Gettin’ busy up North:

Pyongyang is planning to build as many as 100,000 new houses by 2012, the centennial birth anniversary of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and the target year to become Kangsong Taeguk (a great, prosperous and powerful country), a pro-Pyongyang newspaper in Japan said

Kim Hyong-gil, vice director of the municipal general construction bureau, talked about the plan with the Choson Sinbo, the organ of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan.

Kim, who was a member of guiding the construction of Kwangbok street, recalled that at that time the workers overcame all kinds of difficulties and hardship, reciting militant phrases like “Let’s all live and fight heroically,” and “If the party decides, we carry out.”

Kim also said the bureau will arrange water and sewage in the capital, and a postal network along with modernizing more than 70 places in the capital including the Okryu Restuarant, the Central Zoo, the Taedong Riverside, Yanggakdo Pleasure Park and the Ryukyong Hotel.

Woah woah woah. Modernizing the Ryugyong Hotel? But why would anyone want to do that? It’s been perfect since 1989 — unfinished, empty, likely decrepit, and even invisible.

I guess it’s about time. Afterall, just yesterday it was named the Worst Building in the History of Mankind by Esquire Magazine.