturday evenings when they wanted to party. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of the district, but it does have a lot of interesting—albeit overpriced and over-promising—restaurants.

So we walked onto Hongik University's campus. This was the first time, despite ten years in Korea, that I'd actually set foot on the campus grounds.

As it turned out, both of the on-campus museums were closed for prep: there'll be some sort of exhibition eventually, but not today. So we walked around campus and were rewarded with examples of student art in all sorts of random places. Here's a gutsy display:

Next to Club Viscera was this organ-like thing:

Swivel a bit to the left, and you've got people in pieces:

The bottom half of our art victim was off to the side:

This looked like some sort of Buddha head that had been turned to face away from onlookers. I was curious as to what sort of face it had:

My two young ladies showed me the way:

I dubbed this sculpture "The Metafinger":

Art was everywhere, really; there was even cast-off art—some sort of abortive attempt that seemed to be on its way to the garbage, which struck me as too bad:

Our hot, sweaty, humid path took us up some steep-but-short hiking trails, along which were these cairns, of the sort you might find while hiking a Korean mountain:

The ladies stopped at an exercise station to swing their legs on one of several utterly useless exercise machines whose only purpose was to engage you in some sort of oscillating or circular motion that did nothing to improve your health:

Finally, here's a shot of the massive threshold at the front of Hongik University's campus:

We walked about 6,000 steps in all, according to my pedometer. That's really not all that much, but Da-jeong pronounced herself finished. Yeon-ji, who is much more athletic, was ready to keep going. Unfortunately, I had to get back home to talk with my landlady about circuit-breaker problems, so after we passed through Hongdae's threshold and were back on the streets again, I hailed a cab, said goodbye and thank you, and hightailed it to Gwanghwamun, there to pick up my now-familiar 7119 bus. But before I forget: here's a link to a short video of a madly buzzing cicada. Yeon-ji commented on how noisy the campus was thanks to these fat insects, then she saw one sitting rather low on a tree trunk. When she pointed it out to me, I knew I had to video it.

In all, a nice time to spend with my ladies, and not a bad way to begin August. YJ and DJ want to get together to fête me on my birthday, which might be nice. We'll see whether that actually happens. Things are going to be mightily busy come the end of this hot, saturated month.

thinking ahead

According to this page, once I move into Daecheong Tower, which is located in the Songpa region of Seoul (Songpa-gu), I'll have to visit the Mokdong Immigration Office to complete my F-4 processing.

I hate Mokdong Immigration.

Some of my very worst encounters with the assiest of the ass-end of Korean bureaucracy have occurred at Mokdong Immigration. There's a dickhead who works there—been there for years—who used to have a gigantic, ugly mole on his cheek until he apparently had it lasered off. That guy is one of the most unpleasant bureaucrats I've ever had to deal with. He was an absolute choad to me during the 1990s, and the motherfucker still works at the same office. He epitomizes and incarnates all that is wrong with Mokdong.

I've already struck up a cordial relationship with the cute ladies at the Goyang City Immigration Office, not too far from where I live. They've already confirmed what documents I'll need to turn in to apply for an F-4 visa. My fear is that, if USCIS drags its feet and doesn't deliver my mother's naturalization document before I move out of Goyang on the 30th of August (and there's a chance I might move out sooner than that), I'll have to turn in my application at Mokdong. Will the freaks at Mokdong say that the same documents are required? Will they add even more strictures, requirements, and other sundry hurdles for me to heed and to jump through, or will they confirm what the nice ladies in Goyang told me?

Well, there's no use worrying, I suppose. My hiring date at the Golden Goose is out of my control, and so is the date on which I'll receive Mom's naturalization document. The timing is crucial to me, but I have no say in how the chips will fall.

Meanwhile, I do need to start thinking about boxing up my stuff. Hired or not, I'm moving out of my studio by the day before my birthday. And August begins tomorrow.


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my hidden posts are well hidden indeed

I like the system I developed for keeping my "frank" posts away from public scrutiny. The system works so well that, after 24 hours, my latest hidden post has received only four visits, and I'm pretty sure I know who at least three of those people are. Normally, when I post something here and announce the post on Twitter, I get ten or eleven visits right away, and this builds up to maybe 80 or 100-some visits before the post floats out of sight and out of mind. I don't think a single one of my "frank" posts has received over 30 visits. Now that's a filter, Poison Girls!

