When his nation’s land was was threatened by foreign devils, Ahn Sang-Gyu did what any sensible patriot would do: he covered himself with bees.

The Japanese recently claimed a small chain of islands between Japan and South Korea, an area they’ve apparently fought over for years. In protest, Mr. Sang-Gyu – a bee farmer – covered himself with “about 187,453 bees,” the number of square meters on the islands. They weighed over 40 kilograms and stung him “constantly.”

I like to think that he made his point, whatever it was. If nothing else, at least he… umm… got stung by a fuckload of bees?

(video here, bbc article here)

My favorite Chicago paper, The Redeye, has expressed some concern over the soon-to-be-released 9/11 film United 93.  Apparently, five years isn't enough.

I have my own concerns.

In the wake of Tornado Jim (I just named it that), 4,000 residents are still without cable in the Land of Lincoln’s capital. If corpses could move, Honest Abe would be turning over in his grave. Because, you know. He loved cable so much.

As if that weren’t enough, Paul Bunyan has been decapitated. God? WHAT God?!?!

(picture via knowledge is power)

So a female ex-postal worker “went postal” yesterday and killed six people in a mail processing room before committing suicide.  Isn’t that just a little… I don’t know… cliche?  It seems like if you work in an industry that has a stereotype attached to it (like, say, all ex-postal workers come back with a gun and kill their ex-coworkers), you would go out of your way to defy those expectations by, say, not killing all your ex-coworkers.  Like the ice cream man who doesn’t molest any kids, or the milkman who never fucks another man’s wife, these are the people who open our eyes and make us rethink the way we look at the world.  Sometimes it’s the little things – a non-spicy taxi cab, for example – that make all the difference.  Sometimes it’s bigger things, like a sober Irish cop marrying a black chick.  Big or small, these are the things that push society forward toward a glimmering and tolerant future, and it breaks my heart to see people like this set progress back a whole decade, back to a time when it was more than just okay to say someone went “postal” – it was funny.  A time when people got unironically jiggy.  A time when hamsters and babies danced together in harmony.  I thought we’d moved past all that.  I guess I was wrong.

Thanks a lot, female ex-postal worker.

The Chicago Redeye is a consistently awful paper (if you can call it that), but I think they’ve outdone themselves with today’s headline. I wonder how long it took them to come up with this gem:

According to a study in Canada, it can be beneficial to give homeless alcoholics a free glass of wine EVERY HOUR between 7:00 am and 10:00 pm. That’s 16 drinks a day. According to Jeff Turnbull, one of the authors of the study, “Once the craziness of their alcoholism is under control, their wasted lives on the street turned around, they’re interesting people and all that destructive behavior is behind them.” Fair enough.

But while Canada is footing the bill to keep the homeless wasted enough to behave, the bobbies over in London are super pissed at Kate Moss regarding her… ahem… alleged cocaine use.

I don’t want to live in a world where we give our homeless free booze but punish our supermodels for snorting cocaine.  I always sort of figured blow was like a tax write-off for models. Is the problem that cocaine is like CHEATING for models? Like cocaine is to modeling as steroids are to baseball? I guess I don’t understand the modeling industry very well. The way I see it, if we should give homeless people sixteen free glasses of wine a day, then we should give supermodels a free gram of coke a day too.