Thursday, 14 January 2010

The Tote RIP "Nobody who loves The Tote has ANY memories of The Tote."


Teddy Pendergrass RIP


William S. Burroughs - Is Everybody In?


RePost: Girlz With Gunz (This post will be illegal under Australian's Clean Feed Filter)


Still from 'Baise - Moi'.
A film completely banned here in Australia.





'Baise - Moi' Trailer.
Story behind the film from 'The Observer' here.

***

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

You will not be able to Opt-Out of this filter, as was previously claimed.

Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.

What do we know so far?

* Filtering will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.
* The clean feed will censor material that is "harmful and inappropriate" for children.
*All "fetish" pornography will be blocked.
*All games intended for people over the age of 18 will be blocked.
* The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA's blacklist of prohibited content.
* The Government wants to use dynamic filters of questionable accuracy that slow the internet down by an average of 30%.
* The filtering will target legal as well as illegal material.
* $44m has been budgeted for the implementation of this scheme so far.
* The clean-feed for children will be opt-out, but a second filter will be mandatory for all Internet users.
* A live pilot deployment is going ahead in the near future.
HERE

Haiti quake survivors spend second night in streets

Thousands of Haitians are spending a second night in the open after the country's catastrophic earthquake which may have killed tens of thousands.
Medical aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres reported a "massive influx" of casualties at its makeshift clinics, many of them with severe injuries.
The search for survivors under the rubble went on after darkness.
Substantial foreign aid for the three million people said to be in need is due to begin arriving within hours.
The first US aid planes have already landed at the airport serving the capital, Port-au-Prince, and US naval ships are on the way.

EYEWITNESS
Matthew Price
Matthew Price, BBC News, Haiti
Twenty-four hours after the earthquake, and we flew into Port-au-Prince. Just along the tarmac we found some aid trickling in. The airport buildings here have been damaged but not, it seems, the runway.
Many of those who can, are leaving. Millions, though, are left behind in a country that can barely function, even without a disaster.
The leadership here says 100,000 have been killed. Many of the UN peacekeepers stationed here are also among the dead. This country - so often forgotten by the world - now needs its help more than ever.
EU states, Russia and China are among those sending rescue and medical teams by plane while pledges of aid have been made by countries around Latin America.
UN peacekeepers, who played a key role in maintaining public order in Haiti even before the quake, have been deployed to control any outbreaks of unrest as reports come in of looting.
The BBC's Andy Gallacher in Port-au-Prince says the situation in the capital is increasingly desperate with no sense of a coordinated rescue effort, scant medical supplies and aid only trickling in.
With many of Haiti's communication lines down, Haitians living abroad have been battling to get through to relatives.
In the main Haitian community in the US, Miami's Little Haiti, people have been meeting to pray and to raise money for relief efforts.
Sleeping among the dead
The 7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, just 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince and close to the surface.
Haitian children sleep with their mother at a UN hospital in Port-au-Prince, evening of 13 January
The luckier survivors have been treated by UN and MSF medics
The energy released was the equivalent of about half a megaton of TNT, according to Prof Roger Searle, of the earth sciences department at the UK's Durham University.
BBC correspondents in Port-au-Prince say the night is punctuated with the sounds of people crying and praying.
They have described people sleeping among dead bodies in the grounds of one hospital, and say many streets are lined with corpses covered with white blankets.
Efforts to rescue survivors trapped in rubble have been hampered by the lack of heavy lifting equipment and much of the work is being done by individuals with simple tools or their hands.
Patients with "severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs" have been streaming into MSF's temporary structures but the agency is only able to offer them basic medical care, spokesman Paul McPhun told reporters in Toronto.
One of MSF's emergency medical facilities collapsed during the quake while the other two were so badly damaged they became unusable, he said.
At least 1,000 people have sought help at three temporary MSF sites, including some 50 people who were treated for burns caused by domestic gas containers exploding in collapsing buildings.
Hans van Dillen, an MSF worker in Port-au-Prince, reported that there were "hundreds of thousands of people who are sleeping in the streets because they are homeless".
"We see open fractures, head injuries," he said on MSF's website. "The problem is that we cannot forward people to proper surgery at this stage."
The aid agency, which is concerned about the welfare of many of its 800 local employees and their families, said it was dispatching 70 more international aid workers to Haiti to bolster its team.
Map

Wes Andersen's acceptance speech at National Board of Review Awards for Fantastic Mr Fox

Haiti


C'mon everybody: How Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent changed British music for ever


