Author: Peter

In post-87, I noted that “up for that” and “down for that” inexplicably have the same meaning.

I find online a place where others have discussed this “issue”. It’s at a group-blog called “Languaphiles“. Somebody asked if the two phrases have the same meaning. I will extract relevant comments here:

I agree with everything runa27 writes above in her second paragraph (although the subsequent “plosive” discussion is a bit beyond me). I expressed, or tried to express, the same things in post-87. There is an “enthusiasm gap” between “up for that” and “down for that”.

Another commenter has another idea:

“Put me down” makes sense as a possible origin for this. However, because of the ebonics-association of this usage of “down” (which I admit is anecdotal, i.e. it is what I infer from the people I’ve heard it use, and the situations in which I’ve heard it used, in my own life), I’d doubt that “down for that” is a child of “put my name down for that”.

Finally, Runa27 again:

Runa27 wrote that using “down with that” to express approval is “a LOT more slangy”. I agree.

In fact, I think I can confidently say that “I’m down with that” is still firmly “urban street slang”, and that anyone who uses it is trying to affect a “ghetto” manner (“keepin’ it real“, as they say). Anyone not interested in “ghetto street cred” using the phrase “down with that” would be doing so purely ironically, is my supposition. Further, “down with that” may be a cousin of “down for that”. “Down for” may have made strides well outside “the ghetto” by now, but in-so-doing has forced a third cousin, the now-far-less-cool “up for that” to run off to the linguistic suburbs.

Last week, a minor U.S. radio host was fired after picking up and waving that faded old banner bearing those two well-worn words, Yellow Peril. He was talking about golf, specifically women’s golf in the USA, the LPGA. He implied that East-Asians (esp. Koreans) were taking over the LPGA and called for a national-quota system for U.S. golf.

Who’d have thought it, but South Korea (and to a lesser extent all of East-Asia) is producing lots of winning golfers.

The fired radio host said the following:

The radio host, Craig Schaller, included some insensitive remarks (sounding like jokes we made in 5th grade) as he was explaining why such a huge increase in East-Asian players in the USA’s LPGA bothers him:

Schaller proposes a cap on players per country, a national quota system:

The popular blogger ROK-Drop (who is, or was, connected with the USFK [U.S. Forces Korea] and who blogs on USFK matters, and who I think is married to a Korean) was really angry about this. He posted an excoriation of Schaller. It’s outrageous to propose a national-quota system for a sports league! was ROK-Drop’s idea.

The thing is….South Korea itself has an ethnic-national quota system for its sports teams. I’d always heard that the Korean baseball league limited teams to one foreign player. For some reason it’s always a pitcher. Now that I look it up, Wikipedia claims it is two foreign players per team. The cap may have changed since 2009, I don’t know. Let me point out that two foreign players (defacto limited to pitchers) on a baseball team’s roster is miniscule. I think similar rules apply in the other Korean sports leagues: basketball, soccer.

In other words, Schaller’s “outrageous” suggestion of trying to ensure local-players’ dominance of the league actually is…not so outrageous in Korea. It is the accepted practice in Korea. Of course, when Koreans do it, it becomes not so “outrageous”. Our instinct, even my own, is to look to justify it or excuse it away. Koreans are right to limit the number of foreign players; this is a Korean league. Koreans would not support teams that are mostly full of foreign “mercenary” players who can’t speak Korean and have no connection to this country. Korean fans need to feel a connection with these players, whom they are supposed to like and support — if the league is to succeed!

I think the above is a fair summary of the rationale for why the KBO (Korean Baseball Organization) and the other leagues put such a low-cap on the number of foreign players here. The tricky thing for the critics of Schaller is, if you replace “Korean” with “American” in the above, well — Is that not the entirety of Mr. Schaller’s rationale?

I pointed this out in a comment on ROK-Drop, but got no meaningful reply.

Q. What do Armenia, Belarus, China, and Papua New Guinea have in common?
A. All were found to have “peacefulness levels” about equal to the USA’s.

     World Rank / Peace Index / Country
                     97th — 2.12 — Belarus
                     98th — 2.12 — Armenia
                     99th — 2.13 — United States
                     99th — 2.13 — Papua New Guinea
                     101st — 2.14 — China

From the Global Peace Index 2013. The scores range from from 1.0 (most “peaceful”) to 5.0 (least “peaceful”), and are calculated from a wide range of things, like crime, %-of-population in jail, police presence, use of state terror, “militarization” of society, weapons trade, relations with neighbors, involvement in wars [foreign or civil], political stability, etc. (See here for the data from the organization that calculated the scores).

Of the 162 countries analyzed (all the big ones), the USA tied with Papua New Guinea for 99th safest. USA’s rank was depressed due to an especially high “militarization” score. The USA’s jailed-population score is also very high, at 4.5, which is second only to North Korea’s 5.0 (the maximum possible score).

