I made a tirade a few weeks ago about how much I dislike the “one-and-done” aspects of college basketball, and I wrote that I thought the rule made a mockery of the collegiate process. However while I certainly dislike the rule, I certainly don’t think the current “student-athlete” academic experience is one ripe with the pursuit of knowledge. Take University of Buffalo point guard Andy Robinson who tried to get someone to write a paper for him by posting this ad on Facebook:
I am paying anybody who have read the book ‘there are no children here’ by Alex Kotlowitz $30-40 which in some classes you have to read at UB (even more money if you have to read the book a little more!!) to write a 3-4 page paper, on a couple questions which was assigned.
That’s right, he placed this ad on Facebook, a service designed to allow the world to see your posts. The blinding stupidity of Robinson posting an ad on Facebook to assist in cheating is only rivaled by his command of the English language. He’s has been done suspended indefinately from team.
I’ve always had a sort of strange fascination with urban design in other world cultures. That combined with an (un)healthy obsession with Google Earth has allowed me to explore the Ryugyoung Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, one of my favorite urban disasters, in much greater detail. I’d like to try and project some of my horror/amazement onto you.
The Ryungyong Hotel was originally designed to be a 1,083 ft, 5 star, mega luxury hotel in the capital city of the DPRK. The 3.9 million square foot hotel was to feature over 3,000 rooms, 7 rotating restaurants at its peak, and 6 more stationary floors above that. The original thought by the DPRK was that this hotel with 75 degree sloping sides would serve as a springboard to allow foreign investors to toss money into the country. However one might immediately notice that this entire paragraph was composed in the past tense.
Construction on the tower was started in 1987 by Baekdu Mountain Architects & Engineers (read: Kim Il-Sung), but it was abandoned in 1992. The building consists only of its concrete shell and a looming tower crane at it’s peak that serves as a reminder of its desertion. The hotel features no lighting, no plumbing, no electricity, and certainly no guests. Even in it’s uncompleted state, it’s taller than most buildings in the United States and would have been the 7th largest building in the world at the time of its completion. (Currently it’s the 22nd tallest building in the world.) It’s by far the tallest building in North Korea, and it can be clearly seen from most parts of Pyongyang.
The building itself is a national embarrassment. However for reasons of either pride or cost, the structure has yet to be demolished. However perhaps the DPRK is simply waiting for nature to take its course. It’s widely believed that the cement in the concrete of the building is defective. What few reports there are of the building indicate that it’s crumbling and is destined to collapse.
Architecturally the building is simply horrendous as well. It’s clearly the result of some DPRK ministry unfamiliar with building design and not that of an architect. It looks almost like a sort of North Korean response to brutalist buildings that were popular in decades past. I’ve never liked brutalism, but at least pastexamples have some sort of architectural thought behind them as opposed to this sand castle-esque pile of concrete. Esquire went so far as to call the building as the “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind.”
Obviously the building was a financial disaster as well. While no financial records have even been released, it has been estimated by Japanese newspapers that the final cost of the hotel would have been around $750 million, or two percent of North Korea’s GDP. This extravagant spending combined with a stagnating economy at the time is believed to have helped worsen the mass famine in the country during the 1990s.
The country’s “solution” to the failed hotel is also uniquely North Korean. The country has a national eyesore that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is easily seen throughout the city, and is a complete and total failure. So what’s the solution? Pretend it doesn’t exist. You’ll find the building on no maps, no guides, and no pictures of the city. Additionally, residents are very hesitant to even mention its existence even though they can clearly see it from wherever they are in the city.
However, in many ways the building serves as a metaphor for life in the DPRK. It’s a failure that no one talks about, it’s a crumbling shell, a financial disaster, not in-touch with the outside world, under construction, abandoned, etc. The connections just go on and on. However perhaps this mass of metaphors may make the building an architectural landmark. It might inadvertently have become the only honest, symbolic structure in the entire DPRK. Maybe that’s why I like it so much, it’s just ironic.
And I’m not the only one who has a strange fascination with this building as well. German architects Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber have started a conceptual website at www.ryungyong.org that allows visitors to explore and “claim” their own space in the structure. Additionally, an Italian design firm named Extraneo (makers of this disturbing-on-many-levels iPod skin) created this video below entitled “Demolition S How.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what it means, however both of these links show my amazement is not unique.
