Busy but...

As you may have noticed, I've been a tad busy so I can't keep up with my usual five-posts-per-day rate of production. Just thought I'd let my loyal readers (and people who loathe me so much that they obsessively scour my blog for things they can mock me for or use against me) know that family, work, and school are what's keeping me away from the CREATE POST window and not some lack of interest.

In the meantime, I leave you with a favorite post of mine you might have missed, along with a request for possible guest bloggers and The Sonagi Consortium bloggers.

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Netflix can't compete with Netflix

Dammit! My Netflix is about to get 60 percent more expensive. While I was paying about ten bucks for unlimited streaming of movies and one DVD out at a time, I will soon have to pay about sixteen bucks for the same service:

In a reflection of the more challenging economics, the company faces to acquire digital content and ship DVDs, Netflix announced Tuesday that it will no longer offer combined DVD and streaming plans. Instead, the company's more than 22.8 million U.S. consumers will have to pay separately for each service.

Unlimited streaming will cost $7.99 per month, as will taking out one DVD at a time. The combined cost is $15.98 per month, a huge price increase for those who currently pay $9.99 for a combined streaming-plus-one-DVD plan.

In a blog post, the company positioned the price increase as a way to bolster its DVD business, which executives had previously deemphasized.

"Given the long life we think DVDs by mail will have, treating DVDs as a $2 add on to our unlimited streaming plan neither makes great financial sense nor satisfies people who just want DVDs," the corporate blog post said. "Creating an unlimited DVDs by mail plan (no streaming) at our lowest price ever, $7.99, does make sense and will ensure a long life for our DVDs by mail offering."

Perhaps I'm spoiled. After all, I originally signed up when it was just the DVDs for about $9 per month. When they added the streaming, that was gravy. The one-DVD-out-at-a-time service meant, if I watched movies the day I received them and got them out the next day, I could watch about two a week, or about $1.25 per film. That's a 25¢ more than at the Redbox or Blockbuster kiosk, for those keeping score.

But at the same time, I was able to watch as many movies and television programs as I wanted on their streaming service. Lately I've been going through the entire Battlestar Galactica reimagining, as well as South Park. I have a Hulu+ membership (about $8 per month) for more recent television shows.

The problem with Netflix's streaming service is that there are a lot of missing movies. Half the things I'd like to see are available only on DVD, including all the Harry Potter movies I might want to watch before I see the final installment. The question now is whether I want to keep the DVD service at all.

At least I have until September to decide. I should see how many recent movies are at the local library.

UPDATE (September 18, 2011):
Well, it looks like Netflix went and decided for me. If the change described in their blog does go through and there is little integration between sites, I will probably quit their mailing service, possibly even returning to Blockbuster (why I left is explained here).

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No Daily Kor today

Just bask in the glow of Pyongchang having won the 2018 Winter Olympics hosting rights. I'm a bit too busy today, but I'll catch up with today's news tomorrow, just in case Monster Island is your primary source for all that's important and newsworthy on the Korean Peninsula (don't laugh, that is my intention!).

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane to the Mainland, and then off to help out my aunt whose much older husband is an Iwo Jima veteran (on the American side, just so we're clear). He’s in the final stages of Alzheimer’s and is getting sustenance through a feeding tube. This trip will almost certainly be the last time I see him alive (though that's what I'd thought about my trip in March).

His Alzheimer's was really kicking in around the time of Clint Eastwood's film, Flags of Our Fathers*, about those who fought and died or survived on that crucial island. It sticks out in my head because he and my aunt came to meet us for dinner and he talked about having just seen it and how he really enjoyed it, and how he was there, etc., etc. Over the course of dinner, he recounted that story probably three times, each time as if it had just popped into his head.

In hindsight, I wish I’d videotaped “interviews” of the guy when his mind was still clear. Supposedly he lied about his age to enter the war (or he got permission somehow, depending on who’s telling the story) but he was seventeen, I think, when he was at Iwo Jima. His nursing home care has literally bankrupted my aunt.

