It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:
Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the “flat-top crew cut,” “middle hairstyle,” “low hairstyle,” and “high hairstyle” – variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of “long-haired” men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.
In a break with North Korean TV’s usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?
“No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
“People who wear other’s style of dress and live in other’s style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin,” it says.
Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?
Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.
And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.
…long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Just think what Newton, Einstein and I could have accomplished if we all had crewcuts.
Yeah some chap referenced this in a comment on another thread a few days ago. This story is almost as ridiculous as the N.Korean national anthem! Since I first heard about this story I’ve decided to let my hair grow such as to rival Colin Farrell’s mullet…
The government enforces a standard system of weights and measures. Many people would say this is not an unreasonable thing to have a government for
The bastards are inhuman.
Whoops, must learn this new fangled cut and paste thingy.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding was of course my intended target.
Pete: did you actually mean 50 seperate strands of seven centimetre long hairs?! But yeah the pic in your second link is more readily associated with such a harsh description as ‘inhuman’, than is the great footballer pictured in your first.
Yes, the goodly NK is taking lessons from my father, it seems. He used the very same argument about long hair consuming nutrition from the brain. At the time I thought he was a nutcase. Now I see that he was merely ahead of his time.
HAHA, Aren’t they over in The Peoples Paradise off the mark. I believe that they have had a big mixup. I believe Its communism that consumes a “great deal of nutrition and could thus rob the brain of energy”.
This is just the “Public health” hectoring of here in the wast gone to a slight but not too far off for us extreme.
Think smoking and eating “recommendations”.
Mike – that national anthem’s a cracker!! They really have no idea.
My you are an ignorant bunch. Anyone with any sense realises that the problems of mental health correlate so closely with hair length because of the way the synapses are affected by the hair’s Feng Shui. Just as gravity’s influence is inverse square of distance, the Fengon particles emmitted by the hair have an even greater effect on the brain than those emmitted by your immediate environment (which are channelled, of couse, by the position of furniture).
Codswallop and poppycock! Everyone knows that Captain Kirk defeated the Fengons in the second season of the original Star Trek series. And getting rid of their particles had nothing to do with moving furniture about willy-nilly and everything to do with using Head & Shoulders shampoo and rigorously following the program of apply, lather, and rinse four times at intervals of three minutes during a lunar eclipse. The positition of furniture, I mean, really, what some people will believe if you give them half a chance. Next you’ll be telling us that nationalizing heavy industry and redistributing the wealth of the plutocratic capitalist oligarchic imperialists isnt such a good idea after all.
Captain Kirk? I am talking about hard scientific fact and you are wittering on about some television show! Are you so deranged that you can’t tell fact from fiction? William Shatner had a Feng Shui head adornment especially calibrated to repel the negative energy of appearing on the same polystyrene ‘surface’ set every couple of episodes. It pulled the saucy alien chicks too.
The Klingons provides us with a blueprint for future relations with North Korea: Full Frontal Assault.