I guess American beef wasn't so bad after all.

Hell, if Michael Phelps ate it:



That's from a Chosun Ilbo cartoon last week, and the Joongang Ilbo tells us that American beef is numer 2 in Korea behind Australian.

Now that the ban on imports has been lifted, U.S. beef is rushing into the Korean market. After imports from Australia, it now ranks second among imported beef by shipment volume and volume to pass quarantine inspection.

. . .

To restaurants, the advantage of U.S. beef is its low price. According to the industry, 100 grams of premium Korean-bred hanwoo beef sells for between 6,000 won ($5.73) and 7,000 won at a butcher shop. The same amount of Australian beef sells for between 3,000 won and 4,000 won. E-net Corp., a U.S. beef importer, sells its product for around 1,000 won.

Back to the cartoon, that same weird depiction of Phelps showed up the day before, next to Korea's champion weightlifter Jang Mi-ran.



Hey, anything to take the sting off.



Then again, I guess he does kinda look like that, but still. I watched a surprising amount of events back home, but hadn't yet tuned into the Korean coverage until tonight. Do they really have the same coverage on all the networks? I don't get how or why that works. Man, everyone was right about them showing highlights of Korean matches rather than events featuring other countries, and they really lay it on thick. Anyone else find it hard to root for Team (South) Korea? And then feel kinda bad getting as worked up about Korean nationalism as the Korean nationalists you're annoyed with? Yeah. I think I stick up for Korea more when I'm at home than I do here, and remember the US more fondly when I'm half a world away from it.

Something else that caught my eye was a thing SBS had on called "1분 차이나," with short little vignetes on Chinese culture. I like how they included---among representative Chinese sites like the Temple of Heaven, the Terracotta Warriors, and the Water Cube----Zhang Ziyi from The Road Home.



As they should have, mind you, because she's hot. At first I figured she was just thrown in there either for no reason or because she's a generic smiling pig-tailed Chinese girl in that shot, but after watching the first "episode" maybe they threw her in as a nod to Chinese cinema and to Zhang Yimou. Well, SBS ought to be thankful it's doing anything at all in Beijing after the stunt they pulled, leaking footage of the Opening Ceremony a few days early.