How does grandma karaoke?

Family dinners in a Korea differ from family dinners in the U.S. -- and it's not just the food.

But let's start with the food. You eat rice, of course, and then you share all the other dishes, reaching into the middle of the table with your chokura (chopsticks) to grab bite by bite:

• Steamed octopus dipped in sweet chili sauce
• Boiled uncured bacon dipped in salty-salty-salty fish dip
• Cabbage pickled in garlic and chili paste
  
• Greens with chilis
• Skate wing pickled with garlic stems and chili paste
• Blue crabs, raw with garlic and chili paste
• Beef short ribs sliced thin and broiled in garlic
  

You don't drink wine or water or beer or even sparkling apple cider (as we did as kids at pesach). Every few minutes you have a shot of soju (rice vodka) -- everyone reaches into the middle of the table and says kombae or cheers.

Soju has a lots of its rituals too. For example, you never pour your own. When a more senior person pours for you, you hold your glass with two hands. Similarly, if you pour for him, you hold the bottle with two hands.

The next course is fruit and rice cakes.

The whole meal is had at a pap-sang, or short table set in the middle of the room around which you sit cross-legged.

Or rather at two pap-sangs -- one for the men, one for the women.

After dinner, everyone goes to the nooraybong or karaoke. Except the two youngest daughters-in-law who have to stay home and do the dishes.

Below is grandma singing at the club:

Quo vadis in Chunang Park?

Chunang Park is not central Seoul, despite its name.

Surrounded by skyscrapers in a far out neighborhood, it has art, badminton, biking, bands, cards, crowds, drumming (traditional Korean), eating, football, gingkos, go carts, happy families, innovative exercise machines, kites, lounging, water sculptures to walk through, the biggest swing ever seen, and even clean bathrooms.

In fact, the only part of the park not brimming with activity is below.

Do you recognize her?

Her new hair seems to make Candace even more elegant, as if that were possible.

What can you see from a fried chicken bar window?

Mun-sup, Jae, Candace, and I were sitting at bar, eating the juiciest, crunchiest fried chicken ever.

I looked out the window.

What's he waiting for?

We were waiting for Mun-sup and Jae.

It was just outside the Hongdik University stop on line 2.

Who came first -- morality or politics?

Glen Newey wonders (LRB 9 July 2009) "why anyone should think that morality is a given, while politics remains to be constructed. . . . The idea seems to be that morality is grander than politics, because it is more amenable to reason, for example, or has a longer use-by date; so the thing to do is to put politics on a firm moral footing. . . . One could just as well argue the opposite. Or that politics is just the same raree-show of cruelty, boredom, hope, obliquity, and stupidity as any situation where human beings act together."

If you accept "morals are forever, politics is just one dame thing after another" there are three key political questions, according to Raymond Geuss:

1. "Who whom?" apparently from Lenin
2. "What is the thing to do here and now?"
3. How do politicians legitimize their actions and decisions?

Flipping the "how can god allow evil" on its head, Newey sees politics as more hopeful than morality: "In the old days theologians had the task of explaining how god could permit evil to happen, to which the least bad answer was that he had to lump it, as the price of human freedom. No human agency, including the state, can do a remotely plausible impersonation of the almighty. By keeping that in mind, we might even come to see politics, and its forlorn theodicy, not with despair, but muted celebration."

Who reads the Atlantic monthly?

James Fallows quotes (Atlantic Jan/Feb 2010) a Westpointer: "triumph of tactics over strategy." This is the inverse of boiling a frog. The triumph of tactics over strategy is when you keep improving on something that wasn't the right thing to do in the first place. If you toss a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll hop out; if you put him cold water and put it on the stove, he'll never notice that he needs to do something about his environment.

Paul Starr claims (Atlantic Jan/Feb 2010) that "abundance brings scarcity: an abundance of media creates a scarcity of attention. So although journalists and politicians have new ways to reach the public, the public has acquired even more ways to ignore them." This sounds like "demand expands to exceed capacity" said of highways. More is less.