This is the dawning of the age of web querulous

Perhaps I’m being unreasonably tetchy, but this just seems mighty wrong.

At 9.40am I tweeted a link to a photo on Street Boners, captioned “Using party balloons for nitrous is like getting a unicorn to talk to teens about breast cancer”.

At 9:41am I received an email notification that CancerInfoHQ was now following me on Twitter.

Framed Documents #046: Gia

Pre-modelling stardom ingénue Gia Carangi (Angelina Jolie) carves her name with pride in the quite good HBO made-for-TV biopic Gia.

Just say no to GHB, kids!

This made me proper LOL when I saw it on Facebook…

In case you didn’t know it, Carl Williams is currently serving life with a minimum tariff of 35 years for a series of murders connected to the ecstasy and amphetamine trade in Melbourne…

Framed Documents #013: Half Baked

Young Scarface (Michael Raposo) feels the cheeba for the first time in Dave Chapelle’s half-baked Half Baked.

Framed Documents #010: Thank You For Smoking

Booze lobbyist Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) featured on the cover of an industry magazine in the rather good but not great Thank You For Smoking.

Exclusive!

CAPTAIN MORGAN puts down his sword

Plus:

Get your hands off my moonshine

And:

The Benefits of an enlarged liver

After the great attention to detail on the opening credits (all in the style of tobacco product packaging) I do wish someone had proofread the dummy publications a bit better.

A stone’s throw away, somewhere on Stokes Croft…

On Saturday the LLF and I went for a drink with her brother, who is newly pitched up in Bristol. After a false start at the Analphoney (“Bit… Pretentious here, isn’t it?”), we moved on to the Land Of The Trout for a more relaxed few rounds (interrupted only by the arrival and departure of a grazing herd of Blues Brothers stags), before heading home.

On the way we stopped off for a few cans of carry-out at The Best, possibly the least appropriately-named store on Stokes Croft. Still, it is open twenty-four hours a day, so who cares if it’s staffed exclusively by obnoxious oafs.

Whilst paying (and BTW, six quid for four Stripes? Are you having a – I believe the word is – bubble?!), the next customer in the queue, a rather handsome chap in his late twenties, well groomed and expensively dressed, turned round to us and with nary a hint of shame, embarrassment or restraint, asked us:

Do you know anywhere around here where I can buy some crack? I really fancy doing a bit of crack.

Well, that’s a question one doesn’t often hear around the streets of BS2. Perhaps he was a stranger in town, here for a business conference with no time to research the local retail landscape.

The LLF looked at him thoughtfully, smiling, before replying:

Aww, why do you want to do that? You look too nice to do crack!*

Leading him to retort (obviously, now that I think of it)…

It’s a fucking good buzz!

And moreish, too.

* Now CONFIRMED as her Very Own Words Spoken Through Her Self Same Beautiful Lips.

Piss & Vinegar #033: Prime Suspect 5

Ooh-a-bit-scary drug lord The Street (Steven Mackintosh) does a wee in the cells in Prime Suspect 5.

Piss & Vinegar #030: Massive (S1E2)

Coke-troubled DJ/producer Manny Westside (Paul Kaye) flushes like a good little boy during a tinkle break in not-very-good BBC3 sitcom Massive.

Piss & Vinegar #029: Rise Of The Footsoldier

More from Rise Of The Footsoldier: Carlton’s spar Eddie (Patrick Regis) tops himself after the whole Turkish gangsters torture situation.

Happy birthday, Carl

Happy birthday, Carl!

Easy on the cake though, lad.

Inner city lullabys

Tonight the streets here in St. Paul’s have been filled with slowly perambulating clusters of young folk. They’ve been noisy but largely good natured, from what I’ve seen.

Apart from one incident: I think some chaps must have thrown a firework in the road, because there was a loud BANG, shortly followed by a not-so-young woman pushing a pram, who began bellowing at five or six boys who by this time were all shuffling off in the opposite direction from her as fast as their shuffling would carry them, hooded heads bowed, hands in pockets.

