The Shape of Days

News junkies the world over are scouring the web for photographs of the terrible train crash and explosion in North Korea and coming up empty-handed.

The AP just moved an alert over their wire that explains why.

We are pursuing pictures from the train collision site in Ryongchon, North Korea, but at this time there is nothing available from the site of the crash. Video footage from Korean television being seen is not the train explosion, but a graphic reenactment. We do not plan to use images from that video.

There just aren’t any, folks. If this crash happened in the US, or Mexico, or the Australian outback, or the furthest reaches of Siberia, there would be news crews crawling all over it, with photos on every wire service and a real-time feed piped straight into CNN Center in Atlanta.

The DPRK—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—is a different world.

Here is a fascinating travelogue of one South Korean resident’s once-in-a-lifetime trip north of the DMZ.

The DPRK is also home of one of the world’s tallest buildings… or rather it would have been, if it had ever been completed. The 105-floor, thousand-foot-tall Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang is also, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever constructed by the hand of man. I don’t know what it is, but photos of it just fill me with dread. This picture from the above-linked travelogue shows it towering in the distance like some kind of sinister, looming shadow.

Pyongyang must be a very weird place.

• There aren’t any
• I guess there really aren’t any new ideas
• There aren’t enough Google hits out there for my name