Saturday 27 December 2008

Ask An Internet Comment Troll

DokdoIsOurs is happy to introduce another advice columnist to the DokdoIsOurs roster: this fellow has an interesting view of things, and after intense negotiations, we have convinced him to write in mostly lower case.

Please give an open-minded welcome to an Internet Comment Troll.

Dear Ask an Internet Comment Troll:

I came to Korea two weeks ago, and I'm hoping to get healthy while I live here.  Do you have any suggestions I could follow to improve my health (and figure) while I live in Korea?

-Patricia

Dear Patricia:
Obviously you are a fat slut and you are stupid and worthless.  Wanting to get in shape that way reminds me of Hitler, so you should probably just kill yourself.  Secondly, I'm sorry to tell you, now that you are already here, all Koreans are racist yellow garlic stinking trash and you will never be happy here because they'll just stare at your tits and ask if you're Russian and Korea is a shithole.  So instead, you should just go home and soak in shitty American beer and Macdonalds burger grill grease from your old job back home and smoke pot while your boyfriend cheats on you, because you and your boyfriend have no morals and you can't get a job back in America so you come to Korea and have sex with our women.  Wait. . . Patricia is a woman's name.  Forget that last part.  You're a slut, and a snob too good for small Korean penises!  You don't understand my culture, and you're a fat cow, so you should end it all with a bottle of painkillers because Johnny Depp will never love you.  He loves ME, you bitch!  
You'll have to settle for sympathy fu¢ks from Chuck Norris and fat Steven Segal.  Stop distorting Korea's history because I know a lot of history and I have a Ph.D. in American Beef and you're wrong and I'm right because you're just a fuckin commie and the food here sucks and somebody should just drop a nuke on you and Koreans are rude.

Also, many gyms and workout centers can be found all around Korea's towns and cities for reasonable monthly fees, and discounts if you buy three or six-month packages, and yoga is increasing in popularity as well.  Ask a Korean friend to help you navigate the health and yoga clubs in your neighborhood.

I hope you die, and your mother's a ho.
Happy Holidays
Sincerely
Internet Comment Troll

Saturday 20 December 2008

Destruction of Seoul Averted; Wrath of God Stayed by Giant Thumbtack in Chunggyecheon


The giant thumbtack at the top of Chunggyecheon Square had its intended repellent effect on divine punishment last Tuesday, when God came down, full of wrath and vengeance, but poked his smiting fist on the sculpture, also known as "Spring," and stayed his horrible retribution in pain and surprise.

"Oh, my ME!  That really stung!" God told DokdoIsOurs in an exclusive interview.  "Hey.  Take off your shoes.  This is holy ground, sucka."

DokdoIsOurs dutifully removed his intrepid shoes.

"You know, ever since that beef thing, I've been thinking about it; I've smoted a few bikers who don't wear helmets -- but usually by making them choke on boiled eggs or oversized bees flying into their mouths. . . but honestly, even more than the littering and spitting in the street, or the institutionalized prostitution, it was my humanoid projection slipping in ramen vomit that just put me over the fu¢king edge.  Have you ever walked through Jongno early on a Sunday morning?  It's Me-damn disgusting!"

The sculpture was designed by Swedish sculptor Claes Oldenberg, and surprisingly, inspired by another set of sculptures not far away, in Hyehwa.  "Ja, I liked the poop design; it really matched my impression of touring Seoul, after growing up in Stockholm; however, for it to deter the wrath of God, both the Seoul Mayor Oh and I agreed we had to sharpen it up quite a bit."
(picture stolen from dry the rain's flickr page.  thanks, pal)

Just how sharp?  "The tip is lined with diamonds, laser-cut to only a few molecules wide at the sharp edge: it had to be pretty darn sharp to sway God's wrath, you know," Mr. Oldenberg said.

Some believe the sculpture, along with design plans for the revamped City Hall, was simply Seoul's attempt to become the new World Hub of Eyesores, a tough competition against its northern brethren's Ryugyeong Hotel.

However, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-Hoon knew the monument's true purpose from the beginning.

"I told Claes right from the beginning, we gotta make that thing sharp.  Sharp as hell, to keep God's heavenly smiting power far away from the sports massage parlors that are an important part of Korean Traditional Culture in the downtown area.  That was of vital importance to me and everyone else involved in the project." 

Asked whether he was attempting to top Pyongyang's own ugly monument, Mayor Oh seemed diffident.  "Oh, I don't know if I'd go that far.  I think Seoul's unique features should be evaluated on their own terms.  By the way, have you been to Seoul Forest, Central Park of Korea?"

In a later phone call, officials from Pyongyang claimed that the Ryugyeong Hotel has deterred no less than fourteen strikes of heavenly vengeance meant for North Korea and Kim Jong-Il, but had no comment on the puny, sycophantic spike at the top of the degraded lapdog stream, the names for the Chunggyecheon monument and the Chunggye Stream in the North Korean dialect.

When asked about the Ryugyeong Hotel in Pyongyang, God had no official comments, but muttered under his breath, "I hate that fu¢king thing."

Thursday 18 December 2008

Korean Think-Tank Traces Every Single Thing Wrong With Korea to Japan

In a startling release yesterday, a Korean think-tank announced the completion of a years-long research project well-covered in the Korean media.

Ho Jung-ha, head of the project, beamed with satisfaction at the press conference yesterday, as she explained the final completion of her life's work.

"It's taken forty years, and with things constantly changing, it's been hard to stay abreast of all the new developments, but we believe we have conclusively traced every single problem in modern Korea to either Japan's imperial colonial period, their war atrocities, or their economic aggression against Korea in the post-war period.  We have also developed a paradigm by which all new Korean social problems, as they develop, can be integrated into what we like to call blame plinko."

Ms. Ho pulled away a curtain to reveal a giant board, and the crowd gasped in awe.
"Once we laid the groundwork, the whole process became almost a game," Ho says, "Like the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except the Six Degrees of Jappo-Demonizing instead."

The Blame Japan Project would have been impossible without extensive help from Korea's Teacher's Unions, who have already been inculcating appropriate levels of Japan-hate in Korean children for years, as well as the print and television media, and a whole host of commenters, academics and other kinds of experts.  However, Ho Jung-ha took a break from exulting in her accomplishment to thank, "The little people."

"It wasn't just the academics, scholars, and Korean historians I did this for," she said, "it was also the little people: the small, unheralded private individuals, parents, uncles, grandparents, teaching kids to blame Japan even at a young age; all the amateur historians writing letters to the editor, even without the rigorous academic backing I am about to provide for them -- all those people, blaming Japan in their own small ways, helped me, inspired me, to finish this project. . . for them."

Housemother Song Hye-jung spoke out in support of Ms. Ho's valiant effort to validate Korea's place in history.  "We need great patriots like Ms. Ho to make Korea great: without her, Korea's unique culture of fostering distrust and dislike between ourselves and our nearest neighbors, and greatest potential allies, would be lost.  Feeling alienated from our neighbors is an important part of our heritage, and without people like Ms. Song, who would teach our youngsters to carry on Korean traditional land-claim disputes, historical revisionist squabbles, or shirking of responsibility for Korea's problems?  Jesus!  Without Ms. Song, we might need to look in the mirror instead!"

During the question and answer period, Ms. Song demonstrated the uses of her Blame Plinko game: given questions from the press about who is responsible for various Korean problems, from Alcoholism and Asbestos in Subway Stations, to Zoning Confusion in the mailing address system, as well as familiar touchstones like American beef contamination, wonjo kyojae, netizen insanity, road safety, corporate corruption, and university exam competition, she traced, step by step, chains of cause and effect that led, invariably, back to Japan.  As she demonstrated the facility of the blame-plinko board, the crowd slowly grew more and more jubilant, and by the end of the press conference, as she shouted, "Blame goes to...JAPAN!" with increasing relish, the entire crowd would burst into cheers and shouts of, "Fu¢k Japan!  Down with Japan!  Go Korea!" and clapping soccer cheers.