I'm off to Dongguk's Seoul campus to pick up a letter, and to visit Gwangjang Market to pick up some more US Army-style Metamucil.


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the "Bernie Sanders as Nazi" meme

It seems to have sprung up among conservatives both spontaneously and independently: the idea that Bernie Sanders is a "national socialist." The uncomfortable phrase comes from a teasing-out of Sanders's self-identification as a socialist and his nationalist fight to keep jobs within American borders.

On Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

BERNIE SANDERS ON IMMIGRATION: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. . . . It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.”

Plus:

If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.

So it’s okay to have socialism, but it can’t be international socialism, it has to be socialism in one nation. A sort of national socialism, I guess.

That was on July 29, 2015. Nine days earlier, Kevin D. Williamson, one of National Review's wittier, more lively writers, released a retread version of a July 6 article titled "Bernie's Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism." In it, we read:

...there’s not a lot of overtly Soviet iconography on display around the Bernieverse, but the word “socialism” is on a great many lips. Not Bernie’s lips, for heaven’s sake: The guy’s running for president. But Tara Monson, a young mother who has come out to the UAW hall to support her candidate, is pretty straightforward about her issues: “Socialism,” she says. “My husband’s been trying to get me to move to a socialist country for years — but now, maybe, we’ll get it here.” The socialist country she has in mind is Norway, which of course isn’t a socialist country at all: It’s an oil emirate. Monson is a classic American radical, which is to say, a wounded teenager in an adult’s body: Asked what drew her to socialism and Bernie, she says that she is “very atheist,” and that her Catholic parents were not accepting of this. She goes on to cite her “social views,” and by the time she gets around to the economic questions, she’s not Helle Thorning-Schmidt — she’s Pat Buchanan, complaining about “sending our jobs overseas.” L’Internationale, my patootie. This is national socialism.

[...]

In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics. The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative is central to his view of how the world works.

Mark Steyn, meanwhile, sees creeping Nazism everywhere (with thanks to Malcolm for the link).

What else were Germans doing in 1933? Well, on April 8th - one day after the passage of the Civil Service Restoration Act - the German Student Union announced the Säuberung - the cleansing, the purification - of German culture. That's book-burning to you and me. The Germans were a far more literate people than we are, so book-burning wouldn't get you very far today, although the cleansers and purifiers of our own time have gone quite a long way on that - to the point where a Los Angeles school teacher is in the fifth month of his suspension for reading his class a passage from Huckleberry Finn. But, as I said, we're not as literate as the Germans and we disseminate thought-crimes by other methods, like telly and movies and stand-up comedy.

So, for example, an ancient TV show called "The Dukes of Hazzard" has vanished from the rerun channels because the principal characters in the course of their adventures occasionally travel by motor vehicle and on the roof of said motor vehicle can be glimpsed a verboten emblem. They haven't yet burned all existing prints of the show, although I wouldn't entirely rule it out: the owner of the actual car is already painting the roof.

Meanwhile, apparently non-"lunatic" persons are discussing across the cable networks whether the motion picture Gone With The Wind should be banned from cinema and television screenings. Oh, don't worry, they won't burn all the prints. If you're a credentialed researcher researching a thesis on racism in 20th century racistly American racist culture, you'll be permitted to go to some vault in Sub-Basement Level 12 of the Smithsonian Museum of the Forbidden and arrange a screening.

So Steyn makes the case for a sort of ambient Nazism descending on the American cultural landscape. Meanwhile, Williamson and Reynolds seem to be implying that Bernie Sanders is bringing his own brand of National Socialism to American politics. What to make of all this? Time to run, or to fetch a gun?


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haven't done one of these in a while

You know what this means. You know where to find the post.

If you don't, email me.


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"Kick-Ass 2" and "Fury": a two-fer review

I want to make this quick because neither of these movies really deserves lengthy examination. Let's do "Kick-Ass 2" first.

