Dear Kushibo: What's across the street from the Itaewon McDonald's?

Ah, what's in today's mail bag?

Dear Kushibo, 

Tom, Kushibo, and Seoul Guy what’s across the street from McDonald’s in Itaewon? of course you don’t know. None of you actually lives in Korea. 

Signed,

Dreamboat Annie

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Dear Dreamboat Annie,

It's funny you should ask that, because almost at exactly the moment you left this comment at ROK Drop, I was actually in the McDonald's in Itaewon, munching on an Egg McMuffin set (Egg McMuffins are better in Korea than Hawaii for some reason).

But off the top of my head, I couldn't recall what was across the street from Mickey D's, except for some nice eatery a little bit up the hill, so I had to go back and snap a picture. It turns out there's a beauty shop that does Brazilian waxes and "manscaping" and has a bear baring a bare bear crotch to drive that point home. Is that what you were looking for? The number's on the photo I snapped (above).   

Yours,

Kushibo

Although Dreamboat Annie's motivation for that question was probably something else and she doesn't really care what's across the street from the Itaewon McDonald's, here's the picture I took anyway:

My finger has a special message for you.

In fact, this may have been just a dig from Annie, who has joined that bandwagon of people thinking I don't have any business posting so prolifically on Korea because I don't live in Korea. And indeed, although I am now in Seoul (well, Pundang, actually) and my actual home is here and I think in some way that constitutes living here, it has been three years since I was last in Korea. (She also thinks I'm paid to blog, but that misperception may be my fault.)

This is the longest I've been away since I was a teenager. This was not by design, since I had been coming back every six months or so and spending about two months a year in the Seoul area working (even in Hawaii I work for a Korean corporation), doing doctoral research, hanging out with friends and relatives, etc., etc., but some important personal matters that have been first and foremost (since right after I got to Hawaii in 2006) simply did not allow it in 2010 and 2011.

And indeed, it has been an eye-opening experience being away for this long. I've often said that, in terms of change, five years in Korea is like twenty years in the United States, and this "decade" being away has been eye-opening. The traffic patterns have changed, already ubiquitous coffee shops have spread like cockroaches, there's an obvious effort by city governments to create green open space, things seem more orderly and sophisticated, etc., etc. Things that are the same are the constantly-under-construction nature of Seoul.

Perpetual reinvention is the thing that is the same and makes everything different at the same time.

But even while I'm away, my own academic work keeps me up-to-date on what's going on "back home." And even if it did not, I have professional, social, familial, legal, and financial ties to Korea that keep the bond strong. (Three years of being away has left me with a bunch of fires to put out — from getting my finances reordered to paying three years of property tax to getting my vehicle working again to giving face time with my employers.)

That my point-of-view in my blog is so often against the grain of other English-language blogs has more to do with my personal and experiential background than with having been abroad for three years. Back in 2005 and 2006, before I went to Hawaii, I was just as "contrarian."

When I write things in support of, say, HIV testing for all English teachers (as well as all F-series visa holders and all ROK citizens) and criminal background checks for long-term (i.e., over 90 days) residents, more than a few English teachers tend to think I'm against them (especially when they forget things like this), and some choose to make it personal. The "You don't even live here!" meme is a popular one.

Of course, I'm not the only blogger who gets flak from the English-teaching crowd. The Marmot's name is being dragged through the mud because he had the audacity to agree that some of the bad reputation of English teachers as of late (I remember when English teachers were treated as honorable professionals) has been brought on themselves, at least as a group. And that's why he's being called a moron.

Of course, Marmot has long had his detractors, especially Gerry Bevers, who seems particularly bothered by The Marmot's mockery of Gerry's relentless effort to defend Imperial Japan. From his latest blog aimed at demonstrating that the Japanese are good people because Koreans are bad:

So, is the neutrality of The Marmot's Hole really debatable, especially when the man behind the blog wanders Korea wearing the traditional Korean clothing hanbok and brags about his eating of dogmeat?

Not the Marmot.
Some other guy
in apŭrikabok.

I don't know why people bag on The Marmot for wearing a hanbok. Back in Africa he also wore apŭrikabok (or whatever Africans wear) and, as Zen Kimchi noted, he looks damn sexy in a hanbok. It doesn't make him a sellout.

So I guess the point of this rambling post is that people go after me, people go after other bloggers with whom they disagree, and they justify it by making ad hominem attacks. Gerry has done it with me as well, back in my pre-Hawaii days when I was a way-too-frequent-commenter at The Assa Hole.

