Esquire:
The Worst Building in the History of Mankind
It’s the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world’s 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way … forever.
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Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into […]
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AFP:
Reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has boasted of being an “Internet expert,” reports said Saturday.
The communist state keeps itself closed to the outside world to prevent so-called spiritual pollution from subverting its hardline socialist system.
Kim told delegates at this week’s historic inter-Korean summit his Internet expertise made him reluctant to allow further access to […]
Speaking of notable new blogs, Asia-watchers and baseball fans alike will want to check out the recently-launched East Windup Chronicle, “A Journal of Sports, Art, Politics, and Culture from the Pacific Rim” (with a heavy emphasis on baseball).
My pal Aaron and his friend Jackson, writing from South Korea and Taiwan, respectively, have been discussing […]
Phil, author of the fantastic Cambodian food blog Phenomenon, has turned his attention to Asian food in general with a new site called The Last Appetite. And I’m pleased to see that my musings regarding the French fry-encrusted hot dogs I encountered in Korea have inspired him to do a little more digging. Don’t miss […]
Street Peeper is a new blog devoted to global street fashion. The Asian cities featured here include Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo, but Bangkok hasn’t yet joined the party…
CNN:
How ill is Kim Jong Il? Talk of the reclusive North Korean leader’s health emerged anew this week when he made a rare public appearance Tuesday in a surprise meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Pyongyang. Chinese television footage showed Kim shaking hands with the guest and brandishing a big smile.
That image was […]
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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Virgina Tech massacre. My thoughts keep returning to the issue of American gun culture.
I asked my friend Ben P. to weigh in. Ben is an American who’s lived in Australia for the last two years; I asked him what he thought about the shooting.
Why […]
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Hi, all. I’m back.
I have a story at Tripmaster Monkey today about Asia’s craziest buildings. Enjoy (and leave a comment at the bottom of the article, if you like).
Here’s a great story you may have missed. A small Korean child is lost in a market, ends up in an orphanage, and then is adopted, when he’s three, by a couple of American ski instructors. The kid, Toby Dawson, grows up in Colorado and goes on to win a bronze medal in freestyle skiing […]
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Not new, but worth mentioning. God bless America.
Junk Food Blog:
The Jimmy Dean brand of breakfast food won my nod of approval when I found this lovely new entry.
Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick Chocolate Chip pretty much takes what my wife often eats at IHOP and puts it all on a hand-held form factor, allowing […]
How the mighty have fallen.
The Nation newspaper ran some photos yesterday of Thailand’s ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra strolling about London all by his lonesome. (He’s currently in exile there after being deposed in the military coup.)
The images seems to convey that Thaksin feels bummed, like, “I’m so lonely here in the UK and I […]
Travel writer Rolf Potts has concluded his Busan, Korea homecoming with two more excellent dispatches over at Slate: “Fishing Indoors With a Former Member of the Korean Army” and “A Quest for the Musical Russian Triplets of Texas Street.”
Previously: Three Korea Stories of Note.
Two of my pals have recently published excellent stories about Korea. Rolf Potts has got two articles on Slate — one’s about the Busan International Film Festival and an upcoming action comedy film called “Expats,” and the other’s about returning to the city after having spent two years teaching English there in the late 90s.
Elsewhere, […]
Snip from a long New York Times Magazine story about North Korean counterfeiting efforts:
Though there is some dispute on the timing, the first counterfeit big-head supernotes might have arrived on the market as early as 1998. Like the earlier generation of supernotes, the big-head imitations show an ever-growing attention to detail. “They would certainly […]
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With the North Koreans preparing to test launch a ballistic missile (the Taep’o-dong 2), I thought this would be a good time to re-visit the bizarre NK images I linked to a few days back — see them again for the first time with English captions.
Also, I came across the following image. If you ever […]
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