Buena Vista Social Club

Another interesting documentary

Kevin Macdonald's film, The Last King of Scotland, was a fictionalised account of Idi Amin. Now, Macdonald has raised the intriguing possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the 'Butcher of Lyon'. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz. Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, examines how Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. In 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.
The Americans had been hunting Guevara and turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare: he had attempted to crush the French Resistance and was responsible for the death of its celebrated leader, Jean Moulin. Barbie met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US, and gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. Barbie had little respect for Che Guevara. He said once, "This poor man wouldn't have survived at all if he fought in the Second World War. He was a pitiful adventurer, nothing like his popular image. The people have turned him into a myth, a great figure. But what has he actually achieved? Absolutely nothing".' I suppose Barbie himself thought he had achieved a whole lot...
The Che claim came from several sources. In October 1967 the Bolivian army, with CIA help, captured the 39-year-old Guevara and killed him.
Barbie was involved in torture again in Bolivia and dreamed of establishing a Fourth Reich in the Andes. But he was tracked down by Nazi hunters and eventually extradited to France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in jail in Lyon in September 1991.

Beyond the Sea

Conspiracy - a must see series

THE SECRET RULERS OF THE WORLD
PART 1; PART 2; PART 3; PART 4; PART 5; PART 6; PART 7; PART 8; PART 9; PART 10; PART 11; PART 12; PART 13; PART 14; PART 15; PART 16; PART 17; PART 18; PART 19; PART 20; PART 21; PART 22; PART 23; PART 24; PART 25; PART 26; PART 27; PART 28; PART 29

Chicken...crossing the road, of course

Robert De Niro:
Are you telling me the chicken crossed that road? Is that what you're telling me?

Martin Luther King, Jr:
I envision a world where all chickens, be they black or white or brown or red or speckled, will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa:
In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed and that was good enough for us.

Captain James T Kirk:
To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Sigmund Freud:
The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity. How do you feel about your mother?

The C.I.A:
Who told you about the chicken? Did you see the chicken? There was no chicken. Please step into the car.

Albert Einstein:
Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Bill Clinton:
I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define the word 'chicken'.

Homer Simpson:
Mmmm Chicken.

Nick Cave

"Delicate" Art

The Centre for Recent Drawing art gallery in a London, England, suburb scheduled a series of 55 works by artist Jordan McKenzie, called "Spent," even though they consist merely of canvases onto which he had ejaculated and covered with carbon sprinkles. McKenzie maintained that the works were "heartfelt and delicate."

Metropia - Our Future?

Swedish animated feature film for adults is taking place in a near future in Europe. The world is running out of oil and the net of undergrounds has been connected, creating an enormous web underneath Europe. Roger from a Stockholm suburb tries to stay away from the underground, however one day he finds out that his life is controlled in every detail (Matrix?). He tries to break free, and in order to succeed he needs super-model Nina to help him...
It is a mix of animated and non-animated scenes. Voices by Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers) and Vincent Gallo (Buffalo '66). Sounds like a good one.

If My Nose Was Running Money

Southern Culture at its Best

Hexes and Sexes

FBI was investigating Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), and found that the deputy director of that office, Ginger Cruz, a self-described Wiccan, had been threatening to place hexes on employees if they co-operated with outsiders' evaluations of the agency. The Director of SIGIR, Stuart Bowen, who was a former aide to President Bush, commissioned a book telling the history of the SIGIR, and also claimed printing cost of the book to be millions of dollars. He was "dating on government time", had unexplained absences from work and did some cover ups on time sheets to hide the absences. Former employees accuse him of taking non-work related trips to Texas and France, but counting it as paid time.
Bowen inteds to run for congress in Virginia...