On the plus side, it can be fun and occasionally memorable. After a heated exchange (when is an exchange involving Gerry over Japan with anyone not heated?), Gerry asked if was going to respond to him or "have you already posted your one-comment limit for the day?"

To which I replied:

Sorry, Bevers, unlike you, I receive neither masturbatory joy nor subsidies from right-wing sources for flooding the Internet with a one-sided, historically skewed, Imperial-apologist view every time someone utters the word "Tokto," so I will try to limit my writing to just this one comment.

I soon thought better of what I'd written and issued a unilateral apology:

The last paragraph of my post up there was over-the-top. I apologize to Gerry and anyone else who may have been offended by that.

With a glimmer of humor (and no small amount of admission), Gerry replied:

No problem, Kushibo. Like Japan, I was taunting you.

But I had the last laugh:

Good, then. Like Japan, my apology may be meaningless. ;)

Ah, good times.

A less pleasant exchange was when Gerry, as he is wont to do, accused me of taking the Korean side on the Tokto issue (and Comfort Women issue, etc.) because of fear of my "Korean handlers." To which I replied:

[Gerry] Open your eyes, Kushibo, and stop kissing up to your Korean handlers. You have been in Korea long enough to know what is going on. You do have to be afraid. It is possible to live among Koreans without having to kiss their butt.

Fu¢k off, Gerry. Just because I don't believe that "Korea was Japan's greatest ally" and that it's all a big Korea-generalted lie that Korea was butt-fucked by imperial Japan doesn't mean I'm ass-kissing anyone.

I have been critical of Roh for his diplomatic war almost since I started my blog. i have written things that are harshly critical of some of the nationalist sentiments that bubble up in Korea. You, on the other hand, are unable to see anything that would suggest even the slightest bit of culpability on the part of Japan, either past or present.

The Black Dragon Society is sure as hell getting their money's worth from you.

I concur with all who think Gerry is an asshat (and possibly a paid shill like Christine Ahn seems to be for Pyongyang). Even though I actually called his school to defend him and protest his firing when he supposedly got kicked out over his Tokto views (which turns out not to have been true, according to them: they canned a whole bunch of people from that school because of restructuring, including his fellow English teacher, and Gerry was allowed to re-apply).

Anyway, I'm really in Korea, Dreamboat Annie. Send me an email through my Blogger profile page and we'll meet up and have a beer. If your userid is gender-appropriate and accurately descriptive, a few more beers.

...

Time for a change of space?

Though I have my own domain, the blog itself is powered by Blogger (some of you may remember that until nineteen months ago the URL was kushibo.blogspot.com), and every now and then Blogger (which is now run by Google) comes up with some nifty tools.

New among them are the so-called "dynamic views" which promise to completely change the way one might interact with a blog such as this. To get an idea how Monster Island would look different, Blogger has allowed a preview of sorts. Below are the various dynamic views, roughly in order of my own preference:

• Timeslide

• Flipcard

• Snapshot

• Magazine

• Mosaic

• Sidebar

• Classic

Frankly, I'm one of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kinda bloggers. The Marmot changes his layout more often than his hanbok, but I've only made one major change, when I went from the color scheme found in the template used by Dokdo Is Ours to one that I'd customized to draw in the colors of Korea's Taegŭkki flag (and I wonder if anyone every picked up on that).  

The truth is, I like the format now. This is a text-intestive blog, not a photo-intenstive one, and maybe it's better if the headlines and copy are there for all to see. At the very least, I wouldn't want to change to any of those dynamic views unless I could keep my current color scheme. 

I'm also not sure where ads, links to other blogs, and "about kushibo" stuff are supposed to go. 

Anyway, I'd appreciate readers chiming in. 

... 

Looking for nude pics of Amanda Knox?

Some of you certainly are. At least according to Sitemeter.com, anyway. Since the girl-next-door cutie and possible murderer has again become a major story this past week, culminating with her 2009 conviction being overturned in the 2007 killing of her friend, I've seen a ten to twenty percent jump in hits to this blog.

And this is because Monster Island, inexplicably, comes in at #7 out of half a million sites if you are googling "Amanda Knox nude." Of course, I don't have such pictures — if I did would I be blogging for Mini Coopers?! — but because there's this post about a nude yoghurt fight listed in the side bar as one containing "nudity" and "nude," it comes up on the list. Not sure why it's in the top one-thousandth of a percent, though.