Though I have to wonder. If it falls down, how long will it be before anyone outside of Pyongyang figures it out?
I usually have a fairly high faith in the goodness of humanity. Maybe it’s because I’m not as cynical or jaded as I should be, or maybe I’m just stupid. However I see a story like this and I just have to stop and sob for a bit.
It seems like these folding camping chairs started appearing around 15 years ago or so (who knows how long they’ve been around), so whoever invented it is probably not dead, but his achievement should definitely be recognized. As an avid tailgater, griller, drinker, and sitter, I use these things just about every weekend. They’re easy to figure out, easy to use, highly functional, easily transportable, inexpensive, and above all else, comfortable. The dude who came up with these things was truly inspired when he (or she, but these things just scream “dude invention”) came up with it. I feel like shaking the inventor’s hand is not enough. He should probably be deified.
I feel like this post is more appropriate for a many-page essay, but here I go with a short blog-burst.
I think most folks are well aware we’re in an energy crunch. Sure we’re a country obsessed with energy consumption, but right now I’m really not that worried about the future. Alternative fuels are booming, and while there are certainly drawbacks to current methods, the fact of the matter is that these are new, unexplored energy distribution systems and they still need to be developed.
Ethanol is the most widely hyped example of these burgeoning new energy sources, and I myself use ethanol in my Tahoe. However many people point to it as being both inefficient and one of the main contributing factors of the increase of global food prices because of its use of corn and subsequent disruption of the food chain. And frankly, they’re correct. However I’m disappointed in the fact that all of these predictions of failure are based on current, corn-based production methods.
The current method of ethanol production is highly disruptive and inefficient, but rest assured that most of the powers-that-be are well aware of this. The end goal of ethanol production is to create cellulosic ethanol that can be generated from the cellulose in cell walls organic waste and non-food based crops as opposed to complex sugars in corn, and these new methods should both be more efficient and have less of an impact on global food prices. There’s even a startup now that claims it can produce ethanol from municipal waste at $1/gallon. It’s the closest thing we’re going to get to the cold fusion reactor on the back of the DeLorian in Back to the Future 2 in which you could cram trash and get 1.21 gigawatts in return.
In the long run, it’s important to understand that Ethanol is not the solution. It’s widely been argued that it’s not the best bet for our next-generation transportation fuels. Until we figure out how to efficiently harness the wireless nuclear power plant at the center of our solar system, Hydrogen fuel appears to be our best bet, but Ethanol could serve as a great bridge on the road to the solution. Ethanol is at best a Band-Aid, and it’s very important for both lawmakers and consumers to understand this.
However we need to stay on the path of finding clean, renewable energy sources. Oil prices might actually begin to drop in the near future, as it turns out there might not really be any regular gasoline shortage, just way too many jittery speculators. (Which I think deep-down we all knew.) I worry that however that this new predicted drop in oil prices will be a mirror of the price drop that happened after the 1970s oil crisis in which OPEC simply increased production and crushed oil prices. After that, the 1970s search for alternative fuels died out with the re-emergence of cheap gas, and I worry that the same thing might be getting ready to happen again! (On an unrelated note, this reminds of me a quote from a history lecture I took in college: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.”)
Perhaps I’m exposing some Libertarian leanings, but at the end of the day the energy business is just that, a business. And there’s nothing worse for profits that annihilating the planet on which your customers live. There have been many desperate pleas and cries for new energy sources, and if there’s a buck to be made out there in these new markets, you better believe there are many, many people out there trying to cash in. We’re going to be all right people.
Maybe it’s because I’m desperately trying to avoid studying for a final tomorrow, but it seems like YouTube has been ripe with above average content lately. This clip further proves that the NBA on TNT crew are the best sports studio commentators on TV, and I’m hoping TNT won’t take this down.
P.S. Did anyone catch Charles Barkley on the Jim Rome Show challenging Skip Bayless and Jay Mariotti (who apparently is so widely hated that his Wikipedia page is locked) to a 2-0n-Chuck fight?
Geno’s Steaks, a famous Philly Cheesesteak operation in the City of Brotherly Love, recently was given a pass after getting in trouble for having signs around the shop that read: “This is America: When Ordering Please Speak English”. As of now, this country does not have English (or any language) as its “National Language”, and the issue often brings up a lot of different emotions among a lot of different people. I have a lot of political leanings, and its rare that I’m going to express them here unless I feel pretty strongly about it, and this is one of those items. I’m one of the members of the camp that wants English to be declared as the national language, however I’m guessing my reasons are a little bit different than the “ZOMG DEY TERK OUR JERBBBBS” mentality that generally occupies this side of the argument.
