As a dog owner (I have two, one an American cocker spaniel and the other an English cocker spaniel), I realize that I have the responsibility as a dog owner to make sure that I clean up after my dogs when I take them out for their daily walk. Part of my attire on these walks is a small tote bag that contains plastic gloves, toilet paper and plastic bags.
There are a lot of people, like me, who bring the material needed to take away the offending material and deposit it in the correct place, (usually I place it in the toilet and not the garbage because I know some people scavenge the trash looking for recyclables), but unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who don’t. I have seen the evidence of dog-walks on the streets almost every morning. What I really found amusing was a couple of mornings ago. A man was walking his large Jindo Dog and it suddenly had to take a “crap” and squatted down and laid a huge one - right in front of the police station’s door. The owner, naturally, didn’t clean it up, and because the police station (sub-station) is not manned at night - no one was there to correct this errant dog-owner. I wonder if the dog owner (and police) knows that there is a video camera in front of the station that tapes everything?
This was a big issue about a year ago when the Seoul government contemplated banning all pets from the parks - fortunately, the people with pets rose up in protest and swarmed the parks with their dogs almost defying the government and challenging them to issue tickets. Most of us know that tickets are generally ignored in the first place, but nonetheless, the government apparently changed their policy and now dogs are allowed but it is expected that the owner will clean up after them. This doesn’t seem to be happening.
Whenever I go to Yokohama, Japan, I am amazed at the tolerance and acceptance that the Japanese have for pet owners. There are several coffee and fast-food shops that have little hitching posts (like the old-West with the horse hitching posts) where people can tie their dogs and watch them from the comforts of the establishment. They even offer special treats for the dogs, like doggy-ice-cream. The price is extremely high, but I can imagine the dog owners, feeling somewhat guilty watching their beloved pooch sitting outside, give in to the emotional extortion and buy their dog an ice-cream.
Here is a story from the United States of a doggy bag robbery.
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31 Comments
One of my memories of Seoul was always having to dodge the dog turds in the alleys and roads in the neighborhood near the Hyatt where I lived. (To match that experience these days, I have to settle for skipping around Nulji and YoMo droppings in the Marmot’s hole) I can’t recall in three years ever seeing a non-foreign dog owner carrying a bag.
Wow, love the new design! Especially the drop-down menus.
Your new design looks good on Mozilla but there is a lot of overlap of posts and links in Explorer.
Do you notice Koreans being very careful and nervous around your dogs? I know cocker spaniels are small dogs but I have seen Koreans cross the street to avoid smaller ones.
My sister sent a picture of her baby cuddled up with a golden lab and my wife remarked, “She isn’t afraid at all”.
It’s going to be a long time before I win the “Let’s get a dog” arguement .
Dude! What the heck happened to the site?!
Your new design looks good on Mozilla but there is a lot of overlap of posts and links in Explorer.
Now why doesn’t that surprise me?
Thanks for the head’s up.
Very slick design
your new design looks seems to work okay in safari (macintosh browser), but the top of your bell is cut off.
yeah, while a lot of people just love dogs and use them as their surrogate children (surrogate children who will never embarrass mommy by failing the ??????, taking drugs, or marrying a ???????? or a foreigner) a lot of people in korea are nervous around dogs (and cats).
cats get a bad rap for having evil glow-in-the-dark eyes and reputations for stealing people’s souls, but small dogs inspire in some people a feeling that they’re observing a yapping rodent of some kind. if i saw a rodent the size of some of these dogs, i’d get the hell to the other side of the street, too.
the bigger dogs, well, i’m not going to hypothesize that some koreans fear the dogs will rise up and get revenge for years of oppression, but some people see the wisdom of having a large dog around the house as equal to raising a small bear. sure it might protect the house from ??????, but it might decide to eat you one day, too.
Off topic marmot, but this new design change is really kind of well “meh”. Minimalism is nice and all, and I really dig the bell artifact, but to be honest, the colour scheme is flat out bland. It’s really kind of boring to look at, and there is a tad too much white space. Perhaps a slightly off white colour or some lighter pastel? I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to design your blog, just offering some decorating tips
p.s. I love what you’ve done with the side links. It used to be a chore to scroll down to find what you are looking for but now they are in easy drop down menus!
wait… wait… i get it… this new look is part of an april fool’s joke, right?
(if i’m wrong, i’m going to be banished from this blog for sure)
I don’t like the way the comments look either…this is kind of like taking a step backwards. What was wrong with the previous design?
Ray — it’s, as they say, a work in progress. I still have to play with the fonts and work with the comments section, among other things. Besides, I’m also going to add a style changer so you can go back and forth between different styles — including the previous one — in case the current layout doesn’t float your boat.
New design is not bad, but I really like to see national flag(s) next to us. Mine should be the U.S. flag by now.
Anyway, even in America, where people seem to be more mannered in terms of the whole dog culture, I am often annoyed by ?????? on the lawn. I once picked it up with plastic bag. It felt so weird, because I didn’t wear gloves! Obviously, picking-up isn’t a pleasant experience, but seeing somebody else’s ????? in my mown lawn is very unpleasant.
what’s with the fruity lotus motiff? grow a pair, marmot!
(okay, i’m half thinking that the new design is an april fool’s joke, but i’m willing to buy that it could be a work in progress… actually the lotuses are a nice touch, as long as there’s a little more flavor to balance them)
Spiro Agnew
An interesting anagram for you, Nora.