"Kick-Ass 2"

"Kick-Ass 2" (2013) is director Matthew Vaughn's sequel to 2010's "Kick-Ass." It stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Dave Lizewski/Kick-Ass, Chlöe Grace Moretz as Mindy Macready/Hit Girl, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Chris D'Amico, now rebranded as The Motherfucker, the self-proclaimed World's First Supervillain, who goes around in his mother's S&M gear. The movie also stars Jim Carrey as Colonel Stars and Stripes, a former D'Amico mob enforcer turned born-again Christian who wears military gear and dispenses vigilante justice with a baseball bat, all while enjoining his partners in crime fighting not to use salty language. Stars and Stripes, inspired by Kick-Ass's original heroics, has founded a group called Justice Forever. The Motherfucker, meanwhile, still intent on avenging his father's death-by-bazooka in the previous film, creates a group of villains called The Toxic Megacunts. As should be obvious, Matthew Vaughn films aren't about subtlety.

Dave Lizewski is a high-school senior and Mindy Macready is a freshman. Dave is intent on becoming a true superhero, so he asks Mindy to train him. She does so, but her guardian, Marcus—a policeman friend of Mindy's late father—is wise to the fact that she's still living a double life as a crime fighter, and he demands that she stop and just become a normal teen. Mindy tries, and a major subplot of the movie deals with Mindy's difficulties in surviving the "Mean Girls" reality of American high school. So a major theme of the film, dealt with by both Dave and Mindy, is the eternal teen question of identity: who am I, exactly? Further complicating matters is that Dave is worried about what happens when a hero's identity is discovered—an issue that comes to a head when the police begin tracking down all the vigilantes, good and bad, and Dave's father goes to prison because he claims to be Kick-Ass to protect his son.

In terms of plot strands, the movie is a muddle, and it doesn't really tie up its loose ends all that well. The first "Kick-Ass" (reviewed here) was just as preposterous but more tightly written. The sequel also feels like a rehash of the first film in many ways, but there are some major differences, including the surprising tenderness with which Dave and Mindy's relationship is handled. In the end, the movie doesn't add up to much; it feels forced and stitched together, and the essential revenge plot doesn't add up to anything. Did the movie have a message or a moral? I honestly couldn't tell you.

Perhaps more interesting than the movie itself is some of the controversy surrounding it. Carrey reportedly disavowed the film after the Sandy Hook massacre, claiming that he had had a change of heart and could not condone the level of violence depicted in the story. Another controversy surrounds a certain almost-rape scene in the film, which is played for laughs. It wasn't one of Vaughn's better moments, and I ended up not laughing, although I can understand why others might find elements of the scene funny. As one online defender of the scene noted, the joke is on the rapist, not on the victim. That said, it was still a hard scene to take, perhaps because it felt as if it didn't belong in the movie. (Some have observed, though, that the scene is based on a similar, and even more violent, scene from the original comic-book version of the story—and in that scene, the girl does get raped.)

In all, I can't give this movie my recommendation. There were some good moments within it, and some genuine laughs, and the actors did yeoman's work... but Vaughn has proven, at least twice, that he's capable of making a much better film.

"Fury"

"Fury" (2014) stars Brad Pitt at the head of an ensemble cast. Pitt plays Sergeant Don "Wardaddy" Collier, head of a Sherman tank crew in 1945, near the end of World War II. (Fury is, by the way, the name of the tank at the heart of the film.) Also starring are Logan Lerman (you may remember him as Percy Jackson) as Norman "Machine" Ellison, the requisite ingénu, who doesn't earn his war name until near the end of the film; Shia LaBoeuf as Boyd "Bible" Swan, a scripture-quoting soldier; Michael Peña as "Gordo" Garcia; and Jon Bernthal (a.k.a. Shane Walsh on "The Walking Dead") as uncouth Southerner Grady Travis. Cold-eyed Jason Isaacs, sporting some sort of northeast-US accent, makes an appearance as Captain Waggoner, who gives Wardaddy his deadly missions.

It's tempting to call "Fury" an American answer to "Das Boot": the story follows a bunch of men in a tank, after all, much as "Das Boot" followed a bunch of men inside a U-boat. But "Das Boot" was, in large part, about the deadly effects of both war and claustrophobia on the human psyche; "Fury" lacks that shut-in feel, mainly because our heroes keep popping out of their tank to take in, and to fight in, the lovely German countryside.

