Wesley's Tool-Box

Moon Jae-in became the 19th President of the Republic of Korea on the morning of May 10, 2017 immediately after the confirmation of his win in the snap election. Naturally, lots of books written by or related to him were flooding out to the bookstores to capitalize on the occasion. For my kids, I ordered this cartoon biography targeted for young readers (who? special - Moon Jae-in) online yesterday.

To my surprise, the publisher was very keen to have the book updated. The 1st print of this book only came out on March 7 of this year, a few days before the constitutional court upheld the impeachment of Park Geun-Hye. This meant that they were pretty confident of how the events would play out around when the National Assembly approved the motion to impeach last December and started to get the book ready. The 2nd print was dated May 18, which is today, implying that I got one of the first shipments of the even more updated version.


Indeed, this print of the book ends with Moon officially becoming the president. The 1st print had the same pictures but with a somewhat placeholder caption, so the publisher apparently anticipated the results and did a quick edit after the election was over. I have to say, I was quite impressed.

The most important election in the recent Korean history has started this morning - the 2017 Presidential Election. It's being held more than 7 months earlier because the citizens like us have successfully ousted Park Geun-Hye from power. We made our voices heard with various protests, and it resulted in her impeachment at the National Assembly; the decision was ultimately upheld by the constitutional court last March. Now our family put our efforts in electing a new president, who will hopefully clean up the giant mess and make new progress.

Early this morning, Park Geun-Hye has been arrested on multiple charges including bribery. She had been ousted from presidency just 3 weeks ago. Millions of people, including my kids as shown here, had been calling for this to happen for the last several months. Things are progressing - wish us luck.

Less than an hour ago, the Supreme Court approved the motion to impeach the Korean President Park Geun-Hye decided by the National Assembly on December 9, 2016. Much of the nation had been calling for her resignation or impeachment for several months due to the corruption and mishandling of national affairs. That included the rally and candlelight vigil held just a week prior to the National Assembly's motion, which saw more than two million people gathering (including my family) near Cheongwadae, the presidential palace in Seoul. We still have a long way to go, but at least we're moving forward. That's a good thing.

Paper shredders have been used to get rid of sensitive documents for quite some time, but simple ones are barely better than ripping papers by hand. This was clearly proven a couple of months ago when the Korean cable TV channel JTBC's news team was able to recover crucial evidence relating to the ongoing Park Geun-hye - Choi Soon-sil Scandal that's rocking the nation from bags of shredded documents (news in Korean).


Since I have a hand-operated paper shredder at home, I decided to have a bit of fun by re-enacting this process with my daughter Celine. We call it the "JTBC play". After Celine created a "document" to shred, she put it into the paper shredder. I think she likes the feel of the paper being cut up by turning the handle.