The Grand Narrative

( “하늘위로훨훨 ~ 날아올라” / “Flying to the Sky” . Source ) I’m afraid that I’ve been pretty sleep deprived since my baby daughter came home from the hospital sorry, and it’s making my next post take much longer than expected. Having said that, I confess that I liked Naver’s photo of the day above so [...]

( Source ) Well, the news coming out of Wall Street perhaps makes it an inappropriate time to have an addition to the family, but still, I’m very happy to announce that my second daughter is finally at home as of yesterday, doing very well and already 3.5kg a week before her original expected date. Thanks again [...]

( Source ) Cute advertisement for the Korean cosmetics brand Skin Food from last year (notice the cut of the nose).  These non-Koreans at least were a little nonplussed by it, but given everything I’ve said about Caucasians, cosmetics and Korean beauty ideals then I think it would have gone down rather well in Korea itself. [...]

( Source ) I have a confession to make: since last month I’ve been sneaking into bookstores under cover of darkness, snapping up various editions of CéCi (쎄씨), Jubu Life (주부생활),Vogue, Cosmopolitan, GQ, Maxim, and so on, trying to get a feel for which ones I’ll use to conduct my own study of the way gender [...]

( Advertisements for a Brazilian Art School found while trying to find a high definition copy of this quintessential Korean cosmetic surgery advertisement; this Korean blogger (understandably) missed the double entendre! ) Turns out that I put my foot in my mouth a bit at the end of the earlier post: after lamenting the lack of [...]

( Source: ez3kiel ) Friend and frequent commentator Roger Wellor is seeking people to complete a very short survey on the (perceived) successes and failures of Korean international tourism marketing for a conference paper of his, and asked me to mention it on the blog. It takes less than 5 minutes, and the results will have [...]

(Warning: Some of the images and links in this post are NSFW) ( Source ) Introduction: The State of Contemporary Western Advertising For the leading “fashion” magazine of its era, Vogue certainly has a strange predilection for printing pictures of women in various stages of undress, so in hindsight it was naive of me to be surprised at [...]

( Celebrity mother Byun Jung-soo (변정수), posing in July 2005 and then July 2006. Source ) I’ve been reading a lot about Korean modernization recently, and it’s been interesting to see how the few feminist sources on that uniformly emphasize the sociological themes of the nuclearization of the family and “housewifization” involved in the process that [...]

( Source ) No attempt at analysis here sorry: I simply seem to be attracted to high-definition close-ups of women’s faces these days (see here for another example), and enjoy looking at them in the same sense that I would any other form of photography or art. This particular example is an advertisement for the “Noblesse” [...]

( Source: Laneíge ) As long-term readers will (hopefully) recall, in my last major post in this series I put forward the hypothesis that an increasingly feminized ideal of Korean male beauty was not a mere import of foreign notions of metrosexuality, as is often claimed, but more the result of a subconscious or deliberate act [...]

( Source ) Despite Korea’s much-vaunted broadband penetration and web-savvy citizens, much about the Korean internet is outdated, and for the non-Korean often effectively unusable, requiring Korean spouses and/or friends for often the most basic of purchases and/or reservations online. Personally, I have the additional problem of an increasing number of Korean portal sites preventing visitors [...]

( Source: kimwoojong ) Introduction While the Korean public seems to lack any sense of urgency about it, raising Korea’s extremely low fertility rate looks set to become one of Korea’s most pressing economic issues in the next decade or so, and being able to witness events unfold as various vested interests contest the wrenching changes to [...]

( Source. Click on the picture for a larger image ) I don’t know why this two-year old computer graphic of Go Ara (고아라) graced the front page of Yahoo!Korea yesterday, but it’s surprisingly convincing, and fooled me for a minute or so (only the hair gives it away really). In contrast, this one of Song [...]

Update 4, Monday 25th: Elizabeth gets a brain scan and retina check tomorrow, but that’s routine for premature babies, and meanwhile she’s crying, kicking and eating much more than most premature babies the same age. On the home front, my sister-in-laws have already returned to their own homes, my mother-in-law goes back to hers tomorrow, [...]

( Source: monkeyc.net ) Sorry for the dearth of long posts recently. I’ve finished the research for many, and do have one 90% written that I planned to complete and post last Thursday, but not only would my laptop not turn on at work that morning, but as soon as I told my wife over the phone then her PC at [...]

I don’t remember how on Earth I came across them on this Brazilian(?) site, but these shots of Korean students playing around with perspective did put a smile on my face. Click on the link for more. Have a nice long-weekend everybody. :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: [...]

( Taking too close a look at the frogs in the well? ) For those of you that don’t know, yours truly was briefly mentioned in an article on how Koreans handle criticism by foreigners by Bart Schaneman in The Korea Herald on Monday. It resulted in a lot of hits on the day, and even [...]

( Source: trintykisses ) Sorry for the delay in posts, but I’ve had many problems at work in the last few weeks, culminating in me quitting on Monday. Obviously I can’t talk much about the specifics of that for now, but the good news is that I’ll be back in the job market by the end [...]

( Found via Mongdori ) Seriously, it’s great that the makers of this video are trying to encourage children to eat foods with fermented bean paste (된장) rather than candy, but do 8 year-olds really need to be told (0:49) that it’s good for their “S-lines” and “V-lines” too? For those few of you that don’t know [...]

(Update: YouTube video fixed) It’s over a year old, but strangely I can’t find any mention of this computer-generated image of Song Hye-gyo (송혜교) in the Korean blogosphere. Click on the picture for a larger version, and you can see the whole process of its production by Indonesian artist Max Edwin Wahyudi here. I found it myself [...]