Yo, seventies buffs, do you remember "Mad Libs?" Personally, I can never forget them, nor have I figured out why the Surrealists didn’t come up with this vehicle par excellence for automatic or semi-automatic weapons, er uh, I mean text generation. It puts the "Exquisite Corpse," game to shame and doesn’t require, like "Automatic Writing," that you go through the agony of writing as fast as you can without stopping or thinking for eight to twelve hours before you begin to spontaneously and automatically pull those solid carnelian and onyx pagodas of pineal and convulsing splendor directly out of the unconscious and onto the page. Well, you might say, who the hell wants to do that anyway and perhaps you have a point, but, yes, you too can be Salvador Dali and your friends and Korean English students can as well, though I’m sure they’d ask you, "Who the hell wants to be Salvador Dali anyway?" It’s simple and really fun though, you just ask people to give you random nouns, adjectives, and verbs where called for in a Mad lib text without letting them read the text and put them in the blanks. When you’re finished filling in the blanks in pencil, which I recommend that you use so that you can erase them and do another version, you’ll have a text which is often hilarious, boring, bizarre, nonsensical, profound, and surprising all at once.
Here’s a Mad Lib text that I made for expats in Korea while taking a break from my main project which is making a huge Mad Lib text out of the King James Edition of the Bible. I am forming a new Christian sect called the Church of the Mad Lib Christ in which ministers first ask the congregation for nouns, adjectives and verbs and then preach the word of God as transmitted to the faithful’s linguistic antennae . Enjoy, hopefully this will help you laugh off some of the real life non-sequiters you’ve had to live through out there in hogwan land. Have fun and if you can’t have fun well, then just don’t then, O.K.?!
South Korea is still very much ____________ (adj.). Quite a few ____________ (noun pl.) get to the __________ (noun), Seoul, usually enroute to _____________ (a place), and a few ____________ (adj) ____________ (noun pl.) make it to Kyong-ju and the ____________ (adj.) province of Cheju-do, but hardly anyone seems to take the time to _____________ (verb) the other ____________ (noun pl.) of the country.
Undoubtedly the ___________ (noun pl.) of Japan and China serve to ___________ (verb) most people’s attention, yet Korea is one of the most ____________ (adj.) _____________ (noun pl.) of the Far East. Its ______________ (noun) is one of the world’s most ______________ (adj.) _________________ (noun pl.) of a ________________ (adj.) nation’s _______________ (noun) for ________________ (noun) against almost insurmountable _________________ (noun pl.). Sandwiched between _______________ (adj.) more _________________ (adj.) neighbors who, for at least two millennia, have sought to _____________ (verb) it, South Korea has nevertheless preserved its own ____________ (adj.) _____________ (noun) and _______________ (adj.) _________________ (noun). Koreans are very helpful to ________________ (adj.)-looking foreigners, so if you stand around looking _______________ (adj.) with a _______________ (noun) in your hands someone will probably offer to ______________ (verb) you. However if you hand a Korean your ______________ (noun) and ask for _______________ (noun pl.), be sure that they don’t have a ____________ (noun) in their hands- they will draw and write all over it until it becomes ________________ (adj.). One thing you will come to appreciate is the public toilet facilities found in all stations (bus, train, subway, etc.) and adjacent ________________ (noun pl.). Even in busy Seoul., toilets are ______________ (adverb) __________________ (verb) just where you need them and are _______________ (verb) ___________________ (adverb) ___________________ (adj.). It’s a _____________ (adj.) _______________ (noun) to other cities in the region.
Although ________________ (noun) around the country and within the cities is ______________ (adj.), finding a _________________ (noun) can be real ______________ (noun).