I'm Sweeney Todd and I approved this Message

I concede that for serious and sober people especially in the Far East of the world, Kim Jong-un is equal parts menacing and challenging, but for bozos like me, thousands of miles away, he's like something the writers on Comedy Central's Daily Show might imagineer if they were washing 'ludes down with Annie Green Springs.

The good news, I suppose, is they're not. Leaving the bad news that another grease spot with legs is wandering the world tyrannizing his own countrymen and terrorizing his neighbors. There is, in the opinions of people who claim to know this stuff, very probably a no more oppressive, backward and evil regime on earth than the one Jong-un, Dennis Rodman's H-O-R-S-E buddy, heads in North Korea.

Armed to the teeth, paranoid (and with good reason, so I guess in that sense, they're cured), always on the brink of starvation as they continually and continuously fail to produce enough food to feed themselves, and engaged in a form of international relations that makes brinkmanship look like Neville's return from his Weekend in Munich the best thing since Vlad's staff assistance visit to the Crimea, the reason why we haven't nuked North Korea, I feel, is that the South Koreans prefer to be part of a peninsula instead of an island.

And now, in addition to learning 450 recipes for gluten-free rock soup (North Korea's sole cash crop unless braggadocio and BS have been added to the list), Jong-un has skin in the game in terms of haircuts.

This showed up some time ago on line and, once you realize the site is a leisure time activity of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it's actually quite nice, albeit in a you-folks-live-on-a-different-planet-doncha kind of way. I especially enjoy the drop down window on the right side of the screen where moderators and world wide guests exchange invective while pretending they're having a conversation.

And for a moment, it looked like we had gone to ludicrous speed, as the Web was abuzz with 'news' that the men of North Korea were all going to learn the Korean tonsorial command for 'high and tight' but perhaps that's one one tale that's beyond the credible.

I'm still working on the career choice of Simon C, quoted in the story, who describes himself as being someone who arranges foreigners' vacations to North Korea. What do you suppose his client base might be? People who've already seen the Killing Fields of Kampuchea? Does he offer other packages, perhaps a "Flaunt Human Rights" 8 days and 7 nights in some dark corner of the world and/or perks like 'Have Your Picture Taken with Kony'?

Perhaps Jong-un who could be the Pillsbury Dough-boy's evil twin, physically, has stumbled onto a greater truth though he'd never concede it, not even to himself. "Because in all of the whole human race Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two. There's the one staying put in his proper place And the one with his foot in the other one's face."

I'm sure some North Koreans cannot wait for the jackboot to be on the other fist.
 -bill kenny