Leon's Planet (Thanks, Zack!)

Leon Priz teaches English to kids abroad, and he created Leon's Planet as a "polyglot's playground" for his students. The site contains pages devoted to figures of speech, onomatopoeia, the types of irony, synonyms, etc. You know, normal English teacher stuff. Leon's no stuffed shirt, though. He's a big joker who's not afraid to let what's left of his hair down, as evidenced by the "humor" section, which includes these appallingly bad "Fun Puns." Leon's outsized personality would clearly be wasted on a strict educational-lists format, so he gradually expanded the site's scope, to the point where it now costs more than $200 a year to run (there's no way he's not getting ripped off by his hosting company).

If you're thinking about teaching in a foreign country, Leon would be happy to help you follow in his footsteps. He's put up a page that offers a lot of useful information about what you can expect. Maybe a little too much information:

(3d) My fourth year in S.Korea.
This is when I met my wife. Long story short. She left me and her not-quite-one-year-old son a week before his first birthday. She just left one day with her backpack and a smile on her face, and never came back. Koreans blame me. They think I must have been a bad husband. I've got one thing to say in my defense, She gave me the child. Yeah! I have been raising the child by myself for 12 years (and counting). The fact is I didn't want the divorce at the time, but now I see that she was no good for us. She was unfaithful to me and stole a lot of money from me before she left.

Yep, that's the place where I met that evil she-demon of an ex-wife and my life collapsed into a death spiral of pain and suffering. Oh, and be sure to try the kimchi jjigae!

Leon has spent a decade in South Korea (seemingly more out of economic necessity than choice), and he has been documenting his mostly miserable experiences on his "Korean Chronicles" page, including this TRAUMATIZING event from his first year:

Getting jabbed in the anus by a little kindergartener was pretty shocking. Koreans call it (ddong chim), which loosely translated means: "poop push". Evidently the whole idea of a "poop push" was started by some comedian on TV and it became a national pastime amongst little children. I, of course, was not privy to that information, and you can imagine my shock when I turned around to write something on the board and some unknown object (which turned out to be a kid's finger) was inserted into my anus. I about hit the ceiling (both literally and figuratively). Naturally, I was furious. I immediately reported the perpetrator of such a heinous invasion of my personal private parts to the owner of the hagwon. He just laughed and explained that it means that the kid likes me. I said, "Well, tell him I don't like it."

Leon might be a hit with handsy kindergarteners, but his relationships with womenfolk haven't improved since the ex-wife fiasco, and he's channeled his anger into this Reddit-ready rant against the media:

If I can get on my soap box for a little while... The Korean media these days is making a big deal out of one or two foreign men, English teachers, who womanize Korean women, and prey upon the lonely under-aged Korean girls. While I find such behavior inexcusable and worthy of having the culprit's gonads torn off with a pair of channel locks, I find that there are far more wicked Korean women than wicked foreign men. Believe me, I've dated quite a few... the lion's share, perhaps. How come the Korean media doesn't portray how Korean women just use us foreign men to "Play around" before marriage to a Korean man? How come the Korean media doesn't portray how Korean ajumas just use foreign men to get back at their cheating husbands? How come the Korean media doesn't portray the plethora of Korean women who prey upon and take advantage of foreign men's generosities, playing with the men's hearts only to amass valuable gifts and free room and board?

Clearly, the media is too cowardly to stand up and report on the REAL dangers in Korean society: those wicked succubi who call themselves "women," not to mention those vile sexual predators known as "toddlers." When will the white man get a fair shake?

While English is Leon's specialty, he also dabbles a bit in other fields. In fact, he must be the smartest man in the world, because he claims to have deciphered the Shepherd's Monument:

People have been trying to solve this mystery for over 200 years. I don't mean to brag, but I did it in a little over 2 hours (with the help of modern technology, e.g. internet, Google, Wikipedia, etc.)

Yeah, nice humblebrag, you chode.

Leon also has some really funky ideas about science, which is actually just a BUNCH OF LIES:

I LOVE TRUTH! MODERN-DAY SCIENCE IS REPLETE WITH WIMPS WHO SHUN THE TRUTH IN FAVOR OF THEIR RELIGION (THEIR SO-CALLED "SCIENTIFIC" BELIEF SYSTEM). UNBELIEVABLY TO SOME, MYTHOLOGY CONTAINS A LOT OF TRUTH! AND I SHALL PROVE IT! SCIENCE IS FULL OF RELIGIOUS FANATICS!

"The truth" is that 9/11 was a hoax (of course), and gravity is just magnets. Like, duh! Now that that's out of the way, Leon can focus on more pressing scientific issues, like "Why is HELL so HOT?"

This is an excellent question for him, because he claims to have actually visited hell (and no, he's not talking about Korea) and heaven during separate "Near Death Experiences," so he's an expert on them. Basically, he just thought really, really hard about going to hell, like a kid coveting a certain toy for Christmas, and had a spooky dream about it where he... built a house? Then, twenty years later he had another dream about going to heaven, where the house was already built for him. Yes, apparently the major difference between heaven and hell is whether or not you have to build your own house. Looks like Leon just cleared up another centuries-old mystery! ("Free of charge, by the way!")

– Adam "rubber cat" Jameson (@robbercat)