Of course, searching for nude pics of Amanda Knox may not be all that strange, considering red-blooded American males' obsession with seeing female celebrities naked. What's really weird is when people end up here by looking for something like, say, koala porn.

Sick puppies. Seriously, "koala porn" was just something outrageous I thought of to depict "overly weird," sort of my equivalent of Conan's horny manatees. I had no frickin' idea people were actually looking for things like that. (And Safari, please stop autocorrecting "frickin'" as "friction.")

...

"Hello" as "hate speech," an essay

"Hello!"

This is the age of Twitter on your iPhone. You can document right there in the moment something good (or bad) that has happened to you. It's the age where you can blog something good or bad at a traffic light, at a game, right there in the restaurant, or anywhere you happen to be, with great immediacy.

If, for example, someone in a Las Vegas department store who has overheard me speaking Korean on the phone growls, "Speak English!" (a bit relevant to the recent The Black Guy on the Bus™ incident), then I can blog about it right there on the spot. It gains some credibility despite the lack of audio because the "facts" are laid down right away, and my surprise-turned-to-anger was great enough that I felt compelled to share it with others.

It wasn't always so. In the days before smart phones, people usually had to wait until they got home, to the office, or to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf before they could put thoughts to phosphorus. And before camera phones became so ubiquitous (I still like that word, despite its recent ubiquity within Korea), we would have to merely describe, hours or days later, what we'd seen, in our blogs, in list groups, in emails back home, on USENET, on snailmail, or even the guest columnist pages of the local newspaper. This was always unsatisfying to many readers, who would eventually come up with a standard reply: "Pics or it didn't happen!" That's probably why Steve Jobs invented the iPhone.

Um, anyway, as someone who has lived in Seoul off and on since being a teenager, who has lived there for over a third of his life and at this point most of his adult life, a good chunk of that is in the pre-smartphone era, at a time even when few people had email addresses, when the Kexpat list-serve was The Marmot's Hole of the day, and a good back-and-forth might take weeks if it were on the pages of the Korea Times or Korea Herald. My first camera here required negatives to be processed (and it wasn't cheap).

It was frustrating, because living in South Korea, just as now, different people would have different experiences, but it would be so hard without Google, voluminous tweets, or even grainy pictures from an old LG camera phone, it would be very hard to document claims that we made. Right now, I take pictures of everything, but there are literally thousands of things I would have taken a picture back in the day if I'd had at least a camera phone with me everywhere I went, giving me an arsenal of pictures I could use when making arguments on future posts on a blog somewhere that had not yet been created.

If I'd had an iPhone back then, I'd probably have filled it up with pictures of people running around the Panpo-dong Kim's Club in a panic as the economy started to collapse before our very eyes in the last days of 1997. I'd have made a collection of the once-ubiquitous page-sized movie posters that used to be put up in neighborhoods as a collection of movie advertisements or local notices, including one that depicted how violent an American movie was by showing just a frightened woman with a gun pointed right in her face. No concern that kids impressionable kids would be walking by and seeing this on a regular basis, but also very telling in that, while some in Korea complained American movies were too violent, the marketers who made and then disseminated this poster obviously thought that "violence sells."

But when I made that argument (to a KoKo) and cited that poster that is still clear in my mind's eye, my claim was regarded as incredulous, in part because I could not produce said poster. "Pics or it didn't happen."

That's right. It's been so long ago, that I think a lot of people have forgotten what it was like in the days before we could document right there in the moment.

I have run into this kind of problem when describing how much things have changed in South Korea. Though I'm not particularly old (I'm a Gen-Xer in grad school), I've lived in South Korea longer than most bloggers or commenters in the K-blogosphere, and the lack of documentation of so many things before the Millennium makes it hard to make an argument. The owner of The Grand Narrative called this view of mine annoying or some such (I'm still looking for the link to that).

So I was a little giddy when I saw Casey Lartigue, a once ubiquitous writer for the Korea Times who has found his way to the K-blogs, post links to some of his articles from before Y2K. You see, he'd given me the documentation to back up a claim I'd made that was, frankly, nothing more than my word against anybody who might choose not to believe me.

Back in 2009 (pre-Y2.01K), I had written the following, in response to someone asking (first line below, in bold) about the effects of constantly being called "foreigners":

Do they call us foreigners because we stay here a year or two, or do we only stay here a year or two because they call us foreigners?

