ideometric

Korean fashion is full of nonsensical English and references to Western culture. One particular strain is the Hitler/Nazi reference. I’ve seen some guys with full on Third Reich eagles and Swastikas on their t-shirts (no, not the Buddhist symbol). The other morning I was walking to work and saw a girl wearing a tote-bag with “Eva Braun” in big block letters on the side.

People here have no clue of the significance. Talk about lost in translation.  There’s even a Wikipedia article on “Nazi Chic in Asia.“

I was wandering around Yongsan, spending money on gadgets and drinking Vita500 with my friend Chris when we ran across these dudes. They were wearing helmets covered in LEDs, sitting next to what looked like heavy equipment of some kind, like some kind of special construction crew ready to do one of those obscure but essential tasks that keeps the city’s pulse steady.

Alas, no. Their awesomeness went several orders of magnitude beyond that. They were ajusshis from the future. The equipment turned out to be a sort of motorized skateboard, as best as I can describe it. See for yourself in the pictures.

One guy called himself Bulldozer. He customized their gear with with LED lights and other electronics. I asked if they ride in traffic, he says “No problem.” Another guy called himself Superman, and pointed to the lit-up superman shield on his backpack.

The best part: they let us ride them around. It felt like it could get up to 25-30mph easily. Something I’d consider trying to import back to the states. The used ones only cost ~$600.

Click any picture to see more shots on my Flickr page.

Above: Bulldozer

My never ending quest to find quality coffee and espresso was rewarded this weekend after some research turned up Caffe Artigiano, a Vancouver chain with a franchise in Seoul.

I had an espresso, or three. They were solid shots with good extraction, if a bit on the watery side, though I may be used to ristretto shots. In fact, this is the first real espresso I’ve found in Korea. Definitely gonna head back. The space is very large, and interestingly filled with bags of Intelligentsia coffee (though you can’t buy it; I asked…).

Caffe Artigiano is located at Gosok Bus Terminal (고속버스터미널) on the 7 & 3 lines. It’s partially underground outside the Central City shopping complex, but I forget what subway exit it’s next to (we walked around for an hour going the wrong way trying to find it, luckily my friends are good sports haha).

Website: www.caffeartigiano.co.kr

HAHA this is great. Dude tapes electrodes to his face and syncs the shocks to a music visualizer, so his face contorts with the various sounds of the song.

I’ve had Dabrye on repeat for the past week. Check this song ft. Kadence. Most won’t like the first minute. Fast forward unless you dig noise.

Also, another track:

A psychology professor at Yale University found that holding a hot cup of coffee leads people to judge a stranger to be a warmer person, in terms of such traits as generosity and kindness, compared with a group of people who held a cup of iced coffee.

The implication touched on in the article is that physical/environmental cues – warmth, etc – play a significant role in the consumer/user’s behavior and perception, and should be incorporated into design goals.

In other words, get your date a latte.

Cool — coffee trade show coming up, “Korea Int’l Cafe Show.” Maybe I can finally buy a coffee grinder. It also looks like they’ll have some barista competitions, which will be good for finding cafes as well.

I really want to get an espresso machine and grinder now. Maybe at the least, take some lessons.

LA Mill, which generated a lot of buzz earlier this year when it opened its first upscale cafe in Silver Lake, CA, has a presence in Korea of all places. I came across their site while searching for good coffee options in Seoul. Too bad 1lb of beans costs 32,000KRW (~$30).

At first I thought it might be some roaster ripping off their identity and old website design, this is the land of counterfeits after all, but a quick email to LA Mill confirmed the affiliation.

Still looking for cheaper quality options…

I swear the writers of my middleschool English textbook were either morons, or stoned while writing this stuff. Here’s one of the dialogs:

A: Draw me a sheep, please.
B: Sheep? I can’t. I’m very busy.
A: I wish you could draw me a sheep.
B: I wonder if you’d excuse me for a minute? I have to fix my airplane.
A: Please draw me a sheep.
B: All right. Here it is.
A: To me, that’s not a sheep.
B: Then how about this one?

What……? I think if I teach this verbatim, my kids will come out dumber than they went in. BUT if they’re ever trying to fix their airplanes while some dork is bugging them to draw a sheep, at least they’ll know what to say.

