Searching to see whether Google has picked up on the fact that I’ve started writing again, I came across a webpage with a link to one my old posts).
Curious, I re-read the post.. and it made me smile. Ahh.. those were the days in Korea ;)
Since my old blogs are no longer public, I’m going to reproduce the post again here. A piece of Lemon Soju history.
28th July 2003: Do Koreans really have smaller penises than Westerners?
A week or so ago an American girl approached Mike and I in a bar on the pretense of interviewing foreign teachers about their experiences in Korea to ask the question: Do Koreans really have smaller penises than Westerners?
You may remember I wrote about it before. Again, why she should think Mike and I would know the answer to this, I don’t know. A bit of simple active market research would have given her her answer.
Well I think I’ve have found her answer. And thankfully it didn’t even involve looking at any guys penises. Maybe she had some intuition about approaching us after all.
Every day I receive about 100 pieces of junk mail.
In that junk mail guaranteed about 20% will be adverts for Viagra or for some online pharmacy offering Viagra or for some way to add an inch to your penis.
Every single one of those junk mails has one thing in common. They all originate in America. They are all targeted towards Americans.
I’ve never seen a single email in Korean or English offering a natural or unnatural way to extend your penis, or a way to keep it up, to Koreans.
I can only draw one conclusion from this. It’s not the Koreans who have the small penises.
Now I’m sorry if that’s offensive to any Americans, but lets look at the evidence.
Every day 20 pieces of junk mail about extending or keeping limp American penises hard.
Every day no such mail about Korean knobs.
Now you could say that America is a larger country, so would generate more mails. On the other hand, Korea has the highest internet penetration (pun not intended, but I like it anyway) of any country in the world, so you would expect a lot of junk mails in Korea.
However, even ignoring internet penetration, we can see the population of the countries is irrelevant. The USA is the third largest country in the world, with a population of about 280 million. South Korea is the 25th largest country in the world, with a population of about 45 million.
So South Korea has 6 times less people. Let’s even up the junk figure by multiplying the 0 of South Korea by 6.
Still 20 v 0.
You could also say that Korea doesn’t yet have Viagra. Fine. But even before Viagra, the ratio was the same. Now the herbal cures have been replaced by Viagra.
You could say that I don’t have a specific Korean email address. But one of my emails has ’soju’ as the domain. The other is a dot com and isn’t specifically American. I have a Yahoo Hong Kong (.com.hk) email yet I don’t receive Chinese junk about small dicks, only American Junk. My friends with Korean email addresses experience the same ratio as above.
I can come to no other conclusion than Koreans don’t need Viagra or penis extensions. Maybe it’s the Kimchi working its magic again.
And I have one piece of advice for Bush. If you don’t want the world to think that your country is full of people with small limp penises, do something to stop America’s junk mail polluting the world. Something a bit more effective than what you’ve done to stop America’s pollutants polluting the world.
Korea is a country that sometimes drives me NUTS - like today - but it’s also a country that I cannot help but adore.
Underneath the insanity, the people have a heart of gold, and they will break rules and go out of their way to help you. They are human. I remember seeing two guys get into a fight during the world cup - and when the police stepped in, the police just stopped the fight, helped the guys calm down, and then told them to move on. If that was Britain, those guys would have been banged up (and probably buggered).
When faced with a crazy situation in Korea, you can reason with people, explain to them how silly the rules are, suggest strange ways around things - and they will go out of their way to help you (with the exception of Immigration, who seem to be on a planet of their own). Well, they will go out of their way to help me - but maybe that’s because I know how to give as good as I get in Korean.
It’s the complete opposite situation in Japan. Japan is a totally rule based society. If there’s a rule that even makes no sense, Japanese will still follow it to the letter - unless there’s a rule which allows them to break rules.
Today was a classic example of Korean craziness.
Before I left Korea, I switched my phone to KTF. With KTF it’s possible to sign up for the 문자메신저Plus service and be able to send and receive SMS/MMS messages via the KTF internet site, and via an application you can download to your PC. The important thing is that your phone doesn’t need to be switch on to do it (unlike the service from SKT).
For the last 18 months, it has worked swimmingly. When I’m in Japan, I can exchange SMS with my Korean friends from my PC. When I visit Korea, I just switch on my phone and use it as normal.
Yes, for the last 18 months it has worked swimmingly. Until today.
