TAI12 #229 Multiple Ends in Sight...

THE ANSWER IS 12

#229 Multiple Ends in Sight...

Welcome to the Show...

4/23/10       
    The half way point of this semester has come and gone, and I can say that I have never been more happy to see a semester work its way towards its demise.  I have the worst batch of students ever.  I have one class that, had this been my first year of teaching, it would have also been my last year of teaching.  The majority of my students show far less respect than they have in the past.  The have gotten lazier.  They sleep more.  They put less of an effort into the small amount of work I ask of them.  I have never more desired the beginning of a vacation.  I'm ready for Mom to get here.  I'm ready to see Cheeri and the rest of the Manila folken.  I'm ready to meet up with Cooter, Countess and Voice in Kuching.  I'm ready for the three weeks of Bali, Bangkok and Cambodia or Laos to follow InterHash.  I'm ready to put this wretched semester in its grave!

4/30/10
     Wednesday night I completed the two of my final three grad school classes.  I should finish with an A and a B which shouldn't hurt my 3.33.  These were my two most stressful classes to date.  Now I get to relax until mid-August.
     I had two very tall girls show up to one of my classes yesterday.  We are half-way through the ninth week of our 16-week semester.  It was the first time they had made an appearance.  One of them wasn't even on my attendance sheet.  Despite showing up to the second-highest of our five levels of class, they couldn't speak more than a couple of words of English.  One of my other students explained that these giants had been playing volleyball.  The season is over, so now they are in school.  I wish them luck with that.  I know that the school is going to try to make me give these lumps a pass.  That will officially throw away the last little bit of credibility I thought this company had.  If they try to force me to give them a pass, it will prove that I work for a degree mill.  This is why I hate sports in schools.  These athletes aren't contributing anything, but they receive a larger budget than any other program at most schools, and they get free grades for not working.  Schools should divide their budget equally between their extracurricular programs.  Let the parents and local communities make up the differences for programs requiring a larger budget if they feel the need.  Don't make other school programs suffer.  Don't freely give out grades to someone just because they can hit or throw a ball. 

By the Numbers...

95,266  :  Number of Koreans who had their credit card information stolen by a single Romanian man who in turn sold it all to four Malaysians.
300,000  :  Amount (in KRW) paid by four men for the information from 51 of those credit cards.
943  :  Number of credit cards cloned from this stolen information.
49  :  Number of countries these clones have been used in.
677  :  Amount (in millions of KRW) charged to those 943 cloned cards. 
2,377  :  Number of registered foreigners living in Evilwon. 
706  :  Number of registered Africans living in Evilwon.
100  :  The minimum number of texts a third of American teens send daily.  Don't these ricetards know how to call each other?  It's quicker.
75  :  Percentage of American children aged 12-17 who have cell phones.  I can't imagine that one percent of them actually need phones.  I hope their parents are at least responsible enough to make them pay for them.
87  :  Percentage of American teens who sleep with or next to their cell phones.
18,000  :  Number of North Korean defectors living in South Korea.
2,000  :  Number of North Korean defectors living in 20 other countries.
?  :  Number of North Korean defectors who are actually North Korean spies living in South Korea.
2  :  Number of North Korean spies posing as defectors arrested in an assassination plot focused on the highest ranking North Korean defector to date, Hwang, Jang-yop.  He once tutored Kim Jong-il and authored "juche", the North's ideology of self-reliance. 
?  :  Number of Chinese-Koreans living in South Korea as North Korean defectors.  They lie to Korea's National Intelligence Service (Korea's CIA) in order to get settlement money, job training, medical benefits, and to be treated as second-class citizens by South Koreans.  They use fake North Korean identities to achieve this. 
8.63  :  Annual tuition (in millions of KRW, $7,765 as of 4/23) of at my university, KNU, the third highest in the nation for a single campus in 2008.
41  :  Alcohol percentage of the world's strongest beer, Sink the Bismark!, from BrewDog, a Scottish brewery.
60  :  Price (in U.S. dollars) of one 11.2-oz. bottle of Sink the Bismark!
60  :  Percentage of Korean actresses who have been propositioned for sex by "influential figures of TV stations or other 'big shots' from all walks of society."
30  :  Percentage of Korean actresses who have been sexually molested. 
7  :  Percentage of Korean actresses who have been raped.
55  :  Percentage of Korean actresses who have been offered "sponsorships" from wealthy men.  A sponsorship is a secret contract where a rich asshole hires his favorite as a whore for a period of time to screw him regularly.  The report listed that the offers came from "wealthy businessmen, TV and movie directors, and politicians."
84,000  :  Number of foreign students currently studying in Korea.  
17,023  :  Number of foreign students studying in Korea in 2004.  
7,288  :  Number of foreign students studying in Korea in 2002.  
10,000  :  Number of foreign students violating their visas by overstaying them or working illegally.  
4,519  :  Number of foreign students caught by Korea's immigration authorities in 2009 for violating their visas.   
5,113  :  Number of nuclear warheads in the United States' stockpile.  
22,000  :  Estimated number of nuclear warheads in the world.   
12,582  :  Number of Korean office workers who subscribe to E4u Telephone English, a English education website.
73  :  Percentage of the office workers who are junior office workers.
27  :  Percentage of junior office workers who study on the site for more than three months.  Most quit after only one month. 

