Sorry.

It also appears that I’ve gotten a lot of traffic the past week thanks to my Dokdo posts. Leave it up to the controversy over Dokdo to drive traffic to my blog. Not complaining of course, but I think it is high time that people realize that it is time to talk logically about Dokdo. I’ve gotten a lot of complimentary comments that I don’t want to publish because they seem to be very ignorant. Let’s just say I don’t really like it when people say to me “Yeah, Eugene! Stick it to those no good dirty Jerps!” I can’t get down with that..

By the way that’s an extremely mild version of what most of the comments say.

And another thing. If you’re Korean and you’re calling Japanese people monkeys…. how do you think that non-Asians view you? I guess the retort would be “I don’t care what non-Asians think.”

But if that were really the case then why are you trying to convince non-Asians that Dokdo is Korean?

BRAIN EXPLOSION!

Another problem is the house rules people play by whereupon the Free Parking space gives y $500 and too much money is infused into the game.

So if you eliminate those rules then the game should just go smoothly.

But that’s not necessarily fun.

If you want to have a different Monopoly experience, try these house rules.

The everyone is rich game…

1. Start with $2000

2. Get 400 for passing go, 800 for landing on it.

3. Free Parking collects fines and taxes and starts with $500 which is replenished when anyone lands there.

Analysis: With this game, you will see for sure that it really does come down to statistics. The reds triumph over all, but having the reds and oranges while your opponent has the entire rest of the board, you will still have a higher chance at winning.

The everyone is poor game

1. Start with $1000

2. No salary for passing go

3. Auction all declined properties starting at $1.

4. No free parking

Analysis: The only way that money can be infused into the game is by chance and community chest cards, thereby necessitating that some things get auctioned off cheaply. I got Boardwalk for $35 when I played this way. Railroads become the best properties. The 4th side of the board is practically worthless because nobody has enough money to build anything over there.

The Utilities matter rule

1. If you own one utility you get 5 percent of all rent collected on properties with houses or hotels. (That’s $100 if someone lands on Boardwalk with a hotel.)

2. If you own both utilities, you get 20% of all rent collected on properties with houses or hotels (That’s $400 if someone lands on Boardwalk with a hotel.)

3. If there are no houses or hotels in play, you get the standard utility fee if someone lands on your utility.  If there is a house or hotel in play then landing on utilities is free.

This rule applies even if you land on someone else’s property with houses and hotels, in effect giving you a discount.

Analysis: It might not seem like much for some properties, but you’re basically getting rent for other people’s stuff.

Actually riding the railroads

1. When you land on a railroad, you may travel to another railroad space owned by the same person. You only have to pay the fare for the first railroad, because you are getting off at the second one.

Analysis: This makes the game a lot less about statistics, because people will ride the railroads to get past dangerous monopolies. Purples become huge in this game, especially if Boardwalk and Park Place are developed, because people will go to Reading Railroad to avoid that one.

If I think of more I’ll write them.

The shocking secret about foreigners dating Korean women or something.

Now when the blackface thing occurred I came off as somewhat of an apologist, suggesting that we can’t view Korea with a moral lens acquired elsewhere, so some readers naturally thought I would defend this as well. While I probably won’t be condemning it as strongly as other people have, I am still appalled by it.

Some would say that makes me a hypocrite, as they perceive me defending Koreans who are racist to blacks (which I did not do.) and being appalled by racism when whites are included.

There is a difference between the blackface incident and this one, however.

The blackface incident (which I still don’t defend or condone in any way) was carried out by two comedians who likely didn’t know what they were doing was offensive. The video above is attempting to present itself as serious news. Moreso than the content or aim of the piece, I am more appalled by the severe lack of journalistic integrity. Here’s why:

1. All if the foreign people filmed are probably drunk and are being asked questions in such a way that they don’t understand the purpose of the piece… Which is obviously pre determined before they got their sound byte.

2. The taxi couple may well have already known each other. They didn’t bother interviewing them and their take on it (that seconds after their first meeting they are already engaging in skinship) can’t be verified.

3. The girl that they call on the phone said what they asked her about isn’t true. The narrator says she’s not telling the truth. How do we know she isn’t telling the truth?

4. The dude at the coffee shop is talking about a woman that might not even really exist.

It’s one thing to make a bunch of racist claims and back them up with evidence, but these people can’t even do that.

This isn’t entertainment. It’s supposed to be serious journalism that people trust. But it is terrible excuse for journalism and the editor ought to feel ashamed for letting it get through.

