Dokdo update

It seems that Korea's campaign to promote Dokdo's absolute Coreanness has finally gotten global attention. Here's a picture of a bus I saw in England last week.

I am too pissed off for words.

The lightning rod returns!

A great conversation (of sorts) going on in the comment section of a post at the 'Hub of Sparkle' blog (a great name for a blog, by the way, wish I had thought of it first...)

Kushibo is back!

But as some of you already know, with Kushibo you always get 2 for the price of 1. After Kushibo lets loose a few comments ripping on the K-blogosphere in general, one Nora Park shows up and leaves this comment:


I second bo’s comments. too many one note k-bloggers have fallen to the dark side. it is about time somebody stood up and said something. thanks bo, you rule.
i tried to fix things and clean things up, but i just got sick and tired of the sexism racism and homophobia. not to many of the male bloggers were ready for a lesbian who happens to be korean and not some demure submissive asian girl of their sexual fantisy.
i know korea is not perfect, and i pointed that out many times in my blog many times. its time we took a stand, i am with bo on this.

Well said! And look! She has a cute little nickname for kushibo ('bo')! It's almost like they know each other or something.

Of course, it's rude not to respond to a compliment, so 'bo' sends in the following comment a few hours later:


"thanks bo, you rule."
Yes. Yes, I do.

A bit later, Nora shows up again with the following gem of a comment:

after carefully considering what roboseyo and james said, i have to go with kushibo on this discussion. he offers the most balanced and fair perspective.
my vote for best k-blog of 2008. the one and only kushibo.blogspot.com, of course. now that oranckay is gone, he really is one of the lone voices that offer balance and honesty. also, his humour is very john stewart with a little bit of colbert. if you haven’t been reading kushibo.blogspot.com, it offers insight into korea that few k-blogs even come close to. kushibo, was the original “ask a korean” and as far as debunking myths about korea like rokdrop, kushibo has been doing that for years. he really sticks his neck out. now that i think about it, i am voting kushibo for the following.
Best Overall Korea Blog, 2008
Most Thought Provoking Korea Blog, 2008
Most Current and Timely Korea Blog, 2008
Most Helpful Blog to Expats in Korea, 2008
Funniest Korea Blog, 2008
Happiest Blogger, 2008
Best Pop Culture Blog, 2008
Best Culture Blog in General, 2008
its about time he got some recognition. i think kushibo would make an excellent additional writer for this blog. Less kimchi, more nunchi

Wow. The humor of john stewart AND colbert! (note that Nora doesn't capitalize much; it must be a Republican lesbian thing). And she's even going one step further by suggesting that Kushibo join the crack team of writers at the Sparkle.

Come on, what do you say Roboseyo?


A few comments later, some party pooper named 'Mark'* invokes the Nora Challenge.**

A few commenters, including Robo, are stunned by the revelation. Kushibo, however, boldly makes the following response to 'Nora' not long thereafter:


[in response to Nora's many generous nominations of Kushibo's blog]

If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.
I know you’re being a bit hyperbolic, but I was none of those in 2008.


[And in response to Kushibo being another writer for the Sparkle blog]

I have no interest in being a writer for this blog or any blog but my own. I don’t mind if people link to my blog, of course, but I’m not interested in writing for anyone else, not that anyone but Roboseyo has the power to ask anyway.

Damn, that is one humble SOB. I love the last part of the sentence though..."not that anyone but Roboseyo has the power to ask anyway."

Hint, hint...

And yet Roboseyo never strays from his Eternal Sunshine Policy and continues to thank Kushibo for contributing to the discussion, rather than telling him to fuck off and take his socks with him. He does make a response (directed at Kushibo) to 'Nora's' suggestion that Kushibo join the blog writing team:

Mike and I are co-admins, and we usually talk invitations over before we extend one.

Come on Robo, extend the invite! Can't you see how much it means to him? Do you have any idea how painful it was for Kushibo to see people like Shelton Baumgarner get invited to author posts for the popular Marmot's Hole while Kushibo was left stranded like a little Gilligan on Monster Island? Have a heart, man!


Is this Nora-Kushibo guy a character or what? Either he is completely delusional, or he has a really weird sense of humor. Either way, I like it, and am very happy, nay, honored to put his link back on my website now that it appears he has officially returned to us.

Now if only Shelton and Baduk would start posting again...







*Probably one of the Party Pooper's many, many socks that infest K-blogosphere. It's hard for me to keep track these days.
**Here was my own take on the Nora-Kushibo deal, by the by.