* This movie was a two-part film series, with Letters From Iwo Jima being the Japanese-language second installment. This, too, was an excellent movie, told from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers who would mostly die in that desolate place. I had wished that I could persuade my uncle to see it, because I would have been curious about his reaction. Would he have been interested, all these decades later, in seeing the other side, or would it just have brought up negative memories and emotions? Clearly, by the time Letters came out, he was in no cognitive condition to see it and appreciate it on any level, and he had earlier stated he didn't have any desire to see it. It's probably my own selfish conceit to want to have a WWII veteran see this movie, although I think that's what Clint Eastwood intended in part. Sadly, Mr Eastwood's intentions themselves were a bit of a failure: most Americans only saw Flags, and most Japanese only saw Letters, and thus neither side got the big picture Mr Eastwood had hoped. 

Light posting until the end of the semester

Kushibo is a grad student with real world responsibilities, though you wouldn't know that on my eight-posts-in-24-hours kinda days.

Now that the Yŏnpyŏng-do shelling has died down, the FTA renegotiation has succeeded, and everyone is busy shopping for Christmas, and especially since I've gone nearly forty-eight hours without a single post, I thought I should put up a post announcing I won't be posting much over the next week to ten days.

In the meantime, if you're jonesing for some posts, take a look (or second look) at some of the recent ones I thought were interesting:

• Glorious Dear Leader and Brilliant Comrade Thought Bubble Contest #1 and Contest #2

• Kim Jŏng-ŭn is The Kim Who Wasn't There

• Don't buy into North Korea's bogus claims to South Korean waters south of the NLL

• The sun goes down on the Sunshine Policy

• Ban Kimoon doesn't care if people get HIV or need AIDS treatment wants to end the mandatory HIV testing for English teachers. And ATEK is happy sex workers aren't required to be tested anymore, too.

• With the new FTA, is South Korea ready for the Hillbilly Hummer Ford F150?

• The outcry over Blackout Korea

• Would racial profiling have caught Mr Headley?

• Will teaching visas be "semi-portable"? 

• NSFW pictures in a discussion of the TSA full-body scanners

• Impeach Obama? The Teasters say yes!

• Gift of the Megi

No Daily Kor today either, but I leave you with this...

Halliburton, not content to merely jack up our economy with their money pit of a war in Iraq, has now set their sights on the ecology: Is Halliburton responsible for the shoddy work that caused the massive oil spill off the coast of Louisiana that may prove to be an even worse disaster than the Exxon-Valdez spill of 1989?

But wait! No need to worry that corporate mishandling by a shadow government has brought us to this woeful state, because there is evidence and speculation (mostly speculation) that the entire problem was caused by ... wait for it ... the North Koreans! Yep:

While some say environmental extremists, who have committed acts of terror in the past are responsible, the dominant theory that has emerged is that a North Korean sub torpedoed the rig. The Deepwater Horizon oil platform was owned by Transocean, the largest offshore drilling contractor in the world. It was also built and financed by South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. Ltd., which leads many to think about a North Korean attack.

North Korea has been increasingly aggressive since announcing it has developed nuclear weapons last May. It has waged a heavy cyberwar against the United States, arrested and later released two American journalist it accused of espionage, and has been caught shipping military cargo to rogue African nations. North Korea has also become the clear suspect in the March sinking of a South Korean battleship.

For the record, yours truly did note the South Korean connection to the BP rig ten days ago (it's the very bottom story), but I never made the North Korea connection because, well, I can tell the two Koreas apart.

UPDATE:
Joshua at One Free Korea has picked up on more conspiracy theorists espousing this idea.

[above: Louisiana fishermen Lance Melerine and David Hebert are distraught and perplexed as they ponder whether to blame their plight on Dick Cheney or Kim Jong-il.]

Our house, in the middle of Seoul-shi

The Marmot's recent photo essay on Taejŏn (대전/; also Daejeon) has prompted me to post this picture of my old house where I lived and ran an entire office until I bought my current apartment about half a kilometer away a few years ago.

It may not look like much, but it was quite spacious inside. Enough for two or three people to live and also have an office where two or three more could come in and work. I had three small dogs that ran around the modest yard in front and on the side, plus two cats living inside. (They were quite clever, having learned how to work doorknobs and escape from rooms in which mŏn-halmŏni tried to confine them.)

Off to the left you can see my pimped-out minivan, parked on the narrow street that was designed decades even before the Korean War, when no one ever imagined Seoul would be home to millions of cars. It was one-way only, though no one could decide which way was the one way. At night people parked their cars flush with the wall, forcing motorists to squeeze by each and every car. Although it was a through street, it was not a heavily trafficked one, used only by people who lived there and already knew the score.

