Hey there TASER® fans! Your standard TASER® may be excellent for delivering 50,000 volts to the sentient being of your choice, but while you might feel good, do you look good?
Introducing the C2 TASER® fashion range, featuring a choice of hip-looking instruments of agony. Is your target spasming because of the volts, or just because he had hoped leopard-print went out with the 80’s? Who cares, as long as he spasms!
Also available in Red Hot, Fashion Pink, Black Pearl, Electric Blue, Metallic Pink, and Titanium. You’ll be happy to hear that the included lithium battery is good for over 50 tases. For heavy users, additional batteries are available.
But wait, you feel there’s still something missing? Wouldn’t it be totally rad and awesome if, while you’re tasing hippies and old men, you could also be rocking out with some of your favourite tracks. How about “Another one bites the dust” by Queen (though something from their album “Sheer Heart Attack” might be more appropriate). Presenting the TASER® C2 Holster Hard Case with 1GB MP3 Player.
Now, when your victim goes down, you can be getting on down too. Burn baby burn. Disco Inferno!!
Ha! If only I was joking. I’m not. TASERS® are going mainstream, cool, and funky. As TASER® point out, “TASER® devices are not considered firearms by the US Government. They can be legally carried (concealed or open) without permit required in 43 states.”. Yay for concealed deadly weapons for everyone!!!
Sudden In-Custody Death Syndrome is a mysterious ailment that sometimes affects people who have coincidently just had the crap beaten out of them by police, or been electrocuted. It is possible that we will never know what causes it, it’s that bloody mysterious.
Above is security camera footage of an incident in November where an unarmed pregnant mother in Trotwood, Ohio, was tasered by a police officer. It is clear from the footage that her level of resistance was nowhere near that which would make use of such force appropriate. She had already been pushed on her face onto the ground, and was being held down. Why the need to tase her in the neck?
No information is available on whether the cop preferred Leopard-print, or Electric Blue. Perhaps he should go to a TASER® party and find out.
After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, rioters took to the street across Pakistan. Shops, cars, and infrastructure were burned. At least 47 people died in the riots. Rioters destroyed 176 banks, 34 petrol stations, 72 train cars, 18 rail stations, and hundreds of cars and shops. That unrest has yet to run it’s course.
In 2007, a minibike carrying 2 French teenagers collided with a police vehicle, killing the riders. There are differing accounts of who was at fault for the collision, but the end result was once again mass civil uprising, echoing the French riots of 2005. Over 70 cars and buildings were burned, including a library, two schools, a police station, and several shops.
It makes no sense. How can it? When did burning your neighbour’s cars and homes become a legitimate way of showing your displeasure with the government? While it is safe to say that individuals didn’t burn down their own homes or cars, and I’m guessing the library burners weren’t big readers anyway, as a whole the rioters engaged in the systematic destruction of their very own community.
Now we have Kenya, a country which was until the past month considered one of the most stable nations in Africa, coming apart at the seams. I was just watching some footage of a BBC reporter, Karen Allen, flying to the town of Burnt Forest, as it is just too dangerous to travel there by road at the moment. Out of the window, she could see village after village, burned to the ground.
We travelled by helicopter and from the air could see the charred remains of villages, people’s homes razed to the ground.
More than 100 people died here in clashes last week.
In the hospital I saw patients with burns, gunshot wounds and gashes from machetes and arrows.
They had been targeted because of assumptions about which way they voted in Kenya’s controversial presidential contest.
Tribal divisions, long dormant, have been given the excuse they needed to needed to bubble up into genocide. The way you voted is not known, but is assumed from your tribal affiliation. Was this inevitable, or did circumstances simply come together in just the right combination?
Sifting through possessions we stumble across a woman who had escaped. She had sheltered in the church, along with her three children.
She spoke of the minutes before the blaze began. Attackers dragged in mattresses doused in petrol and set them alight. The door to the church was bolted to prevent people running out.
