Lesson of the Day!

Don't go to a sushi bar, drink wildly, get a promise written in Korean and in blood that your drinking partner will repay a loan of $170,000 and expect a judge to enforce the agreement.

Poor Jinsoo Kim learned this lesson on Monday after using the blood oath as the key prop in a lawsuit to recover lost funds he'd invested in several businesses. A California court of appeal based in Santa Ana has refused to overturn an Orange County Superior Court's prior ruling that Kim--who got Stephen Son to prick his finger with a safety pin on loan from a bar waitress and agree to the repayment in October 2004--was out of luck.

"Son, while extremely intoxicated, made a gratuitous unenforceable promise to repay" the money, a three-justice panel wrote in a March 9 opinion.

--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly