After being challenged by a Seattle Times columnist to ask his “pal” Kim Jong-un to release imprisoned American missionary Kenneth Bae, Dennis Rodman has called on his “friend for life” to release American missionary Kenneth Bae.
Unlike their southern neighbors who can test for incoming foreign threats, North Korea currently lacks the technology to test visitors for dangerous levels of Christianity that might spread to the general population.
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The way this (could-be-trivial) piece of news made such big headlines made me smile, I would like to post about it. If the West has its McDonalds and Burger King, Korea has long had 라면 -instant ramyun, the equivalent of cheap and nutritionless yet addictive junk food.
Shin Ramyun 신라면 - which has apparently been holding onto the top spot in sales for yonks (even during the onslaught of newcomers – “white-soup” based instant noodles such as 꼬꼬면 kkokkomyun and 나가사끼짬뽕 Nagasaki Champon) – has now been overtaken by 짜파게티 Chapagetti, and 너구리 Noguri.
For those not familiar with such plebian dining, Shin ramyun is the hot ramyun with the 매울 신 (maeul-”shin” 辛 – Chinese character for HOT (mepda 맵다)) on the package. Chapagetti is the instant 짜장면(Jjajang-myun – brown Chinese-style noodles) and Noguri the instant 우동 (udon). All three are quite ubiquitous, not just in Korea, but one can easily acquire all three kinds in a lot of the Asian markets and supermarket aisles outside of Korea.
Despite 너구리 and 짜파게티 having slightly longer history, 신라면 has been the immobile no.1 for the last 19 years.
This is all due to a recent MBC TV program corner called 아빠 어디가? (Where are you going, Daddy?) – summary in English from a blog in which five celebrity fathers and their infant children bond by going away on trips minus the mothers.
In one episode where they go on a camping trip, one of the fathers (Sungju Kim) is meant to have shown a new concoction that is a mix between Chapagetti and Noguri (now called 짜파구리 Chapaguri) which went down so well with the tots, that it became an instant hit.
For those interested here is the funny link to the segment where the dads are explaining about their dishes in front of the kids where it all happened.
And?
And what made it – reaction from the children
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Ahn Chulsu, the ex-Presidential candidate(independent) who bowed out during the tight 2-way race against Minju/DUP’s Moon Jaein at the last minute (virtually giving rise to the result – election of President Park) has entered the Korean parliament by winning the by-election held in April.
Today it was announced that he will fill a position as a no-party parliamentary member in the National Assembly’s Health and Welfare Standing committee (보건복지위원회). Due to his side-entering (by-election), it is said that his possessing of shares in his own company, AhnLab, was an issue in the course of a position in the National Policy Committee (정무위원회).
All eyes are on Ahn since his proper political debut, especially with regards to whether he will create a new party, but he himself has been keeping a relative low profile. Ahn is scheduled to visit Kwangju for the commemoration of 5.18 democratic uprising, where it is expected that he will include thoughts on his future political plans during the address.
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- There are much easier ways to prevent having children, dude.
- Prosecutors think they’ve got the IDs of more NIS agents they suspect wrote online posts and comments during the last presidential election.
- Rather than engage in flame wars, the NIS really should be looking into how it is that North Korea knew the USS Nimitz would soon make a port call at Busan when neither the United States nor South Korea had made such an announcement. Not even South Korea’s military spokespeople knew about the visit.
- Looks like North Korea won’t be wasting its missiles after all. Bummer.
- Clad in her hanbok, President Park met with Korean-Americans in New York, where she talked about “trustpolitik” with North Korea. Good luck with that. Nice hanbok, though.
- Seoul Metropolitan Government is hoping that locals and largely Chinese immigrants in Daelim 2-dong will learn to love one another at a new community center.
- Racing models want respect.
- Police are looking for a dastardly foreigner accused of taking up-skirt photos of women at a department store in Ulsan.
- The government looks like it won’t play a song closely associated with the May 18 Gwangju Uprising during an upcoming memorial ceremony. Even a former leftist-turned-Saenuri Party lawmaker-cum-North Korea human rights activist thinks they need to sing the song.
- For your viewing pleasure, I’ve posted some more shots of the newly restored Sungnyemun Gate (this time from the other side) and photos from Saturday’s Jongmyo Daeje rite at my Tumblr photoblog.
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Good interview. Horrible pitch.
