Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Intervention
I knew straight away this band has something different to offer when I noticed one of the musicians tearing a newspaper in the background while they performed a cover version of Guns of Brixton. It's right up there with unplugging your guitar mid-song.
I knew straight away this band has something different to offer when I noticed one of the musicians tearing a newspaper in the background while they performed a cover version of Guns of Brixton. It's right up there with unplugging your guitar mid-song.I can taste the fear.
Lift me up and take me out of here.
Don't wanna fight, don't wanna die,
Just wanna hear you cry.
Working for the Church while your life falls apart.
Singin' hallelujah with the fear in your heart.
Every spark of friendship and love
will die without a home.
Hear the soldier groan, "We'll go at it alone."
Hear the soldier groan, "We'll go at it alone."
Lift me up and take me out of here.
Don't wanna fight, don't wanna die,
Just wanna hear you cry.
Working for the Church while your life falls apart.
Singin' hallelujah with the fear in your heart.
Every spark of friendship and love
will die without a home.
Hear the soldier groan, "We'll go at it alone."
Hear the soldier groan, "We'll go at it alone."
Labels: arcade fire
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Swim across the Atlantic Ocean...
Do you ever get the feeling that online or GPS navigation can be incredibly, incredibly daft sometimes (point #5)?
I know I do. Especially when swimming requires a detour to France. Who would want to go to France??!
I know I do. Especially when swimming requires a detour to France. Who would want to go to France??!
Labels: Google
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him" [and not a moment too soon]
OK, fun's over, the big day is upon us, bin Laden has finally been caught. By the police in Swaziland no less. And he seems to have gone quietly too. The Times of Swaziland reports:
'Bin Laden’ arrested, charged with theft
Only problem is, it's the wrong bin Laden. This deadly young individual is Wandile 'bin Laden' Mdluli, a Swazi sports star who can't possibly have picked his own nickname. Either he is making his inclination towards violent jihad a bit too obvious, or he has really pissed someone off in the media.
But you can't be too careful in these troubled times, where terrorists run our hospitals, read our children bedtime stories and put anthrax in our breakfast; it's better to fear the worst. Come to think of it, I suspect those who really know the truth about him name him 'bin Laden' due to his bad-ass behaviour. They want to warn us. His heinous crime here was the theft of a mobile phone, yet that's how they all start. Today: a phone, tomorrow: Afghanistan. He was probably about to take it into his shed and build a bomb or something. Frankly I tremble at the thought that al Qaeda might begin stealing things like phones. Civilization would crumble and even worse we wouldn't be able to ring them up to bitch about it. Bin Laden must be stopped. All of them.
Since the Times has no archive that I can see, here is the whole story, so that we may remember that early intervention stopped this fledgling terrorist wreaking further havoc.
‘Bin Laden’ arrested,charged with theft
BY THAMI PHAKATHI
MBABANE – Manzini Wanderers gifted midfielder Wandile ‘Bin Laden’ Mdluli has been arrested and charged with theft.
The Wanderers crowd-pleaser is alleged to have robbed a lady of her Nokia cellphone valued at E800, while at Lobamba.
The player will appear before the Lobamba Magistrate’s Court this morning facing robbery charges. Royal Swaziland Police PRO Superintendent Vusi Masuku confirmed the player’s arrest .
“Mdluli has been arrested by the Lobamba police and he is facing robbery charges. The 20 year-old suspect of Ngwane Park, Manzini, is alleged to have robbed a lady of her Nokia cellphone while at Lobamba. The police acted swiftly to arrest him and he will appear before the magistrate’s court tomorrow (today) morning,” Masuku said.
Wanderers PRO Vuyile Dlamini said he was not aware of an arrest of any of their players.
“It’s news to me. However, we are meeting this evening (yesterday), where a number of issues will be discussed. As for now I am in the dark,” he said.
The name of the alleged victim could not be obtained at the time of going to press last night.
Wanderers are still to play against Manzini Sundowns, XI Men, Royal Leopards, Malanti Chiefs and Mhlambanyatsi Rovers in their remaining MTN league games.
'Bin Laden’ arrested, charged with theft
Only problem is, it's the wrong bin Laden. This deadly young individual is Wandile 'bin Laden' Mdluli, a Swazi sports star who can't possibly have picked his own nickname. Either he is making his inclination towards violent jihad a bit too obvious, or he has really pissed someone off in the media.
But you can't be too careful in these troubled times, where terrorists run our hospitals, read our children bedtime stories and put anthrax in our breakfast; it's better to fear the worst. Come to think of it, I suspect those who really know the truth about him name him 'bin Laden' due to his bad-ass behaviour. They want to warn us. His heinous crime here was the theft of a mobile phone, yet that's how they all start. Today: a phone, tomorrow: Afghanistan. He was probably about to take it into his shed and build a bomb or something. Frankly I tremble at the thought that al Qaeda might begin stealing things like phones. Civilization would crumble and even worse we wouldn't be able to ring them up to bitch about it. Bin Laden must be stopped. All of them.
Since the Times has no archive that I can see, here is the whole story, so that we may remember that early intervention stopped this fledgling terrorist wreaking further havoc.
‘Bin Laden’ arrested,charged with theft
BY THAMI PHAKATHI
MBABANE – Manzini Wanderers gifted midfielder Wandile ‘Bin Laden’ Mdluli has been arrested and charged with theft.