She told how she managed to scramble through an open window with her three-year-old daughter in her arms.
But when the little girl reached safety the attackers outside flung her back into the flames.
“We have never seen anything like this before, burning churches. These were friends of ours before the election, now they are trying to kill us like dogs,” she said.
17 people died in that inferno, 13 of them children, murdered by their neighbours. Neighbours with oh-so-slightly different genes, and names, and ancestors. I doubt a non-Kenyan would be able to tell the difference between them at all. It’s like Bosnia, like Rwanda, like Somalia, all over again. This time, the excuse is that some tribes voted one way, and some the other. Democracy, supposed to put an end to this sort of nonsense, has in this case become the justification to hate. People are so ready to lay down their neighbours homes, and lives for their blasted cause.
Neither of the two men, President Mwai Kibaki or his opponent Raila Odinga, who have brought their country to this point, deserve to rule. Their mutual stubbornness, and greed for power, and inability or unwillingness to control their followers, has lead Kenya to a dark place, and it will not be they who lead her back to the light.
Perhaps the President of Kenya did steal the election. He would not be the first politician to do so. Perhaps it is a fiction created by his political opponents. Either way, it is not worth the death of a nation. Kibaki and Odinga should both retreat into exile, and allow someone without Kenyan blood on their hands to step forward.
May this coming year bring you everything you need, and even some of the things you want. May you not want for food, or water, or warmth. May you keep or find friendship, and love. May you and your loved ones stay safe from the shadows that surround us. May you know peace enough to hear the quiet voices.
For me, I’m hoping that this is the year I get my life back on track after something of a hiatus. If everything goes to plan (and we all know how often that happens!!!) I’ll sort my health out, and make some progress towards getting a little more voice/acting work.
Recording should begin shortly for season one of the “radio play” Jack Steel and the Starblade, in which I am fortunate enough to be playing Squadron Leader Steel himself. Fear not, gentle reader, for I shall most certainly be making it available for listening to upon this very site. If the universe is willing, perhaps it’ll lead to something else for myself, the writers, and all of our highly talented cast of unknowns.
My father returned home yesterday after what was, for me at any rate, an extremely enjoyable visit. He is really the only family I have left, and if I can do something this year to make him proud I’ll consider it a year well spent. Anyways, I’ll have a lot more time now for regular posting, so we should see things get back on track here.
So, let us go forth into 2008, and see what it has in store for us.
Yes, I know I post this clip every year, but for me nothing says Christmas like Skeletor. The He-man Christmas special is the epitome of everything a cartoon Christmas special should be about.
How’s the holidays going for everyone out there? I have my Dad down to visit for a few days, and he’s keeping me pretty busy! It’s the first time I’ve ever hosted anyone over the Christmas break, and it does feel rather odd, indeed. I’ll have to cook Christmas dinner, instead of having my customary nap! Another one of those rites of passage that I hear so much about, I guess.
Sigh. Because apparently even Giuliani’s own adverts can’t stop playing with themselves, I’ve had to put it on it’s own page. It keeps repeating randomly. Not what you want when you’re trying to read happy stories about giant playmobil. Click below for the story.
I have returned from my oil rig adventures. In truth, it took place at a Holiday Inn near Norwich airport. I have little to say about it, as sadly they were most keen on confidentiality, so I wasn’t able to take any pictures, and I had best not name the companies involved either. It felt like I was pretty much the only person there taking the damn thing seriously, apart from the organisers. My fellow evacuees were mostly random lads having a laugh, and the folks supposed to be tending to our recently blown up nerves were far more interested in the buffet. A buffet, I might add, that was poor in choice, flavour, and quantity. Bah. I shall never set foot on their doomed oil platform. Let us make up for the lack of pictures with this shot of Elm Hill, which I walked up on my way there.
Any journey that leads me up Elm Hill is a worthwhile one. There is a tree, about halfway up, with an ancient circular wooden bench surrounding it. It feels like it has been there forever, and I like to sit there and read my old books, forgetting the 21st century completely. Bit cold for that at the moment though.