Oh, my God! If the precious little lotus blossoms can't handle being called oégugin or foreigner (or gaijin or whatever), then they should stay home where they can wrap themselves up in the cocoon of their majority-ness and feel all secure. Never leave your home country in that case.

Seriously, if someone is so sensitive that would cause them to leave, then they really have too thin a skin. This reminds me of the people who thought little kids shouting "Hello!" was "hate speech" (I'm not making that up).

Damn fu¢king racist Koreans. Most racist people in the world! Fu¢kin' Koreans always shouting Hello!

Now you may or may not agree with my perhaps too-harsh sentiment (being a kvetchpat often stems largely from being stripped of one's "racial transparency" back home), but the main point here is about "Hello!" being "hate speech." Yeah, that was really an argument making the rounds. Not merely that it was annoying to be singled out as a tall, blond White dude, but that shouting "Hello!" was race-based mockery. Mockery. They were making fun of you based on your race.

If you were to acknowledge that the Hello-ee (is this where Haole comes from?) was indeed being noticed because of their obvious physical differences, but that shouting "Hello!" was a way to be friendly or even inclusive, you were dead wrong. Because it was mockery! They were shouting it because of their racism! "Hello" is "hate speech."

So when Mr Lartigue decided to post an old KT piece from August 1999, in response to The Metropolemicist's rant about The Black Guy on the Bus™, I was pleased to see it contained a reference to such:

I heard other complaints from expatriates. Some are bothered by the personal questions many Koreans ask. Some also complain about the lack of personal space and privacy that they have in Korea . By far, the most incredible complaint I heard is that some expatriates feel unfairly singled out by drunks and smart-aleck children shouting, "Hello!"

Now that I'm back in America , I can see that drunks here aren't exactly the most dignified of souls. And many of the kids will tell you to "go f...yourself" if you tell them to tie their shoes. In our respective countries, when encountering rude or playful children, we say, "stupid kids." While in Korea, far too many Americans will say, "stupid Korean kids," attributing the "hello" to a character flaw in Koreans.

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't always see eye to eye with Mr Lartigue, a staunch libertarian. And although he does not corroborate that some of the plaintive cultural plaintiffs did in fact call it "hate speech," but he does independently confirm that there were in fact a number of people making "the most incredible complaint" that they were afflicted by people shouting "Hello!" to them.

Now, if you've read this far and you're hoping for some grand bow to tie this all up with, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I had meant to write a three- or four-sentence post tying my "hate speech" remark at Brian's with the newly posted Lartigue piece from 1999, but I was too tired. This morning, after a restless night of bad dreams of being chased by arachnoid monsters in a post-apocalyptic California, I woke up and just went to town, reminiscing about the days when we could prove so little of what we lived through in Seoul, in South Korea, or in Asia at large, and just had our stories.

If these North Korean kids don't say "Hello," it really might be hate speech.

...

Updating "Our Daily Breadth" blog roll

It's time for a little bit of housekeeping. Some of my favorite blogs and/or blogs I find most useful are listed in Our Daily Breadth, in the right-hand column, down there beneath World Famous Posts. Go take a look. I'll wait. I've got Raising Hope on Hulu, so I'm not going anywhere.

Among them are the usual suspects I routinely check out — The Marmot's Hole, ROK Drop, One Free Korea, Brian in Chŏllanam-do, and KoreaBeat — but the list also includes a few others of less renown that are still worth paying attention to. One of them, List of the Day, has absolutely nothing to do with Korea except for an occasional entry in "engrish photo of the day."

But nothing is constant except change, and so Our Daily Breadth must keep up with the times.

Out with the old.
They say change is good, but they're full of crap. Tell me how "a change for the worse" is good, unless we're talking about Kim Jong-il's pancreas screening or someone like that. A couple of really good blogs were lost today, and I'm not happy.

I find it a bit sad to be removing DPRK Studies, but the only post up, from eight months ago, is a message that blog owner Richardson is signing off. He didn't even leave up the old posts (please, if you ever stop blogging, leave the legacy for others to enjoy.... mkay?).

Now I can't say that Richardson and I saw eye to eye on everything — perhaps only a bit less than Joshua at One Free Korea and I do — but I liked the insight and the effort. It was a good blog.

Similarly, I'm a little disappointed to find that Foundatron appears to be having some hiccups. This is a blog that was dedicated to mapping and bicycling by someone in Seoul, and I put it in the Daily Breadth in part to encourage its development. Unfortunately, it appeared for a while that WordPress bots had taken over, and now it seems the owner is in the process of migrating to Google Apps, but for now I have no choice but to remove it — for now.

