On the Dakdoritang subject, I asked several high school students about it and they told me they’d learned about it through tv (with the possibility of the internet having contributed). I guess some nationalist tv show (or five) did a competent enough job of presenting this point of view to impressionable students. Another student told me that she’d not picked up any of this from her teachers, but that the lunch menu at school posted it as ‘dakbokkeumtang’ whenever it was served.

When I brought up Freedom Fries and suggested how difficult it would be to actually remove French words from the English language, and then offered it as a comparison, one student asked me jokingly if I was a 친일파. I know she meant it as a joke (I think), but it’s a little troubling how quickly that word made an appearance.

“Marmot’s Law” sounds better, but I’ll give Antti full credit for formulating it.

“Marmot’s Law” - yes, that’s better. I’ll change it a bit:
The quality of the post and the time and energy that Robert puts in it are in reverse relation to the amount of commentary it creates.

I didn’t have Yu Hong-jun’s book at hand yesterday, so I took the quote from a site called “Citizen’s Solidarity of Gayasan” (Gayasan Yeondae), that keeps a lot of snippets from Yu on its bulletin boards, among them for example this from Ohmynews: “Yu Hong-jun envigorated Gayasan and killed it”, which is about what Yu’s books have in great part resulted into. (See also the links to adjoingin articles below the article).

Beautiful. I love the fact that there aren’t any obviously anachronistic blocks of polished stone which can only be moved by modern machinery.

The Marmot’s rule: the quality of the posting is in reversed relation to the number of comments it generates.

Would be funny if it weren’t so true.

Thanks for the Yu Hong-jun quote, BTW.

Gaesimsa, mind-opening (開心 gaesim) place. This brings back memories from visiting the place so long time ago that clear memories are already fading. (Or was it all the substances that were consumed during that anthro department trip.) Yu Hong-jun, the art historian who’s at the moment the head of Cultural Heritage Administration, wrote praisingly about Gaesimsa in his hugely popular Cultural Heritage Visits series of books; one can imagine that the lack of means of transportation has been deliberate, considering what the head monk of Gaesimsa said to Yun in one of his visits:

Last summer, I happened to meet the head monk. He first asked me how I knew about this place, to which I replied that I come here often as I like this place a lot. He said: “Don’t make noise about this being a good place. If people start flocking in here, Gaesimsa is finished. Do you have any idea how frightening crowds of people are?” “I see.” Writing Cultural Heritage Visits, I have not been able to keep this promise.