THE ANSWER IS 12
236# It's beginning to come back to me...Welcome to the Show...
12/5/11 Hi-diddely, ho-diddely pagans,
Just over two weeks, and I'll see another semester perish at my hands (or maybe the hands of time). I've got my ticket to the U.S. I expect it to be a somewhat subdued trip. Mom and Dad recently sold the Olds, becoming a one-car family. Living in the boons as they do certainly alters my temporary situation there. I'm okay with it, though. It really doesn't affect me much with the exception of the weekends. Everybody is working during the weekdays, leaving me to my own devices for the majority of my trip. That's okay, though. I've got Mom, Dad, Arlo, and the cats to hang out with. If I'm going to be stuck in the U.S. for a vacation, there are many worse towns in which to be stranded or people with which to be stranded.
I've been going back and looking at some of my old writings and even begun touching on a few new ideas. It's long overdue. I'm missing a couple, but I can hope to find them at Mom and Dad's this winter.
By the Numbers...
3.2 : The number, in millions, of drunk driving arrests made in Korea between 2000 and 2010. 232,712 : The number of people caught drinking and driving in Korea MORE than three times between 2000 and 2010.
44 : The number of people arrested for drunk driving more than ten times.
12 : Percentage of license holders arrested at least once in Korea for drunk driving.
228 : The number of people killed or injured by landmines in Korea since the end of the Korean War.
2,230 : The number of babies born to teenage Koreans in 2010. There are no known figures for the numbers of deliveries at illegal facilities or for abortions (unfortunately illegal in Korea).
2 : The number (in TRILLIONS) of text messages sent annually in the United States alone.
.003 : Amount, in U.S. dollars, of the cost of a wireless carrier for one of its users to send or receive a text message.
.10-.20 : Amount, in U.S. dollars, charged by the major wireless carriers for its users to send or receive a single text message.
22 : The number of Korean whores and pimps recently arrested in Korea for working at a brothel in Japan.
4 : The amount, in trillions of KRW, of the total price of Korea's newest, and the world's most expensive, building, the Yongsan Landmark Tower.
12.1 : The amount, in millions of KRW, of each 3.3 sq.m. of the Yongsan Landmark Tower, scheduled to be completed in 2016.
557,941 : Foreigners in Korea on a work permit in 2010.
168,515 : Illegal immigrants in Korea in 2010.
141,654 : Migrant marriages in Korea in 2010.
69,600 : Foreign students in Korea in 2010.
19,535 : North Korean defectors in South Korea as of May 2010.
2,915 : Refugee claims made in Korea in 2010.
25.9 : Saturday's (11/5) daytime high, in celsius, in Seoul, a record high for November.
50 : Average annual number of earthquakes in Oklahoma before 2010.
1,047 : Number of earthquakes in Oklahoma in 2010.
693,634 : Number of Korean students who took the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) yesterday (11/10).
1,200 : Number of venues across the country which held the CSAT examinations.
21 : Percentage of CSAT test takers taking the test for the second time.
1,000 : Estimated number of Korean women working as whores in Australia.
6,000 : Estimated number of foreign prostitutes hooking in Australia.
27 : Number of sex offenders working at 270,000 youth facilities across Korea, including elementary and middle schools, private educational institutions, gyms, taekwondo academies, and a childcare center, according to a recent National Police Agency (NPA) investigation of 1.39 million criminals nationwide.
15,566 : Number of Koreans who offed themselves in 2010, an average of 42 daily, the highest rate among OECD member nations.
1 : Number of fingers sent to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul by an idiot protesting Japan's claims over Dokdo (Dok Island) in the Sea of Japan.
332,198 : Number of legal, non-paying passengers who, in 2010, took advantage of Korea's exemptions for people over the age of 65, the disabled and people of "national merit".
19.3 : Percentage of all subway riders who legally rode for free in 2010.
343.4 : Amount, in billions of KRW, the free ride program cost Korea's seven subway operators in 2010.
83,000 : Estimated number of South Koreans forcibly taken to North Korea during the Korean War.
42,132 : Number of Vietnamese killed by ordinance leftover from the Vietnam Genocide...I mean War.
62,163 : Number of Vietnamese wounded by ordinance since the end of the Vietnam War.
A Sign That The World Isn't Completely Screwed Yet...
10/11/11 Kudos to the good people of Taizhou, China. The story goes that a woman caught burgling was stripped, hit and forced to walk the street with Chinese characters reading "I'm a thief" on written on her back. If she was truly caught red-handed, then got exactly what she deserved.
Multicultural Racism...
10/13/11 Koreans wants people to believe that prejudices and racism are a thing of the past here, but nobody living here is fooled. The latest incident occurred in Busan this week. An Uzbekistan woman married to a Korean man and possessing a Korean passport was denied entrance to a sauna because foreigners "make water in bathtub dirty" and "pass on AIDS." Korea has no laws against racial discrimination, so the police told her to go to a different sauna. Amazing.
