Odds and Ends 04/12/09

by Robert Koehler on December 4, 2009

Angry over the government’s handling of the Sejong City plan, Chungcheongnam-do governor Lee Wan-koo resigned yesterday.
The Wonder Girls will be on “So You Think You Can Dance.” See here. Levi Johnston apparently wants to do the show, too. UPDATE: My bad — Levi J wants to do “Dancing with the Stars.”
Ben Wagner has a piece on AIDS testing of foreign teachers and the stigma of AIDS.
Soak in the Xmas spirit in Seoul.
Iran is apparently importing a ton of North Korean weapons.
Also on a North Korean note, there is reportedly “widespread anger” in North Korea following the country’s currency revaluation.

{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }

1 mkaplan December 4, 2009 at 2:54 pm: I agree wholeheartedly with Wagner.

Korea has got to get rid of this disgusting stigma on HIV.

Korea should replace this stigma with one on another virulent pathology: foreign lawyers who, rather than pursuing respectable careers quietly rent-seeking and greasing the wheels of economic and political life, try to eke out some meaning out of their wretched lives by embarking on moral crusades to impose dubious norms on the natives.
2 dinkus maximus December 4, 2009 at 3:40 pm: Good news re. the financial ripples of discontent in the north? Signs that a people’s revolution from within might create a few headaches for the next in line?

Yeah, the AIDS thing is kind of lame. But who cares. A blood test now and then never hurt anyone. EVERY waygook has to get tested to get a visa in China. If they are going to be pig headed about it, might as well be pig headed across the board and set up clinics at Incheon.
3 cmm December 4, 2009 at 3:49 pm: “Yeah, the AIDS thing is kind of lame. But who cares. A blood test now and then never hurt anyone. EVERY waygook has to get tested to get a visa in China. If they are going to be pig headed about it, might as well be pig headed across the board and set up clinics at Incheon.”

I assume you mean work visa?
4 ihaveseoul December 4, 2009 at 4:13 pm: I can forgive ya… but “Dancing with the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance are two seperate shows.”
5 Robert Koehler December 4, 2009 at 4:17 pm: My bad, G.

Levi Johnston is still a moron, though.
6 Maximus2008 December 4, 2009 at 4:38 pm: Have any of you watched this “So you think you can dance” thing? The people that compete there are top dancers, all acrobatics and such.

What will the WG do there?? Clap hands in 10 different ways?? Won’t work…
7 seouldout December 4, 2009 at 10:23 pm: Aren’t the Wondergirls the ones with the shoulder shrug/sway dance?

Or are they the ones with the butt dance?

How low can it go? Dance the cameltoe?
8 chiamattt December 4, 2009 at 10:53 pm: The wondergirls will probably do very well.
9 DLBarch December 5, 2009 at 2:06 am: Oh, dear. Your reference to Levi reminded me of this piece of juicy Palinology: In “Going Rogue,” Palin described her one semester in Hawaii at the first of the four colleges she attended as “a little too perfect. Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls.”

Jump to Chuck Heath, Palin’s father, who told Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, the authors of “Sarah From Alaska,” that the presence of so many Asians in Hawaii made his daughter uncomfortable.

Money quote: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.”

Maybe she should have spent a semester teaching English in Seoul!

DLB
10 Granfalloon December 5, 2009 at 11:00 am: I’ve ranted about this before. The real danger to Korea in forcing foreigners to be tested for AIDS is simply fostering a mindset in the Korean population that AIDS is a “foreign” thing, that it’s a disease of them, not us. This is exactly the mindset that propelled the spread of AIDS in the US: the belief that it was a gay thing, and straight people didn’t have to worry about it. Them, not us.

To head off anyone with the “But AIDS is a foreign thing to Koreans!” rebuttal: you’re a couple of decades too late to be making that argument. All those Korean business men on trips, all those students in the Philippines, all those fishermen . . . hey, maybe I’m wrong and all of the aforementioned are paragons of condom usage. Wouldn’t bet on it, though.
11 mkaplan December 5, 2009 at 1:39 pm: It’s not boolean. It’s not a matter of worry vs. not worry. There’s a scale of worry, so to speak. Different classes of individuals have different rates and deserve different degrees of “worry estimates.”
12 seouldout December 6, 2009 at 12:40 am: The real danger to Korea in forcing foreigners to be tested for AIDS is simply fostering a mindset in the Korean population that AIDS is a “foreign” thing, that it’s a disease of them, not us.

You’re right. It’s not a Korean v. the foreigner thing. It’s a good v. bad thing. Certainly the Korean public has been educated about bad AIDS. But what about good AIDs?
13 seouldout December 6, 2009 at 12:41 am: …bad AIDS. But what about good AIDs?
14 skindleshanks December 6, 2009 at 10:21 pm: In other news, the U.S. just stopped denying entry to TOURISTS who are HIV positive.

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Pall+lifts+along+with+AIDS+travel/2293805/story.html

Westerners whining about HIV tests for residence visas smacks of hypocrisy. Frankly, there aren’t many developed countries that don’t require AIDS testing for the granting residence for foreigners.
15 R. Elgin December 6, 2009 at 11:22 pm: That’s old news “skindle”.

Consider that the issue of testing in Korea demonstrates the false notion that AIDS is a foreign disease in Korea and that a foreign teacher can (magically) transmit AIDS to his students, thus needs testing. If this were really the case, then ALL teachers in Korea should be tested but, clearly, such is discrimination, in addition to being insulting to most people who understand the implication. IMHO, testing is more likely the result of bad politics than any real health concern.