I also like the double standard of how Korea wants to portray itself to foreign people, but stuff like this slips through the cracks.

I want to see MBC respond to this in a responsible manner but I think it won’t be. Too bad.

Instead I got a call the next day. They asked me to turn on my computer and connect to the Internet. So I did. Then she told me to go to this website and download that thingamabob. Open this and click that. Suddenly she had gained control of my computer and wanted me to type in my Alien Registration Number to allow her to “check my hard drive for viruses.” I immediately became suspicious and told her that I did not have any viruses and I didn’t like that she had access to control my computer.

She said it was a temporary thing and that she was going to only check for viruses and delete any files that are not necessary.

I told her again that I used to work in IT and that I knew that I didn’t have viruses.

She replied that I couldn’t know that unless she could check.

And that’s where I drew the line. I told her thanks but no thanks. I appreciate that SK wants to eliminate the spread of viruses by scrubbing down every computer, but I found the process invasive and somewhat insulting.

Now I’m no expert about computers, spyware, viruses, or any of that, but I have enough knowledge about computers, networking, and troubleshooting to know that I don’t have viruses. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because I have everything important backed up on an external drive and I am pretty sure that if my computer were to be overrun with worms and spyware I could just reformat it and there would be no problem.

The point is, I know more about that than the average person, so telling me that I can’t know unless I give her remote access so she can check is like a car mechanic telling the lady who works at Jiffy Lube that she can’t know if the car needs an oil change unless she allows the him to check first.

(I know most people working at Jiffy Lube are men. Changing the gender helps make that last sentence more understandable without me having to make names for the two. )

I wonder how many SK customers just blindly follow the instructions? Not that I would suspect the company of anything, but it would be easy for someone to pretend that they are from SK and make a webpage that looks legit. Giving the faker access to your computer would allow them to check your computer for bank account and credit card numbers or nab any file of yours or plant illegal files on your computer.

Be careful everyone.

John Lennon, the most progressive guy ever, right?

I know it’s tired by now. The blackface thing has been talked about to death by this point. I didn’t really have much to say about it though.  It’s not because I don’t care, it’s more because other bloggers have basically said practically everything I want to say.  But in a previous post I heavily criticized the sheer amount of condemnation for Korea or Koreans emanating from the K-blogosphere over the issue.  I must reiterate again, that I don’t in any way approve of what happened.  I think that it was and is wrong to make fun of other races of people, and ignorance is not enough of an excuse, especially when this is not the first time it happened, and there was a high profile backlash the last few times it happened.

So if this is your view, then why were you so critical of other bloggers and their judgement of Korean society based on this incident?

I said what I said because I learned about the incident from a Korean who hasn’t spent a long time overseas, who was outraged over it.  I said that you can’t make a blanket generalization of the whole society based on one incident alone, without proper context.  Saying that Korea is a racist country because this kind of thing is tolerated isn’t really fair.  Anyone who wants to say it is just can’t see things from any point of view other than their own.

Take a look at that guy in the picture.  He’s a pretty famous guy.  (John Lennon for those who are too young to recognize him, though honestly that would be hard for me to believe).

WTF does John Lennon have anything to do with this?

Is John Lennon a racist?

Huh?

You heard me…. Is John Lennon a racist?

You’re kidding me right? The guy who wrote the song Imagine?  The guy who wrote Give Peace a Chance? Basically one of the most influential figures of the 1960′s and the civil rights movement? The self-proclaimed feminist? The man hated by “the man?” You have got to be kidding!  No way! John Lennon was not a racist! He was the personification of peace, tolerance, and brotherhood of man! Did you ever listen to his music? Come on Euge, what the F are you talking about?

Woah woah!  Slow down! I agree, John Lennon was not a racist, and stood for the end of racism and peace and love between all men and women.

What’s your point then?

I’ll get to my point after the jump.

Okay now watch this video. If you don’t want to sit through the beginning, skip to 3:38

Okay. Now that you watched that video…

John Lennon, the personification of social activism and liberal thought did the following:

1. Admitted that he makes Pearl Harbor jokes with his wife.
2. Mocked Japanese accented English.
3. Mocked a traditional Japanese form of art, Kabuki, thereby mocking Japan’s culture.
4. Mocked the Japanese language with what I would equate with “Ching Chong”.
5. Used a racial slur, “Nip.”

[Edit:  The Hip Nip was what Pat Morita (Mr. Miyagi from those Karate Kid Films) was calling himself as a stand up comedian back then.  But Lennon didn't say THE Hip Nip at first.  He said only the hip Nips would get his Kabuki mockery...]

