Picnic ‘n’ mix

Tomorrow is the inaugural International People’s Picnic of Ashton Court! It strikes me as a jolly good idea. I’ve baked some bread and I shall ransack the cupboards for chutney and jam and cheese and the flatmate’s holiday chorizo and wend my way over for the afternoon (well, via the moggies), and hopefully meet some friends and perhaps make new ones

Certainly last year’s jamboree on the Downs was more fun than ACF itself seems to have been…

HonkWatch #067: Drop Dead Gorgeous

An early casualty of the seafood buffet incident in the rather dark beauty pageant comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous.

“If you see him, punch him in the face for me”: Scratcher a rent non-paying little mummy’s boy!

There’s a great little piece in English language Andalucian newspaper The Olive Tree about Mark Thatcher facing eviction from his Spanish bolthole in the wake of Fighting Mann’s EG coup trial:

MARK THATCHER is hiding out in a gated community on the Ronda-San Pedro road in fear of being kidnapped.

He fears an international snatch squad has been ordered to extradite him to Equatorial Guinea to face trial in an overthrow plot, he allegedly helped to fund.

This week fellow plot leader Simon Mann was found guilty and sentenced to 34 years in jail.

The son of former UK PM Margaret Thatcher rarely leaves his £3million bolthole in exclusive El Madronal, which has round-the-clock security.

He has installed a series of high-tech security systems in the home, that is owned by a former school friend Stephen Humberstone.

But now his days are numbered after Humberstone ordered him to leave the home he has rented since 2005 over unpaid bills.

Claiming he is three months in arrears to the tune of over 20,000 euros, Mr. Humberstone this week reportedly plans to serve court papers on him via the San Pedro courts.

“I want him off my property as soon as possible. If you see him, punch him in the face for me.

“I have absolutely no idea why a man as wealthy as him, who can still drive a Porsche, cannot pay his rent.

“All I can think is that he has no money. After talking to Mark I get the feeling he is receiving an allowance from his elderly mother.

“He always likes to pay in cash and even though the villa had maximum security he has fitted even more alarm systems. That shows how scared he is because he is a nasty piece of work and he is not liked.

“Despite all this he can still afford a driver and a cook – so why can he not pay his rent?”

Sir Mark, 54, who is estimated to be worth £64million, denies that he is behind in his rent and insists he has received nothing in writing from his landlord.

The piece goes on to talk about Scratcher’s fears of being kidnapped and sent to Equatorial Guinea to face trial, a theme which TOP covers in salacious detail:

Alarmingly for Thatcher there are an estimated 120 international mafia gangs operating on the Costa del Sol, each capable of undertaking kidnap plots.

In 2005 there were a reported 50 plus kidnappings and “settling of accounts” on the coast.

In 2004 a Lithuanian gang kidnapped British businessman Frank Capa in broad daylight on the Ronda-San Pedro road.

The gang released him after nine days when the family paid a reported £1m
ransom.

A police source told the Olive Press: “There are quite a few groups of former soldiers from the Eastern Bloc, highly-trained with no money, and prepared to carry out these sort of crimes.

“There have been an alarming number of kidnappings over the last few years, most of them going unreported.”

Fret not, Scratcher! I’m sure you’ll be fine!

EG coup blog posts:

• Fighting Mann’s lawyer cries Guinea foul over coup extradition
• Fighting Mann: A “mere instrument” or a total tool?
• Fighting Mann drops Scratcher in the shit
• Fighting Mann earns 34 years
• Sugaring Spicer: the sensitive side of a professional gun

Italian state fails to protect its co-conspirators in torture and terror (though the scum escape any real punishment)

An Italian court has found 15 officials guilty of mistreating protesters following violent demonstrations at G8 meeting in the city of Genoa in 2001.

A judge handed down prison sentences ranging from five months to five years to the accused – many members of the police, as well as doctors.

Another 30 officials were cleared of charges, including assault.

Protesters have said they were strip-searched and beaten by police. The prosecution said they were tortured.

(BBC News website)

ETA -Rape threats, beatings and racist chants: 15 Italians jailed for abuse of G8 Genoa protesters (Guardian)

ETA – Police and doctors convicted of G8 brutality avoid jail (Guardian)

Anonymous scribbler vs national media combine

“Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrelful…”

(Judge Phelan in The Wire)

• Bristol Graffiti on the Mail’s Banksy story
• Ian Bone on the same
• And ditto TBB

HonkWatch #066: Peep Show (S3E2)

Mark fertilises the fairground floor in Peep Show.

HonkWatch #065: Clockers

A rather nauseous Victor Dunham (Isaiah Washington) hits the head in the Spike Lee-Richard Price Brooklyn slang opera Clockers.

