Iran News Article

Take a read:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8282990.stm

"Game", "playing", and "manipulating" . . . hmmm, words I might have used.

Food Showcases

Some Korean restaurants, especially those that serve "fast food" like noodles and fried cutlets (pork or fish), have food showcases to advertise their wares. I have posted pics before of them; here's another, a shot of part of the case, which was outside the restaurant in the street. Though the exchange rate is still a bit off, you can generally translate the prices as W1,000=$1; the food at this place is a bit expensive, but it looks good.

Quiznos

I ate lunch at Quiznos yesterday in Seoul (Itaewon) when I went to the chiro. Today I was supposed to go on a tour of a different part of Seoul, a trippin' university area, but I couldn't find the meeting area and had a communication problem when I called the tour office. Since it took me an hour to get to the area (2 subways; Seoul is a rather big city, after all), I wandered around on my own for a bit, and spotted another Quiznos. Why not? I had another Black Angus melt. They are pretty good, and you just can't get a sandwich like that anywhere else in Korea.

Korean Thanksgiving Holiday Gift Boxes

Next weekend is Chuseok, or the Korean Thnksgiving holiday, and once again the stores are gearing up for it with gift boxes. Yes, gift boxes of all kinds. Here is a small selection (I would have gotten more, but I was politely told to cease and desist from taking pics in the store). The spam boxes always crack me up. The one you probably can't make any sense of (red labels) is ginseng extract.

Deviled Eggs

I thought I'd make some more deviled eggs for the teacher's room today; I made them once before, and everyone seemed to enjoy them: the Korean teachers because, while they are a "western food", Koreans tend to eat a lot of eggs, so deviled eggs don't seem so strange; and the foreign teachers (2 Americans) simply because they are a taste of home. Me, I like them, and sometimes I just like to cook, especially when I have a bit of free time on a Friday morning after a really long work week. Having said that, I'm glad they are done with and setting up in the fridge:)

Kiddie Arts

My first grade class, my beginners, have a new textbook, and the second unit in the book has a picture of a meadow with a picnic. Some of the vocab words for the unit are tree, lake, cloud, etc., but you can fit a lot more words in if you cover the animals (duck, ant, rabbit) and the food (chocolate cake, banana, grapes) from the pic.

So we talked about the picture and listened to the CD and a few other things, then I assigned each kid (there are 8 in the class now) one or two things to draw on the whiteboard, kind of hoping to imitate the book picture.

Anyway, what you see is the result. (Btw, there are 5 girls and 3 boys in the class, and you can often tell which gender drew what pic. Also, "Annie" is a book character's name.)

DDT and the Far Eastern Economic Review

I just recently got turned onto the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) as a website for quality Asian news. In a way it is unfortunate, since the way I heard about this apparently much-heralded journalistic source was in reading that the Dow Jones corporate group, which now owns it, will be terminating it this coming December after a celebrated historical run. Seems a shame.

However, for now, and as a way perhaps to share their twilight period with others, there is an interesting article on DDT that I think everyone should read. The piece is not great in terms of its rhetorical arguments as it does not give the opposition (those fervently opposing any use of DDT based on environmental grounds) their proper due, but the article is noteworthy in that the author claims that millions of lives have been needlessly sacrificed to malaria in the process of banning DDT.

Anyway, I couldn't link straight to it, but if you go to the FEER homesite you can read the article, entitled "Life, Death and DDT":

http://www.feer.com