Update:
Thanks for pointing this out, Brian.

Monday 15 December 2008

Correction for FatmanSeoul

Fat Man Seoul just posted an interesting instructional guide on how to make Korean style kimchi. However, he missed a few steps at the beginning.

Thankfully, Dokdo Is Ours is happy to fill in the missing steps.

Step one: be a direct descendent of fu¢kin' Dangun, the wondrous bear-man who invented half the virility drugs currently in existent, out of the secretions accompanying his ball-sweat.

Step two: Have your culture ass-raped by the Chinese for 2000 years

Step three: Have your culture ass-raped by the Mongols for 500 years

Step four: Have your culture ass-raped by Japan for 2000 years

Step five: Have the best fu¢king culture in the history of the entire universe

Step six: Let everybody else who does NOT belong to your culture know how much better your culture is than theirs

Step seven: Have your culture ass-raped by Japan for 50 more years (this step optional) - at this point you can choose instead to meditate on the tragedy of living in a divided country, miss the relatives you have in the north whom you've never met, and, if you want, blame either America, Russia, Japan (but never Kim Il-Sung or any North Korean) for the current state of affairs.

Step eight: (optional) Pretend your culture was ass-raped by America for fifty years

(Steps two, three, four, and seven are important to gather up the correct amount of HAN which must be added to the recipe right after soaking the cabbage in salt-water.)

Step nine: Hate all the people who ass-raped your culture (it may help to look at this picture while you do this step)

Step ten: from here, continue in the manner outlined at Fat Man Seoul's kimchi post.

(later: after salt has been added to cold water, and cabbage swished, add two full handfuls of HAN, that unique Korean sadness that only Koreans can ever know or understand, and without which foreigners can never make true kimchi).

I can taste the Han.  Can't you?

Thursday 11 December 2008

Tell me how awesome my new masthead is...

or I'll close the blog down forever!

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Latest Attempt To Steal Dokdo Results in Mind-Expanding Experience

When it was reported that Japan was translating its Dokdo claim literature into ten different languages on their Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, the Dokdo Riders, as well as Korea's own foreign ministry, did not take it lying down, of course.  Korea's Ambassador to Japan, Noh, Phok-yu, said emphatically, "We will get people on the job immediately, in order to translate our own Dokdo Literature into at least ELEVEN languages."

However, the new raising of the bar has led to some challenges for the central government and Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"It seems there are more languages than just Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese.  Holy shit.  Did you know there are more than...five languages just in Europe?  It's true."

And was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs having trouble finding Koreans who spoke all those languages?

"We've been to every hogwan in Seoul, and all we can find are English speakers and some folks who can draw a lot of Chinese characters -- in the old style, not the new, simplified style," Hong Seung-joon, the head of public relations, reported, "In fact, I've been researching on the internet, in order to formulate an appropriate response to Japan's latest act of aggression, and found out -- did you know there are more than 150 countries in the world?  I mean, just worrying about Japan, China, North Korea and The United States was hard enough -- this makes our ministry's job so much bigger!  What if we need to start paying attention to the cultures, languages, and needs, of all these different countries!"

So how has Mr. Hong been translating Korea's Dokdo Material?

"Well, Naver didn't have anything on any countries except USA, North and South Korea, Japan, China, and a bit about Brazil and England -- soccer, you know, but GOOGLE told me the eleven most widely spoken languages, and it looks like I'll be starting out with google translate, until we can find speakers of each of those languages who are willing to look over them.  We could just translate the pamphlet into English and Japanese five more times, or get another full-page spread in the New York Times, but I think we really should go for a multi-pronged attack this time, and try for at least seven languages.  The eleven most influential are supposedly Mandarin, English, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portugese, Russian, Japanese, German, Punjabi, Javanese, and French, so that's where we'll start, and go from there, depending on what the Japanese running dogs do."

