The gov’t. crackdowns on the pirate cable operators were due to piracy of content, i.e., not sharing some of the $ w/ CNN & BBC. The channel would be dark, I’d call, and they’d state it had to be off for a while since the gov’t told them to knock it off.

Gov’t-run bordello? You referring to what is now the Seoul Club–near the Shilla Hotel. Don’t know if this is true, but former Peace Corps buddies state so. Nicest swimming pool in Seoul. Great RALF parties in the past.

Robert, very sorry about that. Any chance of a Preview Comment button?

I don’t really get this one though, especially the “negative cultural properties”– what do they mean, miniskirts? How about all the mullets Koreans had a few years ago? Those were certainly negative

Yeah, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but CNN always seemed to be cut whenever some major incident occured between South and North Korea.

The regular movie theatres in my hometown would show the softcore porn (went to see one of those with my then friend/soon to become girlfriend (she had told me she wanted to go see a French movie with me…she didn’t tell me it was titled ‘Erotique’)).

Pirate cable drove me batty. But it was 4000 won a month, and they forgot to bill me for almost 2 years. The cable operators would sometimes have to pull the unlicensed programing, such a CNN & BBC, during gov’t. crackdowns. The only channel that never disappeared was Italy’s RAI. It was 24-hour-a-day variety show like the ones here, except I think it was the same guy who hosted all the time. They were always having beauty pageants.

Beer in theaters I remember. Was the only way to get through the Daehan News. You know, I think all the softcore-porn theaters have disappeared.

PS. If you didn’t get AFKN, you probably just used your TV to watch videos because the availability of English programming was quite limited, and unpredictable (Channel V from Hong Kong had some English programming, but the VJs would constantly switch from English to Mandarin (back then, Koreans still saw Chinese pop music as something to emulate). Once, in the period of one month, I went from having no English channels to having CNN, then Bloomberg, which was in turn replaced by BBC News, and then back to nothing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....commercial

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....mp;search=

I rather enjoyed those old TV ads that had a narator with a thundering voice and the same cheesy electronic music (I don’t think I’ve been here as long as you have, seouldout, but I do remember when movie theatres still sold beer, which we drank during the movie to wash down the mandu that we had bought across the street).