Category: Misc.

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Misc.

North Korea’s Ryugyong Hotel

The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, N. Korea [not my image]


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.

…

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn’t the just the worst designed building in the world — it’s the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

This architectural gem, you might remember, was number one on the list of Asia’s Top Five Craziest Buildings that I penned last year.

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Misc.

Rambo in Thailand: The Reviews Roll In

When I heard that Sylvester Stallone’s new “Rambo” flick takes place right here in Thailand, I knew it’d be a must-see. I haven’t laid eyes on the film yet, I’m sad to say, but some early reviews have just rolled in:

Joel Stein, writing in Time, interviews Stallone and opens with this exceptional lede:

Sylvester Stallone has memorized a lot of Procol Harum lyrics, and for the next two minutes I’m going to hear them. Because if you want to know what inspires a man to write a movie in which hundreds of people are blown up and which, by his own estimate, contains only three pages of dialogue between the two main characters, apparently you have to listen to the lyrics of a psychedelic 1968 song called In Held ‘Twas in I: Glimpses of Nirvana. This is the song that made Stallone want to be a writer, which is surprising because while it contains one Zen koan and mentions the Dalai Lama three times, it does not allude to firing a rocket launcher through a helicopter window.

And then there’s this:

Sure, Stallone agreed to do the movie before Rocky Balboa was approved, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t find something to say. Like Procol Harum, Stallone is not afraid of metaphor, of being opaque, of answering some questions with questions and other questions with a hail of bullets. What he wanted to say in the new Rambo came down to one smart speech: “Old men start wars. Young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is an accident. We’re animals.” Stallone eventually cut all that dialogue out because Rambo is a silent man, and blurting out your thesis is for college papers, not movies.

And finally:

The guy who created Rocky is a cheery pessimist who believes that despite an ugly world, you can make incredible things happen with great effort. “Rocky represents the optimistic side of life, and Rambo represents purgatory,” he says. The world, Rambo realizes, is perpetually chaotic and dangerous. “If you think people are inherently good, you get rid of the police for 24 hours—see what happens,” Stallone says. “I could start a war in 30 seconds. But some countries spend 100 years trying to find peace. Just like good manners, peace has to be learned.”

I also like A.O. Scott’s story in the NY Times:
“Rambo (2008): Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Jungle”:

When we first encounter him, this weary warrior has retreated from geopolitics, passing the time at a remote river station in the Thai jungle, where he hunts poisonous snakes and dabbles in blacksmithing. Old Rambo seems kind of depressed, to tell the truth, until his wrath is stirred by the viciousness of the Burmese Army.

Burma? But why not Burma? (In this movie, no one calls it Myanmar.) As a precredit montage of actual news clips reminds us, the military government of that nation has been engaged not only in widespread authoritarian abuses but also in a brutal, long-running campaign against the Karen ethnic minority. And it is with the Karen that Rambo, once roused from his weary cynicism, throws in his lot. No longer the bloody avatar of wounded American pride, he seems more inclined toward humanitarian intervention — a one-man N.G.O. with a machete. Will he show up in Darfur next?

The review ends on this surprisingly upbeat note:

Mr. Stallone is smart enough — or maybe dumb enough, though I tend to think not — to present the mythic dimensions of the character without apology or irony. His face looks like a misshapen chunk of granite, and his acting is only slightly more expressive, but the man gets the job done. Welcome back.

Other reviews, however, aren’t as kind:

Hollywood Reporter/Reuters: “Rambo should have left sleeping dogs of war lie”

SF Chronicle: “‘Rambo’ – There will be blood. And rippled muscle.”

Kansas City Star: “GRAMPO! At 61, Rambo is in fighting form, but does America still care?”

(Emphasis mine.)

Have you seen this flick? What do you think?

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Misc.

$150 Per Night to Live Like a Peasant in India

BBC News:

Some of India’s richest people are paying $150 a night to live like peasants at a “native village” in the southern state of Karnataka.

The village, Hessargatta – just outside India’s IT capital, Bangalore – is designed to encourage the preservation of some of India’s rural traditions.