The ministry has also seen fit to purchase new, more advanced translation equipment, and are still training staff how to use it.
And what has it been like, attempting these translations?

"Very eye-opening.  I had no idea there were so many countries in the world, so many ways people communicate -- even, so many different ways people think!  In fact, (and don't print this, because it might be more than my job's worth) I've been starting to think that we in Korea might even be able to LEARN stuff from some of these countries, if we paid more attention to them... but that's still just an idea I'm tossing around, so don't take that too seriously, OK?  When I say that?  I'm probably just kidding.  But wow!  I finally see why Ban Ki-Moon is so busy."

Mr. Hong expects his translations to be finished within the month, language-dictionaries or none, and if he can't find speakers of each of those languages, he might hire some English translators to look at his pamphlets and just guess about whether they're linguistically accurate or not; after the pamphlets are published on Korea's Foreign Affairs Website, he expects people from countries speaking the new languages to find them, "Probably within the week," and from there, for a groundswell of international support for Korea's Dokdo Claim to sweep the world away in a frenzy of justice and Japan-hate.

Any final thoughts on Korea's sudden discovery of 195 countries existing in the world?

"I wonder how many of them know kimchi."

Wednesday 3 December 2008

Teacher's Union Warns: Korean Minister of Education's Plan to Take Wife Out For Dinner Will Increase Demand for more Hogwans

Korea's Minister of Education, Roh Gang-ho, was criticized by the Korean Teacher's Union this week for taking his wife out to dinner.

"These days it seems like every decision made by the Ministry of Education is designed to increase the demand for more hogwan education in Korea.  I unequivocally denounce Mr. Roh's plan to enjoy an evening on the town with his wife, and possibly attend a concert," Teacher's union spokesperson Hwang Dong-jun said at a press conference this afternoon.  "I know the Korean Teacher's Union stands behind me as I say that Mr. Roh should cancel his plan, in order to return the responsibility for educating Korea's youth to the hands of those employed by the government to do it."

Ministry media liaison Park Su-young responded to Mr. Hwang's accusations.  "Surely, the teacher's union is blowing things out of proportion here; it is only one evening of enjoyment which, hopefully, you can agree the Minister has earned, after Mr. Hwang here threatening to strike three times a day."

To this, Mr. Hwang replied, "These ad hominem attacks are simply misdirections aimed at hiding the fact Hogwan owning lobbyists have been lining the pockets of Mr. Roh for years now, and he has no intention of truly reforming Korean education, as long as he grows fat off the bribes paid by those who exploit Korean parents and children.  Think about the children!"

Jung Mi-young, a mother of three school-age children, complained, "The burden to send my kids to hogwans for this and that is crippling -- I can't travel, can't save for retirement -- if the Minister isn't doing anything to ease my hogwan fees and the competition between mothers to get their kids into SNU, then I hardly think it's fair for him to enjoy a leisurely night out, especially while  I'm working three jobs to send my kids to hogwans!  I clean houses, I organize files at a local business, and I hrmm ahhemmm hhrommm for cash --sorry.  Had to clear my throat there.  I strongly oppose Mr. Roh's plan."

Minister Roh had intended to eat out with his wife at a new Italian Restaurant near Samchungdong, and then possibly attend an art show, or see a string quartet performing at the Sejong Art Center, and maybe finish off with a bottle of wine in a quiet wine bar nearby, before a note came to his desk with an urgent threat to strike by Mr. Hwang and the KTU, if he followed through on his evening plan.  "It's been a stressful year so far, and I though I'd earned a night out," he said; "even my hairpiece is losing hair now from all the pressure, and I haven't seen my wife for almost a month."

However, in a public position like the Education Ministry, every move comes under scrutiny, and sometimes, as Mr. Roh is learning, a normal life might just be impossible.