How South Korean babies can be both one day and two years old at the same time

There are three common ways to count age in South Korea, but the government has changed its civil code to recognize one: starting from zero on a person’s date of birth and adding a year at each birthday.

This is the age-counting method used most often around the world, but it is a departure from the country’s most popular method, often called “Korean age.” Under that system, a person is considered 1 year old at birth, and a year is added to their age each Jan. 1. This meant that an infant born on Dec. 31 was considered 2 years old the next day.

The three systems for counting age have confused and inconvenienced South Koreans in all kinds of situations including health recommendations, labor disputes and social hierarchy.

For example, some health officials used inconsistent age standards for coronavirus vaccinations. So, a person could be required to show proof of vaccination based on their age under one system but would not actually be old enough to get a vaccine under another system.

Supporters of the change say the new standard will reduce these conflicts.

But it does not yet apply to all circumstances.

Children will continue to start elementary school using the country’s third counting system, known as “year age”: Age-counting starts as zero at birth, then adds a year every Jan. 1. Under this system, a baby born on Dec. 31 turns 1 the next day.

For now, “year age” will also still be used to determine whether a person can drink, smoke or serve in the military. So, a person born in any month of 2004 is considered 19 years old and, therefore, is eligible for all those things.

- Amanda Holpuch, 'Some South Koreans Just Became Younger Overnight', New York Times, 28 June 2023

Is this some dumb metaphor to tell me you're not hanging round?

Thursday music corner: Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist Deborah Conway was born in Melbourne in 1959 and first came to prominence in pop outfit Do-Ré-Mi. She released her first solo album, String of Pearls, in 1991, for which she won a Best Female Artist ARIA award. That record and her follow-up, 1993's Bitch Epic, were both certified gold records in Australia. 

Alive and Brilliant was the first single from Bitch Epic, and reached number 64 in the Australian pop charts. Conway has released 10 studio albums to date, the five most recent of which have been with her husband, Willy Zygier.

Deborah Conway - Alive & Brilliant (1993)

See also:

Music: Deborah Conway - Today I Am A Daisy (1994)

Music: Deborah Conway - It's Only The Beginning (1991)

Music: Do-Ré-Mi - Man Overboard (1985)

Crooked delegation wants a donation

Thursday music corner: Soul legend Bill Withers (1939-2020) roared to fame in 1971 with his single Ain't No Sunshine, and over an 18-year career garnered many fans through his powerful soul vocals, the social social consciousness of his lyrics, and the humility and integrity of his public and private life. He released eight studio albums from 1971 to 1985 plus the highly successful 1973 live album Live at Carnegie Hall. He had six US top 40 hits, including Ain't No Sunshine (1971), chart-topper Lean On Me (1972), Lovely Day (1977), and his duet with Grover Washington, Just The Two of Us (1981). 

Withers' disrespectful handling by his label, Columbia Records, contributed to his early retirement from the music business after his 1985 album Watching You, Watching Me, but his reputation only increased over the years as more artists and fans came to know his music, either the original versions or covers versions such as Club Nouveau's 1987 recording of Lean On Me. Withers was inaugurated into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, and in 2015 a Carnegie Hall tribute concert brought umpteen Withers devotees to the stage, including Dr John, Ed Sheeran and Aloe Blacc. 

Harlem was the opening track of Withers' first album Just As I Am, released in May 1971.  

Bill Withers - Harlem (live, 1973)

See also:

Music: Bill Withers - Grandma's Hands (live, 1974)

Music: Bill Withers - Harlem (Eamon Harkin edit) (2008)

Music: Michel Berger - Apple Pie (feat. Bill Withers) (1982)

The threat of transportation to the colonies

[T]ransportation overseas, in use from 1717 onwards, remained a major alternative option for British law enforcers. Yet exiling convicts from friends, families and familiar lives as a penalty for minor crimes seemed equally disproportionate. Moreover, this policy too was arbitrary in its implementation. Judicial discretion produced major regional variations in trial outcomes. After their conviction, too many prisoners then died in the insanitary ships - known as the 'hulks'- where they were kept while awaiting transportation. And once they had arrived overseas, people's subsequent experiences were also variegated. Hence this penalty also lacked rationality, proportionality and fairness.

That said, the policy of criminal transportation, initially to the North American colonies (before 1776) and then to Australia, continued for a considerable time. Most transportees were adult males from south-east England; but some women were sent too. One was Hannah Rosse, a Londoner described as 'a sort of a dumb [sic], who was speech-impeded or (possibly) shamming. In 1745 she was sentenced to transportation for a second offence of larceny (non-violent theft of goods worth over 12 pence). Rosse's disability won her no leniency, indicating that she had no incentive to be faking it. In all, some 162,400 convicts were taken to Australia between 1788 and 1868. However, this policy was also being slowed, long before it was finally halted. In its last years, it was more of a threat than an actuality. By 1851 the transportees (a number of whom later returned to Britain) constituted only a tiny proportion of the 27 million inhabitants of Britain and Ireland.