In terms of popular culture, many commentators start the Swinging Sixties with the Beatles in 1963, but the Sixties started swinging in January 1960 itself with the UK's first rock'n'roll package tour featuring the American stars, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Judging by reports in regional newspapers by inappropriate theatre reviewers, the tour was a Grade A disaster, but of course it wasn't. The audiences loved the shows and more importantly, fledgling British musicians watched closely and determined that this was the way forward. Considering there are now films about relatively unimportant moments in rock history, it is inexplicable that there has not been a film about Cochran and Vincent, especially when the story is so colourful.
In 1956, the impresario Larry Parnes had catapulted Tommy Steele to stardom as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley. Steele played along for a while, but he was not threatening enough to be a Presley and his records made with London jazzmen lacked Presley's commitment. As Steele developed into a family entertainer, Parnes tried again with Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, who were more committed to the new music.
The managers of the American rock'n'roll stars had been reluctant to send their charges to the UK as there was more money to be made in the US. Bill Haley had passed his peak when he visited in 1957; and although Buddy Holly toured with success in March 1958, the rest of the bill was end-of-the pier variety. Lew and Leslie Grade promoted Haley and Holly but they came unstuck in May 1958 when a Jerry Lee Lewis tour was cancelled after he revealed the age of his wife.
There never was a sweet Gene Vincent. In 1956, when he was 21, the curly-haired boy from Norfolk, Virginia had stormed to success with "Be-Bop-A-Lula", but his unpredictable behaviour alienated him from his band, the Blue Caps, who complained to the union. By the autumn of 1959, he was banned from many States and reduced to playing small-time dance halls with pick-up bands. His new manager, Norm Riley, thought European dates were the answer as nobody would know of his problems. The TV producer, Jack Good booked him for ITV's Boy Meets Girl and arranged a guest appearance at Tooting Granada on Marty Wilde's stage show.
Gene was super-polite, saying "sir" and "ma'am" to everyone, and performed very well. Parnes set up some tour dates with Wee Willie Harris in January, while Good worked on his image. He loathed Vincent's vivid green suit with "GV" on the pocket, but loved the intense way he would gaze into the distance while he sang his songs. "Gene wore a leg iron," he recalls, "so he hobbled a bit. I was a Shakespeare fan, so hobbling to me meant Richard III. I even thought of giving him a hunchback, and I'm glad I didn't! Then I thought, 'He can also be moody like Hamlet', so we'll dress him in black from head to toe and put a medallion round his neck."...
Continue reading

James Cameron rejects claims Avatar epic borrows from Russians' sci-fi novels


It has grossed more than $1.3bn (£800m) worldwide, wowed the critics, and spawned a new generation of fans, the so-called Avatards, who have taken to painting their faces blue.
But the film director James Cameron was facing claims today that his 3D blockbuster Avatar owes an unacknowledged debt to the popular Soviet fantasy writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
Cinema audiences in Russia have been quick to point out that Avatar has elements in common with The World of Noon, or Noon Universe, a cycle of 10 bestselling science fiction novels written by the Strugatskys in the mid-1960s.
It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora – the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.
And while there are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids – the Na'vi in Cameron's epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys' novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.
Arkady Strugatsky died in 1991. Last week Boris, the surviving brother, said he had not yet seen Avatar, which – only four weekends after its release – has become the second-highest grossing film after Cameron's Titanic.
Strugatsky, 76, appears to have shrugged off suggestions of similarities between Avatar and his Noon Universe, and denied reports circulated last week that he was accusing Cameron of plagiarism. On Monday, however, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper devoted an entire page to the affair, and carried out its own close comparison of Avatar with the World of Noon.
Both Pandoras were "warm and humid", and densely covered in trees, the paper remarked. It conceded that in the Strugatsky books two humanoid species live on Pandora, a health resort. In Avatar there is only one species.
Writing on Monday in Russia's leading liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the author and journalist Dmitry Bykov pointed out there were a lot of similarities. St Petersburg's communists, meanwhile, have condemned Avatar as a gung-ho rip-off of Soviet science fiction.
"The Na'vi are unequivocally reminiscent of the [Strugatskys'] Nave,' Bykov wrote. Speaking to the Guardian, though, Bykov said: "My point is that the film is harmful for western civilisation."
Cameron has defended himself from accusations that he has borrowed from other writers in the past, a claim made after the release of his Terminator films and Titanic. He insists the idea for Avatar is an original one. He wrote an 80-page screenplay for the film back in 1994.
Today one film critic said there would inevitably be similarities between Avatar and the Strugatskys' intellectually demanding novels as both were anti-utopian fantasies. The brothers' work sold millions of copies, with many reading their intricate fantasies as a thinly disguised satire on the KGB communist system.
"Avatar is a great technological leap forward. It's a very clever, multi-layered film, and politically highly relevant," a film critic, Yuri Gladilshikov, said. "It depicts the fate of indigenous minorities in countries such as Peru or Venezuela. And there are associations with Vietnam and the war in the jungle."
Asked about the Noon Universe cycle, he said: "In any genre you can find plenty of parallels. Of course there are similarities between the Strugatskys and Cameron. But I think in this case the parallels are marginal."
The Strugatskys' science fiction has inspired several high-profile movies – notably Andrei Tarkovsky's 1977 Stalker, loosely based on the brothers' novel Roadside Picnic. Another Strugastky work, The Inhabited Island – in which a 22nd-century space pilot crashes on an unknown planet, was made into a two-part film in 2008.
There was no comment today from 20th Century Fox, the UK distributors...
@BrandDNA - Happy Birthday to yoooou!

