North Korea unveils its home-grown Netflix rival – Manbang Denizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka Best Korea) get precious little internet access as it is, but the lucky (and loyal) few will now have a Netflix-style streaming service to match similar systems in the decadent rest of the world. The system – unfortunately dubbed Manbang – comes as a set-top box …
I have a feeling that the modems mentioned are not VDSL2. I wonder if the height of Nork (*) nerdery is discovering that AT&L0&M0 (**) turns off the beeping and squawking.
Actually I wonder what they do have for the "lucky" few. It must be on the order of >1MBs-1 to be able to talk of streaming in any meaningful way.
(*) If anyone is wondering whether "Nork" might have other meanings, beyond a contraction of "North Korean", they would do well to dig out their search engine and with a few well chosen search terms discover us (en_GB and en_AU at least) lot sniggering away.
(**) I think I got my Hayes right - it was a while ago ... and my memory is a little dim ...
I remember, when living in West Germany in the late 70s, hearing about the release of the then brand new Rolls Royce Silver Mist in the 60s. Well it would have been called Silver Mist until someone noticed that "mist" in German means shit (near enough). Cue rapid rename to Silver Shadow.
It was about that time that global branding agencies appeared and nowadays we have loads of rather crap but safe brand names.
Oh, and "Manbang"! I'm still sniggering but then I am only British.
In the late 80s I was in Düsseldorf for a trade show. Amstrad were unveiling their new laptop and they had piled them high on a table covered with a cloth. They did a big reveal, twitching the cloth aside (standard gorgeous pouting model used for this arduous task). The assembled crowd stared then burst out laughing. The Amstrad Lap Top (or was it Advanced Lap Top?) was marked ALT.
Old.
I hope you're aware that some of your personal, and organisational names, as well as other innocuous words, sound super retarded or offensive in other languages.
Also this will never be written as "man bang" because that's just a romanization (of which there are many) of Korean. Many of which aren't pronounced phonetically anyway.
"Please give us a few examples for our education and amusement."
A couple of stateside companies, Wang Laboratories and Fannie Mae.
One from France, DiC Entertainment, pronounced 'dick'.
Always brought a smile when a cartoon ended with a little girls voice chanting "DICK!"
I can give you a reverse example: Here the usual equivalent of English ‘Really?’ is ‘Fakt?’ and a bit more emphatic form is ‘Fakt, jo?’. People say it a lot. And you do not need any hint what English speakers hear beside perhaps noting that ‘j’ is pronounced as ‘y’ in English...
Yeah, "meh" on the "manbang" being funny. I actually liked Samurai Champloo (from Manglobe studios) and didn't feel overly inclined to fall into paroxysms of laughter at the mention of either "loo" or "globe". But that's just me ...
Anyway, on a slightly different, but slightly related note, check out Chuck Norris vs. Communism. Best Romanian film I've ever seen. Hmmm... not meant to damn with faint praise ...
So assuming you live in NK and get one of these and assuming your one of the lucky few that has internet, what happens when you do a search for something thats Kim Don iLL doesn't like... do you get the heavy's come round for a little bit that a word in your ear.... I would say its just a propaganda platform, but we have the BBC, Fox, Etc.... so im not going to make to much of a point of that..
My Korean is terrible, but enough to make some guesses.
"Manbang" (만방) is tricky to translate, but means something like "everywhere" or "global".
"Dong" 동 (the missile name) means "east", and "nodong" 노동 means "labour" or "work".
Still funny, but it's good to know the intended meaning!
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