Today when I logged in I was told I needed to receive a confirmation number sent to my phone before I could continue to use the service (인증번호). Why? God knows - no actually, this being Korea, probably he doesn’t know either. It doesn’t even seem to be related to the KTF move from “Magicn.com” to “Show.co.kr”, because that happened last month, nor the KTF Message Manager up(down)grade. It’s just random. Fuzzy logic. It’s Korea.
To my astonishment, KTF have English customer service. For anyone needing the number (and for my future record), it is: +82-2-2190-1180. From inside Korea: 02-2190-1108.
At first, they didn’t help much. I was told by the English speaking woman that there’s “no way” to get around the confirmation number. I explained that the point of the service is to be able to send and receive messages without a phone being involved, hence it doesn’t make sense to block all the international customers use the service. Still “no way” around it - and when I asked to speak to her manager, I was told “I don’t have a supervisor”.
“So you run the office yourself, do you?” Of course she doesn’t.
Lots of pursuasion later (”I’m paying money for this service and you’ve blocked me from using it” / “We’ve not blocked you” / “Yes you have, because it’s impossible for me to login” / “There’s nothing we can do” / “Well the number that I have to enter must be in your system, so tell me it so that I can continue to use the service” / etc), and after numerous comments that there’s no way around it, she agreed to look further into it and call me back.
Which she did. To ask for my password. It makes me laugh that Koreans give out information like that so easily - African scammers counld make a fortune if they just learnt Korean. I didn’t tell, of course.
We did eventually come to a solution though (by this time, we had resorted to her speaking in Korean and me speaking in English): She transferred my number to a spare phone she had, then I requested the confirmation number to be sent, she read it to me, I typed it into the website, and then she transferred my number back to my phone.
So now I can send and receive Korean SMS from my PC again, and I’ve lived through another crazy pointless farce. But the good thing is that it reminded me that crazy as Korea may be at times, because of that craziness, Koreans have some flexibility. It will probably always drive me NUTS, but today it made me happy that I took time to understand how Korean people work, and to understand the country.
Dinally I’m able to see exactly what my projector can achieve when it is given a proper HD (High Definition) source. The quality of Happy Feel (blu-ray rip) was so good at the weekend that it made my eyes hurt with pleasure (shame the movie itself was crap though).
That “woo hoo!” pleasure was courtesy of my new Popcorn Hour Network Media Tank - the little beast that is setting the AV world alight, but which is harder to get than decent Fish and Chips in Tokyo. Yip, I get mine last week, shipped into Japan. I’m one of the first 5000 to get one.
So far I’ve been blown away by how good it is. The quality of the upscaling to 720p is awesome - even subtitle fonts are upscaled smoothly. I can’t emphasize the upscaling quality enough - it way outshines the upscaling of my MG-35 (MG-35 outputing 720p), and the internal upscaling of my projector (projector upscaling 480p/576p to 720p).
Not only that, but it’s fast browsing the network (unlike the MG-35), and so far it has handled everything I’ve thrown at it (as it should, given that it’s the latest Sigma chip). It’s really nice to no longer worry about whether something I download will play or not. It just plays. And the remote control works, unlike my Buffalo Linktheater which seemingly has a mind of its own.
Now that I have the NMT connected to the projector (Sanyo Z5, 720p) and the Buffalo Linktheater connected to the SD TV, my third network media player - the Mediagate MG-35 - is presently just hanging about like a spare prick at a wedding (as my father would say). Bought in January to bridge the gap while waiting for a true H264 HD player, it failed to dazzle me with its slow speed browsing network drives, and so-so upscaling to 720p. At the time, though, I’d no idea when I’d be able to get an H264 HD player (I wont be back in Korea for a few months so will be unable to pick up a Tvix, and I didn’t expect to get to the head of the Popcorn Hour waiting list so quick). I guess I’ll keep it around for when the Linktheater breaks down.
The NMT isn’t without its teething troubles - specifically the font for subtitles with srt files (ie, not DVD subtitles or those in an mkv file) is looks blocky, and it seems to access the internal HDD frequently even though the internal HDD has no files on it - but updates to the firmware are coming quick and fast, and showing real progress. I guess that’s the price I pay for being an early adopter.
Little niggles aside, just wish there was more HD content available. Much of what I watch is UK TV downloaded from UK Nova, and there’s very little HD content there. I do wish the UK would get its finger out and get its broadband and HDTV up to decent levels (moan moan moan).
|
Nikon D700
|
Nikon D90
|
Panasonic DMC-G1
|
Panasonic DMC-GH1/G1HD (check availability)
