• Oranckay offers a lengthy & insightful postmortem on the stem-cell scandal and Dr. Hwang Woo-suk, a.k.a. Dr. Hwang You-suck (at left, he looks unusually calm), observing that the infamous scientist also leads his own religious cult.
• A Korean-language website grabs a Krispy Kreme graphic off the web and—oops—it contains some not-so-sweet English. Read about it in Marmot.
• Seoul subway officials install emergency phones marked “Emergency,” confusing the hell out of Koreans who, through no fault of their own, speak only Korean. “I thought they were information lines for foreigners,” said one commuter. The full story can be found at Marmot.
• The joint government-media committee on the Koreanization of foreign words goes to the trouble of coming up with a Hangeul spelling of the American ambassador’s name—and he nixes it. Marmot explains.
• Joel reads Bruce Cumings's North Korea: Another Country and gets into the nitty-gritty, noting for the record that he (Joel, that is) has “never seen a South Korean man putter around a palace or anywhere else for that matter in pajamas with a perm or rollers. And while many Korean men do dye their hair the term MOST is a dangerous word. That means a majority of men dye their hair and that I would dare say is not true.”
• According to The New York Times, South Koreans are “stampeding” to buy land near the DMZ: “For two generations, the 30 miles between the demilitarized zone and Seoul were intentionally kept sparsely developed, a kind of buffer zone against a North Korean attack. But the political détente between the two countries is bearing economic fruit as South Korea's economic expansion washes away psychological barriers and now laps at the southern edge of the long-feared DMZ.”
• The Pinocchio Theory loves him some filmmaker Kim Ki-duk (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring, 3 Iron and The Isle), but it's strictly academic: “Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness.”
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