Seven Luck

Korean class in the morning. I saw some of the girls I met on the hiking trip - Rachael and Cait. They wanted to go to the foreigners' casino later that day, and of course I was all over that. But before that I killed a little time in Myeong-dong.

Dude. They have clowns. Why doesn't Saturday Market in Portland have clowns?

Those are potatoes, cut into spirals, deep-fried, on a stick. I ate one and it was glorious. Of course, it's really hard to screw up deep-fried potatoes. They're inherently delicious.

I found this park, but there was one slight problem. Is that snow on the ground? No! It is cottonwood! The greatest nemesis of my nasal passages! I didn't feel like testing the effectiveness of my allergy meds, so I ran away.

So I met up with Rachael and Cait and we checked out the casino. It was pretty intense. It's only for foreigners, so you have to show your passport to get in. Rachael had been to the DMZ and got a fake North Korean "visa" stamped on her passport. No one else had mentioned it, even when she was traveling out of the country, but when we went into this casino the lady at the front desk asked if she had been to Pyeongyang.

By the way, I love these girls. When I got to talking to Rachael about the DMZ, we immediately started riffing on the hotness of men in uniform and cracking each other up. And Cait, as I said before, is from P-town and is similarly awesome.

Back to the casino - it was, disappointingly, a small and quiet room full of Japanese businessmen playing at the tables. None of us girls were gamblers, so our plan was to lose a little money at the slots and get out of there. I lost a thousand wan (a dollar), and was pretty much like, "Well, I gambled. So much for that." But while the others were having their turn, I stuck one more bill into a slot machine. I pushed some buttons, some lights flashed, and I have no idea what any of it meant, but out popped nine thousand wan. I made seven dollars.

I threw up my hands. "I actually made money at a casino," I said, "I'll never do better than this. I'm quitting while I'm ahead." Yeah, I know. Seven dollars. High roller, right? Anyway, neither of my companions had any luck at all, so I bought everyone ice cream with my winnings to share the love.

And right next to the ice cream place was a stage where this guy was signing autographs. I honestly couldn't tell you his name, but Rachael is a K-pop fan and she knew who he was. Apparently he's kind of a big deal, so I snapped some pictures for her.

I was looking forward to going out with the girls, but they said that they had partied all night last night and they wanted to go home. Ugh! I always catch people on Saturday after class when they've worn themselves out during the week. And Drew and company are at a DJ festival of some kind, so I was on my own.

So... I went and saw Iron Man 2 (spoilers ahead). Man, I was psyched for this movie. And when I want this badly for a movie to be good, I'll usually overlook a lot of its flaws. But this, well... I guess they can't all be The Dark Knight.

I could write five posts about this movie (three of them about its treatment of women), but I can sum up its main failing easily. In the first movie, Tony Stark was a charming ass and I loved him. In this movie, Tony Stark is a straight-up ass and he is annoying. Only by putting him next to his ungodly hair-pullingly annoying foil, Justin Hammer, is he made to look like a hero in comparison.

Also Pepper Potts got no character development and I really, really wanted her to get some good character development!

Also you can't make a sexist movie and then have Scarlett Johansson (in a skintight catsuit) kill many people  and say, "Look! Feminism!" No, the fact that you made a joke about how ridiculous her outfit is does not make it okay.

Also the science in this movie had me in tears of laughter. My favorite part was when Tony builds a particle accelerator out of junk (and Captain America's shield?), cuts most of his lab in half with a particle beam, then there is a flash of light and Jarvis says, "Congratulations. You have created a new element." Ahahaha. Yes kids. This is totally how SCIENCE works.

However, I will say unequivocally that Rhodey was effing awesome. In fact, I liked him better than Tony Stark even when he was working with the bad guy. That should not happen.

Oh, hey! I just now realized right this second that the casino's name was Seven Luck, and I won seven dollars there. Yay doubly meaningful post title.

And one more thing: Iron Man 2 is not as bad as I made it sound. I just needed to rant. It is actually very fun and totally worth it just for the scenes with Iron Man and War Machine together. And for me, it was worth it just for the scenes of Robert Downey Jr. in a tight black shirt swooning when his arc reactor gets effed up. Damn, I know the guy is old but he makes heart failure look sexy (or maybe I'm just a sadist).