Victor is the straight brother of low-level drug dealer Strike (Mekhi Phifer), whose boss Rodney (Delroy Lindo) has put him in an awkward position.

Price later joined the writing staff of The Wire, where he added flavour to the stories of corner boys and hoppers.

Stokes Croft 3, gentrifiers 1

Okay, so we lost the battle over Lakota, but it seems like the groundswell of dissent in the area over the massive changes to the cultural and social makeup of our area proposed by developers is finally being heeded by the council… In quick succession the plans to put up apartment blocks and student flats on the sites of Clockwork and the Attic Bar and adjacent to the Bell have all been thrown out!

For more info on this and other developments, stay tuned to the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft and the St. Paul’s Unlimited Community Partnership websites, and check my Nu.Bristol pages.

PS An interesting little vid with Chris Chalkley of PRSC, SC resident Keval Shah and Hogge from the Cube talking about the area and the challenges it faces:

Sugaring Spicer: the sensitive side of a professional gun

Tim Spicer <3 blue shirts and big shiny guns

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray is being threatened by lawyers representing the globetrotting mercenary Tim Spicer.

The full text of the letter to Murray’s publishers Mainstream from Spicer’s solicitors Schillings (as taken from the PDF of the letter as hosted on Craig Murray’s blog) is as follows:

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Limited
7 Albany Street
Edinburgh
Scotland
EHl 3UG

BY POST AND FAX: 0131 556 8720

Our Ref: SMS/JXR/ww/A131/3

ON THE RECORD
NOT FOR PUBLICATION

08 July 2008

Dear Sirs

The Road to Samarkand – Craig Murray

We represent Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer OBE, C.E.O. of Aegis Defence Services Limited (“Aegis”).

We are instructed to write to you with regard to ‘THE ROAD TO SAMARKAND- INTRIGUE, CORRUPTION AND DIRTY DIPLOMACY’ (“the Book”) written by Craig Murray and due to be published in September 2009 by you
(http://www.rbooks.co.uk/search results.aspx) to be sold in England and Wales by Random House Sales Department.

We have reason to believe that the Book may contain serious, untrue and damaging defamatory allegations about our client.

Please confirm by return whether the Book is due to be published in England and Wales in September 2008 and if so, the exact date. please also confirm whether the Book is due to be published in any other jurisdiction, setting out each jurisdiction, together with the publication date and publisher concerned in each case.

lmportantly, we require you to confirm by return whether or not the Book contains any reference to our client, and if so, we require you to set out in full each and every reference to our client in its entirety to give our client the opportunity to take legal advice and to respond to any allegations in good time prior to publication.

Any widespread publication of the Book containing defamatory allegations concerning our client would be deeply damaging to our client’s personal and professional reputations and would cause him profound distress and anxiety. We remind you that you would be responsible for that damage and any subsequent republication of the allegations. We also put you on notice that you will be liable for any special damage or loss suffered by our client as a result of the Book and we reserve all our client’s rights in this regard.

We note from your website http://www.mainstreampublishing.com/news_current.html that Mr Murray is due to speak about the Book at a ‘Mainstream author event at the Edinburgh lnternational Book Festival’ entitled ‘Lived Lives’ on 12th August 2008 at 4.30pm in the RBS Main Theatre, Edinburgh. We hereby put both you and Mr Murray on notice that all our client’s rights are reserved in relation to any defamatory comments or publications made by you or Mr Murray in relation to that event.

Please immediately take into your possession all drafts of the Book pre-publication, all notes, emails, correspondence, memos, images and oiher documents relevant to the publication of this Book, and preserve them safely pending the outcome of this dispute. They will need to be disclosed in due course if litigation has to be commenced. Also, you will need to disclose the financial arrangements for the sale and licence of the Book to other publications.

In the circumstances, we require that you confirm immediately that you agree to undertake on behalf of Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Limited not to publish any libels regarding our client in any editions of the Book or at all.

We require the above undertaking by 4pm on Friday 11th July 2008, failing which we will have no option but to advise our client with regard to making applications to the High court for an injunction to restrain publication and/or for pre-action disclosure. You are on notice that we will seek to recover the costs of any necessary applications from you.

We await your response by return. In the meantime all our client’s rights are reserved, including the right to issue proceedings against you without further notice.

Yours faithfully

SCHILLINGS

cc. Craig Murray Esq.

Not bad, eh? Psychic libel lawyers who can predict what might be in an as-yet unpublished book!