Merry Christmas with Yahoo Korea

Tis the season for giving, so allow me to pass on the gift that I've been enjoying for several months now. I use a Yahoo account and, without warning, I was switched over to the Korean Yahoo site a while back. At first I was annoyed, but then I realized that the Korean Yahoo site is an excellent source of Asian soft porn.

If you click on the 연예 tab (apparently the Korean translation for 'cleavage') they provide daily slide shows of various Korean celebrities. Or to be more exact, Korean celebrities with big boobs.

Here's the slide show they had today. [Sorry, they've changed it. You'll just have to believe that it really was there.]It gets very Christmassy a few pictures in, though that dress looks to have been made with a much, much larger cup size in mind.


A nice feature is the 'play' function, which will scroll through the pictures automatically for you, leaving your hands free for whatever else you might need them to do (like, I don't know, knitting a sweater, or perhaps whittling). Those Yahoo guys at the Korean office have really thought of everything.

Enjoy...

The future

Robert at the Hole has translated portions of a Chosun article on predictions for Korea.

I'm sure not even one of you has already been to the Hole lately. Please go over and have a look. Robert needs more visitors. You'll also find a great advertisement to help you meet Korean girls, and another for funny T-shirts, which I'm sure will also help you score with the ladies.

Cause God knows us white guys need all the help we can get over here.

Speaking of predictions, just in case any of you were wondering how the World's Greatest Psychic fared in her predictions for 2007, wonder no more.



Montel Williams gave this hag a forum for her unethical bullshit for years. Montel was a marine before becoming a media whore. He has sat through years and years of Sylvia giving wrong prediction after wrong prediction, but never hesitated having her back on the show. Hal Bidlack, a retired Lt. Colonel from the air force, wrote an open letter to Montel asking him what has happened to his honor as a marine.

I have two Korean female friends who regularly go to fortune tellers. Both know I am vocal about my disbelief in this crap, so every time they think they get some amazing results from their fortune tellers they come running to me to justify their superstition. I've asked them to record the conversation with the fortune teller rather than rely on their memory of what was (and especially of what actually wasn't) said, but they never seem to get around to it. Truth is, they just don't really want to know.

Poetry Corner: The Thing that Should Not Be

"Bak Jun Koo stands stock still, he is a dead meat, he turns all the joy of his family frozen into horror..."

The Secret! A-ha!

Funniest thing I've seen all month:



'You should visualize them back!"


A friend of mine read The Secret last February and gushed on and on about it. She said that now that she has The Secret, she KNEW that she should quit her company and try to get into law school (she hated her job).

A month later I heard from her again. She had a back injury that put her in a number of hospitals (including a famous acupuncture 'hospital', but we'll save that trip down quackery lane for a future post) and is still a big problem for her now. She was in too much pain to study for law school, so she gave up on it. She'll have to resign from her company if she isn't able to get back to work soon (about a year is all they will give her off from work). She started going back to work a week ago even though she is still in a lot of pain.

So clearly The Secret has worked out pretty well for her.

My theory is that the acupuncturists at the hospital she ended up going to were also reading The Secret, and visualized thousands of suckers suddenly having back problems and coming to their clinic for months and months of expensive therapy. Their visualization Kung Fu simply overrode that of my friend.




Something like that also might explain why Song Hye Kyo still hasn't slept with me, despite the fact that I've visualized such for several weeks now.


Perhaps too many other Secret readers have made this same "demand on the universe," and I just need to wait my turn patiently.

Oh, but she WILL be mine...



Second funniest thing I've seen all month:



"Gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench!"

Great vocals. I would love to see this same thing done with some cheesy heavy metal videos from the 80s.

Open Letter to Dokdoisours

Link me you whore! Link me NOW!

And if you think you have HALF the zeal for Dokdo's absolute Coreanness as I do, you are seriously, if not fatally, mistaken. Have you ever asked yourself why I don't update so often these days? YOU try to type a post with only 3 working fingers and 7 bloody stumps! That's how we play on THIS side of the EAST Sea, mo fo!

PS. I keep getting the emails I wrote you (all 84 of them) returned to me. You might want to check your spelling on the 'suck_on_it@not_a_real_address.com' email address you posted.

Finally, this is a video that I made to show the softer side of my love for The Rocks. I played the piano for this piece also, which was no easy feat (see above).

Did you know that there's a mailbox on Dokdo?