Mystery seems to part of the nowadays.

In wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and pestilence, understanding of the great scheme of things seems to be drowned in an unknown pool of mystery — unless one considers the GOP presidential race, where there’s absolutely nothing but puzzlement, but no mystery — and the wave of unprecedented problems appears to have come from nowhere, but actually have been here all along.

We live in a most-interesting age.

(Illustration found here).

And in the recent death of Kim Jong il is another mystery — how did he live as long as he did?
The answer: By being an international village-idiot man of mystery, who was fairly smart.
From Time magazine this past Wednesday:

Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the “axis of evil” in 2002, Kim travelled to Russia to meet with then President Vladimir Putin, and he asked Pulikovsky to do him a peculiar favor.
“He told me, ‘Konstantin, when the official meeting [with Putin] is over, I want to sit down with him in private for ten minutes, with no one in the room, not even interpreters. I need to tell him something.”
That evening, the private meeting was arranged, and as Pulikovsky escorted Kim back toward the border afterward, his curiosity got to him.
“I asked him, ‘Comrade Kim, if it’s no secret, why did you need these ten minutes?'” Pulikovsky says.
“And he smiled at me and said, ‘What’s the difference? The point is for Bush to wonder what we were talking about.’
For me that was classic Kim.
He always found some way to get snagged in your thoughts, to make himself into a mystery.”

And he did indeed drive George Jr. even more crazed than he already is and helped foster the fright of a North Korea.

This week a natural mystery — a metallic ball fell out of the sky onto the plains of Africa’s Namibia, although the object has been called “man made,” what it is and exactly where it came from is…
From Australia’s ABC News:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres, the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.
It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilograms, Mr Ludik said.
The ball was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 metres wide.
Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past 20 years.

Life is getting real peculiar when big, metal balls start falling from the sky — Chicken Little don’t know shit.