meehawl

The Sweeney Todd opera/musical has finally opened. Me and Lisa saw this a few weeks ago. It’s great. Loud, crass, and with a high body count. Rips off Nosferatu for the entrance of Sweeney Tood at the beginning, but in a nice way.

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I was looking at some old Hallowe’en posts on this blog and I found that the 2001 site linked for the Dancing Skeletons had disappeared. But on the Internet, nothing stays lost forever…

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One of the greatest learning experiences of my childhood was watching “Monkey” (Saiyki). Because of the bad dubbing and incomprehensible Buddhist allusions, I had very little idea of what the fuck was going on most of the time, but there was lots of kung fu kicking, a fair bit of magic, and the weirdly hot, androgynous Masako Natsume as a Buddhist monk “Tripitaka“.

Imagine my surprise, then, to read in WaiWai that the guy who played “Monkey”, Masaaki Sakai, is at the centre of a saucy sex scandal. Sakai’s ex-wife, Miri Okada, is being sued by the porn-lite Kyoko and Mika Kano “sisters” for alleging that the Kano sisters attempted to seduce her Monkey husband into some sort of silicone-enhanced gang bang.

Apparently, the sisters are not so upset by the allegation that they would try to engage in sisterly orgies, but are more upset that they are alleged to have tried to ride an older man. Since most of their fanbase consists of sexually confused Japanese tweens and teens for whom the 30-something plasticised sisters titillatingly present both maternal/incestuous and pornographic cues, going for someone so “old” is a career killer for them, removing them from a Paris Hilton aspirational youth porn demographic and placing them firmly and unambiguously in Liza Minelli territory.

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Three of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite Muslim religious parties on Thursday formed a reshuffled alliance to field a slate in December’s legislative elections, raising the prospect that balloting will once more break along ethnic and sectarian lines. The agreement was reached after the Shiite alliance reportedly had been on the verge of splintering in recent days. The two parties that control Iraq’s transitional government — Dawa, led by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — will now work with political affiliates of Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

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Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by Saddam Hussein’s regime, and did so to shore up alliances with Iraq’s neighbors … Estimates of how much revenue Iraq earned from these tolerated side sales of its oil to Jordan and Turkey, as well as to Syria and Egypt, range from $5.7 billion to $13.6 billion. This illicit revenue far exceeds the estimates of what Saddam pocketed through illegal surcharges on his U.N.-approved oil exports and illegal kickbacks on subsequent Iraqi purchases of food, medicine, and supplies — $1.7 billion to $4.4 billion — during the maligned seven-year U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq … Rep. Robert Menendez … told CNN the United States was “complicit in undermining” the U.N. sanctions on Iraq. “How is it that you stand on a moral footing to go after the U.N. when they’re responsible for 15 percent maybe of the ill-gotten gains, and we were part and complicit of him getting 85 percent of the money?” Menendez asked.

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THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister … The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council … an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.

The other three are: Gen. Roustum Ghazali, head of special external intelligence and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon, Gen. Hassan Khalil, liaison between the various Syrian intelligence bodies, and Col. Mohsein Hamoud, a former military intelligence officer who served in Lebanon. Hamoud is the colonel who drove the Mitsubishi Canter bomb car from Syria to Lebanon on Jan. 21.

File -> Remove Hidden Data…

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Up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

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A video of what is currently thought to be the closest star to the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The star orbits the black hole in a highly elliptical orbit with a period of 15 years or so, but at its closest approach it swings within 17 light hours of the black hole (around three times the distance between the Sun and Pluto). In the video, you can see the star ricochet past its closest approach to the black hole. This slingshot effect enabled astronomers to further pinpoint the mass of the black hole, which is confidently estimated at 2 million suns or so. The mass observation, coupled with the size contraints observed, indicates the object at the centre of the galaxy is definitely composed of some exotically dense form of matter. It’s like M. John Harrison’s Light come to life!

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Loyalist musical culture is an almost entirely self-contained one. The bands and singers perform almost exclusively in specifically Loyalist venues; often social clubs which are linked to paramilitary organisations. The CDs and tapes sell only to the faithful, through specialist outlets: they are not even sold in Northern Irish branches of the major international music retail chains. They receive no radio play (even the local community station Shankill Radio largely eschews such material); and even if any of the performers involved had ever made a video, one doubts if MTVs producers would be beating a path to their doors.

Part 2.

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Ireland’s criminal gangs are more dangerous and unpredictable than ever … Their lives are fast and short, their violence is said to be almost psychopathic. Some who lost kidneys in shoot-outs continued to wage war on their rivals unworried by their colostomy bags, pumping themselves with steroids to compensate for ill health. Ireland has the third highest cocaine use in Europe. Seizures of the drug have gone up 800% in the last five years … Irish people, once among the poorest in Europe, are now second richest in the world, according to the United Nations; with so much money sloshing around, it seemed inevitable that an high-octane criminal culture would develop. But although the tiger brought jobs, Ireland now has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the developed world.

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