- Penelope Cornfield, The Georgians: The Deeds & Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain, New Haven, 2022, p.215-6.

I danced to your beat for sixteen hours

Thursday music corner: Jane Weaver (b.1972) is an English singer-songwriter who originally performed with the Britpop group Kill Laura in the 1990s and her self-formed group Misty Dixon in the early 2000s. In her solo career since the late 1990s Weaver has released 13 albums including two under the name of her alter-ego Fenella. Weaver's eleventh album, Flock, released in 2021, was preceded by the single The Revolution of Super Visions. 

According to the Guardian's Alex Petridis, the experimental electronic psychedelia of Flock 'still very clearly a Jane Weaver album, rooted in the influences that informed Modern Kosmology and its predecessor The Silver Globe: the ghost of Brummie experimentalists Broadcast haunts opener Heartlow; the rhythmic pulse that underpins Modern Reputation owes a clear debut to krautrock pioneers Neu!; the title track opens with glimmering chimes and a mass of flute samples that wouldn’t sound out of place on Weaver’s acid-folk inspired album The Fallen By Watch Bird'.

Jane Weaver - The Revolution of Super Visions (2021) 

See also:

Music: Fenella - Stellar in Spectra (2022)

Music: Misty Dixon - Are You Lost, Are You Sad? (2003)

Music: Kill Laura - Never Finer (1992)

Mendelssohn's coach journey from Glasgow to Liverpool

We flew away from Glasgow on the top of the mail, ten miles an hour, past steaming meadows and smoking chimneys, to the Cumberland lakes, to Keswick, Kendal, and the prettiest towns and villages. The whole country is like a drawing-room. The rocky walls are papered with bushes, moss, and firs; the trees are carefully wrapped up in ivy; there are no walls or fences, only high hedges, and you see them all the way up flat hill-tops. On all sides carriages full of travellers fly along the roads; the corn stands in sheaves; slopes, hills, precipices, are all covered with thick, warm foliage. Then again our eyes dwelt on the dark-blue English distance - many a noble castle, and so on, until we reached Ambleside. There the sky turned gloomy again, and we had rain and storm. Sitting on the top of the 'stage,' and madly careering along ravines, past lakes, up-hill, down-hill, wrapped in cloaks, and umbrellas up, we could see nothing but railings, heaps of stones or ditches, and but rarely catch glimpses of hills and lakes. Sometimes our umbrellas scraped against the roofs of the houses, and then, wet through, we would come to a second-rate inn, with a high blazing fire, and English conversation about walking, coals, supper, the weather, and Bonaparte. Yesterday our seats on the coach were accidentally separated, so that I hardly spoke to [Mendelssohn's travelling companion Karl] Klingemann, for changing horses was done in about forty seconds. I sat on the box next by the coachman, who asked me whether I flirted much, and made me talk a good deal, and taught me the slang of horsemanship. Klingemann sat next to two old women, with whom he shared his umbrella. Again manufactories, meadows, parks, provincial towns, here a canal, there a railway, then the sea with ships, six full coaches with towering outsiders following each other; in the evening a thick fog, the stage running madly in the darkness. Through the fog we see lamps gleaming all about the horizon; the smoke of manufactories envelops us on all sides; gentlemen on horseback ride past; one coach-horn blows in B flat, another in D, others follow in the distance, and here we are at Liverpool.

- Composer Felix Mendelssohn, letter, 19 August 1829, quoted in James Wilson Hyde, The Royal Mail: its Curiosities & Romance, 1885

We're in the same boat on a restless sea

Thursday music corner: Schnell Fenster were founded in Melbourne in 1986 by former Split Enz members Phil Judd, Noel Crombie, Nigel Griggs and Eddie Rayner, along with former Tim Finn band member Michael den Elzen. Over their six-year career the band released two albums - 1988's The Sound of Trees and 1991's OK Alright a Huh Oh Yeah - and five singles. The band also had songs on the soundtracks of three Australian films: Nadia Tass' Rikki & Pete (1988) and The Big Steal (1990), and New Zealander Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989). After failing to achieve chart success, the band broke up in 1992.

Same Boat is a rollicking stomper from the band's second album, with music by the band and lyrics by Phil Judd, which deserved much greater airplay than it received. The clip below is mis-labeled on Youtube as a different track from the same album.  

Schnell Fenster - Same Boat (1991)

See also:

Music: The Swingers - Counting The Beat (1981)

Music: Dave Dobbyn - Lament For The Numb (1993)

Music: ENZSO - Message To My Girl (1996)