North Korea is a puppet state, and the Chinese are the puppeteers. They could end this farce tomorrow.

And this is coming from a kid who watched the video for Take It Back a million times. But then again, if Stevie Wonder, Chuck D and BB King got together and told me to jump off a bridge, I might seriously consider it.

It was also bugging me to have something so negative as my last post on this blog. There really is so much I love about this country — sundubu, noraebang, fast Internet, and THE BEST film festivals, just to start. OH, and how CHEAP everything is!

So though I'm no longer a PiA-er, I certainly wouldn't have this job without PiA! And as it turns out Hannah and I will be helping pick the new fellow here at the JAD, so... watch out! :)

The Korean finally says, "I'm gonna kill ya" and drags the Japanese out of his chair, beats him up (under a card showing a mannequin holding a chainsaw) and finally forces him to surrender his claim to Dokdo at (fake) gunpoint before finally shooting him in the head.

These kids are way too young to have been involved or even for their parents to have been involved in the Japanese occupation. And they're way too young to be so hateful. I thought I'd seen everything when it came to nationalist wackos on both sides of this, but that video shocked me.

This next one off YouTube is just weird. An anti-Japanese rap song, the gist of which is that if Japan wants Dokdo Korea should just take over Japan, blares over a slide show of images. Some of them are about Dokdo, but others don't have anything to do with Japan, like TV images of Korean and Italian soccer players abusing each other during a World Cup game, the notorious "Baekdusan is Ours" sign held up by the Korean women's skating team at the Winter Asian Games, several shots of Korean protesters struggling with American soldiers, some screen shots of articles about Korean ninjas (?) . Gradually it becomes clear that this is in fact an anti-Korean piece, as shots of Japanese products -- magazine ads, merchandise, TV shows, motorcycles -- are positioned next to Korean copies, with "ORIGINAL" and "COPY" crudely superimposed. I happen to think the Korean copies of Japanese products -- particularly media -- are a rather creative and harmless form of infringement since, after all, most Japanese pop culture was banned back then.

But the remarkable thing about both these steaming turds is that they are subtitled in English. I'm not sure what these two sides expect to accomplish by exposing their diatribes against one another to the rest of the world. I think we've made it abundantly clear that we don't care. And yet, like cult missionaries on a street corner, people like these continue to preach at us, while programs like the Dokdo Riders receive support from the Korean social and corporate mainstream.

I really and truly don't know how to begin to approach a nationalist youth campaign of this magnitude. All I know is, not only would that first video be entirely unfunny in the U.S., it would get both those kids expelled from whatever school they were in.

What I want to know is, couldn't they think up a more creative title than "The Truth About Nanking?" I mean, that's not just revisionism, that's lazy revisionism. How about "We Didn't Kill Your Grandmother" or "Japan: We Didn't Do All That Stuff We Did"? The Yogi Berra reference would at least lighten things up a bit.

The below item appeared in Daily Variety.

Docs offer rival visions of Nanking
Mizushima, Leonsis take on massacre
By MARK SCHILLING
Satoru Mizushima's docu will refute 'Nanking.'Helmer Satoru Mizushima
will make a documentary correcting what he describes as the "myth" of
the Nanking Massacre.

Click for the rest.

These documentaries include "Nanking," produced by AOL vice chairman
Ted Leonsis. Fortissimo acquired rights to that doc at Sundance on
Wednesday.

Mizushima announced his plans Wednesday at a Tokyo hotel, surrounded
by right-wing politicos and others backing the production. His
supporters include Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara.

The massacre has long been a matter of dispute between China and
Japan. Japanese revisionists set the numbers of dead far lower than
Chinese figures, while exonerating Japanese troops of atrocities now
accepted as fact by the vast majority of Chinese.

References to the massacre have been cut from Japanese school tests
despite vigorous Chinese protests.

Mizushima claims Leonsis' doc is "based on fabrications and gives a
false impression" of the Japanese military's actions.

He plans to release his pic, with a distrib yet to be announced, to
coincide with the 70th anniversary of the event.

China plans its own anniversary release with a film jointly produced
by Gerald Green's Viridian Entertainment and the Jiangsu provincial
government.

Hong Kong action director Stanley Tong and London's Transworld
Pictures also have announced projects on the subject.

On the other hand, they show things like this.

Maybe I should compose music.

Wow. These programs are hard.

This oatmeal package emphasizes that the health benefits of oatmeal remain whether it is eaten cooked or uncooked. Hm.

This taste must be why horses always look so despondent.

