Well, if no one else is going to post any, then you might like to check out a blog entirely devoted to showing off and describing some truly strange maps.

These new rules are really limiting my commenting abilities…..haha.

Funny how they seem to have hit you and nulji especially hard.

(Sorry for the shameless self-promotion, but Marmot is The Godfather of bloggers in Korea, so it seemed to make sense to post here.)

http://news.chosun.com/site/da.....00333.html

He again advocates SK go nuclear. Many people in Korea realize this is the only way to protect the country when NK, Russia, China have nuclear weapons and Japan has strong capability. I believe Japan already has nukes, lots of them. So, basically, Korea is the only one standing naked rubbing two balls when other countries are well-armed.

Thanks. Now average Americans must recognize KoreanAmericans as a part of the country. These KA soldiers died for America. For America! Now, no Americans can say, “KAs are in the country but they are just visiting. They are not a part of America.”

Sonagi,
KAs are very small minority. Cut some slag. We have to watch out for each other. Minority, especially a small minority, can be attacked. Even by a major newspaper. If you have some question about this statement, just look at some articles about Korean Dog-eating. Would the mainstream newspaper write such a degradating story if it were Englishmen instead of Koreans? The majority of newspaper readers are the majority. And, a minority, especially an esoteric one, suffers degradation and exaggeration.

How Koreans feel this week -

With Kim GyeKwan, the NK emissary to the US, smiling and saying “the US sees things our way”, many in SK are bewildered. Some cheers. But, careful people like me are afraid. Very afraid.

These meetings between the US and NK bring into memory the Paris peace talk where the US sold out VietNam. Peace Talk! It was a disguised “sell-out”. South Korea may be going through the same process. The pullout of the US troops and sudden collapse of SK government followed by NK invasion.

I pray that these things get delayed. But, they may happen within five years.

The Koreans are throwing away the most nutritious parts of the grape.

Nah, they’re not.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the grape skin seamstresses. Hunchback dwarfs, society’s refuse much like the grape skins they collect from rubbish bins. Under the dim glow of the Christmas tree lights they’ve scavenged, they stitch together thousands of grape skins with their dexterous, yet stubby fingers. It is said that their stitch work is so fine, so precise that the seams can’t be detected by the ordinary human eye. So straining is this work that most go blind. It is their only hope that they finish one grape-skin sheet to earn enough for their dowry. Or buy their parents’ freedom from the money lenders.

Exported to Japan to supply the ever growing demand of the spa industry, these grape-skin sheets wrap only the most discriminating. In Japan the most highly prized grape-skin sheets are those known as the “sheets of a million tears”. It is believed that the tears the seamstresses shed as they stitch every minute stitch endows the grape-skin sheets with the power to make the infertile fertile.

If any of our esteemed lurkers are from the International Labor Organization, could you help out? More powerful light bulbs, perhaps?

Seouldout (44): Speaking of which, you’re definitely spending too much time alone driving the lonely wilderness of Route 45 country, to come up with doozies like that.

IHBB (18): Looking at options 6 through 10, I’m wondering if you aren’t in a permanent state of agitated agony to even come up with such possibilities! It seems like you need some more time alone to, er, relieve some tension….

Yup, and i’ve just been having the same problem with http://www.PayPal.com — last year they transferred my incoming dollars to my Korean (Won) account just fine, but suddenly as of January 1st 2007 the Korean government has required them to demand a Korean ID number — i enter my Alien Registration number with the same number of digits, but it’s rejected every time –i spend my own money on the phone, PayPal says that it’s my Korean bank’s problem, and my bank predictably says that its PayPal’s problem! Result is, i can’t get my money.

I’m sure that i’m not the only PayPal user living in Korea that has this problem; been waiting for somebody on one or both sides to fix this, but here at March 11th no action has been taken. Has anybody out there in Marmot-Cyber-World figured out a way to get around this yet…?

The Koreans are throwing away the most nutritious parts of the grape. The skins are loaded with resveratrol, a very powerful anti-oxidant, and grape seeds have such anti-oxidant power that they are ground into extracr and sold in health food stores. By tossing the skins and seeds and eating only the sugary pulp, Koreans are rendering this healthy fruit as nutritious as a candy bar. The reason why Koreans throw away the most anti-oxidant packed part of fruits like grapes and apples is that Korean farmers, like farmers in the US and the developing world, probably spray their fruit heavily, and some of that pesticide soaks into the flesh and thus, can’t be scrubbed away. Organic fruit wasn’t available when I was in Korea.

“I just want to log my official complaint against South Korea for requiring a national ID number for online transactions. “

Someone’s already beat you to it. There was an official petition circulating amongst the foreign community a few years ago.

@nerdieboy and Hwarang:

There are two kinds of IDs: one for Korean citizens and one for Korean nationals. Both IDs contain the same number of digits, and I believe both use the same algoritm, yet for some reason, most computer systems recognize only Korean IDs, including the computer system at my old university. It was annoying to have to handle in person transactions that Korean nationals could take care of online just because I failed to be Korean.

Contrast this with America’s national ID number, the Social Security card, which even undocumented workers can obtain for $100.