UPDATE
Talent Clara shows us how it’s done (HT to feld-dog). Not everyone was pleased about the outfit, though:
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The recent deportation of an American English teacher suspected of sexually assaulting a minor in the United States eight years ago inspired the Kukmin Ilbo to pen an editorial on the English teacher menace.
Namely, the paper notes that the current E-2 visa system checks only to see if you’ve been convicted of a crime; it does not check if you’re wanted on suspicion of want. This means murders and rapists could run away to Korea to teach English and nobody would know. The drug check, too, determine whether you’ve done drugs only within the two weeks prior to the test. There has also been a lack of info sharing between investigative bodies like the cops and educational authorities despite what the paper describes as an endless string of drug offenses by foreign English teachers; this lack of sharing makes managing the foreign teacher population difficult.
The bigger problem, says the paper, are the unqualified teachers who enter Korea on tourist visas. Demand for teachers outstrips supply—there are currently about 20,000 foreigners in Korea on E-2 visas, but the number of foreigners teaching English is reportedly far greater. Anyway, the Kukmin Ilbo thinks the government needs to tighten up the foreign teacher hiring and oversight system and wants to see effective measures taken.
The Dong-A Ilbo has more on the case. According to them, the American—who’d been teaching in the Jeollabuk-do area for eight years—was wanted in the States on charges of sexually assaulting a female relative under 12 at his home four times in 2003. A commenter at GI Korea seems to think he knows the guy and give much more detail, but all the caveats about anonymous commenters apply.
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Katie Chang has a small but engaging article in the T Magazine (NY Times) about one person’s pick of things in Seoul: Hometown Advantage | Jung Bae’s Seoul though I would pick other places than she did, it is at least a decent list to start with. The artwork to the left is from “Around the Corner” a Garosu Street clothing and food boutique (owned by LG).
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A leaked recording of a telephone conversation of 남양 Namyang company employee using swearwords and threatening a 대리점, agent stockist, has become very big news in South Korea.
In the recorded file, a young employee threatens using 반말 (casual speech) that he would “kill” the store manager for not taking more milk from him and says he should just “dump the milk” that he cannot sell, to which the manager says “how can I throw away the product?”
It has since led to more allegations against the same company for various breaches and the police are now investigating them for charges which include data-manipulation, sales-forcing and “떡값요구 (demanding bribe)”. It has also led to a nationwide boycotting of their products, both by indivdual consumers and by the stockist/convenient stores despite an earlier official apology from the company. The consumers this time seem determined to show their anger against the tyrannical sales-methods of such a company (an oligopoly, in the case of dairy-products in Korea) and to run it to the ground.
Namyang is a famous case amongst those in the know for its misguided hierarchical structure, styling its management after the South Korean military service – they also like to recruit former army officers!!!
Altough publically listed, they do not care at all about the share prices allegedly and give very little dividends out to their shareholders – this is apparently common amongst companies that like to sit on their hoarded cash. Wonshik Hong, the CEO of Namyang is hitting the headlines with his comment “일일이 법을 다 지켜가면서 회사 경영을 할 수 있느냐 How can you run a company abiding by all the rules” !?!?!?!
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Skytrax’s 2013 rankings put Singapore Changi Airport at the top of the world. Incheon International Airport, last year’s No. 1, dropped to No. 2.
Boo! Boo!
Not surprisingly, there were no American airports in the Top 10. In fact, there were none in the Top 20. America’s top ranked airport was Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Intl Airport, which came in at #30:
American airports are generally fairly awful, so their poor performance in this survey is no great surprise. But it is also worth a response. Airports are gateways to cities and regions, and it’s striking that the infrastructure of the world’s lone superpower lags so far behind that of the rest of the world. The mood in Washington right now is one of austerity, so any near-term improvements to the country’s airports will have to come from state or local authorities—or, ideally, from the private sector. But some of the worst problems can only be solved with federal help. Lengthy delays have a lot to do with America’s outdated air-traffic control system, which Washington is trying to fix, but which cannot be upgraded without lots of money. And the lack of good transport links at some of the most important airports (here’s looking at you, LaGuardia) is probably only rectifiable with federal money.
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After a five year, three month restoration, Sungnyemun Gate has returned to the bosom of our fair city.
Clad in a hanbok, President Park attended Saturday’s opening ceremony, where she stressed the importance of preserving Korea’s cultural heritage:
“The revival of Sungnyemun means more than the restoration of a cultural asset. I believe it will restore the pride of our people and open up new hope and the door for a new era,” Park, wearing Korea’s traditional hanbok dress, said in a ceremony to open the restored city gate to the public.