And bellow she did; as one might expect of a mother pushing home an infant whose sojourn has been interrupted by pyrotechnics exploding near her. Her bellowing appeared to take the form of a lecture in the Fireworks Code, liberally retooled for the twenty-first century. The more she bellowed, the more they shuffled. A straggler had to pass her to rejoin the group, and I suspect he may have made an inopportune remark, because the bellowing lifted louder, and the instruction in firework safety became ever more broadly interpreted. The specifics were a little tricky to identify, though she was rather clearer with the broader strokes, to wit, the gregarious young gentlemen in question were

Ras claats

and indeed,

Pussy claats

into the bargain.

Given that the young men continued their shuffling with only the faintest of defiant mumblings, and never whilst looking back, all as our stickler for appropriate rocket handling continued her presentation, I like to think that we all learned valuable lessons tonight.

–«– –•– –»–

Some while later, more noise drew me to the window. This time it seemed that two friends were having something of a heated discussion, an argument even; I’m sorry to report it appeared to be over money – like so many fallings out. Except that there was only one man there, and whilst it is entirely possible he was Bluetoothing into a phone, his swift gait, stooping posture and robotically swinging arms all hinted that this was not a member of the laptoperati.

You were wrong! That’s it… Friendship over. No more. You shouldn’t have done that. That was my fifty pence. You can make your money on that fifty pence. Friends no more.

And with that, he was gone, a two-legged test transmission in stereophonic sound, panning from right to left and sinking back into the night from which he had risen in just a few seconds.

–«– –•– –»–

No evening here could be complete, though, without a little mercantile hustle and bustle. The brandy-and-cigars of tonight’s feast of street scenes involved two gaunt fellows and their mute female friend discussing prices, routes and methods of transport in brisk fashion. I may be mistaken, but I think they flagged down a passing motorist, and appeared to negotiate a small fee to carry the trio to an informal all-night pharmacy where the smallest of the three held a store account. After two fifty pees (oh, how I wish neither of these was the fateful coin which destroyed a friendship) were passed over to the driver, our seekers finalised their order by consensus:

Well, I’ll pay for the brown, but what about stone?

We’ll get a stone on the way back.

You sure?

No problem, I’ll pay for that, I trust you.

And with that, all three – brooding cipher, affable guide and treasurer – slid into their chariot and were away, car driving off before even the doors were shut.

Good night, St. Paul’s.

Pic: Worth1000.com

Review: Rollin’ With The Nines

After seeing ROTF, which I didn’t think was that bad, I decided to have a crack at Rollin’ With The Nines, an earlier film by the same director/writer team, which most certainly *was* that bad.

It’s got potential, it’s just rubbish overall. There’s a nice opening sequence, which hints at an interesting premise – a narrative based around the journey of a gun through the underworld – but it’s cast aside in minutes in favour of a stodgy, standard ‘rise of a hoodlum’ schtick. The twist – if you can call it a twist and not blush whilst saying it – is that the gangsters are Black Britons. Cue embarrassing stereotypes, leaden dialogue, boring film.

Vas Blackwood and Robbie Gee are in it; they’re not terrible. Naomi Taylor (previous credit: an episode of Doctors) is actually rather good, not that her character or lines are very interesting. Billy Murray has a tiny role as a Cockney über-villain. Turbo Terry Stone is a loudmouthed cop, and in this film his inexperience shows up more than in ROTF, especially when his partner is the eyebrow-raisingly wooden posh boy Dominic Alan-Smith. The co-writer (and brother of the director) Will Gilbey somehow wangles himself a meaty second-string role as another copper on the trail of the gangsters, despite not noticeably having any acting ability (and having trouble with basic speech). Jason Flemyng has a cameo as – wait for it, and bear in mind this is a British gangster film – a police boss called Captain Fleming.

This sort of stuff goes on and on.