My feeling is pretty straight forward, and allow me to go into it a bit. Our nation prides (or at least tries to pride) itself on being a “melting pot” of cultures. Say what you will on whether you feel we’re a “melting pot” or a “salad bowl”, but we’ve certainly got a lot of world cultures congregating in this country. And I feel that that that is a good thing, and not only that, I feel that’s a GREAT thing. Part of what makes this nation strong is the rich contributions, experiences, and hard work of people from around the world who have made the U.S. their home. However if we ever want to consider ourselves a unified country that truly is a “melting pot”, we’ve got to have something that unifies us all, and it seems the most obvious item that will achieve that goal is a uniform language. I’m not arguing that newcomers abandon their culture or their language; they’re welcome to speak and practice what they wish as much or as little as they want. I’m just suggesting that if we all had a national uniform language, then the march into the future might be a whole lot easier. Even if such a law were to pass, is the reality of everyone speaking English even possible? Probably not, but I feel it should at least be a goal.
1972’s Exile on Main Street is probably The Rolling Stones’ magnum opus. I feel like saying, “I love Exile on Main Street” to most music geeks is like saying, “I like breathing.” It’s one of those essential, ground-breaking albums that completely encapsulates one of the peaks of a band’s influence on popular music. It’s an odd album in that it only features a few of the Stones’ all-time hits, and even the hits like “Sweet Virginia”, “Tumbling Dice,” and “Happy” featured on this album are fairly obscure when set against their other major singles like “Gimme Shelter”, “Street Fighting Man”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Under My Thumb”, “Start Me Up”, “Jumpin Jack Flash”, etc. It’s one of those rare albums out there that is simply so good that the end-product is greater than any of its individual parts.
I feel like to completely understand both this album and a lot of the Stones’ work at the time one has to understand a bit of what the music culture was like when the Stones were recording. Before the Stones’ formed in 1962, the Rock ‘N Roll, blues, and soul circuits were peaking in the U.S. Acts like Lil’ Richard, Chuck Berry, Louis Jordan, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino were in their prime, and the world wanted a piece of it. That deep southern rock n’ roll sound really resonated with people around the world, and a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were listening. However music distribution as we know it today didn’t exist back in those days, and the fact that an ocean separated the two scenes only impeded the spread. The result was a small but obsessed Rock ‘N Roll following in Britain in the early 1960s. Artists like Jagger and Richards hoarded whatever records made it across the pond, and while rejecting other popular artists of the day like The Who, they created their own unique blend of southern inspired rock. And that’s what Exile on Main Street turned into, a tribute to R&B and Rock ‘N Roll. It’s hard to listen to this album and not hear the chug-a-lug of the railroad tracks in the rhythm section and the soulful presentation so common in American popular music before the Stones.
Now that all being said, Exile on Main Street stands on its own merits. Recorded both in Villfranche-sur-mer in France and in Los Angeles to avoid taxes in Britain, the album features the band at their song-writing best. It also infamously featured Mick Jagger at the beginning of his plummet down into a crippling heroin addiction. The band (and society as a whole) was experiencing so much turmoil in the early 1970s, and this unrest seemed to be represented through Mick Jagger’s muddled and faded vocals. It encapsulates so raw passion and emotion much that it’s hard to translate it into words. This was one of those albums that defined a period in popular culture, and I feel like it should be in every bar jukebox without exception.
Upon release the album rocketed to immediate success but only received moderate critical success. However as the years went by, many began to realize the significance of this album had on popular music. Even Pitchfork Media, a bastion of music snobs worldwide that would normally scorn anything from someone so popular as The Rolling Stones, rated this album #11 among their top 100 albums of the 1970s.
I feel like there’s not much else to say. The album is just that good.
This very NSFW video by Riskay entitled “Smell Yo Dick” is just too unreal, and my brain can’t process it. There’s no way this is real. If it is real, it means that a group of people thought this was a good idea, and that horrifies me on many, many levels.
The fact that I doubt this video’s authenticity only increases my concern that I’ve seen so many fakes, hoaxes, and rick rolls on the intertubes that I can no longer truly appreciate something so insane as this without doubt.