It offers visitors the chance to qualify in tasks like milking cows and looking after the other animals, such as turkeys, ducks, chickens and dogs…

Related: Virtual Airplane Rides in Delhi.

(Via my new favorite blog.)

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Misc.

Chicago Tribune Eliminates Help-Wanted Ads on Weekdays

Editor and Publisher:

In the most radical move from print to digital advertising by a major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune announced Monday it is eliminating help-wanted ads from the newspaper on weekdays.

Instead, there will be a listing of basic information in the business section every Tuesday. The listing, called “Careerbuilder QuickFind,” will refer readers to the full recruitment ad on chicagotribune.com/careerbuilder through a Web ID.

…

“Chicago Tribune and the rest of the newspaper industry face the same challenges with shifts in help wanted advertising, and we are taking the lead on reinventing the way we present our job listings,” Ellen Glassberg, the paper’s director of recruitment advertising, said in a statement. “We see this challenge as an opportunity for us to retool our recruitment advertising offerings and fully integrate the online and print job search experience to be hyper-focused on the needs of job seekers.”

As reported, the Tribune launched its redesign Monday with a new nameplate, narrower page width, and some changes in section head typefaces.

Emphasis mine.

(Via. blog.pmarca.com.)

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Misc.

Scrivener in the New York Times Magazine

Remember Scrivener, the excellent OS X writing application that I mentioned back in July? Virginia Heffernan, in a recent New York Times Magazine story about Mac OS X alternatives to Microsoft Word, gives Scrivener an excellent review:

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.”

(Via 43 Folders.)

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Misc.

The WSJ’s Informed Reader Blog

The Wall Street Journal’s Informed Reader blog (tag line: “a survey of insights from media around the world”) has quickly become one of my favorite sources for international news from a variety of publications.

Recent posts include:

— “Malnutrition Plagues Peru Despite Economic Growth,”
— “African Farm Boom Defies Continent’s Grim Image,”
— “How Nerdy are Sports Fans?”
— “Getting Vicuna Wool the Inca Way”

(Via fimoculous’s “Best Blogs of 2007 That You (Maybe) Aren’t Reading”.)

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Misc.

Best Books of 2007

I was too busy this year to put together my annual Bloggers’ Favorite Books list (previous lists: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). But here’re some other round-ups that you might enjoy:

— “PW’s Best Books of the Year” — from the staff of Publishers Weekly.

— The New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2007” and “A Year of Books Worth Curling Up With.”

— “Pick of the Bunch,” from The Economist.

— “Of War and Wharton, Starbucks and ‘Peanuts,'” from the Wall Street Journal.

— “The Best Books We Read In 2007,” from The Onion AV Club.

— Entertainment Weekly’s “The Best Books of 2007.”

— “Editors’ Picks: Top 100 Books,” from Amazon.com

— For further reading, I suggest this excellent best-of lists compendium at fimoculous.com.

— And finally, a useful tool for sharing your favorite books and getting recommendations from others is GoodReads.com, which is a sort of social networking site for avid readers.

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Misc.

Thailand Elections: Voters Choose PPP

New York Times: “Former Premier’s Party Wins Thai Vote”

A party that backs former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra won a parliamentary election on Sunday, defeating a party backed by the generals who ousted him in a coup 15 months ago.

At a recent rally for the People Power Party, participants wore masks bearing the likeness of the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, still a popular and controversial figure in Thailand.

The election result was a repudiation of the generals, who had worked hard to discredit Mr. Thaksin and neutralize his supporters. But the shape of the next government remained in question.

With 95 percent of the votes counted, the pro-Thaksin People Power Party had won 228 of the 480 seats in Parliament, less than a majority but enough to try to form a coalition government.

The Democrat Party, backed by the generals and the political establishment, won 166 seats.

The strong showing means that Mr. Thaksin and his supporters will remain a force in Thai politics whether or not they form a government, and ensures that a struggle for power will continue in this deeply divided country.

FT: “Thaksin allies win elections in snub to military”

Allies of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s deposed prime minister, won a convincing victory in yesterday’s parliamentary elections in a strong rebuke to the military coup leaders who drove the controversial premier from power last year.

