Category: Uncategorized

The Osborne Brothers: “When You Wind Down”

I like this song. It’s another I cannot find the lyrics to anywhere on the Internet. Why?
In fact, the phrase “watch out when you wind down” does not appear on the Internet as of April 19th, 2013.

I will transcribe the lyrics myself: [Read more]

              _____________________________________________________
              Watch Out When You Wind Down / LYRICS
              You climbed the spiral rope right to the top
              But the rope’s straight down when you drop
              Your grass is green but winter turns it brown
             
              You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down~
             
              When you left I knew I’d have to make a change
              So I found another gal to take your place
              If you come back you’ll be on rugged ground~
             
              You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down
             
             [Banjo]
             
              You looked me in the eye the day you left
              You said “If that’s your best, then you need help”
              You’re looking for a life that can’t be found
             
             You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down
      
              When you left I knew I’d have to make a change
              So I found another gal to take your place
             If you come back you’ll be on rugged ground~
             
              You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down
             
             [Banjo]
             
              You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down
              You’re wound up now, but watch out when you wind down [End]
             _____________________________________________________

I see in this song several messages:
(1) Success is fleeting.  (“The rope’s straight down when you drop” / and the line about grass). “Hic transit gloria”.
(2) Beware of wanting too much, for it’s very possible “it can’t be found”
(3) Don’t get too excited about things in a negative way (“wound up”), or if you do don’t do anything too belligerent — as the woman-subject of the song did — because when things settle down (“wind down”), you’ll probably regret it.

It seems that martial law has been imposed by government authorities in and around Boston on two occasions:

The first time: The night of April 18th-19th, 1775
The second: The night of April 18th-19th, 2013.

Yesterday, it was due to a manhunt for the “Boston Marathon bombers”. Everything was “locked down“, a euphemism for martial law. (The euphemism is arguably scarier than the term it replaces, in this case). In 1775, it was amidst a wild political climate which saw Paul Revere ride through towns of Massachusetts shouting “the British are coming!” (forevermore to be learned-about by American elementary school students). Fighting followed.

The price of Bitcoins has now risen to $100 again.
My Californian coworker, C., who had planned to buy some, failed to buy any while under $70.

I cannot deny I am intrigued, but there are so many things I don’t understand / don’t trust about it. Here is their informational video:

It seems the total number of Bitcoin owners may now be 227,000 in the world. That is the number of “Bitcoin Wallet users”, whatever that means. It was only in the 50,000-range at this time in December 2012. Four months has seen two doublings in the number of Bitcoin owners.

My coworker, C, told me that he intends to buy several-hundred-dollars-worth of Bitcoins, an all-digital currency not tied to any central bank. I don’t quite understand how it works. I don’t know whether to be excited or scared.

The value of Bitcoin has fluctuated a lot: It reached over $200 in early April, but is now in the $60 range. Speculators cashed-out. My coworker explained to me that he intends to be a speculator, too. If he buys 10.0 Bitcoins at today’s $66 price (total paid: $660), and the value goes back up to $200, his 10.0 Bitcoins will be worth $2,000+.

The current South Korean government will try to revise the constitution to:
            (a) create a four-year-per-term, two-term-limit presidential system like the USA’s, and
            (b) weaken the power of the presidency in domestic affairs.

As of now, their constitution allows a president to serve only a single five-year term. Korean leaders’ increasing unpopularity and seeming ineffectiveness may be due, partly, to being lame-ducks from day one.

Yet, one can understand why the South Koreans established this one-term-limit cap in the 1980s:

(1) 18 Years of General Park: On May 16th, 1961, General Park Chung-Hee staged a coup and soon installed himself in power. In 1979, he was shot dead, ending 18 1/2 years of power. Widely admired today, despite undemocratic rule.

      The correct answer:
      “I’m interviewing students about what they eat. Will you help me?”

      Answer from a student in JA class:
      “I’m enterbull instrudent about what they eat. Will you help me?”

[Comment: Enterbull Instrudent sounds like it really should be something real].

      The correct answer:
      “Anna, do you want to watch a ballroom dance competition tonight?”

      Answer from another student in JA class:
      “Anna, do you want to watch a balloon dance comefortation tonight?”

[Comment: Whatever a balloon dance is, I’m sure it has a very different ambiance than a ballroom dance].

      The correct answer:
      “He doesn’t get frustrated when we make a mistake“.

      Answer from a student in JA class:
     “He doesn’t get freshedent when we made a mistake“.

