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J.C. and The Boys - The strange world of young Jesus. # 2
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Funky Friday: Flashback -Archie Bunker meets Sammy Davis jr.
The greatest bigot of all time on one of the greatest shows of all time.Archie Bunker was as politically incorrect as is inhumanly possible. Spics, Jews, Coloreds, Chinks --no one was spared from Archie's white-colored view of the world.Carol O'Connor and Jean Stapleton were tremendous actors by every definition and the nine season run of "All in the Family" was one of those rare times in
Busan 2060
Jake Stetson stared blankly at the pile of reports on the table of his Jangsan studio apartment and sighed. Wearily, he opened the first book:
“Teacher is stupid and me is kill Teacher”
Typical, he thought, and was just about to score out the “is” when he remembered the most recent communiqué from the Ministry of Education; “Is,” it said, was now an acceptable marker for either past, present or future tense, (“I” had surrendered a long time ago.) Jake blithely wondered whether this particular entry was a confession or a threat but left the sentence untouched. Looking out the window onto the greying expanse of Jangsan Old Town, Jake allowed himself a rare moment’s contemplation. Where, he thought, did it all go wrong?
There’d been struggles in the past, but Jake had always thought the Foreigners had won. None of these were clearer in Jake’s mind than the push for citizenship that had galvanised the foreign community in the 20s and resulted in the Universal Franchise Act of 2028. Since then his stake in society had grown while his pay packet had shrunk; the “price of dignity” he’d once convinced a room full of foreigners in the run up to the Bill. Looking around the sparse studio apartment he’d rented for the past decade, he wondered now whether they’d gotten their moneys worth.
When he had arrived in Korea things had been different. In those days people still stared at you when you walked down the street, now Jake reckoned they just looked through you. Work back then had been a joke too. Before ME centralised Hagwon curriculum and management, foreign teachers could almost get away with murder. Gone were the days when a teacher could slump into class still reeking of the night before and fling a worksheet at the students. Now that everything was rigorously standardised, monitored and evaluated, it had gotten so you couldn’t blow your nose in a Hagwon without someone reporting it.
Oh but how he had ranted and raved back then! The pointing, the misunderstandings, the disorganisation – the slightest thing would set him off! Many times he felt like packing it all in and heading home to some sort of normality. But still Jake remained. The truth was, back then Jake felt like he was a pioneer with the world at his feet, a renegade who’d had had enough of society and checked out. He’d found a place where he could live like a king and under his own set of rules. Looking back, Jake realised he’d been something of an idealist.
“Use this place before it uses you” someone had once told him. At the time he’d dismissed it as cynical, but now the words kept coming back more and more. He’d spent the last four decades with his shoulder to a wheel that had been spinning in the opposite direction and his fire was gone. He was beginning to think he might just have wasted it on the wrong thing.
Jake’s eyes wandered over the smoggy Busan skyline. Since the time he’d lived there that same skyline had danced up and down like the bars on an old fashioned graphic equaliser, and still showed no signs of reaching any state of permanence. It was like the city itself was mocking his own entrenchment and Jake wasn’t sure he could live through another reinvention. Although he occasionally thought about going home, there was no guarantee he would get a job and it seemed pointless to return at a time when people were clambering over each other to get away. If the East was the “new West,” where did that leave someone like him?
Perhaps, Jake thought, it was time to teach somewhere new. Africa was opening up in ways he never could have imagined in his youth and seemed like the perfect place to recapture some of the frontier spirit. Sure, it might be a little hard at first but he had moved before and made it work, why shouldn’t he be able to do it again?
So, as he had done every couple of years for the last decade or so, Jake opened up a clean page in his notepad, swapped the reports for the heavy book on top of the wardrobe and opened it up at the first page.
Now, he thought, if I can only get my Chinese up to scratch.
Finishy
“Teacher is stupid and me is kill Teacher”
Typical, he thought, and was just about to score out the “is” when he remembered the most recent communiqué from the Ministry of Education; “Is,” it said, was now an acceptable marker for either past, present or future tense, (“I” had surrendered a long time ago.) Jake blithely wondered whether this particular entry was a confession or a threat but left the sentence untouched. Looking out the window onto the greying expanse of Jangsan Old Town, Jake allowed himself a rare moment’s contemplation. Where, he thought, did it all go wrong?
There’d been struggles in the past, but Jake had always thought the Foreigners had won. None of these were clearer in Jake’s mind than the push for citizenship that had galvanised the foreign community in the 20s and resulted in the Universal Franchise Act of 2028. Since then his stake in society had grown while his pay packet had shrunk; the “price of dignity” he’d once convinced a room full of foreigners in the run up to the Bill. Looking around the sparse studio apartment he’d rented for the past decade, he wondered now whether they’d gotten their moneys worth.