To save time, here’s the bad stuff handily condensed:

• All the lame racial stereotypes. Really. Short of throwing in watermelon smiles and having massive, hissing black snakes slithering around chained up, alabaster-skinned young virgins, I’m not sure how much lower it could sink. To précis: black people are either musicians, or criminals. And when they’re criminals, they’re really rubbish at it, because they’re all emotional and stuff, and can’t be trusted, or their tiny little peanut brains aren’t as good as superior white criminals’ brains, and they end up getting caught or killed.
• The lack of characterisation at any stage. Who are these people, and why should we care about them? Never mind, Simon from Blue just got blatted in the brain!
• That pointless sex scene. It’s just boring.
• The whole Bristol subplot never gets explored, because of the car chase!
• The rape thing was the worst of exploitation; the only purpose for it was to give the lead woman character a reason for being quite so pissed off to suddenly want to become a drugs baroness (on top of her brother being killed). To me that’s not just lazy scriptwriting, it’s downright offensive.
• The rubbish ‘meaningful’ character names (Rage, Temper, Hope etc).
• Honestly, that Dominic Alan-Smith seems to be the main cop character, but he’s so awful! Didn’t anyone notice at the auditions that he just can’t act?
• Jason Flemyng as, err, ‘Captain Fleming’…
• Cameo appearances by Dizzee Rascal and Kano! Imaginatively cast as a crack dealer and a gangster!

And the plus points:

• Simon ‘Blue’ Webbe gets shot quite early on. In the face.
• There’s No Vinny Jones.
• There’s a nice little chase sequence, taking in motorway, country lanes, cars and a helicopter, which is fairly ambitious for a tiny little Britflick.
• The assault on the Yardie house is impressively executed, even if from a plot point of view it’s totally shit. Reminded me of Bad Boys 2.
• Cameo appearances by Dizzee Rascal and Kano! Imaginatively cast as a crack dealer and a gangster!

[Edited for spelling and all that 5/11/8]

HonkWatch #081: Rise Of The Footsoldier

Andy Riot (Rhys Williams) coughs up under interrogation from ‘truth serum’ wielding Turkish gangsters in the Gilbey brothers’ not-too-shabby hooligan/gangster flick Rise Of The Footsoldier.

For all my pre-viewing concerns that it would be another slice of post-Ritchie Britflick gangster wankery, I actually thought it was alright; I suspect that the IMDb rating (6.9) is about right. It’s fairly proficiently made, though the camerawork is a little too kinetic all of the time in the first half for my taste.

On the other hand, too much has been crammed into it. There’s football hooliganism from the late seventies into the dawn of the nineties, taking in Bill Gardner, the ICF and the police crackdown; then running doors from sticky-floored niteklubs into ye birthe of acide house; involvement in ’security’, ‘protection’ and then ‘distribution’ work; then into the whole Essex clubs/drugs nexus, leading up to the Rettendon murders. There’s too much going on that should have been dealt with at the script stage.

Still, there are some strikingly detailed touches along the way – the answerphone messages during the period between the first news of the murders and the identities of the dead men being revealed, and the disfigured corpses – which appear to have been developed out of the original court evidence.

However, the film does seem to attribute to Leach more influence and importance than he actually had. It also seems to conflate his experiences with those of others. For example, his original meeting with Craig Rolfe sounds very similar to an incident related by (head of security at Raquel’s nightclub/Tucker associate) Bernard O’ Mahoney. The car destruction scene also sounds like an event O’ Mahoney claims to have orchestrated. There are several more such instances.

Stepping back from the film – which I found visceral and watchable – I do wonder why it is hung around Leach. For the first hour, Leach is clearly at the centre of the events being portrayed, yet for most of the ‘Essex Boys’ narrative which fills up the rest of the movie, it’s all about what Tucker, Tate and Rolfe do (and what is done to them); Leach doesn’t really figure in it.

