Oh Beloved Leader, we hardly knew ye.

When an important political figure dies, as Glen Greenwald explains here, we tend to see it as an opportunity to “put politics aside” and pay our “respects” (which means say only nice things about how great they were. This was true of Regan, Nixon and others. It should also be true for the Beloved Leader, Kim-Jong-Il, who passed away this week.

Kim Jong Il was an important political figure and a unique personality.  Some of his political decisions may have been controversial (like starving his own people, holding the world hostage with threats of nuclear war, and generally making North Korea a pit of human misery), but now is not the time to dwell on them. Instead, we should remember the positives: his invention of rainbows and how he helped Korea win WWI with his bravery and cunning. Also his amazing hair.  You will be missed beloved leader, if not by people per se, then at least by exporters of high-end cognac, which he enjoyed squandering his nation’s scarce resources on.

The one you bought because you thought it would be a fun, easy way to get exercise, but now it just sits in the corner of your bedroom filling you with guilt every time you look at it. That’s at least what writing this blog is like for me.

The other similarity is writing this blog has given me amazing triceps.

But for whatever reason, technology is conspiring to make it harder and harder to do something that, ten years ago, was incredibly easy: rent movies.

Yes, this is in part due to the Neflix debacle, but for so many reasons. Now, if I want to rent Goonies let’s say (a hypothetical situation of course, since I own Goonies), my choices are as follows:

1. Put it in my netflix cue and wait a few days

2. Hope is available from some streaming source (VOD, Netflix streaming system, internet), which it never is.

3. Try to understand what that red box thing I keep hearing about is.

Imagine if you came to earth today and were presented with these options for watching movies. Then I came to you with an idea: a place located no farther than a mile or two from your house where you could walk in and literally pick up almost any video you could imagine–and watch it that night? Imagine that the only thing you would need to do to find a movie would be to walk around a room and there they all would be, laid out before you, organized by genre and new releases and with pictures and you could pick up 10 of them and rent them if you wanted.  Can you imagine something that convenient?

Now, back to waiting for the Lincoln Lawyer, a movie I was in the mood to see two weeks ago to show up so I can immediately toss it back in the mail so I can get to The Philadelphia Story, the movie I am currently in the mood to watch.

I’m still waiting for the perfect “So You Don’t Believe in the Holocaust,” card to come out.

No Rob Schneider angle on this story as far as I can tell. Stay tuned.

That may not sound particularly funny to you, but you have to remember back then massacres were considered the ultimate practical joke, and most of the deaths were, if historical sources are to be believed, particularly hilarious.

Proximally of the eggs Wolf Blitzer so enjoyed on his vacation in North Korea.

I think it’s well documented at this point that I’m OBSESSED with North Korea and trying to figure out what life is like there.  So when I saw that Wolf Blitzer spent 9 or so days inside North Korea I thought, finally, some answers to my burning questions like do they really not have stoplights or street signs in North Korea and what are North Korean TV shows about agrarian reform really like?

So you can imagine my disappointment when reading Blitzer’s report, which somehow manages to be more pedestrian an uninformative than a typical Lonely Planet “My Summer in Europe” message board posting.

I mean, this is the weirdest nation in the whole world and Blitzer is reporting that:

The hotel and elite restaurant food was very good, especially if you like Korean food. I stuck with scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast; chicken soup and white rice and steamed veggies for lunch; and usually some grilled Korean chicken or fish for dinner.

And then, with the ridiculous self-pity/self-revelation of a 14-year-old on a camping trip:

Still, six days isolated without e-mail or a cell phone; it was quite a transition for me, but I sort of got used to it and even liked it. I had 983 e-mails waiting for me when I eventually got back to Beijing.

Totalitarian oppression and the threat of nuclear holocaust has never seemed so boring.

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Apples

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Human Heart

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Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin

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Plastic tomatoes

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Certain Snorks

Governor Brewer nails her intro