Saturday, 2 January 2010
Heavy toll at sports event in Pakistan after bomb blast
A suicide bomber rammed a pickup truck loaded with explosives into a playground crowded with families and children watching a volleyball game in northwest Pakistan Friday.
Police and local officials said as many as 75 people had been killed, with scores wounded, making the New Year’s Day attack one of the deadliest of more than 20 suicide bombings carried out by militants since October.
The attack underscored the Taliban’s determination to prevent citizens from forming militias to keep the insurgents at bay as military operations disrupt their strongholds in the nearby tribal belt.
Local authorities said they had little doubt that the village, Shah Hassan Khel, was chosen because residents were forming a pro-government militia. In recent weeks, the militants had been threatening death to anyone who joined.
But as the bomber prepared to strike on Friday, he did not choose the most obvious target: A meeting underway of local leaders of the new militia.
Instead, he drove his double-cabin pickup truck into the middle of a nearby playground where teams were playing volleyball and detonated explosives so powerful that they collapsed homes surrounding the field.
“When we came out, there was a plume of smoke and dust,” said Gul Janan, a member of the pro-government militia, who, along with other dazed members bruised but not seriously hurt when their roof collapsed, emerged to find their village ravaged.
“Nothing was visible,” Mr. Janan said in a telephone interview. “It was a huge bombing.”
All of the victims were civilians, one local official said...
Friday, 1 January 2010
Einstürzende Neubauten - OT
PS: When Neubauten started it was cassettes of live gigs that we were getting in London which were passed around that put out the word.
Nick Cave & Mick Harvey on Rowland S. Howard
Obituary @ The Age
Jack Kerouac's new year resolutions
We're sure Jack Kerouac is celebrating a stupendous New Year's somewhere in the great beyond. In fact, this coming year will mark the forty-first anniversary of the Beat Generation writer's death (due to cirrhosis of the liver, evidence of many a wild earthbound New Year's). While these chunks of wisdom, taken from his Belief and Technique in Modern Prose (or, at least, the style of rapid-fire modern prose he invented and brought down with him), are geared toward writers, they're words to live by in the new decade:
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
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