I noticed that all of my posts so far have been gloomy so I was determined to write something more uplifting today. But alas, there came along a special occasion to change all that.

My mom was going to be rather busy today so she decided to wake me up very early. She has a number of powerful dream-shattering devices in her arsenal including a cassette tape of the most depressing and raucous classical music in existence, but today's treat was different. It was the front page of the Sports/Entertainment Section of a Korean newspaper called Joong-Aang-Il-Bo.

"Kobe Soon Divorce!" read the gigantic headlines (in Korean, of course) that accompanied even a bigger picture of smiling Kobe with his wife and daughter. I was stunned. How did I miss this news? No one told me about it. I immediately went to the Yahoo Sports site. There were trade rumors about Jermaine O'Neal coming to the Lakers, but no Kobe divorce. I went to Espn.com site. Trade rumors about Jermaine, but no Kobe divorce. These guys had serious problems with their priorities or...

I went to the yahoo search engine and typed in "Kobe divorce." The first result was an article from August of 2003. Uh oh. Then I finally saw it, "KCBS-TV Website Takes Down Bryant Divorce Report." It turns out that the television network hastily published a report from another source about the Kobe situation on its website and then took it down. There is no doubt that the story was taken down because it was unsubstantiated. Maybe Kobe wasn't going to get a divorce after all.

My guess is that the reporter for the Korean newspaper saw the report on the KCBS website and then translated the news in Korean. Then what does this mean? If Kobe doesn't get a divorce, the Korean newspaper is screwed. Actually, it's already well into the screwed stage. It appears to have the honor of being the only publication to print the story about Kobe's divorce. On the front page of the sports section. Last time I checked, Kobe has a pretty decent lawyer.

I had long ago detected this dysfunction in the publication. A startling number of the articles that are published are straight from other sources. Instead of using its own reporters and resources to find stories, it relies on American newscasts, newspapers, magazines, and in this case, news websites. This seems to be the case for predominantly the Sports & Entertainment (why would you even group those two together?) and the News section. Its methodology may be convenient for readers in that it provides translations of the stories that major news publications in the U.S. agree are prominent and important. But in this case, it backfired horribly.

I wouldn't be surprised if Kobe sues the newspaper. If he does, the best kimchi recipes will run elsewhere.