Peace Index Score 2013
. .1st — 1.16 — Iceland [Most peaceful country on Earth]
2nd — 1.21 —  Denmark
3rd — 1.24 — New Zealand
4th — 1.25 — Austria
5th — 1.27 — Switzerland
6th — 1.29 — Japan
7th — 1.30 — Finland
8th — 1.31 — Canada
9th — 1.32 — Sweden
10th– 1.34 — Belgium
11th– 1.36 — Norway
12th– 1.37 — Ireland
13th– 1.37 — Slovenia
14th– 1.40 — Czech Republic
15th– 1.43 — Germany
………………
47th– 1.82 — South Korea
………………
97th — 2.12 — Belarus
98th — 2.12 — Armenia
99th — 2.13 — United States
99th — 2.13 — Papua New Guinea
101st — 2.14 — China
………………
150th- 2.73 — Cote d’ Ivoire
150th- 2.73 — Israel
152nd- 2.75 — Yemen
153rd- 3.03 — Central African Republic
154th- 3.04 — North Korea
155th- 3.06 — Russia
………………
159th- 3.25 — Iraq
160th- 3.39 — Syria
160th- 3.39 — Somalia
162nd- 3.44 — Afghanistan [Least peaceful country on Earth]
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What exactly does it mean that Papua New Guinea has an identical “peace score” to the USA? Does it mean people are equally safe in both places? No, because crime is just one parameter of many. (Papua New Guinea is actually much more dangerous in terms of crime, I see from the data.) Maybe the data behind the peace-score is so wide-ranging as to be useless, in the end.

A commenter points out out a methodological problem in line with what I mean: “The idea of ranking nation-states’ contribution (or lack of it) to global peace, when the relative military power of those states ranges from Nauru to United States, is…obviously idiotic…” — Actually, Nauru is not one of the analyzed countries, but his point is valid. USA’s Militarization does depress its score. It’s easy for Iceland to get near 1.0 on militarization, because it has no standing army. Of the top 15 (above), most have benefited, for nearly 70 years now (after 1945), from the USA guaranteeing their security — via military aid, troop presences in Europe, and NATO Article 5. On top of this, none of the top 15 (possibly excluding Japan [NK] and Slovenia [the Yugoslav wars]), that I can tell, have had even the faintest pretense of a real external security threat after 1990.

“The best prize that life has to offer is
the chance to work hard at work worth doing”

I really agree with this idea.

Former U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt said it. (Roosevelt looks similar to Mr. L, who is father of one of my boyhood friends, who was a member of our church, and who was a Boy Scout leader. He now lives, retired, in a cabin in Michigan with his wife. Mr. L also shares a certain “old-American” temperament with Roosevelt, in certain ways.)

The kind of spirit behind this quotation can also be stated as “doing quality work for the sake of quality work”, or “pride in a job well-done, expecting no reward other than personal satisfaction”. This is the way I (like to) think of my own attitude towards “work”, whatever that “work” may be. If there’s a job to do, you might as well do it well.

Talking this way sounds so old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Today’s people are more cynical, more inclined to avoid work, and probably inclined to make sarcastic remarks about anyone sharing Roosevelt’s idea there. I mean, he said these words 110 years ago (in 1903, I find online). The updated version, for a century later, may be: “The best prize that life has to offer is the chance to be able to get by doing very little real work and to mock those who think that anything is ‘worth doing’…”
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Yesterday, a foreign coworker (a male from San Francisco, aged 23) told me that he’d decided to abandon a plan he’d previously proposed for a collaborative project for our 5th and 6th graders. It is something I’d done alone before. For reasons I won’t bother going into, his cooperation was necessary starting in June. In effect, he said he’d rather do as little work as possible. He aims to use prep time for goofing-around on the Internet, it seems. This project would eat into that a bit, it’s true. Sorry, he said, when he sensed I was a mite disappointed with his change of heart and his lame justification. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt would say that the person this coworker ought to apologize to is himself!

Writing post-75 last week got me to thinking again about the company at which I worked for the better part of 2008. It was called (in abbreviation, to avoid this being easily searchable), D’berry.  I lived in Arlington, Virginia (my place of birth). D’berry’s main office building, where I worked, was a fair distance away to the west.

D’berry was a great place to work. I was sad to leave. I liked the work, and they treated us well. Something has made me, over these past days, think about the commute I had then, five years ago (which was similar to the commute I had to/from my university, a bit further off to the west). The commute to or from work was 45 minutes at the very speediest. Coming home, though, I usually took longer than 45 minutes, by my own choice. I will explain below.

For getting to work (by 8 AM), the need to make haste most often compelled me to use the subway. Getting home, I had more options, not being pressed for time. There were three different ways I’d get home, involving some combination of bus, subway, and walking.