[Comment: If “Freshedent” is not the name of a chewing gum, it should be].

These mis-transcriptions all come from dictations JA students (lower-skill-level 6th graders) did as homework. I am having a “dictation contest” with the classes I have for listening, as I have done before.

It would be fun to make a story out of these mis-transcriptions:
“On the afternoon of the big balloon dance, I realized I urgently needed freshedent gum. Imagine going to a balloon dance with bad breath! I began to walk towards the store to get some. Unfortunately, to my dismay and shock, an enormous enterbull instrudent obstructed my path….“

It seems there was a small boy dancer in the popular “Gangnam Style” video of last year, who in 2013 is starting to see his own career take off. His stage-name has become “Little Psy“.

One fact, and one fact alone, interests me about this: 
“Little Psy” (Hwang Min-Woo, b.2005) has a Vietnamese mother and a Korean father.

South Korea is still an overwhelmingly mono-ethnic society, but in the 2010s this may be changing: I see that near 5% (22,000/471,000) of babies born in 2011 in South Korea had a foreign-born parent.

Most of the mixed-couples involve a Southeast-Asian “mail-order bride” and a rural Korean man. (There is a shortage of marriage-age women in rural South Korea).

I’ve seen signs on buses and on the subway for mail-order brides from Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, and (mysteriously) Kyrgyzstan. Those businesses are doing well, I guess:

They’re now saying that 50% of rural births could be to foreign women by the 2020s.

This all sounds alarming to the typical Korean, who cherishes the “one blood” myth.

On the other hand, this 5% figure is padded: a large portion of the “Chinese” mothers must be Korean-Chinese, and some others may be of Korean ethnicity, e.g. Korean-Americans. These factors would reduce the true “mixed” figure down to 3-3.5% of all the babies born in South-Korea in 2011. And those mixed babies are half Korean. Thus, the cohort born in 2011 has only around 1.5-2% “foreign blood” [which is almost entirely other-East-Asian anyway].

If Little-Psy were not known to have a Vietnamese mother, would anyone have known it from his appereance? I’m certain that most Koreans would claim they could spot such a thing, but I wonder.

I remembered an old song, as I was writing post-#23, called “Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima”. It was sung by the 1930s-and-1940s Country-Western group “Sons of the Pioneers”, and wiki says it reached #4 on the Country charts.
It contains the following line:

“Suribachi” is the name of the high hill that physically dominates Iwo Jima Island.

The line in that song refers to the raising of the U.S. flag. Every American knows the photo (at right). These lyrics thus make a ‘claim’ to Iwo Jima, proclaiming it “always will” be U.S. soil.

I’d assumed it was made a U.S. possession and remains one.

That’s incorrect. It turns out that Iwo Jima was a U.S. possession for a long time, but was ceremoniously returned to Japan in mid-1968. But, then, “High on the hill Suribachi flies Old Glory, and she will for…twenty-three years” — That just wouldn’t have had as good a ring to it.

I was in Seoul on Saturday. I came upon the following:

I followed the sign.

Most of the denoted points-of-interest were part of the same complex: Nakseongdae Park (낙성대공원). It seemed to be a kind of grand shrine that doubles as a kid’s park. The shrine part of it revolves around a Korean general (or warlord) Kang Gam-Chan who fought the Mongols in the 1000s AD.

A statue of the general is prominent, and there is a well-and-true shrine to him in a secluded rear area. Incense is kept burning.

Most of the park seems, on weekends, to be occupied by kids riding small bicycles or recklessly piloting electric-powered toy cars. Their wild swerving-around in those little cars cannot help but remind one of a certain stereotype…

In the photo above, you can see a silver building in the distance, on the top right. That is the place I ended up next.

Walking past the above-described park dedicated to the memory of a long-dead general, something calling itself “Seoul Science Park” materializes on the left. It’s a sprawling complex surrounded by some short walking trails in the hills.

Next to this “Seoul Science Park” there also seems to be a farm plucked right out of rural Jeolla and plopped down in Seoul. I conclude that it is an experimental farm (whatever that means). Why else would it be there?

The most interesting feature of this place was its mini-planetariums (or, “planetaria”, if you insist). At the top of the hill overlooking Seoul Science Park, there is an observatory — that silver structure in the above. It is surrounded by little blue spheres (one is below), into which a person can put his head. On the inside of these spheres are compelling re-creations of the night sky. They are soundproof and “lightproof”, so the sensation I got was of being alone on a cloudless, pitch-black night in a very-non-light-polluted area.

