Newsflash #2: Rodman slams North Korea Nuke Test 'Lies'

Cruising through the crowd at a dizzying 6' 7" (2.01m), the NBA's Good-Boy-Gone-Rotten Rodman normally never needs to actually do anything controversial to get noticed. After all, the spotlight naturally follows him everywhere he goes; whether he's alone, sporting dyed hair, tattoos and facial piercings or with partners bathing in his flamboyant mix of celebrity and notoriety - Madonna and Carmen Electra to name just a few.  However today Rodman eclipsed all previous scurrilous stunts combined by claiming that not only was the media wrong about North Korea's secretive nuclear weapons tests, but that Rodman even blames himself for the entire international crisis.

Rodman sending mixed messages - which until now defy decryption

Rodman 6'7" and Electra 5'3" : "How's the weather up there tonight Dinkums ?" 

Cynics claim that since 2013, Rodman's unsanctioned, self-styled, booze and basketball-fueled train-wreck diplomacy has almost come off the rails during several high-profile visits to the one of the world's most oppressive regimes.  Rodman himself maintains that North Korea's diminutive Kim Jong-Un (5'1") is largely misunderstood, unfairly demonised and is simply doing a difficult job in hard times.  However even those who subscribe to Rodman's rose-tinted views found this week's claims more than a little unlikely. Rodman insisted that September's sensational media reports of NK's fifth nuclear test were wildly inaccurate and instead offered a seemingly innocent explanation.  

"I count Kim as my good friend for life; he's cool and like, I can read the man." explained Rodman, "Sure, back in 2013 I made some mistakes and accidentally shat on his mat a little.  How did I know that confirming our kinship by referring to Kim as my 'brother from another mother' could be taken so seriously ? Seems it was nothing short of heresy to imply that I was an offspring of the Kim dynasty. I mean like, as if, huh ? Anyway, it took a while but we got past that and now Kim and I have been in a good place since then."

Rodman explained that a dramatic 'near miss' during a recent visit gave some warning of the inevitable fall-out to come. "We spent much of the last basketball tour going through some like new techniques, sharing our best moves and stuff. The Koreans were really like getting into it. We also took quite a lot of quality time out deep underground in Kim's very own big-ass mancave. He's got like a lot of stuff fitted out down there but see, it's so deep underground and what with the rocks 'n' stuff, you just can't get no decent tv reception.  I mean back in the day you were happy to like twiddle around with a coat hanger thing to watch Star Trek on some black and white portable stuff but today it's gotta be like super HD or it ain't worth watching, am I right ? "

"So we had no choice; we broke out some of the new smartphones that we'd brought with us and uplinked into Kim's mancave wi-fi. It has got to be the world's coolest hangout; chillin' with the team streaming South Korean K-Pop down into like Kim's own crib. It was a real cool party; endless food, open bar, huge hot tub, karaoke in the sauna, stern-looking chicks wearing starched uniforms while toting guns an' ammo; I mean, what's not to like, huh ?  I'd go back there tomorrow." 

South Korea's party girls - no respectable North Korean mancave is complete without K-Pop

North Korea's party girls - no respectable party leader is complete without armed ballerinas

"And that's when it happened the first time," continued Rodman, "We left Kim's crib to return to the surface to warm up for the day's exhibition match.  We rode the elevator for like hundreds of metres back up to the sports hall and had just started our routine when there was like a massive blast from below.  The elevator doors were blown right out and there was smoke and rock dust and stuff everywhere, you know; it really wasn't cool. Of course the army piled in followed by people in biohazard suits, it was pretty chaotic for a while there and I already had some bad feeling that we were going to be held somehow responsible. However Kim's guys got the situation pretty much under control quite quickly and identified the cause of the blast."

"See, it's known all across Korea that the flaming hot kimchi stuff that they eat everyday is more or less like weapons grade material when stored in large quantities. Pound for pound it's proven to pack an explosive yield ten times higher than uranium or plutonium, which is why every Korean always stores kimchi at very low temperatures in fridges at home. Now see, at room temperature kimchi has to be handled in small quantities, which is why it's always served in those small side dishes at the table. Well anyways Kim's guys told us that one of the new smartphones that we'd left in his crib had set up some kinda 'electro-magnetic resonance' with the entire contents of Kim's massive personal kimchi coldstore. Within just a few minutes the phone, acting like a detonator, had started a chain reaction in the kimchi which then went super critical and blew the whole place sky high like a Bond movie. I mean, I apologised to Kim right there and then in front of everyone. After all we wrecked his crib outright; his manspace was violated, I felt bad for the man. But you know, like I keep telling everyone, Kim is cool, he saw it for what it was, an honest mistake. But this just shows that you gotta handle kimchi with the utmost respect and you gotta be even more careful with that new bad-ass Galaxy Note 007. There's simply no tellin' what those things are capable of."

License to kill: The Galaxy Note 007 -Now standard issue to all agents on Her Majesty's Secret Service and all reputable intelligence services worldwide

When failure is not an option, nobody does it better.
The Galaxy Note 007 - the ultimate 'fireball in your pocket' for discerning agents everywhere.

Kimchi

Whatever, wherever and whenever you choose to eat in Korea, your order will always be served with a diverse array of free side dishes which are replenished as you eat.  One or two of these sides will always include some variants of ‘Kimchi’, a food eaten proudly (to say nothing of bravely) with every meal in Korea. 

Some tourist guides have described kimchi as ‘cabbage dipped in teargas’ but this is in fact too kind. Records are unclear about its origins - perhaps an experimental germ warfare laboratory, perhaps fragments from a passing meteor - but in Korea it has been cultivated well beyond the realms of conventional earth science. It makes you glad that the USA only allowed Oppenheimer to play with plutonium, rather than something really dangerous. If Truman had dropped Kimchi on Hiroshima there would be no more Hiroshima today, in fact there would have been nothing east of India since 1945.

Kimchi comes without government health warnings

Kimchi however is no cold war secret.  Not only is it made routinely by most people at home, but as winter begins it forms something of a community welfare effort as huge groups of volunteers are mobilised across the length and breadth of the country to prepare kimchi for the poor and needy. 

Thousands of volunteers at Seoul City Hall making kimchi for the poor

First the cabbage leaves are rolled in a severe cocktail of basic ingredients, yeasts and spices. The whole lot is then left in earthenware pots to go off, biologically degrade and then reconstitute itself as an entirely new alien life form with the ferocity to make a Klingon’s knees buckle

Naturally Koreans suppress a chuckle watching westerners eat this for the first time. They openly encourage us with recommendations that the stuff is ‘very good for cancer’. It is just as we start to formulate a witty riposte that the reaction sets in. First the eyes becoming bloodshot, then the uncontrollable dribbling, the incoherent gibberish and finally that sensation of being 9 months pregnant with a nuclear reactor core in meltdown. 

It should be said the natives here are little better at enduring the stuff themselves. After lunch it takes a full two hours before any of them will venture more than 50 yards from either the gents or a water dispenser, while meetings in confined conference rooms are entirely out of the question.