West Virginia, that is. Country roads, take me home . . .
By the time you read this, I will be packing to go to or en route to, or in the United States of America once again. My one year in South Korea has ended. And in that time, I've seen grown men in suits “feeding the pigeons” (puking up their guts on a city sidewalk), an 8-year-old boy explain in broken English that his aunt had an abortion over the weekend and how it happened (and it's apparently perfectly acceptable to tell teachers this), and I've stood in the apartment of the future. Since the first point is irrelevant, and the second is a bit controversial, allow me to elaborate on the third point.
The apartment I stood was practically brand-new. It had a LCD touch-screen computer that monitored the amount of natural gas used, electricity used, water used, and even the total internet bandwidth used over the course of not just the month, but the entire year. There were options to see the available information in various chart formats. Standard apartments in Korea have a doorbell-intercom. This apartment had a video answering machine that displayed the message on a monitor in a hallway. It also doubled as a video phone for every apartment in the complex.
In short, it was the apartment of the future.
Allow me to contrast this with the apartment I left when I came to Korea.
It was a duplex that had been converted from a single home. And badly, at that. The walls were imitation wood panels nailed to studs. No pesky plywood to keep out the noise and the wind, and oh! The cold. Instead of a circuit breaker, it had a fuse box from the 60s that popped a fuse every time there was more than a single computer and television running. In the winter, with all the electric heaters, it was always a gamble to flip a light switch or ring the doorbell. The toilet sprung a leak at its base, and . . . well, because my roommate and I were really lazy and apathetic, we stifled the flow and smell with baby powder and baking soda, making some new kind of urine cake.
In short, it was the apartment of the damned.
I'm not saying that all Korean apartments are wonderful, far from it, but that was the first time I've ever been wowed by someone's living quarters. I can only hope one day to marry someone with enough money to afford a nice apartment like that.
This issue we have a review of a great Korean sci-fi flick (about love robots), a review of Oscar Deadwood's first novel (about war robots), as well as a couple of Chuck the Penguin comics by the inexplicable G.W. Thomas (one's about a robot). In addition to all that, we also have a story about robot cows, robot fighters, robot deliverymen, and robot worms. This issue's robot thing: completely unintentional.