(1) Bus All the Way. A bus that headed towards my home area was supposed to stop right in front of the D’berry building at 5:12 PM, I think it was, which was right after the quitting time of 5:00 PM. Upsides:  The bus was cheap ($1.35 one-way in those days), it offered a better chance for a seat than the subway, and it also dropped-off nearer to my home than the subway did. Downsides: In my several years riding Metrobuses in Northern Virginia, I never quite felt quite at ease or, frankly, safe on them (whereas in Korea I’ve never felt unsafe on a bus). In those years, I witnessed many disturbing incidents/people on Metrobuses. More practically, Metrobuses were not reliably  on time, in my experience: Occasionally they were very late; other times early, resulting in my seeing the bus whiz past as I was still walking to the bus-stop. Every so often, a bus just didn’t come at all. It was slower than the subway, potentially much slower due to the occasional bus lateness. / In those days, my biggest reason for riding the bus was the money it saved over the alternative of taking daily rush-hour subway trips. In the Washington DC regional urban rail system (subway/”Metro”) fares are higher at peak travel times (“rush hour”). In those days, peak-time fares could reach up to $5.00 for a long one-way trip, I think. That adds up! / The temptation of being able to limit  transportation-cost, to and from work, to $13.50 a week ($1.35 x 10 weekly trips), was high, despite all the negatives.

(2) Bus–>Metro–>Walk. Rather than catching a bus and riding it all the way home (#1 above), I could catch a different bus headed to the nearest Metro station, then ride the Metro, then walk home. The only question was which Metro station to get off at: East Falls Church or Ballston. East Falls Church was 40-minutes away from home on foot. Ballston was a lot closer, only 20 minutes’ walk from home. I often chose to get off at East Falls Church, though. My reasoning was that the 40-minute walk was very pleasant. That walk mostly followed the W&OD Bike Trail, which is a slab of pavement for bikes and pedestrians, surrounded by parkland. No cars to be seen. W&OD was built over an old railroad bed. Oh, I loved walking that trail. Conversely, walking from Ballston involved noisy and hectic streets. Still interesting, in a way, but not as pleasant. Going via Ballston also meant having to deal with the Ballston Station exit area itself, a place I had developed a distaste for in my experiences there in the mid-2000s. (I was pleased the day I realized I could bypass it by exiting the subway station via a seldom-used elevator off to one side.) / Getting off at East Falls Church also had an economic incentive: Metrorail fares were based on distance traveled, and getting off at East Falls Church was 75 cents cheaper than riding one more stop to Ballston. I got home 17 minutes later if I chose the East Falls Church route (20 minutes more on foot, but three minutes fewer in the subway). Was [75 cents] + [the chance for a pleasant walk] worth 17 minutes of my time? At the time, I thought so.

(3) Walk–>Metro–>Walk. This is the same as #2 above, except that I would walk from my workplace to the Metro station, rather than get a bus there. You might think I’d do this only if I’d just missed the bus that went to the train station. Sometimes that was the reason. More often, though, I’d use this “all walking plus train” route if I was feeling impetuous, if the weather was good, and if I’d had a good day at work, which was often. It made me feel free and alive. / The 20-minute walk through the dense-suburban, traffic-filled roads near my workplace was not particularly pleasant, but still interesting for its own sake. I discovered lots of fascinating nooks and crannies out there via my walking in that area. If I also went the East Falls Church route, on the third leg of my homeward journey, it’d amount to quite a lot of walking, which was often the point. Method #3, as I say, is the one I favored when I was in the best mood.
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My dad would sometimes point out to me, when I was young, that life is full of adventures to be had. All you have to do is seek them out. My sister always understood this better than I did.

To paraphrase somebody else, maybe “90% of adventure is just showing up”. I had various justifications at the time (as I’ve tried to describe above) for my decision(s) to deliberately take longer “commutes”. One of my justifications was that I was following the spirit of my father’s general advice, on everyday-“adventure”. Why rush home as quickly as possible? Is home so exciting? Does he who spends most time at home win? Why not make the commute a mini-adventure in itself? Commute-as-“adventure” is how I looked at things in the mid-2000s. Walking back from East Falls Church Station was a small adventure. Riding the bus was, too, even if not necessarily a pleasant adventure. Who said adventures had to be pleasant, though?

My cousin told me that she plans to go on a trip this fall: Hungary, then Munich to catch some of Oktoberfest 2013.

I was reminded of her when I saw BILD reporting that beer at this upcoming Oktoberfest will now cost up to €9.85 (Euro) per “Maß“. What is a “Maß”?, I wondered. It turns out that it is a word in the Bavarian dialect for a mug of one-liter size.

One liter of Munich Oktoberfest beer for €9.85 would translate to $11-14 USD (based on the maximum and minimum exchange-rates over the past two years). One liter is 34 ounces. Twelve ounces of beer (the standard “can of beer” size in the USA), at the same price-per-unit, would cost about $4-$5. A U.S. pint (16 oz.) would be $6-$7 at this price-per-unit.

Beer in Germany’s grocery stores is shockingly cheap. A half-liter bottle, as I recall, was only about €0.30, which’d come to 25-30 U.S. cents for 12-oz., for U.S. comparison. I speculated at the time that Germany “subsidized beer”.
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The artwork at right, of a Maß, is as if it is lifted directly from my own memory. In late April of 2007, I visited Munich for the first and only time. I was traveling around southern-Germany with another American student at the time. We found a veritable Biergarten, open-air, with long wooden tables, quite similar to the scene in the painting. I was a bit ambivalent about the actual drinking, but it’s a “must-do thing”, isn’t it. We got beer in large mugs. They must’ve been Maße (i.e., Maß plural). If I ever knew the word “Maß”, I’d forgotten it, before today. I think we paid €5, plus deposit. This was April, not October. And 2007, not 2013.

