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.
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Iran: Death Toll In Earthquake Expected To Exceed 20,000
I wanted to be able to visualise that figure, so I managed half, here.
I wanted to be able to visualise that figure, so I managed half, here.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
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.
Thursday, December 18, 2003
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)
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Monday, December 15, 2003
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.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
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
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
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.
and this 
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
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)
Sunday, November 30, 2003
brace yourselves
it's early december - a beautiful, crisp, sunny winter's morning - and what better way to spend it than to go out on the moor and kill something?
it's degenerated somewhat, the sport of kings, from the good old days of the gormless, the chinless, the talentless, and the titled gathering to see how many brace of birds they could bag before luncheon. the aristos themselves - crippled by death-duties, poor dears - can only afford their traditional pleasures now by hiring out their killing fields to the corporate upstarts, the meeja hoes, the rock stars, the pimps, the visiting sons and daughters of the Russian mafia - and the usual americans. these people have to have it explained to them that it's a sport, of course, otherwise they'd come onto the moors blazing away with uzis and M47's.
sport.
children, of course, are brought up to understand that 'sport' is something involving skill and rules.
skill.
a typical driven pheasant shoot (anything between £600 and £1,000 per gun per day) involves waiting around with a loaded shotgun in your hands and the other in your loader's whilst the birds fly overhead. (guns are sold in pairs - the Holland & Holland 'Royal' side by side sells at £96,250 plus VAT per pair - but you commoners can probably pick up a pair for three grand or so.) you'll be one in a group of six upwards - in the good old days a line of Edwardian shooters would extend over half a mile or so of gorse and heather, but things were less well-regulated then, and they did tend to accidentally shoot each other with tedious regularity. at a given signal, the beaters - hired for the purpose from the local Surly Mumbling Locals Agency - who have been waiting invisibly and silently in another long parallel line opposite you some half a mile or so off - start moving forwards, noisily. between you and the beaters is a confused flock of pheasant.
this is their day, this is what they were hatched for, and cosseted in well-appointed pens supervised by the only person in the present assembly with any skill at anything - the gamekeeper - a curious atavistic hybrid of naturalist, stock-keeper, farm manager, tracker, vet, and policeman. having raised the birds to maturity, he has earlier supervised their release from their protective cages into the concealing shrub of their moorland habitat.
pheasant spend most of their lives on the ground. they are designed for protection on the ground. they are better at hiding and running than at flying, and are, in fact, unwilling to fly unless all other methods of escape from predation (ie concealment or running) have failed.
right now, they are a little dazed and confused. they pick listlessly at the grit. they are not hungry - they have never been hungry - just a bit nervous.
naturally shy, as the beaters' line gets nearer, they start to run away.
when they realise that the beaters are getting even closer, the first of them decides to take off.
mistake.
they are slow to take off - they are powerful creatures, with well-developed leg muscles (good for chomping down on later) but insufficiently developed wings for prolonged flight - so their method of flying is to flap up to around ten metres or so, then glide, when they arrive at a top speed of about 40 mph.
perfect for game.
as soon as the first bird arrives overhead, you fire.
you don't have to be particularly accurate.
a typical cartridge case contains about a hundred little lead balls the size of a small bead - the shot - packed tightly into a fat four-inch tube. once the firing pin strikes the percussion cap at the base of the cartridge, the shot is propelled from the barrel at a muzzle-velocity of around 1,400 feet per second. depending on the barrel's 'choke' (the amount of constriction in the barrel's bore), this mass of lead spheres spreads out in an expanding conical pattern, so that at a distance of 40 metres (or the 'killing range limit' of 35 yards) it is scattered over a distorted circular lens about 1.5 - 2 metres in diameter. at that range, and with that degree of spread, you only need to wave your gun vaguely in the right direction and pull the trigger at the right time to stand a fair chance of hitting a bird. it's rather like throwing stones at a tin can. some smartass will always end up grabbing a handful of pebbles and flinging them all in a spraying arc in order to knock the can over. you really have to be a complete moron to miss. on a driven shoot, the average expectation is a ratio of four shots to one kill.
skill.
the velocity of a non-aerodynamic projectile such as a piece of lead shot decays rapidly through air-resistance after firing, and has lost more than half of its original speed - the lost energy converted to heat through friction - by the time it reaches a distance of 40 metres. however, a pea of hot lead travelling at nearly four hundred miles an hour is more than enough to inflict devastating damage on a bird averaging 3lb in weight.
it is never a clean kill. this is one of the myths of game-shooting. think about it. the chance of a single piece of shot entering the body of the bird at a point which would cause instantaneous death is so slight as to be negligible. what happens is that the piece of hot shot tears into a wing-muscle, or penetrates some part of the torso, causing sufficient damage to interrupt the bird's capacity to fly, so that the injured bird falls from the sky, still alive, flapping frantically to no purpose. this stalling fall isn't vertical, of course: depending on how high it was when you shot it, and how fast it was flying, it describes a parabola that will finally thump onto the ground as much as a hundred metres away behind you. you, however, have better things to do right now than to walk over and retrieve it - that's what gun-dogs are for.
