Look Mom! I Gots Twigs For Legs

I saw this photo on PopSeoul yesterday and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. On the left is Taemin from the boy band Shinee. On the right is Gu Hara, who I wrote about in a post here. She’s a very small woman by Korean standards (I wanted to say even by Korean standards, but the fact of the matter is that Koreans have grown in just the past decade), something you wouldn’t necessarily notice when she’s performing. When she appears on TV shows, as she and her Kara brethren have been wont to do these days, she kind of looks like a cute head on pencil -- I'm a little unsure if I'm actually attracted to her anymore.

But nothing really prepared me for ol twig legs here on the left. Initially I despised Shinee, but they must have changed songwriters or something, because the new tunes aren’t driving me to spit at the TV. They've got some hooks. Here's a link to their YouTubes most recent videos first.

I'm pretty sure that at least two of the guys in Shinee are gay, which is perfectly cool, but probably an uphill battle in the world of Korean pop music.

Grown' Up

This kind of story always blows me away, partially because I've watched it happen before my very eyes. Koreans are taller than when I got here. I had a girlfriend once tell me that if we had kids she'd "know how to make our kids tall." I had no idea. I'd always thought hanging for hours on the swingset in the backyard was the way to go about that.

From the New York Times:

A growing conviction that tallness is crucial to success has prompted South Korean parents to try all manner of approaches to increase their children’s height, spawning hundreds of “growth clinics” that offer growth hormone shots, Eastern herbal medicine and special exercises to ensure that young clients will be the ones looking down, not the ones looked down upon.

“In our society, it’s all about looks,” said Ms. Seo, 35. “I’m afraid my daughter is shorter than her peers. I don’t want her to be ridiculed and lose self-confidence because of her height.”

I don't mean to oversell this. I don't think I saw many Koreans taller than 6'3 when I arrived here, and plenty of guys around 5'0. Now the site of a 6'3+ fella is commonplace, and while the little guys are still running around, bein' cute and everything, the number of tall young people in this country -- both men and women, as the story says -- is startling.