My traveling companion, B.A., ended up taking his Maß home to the USA, along with mine and those of several strangers. The strangers’ were abandoned ones he’d found in the huge grassy park adjacent to the beer-garden. Mind you, this was not stealing, because everyone pays a 1 EUR deposit, and those who don’t return it forfeit the deposit. So all were paid for, by somebody. / I remember that when B.A. was looking for abandoned beer-steins, a woman in her 70s approached us and spoke a few words. Both B.A. and I had fair, functional German abilities at the time, but her dialect/accent was so thick that we couldn’t understand her at all. You’d think it’d be demotivating, as both of us were students of the language, but it was more amusing. So this was the notorious “Bayerisch”, in the wild.
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I occasionally try to keep up with the news in German. I appreciate the low-brow tabloid, BILD, for this purpose, because the writing in it is simple. I can generally understand the contents of most everything in BILD, aided by occasional vocabulary look-ups (as in this word, “Maß”). It can really be a strain on my skill if I have to read long texts in German from something more highbrow. Sometimes cultural in-references that I don’t quite get can be problematic, even in BILD.

This comes buried in a BBC article about the latest military developments in Syria:

I’ve also heard, in my occasional following of the Syrian news, that churches have been “deliberately desecrated” in the battle zones by some of these Rebels. Why target churches? Assad and his group are not Christians. It just reminds me again that the more I know about Syria, the less I really know.

I was reading an essay by somebody named Stephen Zunes.
He argues against (further) U.S. intervention in Syria, despite being anti-Assad.

He writes:
“A large minority of Syrians—consisting of Alawites, Christians, and members of other minority communities; Baath Party loyalists and government employees; the professional armed forces and security services; and the (largely Sunni) crony capitalist class that the government has nurtured—still cling to the Assad regime. There are certainly dissidents within all of these sectors, but altogether regime supporters number as much as one-third of the population.”

  “This means…that even large-scale direct foreign intervention will not lead to a quick collapse of the regime.”

Maybe it’s best to be wary of armchair estimates of support for Assad. The one-third figure may count active-supporters. The “rebels” (a loose, motley group) may be actively-supported by even fewer. The majority may be ambivalent, just waiting-it-out till the fighting ends.

This discussion reminds me of something I remember from a U.S. history college class. The professor said that in (I think it was) the summer of 1776, as the Declaration of Independence was being signed, colonial-American Whites were divided in opinion, thusly:
            A — One-third supported independence
            B — One-third opposed independence
            C — One-third were either unaware of the independence movement, or were ambivalent about the outcome

[The hard core of group B “walked the walk” and actually fled the newly-created USA when the British abandoned their military effort in the early 1780s. They mostly went to Canada. It’s my understanding that these exiles were “the first English-speaking Canadians”. Before that wave, English-speakers were few and far between in Canada, though plenty of French-speakers were around. Anglophone Canada is a child of the American Revolutionary War.]

There’s a big difference between the Colonial-USA of the 1770s and the Syria of the 2010s that occurs to me, though. There were no “sectarian” splits in the 1770s Colonial-USA based on region, religion, or ethnicity. I mean, Group-A (above) could (and did) draw converts from ‘B’ and ‘C’, at least passive ones. This seems much less likely in Syria.

In this post [in German] a foreign student studying in Korea, Nikola, reports that in the fashionable Ewha Women’s University neighborhood of Seoul, you now have to “buy your haircut online”. If you don’t  “buy the haircut online”, then the price of a woman’s haircut (“with all the frills”) at the hair-salons in that area is at least 120,000 South Korean Won. That is over $100 USD at current exchange. All the salons participate in this, in a kind of cartel.

Nikola reports that you get a huge discount, nearly 50% off, if you do the following:
                (a) Select the haircut online from a list (like this one),
                (b) Reserve a time for the appointment,
                (c) Select a stylist(?), and
                (d) Pay online.
All of this amounts to “buying the haircut online”. In effect, you are given a huge surcharge if you don’t.

I can see some benefits to this: The hair-cutter who meets the client can be a specialist in the particular style she wants (I guess); time-efficiency is maximized because the stylists do not need to just sit around the workplace at all hours waiting, and would only need to come during the appointed times; no one needs to answer the phone to create these appointments, since it’s done online; plus no one needs to handle money or payments transactions, as that’s also online; nobody even needs to go through lengthy explanations or discussions about how to style the hair, because the stylist can see what the customer wants via the selected pictures, so yet more time/energy are saved….

Yes, it seems like an efficient system. A bit surreal, or unsettling, to pick a style online. I’ve never even gotten a haircut in which I asked for a particular style. The $6-per-haircut I pay does not qualify me for “styling”. I don’t mind. It’s just a haircut.
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The author of the blog I link to above is Nikola, of Croatian origin but a German citizen (from what I gather) who is studying in Korea and speaks (at least) Croatian, English, Korean (passably), and German, the latter of which is most comfortable and is the language of his blog.

