terrorists manual




so apparently if you're seen carrying one of these around you're liable to be hooded and cuffed and whisked off for a free holiday in guantanamo bay - so don't say you weren't warned.

Iran: Death Toll In Earthquake Expected To Exceed 20,000
I wanted to be able to visualise that figure, so I managed half, here.

flawed truth

AP
"This front page of Al-Moutamar newspaper published in Baghdad on Thursday shows a picture of Saddam Hussein, shaven and in captivity, sitting on the floor across from Ahmed Chalabi, a member of Iraq's American-picked Governing Council."
this is how the Fort Worth Dallas News captions this pic.
but look at the pic - Chalabi is obviously sitting on a stool, and Saddam, equally obviously, is sitting on a low stool, but Chalabi is elevated because his stool is perched on a step up from the floor of the cell - the iconography of reversed status is quite well enough established by that visual statement without having to embellish it with petty, obvious untruths. saddam is not sitting on the floor, in lowly abasement before his captors, but that's how this newspaper wants us to remember this picture, and that's how the american media have been bamboozling the citizens of that poor benighted land throughout this tragic set of misadventures - by feeding the collective fantasy of moral outrage against this monstrous dictator, and thereby disguising the unacceptable truth about this black episode in american history. one only has to look at this pic with eyes undazzled by the hype to realise that the caption is untrue - not mistaken, untrue, because picture editors are not stupid - but it's the notion conveyed in the caption that matters, so it becomes true enough, because it's what we want to see, therefore unquestionably true.

roll of honour
jg ballard, lucian freud, albert finney, doris lessing, michael frayn, claire tomalin, bernie ecclestone, humphrey lyttelton, john cleese, helen mirren, john cole, alan bennett, ken loach, david hockney, david bowie, inter alia: I may have been a bit snooty about some of you in the past, but I salute you all now.

Jessica Lynch - Plural


an exhaustive, brilliantly illuminating and admirably dispassionate article by Stan Goff - a former special forces master sergeant and father of a serving soldier on active duty in Iraq - that exposes all the hypocrisy, lying, and shameless political opportunism surrounding this sorry episode.
(via xymphora)

so can I have my cake................



..............................................and eat it?

creeping golliphilism


snapped this earlier today hanging outside a small shop in the high street. hard to say which I find the more odious - this continuous local flaunting of a diehard blindness to the racist overtones (as evidenced in the local carnival - blogged last month here and here), or the whimsical jolliness of this smirking ex-pat's utter carelessness about all that silly pc stuff.

dick cheney behaves like a dick and kills a few things for fun. no surprises there. but the malodorous no-brains of the nra and the safari club have even more fun at what they jauntily call their canned hunting trips, where the obese obscenities dispense with the tiresome business of hunting altogether - no cut to the chase, just cut to the kill.

cunning secret of north korea's success - a refreshingly sapient message from
president kim jong-il.

the definitive identity of the rhino (not sure about the tie):


You're an Indie Pop Kid. You like songs about
relationships and the prettiness of nature.
You're sentimental, but not certainly not emo.
Oh, and if you aren't an English Major, you
should be.


You Know Yer Indie. Let's Sub-Categorize.
brought to you by Quizilla

seminal art


There are those who come in and decide they're going to be blasé, and then there are those who are really disgusted and disturbed. As an artist who needs to send his kids to school, the best reaction is, "Oh my God, these are so disturbing, these are so beautiful, I'm buying one."
nerve interview with photographer ashkan sahihi
der spiegel review of his latest new york (where else?) exhibition.

a screamingly obvious connection, of sorts, has apparently been discovered between this

   and this  

it's so reassuring to find that there's still such love and beauty in this nasty old world.

the pelvis of a young medieval woman, containing the remains of her unborn child. although the birth process had begun, the labour was probably complicated, and mother and baby must have died of exhaustion. she was buried at St John's, Clerkenwell, London.
(Museum of London)

the nose knows

what you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts.