Whimsical moment

Let me just say that I’m a massive fan of humanity, especially the mind. The physical form of the human animal is also a big thumbs up, it is a thing of beauty and nowhere is this more evident then in the beauty of a woman where form follows function and both are sublime. If there is any solid argument for the existance of a beneficent higher power then it can be found in the existence of man, as the Bard so artfully put it

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…

So why do we persist in doing as much damage to our bodies as possible? Drugs, Alcohol, Pollution, Lack of exercise, bad diets, and artificial foods….

Institutionalised prophets

Has anyone noticed that after Jesus (or Mohammad), we seemed to stop getting prophets? Sure there have been learned scholars and even a scattering of holy men and saints, but no ones seen a bonafide prophet since the big boys of monotheism. Did God run out of messages? Did he decide that we’d reached perfect understanding of his ineffable will and didn’t need further guidance? The state of the world is all the counterargument you need for that one. Or did he decide that the human race just didn’t ‘get it’ and gave up on the whole shepherd to his flock angle as a bad idea?

In ages past the Word was never a static thing. Once in a while a new amendment would filter down from on-high to say that ‘this’ needed changing or ‘that’ had been misinterpreted. Occasionally there was a whole new segment added or something old overwritten by a new directive. If you’re a Christian then the whole arrival of Christ can be summarized as “well this has been working okay so far, you’ve gone forth and multiplied, but now its time to curb those destructive urges and become better people. Don’t throw away the commandments, but make sure you practice them within the overriding directive of Love thy Neighbour”.

It’s pretty obvious that we didn’t ‘get’ that bit.

Yet somehow all these wise men and updates stopped coming. Maybe we stopped listening to our wise and just followed the rich. Maybe we locked up the divinely touched along with the mentally imbalanced. Maybe the Word was sabotaged by the books that tried to encapsulate it. Maybe we were so caught up in our patriarchal struggles to notice the prophetess that passed unnoticed, so caught up in what is written that we failed to hear when something new was said. Mohammad basically said not to listen to anyone that came after him, and the monolithic church spent all those centuries all tied up in politics at the expense of its pastoral duties. I really hope that is the case and we simply missed the message, I’d hate to think that the Mormons were actually right, or that we’ve ignored David Suzuki’s divine message at our peril.  

Fangs for the memories

I’m out of time and out of options, I now have to do the one thing I’ve been putting off for six months… I have to go to the dentist.

My last dentist trip actually wasn’t that bad, but it was a simple capping, I’m terrified that this might be a full rootcanal. The dentist was a nice guy, with a smattering of English, but I’m not sure that he can translate “..oh my GOD that hurts, stop, take the drill away before I take it off you and embed it in your skull…” then again maybe it will be better that way.

Moooooving on

It’s official, the kids are freaked. One of my littlest girls told me not to eat chicken or cow because her mom says that “only pig is not dangerous”, at 8 years old she knows about bird flu and mad cow disease. In another exercise I had students writing a letter to the President of South Korea. One letter grabbed my attention as it had “..why are you trying to kill us with US beef?”.

Got to love the scare tactics…   

That Kimchi Smell

KimChi, Koreas national dish and source of national pride. Every good wife-to-be knows how to make Kimchi, and every good Korean male wolfs it down. Why not? I mean KimChi can fend off Bird Flu, and probably cures cancer if the unsubstantiated rhetoric can be believed.

Of course KimChi is also a contributor to the distinctive odor of Korea, its an odor that could be described as a cross between stale cigarette smoke, pork fat, and soju mixed with car exhaust and the occasional whiff of sewer. Its not the prettiest image in the world, but the image pales in comparison with the smell, which is quite capable of dissolving small rodents.

The further towards the country you get, and for an Aussie the Korean idea of country is what I would call only semi-industrial, the more rose blossom and animal dung is added to the mix. I’ve always had a good sense of smell, but ever since I got off the plane here I’ve only been catching a small part of the sulfur dust and essence of garlic that makes up the olfactory landscape. 

There are many wonderful things to see in Korea, but that is the key word ’see’. I may be proved wrong by the cherry blossom festival, but so far Korea for me has been about the people, who tend to be lovely. If you live life through your nose I’d avoid summer here entirely, smells are always magnified by the accelerated biological process bought on by warmth, and the yellow dust doesn’t help. There are however some wonderful sights.

