Missing the target audience yet again

Can I just take a moment here to talk about what is one of my favourite things in the entire world?

This is the Ryugyong Hotel.

It is also known as the "Phantom Hotel", "Phantom Pyramid", or - my favourite - the "Hotel of Doom". The Hotel of Doom. That should probably give you an idea of why I love it so, but it gets better.

It's one of the tallest buildings in the world. It's in Pyongyang, North Korea. Nobody knows why - it's not like anybody visits there (not being mean, that's actually true). Anyway, it was built as a hotel, obviously, but in 1992, five years and US$750,000,000 later, construction was halted. It has remained completely empty and unsafe to inhabit ever since. (Apparently in '08 construction resumed - however in '08 it also ceased to be one of my favourite things).

Now, okay, I realise I'm sounding like a giant nerd and this isn't interesting at all. What is fantastic, though, is North Korea's reaction to having an uninhabitable waste of resources sitting hideously in their capital city.


They decided to pretend it didn't exist.




...




No, really.

You weren't allowed to take photos of it. The government would regularly Photoshop it out of pictures, or crop it out. You weren't allowed to talk about it. They would actually just pretend that thing - scroll up and look at it again, and don't ask me how the person who took that photo managed to get out without getting into some serious business - isn't there at all. LOOK AT THE THING. IT'S HUGE. If you need a comparison, it's bigger than Q1 on the Gold Coast, which in turn is bigger than the Eureka Tower. Hey, also, check it out on Google Maps, you can scroll out basically forever and still see it - well, its shadow anyway - if you know where to look.

IT'S LIKE IGNORING ALL THEM BUSHFIRES. "No, okay, I am absolutely certain that your land was not burned by out-of-control wildfire. Charred and blackened, you say? Well, I'm sorry sir, maybe it was coyotes."

The Elderly: A Case Study

Recently, I have had quite a high level of exposure to the elderly. The elderly are strange, morbid, aged reflections of ourselves, that are neither dead nor alive. They tend to congregate in retirement villages and bowls clubs, while rarely venturing out into the world to feast on the flesh of the young to absorb their youth in a futile attempt to regain their humanity.

In my recent dealings with these horrific nether-beasts from the underworld, I have been given the rare opportunity to study these creatures in their natural habitat, and I have made some remarkable discoveries:

One of the main specimens I have been studying is known to his fellow age-ed ones as 'Peter', who resides in my street. Now From what I can gather, this man has undergone a surgery to remove his stomach for some reason. This was most likely due to the fact that Peter is, well, just really old. You're probably thinking 'what? no stomach? but that's crazy talk!'. And I agree, it is crazy talk. Only someone that has lived such an unnatural long life, like Peter, could survive without a stomach. Now I haven't had the chance to examine this specimen at close range, but after analyzing my findings, I have come to the conclusion that the only form of nutrients Peter is capable of consuming, due to his lack of stomach, is raw youth. While children between the ages of 5 and 12 are the main source of raw youth, an unrefined form of youth can also be harvested from teenagers, but this impure youth is considered by most old people as less filling than the higher grade raw youth. 'How does one attain this youth?' I sense you are thinking, well that is quite is simple. You see the upon reaching the age at which a middle aged person becomes and old person, this age being anywhere from 65-75, depending on the mental and physical fitness of the individual, certain biological changes occur in the persons body. Now these changes vary from small subtle things such as the wrinkling of their skin or the loss of their physical appeal, to the most extreme and horrifying physical change: the growing of an organ called the 'youth straw'. Most scientists will deny the existance of the youth straw, passing it off as an urban myth or old wife's tale, but that is simply because they are scared to acknowledge the fact that god could curse humanity with such dastardly bodily mutation. While the youth straw is technically classified as a bodily organ, it is not actually contained within the body. It takes the form of a horrid, fleshy, straw-like appendage that emanates from the belly button of the old person. If you have been unlucky enough to see an old person you most likely wouldn't have seen their youth straw. This is because they tuck it away under their many roles of wrinkly, rotting, dead flesh located on their belly region. As it's name suggests, the primary function of the youth straw is to latch itself onto, and then suck the youth out of a young host, although it can also be used as a secondary from of breeding between a male and female old person, due to the shriveling of the male's testicles and the drying up of the female's ovaries, rendering these sexual organs as unusable, and just kind of grose. 

I hope you have found this study informative and will put the knowledge to good use in your efforts to banish these wretched abominations known as the elderly, back the abyss from whence they came.