The Wanderers crowd-pleaser is alleged to have robbed a lady of her Nokia cellphone valued at E800, while at Lobamba.
The player will appear before the Lobamba Magistrate’s Court this morning facing robbery charges. Royal Swaziland Police PRO Superintendent Vusi Masuku confirmed the player’s arrest .
“Mdluli has been arrested by the Lobamba police and he is facing robbery charges. The 20 year-old suspect of Ngwane Park, Manzini, is alleged to have robbed a lady of her Nokia cellphone while at Lobamba. The police acted swiftly to arrest him and he will appear before the magistrate’s court tomorrow (today) morning,” Masuku said.
Wanderers PRO Vuyile Dlamini said he was not aware of an arrest of any of their players.
“It’s news to me. However, we are meeting this evening (yesterday), where a number of issues will be discussed. As for now I am in the dark,” he said.
The name of the alleged victim could not be obtained at the time of going to press last night.
Wanderers are still to play against Manzini Sundowns, XI Men, Royal Leopards, Malanti Chiefs and Mhlambanyatsi Rovers in their remaining MTN league games.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Something interesting is about to happen...
Jonathan Freedland has given a brief summary of Melanie Phillips' ignorant and increasingly scary outpourings. His sentiments in some places overlap with mine:
"... I confess that I disagree with Melanie on most things. That’s fine: disagreement is a Jewish sport and we enjoy it. But in recent months, I feel Melanie has crossed a few lines that should not be crossed — and cannot go unchallenged."
"Some will tell me there is no point getting agitated by such sentiments, that newspaper columns are merely tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrap. That may be true of what most of us in the column business churn out. But Melanie Phillips is different. She has acquired a particularly devoted audience — far beyond these shores."
That audience is the National Review crowd, the individuals often called neo-conservatives but perhaps deserving little more than the label "fanatics". If they were given free rein to carry out their desires not just Iraq but also Iran and Syria would be smouldering, Europe would be a fierce competitor with the US and the North Korean situation would be more dangerous than even now.
The second big foreign policy obsession Melanie P shares with these nutters is what they call the defence of Israel from being wiped out, a legitmate concern used as a smokescreen to justify war crimes and depriving the indigenous population the state they deserve, frequently supported by an exaggerated vision of how perilous life is for the Jews of the world these days. This latter aspect is intelligently focused on in Freedland's article. It is comforting to know that not everybody is willing to "swallow whole her insistence that Europe is back in the 1930s, and that Britain now seethes with Jew-hatred."
On her website, where Phillips is used to preaching from a pulpit without opposition, she promises a rebuttal. It will be interesting to see how she explains such indefensible remarks as this one, reproduced with Freedland's comments:
"[I]t was a sentence in Melanie’s January JC column that really got me going. “Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion,” she wrote, “but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Read that line again. I have, along with the entire piece that preceded it. Think about what it means: that the Palestinian urge for national self-determination — their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation. No. Their shared desire, their national project, is to join David Irving in pretending that Hitler did not murder six million Jews. Of course, it follows that such people — a nation of neo-Nazis — deserve nothing, let alone a state of their own."
Unlike Ahmadinejad, Phillips cannot rely on mistranslation as an excuse for the amplified effect her bigotry has when one pauses to analyse its implications.
"... I confess that I disagree with Melanie on most things. That’s fine: disagreement is a Jewish sport and we enjoy it. But in recent months, I feel Melanie has crossed a few lines that should not be crossed — and cannot go unchallenged."
"Some will tell me there is no point getting agitated by such sentiments, that newspaper columns are merely tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrap. That may be true of what most of us in the column business churn out. But Melanie Phillips is different. She has acquired a particularly devoted audience — far beyond these shores."
That audience is the National Review crowd, the individuals often called neo-conservatives but perhaps deserving little more than the label "fanatics". If they were given free rein to carry out their desires not just Iraq but also Iran and Syria would be smouldering, Europe would be a fierce competitor with the US and the North Korean situation would be more dangerous than even now.
The second big foreign policy obsession Melanie P shares with these nutters is what they call the defence of Israel from being wiped out, a legitmate concern used as a smokescreen to justify war crimes and depriving the indigenous population the state they deserve, frequently supported by an exaggerated vision of how perilous life is for the Jews of the world these days. This latter aspect is intelligently focused on in Freedland's article. It is comforting to know that not everybody is willing to "swallow whole her insistence that Europe is back in the 1930s, and that Britain now seethes with Jew-hatred."
On her website, where Phillips is used to preaching from a pulpit without opposition, she promises a rebuttal. It will be interesting to see how she explains such indefensible remarks as this one, reproduced with Freedland's comments:
"[I]t was a sentence in Melanie’s January JC column that really got me going. “Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion,” she wrote, “but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Read that line again. I have, along with the entire piece that preceded it. Think about what it means: that the Palestinian urge for national self-determination — their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation. No. Their shared desire, their national project, is to join David Irving in pretending that Hitler did not murder six million Jews. Of course, it follows that such people — a nation of neo-Nazis — deserve nothing, let alone a state of their own."
Unlike Ahmadinejad, Phillips cannot rely on mistranslation as an excuse for the amplified effect her bigotry has when one pauses to analyse its implications.
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