NOTE: The phrase “Buying a Haircut Online”, the title of this post, gets zero (0) hits on a Google search made on June 10th, 2013. I will be the first one to use it. I stole-it-via-translation from Nikola’s post-title, “Frisuren Online Kaufen, ein Muss in Korea” (Buying Hairstyles Online, a ‘Must’ in Korea).

Hits on Google
       Zero (0) for “buying a haircut online”
       Zero (0) for “buying a hairstyle online”
       Zero (0) for “selecting a haircut online”
       One (1) for “selecting a hairstyle online” [but the site seems to be a spam-site]
       One (1) for “choosing a haircut online” [obviously generated by a spam-program from the context]
       Two (2) for “choosing a hairstyle online” [both possible spam-sites]
***************************
       19 (nineteen) for “buy a haircut online” [none of which allude to the concept Nikola describes]
       Zero (0) for “buy a hairstyle online”
       Zero (0) for “select a haircut online”
       Zero (0) for “select a hairstyle online”
       Zero (0) for “choose a haircut online”
       Fourteen (14) for “choose a hairstyle online” [most are obvious spam-sites, only this one is a real, definite human usage of the phrase, and it is not connected with the concept Nikola describes]
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I conclude that the concept of “buying a haircut online”, as described above, may be unknown to the English-speaking world.

I recounted the following in post-73:

To which I appended, in a comment, this:

The “TED Talk” in question, for the record, is from 2006. It is called “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity“.

I was pleased to find that this Ken Robinson delivered another talk in April 2013. It is even more impressive than the 2006 talk. Its title is “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley“. Here it is:

He’s delivered two other TED Talks. I’ve only seen so far the original (2006) and this 2013 one, video directly above.

This Saturday was the first time I played soccer since sometime in mid-2012.

I recounted, in post-6, how I “used to” play soccer every Saturday, from late-2011 through mid-2012 in the Bupyeong neighborhood of the Seoul Megalopolis. The games stopped happening, as people stopped showing up. I’m happy to say that a game finally happened on June 8th and I was there.

I walked to the field, as is my habit, leaving my home about 11:30 AM. I bought two 2-liter bottled waters on the way. The weather is warm enough and the sun strong enough that I was sweating by the time I showed up at 12:15 to find three others waiting. By 12:30, 13 players had showed up, of whom four were American (me and three others), one Canadian (D., who started playing about the same time I did in 2011), and the rest, British or Irish. Most of the faces were totally new to me. All the initial players were White and English teachers, mostly from Incheon. One Korean I’d never seen before showed up late. The games were always English-teacher-oriented, but in the past there were several regular Korean players, and even a handful of miscellaneous players whose “stories” I never learned, like the 21-year-old Russian who said he worked for some company, and who spoke fluent Korean but mediocre English.

I am not in bad shape, I found, but I definitely got tired a lot more quickly than I did playing in 2012. I scored a goal.

My final note on post-75 gets me thinking about our own two veterans’ holidays in the USA. I said:

There may be some reason for it being June 6th that I am simply ignorant of. Alternatively, it may be a “random” day.

We in the USA have two veterans’ holidays, November 11th being WWI Armistice Day, many will know. We also have what we call Memorial Day. Why is our Memorial Day at the end of May? I cannot figure out a reason for that.

Memorial Day in the USA’s real function, of course, is marking the start of Summer. So it’s not a “veterans” holiday at all, except highly superficially. Look at what really happens on Memorial Day (in the USA), what people actually do. They get their “summer routines” started, with barbeques, good-weather-oriented overnight trips (my aunt and cousins were so engaged this year, as they often are on Memorial Day weekend, travelling to Connecticut), or perhaps doing yard-work, or going bicycling, or picnicking. Swimming pools open on Memorial Day weekend.

None of the things regular people do on the USA’s Memorial Day are connected with veterans’ commemoration, it seems to me. What they actually do is connected with “commemoration”, or celebration, of the seasonal change; the start of consistent good weather; the start of summer.

The USA’s Memorial Day, it occurs to me, is a “seasonal-change holiday”, just like the old pagan festivals. It appeals to the same instincts as the European pagans did with their seasonal festivals. My own name, and the name of this blog, is derived from such a Northern-European pagan seasonal festival.

Old habits die hard. I don’t think this is a bad thing.

Thursday, June 6th, was a holiday in honor of the soldiers who died in the Korean War (perhaps, see below).

We were off. Looking back on my other “June 6ths” in South Korea:

June 6th, 2009: I was still settling in to my job in Ilsan. I did not yet have my Alien Registration Card, so I did not yet have a bank account or a phone (I had rejected the offer of my boss to pay me in cash, although I did subsequently run out of money a few days before I’d gotten the ARC around mid-June; Luckily, my predecessor had left me hundreds of coins, which I used to buy ramen for sustenance — I didn’t mind; it was all part of the ride, I thought. I also refused to tap into my U.S. funds, thinking it best to keep as a back-up). / I have no memory of a June holiday in my early time at the Ilsan job. Looking at the calendar, I see that June 6th fell on Saturday in 2009. Korea has no tradition of transposing weekend-falling holidays onto Mondays, as we do in the USA. [Note: In some alternate universe in which I’d chosen to stay at D’berry, the company I worked for during the better part of 2008, June 6th 2009 would have seen me having been awarded the one-year certificate the company gave out, along with perhaps a little bonus, a few weeks earlier. I liked D’berry. See post-13 for a roundabout way of telling why I decided to not get back in with that company in early 2009.]

