Sunday, December 12, 2010

Reeper madness



With a hat tip to KoreaBeat, the #10 most read news story at Naver was about some visitors to Korea who decided to upload to YouTube a video of themselves smoking pot (and meth?) in the little enclosed "smoking area" inside Incheon International Airport. Frickin' twenty-one months ago. (I guess it took the netizen bots that long to scour the YouTubes for offensive content related to Korea.)

This is KoreaBeat's clip descript:
A group of criminal mastermind English-speaking foreigners made a video of themselves smoking marijuana and taking pilopon in the smoking room at Incheon International Airport, then uploaded the video to Youtube.
For those who are unaware, philopon [히로뽕, or hiroppong, in Korean] is meth.

Here is a link to the Donga Ilbo news story at Naver, and here is a link to the actual video ("Smokin' weed in Korean Airport").

While I would love to tell everyone clicking on the Naver site, "Don't fear the reeper," the other side of me puts palm to forehead and goes, "Geez, what are they doing?! Come to a country where drug laws are strict, smoke weed in public, make a spectacle videotaping yourself, and then upload it for all the world to see?" I guess these mooks won't feel any heat since they're apparently traveling on to Russia. Not sure what drug penalties are there, but I can just imagine how well pot-smoking Americans go over with the Russians.

What's that they say about pot smoking and impaired judgement?

Anyway, what I found most interesting about this story is that the Donga Ilbo or Naver decided to pixelate their faces, ostensibly to hide their identity, even though these four gentlemen themselves made no effort to hide what they look like.

Oh, and in the process, they made the one in the middle look like Hines Ward.

UPDATE:
Oh, I should have known from the title that the four gentlemen in question are part of some rap group named Onyx. So I should have introduced them by saying, "Here are several fine young men who I'm sure are gonna go far." Also, the Korean-language article refers to them as 유명 연예인 ("famous entertainers") in the first line.

But the truth is, I don't follow hip-hop. Being straight out of Compton myself, I'm keenly aware of the irony that hip-hop and rap are quasi-musical forms engineered by unscrupulous executives and perpetrated by usually talentless "performers," that are voraciously consumed by gangsta-wannabe White and Asian kids from the suburbs who would sh¡t and pee themselves if they'd seen stuff I'd seen back in my old neighborhood.

So pardon me if I didn't know who these role models are. (And now it's even funnier that the their faces were pixelated.)

Actually, I did sorta think that the guy on the right looked like the obnoxious 
gangsta-wannabe boyfriend of Moesha on the late 1990s UPN show Moesha
and it turns out I was right. That's actor Frederic Scruggs. 
You may know him as Fredro Starr. Or not.

UPDATE:
Ask A Korean also has a post up about this.

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