Kim Jong Un gets one of those awkward gifts and goes mushrooming

[zwiebel]

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who is known for his liking for luxury western goods, must have been rather taken aback when the president of Mongolia visited and offered a gift. Of 130 cows. As it's a diplomatic minefield to refuse a gift (though the queen of England has turned down gifts of crocodiles and camels I believe), the cows were duly shipped off from the snowy wastes of Mongolia December 29th. Bleak pic of airplane setting off from a snow-covered runway at the link. It doesn't look that safe, to be honest.

http://mongolia.gogo.mn/r/143683

It's not stated where the esteemed leader of North Korea put them when they arrived but.....

Could there possible be a connection to this story headlining in the Daily Mail? It's the earth shattering news that Kim Jong has visited a mushroom factory and urged Koreans to step up production nationwide! At first I thought I'd traveled back to the old cold war days, when those of you old enough might recall Russian Pravda and various East German newspapers were packed full of the latest news on (always rising) production figures, and not much else. Funny that those goods never seemed to make it into the stores though.....Anyway, I digress. Is it possible the North Korean leader with THAT hair, has come up with a brand new way of feeding Mongolian cows with mushrooms, to produce mushroom flavored cheese and beef?

If not, I cannot for the life of me understand why the Daily Mail thought Kim Jong Un visiting a mushroom factory was a newsworthy event.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rs-fungi-factory-urges-provinces-growing.html

 

[zwiebel]

Also, if they grew the mushrooms in the dark they'd save a lot of lighting energy and wouldn't have to use all those plastic bottles either.

ETA: Also, none of them are wearing hairnets, which is really unhygienic in a place of food production. No matter how cool Kim Jong thinks his hairstyle is, a person wouldn't want to find parts of it in their mushroom soup.

 

[zwiebel]

When I posted this mushroom story a while ago I thought it was a little, well, odd. But now I see Kim Jong Un had a great plan all along. He wants to turn North Korea into a country of mushrooms. Seriously. They've released a slogan so it must be true.

'Sloganeering and posters have traditionally been central to the regime’s internal propaganda machine and the latest slogans, published by the official KCNA news agency, are as catchy and inspiring as anything yet published...

“Let us turn ours into a country of mushrooms by making mushroom cultivation scientific, intensive and industrialised!” reads another...'


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...reas-new-slogans/story-e6frg6so-1227218200355

 

[zwiebel]

Perhaps a mushroom hairstyle could go with the new mushroom program.

http://awakethebook.com/ch/3-2/mushroom/

 

[zwiebel]

Stop the press. Kim Jong Un seems to be done with the mushroom business. Now he seems to be concentrating on calling up 'elite' troops in preparation for a war with the United States. He will be merciless.

I'm not sure how you guys have offended him - have you been elbowing in on the mushroom business? Anyhow, he's prepping for 'war' and has fired two missiles (not anywhere near America though). Also, he's adopted a new haircut. Not sure what it has do with war or mushrooms though. It's trapezoidal?

http://abcnews.go.com/International...es-sea/story?id=29319874#.VPTCUV83ZsU.twitter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/kim-jong-un-new-haircut_n_6718380.html

 

[wfgodot]

Jonger on 'shrooms a mind-bending notion, whatever the context.

 

[zwiebel]

Mind-bending, hair-raising...whatever.

Wish Kim Jong-Un was more up on British popular culture. He might realise then, that his hairstyle is just Ena Sharples without the hairnet.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/125342/By-eck-guess-who-inspire-Corrie

Coronation Street TV program is the one to google to find out more about Ena Sharples/Kim Jong-Un haircuts.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Street

 

[zwiebel]

I don't think the mushroom business is panning out.

A North Korean diplomat was found carrying $1.4 million worth of gold bars at the international airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh, customs officials said Friday.

Customs authorities seized 170 gold bars weighing nearly 60 pounds from Son Yung Nam, an official at the North Korean Embassy in Dhaka, at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, said Kazi Mohammad Ziauddin, joint commissioner of customs in Bangladesh...

Authorities said the diplomat was seeking to smuggle the gold into Bangladesh to raise cash for North Korea, which is isolated from the world financial system due to stringent sanctions by the U.S. and other countries...

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-bangladesh-north-korean-gold-20150306-story.html

 

[zwiebel]

Moving on from mushrooms forever, Kim Jong Un is now involved in the terrapin tonic business. He is very, very unhappy however.

According to North Korea's state-run KCNA news agency, the country's Supreme Leader recently carried out an inspection of the Taedonggang Terrapin Farm where he noted a number of "serious shortcomings."

For one thing the farm, which is located on the outskirts of Pyongyang, didn't pay enough attention to the study of his late father, who KCNA said was the inspiration behind the project to "provide the people with tasty and nutritious terrapin widely known as a precious tonic from olden times."

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/north-korea-kim-jong-un-terrapin-farm/

 

[zwiebel]

Poor South Korea has missed out on the wisdom of the terrapin tonic diet of its neighbor. It has to put up with street food on sticks instead.