Also, Korea Pop Wars, by the eminently good guy Mark Russell, will be removed just because it's no longer updated. I will put his new blog, the not-nearly-as-Korea-related Mark Russell's Website, in the lesser blog roll.

Extra! Korea has come back from the grave, so I'm happy to keep that one up there. The Grand Narrative will also remain, even though I don't go there as often as I used to. I like the blog and I think the owner has great insight and everything, but it often tends more toward the salacious than the substantive, and I think it suffers. The "sociological image" series, methinks, has veered away from sociology of the people and is at times more akin to analysis of the advertising industry.

Sure, media images from commercials and pop music do affect what goes on in Korea or any other modern society, but if one were to get most of what they learn from TGN, I think they'd get a skewed picture of what everyday South Koreans are like, perhaps even on matters of dating and sexuality that the owner frequently discusses. Just a gripe, not a criticism; I do like the blog and I'm keeping it in Our Daily Breadth, so that obviously means something.

And Brian in Jeollanam-do stays, even though he's not actually in Chŏllanam-do anymore. He does maintain his blog, and his love of the region (some would say tough love) remains high. He's probably the Honam area's biggest promoter in English, and I say more power to him.

In Canada, this is how we do ddongchim. 
You must understand our culture.

Exposed Waygooks! will also remain, just because it's my blog and I do plan to upgrade it, especially after this summer when I plan to cruise Hongdae and Itaewon looking for oégugin and KoKos acting stupid. Or if someone sends me worthy pics.

In with the new.
But I am happy to add new additions as well. Chris at Destination Pyongyang deserves a spot for his analysis of what's going on in North Korea, a topic dear to me.

I have also recently discovered a blog of sorts that amounts to a robust newsfeed on North Korea where the owner, a peninsula-based gent named Tor, occasionally adds commentary. It's called northkorea.Collected, kinda self-explanatory.

I have also added The Chosun Bimbo, Adam Cathcart's blog, and Eat Your Kimchi to my "Blog roll of blogs that list me in their blog roll." I probably should have done that a long time ago. [UPDATE: I've made a further addition, seoulsuzy's A Seoulful Life, which has a lot of neat little personal tips on things to see and places to go.]

Some have asked me why I don't put such-and-such blog on the list. Well, there are some who go on hysterical rants that make sweeping generalizations about KoKos and their attitudes toward foreign residents while whining over and over again that KoKos make sweeping generalizations about foreign nationals. Sheesh. And then there are some where, owing to past uncalled-for acts that caused personal offense, I don't see myself regularly promoting the blogs of said bloggers, even if I occasionally comment on or even occasionally link to theirs and would share a brew of some kind if the opportunity presented itself.

Room for one more.
If you have a blog and you would like me to consider highlighting it, please drop me a line. Even if it doesn't make the eclectic cut for Our Daily Breadth, there is probably plenty of room in the only-slightly-less-prestigious "Blog roll of blogs that list me in their blog roll."

That is, unless you're doing something illegal, unethical, or overly weird, like koala porn.

Kushibo the Link Whore Pimp's Best of 2010

You'll forgive me if I'm about three weeks behind on my end-of-year/new-year stuff, but one thing I wanted to do is make a few "Best of 2010" lists.

And I thought I'd start with a list of favorites from my favorite blogs, which (in no particular order and not an exhaustive list) include One Free Korea, Brian (formerly) in Chŏllanamdo, The Marmot's Hole, and ROK Drop.

But this is a list not of my favorite posts from my favorite blogs, but a list of favorites from those bloggers themselves. In December I wrote to those bloggers and several others and asked them for just such a list. It's just my way of giving back.

Brian (formerly) in Chŏllanam-do:

• Investigated by Immigration over newspaper contributions, with possible Kang Shin-who involvement

• Haeundae motels

• "Korea, Be Inspired," the new Korea Tourism Organization slogan

• No room for older, experienced teachers at Korea's public schools

• Holy f*****g s**t, look at that shirt

Wangkon of The Marmot's Hole:

• "It's like cabbage crack!"