Hi Mr. Marmot san,
I like your new layout complete with a Maitreya, but the poor thing doesn’t have an arm!- So it doesn’t look as if its contemplating like it usually is. -it looks a little upset-?
Come to think of it, the Maitreya is kind of similar to the Western scupture of a man in contemplation… hm-
Yep, its a nice touch (even w/o an arm!)
The new design looks very New York Times-ish. I thought I was on the wrong site for a second. I don’t think it looks “Marmot” enough. The last design was nice.
I have a cat, and I’ll never forget the look on my mother-in-law’s face when I brought it home. I had it in my backpack because I had no other way to carry it. She peered in, and when she saw it, she reacted as if it was a snake. “Oh mo mo mo mo.” The wife didn’t like it much the first day, either. But the little boy and I took to it right away. Now, about 6 months later, my wife says, “It’s almost like having another baby,” spoils it with fish treats, and even feeds some of the neighborhood strays.
My mother-in-law tolerates it when she comes over to baby-sit.
I’d like to have a dog, but my apartment isn’t big enough.
The people next door have a dog that they leave tied up on about a 3 foot chain all the time. I’ve never seen it taken for a walk. As a result, it barks all the time. This is quite handy when we’re waiting for a food delivery man. We might not hear the scooter, but we’ll hear the mutt yapping.
We had a dog before our kids were born (were able to find him a good home thankfully — he’s doing well now) and when I’d walk him in the local park, I couldn’t help but notice how much other gargage was lying around. I started using his poop bag to put regular garbage in, but since that bag filled up so quick, it got to the point where I needed to bring one of those blue “neighborhood” garbage bags that the city included in the pack of regular pink household garbage bags. The reactions I’d get from the Koreans were interesting — some thanked me, some asked me why I was picking up their garbage (I told then that I lived in the neighborhood, came to the park often with my dog and didn’t like to look at garbage), some glared at me (I glared back) but most just looked ashamed.
Hey, Marmot:
I didn’t know where else to post this comment, but I like today’s brush paintingvery classy! The bronze (?) bell the other day was pretty nice too.
Whoops, now it’s the Maitreya Buddha (right? darn, can’t remember now…). Okay, so you’re serving up different images. Well, it’s very edifying. Have you considered captions explaining what the different images are? Might be nice to get a bit of a cultural education while sifting through all the posts….
Excellent, yet another tasteful image! It’s a brush painting of a waterfall and pine trees. Is this the marmot, or the ???? ????????
Just playing with the background images… Unfortunately, you happened to be reading as I was doing it
Sorry about that.
FWIW, IMHO the new front page design is “OK”,
but I think the arrangement of these comments
pages is vastly inferior to what you had before.
I prefer the entire design the way it was more
than a week ago… but it’s up to you of course.
May we presume that this is a Baekje Kingdom
Bronze Mireuk (Maitreya) bodhisattva statue?
Must be one of the miniature ones, I’m not
familiar with it. Amazingly heavy jaw on
that face, compared with the usual delicacy
and almost femininity of classic Baekje
works… Or could this be Goguryeo….?
David — Thanks for the comments. I’m still working on the design, including the comments section. If you could, would you tell me what you liked, in particular, about the previous comments section (like alternating colors) so I might implement those features in the current design?
Very good and unique design! I’ve become fond of this design.
You know what I just thought of. Instead of making the background stark white, perhaps a textureized rice paper background would work. I mentioned the colour in an earlier post but didn’t have the proper word in mind then. A soft peach or bone colour with texture. You wouldn’t want it too dark or texturized otherwise it may make the text difficult to read. But yeah something akin to aged parchment would be grand. Perhaps some classical landscape paintings on the upper or side margins to give it an “oriental” feel. The blog is decent as it stands now, I just still feel that there is too much white. Though thankfully you’ve gotten rid of that awful central white block. The layout of the page used to look like text on the first third, empty white in the center, and links on the right third but actually more white space if you scroll down. At least now if you scroll down when reading, the page is only half white space. (Did you change the spacing to be relative to screen resolutions? I assumed you might have been using 1024×768 which could have been why you didn’t notice a giant empty space in the page) The present format works if there aren’t too many comments for one particular post. However, if the comments exceed 10 or so brief responses, reading subsequent responses is not as pleasant since there is nothing on the right side of the page to balance it out.
Right, the stark white background is hard on the eyes.
And what i liked about the previous comments section
was indeed the alternating colors, and each screed in
a box. And i liked the flags, so that we knew where
the {ahem} opinionated gentleperson was posting from
at the least (since few seem to have the courage of
using their names).
And i loved the drawing of the pavilion at the top!
Mireuk rocks, but a handsomer one wouldn’t hurt…
I agree with Jing and David that something in the background would be nicer. If nothing else, a lot of blank whitespace is actually hard on my eyes. I liked the idea of rice paper; or something similarly subtly-coloured but patterned/textured, without distracting from the text.
Yes. And, the ID line was much better at the TOP
of each comment, so you could know right off who
is speaking; for long posts esp i am always having
to scroll down to see who wrote it, then back up to
resume reading…..
There was a documentary on KBS(?) some time back about the hundreds of toy (rat-like) dogs abandoned in Korea and kept in shelters, sad that people consider the animals a fashion accessory that can be tossed when they become a burden. Oh, and Mr. Marmot, I respectfully disagree with the other posters…please don’t go with a “rice paper” background, it’s kind of tacky…