You can clearly see, that EVEN JOHN LENNON while SITTING NEXT TO HIS JAPANESE BORN WIFE said and did some of the most offensive things towards Japanese people I have EVER seen in my life. This would ABSOLUTELY not fly today, and if John Lennon had said these things today his career would suffer immensely.

But his wife is Japanese and she thought it was funny…

No, I’m sorry, I can’t let anyone continue down that train of thought. First.. the fact that his wife is Japanese does not give him the right to say things offensive to Japanese. Even if Yoko was fine with it, validation by one member of another group does not mean the rest of the group will also welcome it.  This line of defense sounds vaguely familiar, like the people who do some of the most racist stuff ever, then claim to not be racist because they have friends of another race.  Weak sauce defense!

I don’t really know why Yoko Ono let that kind of stuff fly, but anytime any of my non-Korean ex-girlfriends did anything even remotely similar to what John did, it was kind of a deal breaker. (Thankfully it didn’t happen that often, but there was one girl who used to call me her little half-Asian boy… Yeah I didn’t really appreciate that, and yes it did contribute to my decision to break up with her.) I have not followed Yoko Ono’s career, statements, or activism in depth, but I don’t understand why she sits there and takes it, or worse, encourages it. All I can say is that perhaps there is just a sliver of truth to the fact that it was a different time.

Yes, it was a different time back then and…

Yes, at THAT time in history, the civil rights movement was centered around blacks and women. People somehow didn’t realize that Asians, Latinos, Homosexuals, and any other type of minority ALSO deserved respect and civil rights. This was a time when it was still accepted to call people Oriental, where every representation of Asian men and women on TV and in the movies was based on stereotypes, and children in kindergarten classes were reading the story of a “Chinese” boy with a really long name who almost died because his brother could not remember how to say it as he was running around trying to find help. Teachers were being PAID to basically teach kids to be racist to Asians back then, but you’d be hung if you even said the word “nigger” merely to discuss the word itself. Clearly, at that time, the voice crying out for the civil rights of Asians hadn’t been considered or simply became muddled amongst the more audible cries for justice from NOW and the Black Panthers (and their associated groups.) So.. John Lennon gets a pass. He gets to claim ignorance because it was a different time..

So John Lennon, the personification of the civil rights movement, clearly NOT a racist is doing stuff that clearly IS offensive, and could be seen as racist…. but he gets a pass because…. it was a different time. Also, I think we can ALL agree that it was not his intention to be racist towards Japanese people. He may not have even seen it as racist.

So John Lennon is allowed to be deliberately offensive in post 1960′s USA…

Questions:

1. Is post 1960′s USA more progressive or less progressive than 2010′s Korea?

Most of the bloggers who complain will agree that the USA was further along than Korea is now, as far as civil rights are concerned.

Is John Lennon on the progressive side or was he one of those who favored the status quo and wanted to resist change?

Obviously he wanted change.

3. Korea hasn’t had anything that is even a candle next to the nuclear explosion that was the 1960′s civil rights movement in the US.

True.

4. The people in blackface in Korea are also not activists that personify the movement for peace and tolerance in society.

Also true.

So if we are going to allow John Lennon to still be the personification of social change, then you have to give Korea (the country) a break… if not totally exonerate the comedians themselves. Why? Because John Lennon is he personification of social change! He should know better.  The comedians are not the personification of social change, and have probably not been involved in social issues surrounding racial minorities.

My point, I guess, is that we can judge Korea through the moral lens that we have acquired outside of Korea, but that comparison doesn’t mean anything until Korea has had some time to play catch up. Furthermore, if one of the most outspoken activists for change can be super offensive, and still not be considered a racist, in fact, to be considered exactly the opposite…

Then maybe we should try to understand that the Korean comedians who wore blackface were not deliberately trying to be racist. To understand that does not mean we approve of what they did. In fact, the understanding might lead to more dialogue on the subject, which may stop these kinds of things from happening again.

Endpoint.

Now I must say that believe John Lennon was one of the greatest men who ever lived, who succeeded in changing the world with his music and his revolutionary spirit, and I don’t in any way think he is a racist. I want to apologize to the Lennon family or anyone else that may be hurt because I highlighted John in this way. It was not my intention to defame him, and I hope that readers will agree that by using this example, I am trying to promote peace and understanding.