June 6th, 2010: On May 1st, 2010, I’d moved out of Ilsan bound for Suwon, leaving my packed suitcase in the care of my closest Korean friend, Cho B.W. I lived in very cheap but fine lodging in Suwon until June 10th (with a 10-day[?] trip to China in the middle of that period). My idea was to just live-in-Korea without working for a while. I flew back to the USA on June 10th. / I have no memory of there being a “holiday” in the final days of my time in Suwon. Again, I see it fell on a Sunday in 2010. / On June 6th, 2010, I was excited by my upcoming travelling in the USA, including to the Grand Canyon — with a childhood friend, A., and some of his relatives — and my visits to my own extended family in Iowa. / Later, I’d try to get back in with D’berry. They wanted me, they said. I waited. By late fall 2010, I realized it would not happen: The GIS department has been gutted; I remember a full office, I came in to ‘interview’ to see a mostly-empty office; most people had been fired, moved away, or nudged into early-retirement between summer 2008 and fall 2010. I’ve thought about this decision a lot since then, and whether it was the right one or not.

June 6th, 2011: I was not in Korea.

June 6th, 2012: A Wednesday. I was about to hit the nine-month mark at the Bucheon job (which I began in Sept. 2011). A British coworker had invited me and about 10 others friends/coworkers to a baseball game between two Korean teams in Seoul. It was a fun day, and a day I will not soon forget. After the game. the group split up. Three of us — me, my coworker-friends C.H. (a tall and humorous American), and B.S.Y. (a not-very-tall but also good-humored Korean), went to the Yongsan War Memorial Park, at my suggestion. I think of that as my favorite place in this country because (a) It’s so non-busy/peaceful, and (b) There’s lots of interesting stuff to look at. Following this, we had a dinner of a soup called buddae-jiggae and then home. This baseball game and visit to the Yongsan Memorial were some of my friend C.H.’s last meaningful activities in this country, as he flew back to the USA early on June 9th.

June 6th, 2013: A Thursday. I am now about to hit the 21-month mark at this Bucheon job. I regret staying on for this second year-contract. The job has grown to really depress me and angers me, at times, for a lot of reasons, which I have tried to keep off this blog for sake of avoiding negativity. / On the 2013 holiday, I visited Song-do Island in south Incheon (an artificial island that feels more like an American downtown, minus the lurking potential for street crime, than any place I’ve been in Korea), and then the Sinchon neighborhood of Seoul.
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Note on South Korea’s Memorial Day (현충일):
In the days before June 6th, 2013, I asked some students about the holiday. Did it commemorate only soldiers who died fighting under ROK command in the Korean War? Or was it also for “all” Korean soldiers who’d ever died while under arms, in previous centuries? / Or, was it actually commemorating all those who’d served in the South Korean armed forces (as our veterans’ holidays in the USA do, I think). That is improbable, because in South Korea, the latter would “commemorate” almost all the Korean men alive today, due to universal conscription. In fact, the 7th, 8th, and 9th graders I asked didn’t seem to know, but the consensus was that it was only for Korean War dead. / I also cannot figure out why the holiday is on June 6th, which, as far as I know, has no significance to Korean War history.

A friend sent me an analysis into the background of Senator Schumer [Harvard ’71] vis-a-vis the early “SAT prep industry”. It’d been reported that Schumer got a perfect 800 on SAT-Verbal and a perfect 800 on SAT-Math, but there’s a big backstory to how. (“Did Senator Schumer really get a perfect 1600 SAT score?“). There is a lot to digest there, so I’ll try to summarize. (I think it’s important because it relates to my idea of test-prep as fundamentally unethical, which is, I think, why the friend recommended this pertinent article.)
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Very few people achieved perfect scores on the SAT before the 1995 “recentering” (e.g., in 1987, only nine students got perfect scores). Therefore, if Schumer got a perfect score, he may be among the smartest men alive in the USA.

The thing is, Schumer (b. 1950) worked for Stanley Kaplan from ages 14-17 in the 1960s. Kaplan was pioneering the “SAT test prep” business around that time. Kaplan hired kids to take the test and memorize questions. They’d rush back to his office afterwards to report the questions. The compiled questions formed the early Kaplan “test prep” material. Future-Senator Schumer was deep in this venture, manning the “Gestetner machine” [a mimoegraph]. Schumer thus saw all material that came into Kaplan’s hands, and (Kaplan himself says, in his autobiography) Schumer pored over it all. Kaplan also reports than Schumer got a “near 1600”, not 1600, so the mystery deepens.

