This morning, I was reading a perfectly fascinating article in the Times about how Japanese and Korean dry cleaners in New York City have played out a political dispute in slogans printed on their plastic dry-cleaner bags. Apparently there's this island that both countries claim to own.

Anyway, I was proceeding through the article, enjoying it, when I came across the following sentence: "But the real action lies elsewhere. Protesters in South Korea have cut off their fingers, stabbed themselves and, in a particularly inventive move, burned large cardboard effigies of the Japanese Ministry of Education (to protest Japan's teaching of its version of the dispute)." I'm not sure whether the Times was trying to be sarcastic and clever, or whether they're making a genuine political point about the inventiveness of burning cardboard in South Korea. Either way, it made me smile, even while I questioned the journalistic apprpriateness of the remark...