today's inadvertent pondering

At what point did ancient humans start studying history? 

(I don't mean that as a joke, like if I were to ask if a "future studies" major who graduated in the 1950s can now count his/her bachelor's as a degree in modern history.)

American psycho

What's really interesting about Christian Bale's profanity-filled outburst on set is that the British actor yells in an American accent. 

UPDATE: 

Bale's producer defends him. 

South Korean students form largest group of foreign students in the United States

The Chosun Ilbo reports that South Koreans have become the largest group of foreign students studying in the United States for the third year in a row, ahead of perennial favorites China and Japan. The official number is around 110,000 students. 

Here in Hawaii, this really comes as no surprise at all (although Japanese students still heavily outnumber Koreans or any other group). It's very easy to meet yu•hak•saeng (유학생, 留學生; students who go abroad to study) at the beaches, in the mall, at the coffee house (gee, don't they study?!).

Such an accomplishment (if that's what it is) is due to a confluence of several things

1. A drive for English proficiency that leads to more employment opportunities, for which studying abroad seems like a natural way to achieve such a goal.
   
2. Overheated competition for the handful of "elite" universities in South Korea, versus the relatively high number of "well-known" universities in the United States that are much easier to get into, particularly as grad students.
3. A continuing perception that the United States is on top of the academic heap. 
4. A last chance for many young people to live a freer, less stifling experience before having to settle down with family and a job and have the life sucked out of you.
5. Growing national affluence that lopsidedly favors the upper class and upper middle class so heavily in South Korea that it is immune even to a global financial meltdown. 

[above: For this stock photo, these two are pretending to be a prospective yuhaksaeng and her broker, figuring out how to fill out an application form, but in reality they're two young women hoping to make it as hand models.]

No wonder, really.

And in other gender-related Korea news, an Ewha University survey of college students finds that women are considerably more knowledgeable than men, on average, about sexually transmitted disease, contraception, and other sex-related behaviors. 

Well, duh. Women are the ones who would get knocked up and are more susceptible to the problems associated with STDs. Like getting cervical cancer from HPV (human papilloma virus), for example. 

The study also found that 50.3% of college men claimed to have had sex, while only 17.6% of women said they had done so. I'm sure these numbers are probably a bit off, particularly with women in neo-Confucian society still wishing to protect their chaste image, even on an anonymous survey, but they might not be that far off. 

If the numbers are even close to being accurate, it means there are three men having sex for every one woman. Make of that what you will. 

[above: Yuna Lee and boyfriend #2]

Pink or blue?

For years, doctors in South Korea have been legally barred from telling pregnant couples the gender of their unborn child. The reason was that too many couples hoping for a boy in male-dominated neo-Confucian Korean society would abort an unborn daughter and try again for a son. 

Such gender-selective abortion was the major factor in the gender imbalance that has plagued Korea until recently. At one point, the ratio of boys to girls was over 110 for every 100 girls (105 boys for every 100 girls is considered by demographers to be a "natural" ratio). 

Well, as the value of daughters has become higher (and why wouldn't it be when the lopsided gender ratio has allowed parents of daughters to dominate a seller's market?) and the demand for ridiculous amounts of "dowry" called honsu (혼수, 嫁資) has subsided (in part because men have more competition for fewer women), it is perceived that the need to protect unborn daughters from being aborted because of their gender has also subsided. 

But not completely, so doctors will be able to tell the future parents the gender of their child only after twenty-eight weeks, when it is illegal to get an abortion even in the limited cases where abortion is not legally proscribed. Of course, there may be ways around this law, just as there are with the ban both on abortion and on telling the parents the unborn child's gender. Supposedly one workaround for the latter is not to tell the parents what their child's gender is, but rather, what it isn't. Clever that. 

Harold & Kumar escape from Alcatraz?

If US Representative Bill Young (R-Florida) has his way, the prison-turned-tourist-site Alacatraz may become the new home of Guantanamo Bay prisoners. 

I don't know why, but the idea seems very cool to me. And it's a good way for the San Francisco bleeding hearts to ensure that no torture is used: Have shifts of liberals standing on the shore of the Bay 24/7 to listen for screams.

Hyundai. Rhymes with Sunday.

But not with "Sontag" and "日曜日."

Someday in the future, perhaps an Indian or a Chinese automaker will depict an angry Korean executive shocked at the success of the upstart's entry into the luxury car market. And, yeah, that might raise my ire just a bit, especially if I own Kia or Hyundai stock. But in the meantime, this Hyundai Superbowl ad made me laugh: 

Oh, and I might seriously getting a Hyundai Genesis Coupe when it comes out.

May Hyundai have a repeat of last year's successful Superbowl ads.

