World Wide Wes

I fucking quit.

After hearing the story in America about the "65 million pants" and the story below I'm beginning to have second thoughts about my lifelong dream to become a Korean drycleaner.

http://americandrycleaner.com/Community/DisplayStory.asp?id=751

I'm currently reading a book called The World Is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-first century by Thomas L. Friedman.  The book is all about globalization and how it is affecting the world.  It's a pretty informative book if you're into business and economics and still informative if you're not.  I was a Business Administration major in college and my father has every three-letter certification a businessman can get, so it's in my blood.  I chose this book because Donald Trump recommended it.  I don't know The Donald personally but in the last book I read by him and co-authored by Robert Kiyosaki - the author of the immensely popular Rich Dad series of books - he mentioned it was a good book.  And when I found it in the bookstore below SFunZ I jumped all over it.  It's the longest book I've ever read, topping out at 473 pages.

I wanted to share with you guys (both of you) a passage from the book I found well worded about a description of the Arab countries and their treatment of women as second-class citizens.  I wanted to share because I feel that Korea could learn a lesson as well even though it wasn't written about them.  Here:

          In the Arab-Muslim world, argues David Landes, certain cultural attitudes have in many ways become a barrier to development, particularly the tendency to still treat women as a sources of danger or pollution to be cut off from the public space and denied entry into economic activities.  When a culture believes that, it loses a large portion of potential productivity of the society.  A system that privileges the men from birth on, Landes also argues, simply because they are male, and gives them power over their sisters and other female members of society is bad for the men.  It builds in them a sense of entitlement that discourages what it takes improve, to advance, and to achieve.  That sort of discrimination, he notes, is not something limited to the Arab Middle East, of course.  Indeed strains of it are found in different degrees all around the world, even in so-called advanced industrial societies.

Food for thought.

I accomplished my mission of seeing Transformers yesterday.  It was one of the coolest movies I've seen in a long time.  It was definitely the best movie I've seen here in my 25 months in Korea.  It reminds me of the first time I saw Terminator 2 and how blown away at the special effects I was.  It's in my top 3 of best movie special effects.  How often in a movie do you see a group of F-22 Raptors flying in formation and then one of them, in mid air, turns into a robot and jumps on top of the other plane and starts hitting it?  Not very.  It didn't have an Academy Award winning plot but that's not what people expect when they see a movie like this.  I give it an A+!  It was very entertaining and I recommend it to everybody of all ages.  You need to see it in the theater to get the full experience.  Theater sound systems allow you to feel everything.  You can't compare TV screens or even bootlegged computer graphics to a full size movie theater screen.  This movie was made for the big screen.  Go see it!

I know exactly what I'm doing tonight.  I'm going to see the movie Transformers!  I don't know how the hell Korea managed to get a movie released here before the date of the American release.  Transformers opens up in the US on July 4th.  Transformers opens in Korea June 28th.  How is this possible?  I usually seen movies here that are months or even years behind North America.  These questions I'm asking are rhetorical.  I don't really care about the how and why but I am excited to see one of the first big Hollywood summer movies of the summer movie season.

Back home in America I was kind of a movie buff.  I went to see all the big new movies, as well as the smaller ones.  After I finished college and I was in search for that all important first job I didn't have many things to do.  I would go and buy 1 movie ticket and end up secretly watching 3 movies.  I would stay behind the ropes.  Near the end of my first movie I would check my cell phone for the start of movie times that coincided with the ending of my current movie.  Rinse, repeat.  I watched a lot of movies like that.  This has proved more difficult to do here in Korea.  They don't have the names and times of the movie outside the door of the theater so if you wanted to sneak into a movie it would be a crapshoot.  You wouldn't know what movie you were sneaking into or at what part of the movie it would be.  Plus, they make you exit the theater from the front of the theater, near the screen, which makes it hard to "stay behind the ropes" with that single movie ticket you purchased.

While we're on the topic of stiffing movie theaters I want to mention something ingenious to beat the system that my brother Brett thought of when we were in high school.  Brett and I would go to the movies and only buy 1 ticket.  One of us would proceed to go thru and get the ticket torn leaving us with 1 stub.  He thought of passing that 1 ticket stub to the other person in a folded piece of money.  I would go to the ropes where he would proceed to pass me some money and say something like "get me a popcorn."  But really he was passing me the stub to the movie.  I would go to the concessions and pretend to get something.  Then I would make my way into my free movie.  I would walk past the ticket tearing employee and flash my stub of the movie in which my brother was waiting.  Even if the employee didn't remember tearing my ticket personally I had a stub for a movie which they couldn't argue with and had to let me pass.  He was a criminal genius.  Too bad he went off to work for Google.  He could have channeled that energy in much more devious ways.  You can't win em' all.

Judge Roy Pearson has lost his case which has been dubbed "The 65 Million Dollar Pants" case.  Mr. Pearson had sued Jin Chung, a South Korean immigrant, for that outrageous amount because he had lost 1 pair of pants.  He came to that amount by doing some absurd calculation in his head.  Being a judge he represented himself in court.  Unfortunately, the Chungs were not lawyers they were dry cleaners.  They had to pay thousands and thousands of dollars in legal fees to lawyers because this jackass sued them.  I find it amazing that a man of the law would bring about such a crazy lawsuit.  I think he abused his knowledge of the law and because of that has made himself look like a douchebag.  This case is famous all around the US as well as in Korea since the defendants were of Korean descent.  Some people have brought up racism in this case since it is no secret that US blacks and US Koreans aren't too fond of each other.  Remember during the Rodney King riots when blacks intentionally attacked Korean shops?  Who knows why Mr. Pearson would do such a thing?  In the end, sanity prevailed and the case was thrown out.

Read the whole dumbass story here:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-pants_26jun26,1,6136509.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

I find it odd that a country that despises America and is so against mixing with other countries could be so interested in learning English.

http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=2241

The South on the other hand will invite anyone with a pulse that speaks English to come and teach English, that's where I come in.  Pulse, check.  I once heard a story from a job interview for an English teacher position in which the interviewer took out a mirror and asked the interviewee to breathe on it.  If any mark from the breath was visible on the mirror then the job was theirs.  Crazy?  Not really.  Some of the English teachers I've met here have no business being in the classroom.  But the South Korean system keeps bring in unqualified teachers by the plane-load.  What bugs me is when SK's complains about the quality of the teachers when they are doing the hiring!  It's like a Human Resources Manager complaining about how shitty all the employees he hired are.  Though I fear this system won't change until a drastic incident occurs, such as when people found out that John Mark Karr, the alleged child molester of Jonbenet Ramsey, once worked in SK.  Even that didn't do much.  Until then, I'll keep collecting my checks and keep my mouth shut.

This comic from bogglesworld.com explains it all:


PS I'm an English Teacher

Time Magazine's Man of the Year, Rain, has been cleared to perform in the United States after a legal battle.  Now that one hurdle is finished, the other one begins....Who the hell in the US is going to go to a Rain concert?

Read the full full article here:
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2007/06/201_5246.html

By most accounts, hagfish are repulsive bottom feeders that slime their predators, have rows of teeth on their tongues and feed on the innards of rotting fish by penetrating any orifice.

Dress them up on a plate in South Korea, however, the marine maggot becomes an instant aphrodisiac.

An overseas appetite for the so-called slime eel is leading to a rise in West Coast nettings as struggling fisherman cast about for a niche that will replace dwindling stocks of once-plentiful prize fish.

Check out the whole article here:
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2007/06/24/biz/news04.txt