Things I have learnt from work recently.

In a new series I have decided to post an entry every week about thigns that I have learnt in work. Well I say every week, I meant to start this a few eeks ago, hence the ‘recently’ in teh title but I am sure I will do it every now and again. So with out further ado I present the first in a series that might last for one post only but what the hell.

Things I learnt from the Korea JoongAng Daily...recently.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile is the International Furniture Fair of Milan, it’s the largest decoration trade fair in the world and this year Fabio Novembre designed a bookcase that looks like a robot. 

Which I now want.

Andre Berto may have recently lost to Victor Ortiz for the WBC welterweight title but he takes a good picture.

British newspaper, The Times ranked Sheikh Mansour as the sixth most powerful person in sport, citing Mansour's approximate £750m investment in every area of Manchester City and a £1 billion investment in the area around the City of Manchester Stadium as contributing factors.

Still Manchester though.

Cho Yong-pil, the “King of Korean pop,” has kept his promise to return to a lonely island.
The 61-year-old singer and songwriter held a concert on Sorok Island, Goheung, South Jeolla, recently for victims of Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy.

Yes folks that’s right Korea has a sort-of-living and sometimes-breathing leper colony! The island had been one of the world’s last remaining leper colonies and was literally cut off from the mainland until a bridge opened there in 2007 so now you can walk there.

“Many brides visit emergency rooms during their honeymoons due to bladder infections, widely known as honeymoon cystitis. Therefore examining your body and being treated beforehand is important and highly recommended,” The follow up research revealed that traumatic cystitis is probably the most common form of cystitis in the female and is due to bruising of the bladder, usually by abnormally forceful sexual intercourse. This is often followed by bacterial cystitis, frequently by coliform bacteria being transferred from the bowel through the urethra into the bladder.


Something about Wales I didn’t know is that we (particularly the North Welsh) used the javelin as one of our main weapons. During the Norman and later English invasions, the primary Welsh tactic was to rain javelins on the tired, hungry and heavily armoured English troops and then retreat into the mountains or woods before the English troops could pursue and attack them! This tactic was very successful since it demoralized and damaged the English armies while the Welsh ranks were barely damaged at all. Up there for thinking and down there for dancing. And back there for chucking javelins, apparently.


Koreans take a cancer report that was recently published too far and apparently start bulk buying makgeolli.

Korea’s production and consumption of makgeolli surged after research by the state-run Korea Food Research Institute found that potent anti-cancer agents in makgeolli are 10 to 25 times higher than beer and wine.

Sounds good so far but how good is it, can you put a figure on it? You can! Great!

The research showed that people would gain anti-cancer benefits if they consumed 5 to 7 milligram of farnesol per liter of makgeolli.

5 to 7 milligrams, that’s not a lot, should be easy to consume that much. What’s that?

A bottle of makgeolli contains between 0.15 and 0.5 miligrams of farnesol per liter.

Oh.

Critics said a person would need to drink 13 bottles of 750 milliliter makgeolli to gain anti-cancer benefits suggested by the research.

“A person’s health condition would be worsened if he tried to prevent cancer [with makgeolli],” said Sung Mi-kyung, a nutrition professor at Sookmyung Women’s University, because it would involve a high ingestion of alcohol, which has many negative side effects.

What, alcohol has negative effects? But I feel great and generous when I’m drunk and I can perform incredible feats of agility. I do often wake up with cuts and bruises all over and vague recollections of this bloke who looks a bit like me turning up every time I get pissed and telling people to “Fuck off” and shouting at taxis for...driving. He usually does something stupid and when I wake up in the morning he is gone. And he has usually taken all of my money with him.

But surely if you tried hard you could come up with a positive slant to drinking that much makgeolli couldn't you?

And there is another benefit.

Phew.

“Makgeolli’s calories are much lower than other drinks,” Kim said. “While 100 milliliters of wine has a heat value between 70 and 74 kcal and 141 kcal for soju, makgeolli has 46 kcal per 100 milliliter.”

Great so you won’t get fat, you could prevent caner but you will likely die from alcohol poisoning. Decisions, decisions.


Peloton, from the French, literally meaning little ball or platoon and also related to the English word pellet, is the large main group in a road bicycle race. Riders in a group save energy by riding close (drafting or slipstreaming) near and, particularly behind, other riders. The reduction in drag is dramatic; in the middle of a well-developed group it can be as much as 40%.

If only that worked walking down the street in Seoul I would get to work early.


