They're a country akin to heavily floral wall paper, or Ford Cortinas, in that every time I look at them, I can't but help having to double take to check I'm not suddenly in the 60's. Struggling with massive humanitarian and social problems at home, and growing international condemnation, they've opted for the well trodden Outcast Country path of starting a nuclear program. Akin to the loner kid on the corner of the playground, who eventually, after a long stint of listening to the Smiths and wearing black t-shirts, shows up to school with a knife and scares the shite out of Lucy in the toilets, before being carted off by the authorities. Sadly, in our case, there are no authorities, Lucy is Japan, and the knife is a nuclear tipped missile.
Some years back, N Korea tested a nuclear weapon, which was more akin to some bloke in Pyongyang getting a bit excited with a champagne bottle than anything I was prepared to get very worried about. And you know what? I'm still not worried.
Kim-Jong-Il, the world's only hyphenated dictator, has heralded the launch of the communication satellite as a victory, and predictably, the US, and Japan (among others) have publicly made a show of bricking it over what they claim is a cover for a test of a ballistic missile. So let's have a look at this satellite (that may or may not be there, no one is as of yet really sure what happened).
North Korea is a communistical country, so is obsessed by the revolution in the same way that the Daily Express is obsessed with "values." It's really just used a word that endorses anything it's tacked onto. So the satellite has been put there under the express purpose of broadcasting "revolutionary melodies." Presumably under the hope that farmers in the American Mid-West will tune into the tinny Korean jingles, realise what they've been missing all these years, and rise against the oppressive western capitalists. What would have made me stop and worry would have been the satellite pounding out some AC/DC riff, or drenching the world in the radio waves of Pink Floyd. Then I would have been convinced we were faced with a country of nutters, who not only had technology, but weren't taking it seriously! As is, all we've got is another dictator with his trousers down in the boy's toilets, trying to convince everyone how his willy's bigger than everyone else's.