Part of the story has to do with Machine's slow acceptance into the group: he's new to the squad, trained as a secretary, and knows nothing about tanks. In typical war-story fashion, he's the point-of-view character who functions as the audience's surrogate. Unfortunately, this is a painfully clichéd role, which already put me on my guard while watching this rather manipulative movie. Another part of the story has to do with Wardaddy's slow-burn rage against the SS ("Inglourious Basterds" crossover?)—a rage that causes him to make a fatal decision in the final third of the plot when his tank's track gets blown off by a German mine. The tank sits right at a crossroads in the countryside. Machine, who has been tasked with lookout duty, reports that a large German column is on its way to the crossroads. His description of the column leads Wardaddy to realize it's all SS, so instead of immediately sending his thoroughly outnumbered men to hide among the nearby trees to allow the German column to pass, he decides to dig in his heels and prepare to kill as many Nazis as he can before dying. (All of this, by the way, is shown in the movie's preview trailer.)

The rest of the story is a tribute, of sorts, to the Battle of the Alamo. Wardaddy's men have come too far to abandon him after he declares he'll fight the Germans alone, so all the men collectively choose to make this their last stand and to die together. The crossroads itself, along with Bible's constant evocation of the holy writ, adds on another layer of symbolism.

Other critics have noted that "Fury" is gritty and bloody. Strangely, I watched the movie and thought to myself that I've seen bloodier—2008's "Rambo," for instance (kind-of reviewed here; more earnestly reviewed here). That said, there was a lot about the film that just didn't work for me. If this was supposed to be some sort of morality tale about war, I don't think it came across with all that clear of a message. (Or maybe that was the point...?) I also thought the music was both overbearing and anachronistic: it didn't help with my suspension of disbelief. The script was too heavy-handed at moments, and the characters, while well portrayed, came off as stereotypes and not people. One draggy mealtime scene in the middle of the film was supposed to set us up for a lesson in the ultimate meaninglessness of anything and everything in a time of war, but it was too easy to anticipate that that scene was going to end disastrously.

I can't say that I came away liking "Fury." I suppose I liked parts of it, but as with "Kick-Ass 2," above, I didn't think the movie gelled into anything coherent.


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budae-jjigae: been a while, but here we are again

Behold:

What you see above is a bowl of the first budae-jjigae ever to be made at my current residence. It's been a long time since I celebrated with a serving of one of my all-time favorite Korean stews, and given that my time in Goyang is fast drawing to a close, I thought the moment had arrived to break out some goodness.

I'm never shy about quantity: the other night, when I came back to my place laden with a half-ton of goods from the local grocery, I discovered I had enough ingredients to make three huge pots of jjigae—enough to last over a week, possibly two, depending on how large of a bowl I decided to use. I'm now working my way through the whole thing; the above photo is of the second bowl of jjigae.

My buddy Tom loves budae-jjigae, but he also refuses to eat any vegetables. Most of Tom's friends wonder how he's managed to remain alive this long without veggies, but I've come to accept that his biology just happens to be radically different. So while making my budae batch, I got to thinking about what a Tom-friendly version of budae-jjigae might look like, and I think I've got it, even though it'd be expensive to make.

A Tom-approved budae-jjigae would start with regular budae. I'd make the entire thing the normal way, but right after that, I'd run the whole mess through a strainer because the point is to arrive at a budae-ful broth. With enough broth in the pot, I'd throw in another load of budae meats: ground beef, sliced hot dogs, and sliced spam. I'd also throw in some ddeok (rice cakes) and/or some chunks of potato (cooked potatoes aren't vegetables as far as Tom's palate is concerned), and/or a can of baked beans (ditto for the beans). If necessary—and I doubt it'd really be necessary—I'd add more spice and seasoning to the broth. Et voilà: budae-jjigae that's fit for a Tom.

This line of thinking led me to another: what if it were possible to deconstruct and recreate budae-jjigae as something en brochette? 부대 꼬치 budae ggochi: Budae on a stick! A Tom-friendly version of this would involve making a skewer that alternates grilled hunks of spam, hot dog, burger (I might use cubed steak instead, as it's easier to keep on a skewer), ddeok, and tofu. The sauce that I'd slather over the skewer would be a reduced, intensified version of regular budae-jjigae broth. Not sure whether I'd try sweetening such a sauce; that might go poorly. Or, since budae-jjigae is itself an East-West fusion dish, I might use some other kind of American sauce on the skewer.

Mental gears are turning...

