What a coincidence that less than a month after I sent a final (and pointed) letter to the French ambassador and tossed out all but a few pages of the petition seeking the repatriation of Jikji, I was invited back to Cheongju. An event was due to...
Determined not to obsess and worry about my ongoing prostate issues, I had a ticket to Jeonju in hand on Friday morning at Express Bus Terminal. The place was packed, as the Chuseok holiday had begun. Since traffic was stop-and-go nearly all the...
The news feed on my outdated smart phone is very irksome. I scroll down it and find a lot of silly, stupid, offensive or irrelevant stories. I ignore most of them, look at a few and hit the don’t-send-me-such-crap button for the others. The...
Henry Kissinger (USA, 1973), Menahem Begin (Israel, 1978), Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar, 1991), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala 1992), Yasser Arafat (Palestine Liberation Organization, 1994), Kim Dae-jeong (South Korea, 2000), Wangarĩ Muta Maathai...
Kim Haeng-seok’s family has been living in Jeju for 14 generations, or roughly 350 years. One of his long-ago antecedents must have done something to offend the king (Hyeonjong [r. 1659–1674] or Sukjong [r. 1674–1720] if Haeng-seok’s guess is...
In the early part of the 20th century, the University of Chicago was a major force in college football. Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg’s Maroons won 244 games including two national championships (1905 and 1913) and seven Western Conference—later...
The muse came to me recently and spoke. She told me to write about a couple of retired jocks, Rob Gronkowski and Allen Iverson. I complied, and what you see is the result. They are similar in that both rose to the top of their respective...
After lunch four days ago, Yong Yoon and I took a stroll along Gangnam Street south of its intersection with Teheran Street. I knew that among the people on those busy sidewalks, we would see some ladies a few years past their primes doing a job...
I cannot say that I knew Richard Don Moorman during our three years at Bryan Adams High School; with a student body of 3,300, it was too big to be friends with everyone. He is among the class of 1971’s “fallen Cougars,” having died in 2003...
My Illinois-based friend Dex is highly discerning. His opinions about history, religion, culture, sports and politics are invariably well-considered and can be relied upon. In the penultimate category, he is baseball first, hockey second...
The twin (although not identical) sister of my long-ago University of Texas girlfriend, Pam, was named Becky. They were born on July 4, 1952—a few months before me. That means they were sophomores and I was a freshman when we met at Jester...
Most Muslims would regard me as a Kafir, a conscious non-adherent of Islam. This derogatory term is often translated as “pagan,” “rejector,” “denier,” “disbeliever” or—most infuriating—“infidel.” I am no infidel, as I hold warmly to the Christian...
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