Even on a crappy streaming Web site, Cowboy Bebop is awesome. I should totally make my computer sounds be from that show.

My computer sounds are awesome now.

Does buying the three-disc Janggun eui adeul box set make me an old man or just a huge nerd?

Whenever I see "Taehung Pictures" I think it means "well hung" because Im Kwon-taek obviously is. "Tae" means "big," right? I am culturally insensitive.

Maybe I should write a Dungeons and Dragons campaign based on these books I'm translating. That would be cool. I can do that. It doesn't involve modulating orchestral hits.

I could totally get a job at Random House.

On the other hand, I could totally get a job here.

Or I could go back to school and seriously learn Korean.

Hmm... nah.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is so cool.

I eat too much pizza.

Real life isn't really all that different from college, except that it is.

Girlfriends are the best thing in the universe, except when they're the worst, but that's only once a month so I can handle it.

I'm so glad my girlfriend doesn't read this blog.

That I know of.

Hm.

"Coffee is one of those things that smells better than it tastes. You know, like coal."

Click "Continue" to read the text of my review.

But "The Host" is a return to classic monster movie form. An American coroner orders his Korean underling to dump a large amount of formaldehyde down the drain ― and into the Han River. Through some unspecified mechanism, this creates a horrible monster ― a sort of amphibian Ankylosaurus ― that rampages along the Han, stealing a young girl, Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), and taking her back to its lair. Naturally the girl's father, Park Kang-du (Song Kang-ho), sets out to rescue her. But when the government begins to worry that the monster is carrying a virus, the father and his family become fugitives.

Kang-du leads a team of uniquely Korean proletarian heroes: His brother Nam-il (Park Hae-il) is an unemployed 386er and former student protester, while his sister Nam-joo (Bae Du-na) is a member of the Korean national archery team, well known as one of the country's international strong suits.

So when "The Host" soared over 12.3 million tickets sold to displace "The Royal Jester" as the most successful Korean film of all time, we were told it was riding a wave of nationalist and particularly anti-American sentiment, since it sets the Korean salt of the earth opposite the discompassionate United States, oh so subtly represented by the monster its recklessness created.

But I think there's another reason for its popularity: It's just a funny, exciting, straightforward, unpretentious movie.

The most surprising aspect here is the humor. At a funeral for victims' families ― a scene with truly heart-wrenching counterparts in the original "Gojira" ― the Parks fall over each other in grief, drawing photojournalists to capture their humiliation. Bong turns a moment of sadness into a chance for slapstick comedy and a perfect transition to one of the funniest scenes in the film, when a fey government "yes" man leads troops in biohazard suits to quarantine the grieving families. It's this occasional lightness of tone that charms the audience into forgiving the movie's more patently ridiculous aspects (like the grotesque cgi monster itself).

"The Host" is less a rant against American imperialism and more a condemnation of government stupidity and carelessness ― American and Korean alike. After all, it's a Korean, blindly following orders he knows to be illegal, who causes this mess in the first place. And the police who refuse to lift a finger to find Hyun-seo, and later deny the evidence that there is no virus after all, are Korean.

This political even-handedness gives "The Host" legitimate mass appeal and a positive social message, while humor keeps things from ever getting too heavy. A computerized wireframe has replaced a man under the rubber suit, but even so, this monster's sweaty Japanese forebears would be proud.

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I think I might be able to handle that.

This is a list of observed instances of speciation or failed attempts to induce it, evidence that macroevolution does take place. One of the most dramatic and interesting is Dodd's experiment under 5.3.6, where the scientist raised four populations of fruit flies on maltose and four populations on starch. After many generations had passed, Dodd put the populations back together. The starch-fed fruit flies would only mate with other starch-fed flies, and the maltose-fed flies would only mate with maltose-fed flies. See the different kinds of speciation here.

The U.S. was second to last in a recent survey of 32 European countries, us and Japan on how much of the adult population accepts evolution. Only Turkey scored lower, an interesting little commonality between the effects of American Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism, sez a guy in this article.

But this evolution crap is actually hard. The real problem is that most Americans don't know where Ohio is and they know as much math as Latvians do. And these people think they know enough to vote. Sometimes I really don't see why there shouldn't be a test for voting. I know there's a sordid history there vis-a-vis race relations, but California bases everything else -- what quality of education you receive (GATE, STAR), what college you go to (SAT) and whether you graduate from high school -- on standardized tests of young people. There's no reason you shouldn't have to pass a test to register to vote when you turn 18.