西洋오랑캐

I finally finished reading 三國志 (삼국지 / Romance of the Three Kingdoms). If memory serves me correctly, I began this in the middle of Decemeber, and read it every day on the subway to and from work (roughly two hours each day). It was well worth it though, since I now know about 5 different ways to talk about fleeing from combat in Korean. Additionally I learned an insane ammount of Sino-Korean words, that my girlfriend had no knowledge of.
When I was in college, I majored in East Asian Studies, and as part of said studies, I took several courses on Chinese history. Therefore, prior to reading this book, I knew how it all worked out, but reading this version, I was surprised at how much I ended up hating Cao Cao (조조 / Jojo in Korean). In a purely historic context he was just a guy who came out on top, but as a literary character, he was (to quote my colonial American history teacher, who happened to be a Korean immigrant) “real bastard.”
Anyhow after finishing such a lengthy, complicated, and difficult book (I was often reading my dictionary more than the actual text), I decided that I needed to do the literary equivalent of getting smashed with your buddies on the last day of finals.
Enter 아색기가! For those of you who are long time readers of this webpage, you may remember me discussing a late night television program of the same name. Well this is the comic that the program is based on.
Here in Korea there are things known as “sports newspapers.” Basically there are the “news” version of something like the Korean print version of The Man Show. In addition to giving scores and reports of all the major games, they will report all the latest sex based scandals and always feature pictures of scantily clad female celebrities. Anyhow 아색기가 appears regularly in one of those newspapers, and awhile back I picked up a book of the collected works of it.
So today instead of reading about the attempted unification of China, I read a book in which vibrators were featured in at least 6 installments, unwanted male anal sex was featured in two, jokes about penis size in 3, and a guy drinking milk in two. The reason I mention the milk guy is that I found his adventures to be the most humorous (whoa, I almost wrote humourous there).
Of the two my favorite is the installment in which he opens his fridge and looks at a cartoon of milk, only to discover that in five seconds it will be past the sell by / expiration date. He then proceeds to chug milk for five squares (each which give a time stamp). He succeeds in his venture, and the last square shows him walking in an office with the “I got laid last night” face, and several of his co-workers whispering.
Needless to say, I powered though this book in like 35 minutes, but before I return to more intense works (西遊記 I’m looking in your direction) I’ll probably read some more pointless works…짱구 (aka クレヨンしんちゃん) I’m looking in your general direction.