Cast-wise there’s not much for women to do in it, sadly (for all the problems with ID and The Firm, at least Claire Skinner and Lesley Manville were given a little more meat to work with) – wives and whores all, either serving as chattels to big, meatheaded men, or else rending their garments over the battered, broken or lifeless bodies of their menfolk. But the men in it do look and sound like the sorts of people they are playing. Ricci Narnett (one of the scary soldiers from 28 Days Later) does well as Leach (though the part is perhaps written too much as a ‘hero’ of sorts), whilst Terry Stone, Craig Fairbrass and Roland Manookian are enthusiastic as Tucker, Tate and Rolfe. The Tucker hair looks just like the photos, too!

There are definitely too many moments when things descend into pointless musical montage, and the voiceover narration doesn’t help hide that the structure of the film is confused and bloated; but overall, though, a fairly decent flick. Better than Essex Boys and Green Street, and not as idolatrous of violence and violent people as Guy Ritchie.

PS It has both Frank Harper and Billy Murray (who also produced) in it

PPS After being mildly impressed by ROTF, I checked out the earlier Gilbey feature, Rollin’ With The Nines. Despite sharing many of the cast and crew, it was just awful.

Framed Documents #005: Hardware

In the post-apocalyptic near future world of Richard Stanley’s 2000AD-teefing SF flick Hardware, Jill (Stacey Travis) pulls out another Major Good Vibe reefersplifftypedoobie…

(Whilst pootling around the web reading up about the film and its director, I came upon a very interesting and long interview with Stanley conducted by Tom Huddleston. The Shok! incident is not mentioned, though.)

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.

HonkWatch #060:

Couldn’t quite capture the motion-in-motion moment, but I think the vom is pretty clear on the toilet seat. From the moment in Alex Cox’s Sid And Nancy when our eponymous hero first tries junk in Wally Hairstyle’s mum’s house.

HonkWatch #055: Tough Love (E2)

A cut above the average ITV police procedural two-parter, this: it’s Tough Love, with Ray Winstone as mediocre detective Lenny Milton, whose best mate is his charismatic and more successful boss, DCI Mike Love (Adrian Dunbar). To say much more would nudge too much at the plot, but if you like grim and unhappy dramas where coppers are arseholes (and let’s face it, I am), you may well enjoy this. Throw into the mix director David Defence Of The Realm Drury and solid supporting performances, and it’s a decently dour couple of hours.

On the honking tip, here we find Lenny attending to his morning emetic aerobics after being stitched up in a particularly unpleasant way.

Cue laughing policemen cracking down on hippie crack

Dozens of pierced canisters of nitrous oxide have been found in a playground at Claverham, North Somerset.

The chemical, also known as laughing gas, is used in food preparation and as a medical pain killer.

Police believe that youngsters were experimenting with the gas which causes a floating sensation when inhaled.

Officers are trying to find out where they got the 70 canisters from [hmmm, I wonder...] and warned that their misuse could lead to illness or injury.

Pc Phil Kinsella said: “We are very concerned that young teenagers are risking serious injury, as piercing the pressurised canisters could make them explode.

“Alcohol cans and bottles were also found and we don’t know what the combined effects could have for children’s health.

“The Neighbourhood Team will be talking to local schools to encourage them to pass on safety messages to their pupils, but we would also ask parents to talk to their children and make them understand the risks they are running.”

Users also risk frost-bite and its after-effects include nausea, loss of appetite, headache, sleepiness and a lack of co-ordination.

From BBC News Bristol

Well, had to happen sometime. FFS, don’t be dirty bastards, clean up your litter!

HonkWatch #039: The Wire (S1E3)

So finally I got me some time to work over The Wire.

I’d been vaguely aware of it as some TV cop show that idiot critics spunked endless adjectives over (gritty, hardboiled, dark and the rest), but it wasn’t till Christmas, when drunk on wine (proper corked bottle shit) I found myself the net between Ignatius and History Mike as they volleyed favourite moments from the series over my clueless head, that I figured it might actually be worth watching. Fucksakes, I pinned my colours to the Third Watch mast, and lordy, did the third to sixth series bite me on the arse for my troubles. Never again. But pedigree-wise, The Wire looked far more promising.