Joshua Stanton of One Free Korea:

• Capitalist Manifesto (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Some of my favorites from Monster Island:

• In the Year Two Thousand (Twenty), English robots run amok

• Some Americans angry about Muslims who died at Ground Zero

• The Lisa Ling/Kushibo conversation (here, here, and here)

• The Kim Who Wasn't There (and Barbara Demick admits we don't know what's going on)

• A little AES satire from the Winter Olymipcs (and a little Ohno satire)

• Happy birthday, Mr Secretary-General

• Big changes on Monster Island

• 金 = gold (the article is so-so, but I really liked the headline)

• why does korea

• Kushibo's late-night thoughts on working for Census Bureau

• The one where Kushibo sees Avatar: The Last Airbender

• KAL 858 and the smell test

• Selig Harrison stars in "Lie Another Day"

• Marcus Noland has been visiting Monster Island

• Ban Kimoon doesn't care if you get AIDS

• Kaesŏng: The political experiment that won't die

• Waterworld

• Hyundai settles with family of Ryan Dallas Cook (this is important to me in part because it was a years-long story where I may have played a role)

• And speaking of Kim Jong-un... (a silly post, but the pictures make me laugh)

I realize that's a long list, but I did produce 1145 posts last year.

Anyway, I did ask a few other bloggers for contributions, but I got no response (in all fairness, end of year is a bad time to ask anyone anything). I am happy to entertain additions to this list. 

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

Whither Korean Rum Diary?

It might surprise some of you that I enjoyed wandering over to Korean Rum Diary from time to time. Though I never met the man behind KRD, he seemed an alright chap to me, a bit of a diamond in the rough who was putting finger to keyboard to vent his frustrations about Korea.

So it was a bit dismaying to see that KRD decided to pack up the blog when he left South Korea sometime this past month. There were a lot of interesting posts and comments that no one can access now, and that's too bad. There isn't even an email address through which I can contact him to ask these questions.

And this gets into the philosophical problem about what to do when one no longer is able to or wants to continue a blog. Is it right to just delete it, to treat it as if it never existed? Frankly, I think that's a bit unfair to readers, especially those who took the time to leave comments. While they (we) know the risks of leaving a comment on someone else's blog, the blog owner should consider that he/she is eradicating others' words as well.

I've seen this blog shutdown with quite a few that I enjoyed or commented frequently on. Jodi's Asia Pages was one (actually, she shut down her Blogspot blog and then later turned her Wordpress blog into a "protected" blog), while Richardson's DPRK Studies has a "signing off" sign on it.

By contrast, blogs like Plunge Pontificates live on despite years of inactivity (and if you read here, you'll know why I'm glad the blog continues).

I suspect Jodi may have started to feel antsy that some nasty detractors were using some of her less-than-positive posts against her in her professional realm, but I don't see the point in Richardson's case. There were some excellent posts there that will only be accessible if the Wayback Machine gods are aligned just right. As for Korean Rum Diary, I have no idea why he pulled all the pictures off the wall.

So erstwhile K-bloggers, what's up with that? Any chance you'll let us stroll down memory lane again?

And we have a winner...

In a follow-up to this post, someone in Manorville, New York, was the 200,000th hit just a few moments ago. He/she did not appear to be a regular, but someone who stumbled onto Monster Island during a Google search. That search led them to this post on McLovin (of Superbad fame) and the City & County of Honolulu's own Mayor Mufi Hanneman.

Since Google no longer shows which picture people were looking for, it's either the fake driver license carried by "McLovin" or the photo of the very tall Mayor Mufi. Since the latter is considering running for governor, it could be him.

If Mr/Ms Manorville doesn't step up to claim his/her coffee, the runner-up is the 199,999th hit, someone in Land-o-Lakes, Florida, who just simply dropped in (much more likely to be a regular).

I guess I could get a pool going on when the 300,000th hit will come.

Monster Island takes 200,000 hits (sometime in the next 18 hours)

This is a bit of a milestone, hitting the 200K mark. Sitemeter says we're at 199,757, and I've been averaging about 500 per day the past few days (usually it's around 400), so it might happen while I'm asleep (I'm actually about to go to bed... the blog's on Korea time, but my circadian rhythm is definitely in the Aloha State).

It was only eight-and-a-half months ago that I reached the 100K mark. The actual number of hits is more than that, since I didn't start the Sitemeter readings until November 2005, some eight months after I'd started blogging, but I figure the thousands I'd missed in those early months would be about equal to all the times I've visited my own blog, so now we're at 200,000 visits besides me.

I'm especially proud that I've gotten to this second shimman without relying on boob pics, or the 독도누드s I've promised but not yet delivered.

