I want to recomend this excellent documentary on North Korea I had a chance to download and watch a couple years ago, called “A Day in the Life.”. Korea Beat posted a link to an excerpt, edited down and broadcast (and oddly, not credited to filmmaker Pieter Fleury) on Al-Jazeera TV.
However, thankfully one of the […]

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Chuwit Kamolvisit, dubbed the massage parlor king, is running for mayor of Bangkok. This week he assulted an anchor person from a local TV news program following their interview. Wonder how this guy might have voted on the financial sector rescue package. Just wonderin’.
Chuwit pulled out the microphone attached on himself and jumped on Wisal […]

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This was already on Ask a Korean!, where I found it, and the giant Gizmodo, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t post photos of the North Korean Arcade. As AaK! says, ignoring how run down and 1982 this joint looks, it’s interesting that such places exist at all. I wonder how many varieties of […]

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My intention was to do a simple, wholesome post linking to this Betel Nut Girls gallery (PG-13 FW) on Asian-sirens, but while browsing through the comments I came across this relic — a funny article from 1992 about a hot dog stand called Bikini Weenie in Yonkers, New York.
Are the bikini-clad hot dog vendors who […]

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Nate Silver, who developed the famous PECOTA system of player projections at Baseball Prospectus has applied his skills to projecting the U.S. political races on a blog called FiveThirtyEight. For those who read BP you already know this because he’s taken a leave of absence in order to do it. My guess is his data […]

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Classic Marmot’s Hole post, if I may say so, concerning rising anti-Korean sentiment in China. A prominent Korean paper has recently run several pieces on the subject, pointing to the fact that during the Olympics Chinese fans took to rooting for 1. China, and 2. Anyone playing Korea.
They even rooted for Japan over Korea.
This is a subject […]

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A few weeks ago, MLB released a list of predicted ‘08 free agents and their current salaries.  After giddily reading through the list, out of awe and curiosity I calculated that the roughly 199 players on the list will earn a combined $285 million and change during the 2007 season. This is […]

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This is a very lengthy, but fascinating story in the New Yorker titled Angry Youth — The new generation’s neocon nationalists. It’s too long to try and pick through paragraph by paragraph, but I want to give you a sense so that you might print it out and read it.
The piece starts with a desciption […]

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Most people have probably heard that a South Korean tourist was killed by a North Korean soldier over the weekend. I — like any other member of the foreign community in Korea — have been very interested to see how this will be handled by the South Korean side (government, media and public included).
Several of the […]

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Two very different kinds of explosions, both carefully crafted and fitted for media consumption. First is the demolition of the Yongbyon Cooling Tower in North Korea, which, I guess is supposed to mean to someone somewhere that North Korea no longer has nuclear capability.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3UnhTDuQQc

Wow. I guess that’s a wrap, eh?
Or, um, maybe not. From the World […]

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I found another examination of in the Internet’s role in the current meat furor cum presidential protest currently happening in South Korea. This comes from the Korea IT Times and uses the term flash mob, which has an entry on Wikipedia, to describe the gatherings. I’d call it something else, but more on that later.
This reporter […]

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I haven’t had many clear ideas about the Korean protest of the US beef deal that I wanted to get into on this site, even though I’ve probably read more about it in recent weeks than any other topic. The origins of the protests are dubious at best, but I think it eventually (and amazingly) […]

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Listened to this article in this week’s The Economist about the recent Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair, which was held on May 12th-15th.
Originally designed to promote business-to-business contacts, the trade fair, along with a companion event in the autumn, has become one of the few opportunities for North Koreans—or, more accurately, a few thousand residents […]

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South Korean president Lee Myung-bak’s visit with the president of the United States has been big news here and the meeting has been getting lots of coverage most of the week.
I’d say this sums up the meeting pretty well:
Lee drove a golf cart, with Bush seated in the assistant driver’s seat, to the cabin area, while […]

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I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago and my tolerance for Stalinist states is at an all-time low. I don’t consider North Korea to exclusively be a Stalinist state, but I suppose it’s close enough.
I have to admit, after reading an article or two concerning the freedom of Charles Robert Jenkins, I stopped paying attention. But he’s […]

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Think Fidel Castro is sitting around doing nothing since his retirement? Think again. Jottings from the Granite Studio brings us this two-part essay The Chinese Victory (Part 1, Part 2), in which Fidel details his own view of Chinese history, paying special attention separations of Taiwan and Tibet, neither of which (to the surprise of […]

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It’s been suggested that the border between North Korea and China is fairly porous, and easily crossed for the right price. But here’s an insightful and rather extreme article published by the JoongAng Daily, written by a reporter that partook in what is called a “human safari,” basically an underground, illegal trip into North Korea […]

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Here’s a nice, consice analysis of how Chinese influence might take hold in a post-Kim Jong-il or chaotic North Korean landscape written by Andrei Lankov for the Asia Times. People who have done some extended reading on this subject are already aware of this increasingly likely scenario, but for those who don’t follow this closely […]

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Good read from the New Yorker written by Seymour M. Hersh (HT Marmot) about the Sept. 2007 bombing of a Syrian something-or-other by Israeli war planes. Oh, and it also involved North Korea building or shipping some-kind-of-something.
You might remember this story stuck around in the news for a couple months, but nothing all that conclusive […]

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Good piece in the Asia Times by Andrei Lankov, one of the world’s foremost experts on North Korea and the geopolitics that surround it. Here he’s focusing on the domestic changes, or lack thereof, specifically in the marketplace, which he argues are moving toward 1990 rather than 2008.
These changes are considerable and should not encourage those […]

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