At the Wire today, Dashiell Bennett highlights the North Korean state news agency's seemingly random manipulation of an image from yesterday's funeral procession for Kim Jong Il—a crude photoshop job done, Bennett notes, "in such a minor and pointless way that it underscores the paranoid insanity of totalitarian regimes." Meanwhile, over on Reddit, a user links to an Imagur upload of another photo containing a remarkable detail: what appears to be a member of the military in the back row of an orderly formation of mourners, as Kim's funeral procession passes near the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, standing at least nine feet tall.

You might think it's another sign of the North Korean regime's posturing mania that it would want to doctor-in an image like this. But the photo comes straight from the Associated Press, with no credit noted to KCNA (the notoriously creative North Korean news agency), and was, as it happens, included in Alan Taylor's post on the Kim funeral here at The Atlantic yesterday.

Bear in mind, endemic malnutrition has meant that the average adult North Korean male is more than two inches shorter than the average South Korean, who's in turn a couple of inches shorter than the average American. Factoring that into a close look, this serviceman of the Democratic People's Republic, whoever he is, would still clear 8-and-a-half feet.