It was then that I realized that I was dreaming and that nothing around me was real. I couldn’t stand up but I could move up the hill by crawling weightlessly using only my hands. There was a bird nearby. I made myself identify the type of bird. I looked directly at it. It was fuzzy. I kept staring at it and slowly it came into detail, but not to the point that I could distinguish it from any other bird. It wasn’t specifically any defined shape. But it looked like a bird. Since that doesn’t make any sense I knew I was dreaming for sure.

I pointed at the bird and thought to myself that I wanted it to be gone since it didn’t make sense. After two or three tries it exploded into many tiny pieces but there wasn’t any blood or bird pieces left over.

So I tried to stand up. Even though I could still feel gravity to my front, I tried to concentrate and ignore that.

I jumped. It was about three times my height. But I slowly descended back to Earth.

None of this is real! I should be able to fly, I thought.

I jumped up in the air again, this time I was slowly rising above the ground… It was getting smaller. I looked forward but I guess dreamworld hadn’t yet decided what that was supposed to look like, so I was again falling to the ground.

I looked all around me to make sure I knew what my surroundings looked like.

I jumped up in the air. I was floating!!! I did it. As I moved upward everything looked as it should. I was rising ever higher. The houses below we’re getting smaller. Suddenly, my back knocked against a tree branch (somehow 500 feet off the ground.) The pain woke me up.

I tried to go back to sleep and renter the dream… It didn’t work… Or if it did I don’t remember.

Here’s the obligatory picture via asianjunkie.com

We didn't know it was offensive!

Now, why am I writing this post? Plenty of other K-blogs have condemned the Korean media/Korean education/Koreans themselves for this action. I’m not going to do either of those things. I in no way support or condone what has happened and I am thoroughly disappointed, but this post is about the other bloggers.

My good friend Roboseyo was probably the least vitriolic of the bloggers who wrote about this issue.

Other bloggers took the chance to point out that this is proof that Koreans or Korea is racist.

I’ll have you know that this particular blackface incident was not learned from a fellow blogger or fellow expat… A Korean person who has never lived abroad and who doesn’t interact with foreign people on a regular basis pointed it out to me and was very distraught about it. “How on Earth could something like this happen!” were more or less the exact words.

So my friends, this may only be one example out of many, but we have to realize that not everyone in Korea feels that this is not a problem, and that Koreans themselves are not a hive mind.

Are there racists in Korea? Yes.
Are all Koreans racists? No, and far from it.

Express outrage over the issue and boycott the station or organize a campaign to promote awareness of this issue.. but don’t make it worse by stereotyping an entire nation of people.

I once had a job at the mall in college at the Hallmark greeting card shop. We also sold beanie babies which were all the rage at that time, with people marking down on their calendars the exact days that we were getting beanie baby shipments so that they could storm the store when it opened and buy their allotted limit (five per person, I believe) before they all sold out. The funny thing was that only the early beanie babies were worth anything, and by now, everyone was trying to strike it rich by buying new ones as soon as they came out, but since they were so popular, the company that made them (Ty, I think) made so many more of the later ones. With more of a particular thing in existence, the less valuable it is to collectors. Ever wonder why the first Batman comic is worth so much? It’s because your grandpa’s mom lined the dog house with it or wrapped your great-grandpappy’s sandwich in it, and there are probably only 10 copies left in existence.

Well how’s that for a tangent, let’s start playing the wakeup song like in inception and move back up a level.

The point is, there is this one fat lady who came in with her two children bright and early on beanie baby day and tried to buy 15 of each type of new beanie baby, and I told her she could only have five total (so instead of buying 75 beanie babies, I was only going to let her have five). This of course pissed her off and she kept bitching and complaining over and over that she and her children constituted three humans and were therefore entitled to fifteen of each kind. If it were MY store, I would have sold her every beanie baby in the place because honestly I’d be more interested in getting a whole buttload of money than making sure that other moronic customers would have the fair opportunity to purchase a plastic bead filled useless piece of cloth made in a Chinese sweatshop. But it wasn’t my money or my store, and I figured it was in my best interest to follow the rules because for my slightly over minimum wage salary, it would be better to deal with one pissed off customer than the 100 that didn’t get a chance to waste their money on useless crap.

