It’s gotten really strange now. Today there was a van cruising through the neighborhood blaring its loudspeakers, exhorting residents to press the government to prohibit American beef. It’s still all about mad-cow, but where’s the beef? There isn’t any, as far as I can tell from the news I’m able to read here. Do any of my American readers know any different? And the big scare with mad-cow is that one might catch Crutzsfeld-Jacobs disease and die. Again, where’s the beef? The odds of that are damn slim – only one poor guy in England died of the disease.

One would think that Koreans would have more to worry about than American beef. For example, their economy slipped from 11th (based on GDP) to 13th. Or that there’s a bigger scare of bird flu in the northern and eastern sections of the country. Or that they pay me damn good money to teach their kids English, but outside the walls of the school damn few of them practice it and therefore still can’t carry on a decent conversation.