Belated review of Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military
In the past, I used to count and post about every book I read in this space. I did not read Imperial Grunts this year, so there is no number, but it is the book I wanted to write about. Imperial...
View ArticleThe vagaries of loan words and their forgotten equivalents, Korean-only...
This post is actually a comment on this post, which I could have actually posted as a comment on the Marmot's Hole, but didn't because I'm too scared. That Marmot's Hole post comments on this BBC story...
View ArticleKorean drama 별에서 온 그대 (My Love from the Star) causes minor international...
This Buzzfeed article outlines the tremendous popularity of a Korean drama in China, to the point that it became the sort of cultural phenomenon not controlled by the state that drives the Chinese...
View ArticleHandicapping the 2014 London Marathon
As I often do, I'd like to use the odds for Sunday's London Marathon as a starting point for predicting the winner. At roughly 2:1 is Wilson Kipsang, who is on a three-marathon hot streak. He ran...
View ArticleCultural explanations of, and reactions to, national tragedies
Something I never understood before I went to Europe, and something I understood even less after having gone to Europe, was the way people would debate personality traits of different European nations....
View ArticleSmaller audiences, global audiences and focus groups are homogenizing movies
As I sat down to watch the latest X-men movie, I got the feeling that I had seen this movie before. "Isn't this the tenth time I'm seeing the exact same movie?" I asked myself. The answer, after...
View ArticleWhat does it mean to finish a 26:44 10k in 1:57?
In 2011, not long after losing a 10k on the track for the first time in his life, Kenenisa Bekele ran a 26:43 at Brussels. He ran the last two laps in 1:57-1:58, closing in roughly 60-61 and then 57...
View ArticleSummarizing a 2011 Hankyoreh series on Muslims in Korea
Various sources claim that there are tens of thousands of ethnic Korean Muslims in Korea. Wikipedia puts it at just under 30,000, while the Korea Muslim Federation puts it at 35,000. The way I try to...
View ArticleGetting fed up with food (in a good way), security theatre and particulates...
I just got back from Beijing from the fourth time, though two of those trips have been 24-hour layovers. I don't claim to know much about China, but having spent a little bit of time there in 2009,...
View ArticleToronto the Unchanging
I had already started writing this post before reading this piece by Chris Selley, focused on the Union-Pearson rail link, on why it is that nothing ever seems to get done in Toronto, but I enjoyed...
View ArticleThe Rip van Winkle experience in Toronto
While I said in my last post that nothing ever seems to change in Toronto, some things have changed, while I've forgotten how to do many others. The result, I joked, is that I feel like Rip Van Winkle,...
View ArticleWhat's it like being a hagwon student?
I recently went through the process of acquiring a Korean driver's license. I learned how to drive in Canada but after missing my initial road test for scheduling reasons, I never bothered...
View ArticleReflecting on Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Antifragile and applying it to living,...
I enjoyed Taleb's Black Swan, about which I wrote here. I learned more from Antifragile, which was more technical and diverse in its scope, though I found much more to disagree with than I did while...
View ArticleArrest of Canadian couple on meaningless charges in China is a test for...
Canadians Kevin Garratt and Julia Dawn Garratt were arrested in Dandong, China earlier this week on charges of espionage, specifically "stealing state secrets about China’s military and national...
View ArticleWatching A Most Wanted Man at the Seoul Cinema
I saw Philip Seymour Hoffman's last movie, A Most Wanted Man, at the Seoul Cinema on Friday night. I thought I had been to the Seoul Cinema (서울극장) before, but I realized that I hadn't, mostly because...
View ArticleWill North American car culture be remembered as a relic of the late...
A Danish tourist to Ottawa wrote a letter to the Ottawa Citizen lamenting Canada's car culture, which in many ways served as her last impression of Canada more than its sights, culture and natural...
View ArticleWhat the women's 4 x 400 at the European Championships and Flotrack's cross...
I post videos of races on Facebook from time to time, and most get a handful of responses from other fans of track, even though people who have never run, say, 20 km without stopping probably make up...
View ArticleReading Jeff Pearlman's biography of the 1990s Cowboys, Boys Will Be Boys
There are a handful of books and TV shows that I've watched because they were promoted on The Daily Show, but I don't think I've ever read a book because it was briefly mentioned in a Daily Show...
View ArticleThe beauty of spectacular, crushing failure
Although there was a game on Thursday, today is really opening day in the NFL. Today marks the first of 20 straight Sundays (Monday mornings for me) with at least six hours of meaningful football, a...
View ArticleWill there be a 10,000-metre run at the 2020 Olympics?
The Memorial Van Damme meet in Brussels just took place without a 10,000 for the second straight year. This means that the only world-class men's 10,000 of the year took place in Eugene at the Pre...
View ArticleShopping can be this uncomfortable: paying $10 and waiting a week just to...
I had a peculiar problem. Ever since I broke or lost my decade-old Timex Ironman watch a few years ago, I have been running with a series of cheap watches bought from stalls at Korean road races, and...
View ArticleMovie review: One For All, All For One (60만번의 트라이)
I saw this movie Saturday afternoon in a tiny theatre at the Apgujeong CGV along with at most two dozen people. All I knew about it was that it was a Japanese movie about a Korean high school's rugby...
View ArticleWatching October baseball for the first time
Maybe it's the fact that I've gotten married or it's the fact that I teach university students, but I have chosen this year as the year to feel fully grown up. This probably explains posts such as this...
View ArticleNBC's coverage of the Chicago Marathon was understandably terrible
NBC's coverage of the Chicago Marathon was awful in so many ways. To broadly characterize it, although the main broadcast was done by Ed Eyestone and Tony Reavis, with Greg Meyer and Joanie Benoit...
View ArticleEliud Kipchoge's press conference and how language humanizes us
A long time ago, Michael Hurt wrote that language humanizes us. The exact point he made was that speaking Korean in a situation where you are being harassed would earn you the sympathy of bystanders a...
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