Hypocrites...

(Photo property of me!)

4/12/10 

    I took this picture in Insadong.  These three were trying to gain support for the 20 million North Koreans kept in poverty and ignorance.  It would also be helpful to try to save them from the South Koreans.  reunification isn't a big goal of the South.  While most southerners will say that they desire to be reunited with their cousins to the north, most of them say that they want it to happen after they die.  Current estimates put the financial damage it will cause the south at ten times worse than when East and West Germany came together.  Many of the 20,000 defectors here frequently complain about their lives here.  Their southern "cousins" view them as second-class citizens.  Despite job training from the government, many have trouble finding jobs, because their northern accent forever differentiates them.  Southerners also resent the money defectors receive help them survive in the south. 
     The problems North Koreans have with the South extend beyond the borders of both countries.  South Korea arrested one of their own this week for hunting and returning North Korean defectors in China.  The 55-year-old man had lived illegally in China and gone to North Korea for spy training. Before asking the rest of the world to remedy the situation, maybe the South should first work on fixing their own issues with their cousins.

Piss Poor Pee Plan...

4/15/10 

    Irish airline, Ryanair, has announced that it is considering installing coin-operated doors on its planes' toilets.  Passengers could be charged one Euro or one pound.  Airlines have gotten out of control.  I can promise you that if I ever find myself on a flight that charges to use the bathroom, I will wet myself in my seat like a two-year-old and laugh about it all the while.  I hope you're not sitting next to me on that flight.  Don't even ask what would happen if I had to chop a brown tree down...

SNL Does ICP Again!...

4/21/10 

    Those Killer Clownz from Murderous City D-Town released a new video from Bang! Pow! Boom!  The cast of Saturday Night Live was quick to do a parody of "Miracles".  Watch them.  They're great! 

No Sh*t Sherlock...

