What with the breaking news that North Korea has successfully tested a nuke (it's Monday there by the way, if anyone cares), I find myself thinking more of Building T2 than of the imminent game of armed musical chairs the nuclear-club is about to play.

T2, you ask? Check it: the DMZ between North and South Korea is essentially a sixteen-inch-wide strip of concrete, lined with scowling young men with guns on their hips/backs -- and ball-bearings in their pants. Among other things, that strip bisects Building T2.



Let us go inside. Therein, we will find a room. In that room, there is a table. On that table, there is a line of studs. Those studs run precisely one table-height above the line of the concrete strip. That room, including the table, is the one point along the entire DMZ where you can cross back and forth between North and South without getting your head blown off.

Ponder with me the ridiculousness of shaved-ape geopolitics. Next to that, yet another tribe with nuclear capability just seems kind of silly.

EDIT/UPDATE: 3:21PM THE NEXT DAY
I suspected they might be bluffing ... but some dude on James Nicoll's LJ unwittingly pointed me to this wonderful earthquake tracking site (medusaheading it by the way) that says otherwise. Click on the orange dot for a tabulated breakdown of everything they know about it. Timeline fits and all that.

...

Why are we trying so very hard - and collectively at that - to destroy a world that we've gone to so much trouble to learn and study and create? What the fuck is wrong with the human species?