They’re a long way from being the next Spice Girls or Pussycat Dolls but five Asian women are hoping to take the world by storm in what is being billed as the first pan-Asian girl band.

“Blush” is made up of five girls from the Philippines, India, China, Japan and Korea who beat hundreds of other pop star wannabes during a talent search across Asia last year.

Can’t wait for their greatest hits album. Oh wait, I actually can wait 6 months. I meant I can’t wait for them to disappear into obscurity and for the Korean media to proclaim that the Korean one is the best. At everything. Oh and it isn’t right that she should be in a group with an Indian girl.


Britain and the British Empire (including the eastern part of what is now the United States) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, by which time it was necessary to correct by 11 days. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752. Claims that rioters demanded "Give us our eleven days" grew out of a misinterpretation of a painting by William Hogarth. After 1753, the British tax year in Britain continued to operate on the Julian calendar and began on 5 April, which was the "Old Style" new tax year of 25 March. A 12th skipped Julian leap day in 1800 changed its start to 6 April. It was not changed when a 13th Julian leap day was skipped in 1900, so the tax year in the United Kingdom still begins on 6 April.


The Korean national pension fund’s stake in Samsung of 5 percent was larger than that of Chairman Lee’s 3.38 percent stake. The Federation of Korean Industries, the largest industry lobby in Korea, which claimed the move would inevitably lead to increased control of private firms by the government. The FKI described the proposal as “pension fund socialism” that violated market principles.

So the FKI are opposed to nationalising companies for the benefit of the majority, never to God.


Optimizing when you wake up might be the answer to improving the quality of your sleep. The $0.99 Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock app is designed to reduce the likelihood that your alarm will go off during a period of deep sleep. It analyzes the different stages of your sleep and begins determining the best time to wake up in the 30 minutes leading up to the time you have set your alarm to wake you. For example, if you set an alarm to go off no later than 8 a.m., the app will monitor your physical movement from 7:30 a.m. using its accelerometer. The alarm will go off when you begin to move during that 30 minutes. The app does not help you to have a deep sleep but if you are feeling tired during the day you can at least confirm a bad night’s sleep by looking at the fluctuating graph of your sleep cycle.

This actually sounds good. Not sarcasm or stupid comments. I just need to be a douche with an iPhone!


Wearing a blue jacket, beige pants and white sneakers, Kim Tae-ho, the lawmaker-elect of Gimhae, South Gyeongsang, was standing in front of Changwon Tunnel and bowing to cars that passed to thak people for voting for him.

“I have bowed 5,000 times every morning for this victory,” Kim said, as he continued his bowing. “This is the greatest asset of my political life and I have earned it during the past 50 days.”

Twat


The ARA General Belgrano was an Argentine Navy light cruiser in service from 1951 until 1982. Formerly the USS Phoenix (CL-46), she saw action in the Pacific theater of World War II before being sold to Argentina. After almost 31 years of service, she was sunk during the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas) by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror with the loss of 323 lives. Losses from the Belgrano totalled just over half of Argentine deaths in the Falklands War.

The “Formerly the USS Phoenix (CL-46)” was the “What I learned part.”


Yeonggwang is famous for its large production of Small yellow croaker which Korean people choose as one of the best presents to give to other people. It is called Yeonggwang gulbi (meaning dried croaker) among Koreans, and it is nicknamed "rice thief" because of its wide popularity.

They originated from the Goryeo Dynasty. Yellow croaker move northward from the East China Sea, where they spend the winter season, to Yeonpyeongdo Island, to spawn at the start of the thawing season. They spawn at sea in front of Chilsan, near Beopseongpo in Yeonggwang, between April 10 and 30, while moving northward.

Now you know what to buy the Koren that has everything. They also have a nuclear plant so one day you might be able to buy huge, mutant croakers!

Not to be confused with Yonggwang in North Korea. If you go there asking for croakers you will be in deep shit. If you go asking for depleted uranium, however, you might be in luck.


Before the composition of Aegukga, the lyrics of Korea’s national anthem were sung to Old Lang Syne until composer Ahn Eak-tai composed a new melody to the existing lyrics. Like Japan and Taiwan, it is now used in South Korea as a graduation song and a farewell song to friends or at funerals.


Hannover 96 (nickname Die Roten or 'The Reds')

Need I explain this one.


The scorpions are from Hannover! Die Scorpions.

You see what I did there?


Andreas Wolf (Russian: Андрей Андреевич Вольф; born 12 June 1982 in Leninabad, Soviet Union) is a German footballer who plays as a defender for 1. FC Nuremberg. He has played at the club since 2002 and is the team captain.