My students supported this theory when we recently watched a video from the NorthStar books my department is currently using. The video in question was about the urban garden program of a Los Angeles high school. The video opened by showing a classroom of black students. My students found this to be hilarious for some mysterious reason. Not a single student in the video had said anything crazy, nor did any student look like a rap video clown. And yet those kids were for some reason funny to my 18-year-old children.
Quote of the Week...
10/18/11
"I couldn't stop disco, but I'll be damned if any more of that crap gets by me!"
Mental and Physical Insecurities
or
More People I Don't Like...
11/6/11Chang Hyang-sook is pathetic. Chang wasted 2.3 million KRW to have her eyelids Westernized. This is bad enough, but unfortunately also common enough in Korea. Chang, a makeup artist (aka: useless human), went far above and beyond the call of stupidity by blowing an additional 22 million KRW. For the price of a mid-sized sedan, she had her teeth rearranged and her jaw bones "cut and repositioned" as part of a double-jaw procedure. People are blaming this increase in vanity surgeries in part on the number of celebrities who are having them done. The celebrities are blaming them in part on wide-screen and high-definition television close-ups. Dr. Park Sang-hoon's clinic, the ID Hospital, has sliced up the jaws of 3,000 insecure people over the past six years.
Two years ago, a survey showed that 20 percent women age 19 to 49 in Seoul had gone under the knife. The fact (and smart idea) that the national health insurance doesn't cover plastic surgeries makes it difficult to track the true number of procedures performed in a country where illegal underground surgeries, like plastic and abortions, are common. The government imposed a ten percent tax on the five most popular plastic surgeries this July. People protested that it discriminated against women and the poor. I agree. Men should be more insecure and willing to waste their money. The poor have the right to be just as vain and mentally retarded as the rest of society. Of course, if they're poor, I don't think that plastic surgery is something on which they should be focusing. It's like the idiots in America who put flat screen televisions on credit cards they can't pay off.
I want to find a copy of a booklet issued to Korean high school students this August by the Education Ministry that lectures against the dangers of "plastic surgery syndrome." The booklet cites Michael Jackson (no surprise there) and a local woman as warnings. The local woman hung herself last November after a botched double-jaw surgery left her with a "grotesquely swollen face" which made every waking minute hell for her. Countering this, a secretly made film shows somebody at a plastic surgery clinic trying to sell a double-jaw surgery to a woman by convincing her that she won't be able to get married without it. Genius. I love marketing to the mindless masses.
This desire to alter their bodies goes against long-held Confucian beliefs against tampering with the body. I say that it goes against common sense to so badly desire that others like your outward appearances you'd be willing to mutilate your body and risk death and other complications just to "fit in."
In the end, I believe that every useless plastic surgery should include a complimentary spay and neutering. I would say that they should include a lobotomy, but it's apparent that someone beat them to it.
More People Getting What They Deserve...
12/1/11I wasn't sure whether to put this after the plastic surgery tale or the superhero story (see below). Oneal Ron Morris is a scary tranny, but is an amazing human being. He/She/It punishes the stupid. Morris was recently arrested in Florida for pretending to be a plastic surgeon and performing an ass surgery on at least one extremely vain and unintelligent woman. Morris filled the woman's rump with fix-a-flat, cement, super glue, and mineral oil. Several other women with mental issues (and screwed up bodies) are beginning to come forward. I can't wait to see how many fell for it!
More People Getting What They Deserve...
11/16/11
PETA made a parody of the game called, Super Tanooki Skin 2D. This is an amazingly shitactular and wonderful game. You are the Tanooki whose skin Mario has peeled. Your skinless body chases Mario as he flies around in your flesh, blood dripping the whole time.
This isn't PETA's first game. They attacked and parodied Cooking Mama in 2008 for having real food, i.e., not vegetarian. Super Tofu Boy involves a piece of tofu jumping around a gore-caked slaughter house (leaving tofu drippings behind on everything he comes into contact with) on a mission to save...I can't believe this is f*cking real...Bandage Girl. Yes, you are a dribbling chunk of tofu out to save your used-bandage of a girlfriend. Freaks.
Supe on Trial...
11/24/11
I am proud of Seattle for not pressing charges against Phoenix Jones, a lunatic who runs around in a mask and muscle suit claiming to be a superhero. It was only a matter of time before life imitated art. The incredible comic book and movie, Kick-Ass, was bound to inspire people. I'm glad it has. I like the idea of vigilantes bouncing around dispensing what is hopefully justice. Phoenix almost got into trouble for pepper spraying some idiots fighting outside of a Seattle night club. Authorities couldn't track down two of those involved, and Washington has a law that allows people to use force in the defense of others.
I am proud of Seattle for not pressing charges against Phoenix Jones, a lunatic who runs around in a mask and muscle suit claiming to be a superhero. It was only a matter of time before life imitated art. The incredible comic book and movie, Kick-Ass, was bound to inspire people. I'm glad it has. I like the idea of vigilantes bouncing around dispensing what is hopefully justice. Phoenix almost got into trouble for pepper spraying some idiots fighting outside of a Seattle night club. Authorities couldn't track down two of those involved, and Washington has a law that allows people to use force in the defense of others.
I've Been Saying It For Years...