FINAL NOTE: Atkins acolytes will be happy to note that budae-jjigae is both rib-sticking and extremely low in carbs as long as you leave out any beans, noodles (ramyeon is standard), rice cakes, and potatoes (potatoes aren't usually a part of budae-jjigae, anyway; I mentioned them, above, as a means of fortifying the soup for my buddy). According to one site, an entire bowl of budae has only 17 grams of carbs in it. If you're trying to keep your daily carb input under 30 grams, this isn't a bad dietary choice. At a guess, I'd say that most of the carbs come from the gochu-jang, i.e., the red-pepper paste that flavors the broth. This site shows that gochu-jang contains barley-malt powder, sweet-rice flour, and rice syrup—all very carby. But you don't need more than a couple large dollops of the paste to flavor an entire pot of stew, so the carbs get distributed throughout the entire thing. Don't focus too much on the question of what size "a bowl" is; focus instead on the fact that, however large a bowl might be, probably over 95% of that serving will not be carbs.


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on gastropods, French-ish desserts, and crazy motherfuckers

My buddy Charles and I met in downtown Seoul Monday evening with the specific purpose of eating golbaengi, i.e., large sea snails (I've blogged on golbaengi before: see here and here). I had told Charles about my desire to hit Golbaengi Row, which is on Eulji and Supyo Streets, not far from the Myeongdong Lotte Hotel. Charles made a counter-proposal, suggesting we hit a place he knew that served quality golbaengi. That sounded fine with me, so off we went to a place called Taeseong Golbaengi, a restaurant with a large, sedate interior that served snails along with a variety of other good-with-beer sorts of food. Charles suggested we go for the fried chicken along with the snails—a classic pairing, he said. Some Americans might raise their eyebrows at that claim, but when the food came—and it arrived quickly—it was indeed a good pairing. As Charles explained it, the idea would be to eat the snails, which were mixed in with a sweet, spicy chili sauce and veggies (muchim-style), then turn to the chicken once the taste of the sauce and the spiciness had built up. When the chicken got too greasy, we'd switch back to the snails, punctuating our meal with swallows of our beverage of choice (beer for Charles, Coke for yours truly). So that's how we ate.

Click the image below to enlarge.

Conversation involved mainly catching up on recent events; Charles had recently returned from a conference in Europe. Eastern Europe was apparently disgustingly hot, while Germany (Berlin and the city of Bochum) was cold and rainy. Earlier on, Charles had sent me some impressive photos of a delectable pizza that he and his wife tried in Zagreb, Croatia. I admit I was envious. We talked about family; we talked a little about how Charles would be prepping for the next semester whereas I would no longer be a teacher—ha ha!

From the snail palace, we walked over to Jongno Street, and from there to Gwanghwamun and into Samcheong-dong, the "couples' district." Samcheong-dong is pretty, tailor-made for dates, and when I mentioned this to Charles, he pronounced himself secure enough in his sexuality to walk with me into the land of manicured gift shops and twee tea shops. After failing to find my chocolatier, we found one of the few French-themed sit-down coffee-and-confection shops located on a back street: Deux Amis. Since I had paid for dinner, Charles insisted on buying drinks and dessert; I felt bad for him because the bill for our after-dinner refreshment was close to what I'd paid at the house of escargot. Conversation turned to architecture, especially to the types of structures that fascinated us, and to the sorts of facilities we'd like to have if we could design our own houses. Both of us agreed we'd want space—a hard thing to find in crowded Seoul. At some point, while we daintily worked our way through our poofy desserts, we got onto the topic of George RR Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire. Charles said he'd seen Season 1 (he really said "the first series," per the British terminology for a TV season) of the HBO version of the story, and while he had the books on Kindle, he hadn't begun reading them yet. I told him of my initial trouble getting into the books but reassured him that, once he gained momentum, he'd find them enjoyable.

A remark about dessert: I've come to realize that, even when Koreans closely simulate Western-style desserts, they often introduce a certain element of Koreanness to them. That was the case at Deux Amis: my dessert was supposed to be a blueberry tiramisu, but there was nothing tiramisu-ish about it. This isn't to say it was bad: I'm merely pointing out that, whatever the dessert was, it wasn't tiramisu. Charles's lemon tart was lemony and tartish; it very roughly matched some photos that we phone-Googled for comparison's sake, but even that dessert didn't seem completely European.