the beaters have now advanced well into the field, and half of the flock has been flushed, flapping noisily towards you, each bird gamely fulfilling its destiny, doing exactly what it's supposed to - flying directly over a line of blazing guns.
you and your neighbours are banging away as if your lives depended on it. you're experiencing the kind of rush that's associated with all the defensive postures of sport - the batsman facing the fast bowler, the goalie facing the penalty, the tennis player waiting for the ace serve, the full-back facing the winger. it's irrelevant that the 'threat' is threat-less - that this isn't a charging sabre-toothed tiger. the point is that it's alive, it's moving, and, unlike in most other sports, you're allowed to kill it to stop it.
as soon as you've blasted off both barrels, you reach behind you and exchange your smoking gun for the freshly-loaded one that your loader has ready: he will then re-load whilst you shoot again, and again, in a bang-and-swap relay, until the air reeks of cordite, your ears are ringing, your shoulder is bruised from the recoil, your cheeks are flushed with arousal (you'll laugh it off as the heat of the barrels), and all the birds have, finally, lifted and been dropped.
a few will escape, of course - they'll eventually make their way back to the safety of their pens, until the next time.
meanwhile, once the mayhem subsides, the dogs are sent to find and retrieve the bodies littering the moor behind you (lifting the dying birds in ironically gentle jaws), necks are finally wrung, whisky flasks are unscrewed, the banter about whose bag is best begins, the beaters trudge on to their next starting line, and the gamekeeper's landrover moves discreetly in, rocking over the tussocks with a fresh batch of birds in tow to freshen up another part of the moor for the next drive.
roast pheasant is an-over-rated, acquired taste: the stall price of game is kept artificially high for its snob-value. and the meat has other, hidden drawbacks: aristocrats have famously bad teeth, easily and frequently cracked on the pellets of shot left embedded and undiscovered in the preparation of a shot bird's carcass.
cave venator.
the hunters 'n' shooters are fond of blathering their mealy-mouthed protestations that it's 'unsporting' to kill an animal unless it's for the table or for culling purposes. the truth is, pheasant as food is not the point. who really needs that excuse? the point is, it's early december - it's a lovely, crisp, sunny winter's morning - and what better way to spend it than to go out on the moor and kill something?
it's early december - a beautiful, crisp, sunny winter's morning - and what better way to spend it than to go out on the moor and kill something?
it's degenerated somewhat, the sport of kings, from the good old days of the gormless, the chinless, the talentless, and the titled gathering to see how many brace of birds they could bag before luncheon. the aristos themselves - crippled by death-duties, poor dears - can only afford their traditional pleasures now by hiring out their killing fields to the corporate upstarts, the meeja hoes, the rock stars, the pimps, the visiting sons and daughters of the Russian mafia - and the usual americans. these people have to have it explained to them that it's a sport, of course, otherwise they'd come onto the moors blazing away with uzis and M47's.
sport.
children, of course, are brought up to understand that 'sport' is something involving skill and rules.
skill.
a typical driven pheasant shoot (anything between £600 and £1,000 per gun per day) involves waiting around with a loaded shotgun in your hands and the other in your loader's whilst the birds fly overhead. (guns are sold in pairs - the Holland & Holland 'Royal' side by side sells at £96,250 plus VAT per pair - but you commoners can probably pick up a pair for three grand or so.) you'll be one in a group of six upwards - in the good old days a line of Edwardian shooters would extend over half a mile or so of gorse and heather, but things were less well-regulated then, and they did tend to accidentally shoot each other with tedious regularity. at a given signal, the beaters - hired for the purpose from the local Surly Mumbling Locals Agency - who have been waiting invisibly and silently in another long parallel line opposite you some half a mile or so off - start moving forwards, noisily. between you and the beaters is a confused flock of pheasant.
this is their day, this is what they were hatched for, and cosseted in well-appointed pens supervised by the only person in the present assembly with any skill at anything - the gamekeeper - a curious atavistic hybrid of naturalist, stock-keeper, farm manager, tracker, vet, and policeman. having raised the birds to maturity, he has earlier supervised their release from their protective cages into the concealing shrub of their moorland habitat.pheasant spend most of their lives on the ground. they are designed for protection on the ground. they are better at hiding and running than at flying, and are, in fact, unwilling to fly unless all other methods of escape from predation (ie concealment or running) have failed.
right now, they are a little dazed and confused. they pick listlessly at the grit. they are not hungry - they have never been hungry - just a bit nervous.
naturally shy, as the beaters' line gets nearer, they start to run away.
when they realise that the beaters are getting even closer, the first of them decides to take off.
mistake.
they are slow to take off - they are powerful creatures, with well-developed leg muscles (good for chomping down on later) but insufficiently developed wings for prolonged flight - so their method of flying is to flap up to around ten metres or so, then glide, when they arrive at a top speed of about 40 mph.
perfect for game.
as soon as the first bird arrives overhead, you fire.
you don't have to be particularly accurate.