Keith Olberman wishes Rush Limbaugh & Pat Robertson "to hell" fot their comments about Haiti

Imelda May Johnny Got A Boom Boom Live Abbey Road Nov 2009

The Never-Ending Horror of Pat Robertson by Michael Rowe

2010-01-14-image1482287x.jpgLast night, as I was updating my Facebook status, I briefly considered a post wondering how long it would take before Pat Robertson made some monstrous insinuation about the earthquake in Haiti being God's will. I remember thinking, No, even Pat Robertson wouldn't exploit a tragedy of this magnitude--a tragedy that, as of this writing, has claimed over 100,000 lives.
Even Pat Robertson would have seen the pictures of the broken and mangled bodies of children, their limbs bloodied, crushed by fallen concrete. Even Pat Robertson, T-1000 Pharisee though he might be, would have a vulgarity threshold he wouldn't cross. Surely a natural disaster in one of the poorest countries on earth would be beyond the pale, even for him, especially given Christ's edicts relating to the blessedness of the poor.
As it happens, I should have taken bets on "when" instead.
On the 700 Club today, Robertson did what he does best: he perverted a tragedy to suit his religious agenda. In his best creepy Evangelical wizard voice, he intoned that the people of Haiti had brought this catastrophe on themselves by compacting with the Devil.
"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the Third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the Prince.' True story. And so the Devil said, 'OK it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."
In the aftermath of 9/11, CBN aired a dialogue between Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell in which Falwell asserted that the ACLU, abortionists, feminists, gays, and the People For the American Way, were responsible for the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers. Robertson concurred with Falwell, and offered up a prayer, flagellating Americans for--you guessed it--bringing 9/11 on themselves.
"We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government, we've stuck our finger in your eye. The Supreme Court has insulted you over and over again, Lord. They've taken your Bible away from the schools. They've forbidden little children to pray. They've taken the knowledge of God as best they can, and organizations have come into court to take the knowledge of God out of the public square of America."
Robertson would say something similar when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. He proposed that then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts "could be thankful" that the tragedy had "done him some good" by providing a backdrop that would intimidate Democratic senators who might otherwise question Justice Roberts' views on abortion and other conservative deal-breakers.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries on earth, and its heroic survival in the face of horrors--the likes of which Pat Robertson could only imagine enduring in his worst nightmares--has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Haiti was the site of the only successful slave revolution in human history. Between 1791 and 1804, Haiti's slaves threw off the shackles of French rule, a rule whose barbarous cruelty shines even in the annals of slavery. Their history in the two hundred-plus years since they were emancipated from France has been fraught with extreme poverty and internal turmoil.
The estimated death toll from the magnitude 7.0 quake that rocked the country on Tuesday continues to soar even as I write this. It's reported that both the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot, is among the dead, as reportedly is the chief of the UN mission in Haiti, Hedi Annabi. Aid organizations, both religious and secular, have mobilized the world over, recognizing this as a human catastrophe on par with the tsunami of December 2004. Most people of genuine faith are turning to prayer at this moment, and hopefully to their pocketbooks as well.
What's Pat Robertson doing? Writing horror stories in the blood of innocent victims of a monstrous natural occurrence--again. While women scream for their dead children, Pat Robertson is telling apocryphal tales about how the Haitians are suffering unimaginable pain and despair because they "swore a pact to the Devil" in order to be freed from the horrors of slavery under "you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever."
In the same way that social pundits have suggested that the revelations of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's unfortunate use of the word "Negro," in expressing his support of then-Senator Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, might possibly herald an open and honest discussion on the reality of race in America, perhaps we can hope that this latest obscenity from Pat Robertson might herald an open discussion on the caustic effects of religion in America.
Perhaps in the aftermath of yet another grotesque pronouncement from this man who claims to speak for God, while blaming victims of a natural horror for their own misery, it might be time for America to take a long, hard look at the multi-billion dollar religion industry (which is largely tax-exempt) and ask itself if it still wants to invest people like Pat Robertson and his evangelical corporation with anything but jaundice.
It's too much to expect Robertson's millions and millions of followers to share the outrage we feel over his comments about Haiti. It's too much to expect them to immediately cease funding his enterprise and send their money instead to an aid organization. Imagine the many millions of dollars for Haitian aid that would generate.
It's too much to expect them to recall what their own Bible says about false prophets, or to see Robertson in the context of Isaiah 29:13: The Lord says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men."
But of those of us who are outraged by Robertson's foulness chose to give an extra ten dollars to Oxfam or the Red Cross as an expression of that outrage, perhaps some small good can come out of it.
Because now is not the time for anything but goodness.
And then, when we've really done all we can, perhaps we can finally have that honest discussion about religion, and the role of people like Pat Robertson in American popular culture. And perhaps then we can discover who's really made a pact with the Devil. Lets hope it isn't us.

US Haitian ambassador Raymond Joseph shames Pat Robertson