For a start, it’s created by David Simon, the crime reporter whose book about a Baltimore police squad inspired the excellent Tom Fontana/Barry Levinson/Paul Attanasio series, Homicide: Life On The Street. Secondly, like Homicide, it’s set in Baltimore, so no over-familiar NYC or LA locales. And thirdly, it’s not strictly speaking a cop show. As the unusually perceptive Wikipedia page for the show points out, it’s about organisational dysfunction and the failure of capitalism to serve the interests of the many. It just so happens that a lot of the plot hangs on crime and detection, and that a lot of the characters weave in and out of the criminal justice system. Many of the police characters are corrupt, incompetent, lazy, hubristic, indifferent; whilst many of the criminals in the show display strength of character, resourcefulness, honour, loyalty, intelligence. That’s not to say that black hats are wholesale swapped for white, just that individual characters must be judged on their actions at any given moment, rather than defined wholly by their role in gameplay. And that makes for a compelling show.

But enough wittering, I have plenty of Wire-related Motion Picture Motions in the bag to serve as excuse for further self-indulgent word-bilge, so let’s cut the chatter and get with the chunder.

Here we have the aftermath of the first time we see standover man Omar Little in action – having scoped out the routine in The Pit, he waits till crew boss D’Angelo goes on a food run before assaulting the stash house to rob him some Barksdale drugs. Shotgun is fired, belly is emptied. Good result.

Cheers Ignatius and History Mike.

HonkWatch #036: Attachments (S1E4)

Oh look, there’s coke-addled wideboy Essex offender Reece getting a shoulderful of lung chunks after raping Zoe the intern in Attachments S1E4.

Big weed raid in Montpelier sparks up looming stoner depression; sense of calm descends on Valley Road

Almost £900,000 worth of cannabis plants have been seized during a raid on a house in Bristol.

Avon and Somerset Police said the seizure of 900 plants was thought to be the biggest drugs seizure from a residential property in the city.

They were taken during a police operation in the Montpellier [sic] on Wednesday.

A spokesman said: “We can’t cut down all the plants until the electricity is made safe by the company.”

BBC News

First person to suggest that the number of plants said to have been seized diminishes by the time this reaches court risks an ASBO.

HonkWatch #014: Narc

Oh, and talking of Narc, here’s Jason Patric giving good chunder after discovering a decapitated, emasculated and marginally disembowelled cadaver. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

It’s not a bad film – some decent performances, some nice pictures – it’s just a bit dull, and the two or three really good scenes are strung together with those that are merely mediocre. And the ending doesn’t half drag. I ended up selling my copy of the DVD to those modern day shylocks down Cex. Think I just about broke the one pound sterling watermark. Hoo hah.

Kentish Ken, The Dark Duke & The Wonder Boy

I never realised that infamous rave-busting Kent copper Ken Tappenden had entered showbiz…

It seems the former CID head honcho in the Garden of England – who first made a name for himself harassing pickets during the Miners’ Strike – has entered into a second career as, and I quote:

a fully trained toastmaster and Master of Ceremonies having undergone a rigorous process of training

Lawks!

He’s put his lethal toastmastering skills to the test at a wide range of events, from royal galas to private wedding functions, and has celebrated the likes of Thatcher (her 80th birthday), GMTV (its 10th anniversary), and even Nelson Mandela at a dinner hosted by the ‘Jewish Board of Deputies’*!

It all makes something of a change from his most celebrated work as a police officer, setting up the Pay Party Unit, which was tasked with monitoring and then destroying the nascent rave scene in the late 80s and early 90s:

Tappenden was eager to take on the ravers on their own terms. As he’d shown during the Miners’ Strike, he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty, maybe stretching the spirit of the law a little.

