North Korea isn't culturally isolated. It has quietly assimilated Western culture, music & fashion. Moranbong Band members, mastering western rock elements in their performances, are “fusion rock stars”.

This is from the Moranbong Band HD YouTube channel:
https://t.co/a26uQMzS57

Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man fights off an unusual animal attack?"

The answer is artist Will Hulsey...

Will Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.

Very little is known about Will Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.

Their audience was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read; this led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.

As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!

Dear fellow musicians, performers, technicians etc. Here’s a thread about how our lives are going to change re touring/working in the EU in 50 days time. Think of it as a kind of Bad News Advent calendar. Here goes 1/

First things first, you’ll need a passport with at least 6 months left on it. And you’ll need full travel/third party/health insurance, since if you get ill or have an accident every penny of your care will have to be paid for 2/

To work or do a gig you’re going to need a work visa, just like you do for the USA. But here’s the thing. Work permits & visas and the conditions attached are a matter not for the EU but for the member states themselves 3/

Yes, every member state controls who comes in and who doesn’t and what the rules will be for work and residency. It’s almost as if the Brexiters have been lying about this ALL ALONG. EU members CONTROL THEIR OWN BORDERS 4/

So you’ll need to get a work permit for every country you’re intending to work or gig in and the rules are often different, as are the rules on eg taxation of that work (eg Spain has a withholding tax, France does not) 5/

Importance of Famous Payyannur Pavithra Mothiram or Ring

Payyanur Sri Subramanya Swami Temple 🚩
Kerala

Temple, constructed by Parasurama is known as the 'Pazhani' of Kerala.The place got its name from 'Payyante Ooru' where Payyan is another name by which Subramanya was called.

There are references about this temple in Brahmanda purana. Muni Garga mentions this temple and the place to  the Pandavas when they were in Vanavasa. Temple was destroyed two times, once due to fire and then during the attack of Tipu Sultan.

Important tradition here is wearing of Pavithram by the temple priest. Pavithram is a sort of  ring worn during performing Vedic rituals or during the "pithrubali". Usually worn while performing Tarpana or Shradham. The traditional Pavitram is usually made of Dharbha grass

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.

MUST READ TILL END:
FB POST BY MR PRABEER BASU,
IAS-1976(BIHAR)
" Received a hurtful post from an old friend and colleague. He was on my daily Broadcast list of WhatsApp. He requested that I do not send him any of my posts on 'political' issues. I gave him a long explaination
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on why I write and what I write. But he was not convinced.

Being alerted by him thus, I felt I should clarify to all who read my posts on what exactly I think and do.

The charge against me is that I wrongly support our current Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi..
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and that it establishes I am not rational and impartial anymore.
Let me try and explain.First and foremost,I do not write on 'political' issues. I write on 'national' issues. For example, I have no opinion on whether Rahul Gandhi should be President of his party or not.
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Similarly, I have no views whether BJP is a better party than Congress or vice versa.
Even after 36 years in the IAS I have no MLA, MP or anyone involved in politics whom I can classify as my friend or even acquaintance.
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So, naturally I don't care which party wins or loses as long as the winning party runs an honest government doing good to my nation.
Now, why I speak in favour of Shri Modi:

1. Ever since the beginning of my service I realised that Planning Commission was not serving..

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