THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And to get it, North Korea has announced plans to launch a satelite using their bestest Unha-3 rocket to do so from their newly renovated Tongchang-ri launch site.

The agency, the International Maritime Organization, said Tuesday that it had received a notification from the North Korean authorities of a multistage rocket launch between the hours of 7 a.m. and noon local time, on an as-yet unspecified day between Feb. 8 and 25. An agency spokeswoman, Natasha Brown, said North Korea’s notification described the payload as an Earth observation satellite it called Kwangmyongsong, which translates as Lode Star.

If the launch goes as planned, the notification said, the rocket’s first stage will fall in waters off the west coast of South Korea and the second stage in waters east of the Philippines.

The notification followed warnings to North Korea advising against a launch from the United States and allied nations, which consider such a step a cover for developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear bomb. Under a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions, North Korea is barred from developing nuclear weapons or ballistic missile technologies.

North Korea had notified the International Maritime Organization of some earlier rocket tests.

Another United Nations agency, the International Telecommunication Union, said Tuesday that it also had been notified by the North Koreans of an impending launch of the Kwangmyongsong satellite, but without specifying a date range. An agency spokesman, Sanjay Acharya, said it had been advised by Kim Kwang-chol, the North Korean minister of posts and telecommunications, that the satellite was designed to function for four years.

North Korea insists that its rocket program is peaceful, aimed at launching satellites to gather data for weather forecasting and for other scientific purposes. But after the country successfully put a Kwangmyongsong satellite into orbit by using its Unha-3 rocket in December 2012, the United States worried that in the process, the North was also moving toward acquiring the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on a long-range ballistic missile.

And while all the big swinging dicks posture about whose dick is biggest, the standard North Korean diet consists of Rock Soup with a mesclun of dessicated winter grass and seasonal weeds.