Murray’s response to the threat is unequivocal:

Schillings are a firm of libel lawyers dedicated to prevent the truth from being known about some deeply unlovely people. They managed temporarily to close down this blog (and several others) to keep information quiet about the criminal record of Alisher Usmanov. Now they are attempting to block the publication of my new book in the interests of mercenary commander Tim Spicer, one of those who has made a fortune from the Iraq War. It is sad but perhaps predictable that private profits from the illegal Iraq war, in which hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died, are providing the funding to try to silence my book.

Libel law in the UK is a remarkable thing – Schillings can go for an injunction when I haven’t published anything about Spicer yet and they haven’t seen what I intend to publish. People might conclude that Spicer has something to hide. You will see that they also are attempting to censor not only the book, but what I say at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 12 August. I can assure you that they will find it impossible to affect what I say about Spicer at that event.

Nor will they prevent me from publishing the truth about Spicer, one way or another.

In a subsequent blog post, he adds:

Among the incidents I cover in my new book are the murder of Peter McBride, the Aegis Trophy Video, the Papua New Guinea coup, the Equatorial Guinea plot, Executive Outcomes’ muder of civilians in Angola and the Arms to Africa affair. I do hope that other bloggers will generate another Streisand effect through blogging on these subjects.

Lest we forget, Spicer – currently running extensive private military operations in Iraq and elsewhere with his company Aegis – has a history of working as a gun-for-hire in places like Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone, and via connections at mercenary outfits like Executive Outcomes and Sandline has long been a colleague of fellow former Scots Guard the recently convicted coup plotter Simon Mann.

Definitely one to keep your eye on, this’un…

Piss & Vinegar #017: Peep Show (S1E5)

Mark (David Mitchell) goes a little mad and pisses in Barbara’s drawers in Peep Show.

HonkWatch #064: The Government Inspector

Janice Kelly (Geraldine Alexander) tickles the cistern in The Government Inspector, Peter Kosminsky’s quietly angry TV film about the Dr David Kelly affair.

HonkWatch #063: I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

Will Graham* (Clive Owen) is a former London gangster who has long since left the big city and the game. But a series of seemingly unconnected events – being sacked from his forestry job, a nighttime assault in the woods, and (unbeknown to Will) his brother dying suddenly, violently – conspires to draw him back.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead sees director Mike Hodges team up with Owen again after the critical success of 1998’s Croupier, and also revisits the core plot strand from Hodges’ earlier gangster classic Get Carter – a brother’s suspicious death brings a man of violence back to his home town.

It’s refreshingly impressionistic in comparison, though. There are no internal monologues, no expositional dialogue explaining exactly why Will left London, why he broke up with Helen (Charlotte Rampling), or why Boad (Malcolm McDowell) doesn’t like Will’s brother Davey (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), and no hip soundtrack, just diegetic sound and atmospheric score.

Some of the tropes could be seen as a little clichéd – man seeks revenge for brother’s death – but seeing as they are built on human impulses as old as humanity, and are never made too intricate, this works well. Whilst the viewer knows ahead of Will what has happened, it is not so complicated an affair for Will not to follow the blood trail. And there is no moral at the end of the story. Well, there’s not really any ending to it, either. Just an arbitrary full stop hanging in time over a series of interconnected events and overlapping strands.

This HonkWatch sees Will throwing up once back within the city limits. He is a scruffy nomad at this point, not yet again preened and strutting like his former self, not yet purged of the simpler life he retreated into, not yet polluted with the filth of the city he hates. It is one stage of several throughout the film of him preparing to wreak lex talionis, a slow, extended tooling up sequence.

* Note that Will Graham is also the name of the FBI agent who specialises in getting himself into the mindsets of serial killers in Manhunter/Red Dragon

MPs: “80% of British households are scum”

The government needs to do more to prosecute suspected benefit fraudsters, MPs have said.

The Commons public accounts committee said fewer than 7,500 out of 200,000 potential fraud cases investigated in 2006/7 had ended up going to court.

It said the Department of Work and Pensions risked not being “seen to be taking firm action”.

…The report said: “Potential fraudsters will not be deterred if the department is not seen to be taking firm action where there is good evidence that fraud has taken place.”

It urged the DWP to continue to take a “firm and co-ordinated approach” on organised crime posing a “serious threat” to the benefit system.

The committee’s chairman, Conservative MP Edward Leigh, said: “Benefit fraud diverts public funds into the pockets of criminals and, in so doing, reduces our confidence in the benefits system.

“There are important areas where the DWP must improve its performance.”

(BBC News)

From the Office of National Statistics:

From the House of Commons Information Service:

Fighting Mann earns 34 years

Dude goes down for more than the prosecuting authorities originally asked for!