So this lady didn’t just complain, she begged, she pleaded, she yelled, she screamed, and she called me an anti-semite even though I had no idea that she was Jewish. (And she had no idea that I wasn’t.) I called for my assistant manager who kept trying to explain to her politely that she could only have five because it was store policy. Finally when the angry mom realized that she wasn’t going to get her way, she bought her allotted five and threw the other seventy on the ground and walked away very briskly saying that she was going to go to the OTHER Hallmark store in the mall where they treat her like a person. (Even though that one was owned by the same guy, as well as practically all other Hallmark stores in the state. )

The point of this story is that she is the customer that I will ALWAYS remember from that job (other than the few celebrities that came into the store, perhaps I’ll save that story for another time). Even though thousands upon thousands of people came in, found what they wanted, paid for it, and left without causing any trouble, I won’t ever have any recollection of any of them. I still remember this lady and if you put her in front of me today in a lineup, I could probably pick her out to you.

Now this blog seems to be about things that annoy me and that I am always annoyed. The thing is, I’m not telling you a lot of the GOOD things that I’ve been going through on this blog, because I don’t need therapy to cope with the good things. The bad things are more memorable and provide an impetus to write. The good things that are much more common stand out less and I don’t need therapy to cope with them, which is one of the functions this blog serves. But anyway I’ll share something nice with you that happened the other day because it made me feel awesome.

This is what the back tire of my scooter looked like.

I’ll explain it after the jump.

Okay, so I was driving on my scooter when suddenly I noticed that it was having trouble going straight. It started leaning left and right. Luckily I wasn’t in a situation where I had to maintain any speed, so I jumped off the bike and pushed it to the side of the road. The kind drivers were patient enough to let me do this instead of speeding by and honking. (I still don’t see why expats say that people can’t drive here… I don’t really notice any difference.)

It became apparent. I had a flat. The nearest bike shop was about a kilometer and a half away… and that’s a long way to push. So I spent the next hour or so pushing it there. Man, I was beat. But I was at least happy that I would be able to fix the tire, pay the guy, and quickly ride to my weekly radio gig. When I got to the bike shop it was closed because it was Sunday! This made me somewhat angry, because I was now in a situation where I couldn’t just push it back home, so I would have to leave the bike there overnight and hope that nobody (including the owner of the shop) would steal it. To make sure I called the owner (his number was listed on the storefront) to inform him that my bike had a flat and that I was going to leave it in front of his shop. He agreed.

The next day I went to the shop pretty early in the morning and knocked on the door. The old man who owned the shop smiled and asked me politely what the problem was. I explained that I had a flat tire. He told me to have a seat in the shop and gave me a cup of instant coffee, and started to work. His first task was to pump air back into the tire. He then began spraying something (probably soap or glycerin) on it. I guess if there were any holes in the tire, there would be bubbles forming where the holes were. There were no bubbles, so there was no flat. He called over to me to say that he was finished. I began to reach for my wallet, and he said.. no no. No need.

Wait, what? Is that possible? A mechanic who worked on my bike for 15 minutes doesn’t want to be paid? He probably could have asked me for 10 bucks and I would have gladly given it to him. I don’t have my own pump to put air in my tire and he does. I don’t have glycerin to make sure it’s not flat, but he does. I didn’t get my hands dirty, and he did! I was helpless basically, because there was no way that I would have been able to push my bike to a competing shop, so if he were to tell me that he wanted 100 bucks, I’d have no recourse other than to pay or abandon my bike.

I asked him with a confused look if it was really okay that I didn’t pay anything.

He laughed. “What, do you think I’m gonna charge you for air?”

I thanked him and told him I’d be back if I had another problem, and rode away with the conviction that maybe not everyone in this world is out to make a buck at the expense of their humanity, but if you read a lot of other expat blogs, you’d think this entire country is full of people who worship money, and who have a goal of making as much money as possible by any means possible. Not so, my friends…not so.

Anyway this conversation did not go this way. After the inquiry into my Korean ability the lady said that in the past it would be totally okay to talk about foreigners right in front of them but now we have to be careful because they are more likely to understand. I said that this was probably true. Then she said that back in the day whenever a black person came along people would casually talk about that person freely using the Korean equivalent of Nigger.

I asked the lady not to use that word and she laughed saying it was okay because she wasn’t calling anyone that, she was talking about calling people that. She has a point, but she was talking about herself calling people that. Besides, any escape clause this presented was dashed when she said that it’s okay because there weren’t any around.

She then switched to English to my surprise, and explained that she had lived in LA for a long time and used to work in an hair product shop that was frequented by black women and she got in serious trouble when one lady tried to buy a product ad she wanted to suggest another that would be better for her hair type. She said that this other product was designed for Nigger hair. Since then she has known to watch what she says in front of certain people.

I would have thought that this would lead people to eliminate certain words from their vocabulary regardless of which company was present. But she’s old so I give her the benefit of the doubt.

At least she didn’t talk about Korea’s four seasons.