Y for Yenndetta

With a lot of contests happening on TV, I’ve learnt that it’s kind of more fun watching them if I have a particular contestant to root for. Then the contest you watch will have, how can I put it, a Dragon Ball feel to it. I usually don’t follow such programmes, principally because I hate to watch judges being mean and rude to their participants. I know, I know, that’s necessary for the drama the programmes aim to deliver; it’s just me believing that truth should be served warm (and preferably wrapped in bubble wrap ). Anyhow, I ran across this Boyzone act on Britain’s Got Talent a couple of weeks ago and knew that I’d be watching the next weeks’. And last night, I found my team!

I am noticeably high on life in April. To me, it’s the best month of the year. No particular reason - other than the fact that it’s, well, my birth month. I do make a song and dance about my own birthdays, more than a grown-up lady should. I just can’t help so. I was the first and long-awaited baby to the whole family, and my grandma always made such a big deal out of my birthdays when she was around. Totally spoiled me in this department…

This year, with a little bit of help of the marvelous Web, I’ve learnt that I share my birthday with not only Adolf Hitler (which I’d already known) but also Adolf Lu Hitler R. Marak. I’ve also learnt that Elvis Presley found himself on the top of the Billboard charts 4 times on my birthday during the past 120 years or so.

Only one thing I am grieving about on this topic is that I picked up a pencil, instead of cotton thread or rice grains, on my first birthday. What am I talking about? In Korea, on the very first birthday of a child, the parents put certain objects on the table, each of which symbolises something in life, and let the baby choose one. The first thing the baby grabs indicates what kind of life he/she will lead. How cruel. And how accurate! The pencil must have meant, “This baby will be enslaved by her writing needs.” Hmmm.

Again, this is about something I read a couple of weeks ago. I have been a bit consumed by the annual conference of the PSA UK in Swansea last week and a piece of writing that I had to revise. As you might have noticed by now, my blog is never for a real-time reaction to what’s going on in the world. Mine is more for, well, rumination.

Anyway, this Hankyoreh article was about how Korean high school students still have to go through appearance-checkup every morning, during which any hair types other than ’straight black’ will be picked out. According to the article, quite a few schools issue a special card like the one in the photo for such students to carry with them. The card says it is certified that this person is brunette by birth [not having had her hair dyed]. The purpose of this practice is, in the words of the faculties of the schools, to help students avoid unnecessary hassles they would have had to gone through every morning against teachers otherwise. Ah, I can’t believe things haven’t changed at all since my high school time. My school didn’t have a system like this, and God only knows how many times I was picked out for the lighter shade of my hair. I even had it dyed in black a couple of times just for a simpler life. BTW, for boys, it’s rather straightforward. I don’t know about now, but when I was in school, boys’ hair couldn’t be longer than 0.3cm or something. The best measure was known to be a tennis racket on the top of your head to see if your hair comes out of the net of strings.

Hmmm, how am I gonna end this random post? Nina Simone, perhaps?

About a week ago, someone pointed me to a video clip on Funny or Die (Loving this URL!), asking if I knew who the *enthusiastic* drummer was. The above is the same clip I found on YouTube. It surely is a Korean band, but I had absolutely no idea in what context it was shot and who the performers were. Judging from the setting and the choice of the song, I guessed it was from the late 1950s or early 1960s. Then a couple of days later, I came across a news article up on Cyworld about the clip. It was in the section of ‘What’s Hot on the Internet’. The article didn’t offer anything more than what I already knew. It just said it was up on a site called Funny or Die, and visitors to the site seemed to be amused by the drummer “looking like one of the Muppet characters”.

At the bottom of the article, there was a ‘best response’ selected by peer users as usual, and this time it offered something the article didn’t even attempt to. “No need to look further wondering who he is. His name is Kwon Sun-Geun, and he used to play in a band called ‘Ad 4′ or something. He’s currently living in Toronto, Canada. How do I know all this? I took drum lessons from him for 5 months or so when I was in Toronto.”

There is a possibility that the writer of the comment was just taking the mickey, but let’s say we give him the benefit of the doubt for now. This reminded me of two things. One is that this is not the first time that I witnessed a random individual being tracked down in the twinkling of an eye by a collective of online users. Not entirely about the power of the Internet. Koreans unofficially talk about three degrees of separation, not even six. Everybody knows everybody, which can come as scary sometimes. The other thing is that news articles in general are shamelessly incomplete nowadays, at least in the case of Korea, but my interviewees from the both sides of professional journalists and end-consumers of news told me that even so they wouldn’t worry because they believed the comment boxes would complete the story instead. I now understand what they meant by “news in the Internet age is not a product but a process”.

Enjoy the music!

A bamboo laptop! Made my heart sing. The photo from here and more (including how to assemble one) here.