4/22/10 

   The Korea Times printed an article today that might as well have told us that they sun was going to rise in the east and set in the west today for all the surprising information it provided.  Titled "Koreans Swayed by Herd Mentality", it reported what everyone who has been here for more than five hours already knows.  Sales of mosquito nets and insect repellents spiked 50 percent this week after hearing news reports last week that mosquitoes transmitting viral diseases causing brain inflammation.  The problem is that they were only found on Jeju Island, hours away from the mainland.  
     By no means is this the first time the country has had spasms upon hearing news be it true or false.  We saw it two years ago when the whole country became more anti-American than usual upon a batch of lies reported by the television news show, PD Notebook.  The story reported that Americans had died of the human form of mad cow disease, when in truth only three Americans had ever died from from mad cow disease, and those had contracted it from beef eaten in the U.K.  It also fabricated information about the quality of meat being exported from the U.S. and said that Koreans are 2-3 times more susceptible to mad cow disease than other ethnic groups.  The country rose up as one to protest America and then their own president.   
     Other past occurrences of this lemming culture include the long history of regionalism (most frequently arising in elections and sports), the death of two middle school girls who couldn't be bothered to move out of the way of a slow moving tank, the Dokdo issue, the Sea of Japan issue, and Korean comfort women paid off by Japan in 1965 and screwed by Korea' s government ever since.  The current worry is that this lemming effect will have negative consequences on the nation's economy as it struggles to climb out of the current global recession.  

Banality in 140 Characters or Less...

4/23/10 

   Twitter is one of the most useless ideas of all time.  The twatters who use twitter manage to find simpletons who follow their 140-character messages of what they are eating, where they are at or the condition of their most recent bowel movement.  Facef*ck is bad enough as it is, and twitter is nothing but Facef*ck boiled down to its single most useless feature.  Twitter has come to Korea and brought with it one interesting story.  The third most followed twat is that of Soranet, a Korean porn website shut down by police in 2004 with 60 arrested in association with it.  The website had 600,000 subscribers; its twatter account has 100,000.  Soranet's twats have gained popularity because they give information on gaining indirect access to its porn site.  The government is also looking to block political-themed twats in upcoming elections.

Vegetables, Adultery and Lawsuits...

4/27/10 

    Korea's Supreme Court has ordered a woman to pay her mother-in-law 10 million KRW in damages for cheating on her husband.  Her husband has been in a coma since 2005 when a truck ran him over.  The court has also upheld a lower court ruling that the man's mother can seek a divorce-by-proxy, seeing the wife's cheating as her giving up her right to be his legal guardian. 

Get Out While You Can...

5/3/10 

    Korea is giving an option to illegal aliens here.  Illegals who voluntarily leave the country between May 6 and September 31 won't be subjected to fines, and their offense won't be taken into consideration if they decide to return legally in the future.  There is one problem:  September only has 30 days.  If employers of illegals come clean during this semi-imaginary grace period, they can avoid paying the usual fine of up to 20 million KRW and being barred from replacing them for three years.  The Ministry of Justice estimates that there are 178,163 illegals currently on the peninsula.  That's 15.1 percent of the 1,180,598 foreign residents in the country.  It's also slightly higher than the number of illegal Koreans living in the Los Angeles area. 

Arizona Makes the First Move...

5/5/10 

    Arizona's new immigration enforcement law is over the top, slightly fascist and long overdue.  America has long needed to take a stand on immigration.  We know that there is 12-20 million illegals in the country, but we don't do anything about it.  Arizona has gone too far, but it's a good start.  Look at California's medical marijuana laws.  The state is way too liberal with its plan, but it has given other states a blueprint with which to work.  Other states can look at Arizona's method and tweak it and implement it with improvement.  Of course I still think we should go with the plan I devised many years ago for illegal aliens:
First time caught:  Fingerprinted, photographed, given a warm meal, and put on a bus or boat back to their own country.
Second offense:  Sent to jail for a year to do hard labor.
Third offense:  Electric chair.  Problem solved.
We have laws.  Obey them or convince voters to change them. 

Break Dancing Brain Buffoons...

5/5/10 

    Korea has caught nine break dancers who faked mental illnesses in order to get out of their national duty to serve in the military.  They read up on mental health issues and then faked symptoms.  They faked hearing voices, depression and wouldn't go outside.  They managed to fool their families and doctors.  They weren't too smart, though.  They were caught authorities learned that they had gone overseas to break dance.  These fakers will now have to serve out their military service.  I'm not so sure they were faking it.  Anybody attempting to make a living by break dancing 25 years after it reached its popularity must have mental problems.  I'm surprised Korea doesn't have any disco dancers.