The sentence is longer than expected. During the trial, José Olo Obano, Equatorial Guinea’s attorney general, urged the court to sentence Mann to 31 years, eight months and three days. The death penalty was not permitted under the terms of Mann’s extradition from Zimbabwe. It was suggested last month that Mann may be released before completing any sentence.

Others in the trial earned smaller sentences: Lebanese businessman Mohamed Salaam got 18 years, while four Equatorial Guineans (not considered worthy in the Western press of having their names published) have gone down for six years, another for one, with a sixth being acquitted.

Oh, and in addition to his thirty-four summers…

Mann was ordered to pay a fine and compensation to the Equatorial Guinea state totalling around $24m (£12.1m). Mangue said in the ruling that Mann failed to show “an attitude of regret”, despite his apology before the court.

Stroll on Scratcher and Smelly!

HonkWatch #062: Savior

Milky baby puke, from FRY Civil War flick Savior. It’s grim stuff, but watchable.

Nice book, shame about the creases…

The other week I was well chuffed when I won a Roy Of The Rovers reprint album – pretty much the first thing I’ve won since a runners-up prize in Look-In one Easter back in the early 80s!

Well, today it arrived (along with – at long last – the flatmate’s WSM, but that’s another story), and whilst I’m still rather gleeful with my victory and its booty, my joy is somewhat mitigated by the condition it’s arrived in

The spine’s wrecked, and there’s big, fat creases running through the whole book, top and bottom. Most disappointing. It was sent direct from the publishers, so either it was a slightly manky copy lurking in the publicity department to start with, or else (and let’s face it, this is the more likely reason) Royal Mail has fucked up again. It’s a modern softback edition, which is a pretty damn sturdy format, unless you really have a go at the spine (and the creases go through all 200-odd pages of glossy high gsm paper – no mean feat), and it was posted in a new jiffy bag, so I can’t see how this level of damage can be down to everyday passage through the postal system. Grrr!!!

Anyway, I look forward to reading it (if I can prise the bloody pages far enough open), and I am still grateful to DownTheTubes for the comp in the first place, and to Titan for supplying the prizes.

PS The lady friend thinks it’s weird I have “children’s comics” on my bedside shelf

Pity the fool

I try and make sure all comments on here get published – everything bar blatant spam. Even the mental stuff goes up. The only comment I can remember deliberately not approving was one which did the rounds of Bristol blogs, which claimed to be ‘outing’ The Bristol Blogger.

Then after a week away, I noticed this little gem on the comment waiting list. I’m not prepared to sully my lovely Yuppification section with its ignorant, prejudiced, sub-literate witterings, but for the sake of openness I present it here on the wire for you to marvel at.

A few points:

• Note the meandering, bitter tone, and the switches of target between the area of Stokes Croft itself and its inhabitants, signs perhaps of an addled liver and a restless (and I use the word in its broadest sense here) mind;
• Appreciate the erratic use (or absence) of eliding apostrophes (“Its full of”, “You can’t go”);
• Gasp at the daring omission of letters from words – a triumph of expressiveness given poetic balance by the unnecessary addition of letters elsewhere (“The are whores everywhere”, “heroine addicts”);
• Applaud the confident yet entirely evidence-free assertions of FACT (“Most residents of the croft ARE claiming benefits”, “There are hostels everywhere”), which are sometimes strikingly specific (“It has a crime rate equal to that of Hackney”, “Most residents are…shooting up in the hallways of the 51º02 block”);
• Take your hat off to the author’s heroic refusal to be bound by outdated concepts of consistent capitalisation or formatting (“the full moon”, “the UK”, “the croft”, “Hackney”);



• Revel in the bold failure to connect any of the numbered points to the commenter’s initial statement that “Stokes croft needs to be developed”…

I could go on, but I’m sure you, dear reader, have more than enough meat between your teeth already.

The Digest: June 2008

JUNE 2008

Ah, well June was a month of love for me, in which I got to spend a lot of time with a very special woman. I did a bit o’ blogging, but didn’t have much time to read other people’s or listen to many podcasts. It was damn hot and sunny a fair bit too! Ooh, and we had a grand old time at the Bashout first birthday party down the Dirty Duck

The month of June reflected in the BunKRS…

• People’s Republic of Stokes Croft tried to galvanise local people behind an effort to block a developer’s planning application for Lakota, which was nonetheless eventually voted through by the Council;
• My local councillor Shirley Marshall went AWOL (but subsequently resurfaced);
• Developers on the new museum project went zero tolerance on graffiti;
• George Carlin died;
• Bristol briefly went jihad mad with news of a techno terrorist;
• Simon ‘Fighting’ Mann’s mercenary plot trial got underway in Equatorial Guinea, in which Mark ‘Scratcher’ Thatcher was soon grassed up;
• And I won a competition!