Sorry, everyone. There are just so many spare hours in a day, and too many important things to do. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

This week, I’ve had to reallocate my limited blogging time to some other high-priority, not-for-publication projects I have to get done. Hopefully, normal service will be restored next week.

One day in 2006, I took a few hours off from work to attend a hearing of what was then called the House International Relations Committee, one of many hearings to ponder the then-awful state of the U.S.-South Korean alliance without calling it awful. One of the witnesses that day was Richard Lawless, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Affairs, who had to squeeze past my chair to get to his. Lawless is a large man, but I can’t say...

Thanks for your patience for the flurry of design experiments and changes to this site over the weekend. No, it’s not because the North Koreans hacked the site again. The culprit is actually Google, which just announced a policy that sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be buried in SEO rankings. For the last four or five years, this site had been using an extensively hacked version of this template, which I liked very much, but which was also the reason...

Granted, Buzzfeed has never been known as a paragon of journalistic integrity, but it should have to register as a foreign agent for giving in to this. Separately, Anne Applebaum writes about state-sponsored comment trolls, who I’ve often suspected of having an outsized presence at the Post’s own comments section, and of commenting at this humble site on occasion. Most of the best comments and corrections I get come by e-mail, which is why I often wonder whether enabling comments is worth...

If you’re one of them, kindly drop a comment or send an email (it’s the icon on the right, immediately below the banner).

Here’s the url; meanwhile, I’m reading all about what an AMA is and how not to make mine like Woody Harrelson’s. Update: Try this link if the other one doesn’t work.

One of the things they didn’t teach me us in law school was web design, and I will soon have to take on a significant project on this site that I lack the time and the technical sophistication to do myself. In short, I need some technical help from someone with a solid understanding of WordPress, databases, sql files, and such things.  Ideally, I’m asking for a referral to a known, reputable, and affordable commercial service to consult with.  (The...

Recently, you’ve probably noticed how many spam comments my plugins aren’t catching. I don’t like seeing it get though. It gives the site a weedy look, and never more so than when it’s hawking some questionable product or service. If I didn’t have other life priorities, I suppose I should just find better plugins, but that’s a near impossibility with my decrepit version of WordPress, and an upgrade is a bigger project than I’m willing to take on right now....

You’ve no doubt noticed the relative lack of postings in the last few months, and that trend is going to continue for the next few months. This is the collateral effect of good things happening in the family and work parts of my life. Unfortunately, as those responsibilities grow, they leave relatively less time for other things. So for the foreseeable future, my prime blogging time — my commute — will have to be spent reading and studying other things,...

On this day, way back in 2004, I published the first OFK post. Had you asked me then what I’d be blogging about now, I’d have have said that I wouldn’t be. Then, I might have suggested reconstruction efforts, or possibly a low-intensity conflict between Chinese “advisors” and North Korean insurgents. Seven billion dollars in South Korean aid, Chinese money, and unsteady American policies have prolonged the inevitable, but it still looks inevitable, if different. Then, I imagined that a...

I blame a series of developments for this. First, I can’t forgive that virus known as Windows Vista and the manufacturers who foisted it on us. Second, my iPod turns out to have been a gateway drug. It’s just a thing of beauty, and I’m still amazed by its functions and capability, all fit into such a tiny object. Third, my old Dell is about dead from sheer exhaustion. I’ve preliminarily settled on a Macbook Air, and am leaning toward...

As a member of the U.S. military almost ten years ago, he was surprised by what he saw as the obvious contradiction between the public reaction to the deaths of two young South Korean schoolgirls in an accident involving a U.S. military vehicle and what he calls “the nearly unanimous apathy about the millions of North Koreans being starved by Kim Jong Il, or the hundreds of thousands of dead and dying in his political prison camps. Thanks to the...

Read his account of it here. The FBI may be interested in this, since an effort this sophisticated raises the very real possibility of a state-sponsored hack. Curtis, you have arrived. If anyone has any recommendations for how to detect and protect against this kind of attack, I’d be interested in hearing what they are.

Kevin, who blogs pseudonymously as Kevin Kim or The Big Hominid, lost his mom to brain cancer last night after many agonizing months, months during which Kevin invested much love and heartache in taking care of her to the very end.  If you can spare a minute to leave your condolences, I’m sure he’d appreciate it.