a typical cartridge case contains about a hundred little lead balls the size of a small bead - the shot - packed tightly into a fat four-inch tube. once the firing pin strikes the percussion cap at the base of the cartridge, the shot is propelled from the barrel at a muzzle-velocity of around 1,400 feet per second. depending on the barrel's 'choke' (the amount of constriction in the barrel's bore), this mass of lead spheres spreads out in an expanding conical pattern, so that at a distance of 40 metres (or the 'killing range limit' of 35 yards) it is scattered over a distorted circular lens about 1.5 - 2 metres in diameter. at that range, and with that degree of spread, you only need to wave your gun vaguely in the right direction and pull the trigger at the right time to stand a fair chance of hitting a bird. it's rather like throwing stones at a tin can. some smartass will always end up grabbing a handful of pebbles and flinging them all in a spraying arc in order to knock the can over. you really have to be a complete moron to miss. on a driven shoot, the average expectation is a ratio of four shots to one kill.
skill.
the velocity of a non-aerodynamic projectile such as a piece of lead shot decays rapidly through air-resistance after firing, and has lost more than half of its original speed - the lost energy converted to heat through friction - by the time it reaches a distance of 40 metres. however, a pea of hot lead travelling at nearly four hundred miles an hour is more than enough to inflict devastating damage on a bird averaging 3lb in weight.
it is never a clean kill. this is one of the myths of game-shooting. think about it. the chance of a single piece of shot entering the body of the bird at a point which would cause instantaneous death is so slight as to be negligible. what happens is that the piece of hot shot tears into a wing-muscle, or penetrates some part of the torso, causing sufficient damage to interrupt the bird's capacity to fly, so that the injured bird falls from the sky, still alive, flapping frantically to no purpose. this stalling fall isn't vertical, of course: depending on how high it was when you shot it, and how fast it was flying, it describes a parabola that will finally thump onto the ground as much as a hundred metres away behind you. you, however, have better things to do right now than to walk over and retrieve it - that's what gun-dogs are for.
the beaters have now advanced well into the field, and half of the flock has been flushed, flapping noisily towards you, each bird gamely fulfilling its destiny, doing exactly what it's supposed to - flying directly over a line of blazing guns.
you and your neighbours are banging away as if your lives depended on it. you're experiencing the kind of rush that's associated with all the defensive postures of sport - the batsman facing the fast bowler, the goalie facing the penalty, the tennis player waiting for the ace serve, the full-back facing the winger. it's irrelevant that the 'threat' is threat-less - that this isn't a charging sabre-toothed tiger. the point is that it's alive, it's moving, and, unlike in most other sports, you're allowed to kill it to stop it.as soon as you've blasted off both barrels, you reach behind you and exchange your smoking gun for the freshly-loaded one that your loader has ready: he will then re-load whilst you shoot again, and again, in a bang-and-swap relay, until the air reeks of cordite, your ears are ringing, your shoulder is bruised from the recoil, your cheeks are flushed with arousal (you'll laugh it off as the heat of the barrels), and all the birds have, finally, lifted and been dropped.
a few will escape, of course - they'll eventually make their way back to the safety of their pens, until the next time.
meanwhile, once the mayhem subsides, the dogs are sent to find and retrieve the bodies littering the moor behind you (lifting the dying birds in ironically gentle jaws), necks are finally wrung, whisky flasks are unscrewed, the banter about whose bag is best begins, the beaters trudge on to their next starting line, and the gamekeeper's landrover moves discreetly in, rocking over the tussocks with a fresh batch of birds in tow to freshen up another part of the moor for the next drive.
roast pheasant is an-over-rated, acquired taste: the stall price of game is kept artificially high for its snob-value. and the meat has other, hidden drawbacks: aristocrats have famously bad teeth, easily and frequently cracked on the pellets of shot left embedded and undiscovered in the preparation of a shot bird's carcass.
cave venator.
the hunters 'n' shooters are fond of blathering their mealy-mouthed protestations that it's 'unsporting' to kill an animal unless it's for the table or for culling purposes. the truth is, pheasant as food is not the point. who really needs that excuse? the point is, it's early december - it's a lovely, crisp, sunny winter's morning - and what better way to spend it than to go out on the moor and kill something?
Thursday, November 27, 2003
durham, north carolina. 1940 (photographer: jack delano)
photographers working for the Farm Security Administration Historical Section (later transferred to the Office of War Information) were encouraged to document continuity and change in many aspects of life in America during the years the unit was in operation. they were particularly encouraged to photograph billboards and signs as one indicator of such developments. although no documentation has been found to indicate that photographers were explicitly encouraged to photograph racial discrimination signs, the collection includes a significant number of this type of image.
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Bill Clinton to become fashion model
Bill Clinton is reportedly set to become the face of a men's clothing brand based in China.
The former US president will be paid around £1.3million to model for Fapai, in Wenzhou, eastern China.
According to Taiwan's United Daily News, Fapai chairman Peng Xing has been trying to enlist Clinton's endorsement for the last three years by sending him a selection of suits, shirts, ties and shoes.
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