Korean Beauty

As far as I’m concerned there is no quantifiable measure of beauty, even sexy isn’t limited to  specific ration of curves. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder, unless you live in Korea where beauty is what you see on the billboards. There is a formula, and apparently the ultimate goal is to look like one of your parents was white. Oh, and you have to be of the right age to be beautiful too, anywhere between 15 and 28 seems okay, but once you’re past that you’re just an old maid. Even Shin Mina (better known to most of us as the Korean World Cup Babe) fell afoul of that rule when it was discovered that she was actually born in 1972.

I’ve always found this amusing considering the amount of nationalists who want to keep the Korean ‘race’ pure. “How dare a white man touch our woman, but I’d love to have a white girlfriend”… seem to be how the rants go. Yet when the ideal woman is supposed to have a narrower nose, rounder eyes, paler skin, bigger bust, and longer legs (the antithesis of the naturally occurring traits that seem to be prevalent amongst Koreans) the only conclusion I can reach is that they are usually trying to look (at the very least) Eurasian. Naturally when the actual Eurasians such as Ursula Mayes come to Korea they get a lot of attenion, though strangley Ms Mayes wore far more conservative cloths on her visit here then she does back home.

I’m not saying that I’m against rhinoplasty, that would be hypocritical of me since I certainly don’t mind observing the results, but when eyelid surgery is a common graduation present for girls here it looks to me like a real issue. Stars undergo painful jaw remodeling to get a nice V line, breast implants are seen as the next step even for those already considered attractive like Lee Hyori, and beauty is once again reduced to being something that is only skin deep. What I object to is that fact that some many women feel the need to undergo surgery to ‘measure up’ to impossible standards.

Porn to be Mild

I was thinking about writing a bit about pornography, tastes, trends, availability in various countries, and how sex is treated in Korea. This invariably led me to reminisce about my first experience with (non-magazine) porn, so I thought I’d share this cautionary tale.

I’m still in contact with some of the folks involved in this, so names have been changed to protect the embarrassed and perverted.

It started like any other abnormal night, with massive amounts of procrastination and a real effort to find an excuse to drink two nights before a major assignment was due. A 20,000 word assignment due in two days with only 3,000 words done seemed to be the story of my life back then and could explain why I only just scrapped through my third year of University. Thankfully the neighbour popped around with an invitation to the irregular movie night and I think I reached the next house before my books actually managed to hit the ground.

A bit of history here, I lived in a share house with six other people, one of whom was a friend, two very attractive women who didn’t want a bar of me, and four people I considered strangling in their sleep. The neighbours house was also a share house but with only four people, three women, and a somewhat effeminate man.

So grabbing a few drink we settled in to watch the usual far, or so we suspected. The original plan was to watch a documentary of some description, the details elude me but I’m sure it was about Nazi Germany, but after three drinks and absolutely nothing new or interesting happening on the screen we were all more interested in talking then watching. At this point one pair decided to move into their room to discuss Magic ™ cards, with the door shut, and the music up loud………. hmmmmm.

Somehow the conversation moved to sex, as it always did, and the only other male still present (who I will call A) announced that he had something to show us all….. a porno. While there wasn’t a huge amount of enthusiasm for the idea no one actually stopped him from dashing into his room and coming out with a suitable nondescript, and battered, VHS tape that I expected to have once looked something like this….

 

 

Everyone got another round of drinks, A slipped the tape into the machine and began to rewind it and I stepped outside with one of the girls for a smoke. To be more accurate I stepped outside with one of the girls while she smoked and I tried to mentally prepare myself to sit through a skin-flick with two women that I found quite attractive.

When we got back inside the tape started and all conversation died to a few nervous mutterings. A little while later you could have heard a pin drop, A and the smoking girl were staring in fascination at the screen while the non-smoker was giving me a “I’m so sorry” look from across the room. It was only then that I noticed her seat was strategically situated so that she could stare out the window into the empty street instead of watch the movie. Apparently she has been subjected to this before.

I finished my drink, made an awkward and probably unnoticed excuse about having to get back to work and left the room wondering if I would ever have the guts to watch a movie there again…… next time I saw A he was really interested to know what I thought of the movie, asking about scenes that must have happened well after I left. He was so enthusiastic, and went into so much detail, that it ensured that I’d be cutting down my visits (occasional intoxicated Magic nights aside) so as not to run afoul of movies like this….

 

 

The moral of the story? JUST SAY NO to shared porn viewing with people you don’t really know. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us.

EDIT: I know the first comment below is spam… but it’s for a German Bed & Breakfast…. how cool is that?