(I was reminded of my mom, who worked on behalf of saving the Arlington Planetarium a few years ago, when it was under threat of demolition).

Walking some more in this area, I see some trees that I presume to be cherry-blossom trees. (See post-16).

I concluded that this area of Seoul is pretty neat.

I was delighted to be interrupted yesterday by my fellow foreign teacher, M.R., midway through a class. He was teaching in the next classroom over at the time.

Knock, knock. He opens the door without waiting for a response. M.R. resembles Steve Jobs (who is a secular saint in Korea), and thus he is half-affectionately called “Steve Jobs Teacher” from time to time.

“Can I ask you something?”

Now, a teacher barging-in and asking such a thing to another teacher is an unusual occurrence. I don’t think it’d ever happened to me before that moment. Maybe another teacher would come in looking for a lost board marker, eraser, or the like (classes “own” rooms at this language institute, and teachers shuffle between them), or maybe one would ask to consult briefly with me outside for some urgent reason. Not this time: What followed seemed, even at the time, a bit surreal: M.R. asked me, loudly, in such that all my students could also hear: “If I call your name and you say ‘Why?’, is it rude?” The door to his room was still open, too, so his own students could hear what was going on.

I say: “In English, it is.” / “Yes, thank you!“, he thunders.

Most students were working on honing the fine art of shirking, trying to do anything but EtE1’s tedious textbook work.

A moment after the exchange above-described, one particularly impetuous student, Trever, loudly agrees with M.R. and me. “Yes, it is rude!”, he says. M.R. gets so excited by this, that he asks Trever to go next door and explain to them. Trever went. Well, he did after he was assured that the other class’ students were all younger than he was.

It seems that M.R. had called on a drowsy, inattentive student, and heard “Why?” in response, and was offended by it.

The thing is, in Korean, “Why?” (“왜요?”) functions as English’s “What is it?” or , more politely, English’s “Yes?“

    In Korean
        A. “Kim?”
        B. “Why?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

    In the USA, in English
        A. “Smith?”
        B. “Yes, what is it?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

These two exchanges are functionally identical. A Korean  student responding with “Why?” is just saying in English exactly what she’d say in Korean, and means no offense, I think. I remember my early days when I didn’t realize this yet, and also thought students were being openly rude. I’d never contemplated doing something like what M.R. did, though, and couldn’t’ve anyway, as I was the only foreign teacher at my first language institute, in Ilsan in 2009.

The above is what it says on the back of my phone, behind the battery. It is the phone’s manufacture date. (April 12).

Today is my cell phone’s fifth birthday.

I got this phone from my friend Byungwon in early 2010. He was buying a new one. Maybe it was a smart-phone.

Buying a new phone is more common than I’d thought for Koreans. It turns out that 68%  of Koreans got a new phone in 2012, the highest turnover rate in the world. Of the 32% that didn’t get a new one, some must have gotten new ones in 2011, 2010, and 2009. The number of people still using a phone manufactured in 2008, before smart phones, must be very low. / Hey, this phone still works fine. I’m used to it. The battery still holds a charge fairly well, to my surprise. Why do I need a smart phone? That’s my feeling on the matter.

Now that Tim is gone, I think I am the only employee at the language-institute here without a smart phone. Oh well.

According to an article, 2.4 million Japanese died while under arms in WWII: 300,000 at sea and 2.1 million on land. 

The remains of over a million of them are unknown, even in 2013. Part of the reason why:

Many of these Japanese soldiers died on islands where they made hopeless total-defensive-stands, famously at Iwo-Jima.

(Note: I see that up to a million more Japanese, civilians, died from the firebombings of their big cities, and in the two nuclear attacks of August ’45.  I’ve also heard that one-in-seven of the Hiroshima deaths were Korean laborers).

Japan lost 22,000 dead at Iwo Jima. (See left). Most of the dead defenders lay in unmarked graves until 2010, according to the article:

How Small is Iwo Jima?
It’s very small, only eight square miles, or 30% as large as Arlington County, my place of birth.

Eight square miles is about equal to the area in Arlington County between Arlington Blvd. and Lee Highway, excluding Ft. Myer. See the map at left. (I calculated that area using this tool).

It’s hard to imagine 100,000 men fighting for weeks on an island so small, with 30,000 of them dying.

(Incredibly, it seems that 4-5% of all U.S. military deaths in the Pacific Theater were at Iwo Jima, a single island).

