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These are some of the more ridiculous stories that I’ve noticed in the travel sections of various websites over the past few days:
“North Korea plans to increase tourism tenfold by 2017“ (Daily Mail) – According to the Daily Mail, North Korea gets “just 100,000 tourists per year” (I’m staggered that they get that many!) with most coming from their long-time ally, China. 
Image courtesy of Stephan
Well, they’ve crunched the numbers and, apparently, the North Korean government has decided that they need more Western tourists and they’re going to make a concerted effort to drive the numbers up.
There’s no real mention of what this “concerted effort” will involve but their numbers are noting if not ambitious. They expect to be attracting 1 million tourists by 2017 and increasing that to 2 million by 2020.
A quick note to Kim Jong-un: You may want to cut down on the executions by anti-aircraft fire if you want to have any chance of getting more people visiting your country.
Image courtesy of Gideon Tsang
How to Perfect Elevator Networking (Entrepreneur) – As someone who does their very best to avoid any sort of conversations or interactions with people in elevators, this article caught my eye. I was really hoping it was going to be written tongue-in-cheek but, I’m sorry to say, this is pure marketing [insert word of your choice].
Suggestions form the article include:
“Speak up – When a businessperson steps onto an elevator, there’s really no time to lose. The first to speak will guide the short conversation, so being the first to comment will place you in a position of networking power.” – Yes, because nothing say’s let’s do business together like accosting someone the second they get into the elevator.
“You should be armed and ready with interesting conversation starters that will be useful to fellow elevator riders (as opposed to annoying).” – just how long are these elevator rides?!
“In many cases, elevator networking can be expanded to include parking lot networking, lobby networking, you name it.” – Isn’t that called stalking?
Read the whole set of “suggestions” here.
Man claims harassment by police after bringing AR-15 into airport (Road Warrior Voices) – One day America will look back on some of its gun laws and wonder what on earth they were thinking. Until then, however, we get stories like this one:
Man walks in to airport with his semi-automatic AR-15 rifle while dropping off his wife and daughter (you never know when you’re going to need to cut someone down in a hail of bullets). This happened in Georgia and, because they’re so very sensible down there, it’s perfectly legal to openly carry a gun – even a semi-automatic AR-15.
Under Georgia law the man was completely within his rights to carry the gun, openly, in the airport as long as he didn’t try to get through TSA (although based on their recent record he probably would have gone through just fine). Despite this he was stopped, a few times, by police officers who questioned what he was doing. See what happened here.