However, the People’s Power party, which became a refuge for Thaksin loyalists following the May dissolution of the former leader’s Thai Rak Thai party, fell slightly short of the 240 seats needed for an absolute parliamentary majority, with early results showing them winning about 230 places in the 480-seat assembly.

This opens the door for a period of intense political bargaining that could see the second-place Democrats, led by the Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva, form a government in coalition with all other parties.

The military, and the palace backers of last year’s coup d’état, are expected to lean hard on the five smaller parties to deter them from entering an alliance with the PPP, and to press them into a shotgun marriage with the Democrats, which won just 160 seats of the parliament.

Guardian: “Election triumph could herald Thaksin’s return”

The successor party of deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra claimed victory last night in the first election since the military coup 15 months ago, fuelling fears of further political uncertainty.

The Thai election authority’s unofficial tally with most votes counted showed that the People Power party (PPP) won 228 seats, less than an outright majority in the 480-seat parliament, but well ahead of its key rival, the Democrat party, which was headed for just 166.

The electorate’s damning verdict on the coup, if borne out by the final results revealed today, is likely to provoke a protracted period of negotiation as the PPP seeks to form a coalition government.

But the outcome heralds the strong possibility of Thaksin’s return from his London exile as the PPP leadership pledged on the campaign trail that it would dissolve the agencies appointed by the junta to probe corruption charges against the billionaire tycoon who bought Manchester City football club.

Watching from Hong Kong as the results rolled in, Thaksin, 58, raised the spectre of a comeback. That would be a disaster for the military which staged the coup to rid Thai politics of such a divisive figure.

“I would suggest that if we [the PPP] form a national reconciliation government then things will move from there and get smoother and smoother,” he said. “Probably somewhere around mid-February they will have a democratic government. I will consider then when I should go back.”

For further reading, in addition to BangkokPundit, there’s a Wikipedia page that offers a basic overview: Thai general election, 2007.

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Misc.

Thailand Elections on Sunday

Thai voters go to the polls on Sunday in what will be the first election since the military coup in September, 2006.

AFP: “Rallies to mark final phase of Thai election campaign”:

Thailand enters its final day of election campaigning Friday, with rallies planned in the capital as the kingdom gears up to vote in a new leader and end more than a year of military rule.

People will head to polling booths on Sunday in the first vote since twice-elected premier Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a coup in September 2006 after months of political turmoil and street protests.

Many of Thailand’s 45.65 million voters are hoping the elections will bring stability back to a nation that has seen 18 coups since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932.

But the country remains fiercely divided, with the poorer northeast still loyal to Thaksin, while people in more prosperous Bangkok and the central regions are vehemently opposed to the return of the millionaire politician.

“What emerges very clearly is this election is about whether or not you support Thaksin and (his party) Thai Rak Thai, or whether or not you support the junta and those who opposed him,” said Giles Ji Ungpakorn, a politics lecturer at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

Two major parties have emerged as frontrunners, and both are hoping that rallies late Friday in Bangkok will give their campaigns a last-minute boost…

AP: “Corruption and politics: Thailand’s old guard set to return in post-coup election”:

One leading candidate in Thailand’s election is nicknamed the “Walking ATM Machine” for allegedly doling out cash to buy votes. Another reportedly made millions from illegal gambling dens.

Thai voters elect a new government Sunday, 15 months after the military deposed former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on grounds that he was too corrupt. It looks like they will get more of the same.

Local commentators have dubbed the election the return of Thailand’s political dinosaurs, many of whom were sidelined during Thaksin’s six-year grip on power.

“Unless the old guard has come up with new ideas, it is likely that Thai politics will return to the same vicious cycle of vote-buying, election, corruption, protests — and then, perhaps, another coup,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

CSM: “Tensions rise as Thais head to polls”:

Thai voters go to the polls Sunday in the first elections to be held since a bloodless military takeover last year. But the final results may not be to the generals’ liking, dimming the prospect for a smooth hand over of power and an end to a protracted political crisis.