I wonder how many people ask what the time is and then piss themselves laughing? Not many people in Germany but God help him if he ever plays in England or Wales. Do Scottish and Irish people like to ask wolves the time?

Whanki Kim.

Enough said.

Whanki?

What's the time?

Fear

A fluttering heart points to love
but pain is waiting in the wings.
Breathless lungs and blinking eyes
Anxiousness.
Rapid breathing, swallowing, frustration and cold shivers.

Time ticks down and breath becomes shallow.
Words spill out and eyes glaze over
as thoughts turn dark.
Too much talking,
not enough listening.
Breathing speeds up and shivers get colder.

Relief creeps up as soft words are spoken.
Assurances made and lumps diminish.
Tears return but it's OK.

Time ends, goodbyes said.
We'll meet again in a better place,
better for me and better for you.

iphone 4G repost!

Hold on to your hanbok, the iPhone 4G is coming to Korea, soon. Maybe. Eventually. The where and when are yet to be answered officially but the proverbial cat is out if its proverbial bag as far as what to expect from the new phone is concerned.

In their unstoppable plan for complete and utter world domination, Apple have released another version of their iPhone with a few changes. Not nearly enough changes to make you part with a sizable wad of cash of course but many will. Dedicated, techno-savvy consumers who like to live on the cutting edge of all that is deemed cool will be soiling their silk boxers at this one.

The new phone will have both new and improved features but thanks to the techno-nerds at Gizmodo.com Mr Jobs will not have the pleasure of announcing his secret to the world. The Gizmodo team bought (possibly illegally) and dismantled a prototype iPhone 4G that a presumably now sacked employee left in a bar and gave the world a premature rundown on what to expect, so here is an incredibly brief rundown of what they found.

What's new

There is now a front-facing video chat camera, an improved regular camera, a camera flash, a micro-SIM instead of standard SIM, improved display, what looks to be a secondary mic, there are split buttons for volume, power and mute and the volume buttons are all metallic, presumably to give it a glitzy biker feel. Or not.


And what's changed from last year's 3Gs

The back is entirely flat, there is an aluminium border going completely around the outside, it has a slightly smaller screen than the 3Gs, everything is more squared off, 3 grams heavier, 16% Larger battery, internal components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

The big question that remains is when will it be unleashed on the world. Well at the moment nobody actually knows. Apple like to have the full attention of the world's media and so it is a pretty safe bet that the (re)unveiling will take place at their annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June. Steve Jobs will have a difficult time whipping the audience into a frenzy given that everyone who cares about such things will already know all about it!

One of the selling points of the iPhone is the plethora of applications available and we have found 5 of the most utterly useless that you may or may not want to waste your life away with.


5 stupid iPhone apps
1. Birth Buddy - Birth Buddy is a tool to track labor contractions and it will even let you send an email to yourself, your care provider or curious family members. 

2. Age Calculators - This app, amongst other things actually calculates your own age and tells you when your next birthday is.

3. Hold The Button - A game in which you...hold a button.

4. Hair Clinic - This app promises to give you "healthy and abundant" hair by generating "various types of inaudible high and low frequencies, promoting blood circulation. A helpful disclaimer adds that the Hair Clinic app is not a cure for alopecia and can, in fact, cause headaches if the iPhone's built-in speaker is held too close to the ears. 

5. Proposal "Will you marry me ? " - As if iPhone users have significant others. Ha.

Headlines you are unlikely to see in the UK

'He is a passive homosexual'

From The Star newspaper of Malaysia on Wednesday 23^rd of February.

Perhaps the title of this post should read stories you are unlikely to read in a British newspaper as the headline is rather tame compared to the content. To keep it as brief as possible the article talks about how a lawyer at a trail claimed a man was a passive homosexual based on DNA evidence. This is the conversation the lawyer had with the DNA expert in court after the expert confirmed mutliple samples of semen were found on the defendant's anus but later admitted one of them to be from the defendant himself.

Lawyer : Which means he was a passive homosexual, or the semen couldn't have gotten onto his anus.

DNA Expert : I wouldn't be able to conclude on that.

L: I put it to you that it is a logical conclusion. Multiple DNA profiles in his anus amounts to him being a passive homosexual.

The defendant, a 63 year old man has been charged with performing carnal intercourse against the order of nature on another man.

I honestly don't know where to begin with this.

Do Flies Feel Shame? And do they have dreams?

Sounds like a mad question but I swear I recently saw a fly cowering from his fly friends in shame. 