Go forth and multiply

Some kids are so sweet, you’d love to adopt them and take them away from the insane hours of study and ridiculous academic expectations. Ah, the fantasy of stealing a well behaved and toilet trained kid beats the potential horror of facing my own genes coming back to haunt me. Others………..

I have one little monster who I just wish would quit; he’s a spoilt brat who has absolutely no respect for me, or for his fellow students. Now I’ll be the first to admit that this is partly my fault, his only classmate was having a hard time and I was going easy on the homework and formality when he arrived…. but that doesn’t stop me from wishing that he’d quit.

I’m always seeing him busily stuffing his face, goofing off, and generally being obnoxious to  other students. I’ve never seen him work, despite what he tells his mother (apparently he’s the boss in his household as his mother is always making the “he has no time to do his homework” excuses), and I’ve certainly seen no improvement in his speaking or vocabulary. I would normally accept the “no time” excuse at face value in the coal-front that is a Korean ‘volunteer’ study program, and often do with the students that are progressing, but not with this little tyke.   

Sadly I’ve now realized that I’ve created another post where scantily clad women might seem inappropriate…. guess I’ll have to fix that next post.

Overperscribe much?

Has the Prozac generation gone too far? Is the age of ritalin just giving us the latest contaminants to add to mankinds holiest temple (….for the theologically stunted I mean the body). We have artificial sweeteners that can apparently cause (or mimic) MS and neuropsychiatric disorders, preservatives that may be carcinogens, vitamin drinks that convert to Benzine (another carcinogen), and fat substitutes that leach our bodies of nutrients. On top of the hard-to-avoid chemical compounds in day to day life we also knowling ingest thousands of tons of pharmaceutical grade chemicals every year.

Our bodies have evolved over millions of years and as a part of their environment, add a brand new, laboratory made, chemical to them and drastic things are going to happen. Now that might be a great thing for precision pharmaceuticals aimed at specific organic failures and diseases, but when just about everything we eat (and in China, Korea and most major western cities, breath) is a chemical cocktail something has to give.

“Oh my god I’m not happy ALL the time….. I must be depressed, guess I better pop some of these green pills.”

“Oh my god I got so excited that in the confusion I made some bad business choices…. I must be manic…. good thing I can take those little yellow pills.”

“Oh my God my son/daughter isn’t doing as well as I want them to at school.” This is of course despite the fact that they are doing better then you yourself did at that age.

“They must have ADD, better get them some of those little red pills“ .. never mind that junior is getting no exercise and spending 8 hours a day in front of the idiot box, or playing Nintendo, while stuffing their faces with artificial flavours, artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, and artificial fats. They should be able to overcome the genetic limitations that come from being my child and become the popular genius that I never had the brains or charisma to be.

Lets face it, even if junior was trying to do all his homework, how many parents are there to help him/her with it?

Never fear, neglected child…. we’ll have a pill for that soon too. They may never learn to focus their vision more then 4 meters away, or learn to converse with another human being, but by god they’ll have well developed thumbs, and perhaps even the ability to interface directly with electromagnetic radiation.

Now… I’ve had my daily dose of three cups of coffee and no food, now off to play warcraft till 5am.

P.S. no babe today… I’m on a diet.

Would you like insanity with that?

Where’s the Beef? It’s out the back, rubbing its hooves together and cackling as it plots to take over the world!

 

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but then everything is exaggerated over here. A while ago beef imports from the USA were stopped following a Mad Cow Disease scare. Now mad cow isn’t exactly Anthrax, it won’t leave you writhing on the ground, foaming at the mouth and then convulsing so hard you snap your own spine. The chance of being infected with BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is actually quite small and the most potentially dangerous parts of the carcass are the bone and nerves. No harm, no foul… right? Well not exactly.

Mad Cow translates into the human form as variant of CJD (Variant CREUTZFELDT-JAKOB DISEASE), its not a biological agent causing instant death, instead you slide slowly into senility or insanity as your brain tissue is slowly eaten away. It’s not a shocking instant killer that can galvanise the headlines, its something that steals your life (and sanity) slowly over the course of 6 to 10 years.

 

I could go into how the Korean public is being hoodwinked into rejecting American beef for political reasons, and their inability to distinguish fact from spin, but X does a much better job of it over at the Metropolitician then i ever could. Mostly I won’t because while he makes a lot of accurate points about the willingness of people in this country to swallow some of the dumbest stories, I still think there is a legitimate concern here.