As best as we could discern, the house was constructed around 1935. The owner had lived there since it was first built, but when her husband died the memories became too painful and she moved to an apartment in southern Seoul and offered her home as a chŏnsé house (often spelled chonsei or jeonse; a refundable large-amount lease).

It was well kept for a sixty-year-old Seoul home built in a modern style when the tenants prior to me moved in, but they modernized the incoming water pipes and converted the heating system from yŏnt'an coal-burning to gas lines. The new tenant fixed up old colonial-era homes and flipped them or turned them into restaurants (he is running one now, near where the new US embassy will be).

His restauranting may have gotten him noticed by the local gangsters; I remember one scary night when I was about to go out and four large men with crew cuts, blazers, and faux turtlenecks were waiting at the front door asking for him. When I told them — without opening up the front gate — that he didn't live there anymore, they kept telling me to just call him down, and they wouldn't leave. It scared the sh¡t out of Halmŏni and probably wasn't good for her ninety-year-old heart. The men eventually left, though I think I'm not sure what eventually convinced them I was telling the truth. Just in case they were coming back, we called the police and asked them to make regular passes, which they did. (I'll tell you: it pays to know the police in your neighborhood before you ever need them.)

I lived there for several years, but the owner's daughter had dollar signs in her eyes and she forced her mother to sell. She knew her mother placed sentimental value on the building, so she promised to sell only to someone who would keep the building intact. We were forced to move (though our "eviction" was in line with housing law and leases) and I bought my own apartment using the same W80 million chŏnsé as a down payment.

(The rest was lent to me by Shinhan Bank. Though I'm not a ROK citizen, the apartment is in my name and my name alone, while the bank loan is in my name alone with no guarantors; I've had people who are so married to the meme that foreign citizens cannot own property in Korea that they simply don't believe me when I tell them — I'm either lying to them or I myself am the victim of a big scam involving the tax office, the local Ward Office, my real estate agent, and the bank. Anyway, if you're interested in buying property and would like to ask questions, I can let you know how mine went and maybe offer some advice.)

The house is no longer standing. The owner's daughter deceived her mother about what the new owners were going to do. They knocked it down and built a four-story cookie-cutter yŏllip chutaek (연립주택), those nondescript buildings with a different unit on each floor. It's not that bad-looking, but if you know what was there, it's sad.

The neighborhood itself, in northern Yongsan-gu, still has lots of old buildings like this scattered throughout, many of them in quite good condition because the owners were well off enough to build homes large enough that they continued to be good placed to live for decades to come. It also helped that they had the means to fix things up.

But this neighborhood itself may not be there much longer. In the last couple years it was rezoned for mid-rise housing: all homes ancient or recent are to be razed so that brand-spanking new apartments can go up in their place. This is not a shantytown like the neighborhood of southern Yongsan-gu where the recent violence took place; most of the people whose homes will disappear are either owners (who will get one of the new places) or tenants with means to move elsewhere. The people in my apartment complex are excited about the prospect of getting newer and larger places, though the economic downturn has put a damper on all that.

By the way, the property in front of which I was standing when I took this picture (in 2001) is a vacant lot. The house that was there was also one of these old colonial-era buildings. The tenants, two Americans, accidentally burned it down when they tried to incinerate their garbage so they could avoid buying the plastic bags legally required to discard one's trash.

The neighbors were furious and demanded their immediate arrest. The prosecutor demanded harsh sentences of five years each for the crime of arson. All across the city of Seoul, notices were placed in poorly worded English not to burn your garbage because you could burn your owner's house down.

Ah, I'm just kidding. The neighbors felt terrible for these two gentlemen, who were both nice guys who tried to speak Korean and be neighborly, even if they were irresponsible with fire. There were offers to let them sleep temporarily in neighbors' homes, and over the next few days, neighbors tried to help them find a new place to move into.

My little niece

My scanner now brings you the most adorable baby in the world:

And I hate to say it, but the one reason I have started thinking that I want to get married and have kids sooner rather than later (although the Korean 빨리빨리 aspect to getting married hasn't gotten to me yet).