She said, “The No. 1 national treasure is South Korea’s face, which symbolizes the national spirit and identity.”
Park highlighted that her fledging government will focus on fostering cultural assets, saying, “In order for South Korea to become a cultural powerhouse, the country needs to well preserve and pass down traditional cultural assets, which are the root of our culture.”
In some ways, the restored gate is better than the pre-fire one. Parts of the old wall—torn down by the Japanese at the beginning of the 20th century—were restored, traditional paints rather than factory paints were used, kiln-fired tiles replaced the factory-made tiles, and disaster prevention technology was incorporated into the gate.
Your’s Truly photographed the restored gate the evening of its opening—probably one of the best images I’ve made, and certainly the best received on Flickr, where it made Flick Explore yesterday. Yay me.
I’m certainly pleased that the gate’s been restored, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit of regret, too. For security’s sake, Sungnyemun Plaza—the grass field in front of the gate—is locked off to the public after 6:30 (5:30 in winter). The plaza was created in 2005 at a time when the authorities were trying to give the people greater access to their cultural heritage. After the fire in 2008, however, I’d heard some grumbling that the policy of greater openness was a factor in the fire. Frankly, I thought this was both BS and politically motivated, but seeing the square now locked up, it appears the heritage authoritarians have won. This saddens me—it’s precisely the wrong lesson to learn from the Sungnyemun fire, and comes off as punishing the public for the government dropping the ball.
Anyway, a friend and I watched with some amusement as Cultural Heritage Administration staff waged a search-and-destroy campaign against photographers sneaking over the fence to shoot photos of the gate. Sometimes they’d let them get a shot off, sometimes not. I later learned that earlier in the day, a Kiwi friend had been manhandled nearly into moving traffic by an overzealous CHA official. Probably not the best way to mark the gate’s return to the public.
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Considering all the venomous crap being spewed on comment boards the world over, it’s nice to see someone trying to tilt the scale away from the dark side.
Guys like Min Byoung-chul and his “Sunfull Movement” are doing just that by organizing groups of people to post positive comments on sites around the internet where people are being attacked by trolls or have suffered tragedy.
Professor Min Byoung-chul of Konkuk University known for his anti-cyber bulling campaign has launched a new one to write online condolences to families of Sichuan earthquake victims.
Min also assembled a book of condolences from his website (www.sunfull.or.kr) and presented it to families of victims of Sandy Hook. The condolences book contained 5,000 messages.
A representative from the People’s Daily, with whom Min partnered with for the Sichuan campaign, said of the program, “I am convinced that this campaign will enhance trust and friendship between Koreans and Chinese.”
And with whoever those people in the accompanying photo on all those Macs are, too, I am sure.
According to the English version of Min’s site:
Our members have posted 4,064,206 positive and meaningful comments on sites where people are being attacked.
Good stuff.
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I wish I were making this up. Seoul District Police raided an NGO called “Youth Association for Realization of the June 15 Joint Declaration,” a progressive NGO focusing on the unification issue, on the suspicion of subversive activities. Not only did the police raid the NGO’s office, but also it raided the private home of the NGO’s head. By the way, the NGO has existed since 2004, and has never been a target of such investigation for its existence of nearly a decade.
But the real winner is the reasons that the police gave to obtain the warrant for a raid. In the court papers, the police asked for the warrant against two of the NGO’s officers based on the fact that the two were unmarried — and therefore, according to the police, they were likely to run away if they had to. For another warrant request for another NGO member, the police claimed that the member intended to “secretly exchange messages” because the member used Gmail rather than a Korea-based email service.
So remember boys and girls. If you see an unmarried person with a Gmail address, that person is a dirty communist. If you see a married Gmail user, don’t let your guard down–that person is probably a pinko fellow traveler.
(For those who thought I was overreacting when Park Geun-hye’s election would lead to the second coming of yushin — remember to get rid of your Gmail accounts!)
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. . . The incoming president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) has told attendees of its conference they are freedom fighters in a “culture war”
Have a great weekend fighting for your cultural pursuits.
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And at my Tumblr blog, I’ve posted some shots of Seoul at night taken from the peak of Gangnam’s Mt. Guryongsan.
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Korea News via Yahoo
