Korea Times stops being in English, stops being about Korea.

I'll take a more serious look at the Korea Times and their recent, um . . . yeah, a little later, but there's this today.

South Korea is not an exception in that one gets spam emails every day, including cheap Viagra. After all, the nation has a huge market for the erectile dysfunction medicine with the market potential of 100 billon won a year that sells 10 million pills that supposedly curses impotence.

In fact, South Korea has an underground market that sells unauthorized medical products that claim to have "Viagra effects," with bigger profit margins, according to Chosun Ilbo.

For example, a liquor contains sildenafil, a main ingredient for Viagra and sells like a hot cake. A Chinese medicine includes the same chemical and sells with a claim that it boosts health middle-aged men."

These items are easily obtainable because they don't require a doctor's prescription. Choosing this easy option can easily turn out to be a trouble for a man, or even kill him.

In 2008, in the space of just five months, some 150 men were hospitalized unconscious, without immediately identifiable causes that might have brought led to the consequence. They all suffered low-sugar level in their blood. Their ages ranged from 51 to 97. Four of them eventually died.

Singaporean authorities launched investigation. They found that these patients all purchased fake and therefore cheap Viagra and Cialis, another impotence drug.

The results were shocking and serious that the results were published in a recent edition of the New England of Medicine.

"There is no guarantee that the Singaporean case won't happen in Korea," the article concluded.

I had no idea @koreangov was writing for the Times. "[S]ells like a hot cake" gave it away, that's one of his favorites.

In a conversation with somebody at the paper recently I said it was held in low regard among English teachers and among many foreigners here, but I was told that I have no evidence for this and it was just my opinion. So, my bad. The Korea Times is not held in low regard by anyone. People enjoy reading articles that make no sense, on tabloid topics of no relevance to South Korea, with information either fabricated or taken from translations or "translations" of other local newspapers reporting in turn on overseas media items. Here's their currrent list of most-read articles:



All ten of them are reports taken from other papers or other webpages. Most of them have English that's either awkward or downright wrong, and only four are remotely connected to Korea. And how did their article currently atop the page, "Korean Dramas Fail to Appeal to Chinese Men" come to that conclusion?

Citing a man living in Wuhan province

I'll have more on this later in the week, so . . . to be continue . . .