On our way back toward Gwanghwamun, we talked about the Harry Potter series, which Charles had finally completed. There was some movie-to-book comparison, some discussion of the rules of magic in JK Rowling's world, and a disagreement about the merits of the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which Charles felt contained too much "emo Harry." I told Charles the fifth book was my favorite one, despite all the emo, but that my favorite film in the filmic series was the sixth one ("Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince"), which was well scripted, well paced, and often hilarious to boot.

We walked over to where I planned to take the 7119 bus back to Goyang. Charles was going to go on to a subway station, but he decided to hang with me until my bus came.

And that's when it happened.

A short, stocky, agitated-looking Korean woman puffed her way into view and immediately headed toward us two foreigners.

"Do you speak Spanish?" she demanded in a tone that brooked no refusal or repudiation. I said no; Charles said no. She scowled and walked away.

Then she walked back, apparently incensed.

"Thirty percent of Americans can speak Spanish!" she shouted at us. She then pointed her finger in our faces, one at a time: "You're a liar, and you're a liar!" She stormed off. Later on, I heard her barking incoherently several yards away—maybe in English, maybe in Korean. I have no idea.

The expression "You're a liar!" is one that's apparently familiar to many Korean students of English. My own students would use that expression jokingly on me if they thought I had broken some promise. "Yo-wuh rye-yah!" I'd often hear. It wasn't surprising that a Korean might keep this phrase in reserve as a rhetorical weapon; what was surprising, though, was the out-of-the-blue nature of the encounter. I really had to wonder what in hell was going on in that crazy woman's fuzzy head. Why did she need to know whether we spoke Spanish? Why was she convinced that we did speak Spanish but were withholding this information from her? Crazy people fascinate me sometimes, and this woman was obviously fucking nuts.

One thing that most of us instinctively understand about crazy folks is that they're super-sensitive to their environment. Here's an example from my time as a college student in Washington, DC: there was a certain building on M Street with street-level recesses in which a homeless guy might tuck himself. In that spot, there'd often be a guy who was constantly mumbling to himself, but the moment I walked by, I'd be looped into his narrative: "And look at this motherfucker here," he'd screech whenever I passed in front of him. No one likes to be selected for unwanted public attention, and I'm pretty sure both Charles and I felt the same way about this very angry, very unhinged woman. Both of us just wanted to be left alone, not interrogated and catechized about our Spanish ability.

When the woman went away, Charles and I joked quietly about the incident, and when we'd said our goodbyes and I'd boarded the bus, I chewed on the encounter for a while, fantasizing about what I'd have done had I had pepper spray or a baseball bat and the balls to use either. I doubt the crowd at the bus stop would have applauded violence: first, a foreigner physically attacking a Korean is always going to generate sympathy for the Korean, no matter how fucked in the head that person might be. Second, the fact that the person is cuckoo will automatically evoke sympathy in some members of the crowd: we're supposed to be compassionate to those who've been touched in the head, aren't we?

But I part company with a lot of people when it comes to the insanity defense. My feeling is that we're all afflicted with mental forces that affect the level of our human freedom, but we can nevertheless exercise both freedom and rationality even with those compulsions swimming inside our heads. When a depressed guy is about to jump off a roof, you try reasoning with him—you don't harpoon him. On some practical level, most of us believe that rationality is still effective when dealing with people who are in extremis. The unpleasant lady we encountered on Monday night was obviously rational enough to try to formulate some sort of argument to justify her nutty belief that Charles and I must be able to speak Spanish: after all, thirty percent of Americans (about 100 million of us) can speak it. So my view is this: despite the laughable illogicality of the woman's claim, she tried to offer a rational justification for her anger. That, to my mind, makes her morally responsible for her own actions, which means I can call her a bitch.

Now, Charles and I are both far too civilized to punch a short, squat crazy woman in the face, but I wouldn't have blamed Charles if he had hauled off and decked her. She was damn annoying. Luckily, the encounter was brief. Charles joked that it had been a while since he'd had a run-in with a crazy person, so he was about due. He also noted that he was a magnet for crazy people, which made me wonder how often he normally expected to run into God's very, most specialest children.

That nonsense aside, it was a good evening of snails, chicken, dessert, and conversation. Our mutual friend Tom is still in the Philippines, but we're hoping to get together at Tom's place for a rooftop barbecue sometime in August.

So we've got that to look forward to. Which is nice.


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