Thursday, December 10, 2009

For one brief shining moment...

... the Wonder Girls were the most googled thing at Google: #1, as in Numero Uno (Una? Unas?). This followed their appearance (which I did not see) on Fox TV's "So You Think You Can Dance."

Unfortunately, by the time I read this at the  Joongang Ilbo site, they had dropped from the #1 Google search to #3, as you can see below. Which is still pretty damn respectable.


Kendra Wilkinson in labor?! Who the hell would want to see that?! And "rain on my parade" at #1? Could that be our buddy Bi?

Now, if you're a regular at any K-blog, the obvious thought in your mind (even if you aren't the one who put the notion there) is that this is 1000만 Korean netizens at 1000만 keyboards trying to either write Shakespeare or get Korean artists, actors, performers at the top of every list imaginable.

You know how scientists used to tie a bunch of regular computers together in serial and together they had the combined power of a supercomputer? Well, that's the model on which Korean netizenry is based. If one netizen tells his friends to google the Wonder Girls and they tell all their friends to google the Wonder Girls and so on, and so on, and so on... You get the picture.


And why not? They are so adorable.

And maybe, just maybe, Ma and Pa America also thought they were so adorable (and so did Ma and Pa Canada living within a hundred clicks of the 49th parallel) that they just had to look them up.

Maybe, just maybe, the rise of the Wonder Girls (or Rain, for that matter), isn't a Korean new media-generated pipe dream after all.

UPDATE:
Several hours later now, I checked again and they're at #9. In other words, they're sinking faster than a kisaeng tied to a general. A look at another chart may show what's at work here:


Almost zero interest in the Wonder Girls until 5 p.m., Hawaii time, which corresponds to late prime-time viewing (i.e., "So You Think You Can Dance") in the Eastern and Central Time Zones. The next peak, three hours later, is the same show in the Pacific Time Zone.

Now that everyone has gone to bed, activity has mostly died down, except for insomniacs, angry loners, and the unemployable. As water cooler talk tomorrow (er... later today) turns to the show and the South Korean quintuplet of cuties, expect another mini-spike.

UPDATE #2:
Well, now fourteen hours later, the Wonder Girls are off the charts, but not in the good, idiomatic way. I just hope their actual rise and fall in America isn't this fast. Damn fickle Americans. If they can't even be bothered to stick to a war until it's finished, what hope do the Wonder Girls have of popularity that lasts until the next morning.

16 comments:

  1. Stop all this high school Asian girl fetishizing you dirty old man!... ;)

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  2. Just because you're making randy comments over at The Hole doesn't mean you let your lasciviousness spill over onto Monster Island and make disparaging and wholly libelous innuendo about me.

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  3. hahaha... I'm just kidding kush.

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  4. ... and my comments at TMH had a ring of truth to it... you can't say that it doesn't!

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  5. Plus... I made fun of my own school too!

    http://www.rjkoehler.com/2009/12/11/korean-food-to-be-mainstream/#comment-355214

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  6. USC: University for Spoiled Children

    UCI: University for the Children of Immigrants

    UCLA: University of Caucasians Lost among Asians

    Anyway, the last thing I would characterize UCI girls as is "dumb." And coming from a USC alumnus, that's just offensive.

    USC = unethical school connections

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  7. Whoa, you took me way too seriously. By expanding on what thekorean said in that thread, I was also implying that USC kids were equally dumb.

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  8. Actually, you're taking me too seriously. But it's my fault; I didn't include a wink emoticon.

    And for the record, the only fetish I have is a White-girl-who-speaks-Korean fetish.

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  9. Oh, you mean this?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt7yEGN3uKc

    That's hot, huh?.. ;)

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  10. Edward wrote:
    Oh, you mean this?

    You know I blogged about this last June. And I think I was the first.

    That's hot, huh?.. ;)

    I said "White girl who speaks Korean," not "barely literate monkey struggling with Romanization on a cue card."

    When it's done right, it's so hawt.

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  11. Yeah, I know... that was extremely painful to listen to.

    You know what's better than a white girl talking in Korea? A half Korean girl speaking in Korea. It's hot and cute all at the same time... you don't know whether or not to pinch her cheeks or make a move!

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  12. *speaking in Korean* not *speaking in Korea*

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  13. I said "White girl who speaks Korean," not "barely literate monkey struggling with Romanization on a cue card."

    What if it's the old Romanization that she's using?

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  14. Maybe if she could demonstrate that she had some inkling of the merits of McCune-Reischauer Romanization over Revised Romanization, that might do something for me, but if she's just reading gam-sa-ham-nee-da off a cue card, it's no particular turn-on whatsoever.

    And this lone "fetish" of mine (note: not really a fetish in the real sense of the word) does not extend just to White girls. Black girls who can speak Korean, too. Really, any non-Korean girl.

    My Caucasian ex in Korea was so adorable when she sprinkled her English with Korean phrases that we use as everyday terms.

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  15. Perhaps kush has all the episodes of Misuda on DVR?.. ;)

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  16. Edward wrote:
    Perhaps kush has all the episodes of Misuda on DVR?

    Ah, one might think that. But the truth is, I've never even seen the show.

    But I used to know one of the people who was originally on the show (maybe still is; I really don't watch).

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