I have walked all around the green-highlighted area above, many times. It’s not that big. There is a bike path that runs from one end of that area to the other.

At the extreme east of the green-shaded area stands, incidentally, the Iwo Jima Memorial — My familiarity with that memorial is what caught my eye in the article. My dad always likes going to “Iwo Jima” (the memorial, not the island).

One thing I can say about the Iwo Jima Memorial is that it’s more than a bit hard to find, to actually get to, on foot. If you approach by foot, the ‘hazards’ you face are many: busy roads, blockages, fences, unclear lines of vision as you approach, hills — It calls to mind the physical obstacles, confined spaces, and danger that the men would’ve had in February and March of 1945. I’ve wondered for years whether this was an intentional feature of the memorial’s design or not. If so, it was a success.

I have had versions of this conversation with superiors at the language institute at which I work, at various times and in various contexts, and I’ve gotten about the same response Dilbert gets above. This disappoints me.

Heard on a U.S. radio show, broadcast April 10th, 2013:

North Korea exists to keep Wal-Mart (and all that it entails) out, it seems to me. I think the pundit inadvertently hits something profound, even though he was just aiming for a laugh line.

One of the hardest things in the world to get a true sense of is how many South Koreans sympathize with the North. The outright pro-North-Korean candidate in last year’s election polled at only 1%. But then, consider that only 3% of Americans voted for Nader in 2000 (including my cousin B., he told me), but far more support environmentalism.

I once heard a Korean, with whom I was close at the time, express a respect for the North in the following terms: “Everything they have, they’ve built themselves“. By implication, he was saying, South Korea had gotten a lot of outside help, mostly from the USA, and that was less admirable than autarkic North Korea.

There is something appealing to the Korean psyche (I think) about this “No Wal-Mart” attitude. Looking back to late 2011 and early 2012, this attitude may also be the well from which the fiery opposition here to the U.S./South-Korea Free Trade Agreement drew its water.

Two snapshots of Mr. Kim Jong-Eun that I found:

1999:

The Kim Jong-Eun of 1999 was about 15 years old, studying under an alias in Switzerland.

He was a fan of basketball:

2013:

My mother asked me by email if cherry blossoms were yet out in Seoul. There are cherry blossoms in Seoul?, was my initial reaction. It seems Seoul’s Yeouido Island has some. I had no idea. My own ignorance surprises me.

She asked because the cherry-blossoms on the National Mall (a few miles from my home) are blooming.

For some reason, this is quite a big event in the Washington DC area at this time of year. I don’t know the last time I walked among them. Not in the 2010s.

The first photo (AFAIK) ever taken of me outside of my birthplace (Arlington) was in the shadow of these trees.

I was born in February. In April, my grandfather was visiting from Iowa, as he worked part-time as a kind of deliveryman for Winnebagos at the time. Somebody in Maryland, say would order one. He’d drive it out to the buyer, and Winnebago would fly him home. As he was passing through, he and my dad took my down. I was two months old, and in the photo, I frowned in that curious way babies have of doing flawless impersonations of Winston Churchill.

Come to think of it, I never much cared about these cherry-blossoms, thinking it a tourist thing, or something. Or maybe it was because of the crowds: Consider the picture snapped above: The crowd is so dense that it hugely detracts from the value. Doesn’t it? I much prefer walking those pathways when they are deserted, as I have many times.

Back in Korea: I did see that Korea’s Jeju Island, far off the southern coast, has some kind of cherry blossom festival.

This brings up an interesting question: Are cherry blossoms actually Japanese? The city of Washington got its cherry-blossom trees as a gift from Japan in 1912. That is shortly after the annexation of Korea by Japan. I wonder if cherry blossoms were also aggressively planted in Korea at a similar time. Is that possible? Wiki says that “watching of cherry blossom was introduced to Korea during Japanese rule”, whatever that means.

It was a drizzly Saturday, and I visited Gapyeong and Chuncheon. Both are serene rural-ish places.

In case this attempt at an embedded-Google-Map doesn’t work, try this: [Map]. Click on it and zoom out to see just how far east Chuncheon is, more than halfway across the country.

What may be most interesting about the trip is my method of transportation: I got there on the Seoul subway network. Amazingly, I can scan my card into the “subway” system here in Bucheon, and arrive in Chuncheon 2 or 2.5 hours later. Total charge: $2.65, deducted from my card. Less than Koreans tend to pay for a single cup of coffee.

