Tag: wtf

Welcome to the Hotel North Korea

thenulldevice just alerted me to the existence of the Ryugyong Hotel, which is one of the world’s weirdest buildings.

According to the Wikipedia article and a fascinating blog post about it, the hotel is over 1000 feet tall, has 105 stories, and is windowless. It is completely unoccupied. It’s a sharp and pointy pyramid at a 75 degree angle; Lovecraft would have made it Cthulhu’s headquarters. The thing sits glowering over Pyongyang like an Aztec temple. You have to wonder if it has decorative blood gutters on it the way the Mexicans did theirs back in the day. Now there’s a culture that understood official architecture!

It has seven revolving restaurants. Begun in 1987 to get back at the South Koreans for building another big hotel quickly, it was supposed to open in 1989, but construction stopped in 1992. It may well be completely unsound because of the concrete used to build it. I want to see it SO BAD! A tantalizing hint of some fun to be had: an Italian magazine is sponsoring a contest for completing the thing. I bug-me-not’d through their registration to peek at it, and they have photo survey and plan documents to download.

Now if they could just somehow move the thing to Las Vegas. Or sell it to Robert Schuller for a new church…

hey wearescott! Your town gets another honor!

They’re the first town in the U.S. to get an official Wal-Mart dating night, which has already been some type of success in Germany of all places.

The program was hatched by Michelle McGenity, an inventory associate at the Roanoke store, who read an online story about a similar program at a Wal-Mart in Germany. She proposed the idea to her manager, and they devised a plan to publicize it on fliers around the store and even turn it into a charity event. Participants have the option of making a $1 donation to the Children’s Miracle Network.

via robotwisdom

I hate to keep bringing up Dr. Strangelove, but

For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure.

One misconception you may have is that the people who plan our military adventures are cold, calculating bureaucrats who comb through huge quantities of data and calculate invasions, bombings, and coups d’état with analytical precision. That would in fact be hateful and frightening.

Spreadsheets are involved and there are huge quantities of data. And bureaucrats, lots and lots of bureaucrats doing this work. But they’re all completely insane.They have abstracted the world so completely that there is no longer any connection to the ordinary evil of war; they live in another place. Remember that next time you’re watching the news and we do something tragicomic on a huge scale.