The break room in the seed factory I worked in has a fly problem. To call it an infestation would be an exaggeration but even as few as 5 flies, milling around and trying to land on you or your food every 15 seconds is enough to warrant anger, frustration and disgust. No matter how much insect killing spray or energy you expel swinging a rolled up newspaper, they return the next day. I am fully aware that they are unlikely to be the same flies.

As I sit eating my drab lunch of pasta and roughly chopped tinned tomatoes, which incidentally the flies find infinitely more appetising than me, and drinking my 3^rd cup of tea of the day and I observe what I am going to call a family of flies. Much like the gulls in Sydney's Darling Harbour there seems to be some kind of hierarchy and even though they seem to fly around haphazardly there appears to be animosity amongst their group.

Every now and again, when 2 of them get close enough to each other one leaps on the other and they wrestle around for a few seconds.

This particular day was much like any other, flies were buzzing and I was, as I have mentioned on my 3^rd cup of tea when 2 flies began wrestling and a few seconds later. when it was all over (although it may have lasted hours in fly time, I'm not quite sure how it works) one flew away, apparently victorious and the other turned to face the end of the table they were fighting on and stood still, facing away from the table and away from the scene where the other flies were going about their usual, dirty business.

Now this may sound mad but as I looked at this lone fly, humiliated by one of his fly brothers he looked sad and ashamed. Perhaps it was contemplation on his face, perhaps he was deciding if this is what he wants to do with his life, buzzing around all day every day avoiding the wrath of the newspaper and wrestling for scraps of food with other, apparently stronger flies. There should of been some soft music, maybe with a saxophone solo in the background as a camera slowly panned and tilted around his head, showing that he had had enough of this life and then, as the music became more hopeful he would fly off into the sunset leaving behind all this bullshit and off to a new life, to the big city where there were more opportunities for a young fly. Perhaps it was the fact that his behaviour was so strange, the motionless figure had never before been so still that he looked  dejected and depressed. I swear he flew off in the direction of the vent in the wall that leads to the outside, to the city and to a better life. 

The French

I initially winced at the openness with which the fat, one armed Australian man we picked up on the way to Corryong from Albury mocked the French boys with calls of “Little Froggies!” Now however I have a slightly different attitude. I have no transformed into a racist, fear not but I do have less sympathy for these particular French people after living with them for 3 weeks.

Sacha Distel, Edith Piaf, Nicholas Sarcozy and Zinedine Zidane. The French. Freedom Fry eating, cheese eating surrender monkeys. Some say. Good wine and even better cheese, arrogance and ignorance. Shrugging shoulders and fine food. All things that have been said about the French many times and things that will be said again.

There are a lot of French people in Australia, too many for my liking actually. That's not to say I haven't found some of them charming, beautiful, sexy, endearing, generous or funny, I have, but I didn't come to Australia to be surrounded by French people, I can board a ferry to Calais to stock up on booze if I wanted to be surrounded by them.

In Sydney I came across a few, as I did with lots and lots of other nationalities and until that point I hadn't met too many in my life. I have not been to France and so the few that I had met up to that point were the tiniest sample and so in Sydney it was in no way overwhelming. I met a very nice French girl in Sydney who has become a friend, one I am sure I will see again if we ever end up back in Europe in the future and the few others I met in my time in Sydney were also fine, as far as my recollection goes.

In Tasmania I met a few more and then a few more and found that aside from the odd individual they travelled in wine slugging packs around the country, speaking French, listening to French music, watching French films, clearing entire supermarket shelves of Brie and Camembert and shrugging their collective shoulders and turning down the corners of their collective mouths to indicate they didn't know or else didn't care about whatever was being talked about at the particular moment.

But Melbourne! Well let's just call it the Paris of Australia. This is the thing about French people, they are drawn irresistibly to each other like Gallic magnets, I'm not sure if they give off a scent that only they can smell (I can actually dispel that rumour that they all smell of garlic and cheese, only some of them do) but they find each other and sometimes, if the weather conditions are right they converge into a Gallic super cell where entire aisles of cheese are swept aside and pallet upon pallet of boxed wine is enveloped as this wave of shrugging passes through. Maybe this is not uncommon to people from say Ireland, who also have whole packs of fellow countrymen to latch onto but for me, from Wales, I don't and am unlikely to ever have anything more than one or 2 fellow Taffs to talk to about things back at home or to lament over the fact that we lost to England in Rugby. Again. Maybe this is my issue but this also happens to be my blog so I will skew it whichever way I see fit.

