Which Korea is Best Korea?

There has been a great deal of news coverage lately with the talking heads discussing which Korea is best Korea. If you haven’t heard, relations between North and South Korea have reached a boiling point. A couple weeks ago, A South Korean naval ship was sunk off the coast of North Korea. After looking at all the evidence, the South Koreans determined that it was a North Korean torpedo that sunk the ship, claiming some 60 lives in the process. Also, if you haven’t already heard, the North and South Koreans are not exactly BFF. They have been involved in a war that never really ended for the past 40 or so years. Now, since I have a Masters in Pan-Asian Studies, I feel qualified to give you a brief description of how the North and South got to where they are today.

After the sinking, South Korea unfriended North Korea on facebook. They also set their relationship status to “complicated”, a common way for tweens to indicate that their relationship's are on the rocks. The North responded to this by hacking the South’s yahoo email address and forwarding a message of hate to all of the South’s contacts. The reports of this message are still fuzzy, but initial reports say it was along the lines of calling the South a bunch of “doody-heads” and insinuating promiscuity about their mothers.

The South responded to this act of aggression by tweeting about the North’s leader’s propensity to be “ronery, so very, very ronery”. North Korea was reportedly too busy following Justin Bieber updates to see the message, however. Kim Jong Il, aka the Illa of Manilla, threatened to use his WWI era technology to level Seoul, South Korea, if it sees any aggression on from the South. This is where we stand right now. The situation appears to be long past name calling and fart jokes. The UN reportedly was on the verge of writing up a strongly worded letter to the North. The letter apparently included the words "or else" and "we're really serious this time".

It is unlikely that the South would execute an attack any time in the near future, however, as Star Craft 2 is only weeks away from being released. As the entire economy of the South plunges to do lack of productivity, the North may have an ideal time to execute an attack plan of its own. North Koreans, as you know, have very little electricity and therefore are unable to play silly RPG games for hours on end. The release of Starcraft may very well prevent an all out war between the Koreas.

Tensions remain at an all time high as the world waits to see how this conflict will be resolved. One thing is for sure, this business will get out of hand. It will get out of hand and we will be lucky to live through it. (Lets play guess the quote). At any rate, officials urge everyone who had vacation plans in North Korea to seriously rethink how they got to that point in their lives with one official even saying “I didn’t think North Korea was even a real country”. Stay with me here for updates on this developing situation. I will pass along any and all trivial news about what we are now calling “The Great Saber Rattling Event of 2010 that happens to involved two countries that hate each other.” The world watches and waits.

Astros update

Ok, since not much else is going on right now, I felt like this would be a great opportunity to talk about the Astros as we near the end of the first quarter of the season. As it stands today, the Astros currently have a 13-24 record fresh off being swept by the Giants (A team who had just come off a large losing streak of its own). Sadly, many, if not all, of the predictions I made at the beginning of the season have come true.

The Astros currently hold the 2nd worst record in baseball, trailing the historically miserable Baltimore Orioles by only 1 game. The team batting average is hovering around .230. The usual offensive power of Berkman and Lee is nowhere to be found as both of them are hitting near .200. Kaz Matsui, one of the worst signings of the organization in the past 2 decades, is struggling to keep his batting average above .100. The offense simply isn’t here this year. And this isn’t like years past where the offense was bad. The ‘stros are literally losing games 2-1 and 1-0.

And that brings up the sole prediction I made this year that turned out to be wrong. The pitching has been nothing short of phenomenal. Roy Oswalt has an ERA of 2.62 and a 2-5 record to show for it. It has got to be demoralizing as a pitching knowing that if you give up 2 runs there is a really good chance of you losing the game. Knowing that you have to be nothing short of perfect every single time you trot out there cannot be healthy for your state of mind. And it isn’t just Oswalt, Myers and Wandy are also having good, solid outings with little to show in the win column for their efforts.

Sadly, I believe this kind of performance is necessary for management to wake up and make some hard decisions. As much as I hate to say it, we need to start looking into gutting the team. And I mean REALLY gutting. Oswalt said he would be willing to relinquish his no trade clause in exchange for going to a contender, and I cant really blame him. Berkman too says he would be willing to part ways with the club if it meant going with a team that looks like it is headed in the right direction. Along with Lee and Matsui, those 4 guys comprise the majority of the Astros budget.

I would really like to see the Astros building a team around the young talent on the club. I think they need to lock up Pence and Bourn long term now while they are still young. After that, they need to get back to the way they build the World Series team, by getting young talent from the draft and farm clubs. They need to stop signing overpaid, overweight (cheap shot), old players that are past their prime. Sadly, we gave up so much of our farm clubs to acquire big name hot shots like Carlos Beltran back in 2004. Since then they have just been going through the motions it seems, trying to buy championships instead of developing them.

Watching the team score 0-2 runs a game is getting old fast. I’ve been noticing fewer and fewer people at the home games. I can only hope that the team doesn’t descend into darkness for the next 16 years like the Pirates who haven’t had a winning season in nearly 20 years. Hopefully this “rebuilding year” will actually be a year with rebuilding. I’m not holding my breath…