Just like last time, I'm promising a free coffee to whomever the 200,000th visitor is, unless it's someone looking for semi-nude pictures of Megan Fox while at work in the San Bernardino Superintendent of Schools office or some such thing, like last time.

Good night!

UPDATE:
And here's our winner.

Big changes on Monster Island

As you may have noticed, this blog is now automatically redirected to its new name domain, monster-island.net. This is one of several major changes coming into effect at the beginning of the 2010-11 fiscal year. Allow me to explain.

As some of you already know, the Ministry of Culture & Information and the Korea Tourism Organization have been jointly subsidizing my blogging efforts for the past five years, part of an effort by the Korean government to offset the generally negative impression generated about South Korea elsewhere in the K-blogosphere.

This has been a wonderful gig: I got paid a decent amount of money to trawl the Internet for happy, fuzzy stories about which to blog while taking my online persona to other blogs and countering false, misleading, or overly negative writings about Korea. This pay — 95만원 per week, hence the handle kushibo — helped pay for my education, my mortgage, and a brand-new Mini Cooper when I arrived in Hawaii.

But now the gig is up. For a variety of reasons, the MoCI and the KTO have decided not to renew my five-year contract, citing three major reasons in particular. First, the weakened economy means less money for experimental projects, and I have lost out to a promotional campaign that brings Nobel Peace laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners to Tokto. Second, there was a growing perception that most of the viewers of K-blogs were English teachers who were going to form negative views of Korea no matter what rosy things were written on blogs like mine, so the effort was "inefficacious."

And finally, it didn't help that my post ridiculing uber-patriots who want to scrap the Korea spelling in favor of Corea — written solely to throw off those people who might suspect a clandestine financial arrangement like the one I had made — has been the second most viewed post in the entire English-language K-blogosphere for the past three years.

So it was abruptly last week, after several emails sent from my end inquiring about contract renewal, that I received the call that the funding wouldn't be there for the coming year. But then they added insult to injury: the KNTO felt that they might be able to find someone else to do my job more quickly and cheaply in the future, so they forced me to relinquish the Kushibo name, a brand I had developed on my own. Indeed, before even telling me I was fired, they'd already posted a job listing on Dave's ESL for a cultural blogger to replace me, and they've threatened a lawsuit if I keep using that handle.

Fortunately I never signed any documents related to the Monster Island name, which was actually added as a joke in 2006, hence the new domain. And since I still control the passwords for the kushibo. blogspot.com address, I've been able to redirect traffic to here, at least for the time being. But in the future if you encounter a blog at kushibo.co.kr or kushibo.go.kr, please realize it's a fake and treat it as such. Anybody posting as "kushibo" will also be fake, as from now on I plan to use my actual name, Spot Miller, in all my blogging.

But now there is the problem of payment. A sudden deficit of W950K per week is a gaping hole to fill in tough times like these, but I have some ideas. There will be more ads, of course, but I'm also planning to make this a by-subscription site. I have an average of about 400 to 420 daily readers, and 950K won works out to W4.1 million won per month, so if each of my regular readers paid 10,000 won per month, then there'll be no loss of income and I can continue to provide information and humor without interruption.

In fact, it would be even better humor because I wouldn't have to kiss anyone's pasty arse by saying nice things about the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (who the fu¢k's drinking binge churned out that name?!). I can promise more posts, more information, more cutting-edge humor, and yes, Tokto porn.

Oh yeah, you read that last one right. I had suggested in 2007 that risqué pictures featuring Tokto as a backdrop or a theme would lead to numerous hits, but I was shot down by Lee Hanu himself, that prudish Moonie who was the real force behind my ouster.

But now I'm free! Free-falling, as it were.

For now the blog will remain subscription-free for the next thirty days, but starting on May 1, it will look a lot like the Wall Street Journal site, where most of the items will have one line only. And it won't be the best line, I'll tell you that.

In the meantime, however, please feel free to donate money to the cause. Here's the link. I don't really buy lattes with it: I buy groceries, gasoline, and plane tickets to see my ailing uncle. I don't even have enough money for beer or gambling. And if it weren't for a steady supply of girls whose low self-esteem is constantly triggered by all the half-naked women running around Oahu, I wouldn't even be able to afford to date.

I'm sorry things have worked out this way, but come on, isn't it worth just 333 won per day — less than the cost of buying a Nigerian orphan a cup of coffee — to keep viewing the Daily Kor, Loose Change, Person on the Street, and the occasional K-pop celebrity soft-core? Wouldn't your life be a miserable hell hole without it? I know mine would.