11/17/11
A British survey 35 years in the making has helped prove a theory I've had for a long time: smarter people are more likely to take illegal drugs. Researchers interviewed 7,900 people after testing their IQs at ages 5, 10, 16 and 30 who were all born in April 1970. People who admitted to having done drugs in the previous year tended to score higher on their IQ tests than non-users. The women in scored in the top third at age five were twice as likely to have tried marijuana and cocaine by age 30. The highest scoring men were twice as likely to have used amphetamines and 65% more likely to have eaten ecstasy. Figuring in socioeconomic status and psychological distress didn't change their results.
How can this be? The research theorizes that the England's anti-drug movement of the 1980s didn't target smarter children due to the lack of logic in their ad campaigns.
I don't know what it was like for them, but I clearly remember the god-awful ignorance and misinformation dumped upon me during my childhood. Richard Nixon started America's longest running, costliest and losing-est war. Nancy Reagan put her face on the War on Drugs and owned that batch of madness throughout my childhood. The government can't expect people trust from people it spent a decade trying to convince that heroin was every bit as dangerous as marijuana. It didn't take a lot of intelligence for my generation to realize that we were being fed a horrible line of bullcrap.
A British survey 35 years in the making has helped prove a theory I've had for a long time: smarter people are more likely to take illegal drugs. Researchers interviewed 7,900 people after testing their IQs at ages 5, 10, 16 and 30 who were all born in April 1970. People who admitted to having done drugs in the previous year tended to score higher on their IQ tests than non-users. The women in scored in the top third at age five were twice as likely to have tried marijuana and cocaine by age 30. The highest scoring men were twice as likely to have used amphetamines and 65% more likely to have eaten ecstasy. Figuring in socioeconomic status and psychological distress didn't change their results.
How can this be? The research theorizes that the England's anti-drug movement of the 1980s didn't target smarter children due to the lack of logic in their ad campaigns.
I don't know what it was like for them, but I clearly remember the god-awful ignorance and misinformation dumped upon me during my childhood. Richard Nixon started America's longest running, costliest and losing-est war. Nancy Reagan put her face on the War on Drugs and owned that batch of madness throughout my childhood. The government can't expect people trust from people it spent a decade trying to convince that heroin was every bit as dangerous as marijuana. It didn't take a lot of intelligence for my generation to realize that we were being fed a horrible line of bullcrap.
Weakly Konglish...
11/29/11
I have worked the same company/university for more than eight years now, and I find myself continually amazed at the poor English across this campus. Whether it's in the school newspaper (even the English supplement), school brochures or on signs, KNU never has a shortage of bad to terrible English/Konglish. A new sign and banner on campus this week are proof.
Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race, depriving America of the chance of having its first black president. The Republican Party has gone to hell. This is the same party that got James Bond villains Nixon and Reagan into the White House. They even got W in there twice without having won either election. Obama hasn't done much in his first, and possibly last, stint at the big desk. If the Republicans could find even one half-way decent candidate, we could all but call the election now. Instead, they are presenting a freak show of slow kids from the political playground. When Ron Paul and Mitt are the two best candidates going for a party, you know you are in trouble. Failing finding a real candidate, the Republican bid falls on the hope that the masses who foolishly expected some sort of magical change with the conclusion of eight years of dictatorship by the election of America's first half-white president have been disenfranchised enough to vote for the same machine they thought they were rebelling against four years ago.
I have worked the same company/university for more than eight years now, and I find myself continually amazed at the poor English across this campus. Whether it's in the school newspaper (even the English supplement), school brochures or on signs, KNU never has a shortage of bad to terrible English/Konglish. A new sign and banner on campus this week are proof.
El Presidente?...
12/05/11Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race, depriving America of the chance of having its first black president. The Republican Party has gone to hell. This is the same party that got James Bond villains Nixon and Reagan into the White House. They even got W in there twice without having won either election. Obama hasn't done much in his first, and possibly last, stint at the big desk. If the Republicans could find even one half-way decent candidate, we could all but call the election now. Instead, they are presenting a freak show of slow kids from the political playground. When Ron Paul and Mitt are the two best candidates going for a party, you know you are in trouble. Failing finding a real candidate, the Republican bid falls on the hope that the masses who foolishly expected some sort of magical change with the conclusion of eight years of dictatorship by the election of America's first half-white president have been disenfranchised enough to vote for the same machine they thought they were rebelling against four years ago.
Peanuts in the Pooh...
11/23/11
Megyn Kelly is one incredibly stupid ho-bag. She said that pepper spray is "a food product essentially." While I'm not against all of the spraying that's been going on, I've been sprayed a couple of times before and know better. I'd like to blast her in the face.
11/24/11
Reality/talent shows are like war. They're all the same, and they're all gut-wrenchingly terrible.
Megyn Kelly is one incredibly stupid ho-bag. She said that pepper spray is "a food product essentially." While I'm not against all of the spraying that's been going on, I've been sprayed a couple of times before and know better. I'd like to blast her in the face.
11/24/11
Reality/talent shows are like war. They're all the same, and they're all gut-wrenchingly terrible.
