Category: Uncategorized

I wonder if knee surgery would have been cheaper than this:

A family hoping to cure their mother’s weak knees bid nearly $120,000 at an auction for a set of wild ginseng roots that included specimens 110 years old.

Ginseng is highly valued in Korea for its potent healing benefits.

Looks like Viagra has competition now with the release of the Korean made Zydena anti-impotence drug:

South Korea’s health watchdog said it had approved for sale next month the country’s first locally developed anti-impotence drug for men.

The drug, Zydena, is made by Dong-A Pharmaceutical, the country’s largest pharmaceutical company.

“Zydena was found to be safe in clinical tests,” said Park In-Won, a spokesman for the Korea Food and Drug Administration.

“It is the first locally made anti-impotence drug which has won our approval,” he said Tuesday.

The official added that the new drug was effective for up to 12 hours and showed no side effects such as hypertension.

I thought the first locally made Korean anti-impotence drug was boshintang?

Is it just me or is this whole war shrine bickering nonsense getting really old?:

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Monday denounced the Japanese foreign minister’s remarks about a controversial Tokyo shrine that honors convicted war criminals among Japan’s other war dead.

“These remarks are based on misguided recognition of history and the government expresses strong regret about the ill-considered remarks,” the ministry said.

Korea’s national soccer team head coach Dick Advocaat let K-League officials know how he feels about with holding players from playing in an upcoming national team tour:

South Korea, who with fellow Asian teams Japan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have qualified for Germany, will hold a training camp in the United Arab Emirates and compete in tournaments in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong in January.

“If I was a player and told I could not go, I dont know what Id do — the players can only move abroad through performances in international matches, not the K-League.”

Some of you may remember the problems former head coach Joe Bonfrere had in dealing with the K-League that ultimately helped lead to his firing. However, Bonfrere seemed easier to push around than Advocaat is willing to be. It is going to be interesting to see if the K-League gives into Advocaat’s demands to let the players play.

I am wondering after reading this if Korea is really putting an astronaut or a tourist into space?:

South Korea has decided to put out an open application for the country’s first person in space, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute announced Tuesday.

(…)

There they will spend seven or eight days performing pre-selected experiments, as well as ones elected via an idea contest among the young Korean public.

If the Korean government is paying the space tourism fee which I believe is around $30 million to Russia in order to put these “astronauts” into space should they still be considered astronauts or space tourists?

As expected the South Korean government has decided to withdraw one third of the Zaytun unit soldiers from Iraq:

South Korea will begin phasing out one-third of its 3,260 troops stationed in Iraq on a humanitarian mission in the first half of next year, the Defense Ministry said Friday.

Combat forces will be mainly affected by the plan, with medics and military engineers required to stay to support the U.S.-led reconstruction efforts in the post-war Iraq, officials said.

After reading this last paragraph I immediately began thinking, what did they need combat forces for, to guard the new toilets?

Of course the US media is making this look like a slap in the face to President George Bush:

The announcement came a day after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun met with President Bush in the South Korean city of Gyeongju, where the leaders insisted their countries’ alliance was strong and agreed to work together to curb North Korea’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Of course some incompetent no name from the Bush administration makes it seem that way:

South Korea’s announcement caught the White House by surprise. “They have not informed the United States government of that,” said National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones.

This is not a surprise to anyone paying attention to Korea. The Uri Party has been saying since last month that they were going to cut the troop presence in Iraq by one third. If the dopes that work for Bush in the White House had a clue about developments in Korea they could have presented this development as an example that Iraq is stabilizing because the Zaytun unit is completing their designated mission of reconstruction in Irbil and are beginning a phased withdrawal accordingly.

Of course the dopes that work in the White House blew it by coming back and criticizing the South Korean government which is sure to further strain relations after IMHO, the South Korean government is actually doing President Bush a favor. By doing a phased withdrawal over the next year instead of just pulling all the soldiers out at once let’s the President save some face.