…If this was a high-tech war, he wasn’t going to be the one fighting with obsolete hardware. If they used phone lines, he’d counter with phone taps; if they used pirate radio, he’d monitor it; if they sent out spotters to find remote warehouses, he’d have helicopters and light aircraft out after them…

“After three months we had started 20 major investigations. The HOLMES database held 5,725 names and 712 vehicles. We had monitored 4,380 telephone calls and made 258 arrests.” The work went on all week, relentlessly. “We weren’t using the lads on the ground, we were using very experienced, hardened detectives,” says Tappenden. “At any one time we were running over 200 intelligence officers through the country. Now that is a colossal amount of intelligence, and it was banging down these computers 24 hours a day. We never stopped, we went through the night, through the day. The database was unbelievable.”

(pp101-2, Altered State by Matthew Collin and John Godfrey)

PS Whilst I was flicking through Altered State, I came across a rather interesting reference – one which I don’t remember picking up the first time I read the book ten years back – to spooky right-wing nutjob and Lord Lucan lookalike, David Hart. You may remember him as the chap who styled himself as an informal adviser to Thatcher.

Anyway, one of the principal rave organisers was one Paul Staines, who had been a member of the Federation of Conservative Students (and is now a political blogger). He ended up as Hart’s political aide, and got involved in all manner of shonky business (Brian Crozier gets a mention) under Hart’s tutelage, before taking his first E and immersing himself in rave culture. I like the touch about becoming Sunrise’s publicity officer and “at first running the operation out of Hart’s premises”!

Staines’s past political involvement came back to haunt him when a ‘Home Office offical’ tried to put the screws on him:

He said, ‘look, I know who you are, we know all about you’, because I had a Special Branch record from being in poitics, working in extreme groups. They couldn’t work it out: ‘You’re a right wing Tory, why are you doing this?’ Because I’m doing loads of E and having a great time!

He’s also got a rather nice description of Hart:

He’s completely charming and can charm senior people like Thatcher and appear sane for a while. But any close proximity to him for a prolonged period of time, you know he’s completely off his fucking head.

A nice touch of circularity there: Staines, the protegé of Hart (architect and financier of the scab National Working Miners’ Committee), duelling with Tappenden, strikebreaker-general. Oh happy days.

PPS Staines also mentions working on World Briefing and British Briefing, the propaganda rags-cum-political newsletters published by Hart for the benefit of any powerbroker into whose ear he could whisper; according to Staines, George Bush (the elder) was on the mailing list

PPPS I finally got round to putting together a proper triptych picture of the trio mentioned, but I had great difficulty finding (okay, I *couldn’t* find) a picture of David Hart. I trawled the interweb, all the usual places; couldn’t find a chipolata. I waded through all my miners’ strike and spook books; nothing. But I know I’ve seen at least one published picture of the dude…

So if any of you out there can point me in the right direction, I’d be most grateful.

In the meantime the Richard John Bingham snap shall act as a placeholder…

* I think Our Ken means the Board of Deputies of British Jews, but hey, when’s accuracy ever been all that to a senior copper, eh?

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Cream of the cop

I’ve been rewatching Bergerac, that fine 80s Jersey tec drama, and whilst pootling around the interweb for fansites, I discovered that the man from the Bureau des Étrangers himself has been blogging his own brand of booze-free, boss-antagonising common sense.

Here’s Jim on drugs:

Don’t do Crystal Meth. That’s the advice from the government following a recent study into the UK’s latest drugs explosion.

On a superficial level I must say that, yes, I’m inclined to agree. Nobody likes these destructive class A drugs and the people who besmirch our green and pleasant land by dealing in them deserve to be shot (see series 4 for my armed response to 4 teenage marijuana dealers).

But hang on a minute. Could we be going too far by demanding an instant crack down on this particular narcotic? Could it be that crystal meth, far from being a repellent, evil and damaging drug might actually be a useful tool in the fight against crime?