UPDATE: 

The whine cellar at Marmot's picks apart the ads (it doesn't help that Marmot's own headline is a bit of an exaggeration methinks). Apparently the one with the faux BMW and Lexus execs is "borderline racist."

Korea, Mumbai, and New Ulm

Name three locations that get riled about their image. 

Some folks in the Korea blogosphere whinge about how Korea is so nationalistically caught up in promoting and protecting its national image. I do agree that many native Koreans can get rather sensitive about depictions of the country, which is still seen as a war-torn backwater straight out of M*A*S*H where crappy goods are churned out and dumped in American stores. That image is so 1980s.

What bothers me about that meme is that some folks who have never lived outside their home country until they came to Korea seem to think that it is a uniquely Korean response demonstrating Korea's unique insecurity, when in fact it is a fairly common national sentiment in many countries, and a fairly prevalent regional sentiment in parts of the United States.

A lot of Koreans were quite upset about depictions of Korea when the 2002 James Bond flick "Die Another Day" came to the peninsula. Among a number of things to get upset about in that film (like James Bond and Jinx having sex in a Buddhist shrine), some people were quite irked at the site of a water buffalo being used as a beast of burden on a farm believed to be in South Korea.

[above: Wait, don't pull it out. I'm not finished with it yet. It's a perfect fit. Leave it in.]

Korean-American actor Rick Yune, who played one of the villains in that movie (Zao), was ambushed in his press conference, where the agenda-driving press decided to make "Die Another Day" an object of the anti-American Zeitgeist they had largely engineered that year. Poor Rick (and I don't say that sarcastically) didn't know what hit him.

Fast-forward to India in 2009, when "Slumdog Millionaire" has become a surprise hit at the Golden Globes and an Oscar contender. Some are quite happy that Indian cinema (Indian actors, moviemaking styles, and venues, if not directors) are being brought to mainstream Western audiences. But others are disappointed that up-and-coming technical power India is being depicted yet again as an impoverished backwater (related story here). Sound familiar?

And then there is New Ulm, Minnesota. Some would be happy that their small burg is being put on the map with the movie "New In Town," right? Not so fast: More than a few New Ulmians (Ulmites? Ulmers? Ulmese? Ulmisch? Ulmiaks?) are a little taken aback that the New Ulm in the movie is actually Winnipeg in neighboring Manitoba and that the accents are from another movie. 

The 300-ton gorilla in the room

The Los Angeles Times recently had an interesting article on the Airbus A380, the double-decker airliner that can carry up to 853 passengers.

It focuses on how Los Angeles International Airport (ominously code-named "LAX," though not so ominously pronounced as lax) was not built for such a huge plane, causing other operations to shut down during any time one of these behemoths comes in or takes off.

The authorities in Southern California have been scrambling for a new airport for years, with ideas floated around building one out in the (as yet) vastly underpopulated High Desert nearby, reworking the former Marine base at El Toro into Orange County's second major airport (the idea was nixed and the place is being turned into Orange County Great Park), building a new airport on reclaimed land out in the ocean, a la Osaka's Kansai International Airport, or even a floating airport off the San Diego coast. Any of these, presumably, would be designed to handle multiple flights of the A380.

[above: If an attractive airline employee asks you if you'd like to be on top or on bottom, she's probably not coming on to you.]

This gets me to wondering, did the planners of Inchon International Airport, which opened only recently, in 2001, plan for this kind of thing? Well, maybe not: according to one critic of the airport before it even opened, it would be nice if "people who design and administrate the construction actually thought about what they're doing... it would make life so much easier," so maybe they didn't think of really big planes. Yeah, what a failure Inchon International has turned out to be (oh, thank God stuff in Korea isn't nearly as bad as the whiners predict it will be). 

Well, at least he can pronounce "nuclear."

Through PBS podcasts during my daily jog, I've been listening to President Obama address the Arab world through the Al-Arabiyah network (for those keeping score at home, that's the Arab-language news network that despises us least).

While he makes a nice speech with a good message, I'm a little disturbed by the Chief Executive's apparent inability to properly pronounce the word espouse. He keeps saying "expouse."

I don't know if he's mentally blending espouse and expound and it's coming out his mouth as "expouse," or if the Harvard-educated president really doesn't realize that he's mispronouncing this bit of GRE vocabulary.

Could it be his Hawaii upbringing? Folks in the Aloha State can't pronounce words worth crap. And that includes a lot of the Haoles, too. Their enunciation is as bad as their driving. Trust me, that's bad.

Anyway, I'll cut Obama some slack for now. Maybe his handlers will read my blog and get him to clean up his act. And even if he never pronounces espouse correctly, at least he's not as bad as his lexically challenged predecessor. That a person with his finger on The Button couldn't help but say "nucyular" was truly frightening.