I haven’t agreed with the ROK Army deployment since it first occurred because the unit is not being allowed to do any meaningful reconstruction because of a government more concerned about casualties then actual reconstruction assistance. So in the grand scheme of things the redeployment of the ROK forces means nothing tactically, and would have meant little politically if it was handled properly.

Of course incompentent government officials combined with a liberal press eager to spin this story against President Bush turns this into another political disaster for the administration and the ROK-US alliance.

Some Korean university recently visited some USFK facilities not to protest but to learn:

The students were members of the South Korean nonprofit Community Mental Health Volunteers. It consists mainly of undergraduates training for careers in social work. They were drawn from around South Korea — Daegu, Daejon, Gwangju and Seoul.

At the Child Development Center at Camp George, students were impressed with “every single detail, like safety, cleanliness, all the supervision,” Hyun said. “There’s a camera always monitoring the classrooms to make sure they can provide safety and right supervision for the children. Those details gave them an impression about how much we focus on safety and supervision, those concerns, for taking care of children.”

Here is something I found amusing:

Taegu American School, also at Camp George, struck them with its broad range of extracurricular sports and arts activities and the number of computers and library books available.

“They were like, ‘Wow, they do lots of things other than studying,’” she said.

Yes there is more to high school than studying just like there is more to college in Korea than protesting outside a USFK facility.

The South Korean film industry is getting a taste of what censorship feels like for Hollywood in foreign markets:

The growing boom of South Korean soaps, films and pop songs in neighboring Asian states has had an unexpected and adverse effect on trade, government officials said Friday.

“We may stop airing Korean programs in Vietnam if the current imbalance is not alleviated.”

China is also getting in on the Hallyu bashing:

Vietnam’s rigid stance appears linked to China’s views on the surging “Korean Wave”, known locally as “hallyu”.

A campaign for opposing hallyu and supporting China’s entertainment industry is reportedly under way in mainland China and Hong Kong under the initiative of international superstar Jackie Chan and movie actor Zhang Guo Li. The two stars’ influence in China is diminishing due to the popularity of rising South Korean stars.

Yes, Korea you have come a long ways. You have your own Korean film bashers now. Maybe that UN law wasn’t such a good idea after all.

The South Korean and Swedish soccer teams tied 2-2 in a friendly held in Seoul:

South Korea did more than enough to suggest new coach Dick Advocaat has them on the right track when they drew 2-2 with Sweden in a friendly in Seoul.

Sweden struggled to cope with the pace and movement of Manchester United’s Park Ji-sung and Tottenham’s Lee Young-pyo in particular and were fortunate to go in level at the break.

I have to agree with the CNN/SI analysis because the South Korean soccer team is playing better. I don’t know if it is because of Coach Advocaat or the great play of the above pictured Park Ji-sung who continues to dominate play. There is still a lot of time between now and the World Cup, but things definitely appear to be improving in Red Devil land.

The mayor of Gwangju Park Gwang-tae is upset that he got the extra security check at the San Francisco airport and had this to say in retaliation:

In a statement on Thursday, Gwangju City said Park and an 18-member group now in the U.S. to drum up investment were put through a thorough security check at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday morning that lasted an hour and 45 minutes.

The mayor blamed the Korean government’s “submissive attitude” toward the U.S. for the incident. “According to the diplomatic principle of reciprocity, Korea should carry out more thorough security inspections of Americans who come and go in Korea,” he added.

I often hear from Koreans that many people from Gwangju are idiots and commies and these kind of remarks from the mayor only reinforces that stereotype. The San Francisco airport says they were randomly selected for the security check, just like I have been randomly selected for the same security check at that same airport the last time I flew through San Francisco and I am an American citizen. I didn’t complain and moan like this guy. I actually liked the fact they were checking people. Also the fact that it took an hour and forty five minutes to get 18 people inspected is actually pretty good. That is a 6 minutes per person average if one person was checking all of the passengers.

As far as withdrawing the American forces from Gwangju, he would actually be doing them a favor because I’m sure the PATRIOT soldiers would love to go back to Osan and out of the land of the idiot mayor.