Election officials expect a large turnout after nearly 3 million out of 45 million eligible voters cast advance or absentee ballots last weekend. The elections are the first to be run under a new military-backed Constitution, Thailand’s 18th since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. Politicians have already vowed to amend the 2007 Constitution, which gives judges, bureaucrats, and generals immense powers to keep elected governments in check.

In recent weeks, tensions have risen over the strong showing of the People’s Power Party (PPP), which is openly loyal to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Polling is illegal during the final week of campaigning, but previous polls indicated that the PPP may win as many as half of the 480 seats in parliament, well ahead of the second-place Democrat Party.

Time: “Thailand’s Proxy Candidate”:

If you’re a Thai voter who longs for the return of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, then Samak Sundaravej is your man. An acid-tongued, fire-breathing ultra-conservative who brands his opponents communists and “street gangsters,” the 72-year-old former Bangkok governor is running in the Dec. 23 national election on a platform the rural masses find irresistible: as he unabashedly declares, “I’m Thaksin’s nominee.” Samak, the nominal leader of the People Power Party (PPP), has promised that if elected he’ll bring back Thaksin and his populist policies, like cheap credit and debt moratoriums. Samak has vowed to grant amnesty to 111 politicians convicted last June by a Constitutional Tribunal of electoral fraud, including the former prime minister. The judges banned them from political activity for five years and dissolved their Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party. Samak’s pledge has the PPP, essentially a reconstituted TRT, leading in every opinion poll.

Reuters: “Stars twinkle political chaos over Thai election”:

Thailand’s soothsayers, like most of its political analysts, reckon Sunday’s general election will do little or nothing in the short term to resolve the country’s deep divisions.

Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Eton- and Oxford-educated chief of a Democrat Party expected to emerge second to the People Power Party backing ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, should become prime minister at the head of a coalition, they said.

But it was not expected to last or go unchallenged.

“The country will be in chaos as People Power fans don’t want to give up and the economy will escalate from bad to worse,” said Kitja Thaveekulkij, who predicted Thaksin’s ouster in 2006 five months beforehand.

“Abhisit will be prime minister for one-and-a-half years at most. After that the Democrats will have to shut their party for renovation awaiting a new leader to emerge,” Kitja told Reuters.

That prediction was much in line with the views of political analysts who believe the leaders of the September 2006 coup against Thaksin and the royalist establishment are determined not to let his followers back into power.

For frequently-updated info, check out BangkokPundit and 2Bangkok.com.

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Misc.

Waffle-Coated Hot Dog: Consumed in Kanchanaburi, Thailand

Remember the french fry-coated hot dog that I photographed in Seoul a while back? I mean, seriously, given the international acclaim that followed, how could you forget?


Well, in my ongoing quest to identify and consume hot dogs encrusted in all manner of incongruous snack foods, I bring you the waffle-coated hot dog.

The Waffle-Coated Hot Dog

In a feat of observation that would make Austin proud, I recently spotted — and subsequently scarfed down, lest I fail in my mission — this remarkably-executed example of Euro/American-Thai culinary fusion at a night market in Kanchanaburi, Thailand.

The Waffle-Coated Hot Dog

Waffle-Coated Hot Dogs

Waffle-Coated Hot Dog: the Chefs in Action

Per the vendor’s recommendation, I applied ketchup. The result was a flavor profile not commonly encountered in the west: The dish was doughy and sweet from the waffle, meaty and nitrate-infused due to the hot dog, and acidic from the ketchup.

After finishing my snack, I thanked the vendor — the man in the photo above — and asked him what this particular treat was called. He looked at me blankly, turned to his companions, and then took a deep breath. “Waffle…hot dog,” he said.

There you have it. The international language of snack foods, my friends.

LINK LOVE UPDATE, Dec. 16: The Thai waffle-coated hot dog, I’m happy to say, has struck a chord with lovers of silly foodstuffs the world over. It’s been featured on the following fine blogs: Coudal.com’s Fresh Signals, The Food Section, SuperSizedMeals.com, and Blog on a Toothpick.