Frustratingly, on Monday morning I received a phone call from a local radio company, offering me a week of work experience starting right there and then. As I had already contracted to the roleplay job I had to turn them down, though we did schedule me a week in April. As usual, my timing absolutely sucks. Working for Broadland Radio (Norwich’s local radio station) in the week leading up to Christmas would have been awesome :( My Remploy contact had arranged things with them months ago, but forgotten to tell me, as the Wavelength Films gig drove it from his mind. Fair enough, as Wavelength did do me an awful lot of good. I have no pictures of that either though, so I shall compensate you with this iron pig I met on Elm Hill. I hope with all my heart that it is made of pig-iron, though I suspect even in this shall I be frustrated today.
Vladimir Putin may be popular in Russia for saving the nation from the chaos of the 1990s, but a sect in the country has taken its devotion a step further by praying to ‘presidential icons.’
The Bolshaya Elnya village in the Nizhny Novgorod Region is home to the “Rus’ Resurrecting” sect, a group of local residents who believe that President Putin was both the Apostle Paul and King Solomon in previous lives.
Rus’ is the term used for the medieval East Slavic nation that gave its name to modern Russia.
“We didn’t choose Putin,” Mother Fontinya told the Moskovsky Komsomolets paper, expounding on the first time she laid eyes on the “holy one.”
“It was when Yeltsin was naming him as his successor [during a live New Year’s Eve TV broadcast in 1999]. My soul exploded with joy! ‘An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!'” I cried.
“Yeltsin was the destroyer, and God replaced him with his creation,” claimed Fontinya.
The sect possesses a President Putin icon that Fontinya claims miraculously appeared one day.
“He has given us everything,” she said, pointing to the sky.
A special newspaper published by the sect – ‘The Temple of Light’ – features interviews with long-dead religious figures, including the Apostle Paul. The sect members are also convinced that President Putin knows about and supports the actions of their ‘Mother Superior.’
Russian Christian sects have long been known for their unusual choices of icons, some of them praying to portraits of such well-known ‘holy men’ as Stalin and Ivan the Terrible.
Another Russian sect is currently holed up in an underground shelter in the country’s central Penza Region and has threatened to commit mass suicide if any attempt is made to bring them to the surface.
Religion was tightly controlled in the U.S.S.R. and the collapse of the Soviet Union saw an explosion in sects and cults, as well as interest in New Age philosophies and beliefs. The back pages of many Russian tabloid newspapers are full of advertisements for ‘healers’ and ‘magicians’ who promise to bring happiness in love, success in business, as well as a range of other services.
This reminds me slightly of the cargo cults that have chosen Prince Philip as their unlikely saviour. Unlike Prince Philip, though, Vladimir Putin is the leader of a huge cult of personality. It’s not too surprising that a proportion of his followers have taken that extra step and decided he is their messiah.
With his term as President almost up, he has made it very clear that while he will obey the letter of the constitution and stand down, he fully intends to maintain a steel grip upon the governing of Russia for the foreseeable future. The unfortunately named Putin youth group, the Nashi, are numerous and skilled at intimidating anyone who dares to criticise him, and are impressively zealous and filled with love for Putin. For the time being it seems, Gary Kasparov notwithstanding, that Russia is a one-party state, and the depth of devotion to their dear leader only seems to be increasing with time. Until such time as someone within Russia is willing (And able to avoid dying or imprisonment, both of which are epidemic amongst Putin supporters.) to stand against his complete dismissal of criticism of himself, or the darkly comical way in which the political system of Russia is conducted, his powerbase will continue to grow.
By the way, calling him an “ubermensch” does absolutely nothing to make feel any better about all this. I don’t mind so much other people thinking he’s the messiah, just so long as he doesn’t start believing it himself…. Perhaps this is what George W Bush really saw when he famously looked into Putin’s soul…
