Afghanistan: Hashashin trailer

Brilliant. This is meant to be a trailer for a feature length film. The film-maker is called Emre Mirza, I think Turkish, and the name of the American who speaks Pashtu and passes for Afghan is John Cristopher Turner. The production is French, guessing by the sub-titles. Does anyone out there know anything more about this film? Send information, please.

(We have an update, with an anonymous comment seemingly originating from Bali, Indonesia, according to which Mr Mirza is a fraud and has no rights to this footage. Other sources also suggest that he cut and run from filming in Afghanistan, stealing a quantity of irreplacable footage which didn't belong to him.)

Bad craziness

once you get pink Ladas full of crazed armed adrenal-gland-chewing hashashin pilgrims to Mecca driving out of the walls at you with thick pot-smoke pouring out of all windows, vents and exhaust pipes, you know the bad craziness is only just beginning... at least it's still just pink, it could be a much more aggressive colour, and they're not shooting...

Choose pain

(messages and rants to people who will never read them, part #1)

Cossetted, over-priveleged, ungrateful fucking pussies and cowards, with your absurd sense of entitlement, your greedy fucking eyes, and all the wealth that you don't even recognise as such thrown at you by the welfare state. You act as if waking in minor opiate withdrawals is the closest thing to hell on earth.

Oh no. Human experience gets worse, so much worse. I'll spare myself from listing all the blood-chilling ways it could be worse. You could be waking up in a ruined bunker with your rifle frozen to your fingers, your toes going black, the supplies are cut off and you've had nothing but thin cold cabbage soup and a few coffee-beans to chew on for the last two weeks, and there are ten divisions of Russians with bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks somewhere out there in the -20 C blizzard, coming to disembowel you and burn you and squash you into the ice under their tank tracks.

And you'd still have something to be thankful for, then: a chance of survival. If that's something to be thankful for. You could be alone, bound spread-eagled to rocks, the desert sun scorching your skin and stabbing your defenceless eyes like spikes (their obsidian knives neatly removed your eye-lids), praying for some wild beast to find you and devour you and end it all now. But there is no life here, in the burned desert, and no one will find you. Your strength ebbs, and long before you become crazed enough to do it, you won't have the strength to smash your own head on the rocks to hasten your terrible passing...

As stated here previously - take hope, ye people! - there is a painless cure: death.

At least you have the luxury of the option.

Choose pain.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

Fortune, Empress of the World

Play

O Fortuna,
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem;
Egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.

Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
mihi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.

Sors salutis
et virtutis
mihi nunc contraria,
est affectus
et defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite

(Carl Orff, O Fortuna theme from Carmina Burana)

Is the spam getting genuinely sinister or am I losing my mind?

From: Ev escott
To: realgem-at-globaldomination-dot-uk
Subject: Would Sammael simply go elsewhere, find another land to master?

She was one of those people who can disguise themselves as an object in the room, a shadow in the comer, whose presence is a delicate happening.

Samael is, as you may or may not know, found referred to in the Heptameron, one of the strangest and most explicit late-medieval books of magic. I will not write anything more on this as anything I could say would merely scratch the surface of a bottomless abyss. When I read this book, the rosary I habitually wear around my neck snapped and fell off. Even as I write this entry, an invisible force knocks a toothbrush over into the sink.

Desultory conversation

["I love you all! I want to make all of you famous!"]
["yeah here's 20p go and phone someone who gives a fuck"]

The conversation has taken a sudden lurch towards the morbid. Jarringly, someone has asked: "Well, if you were to go, how would you like your body to be disposed of?"

Faces are heavy, silence around the table as people are thinking of something to say that would move things back towards lighter subjects. No bright ideas from anyone. Hm, pretty much like I expected. I don't want the conversation to die a grisly death and it's up to me now, so I venture: "Well, since you brought it up, I'd like to be cremated, I suppose..."

"WHAT?!? Do you think I'd fucking waste £2.50 on a bottle of white spirit just to burn your stinking corpse? That's two beers, you know..."

This is Mr Arofish (see sidebar link under Photography and Art), who once said to me: "Not everyone can afford a good death." I mis-quoted that on to people as "The best thing we can hope for from this life is a good death" and later realised I had actually developed a glib aphorism of my own.

Oh, but what the fuck? That nutcase is threatening to break his own nose for drunkenly blurting out some inadvertently filthy suggestion to the girl across the table. I slap him across the side of the head. "Ow! My ear!" He stomps on my foot, nearly breaking some toes.

"No fighting! No fight in here! Calm down now!" Sara is pleading, exasperated but amused, and others are looking semi-alarmed.

"But everyone knows your room is the fighting room, for the whole street," says Mr Arofish. "I mean, that's well established. You want to fight, you come to Sara's place to settle things. She adjudicates. Fair fights. No elbows. No weapons. Gum protectors. Masks. Rubber suits. Snorkels..."

...?

"...and then when Sara is finally sexually satisfied... OH NO! I did it again! This time I'm really going to break my own nose. Don't try and stop me..."

...

We get drunker and drunker, people wander off to crash. No sleep for the wicked or withdrawing, respectively. We decide (after some feeble excuses from the artist that he doesn't have the right colour paint) to go and find a nice blank wall in the Docklands somewhere. I keep inebriated look-out for potential twin cop cars driving side-by-side, while the artist sets to work with spray-cans. He is harshly critical of his work afterwards, but considering the prevailing blood-alcohol levels, I truly can not fault anything:



I steal some cachaca from Paulette as she sleeps (don't tell, please) and after one more drink and a joint of high-grade Maroccan, I finally manage to lose consciousness on the nearest sofa.

What happened to Pakistan?

Here are two old adverts for Pakistan International Airways, the first from the 60s, the second from 1979. Found via pakistaniat.com.

Oh, how the world has changed... in this case, largely because the USA and the ISI created their uncontrollabe Frankenstein weapon of international jihadi-ism to protect the "free world" from Soviet communism... or to bleed the Soviets a bit for their hand in humiliating the US in Vietnam...

Blowback, the people in the industry call it.




eerily premonitory image, in retrospect... and if you have a Sept 11 conspiracy theory: here's 20p, go and phone someone who gives a f--k.