Seoul Hero

The blogs are first: Cat over at Bukhan Mountain Breakdown has an excellent post showing the stupidity of foreigners who remain permanently stuck in prejudicial, Korea-bashing mode. Remember that she’s not an English teacher, and her husband is not in the US military! While you’re there, check out her banner, which has to be the best banner image in this section of the blogosphere–after mine, of course!

Another blogress I’ve added to my sidebar is Expatriate Games; you’ll find there a number of posts written by a caucasian woman who is married to a Korean man, and who is a new and happy mother of a new baby girl!

I’m delighted and very pleased to see that Sumiyoshi Pilgrim has posted a very reflective post in which he muses about the changes in his life since high school, and what drove those changes. Read it and enjoy. This is the Sumiyoshi Pilgrim we like the most!

One blogger I always enjoy, Fred of Ricepaddydaddy, posted–some time ago, actually–some interesting pictures of a “capsule hotel”. I had meant to link to them sooner, but hadn’t got around to it. I’ve wanted to stay in a capsule hotel ever since I first heard about them. Owing to my speedy marriage, though, I’ve never had to make the famous “visa run” to Japan in order to change employers.
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A few articles in the news caught my eye this morning. Two AP articles, both written by the same author here and here on the subject of geneologies, appear to be very naive.

Here’s one quote:

That revelation is “especially startling,” statistician Jotun Hein of England’s Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature.

“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled.

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.

I think that the writer of the articles based them on a book he seems to have read very uncritically. Given that Jewish history and ethnicity (when that is defined as Israelite history and ethnicity), only go back into the second millenium BCE, I think his attempt to prove in that sentence about Palestinian suicide bombers the brotherhood of us all goes much too far. That we are all descended from common ancestors is beyond doubt. When that ancestor lived is certainly not beyond dispute, however.
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Postscript

I was going to remark that the idea that kings and nobles fathered a high percentage of the citizenry of an area was not without merit, due to the droit de seigneur, also known as jus primae noctis. However, a little net research has resulted in my learning that the evidence for this custom is lacking, and its existence disputed:

The existence of a “right of the first night” in the Middle Ages was a disputed topic in the nineteenth century. Although most historians today would agree that there is no authentic proof of the actual exercise of the custom in the Middle Ages, disagreement continues about the origin, the meaning, and the development of the widespread popular belief in this alleged right and the actual prevalence of symbolic gestures referring to this right.

In fact the jus primae noctis was, in the European late medieval context, a widespread popular belief in an ancient privilege of the lord of a manor to share the bed with his peasants’ newlywed brides on their wedding nights. Symbolic gestures, reflecting this belief, were developed by the lords and used as humiliating signs of superiority over the dependent peasants in a time of disappearing status differences. Actual intercourse on behalf of the alleged right is difficult to prove.

Of course, there’s still the matter of all those royal bastards running around. To take a modern example, I wonder what percentage of Saudi Arabians under the age of 20 are descended from the House of Saud.