Do you link to Monster Island?

If you link to this blog, please drop me an email so that I can make sure I include you when I update the cross-linkage portion of the right-hand column.

That is, unless you're doing something illegal, unethical, or overly weird, like koala porn.

Vote for your favorite blog at 10 Magazine

The link is here.

And vote for LiNK in the Pepsi thing (see link for LiNK in upper right corner). That's actually more important.

Back in Hawaii, with normal blogging to resume soon

Well, after visiting three other states, I'm finally back in the Aloha State, with things gradually returning to what counts as normalcy for me these days. I expect to get going with regular blogging sometime this week, and get back to the Daily Kor news roundup by the end of the week.

The end of an irking?

Wow. Just wow. The Marmot has gotten so annoyed with some of the behavior in his comments section that he has shut the whole thing down completely — at least for now. All previous comments — going back years — are now locked out. If you want to put up a comment, it has to go through him first and he might put it up. Wow.

As I’ve said before, I appreciate the overwhelming majority of the readers and commenters I have.

But frankly, people keep pissing on my rug, and I really don’t have the energy or ambition to moderate everything.

I do this blog because a) it’s fun, and b) because it seems people enjoy reading it. I certainly don’t do it to get aggravated.

I’ve had to shut down two comment threads in less than a week, however, and I see the same characters going at it again in another thread. This morning, I get a phone call — at work! — from one of the characters I banned, as well as an email to my boss that accuses me of advocated porn and encouraging hate speech.

Frankly, I don't blame him. I even put up an entire post about the deterioration recently, and after he shut down the first thread, it looked like several commenters were daring The Marmot to ban them. Who saw shutting down the whole readership side of the operation coming?

This sort of begs the question: What is the proper way to handle blog comments in a way that balances privacy, freedom of speech, and civility?

Is a real-name system the answer? Speaking as someone who has had some serious real-world threats made against him going back to the late 1990s, I can understand the desire and preference some bloggers and commenters have to be cloaked in anonymity. Others who mock such decisions not to use one's real name are often people far removed from a situation in which speaking one's mind can get them in hot water or where an online opponent can do them harm.

Should comments be pre-approved before they're posted? This "solution" requires an even greater time input on the part of the blog owner, and it inevitably creates bias when it comes to accepting or rejecting posts, though some bloggers are better at objectivity than others.

Is there a way that people can be guided toward civil behavior on a strictly voluntary basis? If intervention is hard to stomach, is there a way that the hoi polloi can be nudged toward more responsible netizenry?

And ultimately, is a tamer comments section what the people want? I know it is for me, as I prefer a forum where we discuss the issues and try to find common ground, if not solutions. But I've heard again and again (from some readers and commenters) that the outrageous comments are just as much reason to check out The Hole as the posts.

bar graph of blog visits

Okay, more boring blog stuff. A comment on the 100,000th visitor milestone post by The Sanity Inspector (who has several good blogs here, here, here, and here) inspired me to put up a little more data. Again, things that may be of interest only to me.

Before I went into retirement and came to Hawaii, I was usually in the range of 100 to 150 hits a day. During that retirement period, before I started blogging again in earnest in the latter half of 2008, I still averaged from 20 to 30 hits a day, mostly from Google searches and from people following old K-blog links or Wikipedia links, especially to the Korea-versus-Corea post.

When I started posting on my blog, I believe the fresh activity prompted Google to move my blog further up the ladder in web and image searches, which led to more hits. My comments on other favorite blogs like Brian in Jeollanamdo or KoreaBeat, even when I didn't leave a link back to my blog, led to more and more hits. One Free Korea, a must-read blog for anyone who is interested in North Korean human rights, also produces a lot of hits.

The huge jump in March 2009 is partly explained by The Marmot putting my once-dormant blog back on his K-blog aggregator. I get a fair number of hits from being in the blog roll of sites like ZenKimchi, Mississippi 2 Korea, Extra! Korea, Ask The Expat, and others (apologies if I'm missing anyone).

If things keep up, by maintaining my average of over 8000 per month, I could hit 200,000 by next September. But the real question is what can I do to hit one million? The answer may lie in my plan for 독도뉴드s.

UPDATE:
The 200,000th hit came months earlier, at the end of May 2010.

Now watching: "Inappropriate" on Newsradio on hulu.com.