[left: President Obama appears on Al-Arabiyah. For all we know, the caption reads, "Be patient, my Muslim brothers. I will deliver the American infidels into your loving clutches in due time." Or it could be an ad ticker for Pizza Hut Dubai.]

I want my NBC!

Okay, I had briefly thought about foregoing my protest against the NFL for letting the Rams leave Orange County, but when I discovered today's Superbowl was on NBC, I knew it would all be for naught. 

You see, all stations in Hawaii have already made the switch to digital, two and a half weeks ago and about a month before the rest of the country, in order to preserve the nesting ground of the dark-rumped petrel (a non-hygienic-sounding bird if ever there was one). 

Great, no problem, I had long ago set up my $40 converter box for my DVD-R (digital video recorder) that I purchased through the government coupon program, and I had my EyeTV digital tuner all hooked up to my iMac. The problem? NBC's local affiliate, KHNL (channel 13), has an anemic signal from a broadcast antenna way over on the other end of the island (or so I was told on the phone last month). It's not like I live in a cave; I'm near Dole Street in Honolulu — about three miles as a crow flies from the center of the metropolis.

View Larger Map

I don't understand KHNL's affirmative action program for the geographically challenged, but it has me pissed off! Royally. NBC, ironically, was one of the few analog stations I was able to pick up before the switch, which was fine with me, because I was able to watch "The Office," "30 Rock," etc., without any problem. But now I'm left in the dark. 

Well, not literally in the dark, because where KHNL's analog reception used to be there is a Hawaiian shirt-clad Dale Payson telling anyone seeing his repeated-ad-nauseum seven-minute presentation that the problem is them the viewer and not the idiot broadcasting station that doesn't understand television signals do not pass through solid rock. (And I'm not so certain this will be resolved when they move their transmitter to higher ground on Palehua Ridge in the spring.)

This has prompted me to write a letter to KHNL, informing them of the problem and my displeasure that they haven't yet fixed it:

January 29, 2008

To Whom It May Concern at KHNL:

You are idiots, and you suck! Give me back my NBC! Oh, did I mention you're idiots?

Yours sincerely,

K. Ushibo

Now if only I can find a stamp.

Phht. In the meantime, I guess there's always Hulu. 

Credit where credit is due

This will someday be the kernel for a lengthy post on my now-just-in-the-conception-phase public health and medical sociology blog, but for now, I'll do a short blurb on the subject... 

I know loads of public health specialists who are thanking the Almighty that the Republicans are no longer in power (perhaps for good reason). But out-going president (as in exiting, not as in gregarious) president George W. Bush deserves some credit for some substantial progress: he has doubled Federal funding for public health centers. This makes him responsible, says the New York Times, for "enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas." Quoting the Grey Lady:

For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.

Despite the clinics’ unprecedented growth, wide swaths of the country remain without access to affordable primary care. The recession has only magnified the need as hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their employer-sponsored health insurance along with their jobs.

In response, Democrats on Capitol Hill are proposing even more significant increases, making the centers a likely feature of any health care deal struck by Congress and the Obama administration.

So the Democrats are going to expand on what Dubya built, got that? And let's not forget to mention Bush's efforts to expand anti-AIDS funding (even if it gets mixed reviews because it includes abstinence education).

Soup Bowl Sunday

Today is Superbowl Sunday. I'm not so big a fan of the Superbowl, not since the Rams left and Orange County and the Raiders left Los Angeles, leaving us with the San Diego Chargers way the hell down by Mexico.

In protest, we would head for Souplantation and celebrate Soup Bowl Sunday. This, of course, was little change from our usual post-church Sunday routine, but the difference was that we'd boo anytime we heard someone cheering, on the off chance the game was what was making them whoop and holler. (And, yes, we did ruin some poor saps' birthday celebrations, and we may have gotten into a parking-lot altercation or two.)

So this is my attempt at a Superbowl post. I don't give a rat's ass who wins, but I thought that this prediction and comment by my favorite actress on my favorite show (Jenna Fischer who plays Pam Beesly on "The Office") was kinda cute:

Arizona, 27-24. Pam is rooting for Pittsburgh since she is from Scranton, but I'm rooting for Arizona since they used to play for my hometown of St. Louis. It's a little tense around here. Luckily, Pam is so focused on getting ready for the post-Super Bowl show she can't come to my party. Otherwise we might have had a real fight on our hands.

Okay, maybe "The Office" and Jenna Fischer's humor isn't for everyone, but she is adorable. Freakin' adorable. 

But I do have to take issue with Ms Fischer's comment about cheering for the Cards because they used to play in your hometown: They left you! They took off and left! Let the ungrateful bastards crash and burn!

I have issues.