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January 24, 2008
THIS WEEK IN POONSGOO
Lee Myung-bak was elected president of South Korea in December, with experts in "poonsgoo" (similar to the Chinese feng shui) attributing the victory in part to the favorable location of his ancestors' graves, which is an important predictor of good fortune. Candidates not so lucky spent part of the campaign moving their ancestors' remains to better sites. Former president Kim Dae-jung is said to have learned the hard way, losing an earlier election with poor burial location, then winning after moving some dead relatives around, according to a November Reuters dispatch.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY
While European and American TV and film producers take care to have dialogue dubbed into foreign languages using voices that are appropriate for each actor, the dubbing in Poland continues to be done by "lektors"—males with smoking-seasoned voices who speak the dialogue of all the characters in a story in the same pitch. The trick, according to an October Wall Street Journal dispatch, is "speaking so smoothly that viewers forget that Paris Hilton sounds like a Polish Johnny Cash." One experiment using six different actors for the cast of an episode of Friends bombed with viewers, and the next week, the lektor returned.
YOU CAN'T SPELL 'PASSPORT' WITHOUT…
In November, an association of Ugandan activists of Rwandan descent complained to the Ugandan Parliament that the government was discriminating against its women, in that passport-application officials single them out to verify their Ugandan nationality based on the whether their derrieres and legs are sufficiently large. According to a columnist for the newspaper East African, "Uganda is a society that's besotted with women's buttocks like few other places are." Immigration officials denied that they "profile."
LEAST COMPETENT CRIMINALS
Arthur Cheney, 64, was arrested near Marysville, Calif., in December driving a car that had been spotted at a bank robbery. On the center console of the car, officers found a yellow "sticky" note with a handwritten "Robbery–100s and 50s only." Said an officer, "We call that a clue."
VERY PROGRESSIVE LEADER
Jacob Zuma, a flamboyant Zulu activist since his teen years, was elected president of the African National Congress in December and is a presumed shoo-in to become president of South Africa in 2009, despite a 2005 rape trial (at which he was acquitted). Zuma had testified that the sex was consensual, that "[i]n Zulu culture, you cannot leave a woman if she is ready. To deny her sex, that would have been tantamount to rape." He also said that he had not bothered with a condom even though he knew she was HIV-positive, cheerfully explaining, "I had a shower afterward." The rate of HIV infection in Zuma's KwaZulu-Natal province is about 40 percent.
LATEST RELIGIOUS MESSAGES
More than 5,000 Christians have joined the Hollywood Prayer Network to pray anonymously for the spiritual transformation of certain troubled celebrities, according to a November Chicago Sun-Times report. Also, an "Incognito Prayer Network," whose members wear "90028" bracelets with Hollywood's ZIP code, will assign celebrities to members who are touched by a particular star. Even in the face of criticism, members stand firm. Said one, "I don't know if I could turn off this compassion that I feel [for a particular celebrity]. I'm called to do this, so I do." MTW
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