I just checked on my sole contribution to Wikipedia, the entry for Netwar, and interestingly it’s largely unchanged except for a few cosmetic edits. I can see how people would get addicted to this, there’s a kind of nerdy sense of accomplishment and purpose in compiling and ordering human knowledge…

So, my school has sports day this week. I was in class giving a lesson when my co-teacher said something in Korean and the whole class started cheering. Then she told me she had volunteered me to run against the class on sports day. Gee, thanks! So I’ve been running up the 4 stories to my office instead of taking the elevator. I’m resolved to annihilate any competitors.

I like this quote, and the implications. From Alain Touraine:

“society is not what it is but what it makes itself be”

concern has grown as countries like Iceland and Ukraine have begun asking for emergency financing from the International Monetary Fund, and as South Korea, the fourth-largest Asian economy, has begun to look vulnerable to the credit crisis. Its currency, the won, has lost 30 percent of its value against the dollar this year. With borrowing costs soaring, South Korean banks have scrambled to secure the dollars needed to repay maturing foreign-currency loans. Its benchmark stock index, the Kospi, has fallen 38 percent so far this year.

Great.

NYT

Photo taken @ Blue Bottle Cafe , San Francisco

Killing time at work. I came across this in an old newsletter from Sweet Maria’s.

With great coffees, there is a transformation as the cup cools, and flavors that piqued your interest when hot, change, mutate, or disappear as it cools, with new flavors that might have escaped your awareness emerging. In short, I like cold coffee. I like warm coffee. I like the whole “cooling down” process!

Some coffees, particularly South American, actually taste better to me after they’ve cooled and are barely luke-warm. It’s counter-intuitive, but when I make coffee for friends and co-workers it’s always something they notice – woah it still tastes good, maybe even better, and it’s been sitting on my desk for an hour.

A couple times a week now, I’ve been making coffee at work here in Korea — the land of instant mochas and powdered lattes that taste like caffeinated cancer in a cup. I just now hand-ground and pressed a cup of some Ethiopia Misty Valley from Blue Bottle in San Francisco (thanks Jessie!). My co-teachers love the smell; when I tried to throw away my coffee grounds, they insisted that I leave them out in a bowl.

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In class today, I had a student point at my arm and say “fur is very beautiful,” with a straight face.

The Obama campaign has purchased virtual advertising on billboards that line the roads in racing videogames like XBox 360’s ‘Burnout Paradise.’

I guess that’s what you can do when you’re raking in donations. I think it’s kinda cool. Ripe for irony  depending on the candidate and the game world.

I could imagine seeing McCain campaign flyers appearing in a counter-terrorism themed game. Etc.

I’m not too savvy on economics, but I wonder to what extent this current crisis might lead to a referendum on the past decades of deregulation, trickle-down economics, and the rise of finance capitalism?

From a policy perspective, how would a shift in the US play out on the nature of globalization? It seems like this could be a catalyst for change, depending on who wins the US election and the degree of freedom they have to act. In progressive hands, the Federal takeover of such large financial institutions and the mandate to enact reforms and take bold steps seems like an apt time to reverse many of the dominant policies that favor the interests of the richest few.

What exactly is the historical relationship between the current crisis, and the overall chronology of US economic policy since the shifts in the 1970s? Specifically, I’m wondering how directly it is tied to the end of Fordism, the generally conservative political climate since then, and the dominance of neoliberalism as the guiding economic and political ideology.

I’m currently reading former labor secretary Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism to try to get a better grasp on that history…

UPDATE: By way of Matt Yglesias, an article by Fareed Zakaria that hints atleast in part at what I was thinking.

 This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today’s pain will translate into gains in the long run.

And over at John Robb’s blog, doom and gloom about ‘hollow states.’ I agree with a lot of what he says, but I think his take is much more pessimistic. What of the alternative to a hollowing out, worst case scenario?

I think I’ve cultivated a dry, detached academic writing style. I don’t like it.

I’ve been wanting to get back into the research I was doing for my thesis on globalization, social organization/movement, and information technology. I’m going to use that as a partial excuse to buy a “netbook” computer, a tiny barebones laptop designed mainly for typing and surfing the net.

It fits in well with the mass-transit lifestyle here in Seoul where you’re limited to whatever size and weight you’re comfortable lugging around with you. Those 40 minute commutes on the bus or subway are also prime time for productivity (or napping). Most Koreans seem to use the time to watch incredibly popular and inane variety shows on their cell phones (I swear at times I feel like I’m living in a not-quite-but-almost nightmarish postmodern version of late 1950s America, but that’s fodder for a later post). Right now I’m thinking a tiny “netbook” would be good for reading journal article PDFs while riding, and for carrying around to write whenever I’ve got some downtime at work or at a cafe.

The sub-$500 price is nice too.