(My friend Jared dreams of a day in which the subway system is nationwide. Scan-in with your card at your home station in Ilsan [say], and get off in Daejeon [say], several hours later. Not very speedy, but essentially free, and gloriously easy. Why not?).
______________________________________________
Chuncheon is famous for the tasty Korean chicken dish called “dakgalbi“. We ate a delicious meal on “dakgalbi street”. The soda was free, all-you-can-drink, which delighted me.

I find it funny that in Seoul, everybody claims to make “authentic Chuncheon-style dakgalbi“.  Naturally, in Chuncheon, though, I noticed several businesses bearing the name “Seoul”. Seoul Dry-Cleaners, for example. The grass is always greener on the other side. I also noticed a bunch of quaint establishments called da-bang (다방), tea houses. I’d read about these in old tourist guidebooks. I had no idea they still existed. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any in the Seoul area outside Insadong, the tourist street. In Seoul, it’s all coffee. Maybe I just don’t look hard enough.

Update, October 2014: Post-238 Revisits this Song

I posted a stanza, in the previous post, from a song by an obscure band called “Jack the Lad”. I’d come to download the song (“The Third Millennium”) years ago, from a file-sharing service called WinMX. I could not locate the song on Youtube at all.

In the course of my brief and failed search, I found another song by this “Jack the Lad“, a 1970s British band that reminds me of American Bluegrass of the same time. I mean that as a great compliment.

The song is good. It’s called “The Seven Seas”. I like it a lot.

Even if I didn’t understand English, the song would be pretty nice, but the lyrics just make it cross a threshold into memorable-greatness, for me. These lyrics roughly explain why I came to Korea.

Below is my transliteration of the lyrics (I could not find the lyrics anywhere else online). [Click to read lyrics] .

Read Lyrics

Lyrics of “The Seven Seas”
By Jack the Lad / 1975

Sitting by the fire
In an old rocking chair
Like my grandaddy taught me to do
Listening intently
To the words he had to tell me
Because in my mind
I knew they were true
He said he’d sailed the seven seas
In ships, with tall masted sails
And he’d ridden, from London to Leeds
In one day-!

[Get up!]

I took a walk  to pass the time
I discovered many things
Things that I had to force myself to do
Like study and find a job
Take a wife, feed my kids
And I did them, as I thought they were new

But I never sailed the seven seas
In ships, with tall masted sails
I never rode from London to Leeds
In one day~!

As I’ve walked, there passed the time
I’ve collected many assets
Folks say that I’m “successful as can be”
But my grandaddy died
Without a penny to his name
He was a damn sight more successful than me

Because he’d sailed the seven seas
In ships, with tall masted sails
He’d ridden from London to Leeds
In one day

[Fiddle]

And now I’m sitting by the fire
In that old rocking chair
And I’m dreaming of the time around now
I’m searching for a yarn
To tell my own grandson
And I’m wishing to God that time would face about

So I could sail the seven seas
In ships with tall masted sails
And ride from London to Leeds

Sail the seven seas
In ships, with tall masted sails
And ride from London to Leeds
In one — day~!

Post-238 Revisits this Song

Today, April 6th, is the 151st anniversary of the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

The 16th Iowa Regiment was there. In it, a no-doubt-scared 21-year-old, George, happens to have been the first person in the USA bearing my surname. His regiment was thrown into the fray to slow the Confederate tide. They made a stand. He was hit. He fell. Maybe he died instantly. Maybe he lay dying on the field as his regiment began to crumble around him. His regiment listed him as “killed in action at Shiloh“, one way or another.

If anyone is interested, watch this rather well-made animated-and-video re-creation and synopsis of the battle. (In case the link goes down, it is called “Battle of Shiloh”, produced by Wide Awake Films).

I asked MA-Class to write a pair of contrasting short-essays based on these prompts, in the “Staying Fit” unit.

I was curious about choices for #1.

“There are no unhealthy Korean foods.”

Those were the words of a genuinely-befuddled 7th-grade student. This is not a student who uses sarcastic excuses to avoid work or something, as some do. No, he was quite serious.

In the short discussion that followed, it seemed that no one in class was willing to concede that any “Korean food” could be unhealthy. Finally, we agreed that fried-chicken was unhealthy. That is Western food, they said. True. But, I said, given its popularity, we could — by this point — dub fried-chicken a defacto Korean food (especially this variety).

Result: I think almost all the students chose fried-chicken for #1. All or almost all chose kimchi for #2. Groan.