When he had arrived in Korea things had been different. In those days people still stared at you when you walked down the street, now Jake reckoned they just looked through you. Work back then had been a joke too. Before ME centralised Hagwon curriculum and management, foreign teachers could almost get away with murder. Gone were the days when a teacher could slump into class still reeking of the night before and fling a worksheet at the students. Now that everything was rigorously standardised, monitored and evaluated, it had gotten so you couldn’t blow your nose in a Hagwon without someone reporting it.
Oh but how he had ranted and raved back then! The pointing, the misunderstandings, the disorganisation – the slightest thing would set him off! Many times he felt like packing it all in and heading home to some sort of normality. But still Jake remained. The truth was, back then Jake felt like he was a pioneer with the world at his feet, a renegade who’d had had enough of society and checked out. He’d found a place where he could live like a king and under his own set of rules. Looking back, Jake realised he’d been something of an idealist.
“Use this place before it uses you” someone had once told him. At the time he’d dismissed it as cynical, but now the words kept coming back more and more. He’d spent the last four decades with his shoulder to a wheel that had been spinning in the opposite direction and his fire was gone. He was beginning to think he might just have wasted it on the wrong thing.
Jake’s eyes wandered over the smoggy Busan skyline. Since the time he’d lived there that same skyline had danced up and down like the bars on an old fashioned graphic equaliser, and still showed no signs of reaching any state of permanence. It was like the city itself was mocking his own entrenchment and Jake wasn’t sure he could live through another reinvention. Although he occasionally thought about going home, there was no guarantee he would get a job and it seemed pointless to return at a time when people were clambering over each other to get away. If the East was the “new West,” where did that leave someone like him?
Perhaps, Jake thought, it was time to teach somewhere new. Africa was opening up in ways he never could have imagined in his youth and seemed like the perfect place to recapture some of the frontier spirit. Sure, it might be a little hard at first but he had moved before and made it work, why shouldn’t he be able to do it again?
So, as he had done every couple of years for the last decade or so, Jake opened up a clean page in his notepad, swapped the reports for the heavy book on top of the wardrobe and opened it up at the first page.
Now, he thought, if I can only get my Chinese up to scratch.
Finishy
Street Foodie
Hello and welcome to Street Foodie, my brand new food blog!
In the coming weeks and months I will be dispatching regular reports on my kerbside culinary experiences as I travel from Korea (where I am currently slogging out the last few months of a teaching contract) onwards to Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, before finally finishing up in my personal street food Mecca, Singapore.
So why street food?
For me, street food represents everything that is integral to visiting a new place for the first time. Many of my most treasured travel memories have revolved around this most basic of cooking styles. Whether it be watching the smoke rising from the grills over Marrakech’s Djma el Fna like some medieval battlefield, or sampling Paejon (a Korean seafood pancake) for the first time, street food has provided me with some of the best eating and traveling experiences of my life.
Street food is also a local, seasonal and authentic way of cooking that usually utilizes only a handful of ingredients and cooking equipment to produce something that can be at once cheap, unique and delicious. There is something mind-boggingly diverse and attractive about a type of food that suits every kind of wallet and varies widely from region to region, country to country.
In my explorations in the world of gutter gastromony, I also hope to shed some light on why it is that aside from greasy hotdog stands and overpriced farmers markets, the UK and Ireland by in large fail to have any real street food scene. The weather of course is a factor, but as anyone has experienced Seoul in winter time or the mid-afternoon downpour of monsoon season will tell you, this most British excuses simply doesn’t wash.
Most of all however, I plan to enjoy some great food on the cheap and get a flavour of the people and places I visit.
But enough of the bumpf – all that’s left now is to finish with a bad pun to get things rolling.
Bon appe – street!
In the coming weeks and months I will be dispatching regular reports on my kerbside culinary experiences as I travel from Korea (where I am currently slogging out the last few months of a teaching contract) onwards to Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, before finally finishing up in my personal street food Mecca, Singapore.
So why street food?
For me, street food represents everything that is integral to visiting a new place for the first time. Many of my most treasured travel memories have revolved around this most basic of cooking styles. Whether it be watching the smoke rising from the grills over Marrakech’s Djma el Fna like some medieval battlefield, or sampling Paejon (a Korean seafood pancake) for the first time, street food has provided me with some of the best eating and traveling experiences of my life.
Street food is also a local, seasonal and authentic way of cooking that usually utilizes only a handful of ingredients and cooking equipment to produce something that can be at once cheap, unique and delicious. There is something mind-boggingly diverse and attractive about a type of food that suits every kind of wallet and varies widely from region to region, country to country.
In my explorations in the world of gutter gastromony, I also hope to shed some light on why it is that aside from greasy hotdog stands and overpriced farmers markets, the UK and Ireland by in large fail to have any real street food scene. The weather of course is a factor, but as anyone has experienced Seoul in winter time or the mid-afternoon downpour of monsoon season will tell you, this most British excuses simply doesn’t wash.
Most of all however, I plan to enjoy some great food on the cheap and get a flavour of the people and places I visit.
But enough of the bumpf – all that’s left now is to finish with a bad pun to get things rolling.
