We Totally ROK It

Yes, For Today We Hop, Skip And Jump Across The World -
Don't worry, we'll get back to Keanu and north-east Poland at some point.  Today, however, we focus on Korea, and South Korea, occasionally known as the Republic Of Korea. Not the DPRK, usually known at North Korea, because it's neither Democratic nor a Republic, being in fact a feudal fiefdom under a Fat Controller*.  Art?

The lights at sea are Japanese fishing fleets

     The BBC, you see, had an article on an activity I'd never heard of before, naked weasel-juggling the sending of hot air balloons over the Korean De-Militarized Zone from the South and into the North.  Art?

Insert tasteless pun <here>

     These balloons are sent aloft for the prevailing winds to carry them o'er the border, carrying payloads of such regime-toppling items as chocolate, propaganda leaflets and - most heinous of all! - dollar notes.  Nork guards, incensed to the point of stupidity, have tried to shoot the balloons down in the past, thus creating inadvertent gun battles with their Southern counterparts.

One hundred-thousandth of the total sent

     The Nork regime's spokesdemon came out with a venomous frothing rant about this balloon-baiting, which is the worst thing she could possibly have done, because now the Southern balloon-launchers know it angers her (and thus the regime) and will carry on doing it, just to spite them.
     Now, I know you think you know why the Snapping Dragon spake thus - Art?

Obviously slower than her brother at getting to the pies

     You reason: because anything like an un-monitored balloon carrying propaganda that makes the Nork regime look bad, right?
     WRONG!     Let us cast our minds back to Perfidious Albion in the spring of 1942, standing alone against the Nazi hordes**, retaliating by sending over -
     Balloons!
     That's right, 100,000 rubber balloons, which trailed a long, thin steel cable, and which had some simple mechanisms to maintain a height of 1,000 feet once across the Channel.  These balloons cost about £3 at the time, the cable even less, and they wrought utter havoc upon Occupied Europe's power supplies.  They would be carried into power and signal lines, cause short circuits, burn out cables, start fires and even, thanks to faulty safety gear, caused an entire power station to burn down.  Art?

This bit of kit should not look like this.

     It is the spectacle of sabotage like this happening that must haunt The Only Fat Man In North Korea, because if a highly-industrialised, very large and utterly dismissive of legal niceties nation like Nazi Germany can be sent round the bend by some cheap balloons, what would the effect be on the Norks if those balloons accidentally and entirely coincidentally used 'trailing wires' to attach their payload?  Art!

What was left of the power station at Bohlen.

     Yeah, it's estimated that £1,000,000 worth of damage was caused by a balloon-and-wire combination that cost £6.
     Quiver, Fat Man, Quiver!
     Yes, I know what you're thinking - Politics and Current Affairs on BOOJUM! - how can this be?  Well it can be because I say it can, and because it has an informational base eighty years old.     Motley!  You hold these balloons I've inflated with hydrogen, and then I'll shoot them with my laser - well you should have shut your eyes, then.

Quite possibly the motley, smarting a little

The K-Pop StopConrad, on reading the BBC article, headed right on over to Ask A Korean! in order to check and see if he'd responded.
     Nope, seemingly never.  Perhaps he considers balloon-launching to be a banal and harmless pastime WHICH IS CLEARLY WRONG!
     Your Humble Scribe then realised he'd left that list of Top 50 K-Pop Bands at Tae Jin Ah, and hadn't picked up anything since, oooooh, ages ago.  You remember?  I was going through a list of K-Pop bands that AAK! considered important, and the only one I really liked was Delispice.

Worth a listen

     So!  Here we go!
     "Song Dae-Gwan": aaaaand nothing on Spotify.  Bar some cheesy karaoke instrumentals "in the style of" and it didn't make a difference if Conrad included the hyphen or not.  I don't even know if we can get a photo of he/she/it/they - Art?

Hmmmm.  A bit long in the tooth to be a pop star.  Is he from the Sixties?

     Then there is the rather mysterious "Dongbangshinki", because when Your Humble Scribe used this name on Spotify, the first song was a K-Pop staple, that of the Slushy Balladeer, which Conrad is not fond of (even if the tweenaged girls swoon for it).  And then there was another track, which was quite electro and worth listening to - except the band name that came up at bottom port in Spotify was "TVXQ!", meaning I'd picked up a completely different band.  Perhaps.  Given that it was 23:05 I didn't have time to check; maybe tomorrow.  Art?

"Who Are You"?
(enquired Roger Daltrey)

     Last of today's trio - for we do not want too much of a questionable thing, do we? - came "Kim Jong-Seo", and this chap started off with a mournful piano and Korean lyrics, morphing into some decent songs.  It ain't rock but it was definitely a harder-edged pop.  Art?

GET A HAIRCUT***!

"Invasion 1984"
Your Humble Scribe was surprised to see mention of this comic strip on a comics website (probably "Down The Tubes" as that excellent resource "Blimey" went dark at the start of the year), with artwork and splash panel and plotline all torn directly from the pages of "2000AD".  Art?

One has a bad feeling about this ...

     The thing is, Conrad knows all the 2000AD strips up until issue 1000, and this wasn't one of them -
     It turned out to be from the pages of "Battle Action" and was an unrelentingly grim and gory story, where some plucky British chaps (presumably no PC nonsense about women as this was in 1983) try to overcome an alien invasion.  Artwork by the very excellent Eric Bradbury, and the whole thing looks intriguing enough that Conrad may yet purchase the trade paperback.

Urban renovation, UFO style

Finally -
For some reason the blog was unusually popular yesteryon, hitting the 200 mark, which it only usually manages at the weekend, when Your Humble Scribe posts twice a day and people resort to reading BOOJUM! because of their hollow empty lives under lockdown.
     I can only think it's the constant references to Hell and Hades and similar, and so let us end with the Darvaza gas crater instead of fluffy bunnies and rainbows.  Art!

Your Pocket-Hell Simulator for 48 years!

*  This will earn me Death Sentence Number 58 from the DPRK regime; I keep a tally on my bedpost.
** I only say this to tweat Tsar Putin's tail.  That's either Death Sentence Number 17 or 18, their admin is a bit poor.
***  I do seem to be saying this a lot, don't I?