July Jorts!

Can one man influence the fashion culture of an entire nation by purchasing a pair of cutoff jean shorts and wearing them for 30 days? The world will soon find out.

Lance Murdoch eat your super-sized cholesterol-infested heart out!

It begins with a simple idea, as all revolutions do: Can the youth of South Korea, whose social identity is steeped so heavily in conformity and public trends, be persuaded to accept an article of clothing long outdated as a staple of mainstream fashion?

I don't know who this guy is, but if I was a lady I'd get pregnant with him.

Let’s look at the facts, observing first the predominant fad among Korean youths today:

Baseball caps

Simple. Classic. Gender neutral. Baseball caps are more prevalent on the heads of Koreans ages 18-35 than perms, blonde highlights, and emo glasses combined.

It's like Willy Wonka had a thing for Asian chicks, and spent a weekend in Seoul's redlight district.

According to a study conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union in preparation for Y2K, the typical American male wore a baseball cap an average of 2.7 days from 1990-1999. This translates into a 10-year lag on the international cranial accessory chart. In other words, it took just over a decade for baseball caps to cross the Pacific Ocean.

Koreans favor the Boston Red Sox because of the red and blue insignia, which match their national colors, not because they're pasty sexually-repressed assholes with bad accents.

I’ve crunched the numbers and arrived at the following conclusions:

If I wear a pair of cutoff jean shorts every day for the month of July 2010, I will have attracted enough interest in the Korean fashion community to legitimize jorts by the Spring of 2015.

Now most of us will have long shuffled out of this mountainous country by then, but if we get just 100 people to support this completely necessary cause, then we should have garnered enough awareness to start seeing our host brothers and sisters in a pair cutoffs by late September.

So please, in the name of science, show your support. Break out that old pair of thigh-high Lee’s and hit the streets of Daegu. And for those of you back in the States, please write to your local assemblymen urging them to address this issue, which again is completely necessary.

Also available in Women's Sizes (not shown)

Redneck Fantasy Camp: A Weekend in Inje (Day 2)

Ahh ATVs: the chariot of the lower-middle class.  For those days when a roomy sedan, a paved highway, and a comfortable yet efficient speed just aren't in the cards, you can always count on an ATV to propell you at 5mph through terrain that looks like Swamp Thing's diarrhea.

And if you're a really cool guy you can stand up while driving and impress all of your friends.  (How do you think I took that awesome picture of people's backs?)

WARNING: Do not attempt to stand up on ATV unless you are 100% positive that you are a cool guy.  I was only 95% sure, and I ended up with a three-inch gash on my leg when a rogue tree root nearly upended my vehicle.  Pregnant women and people with heart conditions should never attempt to stand up on an ATV, as they are by definition not cool.

You must be at least this cool to stand up on an ATV.

Shortly after returning from the trails, I did this:

Two points of fault must be addressed here:

1. I did not in fact bungee jump horizontally, nor did I start in mid-air.  Although I have full faith in the Korean governement's ability to develop a gravity-shifting device capable of warping time-space for the benefit of extreme sporting (they have refrigerators that tell you when you're low on eggs!!) I went down the old-fashioned way.  This time.

2. As is required by law of all white American males engaging in bugee jumping, I yelled out "Do the Dew!" while leaping from the platform.  I'm so proud of fulfilling my obligation that this event has made it onto my Top 5 Proudest Moments of My Life list, surplanting "That time I made eye contact with Bob Dylan at the concert" from the #5 spot, and falling right behind "Getting 2nd Place in the Saved by the Bell Trivia Contest in college."

I wish I could have gotten actual footage of my exteme exclamation, but my cameraman forgot to put his professionalism pants on that day.  In retrospect I probably should have heeded the advice my grandmother gave me at my First Communion: "Never give your camera to a Canadian."

Rounding out the day was a nice leisurely rafting trip down a Level 2 whitewater course.  Rivers are ranked on a scale of 1-5 based on their difficulty, with Level 5's recommended only for professionals.  I'm so extreme that I exclusively run Level 8 courses, which involve rafting off a 200-foot waterfall, but I figured today I could make an exception, since others could clearly benefit from my navigation expertise:

"Hey guys let's rock the boat, it'll be so fun!"

...The End.

Redneck Fantasy Camp: A Weekend in Inje (Day 1)

Paintball, ATVs, bungee jumping, octopus stew.  One of these things would not fit with the others in the States, but in Korea they go together like ham and morbid obesity.

This past weekend I met up with fellow extreme adventurers through a group called Daegu Pockets, an organization dedicated to reversing the feelings of awkwardness experienced by white foreigners whenever K-Pop is played in a club.  (Don't you get it Korea, we can't even dance to Bieber!  And he's whiter than a Klan leader's bedsheets.)

After a very un-extreme 4-hour busride we arrived at our destination in Inje, a small town in the northeast province of Gangwon.  Gangwon, as far as I can tell, has a greater abandoned landmine population than that of people, which makes it a perfect location for extreme sporting in Korea, as well as a prosthetic limb shop.  If I were to open one up I'd call it "Limbs and Things"--our motto would be "Our prices will cost you an arm and a leg!"--but I've got a lot on my plate right now.

 That's not mist on the mountains.  It's smoke.  From the abandoned landmines.

First on the agenda was paintballing, the civilized man's version of gun violence.  If only our founding fathers had the foresight to predict the invention of a semiautomatic weapon that could hurl tiny pellets of neon pink paint at friends and strangers alike, the Second Amendment might not be such a contentious issue in modern American society.  (Come on Jefferson, you couldn't take a break from "makin' the swirl" long enough to think of that?)

 Thomas Jefferson VI was unavailable for comment.

The highlight of this extreme activity was the Rules and Precautions lecture given to us by the facility's manager, when, in the midst of an explanation emphasizing the importance of equipment safety, a Northern Irishman's gun went off, circumventing the crowd of bystanders immediately to his left and striking the sole gentleman from the Republic of Ireland in the leg.  I like to think that somewhere in the world, Seamus Heaney shed a single tear, and had no idea why.

That night we settled into our pension (which is a lot like a hostel, except the floors aren't stained with blood and you sleep on them), lit a bonfire, and got to know each other a little better over a New Zealand drinking game, which, much like their accent, is hilarious and only minimally difficult to understand.

 For kindle we used tattered pieces of discarded English flags.

Suck it you wankers!  Way to stick Hothands McPenisfingers between the posts.

(Next Up: Bungeee!!)

Where Have I Been?

Time flies when you can't read a 24-clock.

I realize now, upon writing this blog, that it's been well over a month since I blogged my last blog.  (Can we think of a synonym for that?  Get on it NASA.)  I'm reminded of the very famous line from Confucius that reads, "Excuses are like assholes--everyone's got one, and they all stink."  So rather than subject you to a laundry list of embellished activities that have occupied my time over the past five weeks, like most travel blogs do, let me reveal to you the simple truth of my whereabouts:

I've been on a Top Secret mission working with Korean officials to uncover the cause of the Cheonan warship sinking last month.  After conversing with numerous military experts, nautical engineers, and political scientists, I have come to the conclusion that, contrary to my initial suspicions, the attack was not in fact perpetrated by Red Herring.

You got off this time Red, but that cut-off denim vest top screams civil disobedience.

While we're still hard on the case over here, I have been able to sneak away from my research long enough to take in a little culture here and there.  And while it's a little backdated, I will dedicate the next week to catching up on the stories, shenanigans, and under-the-table xenophobia that makes this blog what it is: a threat to my employment in Korea.