This was all before anything like an “SAT test prep” business existed. The makers of the SAT would not have yet been prepared for a concerted attempt by an aggressive group to “game” the test in this way. Thus, when Schumer took the test (probably multiple times), he may well have been the most “prepared for the test” of any student alive in the 1960s. He’d had years of defacto “SAT-prep” (seeing the actual questions used by the SAT), before the field of SAT-prep even existed. That this boosted the scores of a smart boy into the near-1600-range is plausible.
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The way Kaplan, Schumer, and co. aggressively “gamed” the SAT in the 1960s is distressing, yet even “honest” test prep strikes me as at least a bit ethically dubious. If standardized tests are supposed to be about how smart (or how informed on a given subject) a person is, then highly-aggressively “prepping” muddies the waters, and can be seen as a form of non-punishable cheating. It tests what you studied, not what you know, if that makes sense.

See the Ethics subsection of the “Teaching to the Test” Wiki article:

Kaplan and Schumer, it seems, engaged in #6, and arguably/potentially dabbled in #7 as well. I really agree that only #1 and #2 above are solidly-ethical forms of studying/instruction.
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In extreme cases (Korea) too much time devoted to test-prep seriously dulls the intellectual passions of teenagers.

A lot of what I’ve taught over the years in Korea has been test-prep, I must confess. It’s been principally for TOEFL. Parents of Korean teenagers want this, for some reason. Korean parents really seem unaware/unconcerned when it comes to this “dulling the intellectual energy” effect of endless, mindless test-prep.

The lion’s share of regular-schooling for Korean students is also directed towards test-prep, especially for their version of the SAT called the Su-Neung. Are the Koreans, after literally countless thousands of hours of test-prep for the Su-Neung test, really better-off — “better-educated”, better-informed-about-the-world, able to make more informed choices, possessing of more intellectual passion and curiosity — than they would have been if they’d done no prep at all, and used that time for other purposes? Not from my (limited) observation. / The test-prep obsession is a manifestation of something else, which is harder to pin down, but test-prep is a “tentacle” of it. This “tentacle” seriously stunts the personal development of many Koreans, and (as I understand) many East-Asians, generally.

Fighting the System
A year ago, my coworker-friend C.H. (an American in his 30s from California) quit his job here in Korea, partly due to frustration with the above-described system. He spoke a lot about how bad he felt it was. In his final weeks, C.H. eagerly recommended this TED talk to all students. / You know how, in a certain kind of movie, when the good-guy is surrounded, outnumbered, and begins to run away, he tends to shoot wildly into the distance while making his escape, right? He’s shooting at the bad-guys. The good-guy is hoping to score some hits, sure, but the shooting may be mostly for his own satisfaction, I think:“I fought the good fight and I did the best I could”. C.H. was the good-guy, and each of his recommendations of that particular TED Talk was a bullet fired at the enemy.

I was surprised to learn that it is impossible, in South Korea, to “fail a grade”.

I mean, if a Korean does very poorly in (say) 1st-grade of high school (=10th grade in the USA), failing all tests, and shows not even a basic understanding of the material taught, he will still go up to 2nd grade of high school with the others of the same age. There is also no “summer school”, as we have the in the USA, to make up failed classes.

What is the incentive to learn, if you will just advance to the next grade no matter what?”, I asked.

Two answers were forthcoming: “Making parents happy” and “getting into a good university”.

I found these answers uncompelling, and it reminds me a lot of what I wrote in post-73.

“She is most frugal in matters of business, but in her private life she reveals a streak of ___________.”
             (A) antipathy
             (B) misanthropy
             (C) virtuosity
             (D) equanimity
             (E) prodigality

This question appeared recently in the English-education insert that typically accompanies the Korea Herald newspaper. It is from a semi-daily section called “John’s GRE Prep”.

I’ve done dozens of “John’s” GRE practice questions, and I’ve gotten every one of them right, until this one.

I rejected choices (A) and (B) immediately, but none of the other three seemed like knockouts. I was doing this on the subway, so I may have been unable to properly concentrate. But the real reason I think I got it wrong was that I was led astray by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (no relation to the John of John’s GRE Prep), whichever one of them recounted the Prodigal Son parable.

My knowledge of the famous Prodigal Son parable has led me to believe, from a young age, that “prodigal” means “rebellious”. “Rebellious” is not really a good candidate to be an opposite of “frugal”, I thought, so I gave that one a low-mental-ranking. I wavered. No choices seemed right. My final choice was (D). That was wrong. The correct answer is (E).

“Prodigality”, it turns out, has the following definitions (according to this): 1. Extravagant wastefulness. 2. Profuse generosity. 3. Extreme abundance; lavishness. / Not “rebelliousness” at all. Since age 9 or so, I’ve inferred that the word was tied-in with the theology of that particular parable, which is more about the rebelliousness of the son, turning away from the father, and not about the son’s “lavish wastefulness”.

In late 2009, my then-boss in Ilsan bought a new Volkswagen SUV. I was surprised that she bought a foreign car. At the time, I interpreted it as luxury purchase. Due to tariffs on foreign cars, a Korean buying a foreign car was engaging in overt conspicuous-consumption, I thought.