Satellite on the lookout

As you know, an out-of-control the size of a small bus US spy satellite, whose engine had failed, is plummeting out of its orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on the planet within weeks. It has been claimed that a spy satellite heading uncontrollably towards Earth is not an uncommon event. Satellites come out of orbit and fall back to Earth harmlessly on average once a year. Normally, when US spy satellites reach the end of their lives, they are disposed of through a controlled re-entry and dumped in the Pacific Ocean, so that no-one can learn their secrets (!!!!). However, older satellites are often more difficult to de-orbit properly.
When they re-enter they usually burn up in the atmosphere because a lot of heat has developed and there is a lot of friction. Only heat-resistant or very heavy objects will survive. There is a risk in this case that something will hit the ground.
Officials have no idea where it might land but they are keeping other countries abreast of the situation. By now the satellite is around 200km up, and it's falling by almost 1km a day. So it is expected it will hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere by the end of February or early March.
24 hours before it hits the ground they can predict ground track very well (the line over the Earth where the satellite is overflying). An hour or so beforehand experts might know roughly where the satellite will land - but it is only rough because the line is something like 10,000km long.
The pieces are believed will drop into the sea somewhere ( given that almost three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by water). There is the possibility, however, that they could land in Russia or China. Now, with all the "secrets" aboard, we'll see what happens next!

Oh, Almighty!

Relative to strengthening their commitment to Islam, many men in Egypt suddenly appeared to start getting dark calluses on their foreheads ("raisins") as a signal of perhaps-overenthusiastic daily praying. The five prayers require, in all, 34 contacts with the ground (of forehead and nose), and additional personal prayers add to the total. Rumors persist that some men use sandpaper to darken the calluses to appear even more pious...

*************

At Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics share space at the site thought to be the birthplace of Jesus, some Orthodox faithful wandered into the Armenian section during Christmas season, and officials of both faiths squared off and flailed at each other with brooms before being separated by Palestinian police...

XYu - Dinamit

Tocak, Bocek, Krle, Bata Kostic, Dragi Jelic...

Don't drop the Soap!

The "creative" son of the governor of Kansas has invented a board game with his school mates called Don't Drop the Soap. The prison-theme game made his mother, governor Kathleen Sebelius, and his father Gary very proud of him. John Sebelius, a 23-year-old design student, has launched his game on the market through the internet and he is selling it at $35 . The internet page describes the game as a complete simulation of a prison cell where you can experience all the charms of life in prison: Escape prison riots, Slip glass into a mob boss' lasagna in the Cafeteria, Steal painkillers from the nurse's desk in the Infirmary, and more.

Makes you want to go through it in a real life, doesn't it? Oh, joys of entertainment...

That's what I call an Inventor!

Michael Windisch, proprietor of the Maltermeister Turm restaurant in Goslar, Germany, solved what has become a crisis for other restaurants since the state extended a smoking ban in August. Windisch opened three holes in an outer wall so that, in cold weather, a smoker need not venture outside but can stick his head and arms through the holes and puff away while remaining inside.

Soup Dragons

A Party in Bordeaux (courtesy of Tvrtko).

Kurosawa's Films

A part of a cult director Akira Kurosawa's opus can be downloaded for free (films like Rashomon, To Live, Stray Dog, They Who Step on Tiger's Tail,...
HERE

R.I.P.

Heath Ledger loved Nick Drake’s music. Drake was a singer and song writer who committed suicide in 1974. Last September Ledger was a guest at the Venetian Mostra festival when he promoted the biography of Bob Dylan, ‘I’m Not There’. On that occasion he spoke about his obsession with Drake whom he described as a very mysterious figure. "I was obsessed with his story and his music and I pursued it for a while and still have hopes to kind of tell his story one day". Ledger filmed and directed a video in his honour. The video has not been published on the Internet, but many describe it as a black and white video featuring the song “Black Eyed Dog”. As the video nears the end, Heath turns the camera on himself and drowns in a bathtub. The video was incorporated into a multimedia installation dubbed “A Place To Be” that was exhibited last September at the Bumbershoot Festival and at last October’s celebration honouring Nick Drake. “Black Eyed Dog” is the last song Drake wrote before he committed suicide with an overdose of antidepressants.

Original video Black Eyed Dog