Much, much more delicious-looking stuff at the link.

http://mattbites.com/2011/08/23/street-food-in-korea-and-stuff-on-sticks/

 

[zwiebel]

Sorry, I got behind with activities and never posted about the submarine photo (or should I say photoshop collage?). But meanwhile, the mushrooms and the terrapins are history. Greens are the latest trend for feeding his citizens with Kim Jong Un now. Strange, considering North Korea's undergoing its worst drought for many years.

Also, a Panama hat. Cost about $95, if its from the West.

I still don't know what's wrong with simple rice as a staple - is it being sold for hard currency or something?

http://nypost.com/2015/06/01/kim-jo...w&utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow

 

[zwiebel]

His food policies have turned out to be as wise as his hairstyle choices. North Korea is facing famine.

"We don't have enough information to say if people are starving or not," senior FAO official Liliana Balbi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Thursday. "But the situation is serious. They are on the borderline."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015...0150618?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews

 

[zwiebel]

Photographer Eric Lafforgue:...

http://www.ericlafforgue.com/

...managed to wrangle himself into a photo tour of North Korea. This one just chilled me to the bone. Toddlers playing on a North Korean highway.

http://canyouactually.com/27-banned-photos-of-north-korea-you-were-never-supposed-to-see/

 

[zwiebel]

Moving on from mushrooms forever, Kim Jong Un is now involved in the terrapin tonic business. He is very, very unhappy however.



http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/19/asia/north-korea-kim-jong-un-terrapin-farm/

Quoting myself because this originally comic-looking photo of the esteemed leader having a seemingly stage-managed rant about the terrapin farm, now seems horrific.

Kim Jong Un is reported to have summarily had the manager of the terrapin farm executed for failing to keep the creatures alive. That's despite the manager's pleas that their deaths were due to the lack of consistent electric supplies.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...lectricity-being-the-root-cause-10372521.html

 

[zwiebel]

Here is a firsthand report of a woman growing up in North Korea during famine in the 1990s when around 1 million people died. She escaped the country in 2010.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/13/arduous-march-north-korea-famine

 

[zwiebel]

Squid are now saving the day for some hungry people.

The drought has led to a huge number of squid in the warmer seas around North Korea and people are rushing to the coast to catch them. This is not a new-fangled food initiative by Kim Jong Un, so it seems to be working quite well at the moment.

However, North Koreans are only permitted to keep 10 per cent of what they catch - the rest is exported to China. Their are reports that people are even paying their steeply-rising coastal rents in squid, because it's more useful than the currency.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/north-korea-drought-squid-harvest?CMP=twt_gu

 

[zwiebel]

North Korea has turned back time by 30 minutes.

The reasoning is 'wicked Japanese imperialists' who inflicted their time on Korea during WW2, depriving them of their standard time. North Korea will be half an hour behind South Korea and Japan time from August 15.

The odd announcement more than 70 years after the original event seems to have been timed ( ) to concide with the global commemorations of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but North Korean authorities don't acknowledge that. That would mean acknowledging America's role in defeating Japan in the war, which it doesn't. North Korea has its own version which credits state founder Kim IL Sung and his supporters with defeating Japan all on their own.

Although the decree isn't issued under the name of current North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, a person has to guess he's approved the new ruling.

According to the report on Friday, the decision to change time zones was made to honor the feats of its late president, who it said “crushed the brigandish Japanese imperialists…and liberated Korea.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/north-korea-to-go-back-in-time-1438931792

 

[zwiebel]

I couldn't resist this song to go with the announcement:

https://vimeo.com/42911636

ETA: That video is eyewateringly suggestive! How'd she get away with it?

 

[zwiebel]

The sound wars between North and South Korea have started up again, after going dormant since 2004. With North Koreans denied access to the Internet, South Korea figured one way to get messages across was to broadcast music and messages straight across the border, which could be heard for about 12 miles.

This month, South Korea recommenced the music wars August 10- after two of its border patrol soldiers were wounded by North Korean landmines - by broadcasting pop music by a girl band, and also messages calling leader Kim Jong-Un 'incompetent' and 'childish'. This enraged North Korea so much it's been threatening a real war in return. Authorities there did attempt a musical counter-attack, but the electricity supply proved too erratic to keep it going.

That suggests the poor turtle farm manager who was executed may have had a point when he blamed its failure on lack of power supplies. (Mentioned in an earlier post)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/w...les-north.html?smid=tw-nytimesworld&smtyp=cur

* I vaguely recollect this thread started off with a post about cows being loaded onto a decrepit-looking plane on an ice-bound runway as an awkward gift for Kim Jong-Un. Wonder whatever happened to them or if they even made it?

 

[zwiebel]

Good heavens. I just looked up a video of one of the bands South Korea has been broadcasting to the North. It's not the girlband - it's a boy band called Big Bang. Space-themed? I've seen an astronaut dancing with a cowboy, someone in an English Coldstream Guard bearskin hat posing on an American Cadillac, another with a haircut designed for zero vision and...well, I think I've seen enough really.

The music itself is quite jiggy but I still think I'd be begging for peace on any terms after more than a couple of hours...or begging them to play Bowie's Major Tom 'space-themed' music instead.

[video=youtube;XdDjIqzRA4s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdDjIqzRA4s[/video]