It is written in the official Communist Dictator Handbook that when a leader dies he must be laid out like a meat-and-cold-cuts tray at a regional sales conference. Today mourners paid respects to Kim Jong il's dead body.
When Kim Jong-Il died Saturday he was on a train finishing up one of his frequent "field guidance tours," which are famous on the internet for the surreal photos they produced of Kim looking at everyday objects. Here are photos taken during the last stop on Kim's last tour, about two days before his death.
Kim Jong-Il's successor is his youngest son, Kim Jong-un. It's time to meet the most powerful twenty-something in the world: an enigmatic basketball fanatic and four-star general with a bad case of fat cheeks and an itchy trigger finger.
With the death of Kim Jong-il, the world loses one of the greatest self-aggrandizing fantasists of all time. Here are ten of the craziest Jong-il stories floating out there:
Kim Jong-il, the fearsome, furtive, and fashion-forward leader of North Korea, is dead at age 69. This according to a weeping announcer on a "special broadcast" delivered on North Korean television on Monday. The Dear Leader was on a train traveling through Pyongyang during a "field guidance tour" at the time.
Seems that all the revolutionary goings-on in Libya have made North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il a bit nervous. He doesn't really want his people to get any funny ideas, like "oh shit—why do we obey this dude again? He's not even hot."
A big, tentative congrats to North Korea, whose infamous Ryugyong Hotel (aka the "Hotel of Doom") is slated to open its doors in April 2012—only 24 years after its groundbreaking, and just in time for the 100th birthday celebration of O.G. Most Glorious Leader on High Kim Il-sung. Sadly, he won't be doing the ribbon-cutting because he died in 1994. But his ghost is expected to haunt and place bugs in some of the rooms.
The Mangyongbong, a ferry that was previously used to shuttle passengers between North Korea and Japan, is now North Korea's hot new tourist vessel. Yesterday was the Mangyongbong's maiden voyage as a pleasure craft, embarking on a tour of the country's eastern coastline, and North Korea's official KCNA has the details:
Hey, has anyone seen Dutch stamp collector Willem van der Bijl? He went to North Korea in July to buy some of the country's stamps, and his family hasn't heard from him since. Oh! There he is! In the Pyongyang Times, extensively praising North Korean elections in a personal essay!
What does North Korea look like? Not too different from anywhere else—just emptier.
Despite threats from the U.S. State Department last summer that Kim Jong-il would no longer be able to buy jet skis and Iranian caviar, he's still shelling out millions of dollars on everything from Rolex watches to Gucci handbags for his top officials and he's even having McDonald's delivered by airplane from China, according to the Korea Herald.
You could spend hours coming up with strong contenders for the title of world's most thankless job, but how about any job that involves negotiating with North Korea? That would have to be up there.
China and North Korea are the happiest nations on Earth, while people in the United States are utterly miserable, according to a completely objective survey by North Korean researchers. Groundbreaking.
South Korean soldiers have been ordered to stop using pictures of Kim Jong-il, his daddy Kim Il-sung, and cherublike son Kim Jong-un for target practice after images of the targets surfaced in newspapers there this week. That should really help to restore normal relations between the two countries.