I thought I had been around enough French people to have become inoculated against their less desirable qualities but I was dropped into an almost entirely French zone when I landed in Corryong or as I have dubbed it, the French hole from hell.

The house I was staying in for, at the time of writing, another 2 and a half days is currently occupied by 4 French 'boys' and I use the term correctly as opposed to 'men' and a guy from Finland, who shares some of my sentiments about the French boys but is on his way to being assimilated into their collective mind as he has started forgoing the tradition of putting things in the bin.

The quartet of Frenchies though are something else. The most disgusting habits and levels of cleanliness I have ever encountered and I have stayed in a shared house in University. Flies have set up camp here and I am sure they are signalling across the vast and empty countryside that maroons Corryong from civilisation to their brothers to come as there is more shit here than in a field full of cows. And they come. They must number in their hundreds throughout the house, especially in the kitchen where none of the filthy bastards, the French that is not the flies, lift a finger to wash a single dish until they want to use it and leave all kinds of food items uncovered to fester.

The living room is worse in a way as the dishes that stay on the table for days at a time attract flies away from the kitchen which makes watching the TV unbearable as every 30 seconds a fly tries to land on you with its filthy feet that have been standing in god knows what all day.

So to sum up French people are disgusting. But not all of them.  

Australians

The people of this very large island are not hamstrung or hog tied by stupid things like etiquette or a sense of formality. From the highest offices of government right through to the common man, Aussies 'tell it like it is.' I'm not saying this is always a good thing, it isn't, it can never be a good thing to tell it like it is all of the time but there are times when it's refreshing to be in a country where the people are not shackled by political correctness. 

A good example is the banter on TV breakfast shows. A recent sports news section showed a pretty impressive slam dunk from an all star game and as the news reader acknowledged the prowess of the athlete for jumping over a car whilst catching a ball mid air and dunking it, he finished with “we still don't need to see it 45 times.” A very tame example but one that you would not likely get on a British news bulletin. I often think the same when replays are overdone, every angle at varying speeds is frankly too many. 

The police too are quite relaxed and do not have the formality and by extension the unapproachable aura about them that British police officers have. My most recent experience came when my next door neighbour in Corryong, a regular piss head who played music loud and often aggressively attacked the nearest fence with both fists and head, decided, as if there was any sentient thought involved at all, or felt compelled to light a fire very near to the house I was staying in using our own rubbish as fuel. The rubbish was admittedly spilling over the floor from an unsealed bag (see my post about the French) but still a drastic measure I think. Jarkko, my Finnish mate in the house put out the flames with a pan of water and as I poked my head around the corner to have a gentle word with the psycho he appeared in just his boxer shorts carrying what the police later described as a 'tomahawk' which to me and you is a hatchet or a small axe. Suffice it to say the police turned up soon after and had a chat to him. After telling him, let's not forget we are talking about a drunken, axe wielding pyromaniac, to not be a naughty boy police officer 1 came to us and said “I threw the tomahawk in the out house so he probably wont find it for a couple of days and we told him to got bed so if he causes any more trouble just give us a call.” 

PROBABLY WONT FIND IT. 

What if he does find it and he decides that he wants to use it or he decides that the fire we so rudely put out needs to be started again or that we really shouldn't have called the police and we need to be punished. And what if he decided to punish us at 4 in the morning when we are all in bed? Perhaps he would creep in and slaughter us in our sleep, although I don't think creeping is his style, I imagine he is more of a Jack Torrance type character. Or maybe he would plump for setting the tinderbox Australian house on fire, which I am pretty sure you could do very easily with a piece of flint and a stone. In this case I would have to say the relaxed attitude of the police was maybe a bit too relaxed. At least take the bloody axe away with you.

I have also been slightly surprised by the number of Australians, seemingly normal people who do not look like the have recently escaped from some hospital for the mentally ill, who walk around the streets with no shoes or socks on. Out of the 2 having no shoes on is the bigger deal I think because I would be inclined to think someone was even more of a nutter if they had socks on but no shoes but never the less there are a lot of people here and by here I mean in Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania and Corryong who walk around with no shoes on. Like hobbits. Maybe they are trying to toughen up the skin on their feet in order to become a hobbit, god knows some of the have the rest of the hobbit features but honestly what is the deal with this. If you are walking form the beach to your car or carrying your surfboard and are clearly going to or from the sea and don't want anything you have to leave on the beach that might get stolen, you get a pass but other that that you are just an idiot. And you like like a trampy hobbit.

WELCOME TO CORRYONG!

Where shoes are optional and nutters are free!