It seems that my boss was on the cusp of a trend, back in 2009. According to the Korea Herald, foreign carmakers’ “market share” in South Korea (which I assume to mean the percent of cars on the road) has increased as follows:

Share of Foreign Cars on the Road in South Korea
        4.7% : Mid-2009
        6.7% : Mid-2010 [+2.0% market-share]
        7.4% : Mid-2011 [+0.7%]
        10% : Mid-2012 [+2.6%]
        11.7%: April 2013 [On track to be +2.0% for Mid-2013 over Mid-2012]

Soon, one-in-eight cars on the roads of South Korea will be of foreign origin. My former-boss was one of those responsible, as her purchase helped push the foreign-car-share past the 5%-threshold back in 2009.

South Korea’s long-tightly-protected car market may finally be opening up, perhaps partly due to the Free Trade Agreements. Then again, these foreign cars seem to me to be all “high-end”. (Americans don’t think of VW as a “luxury brand”, but in Korea it rather is. So is Ford; the few I see are “high-end”.) There is a street in Gangnam that is lined with glamorous stores selling glamorous foreign cars, displayed in their windows [as is usual here]. If this is the “image”/”market” for foreign-cars, then growth will slow and stop.

The USA, by comparison, has a 60% foreign-car share. (60% of cars on U.S. roads are not made by U.S. companies).

The price I pay for a haircut has risen: From 6,000 Won ($5.30 at current exchange) to 7,000 Won ($6.20).

For the past year and a half, I’ve gotten my hair cut by a woman who runs a small barbershop in eastern Bupyeong**. After today’s haircut, she handed me back three 1,000-Won notes after I handed her a 10,000-note. She’d smiled and said something I didn’t understand, but indicated that she was aware she was giving me 3,000, which means the new price is 7,000. This is the first time I’ve paid that price. / Alright. It’s still half what I paid in the USA.

In all my visits to this woman, she has never once tried even one word of English. Our limited communication is in Korean. I appreciate that, even though it means very limited communication. / There are some foreigners of my acquaintance here who have located an “English-speaking barber” in central-Bucheon, to whom they shell out 20-25,000 (about $20) for a man’s haircut. I consider that a waste of money, but “to each his own”.

** — “Bupeyong” (부평) is an older neighborhood between Incheon and Seoul. I live to the east of Bupyeong, in a newer development called Jung-Dong, Bucheon. I have always felt a bit more comfortable in humbler Bupyeong than in self-consciously wealthier Bucheon. Bupyeong is also where I used to play soccer. See post-6. Actually, the barbershop is just above the anchor-point of post-6’s map. I found it once on the way to play soccer, and I’ve stuck with it.

[A follow-up to post-67: Syria’s Complicated Conflict]

I don’t claim to understand Syria or its war, but I trust experts who say it is complicated more than I trust third-rate pundits in the USA who repeat silly claims that it is a “popular rebellion against a dictator that is being repressed”. That kind of analysis is easy and lazy, and ultimately boring.

If Syria is a multifaceted ethnic-religious-political-cultural civil war with significant foreign intervention, what are some analogies to other wars in our history which Western people would know more about? Two strike me:

(1) The Spanish Civil War (1930s). Orwell’s book, Homage to Catalonia, described a frantic and angry civil war within the “Republican” (anti-Franco) side itself. He identified three main paragroupings (and his favored side was crushed by the Stalinists, as he recounts it). This is similar to the wide range of ideologies among Syria’s co-called “Rebels” (and the government). In Spain, there was not necessarily an ethnic-religious angle akin to Syria’s today (though the case can be made, it was once pointed out to me, for a real implicit ethnic-religious angle to the Spanish war).

(2) Europe’s Thirty Years War (1618-1648), a war for Catholic or Protestant domination of Central Europe. This had a definite ethnic-religious angle, as Syria does, and many interventions. The 30 Years War ended in a kind of draw. The German-speaking population of Europe was reduced by one-third; neither Catholic nor Protestant dominated. However, Protestants won more rights, the empire was weakened, and Germany was splintered into 300 statelets.

I’ve often thought about this (boringly-named) “Thirty Years War”. Its Protestant hero, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, seemed to have a street or a platz named after him in every Protestant city I visited in Germany in 2007.

One result I see of this war was the end of a Catholic-dominated Europe. Before 1648, Protestants were always a kind of rebellious minority, in fact or in imagination. The war won them normality, a large majority of German-speakers in Europe, and a major “civilizational morale boost” (or so I imagine). The split with the medieval and feudal past was complete, allowing the Protestants of Europe to seize their own destiny. Up to three centuries of spectacular output followed. The early USA, e.g. is an obvious product of secular-Protestants.

Being of half-Scandinavian background and (nearly) half-German-Lutheran background, I almost can’t help but sympathize with the Protestant side in that war. And, in my biased view, an abject defeat of the Protestant side (e.g., by a total failure of the Swedish campaigns under King Gustavus) would have been a defeat for Europe itself, a partial step back into the medieval order.

The paragraph directly above, if its (i.e., my) prejudices and ‘national’ feeling were transposed onto Arabs, and altered in form to fit their Islamic heritage rather than my own, may explain why there will be no easy end to the Syrian war (with the possible exception of a deux ex machina in the form of thousands of NATO bombs, as in Libya).