Socks from Heaven: South Korea Sends Warm Socks to the North via Balloons

An activist group in South Korea has sent over one thousand pairs of warm, wooly socks to the long-suffering citizens of North Korea...attached to enormous balloons.

Crates of the socks were sent high up into the heavens attached to five balloons while the breeze was blowing in the right direction toward the North Korean border from the South Korean city of Paju. The Seoul-based activist group called North Korea Peace also attached "innocuous non-political" messages with the socks. "We're not interested in sending political messages or sparking any troubles there. All we want is that people in the North wear warm socks over their frozen feet," states North Korea Peace spokesperson Sunny Kim.

Socks are apparently so hard to come by in North Korea, that they are often traded for cash. One pair of warm socks can be traded for 22 lbs. of corn, which can sustain an individual for approximately one month. Information sneaking out of the communist nation tells of a nightmarish existence for the North Koreans, including millions of deaths each year from starvation, disease, and exposure.

Relations with the two countries continue to be strained, even in the light of former North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's death last month of a heart attack at the age of 69. Power has since been transferred to Il's son, Kim Jong Un.

Ashes to Ashes: South Korean Company Turns Loved Ones' Ashes into Beads

South Korea has a long tradition of honoring the dead, but now that space is limited for burials and many South Koreans find the tradition of storing a loved ones cremated remains in an urn distasteful, a company has come up with an interesting alternative.

The South Korean company Bonhyang is now offering grieving families the opportunity to transform the ashes of the deceased into decorative bluish beads, which can then be put in attractive containers for display. 

Over a thousand customers have already paid the equivalent of $900 for the unique service, which grinds the deceased's ashes even finer, then heats them up and shapes them into beads more suitable for public display than a boring old urn containing ashes.

Critics claim that the entire process dishonors the dead, but Bonhyang's CEO insists that the process is not disrespectful to time-honored traditions and that the beads created are a beautiful way to honor the memory of a loved one. "They're very beautiful to look at," he says. "You don't feel that these beads are creepy or scary. In fact, there's a holiness and warmth to them."

The Grinch of Pyongyang: North Korea Threatens to Shoot Down Christmas Tree Tower

"Look everybody, it's the Star of Bethlehem! Wait, that's a rocket from the North! Ruuunnn!"

The Christmas Grinch has been found this year, and he lives in Pyongyang, North Korea!

The atheist rogue nation of North Korea has threatened to shoot out the lights of a giant Christmas tree-shaped tower that neighbor South Korea plans to illuminate near the tense militarized border between the two countries!  South Korea plans to turn on about 100,000 lights on the 100 foot-tall steel tower in the shape of a Christmas tree at the top of Aegibong Hill for a second year, located some two miles from the border with North Korea. 

Government officials in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, say that switching on the Christmas lights is an act of sheer propaganda because the twinkling beacons of hope will be visible with the naked eye from the major northern border city of Kaesong.  North Korea, ruled beneath the crushing dictatorship of mini-whack job Kim Jong Il,  believes the lights on the border of prosperous South Korea will be viewed by North Koreans as a sign of affluence of the South and will weaken the regime’s ideological control of its people, who are currently suffering through one of the worst famines in decades.          

So, the psychos of Pyongyang would shoot down a Christmas tree tower, but would let this hideous eyesore of a skyscraper, the decades-unfinished Pyongyang Hotel, stand?

"North Korea: Come for the charm, stay for the death sentence."