Bon appe – street!
Jesus on a License Plate: Rude or Stupid?
Only in one of the most religiously partisan countries in the world would a government conceive of a hair-brained idea such as offering license plates with a guy nailed to a wooden cross. The country is, of course, America. And the guy --Jesus. Perhaps you have heard of him.Never mind the obvious issues of the separation of Church and State, they have already been parsed through enough --I am
On Feeling at Home Away from Home
It has been 10 months now and the earth has gone far enough in its circuit around the sun that the city is starting to throw recollections at me, fleeting memories of my first days here. The slant of the sun, still up now at the end of the work day, the outdoor revelry on weekend nights, the smells erupting from the open-fronted grills, and even the feeling of warm sand under my feet, these things all recall to me in brief moments the initial thrill of being for the first time in a place, then to me, utterly foreign.
It is a bittersweet emotion I feel when a sight or smell reminds me of that first rush in the early days of this journey. In my blissful naivety I felt like an explorer. Every walk to the grocery was an adventure. Every meal was an unfolding mystery. Every weekend was epic in its delicious sense of possibility. Those days are gone now. The streets still glow, but it is no longer the same quality of light. It is as if someone snuck into the booth, focused the camera, turned on the surround sound, and then, adding insult to injury, switched on the subtitles. For because I can read hangul now the menus and bus routes are decipherable. I know my way around the subway and the railway. I can negotiate with shopkeepers and motel-keepers. I can find deodorant and chicken bullion and Land-of-Lakes butter and fresh baguettes and Monterrey Jack.
Yet all of this familiarity has come with a price. It's an odd feeling of being lost in the familiar. This is juxtaposed in my mind with those first magical days, especially now, when I am being bombarded with intimations of what it was like before, back when I knew too little to be unimpressed by the now common sights that were once a source of wonder. An old lady sitting cross legged on a piece of cardboard selling tiny bunches of what look like weeds in the subway. A shop where a man is making tea from wood chips and roots. The street markets teeming with a thousand varieties of commerce, where live fish stands abut purveyors of rainbow hued sandals on one side and handmade ceramics on the other. The stinking drunk laying in his own puke, pockets turned out, in an alley off the rotary. The million tiny dishes and smoking grates covered in meat, that make up the cornucopia that is Korean cuisine.
All of this is still wonder-full, and I have come to love this place more and more as I have become comfortable, but I still miss those golden afternoons when the air, the light, and the sounds of this city all seemed permeated by an unknowable otherness. That loss is the price you pay for making yourself at home.
It is a bittersweet emotion I feel when a sight or smell reminds me of that first rush in the early days of this journey. In my blissful naivety I felt like an explorer. Every walk to the grocery was an adventure. Every meal was an unfolding mystery. Every weekend was epic in its delicious sense of possibility. Those days are gone now. The streets still glow, but it is no longer the same quality of light. It is as if someone snuck into the booth, focused the camera, turned on the surround sound, and then, adding insult to injury, switched on the subtitles. For because I can read hangul now the menus and bus routes are decipherable. I know my way around the subway and the railway. I can negotiate with shopkeepers and motel-keepers. I can find deodorant and chicken bullion and Land-of-Lakes butter and fresh baguettes and Monterrey Jack.
Yet all of this familiarity has come with a price. It's an odd feeling of being lost in the familiar. This is juxtaposed in my mind with those first magical days, especially now, when I am being bombarded with intimations of what it was like before, back when I knew too little to be unimpressed by the now common sights that were once a source of wonder. An old lady sitting cross legged on a piece of cardboard selling tiny bunches of what look like weeds in the subway. A shop where a man is making tea from wood chips and roots. The street markets teeming with a thousand varieties of commerce, where live fish stands abut purveyors of rainbow hued sandals on one side and handmade ceramics on the other. The stinking drunk laying in his own puke, pockets turned out, in an alley off the rotary. The million tiny dishes and smoking grates covered in meat, that make up the cornucopia that is Korean cuisine.
All of this is still wonder-full, and I have come to love this place more and more as I have become comfortable, but I still miss those golden afternoons when the air, the light, and the sounds of this city all seemed permeated by an unknowable otherness. That loss is the price you pay for making yourself at home.
South Korean Student Defects to the North
According to sources, a seventeen-year-old South Korean high school student has defected to North Korea. The sophomore student, Lee Sang-han, escaped in the early hours of the morning from his hotel, while on a one-day two-night class trip to China.South Korean Deunification Ministry official, Ahn Mei-eun, said that this is the first occurrence of a defection by a South Korean student to the
Obama blames swine flu on George Bush
President Barack Obama today placed blame for the outbreak of the Swine Flu on the previous administration of George W. Bush.In a quickly called press conference Obama claimed that it was no coincidence that scientists believe the Swine Flu made its way into America over the Texas border.Speaking without the aid of a teleprompter the president said, "There has been a great deal of, uhmm,
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