Stop and consider the evidence. In episode 4, series 3 of Bergerac, I spend 4 sleepless days setting a trap for 2 well to do businessmen who are hell-bent on defrauding the Jersey Rotary club. How did I stay awake and alert I hear you cry. Yup, you’ve guessed it. I snorted meth til my eyes bulged out. And then some.

Drug Tsars listen up: Crystal meth warms, invigorates, energises and by god, it makes you feel like a man. I can stop any time. Any time.

Jersey Cream – The Random Bloggings Of Jim Bergerac

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The Di$neyland Memorial Orgy

While reading up on Wally Wood and his involvement in the Warren Publishing comic lines (Creepy, Eerie etc) – via Russ Jones’s very interesting memoir of it – I came across a poster he did for Paul Krassner’s magazine The Realist, entitled ‘The Disneyland Memorial Orgy‘.

Originally a black and white panorama, it was commissioned by Krassner shortly after Walt Disney’s death in the winter of 1967:

This was a few years after Time’s famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney was indeed God to Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy — the whole crowd — he had been their creator and had repressed their baser instincts, but now they could shed all their inhibitions and participate in a magnificent mass binge.

Notes Wikipedia:

Only about a third of the 64 Disney characters depicted are actively involved in sexual intercourse or are on the point of undertaking it. Most are just observing the others. A few of the characters are occupied with other activities. A dazed Mickey Mouse, to the left in the bottom area, is plunging a syringe in his arm, while the paraphernalia of drug addicts lies at his feet. Next to him, an evil looking and grinning Pluto is urinating on a large painting of the eager face of Mickey. One of the small rabbits from Bambi is probably engaged in the sin of gluttony, featured licking an ice cream cone. In the upper left, Dumbo the flying elephant has just defecated on Donald Duck while in flight.

The wide activity of the scene and the panoramic view resembles the satires of William Hogarth or medieval depictions from such masters such as Hieronymus Bosch. The upper left portion is decorated with a few allusions to the lucrative nature of Walt Disney enterprises.

‘Ecstasy-Plus’ – the lethal new terror drug sweeping the nation

Secret recordings of a supermarket manager allegedly plotting to poison her husband’s curry have been played to a Swansea Crown Court jury.

The jury was told Susan Shervill, 46, asked colleague Tyler Davies for drugs to give her husband David an overdose…

…Mr Davies told her he had a friend who could get him a single extra strong ecstasy tablet which would kill.

“My mate’s got this tablet and it’s called ecstasy-plus, right, and I am not joking, one tablet will kill him,” Mr Davies told her in the taped conversation.

Particularly nice (and ‘nice’ is relative, given this is a tawdry and rather sad story about real people’s real life problems; but let’s roll with ‘nice’ anyway, because ‘nice’ is just ‘nice’) is the touch about the intended circumstances of this alleged poison plot:

In the tape she also said she intended to ensure her husband’s best friend, a prison guard named Eddie Murphy, and his wife Cheryl were with them as witnesses.

BBC News report

Milk+two, ta

Tea drinkers of the world, unite!

Tea & toasted

Both from A Canterbury Tale by Powell & Pressburger.

Check it out, it’s a great film!

A Canterbury Tale at Videostored (DivX)
A Canterbury Tale at Criterion Collection (if you like the film, get the Criterion 2-disc DVD, all spiffing-looking and packed with extras)

Africa! Drugs! Graphics! Panic!

I’m not going to bother reading it just yet, as my brain is frazzled and I think I’m going to have to go to bed in a bit, but kudos to the BBC website for the BrassEye/The Day Today level of commitment to the power of graphics in news reportage, as shown in its article ‘Africa – new front in drugs war’!

Pot cop gets kettle chip munchies!

Barry Cooper sells a DVD on how to stash pot in your car without getting caught. This fall he will release a second one on how to keep police from raiding your home for marijuana.

Now for the kicker: Cooper is a former narcotics officer once considered among the top cops in Texas, where more marijuana is seized each year than in any other state.

The formerly straight-laced lawman has become a shaggy-haired militant for the legalization of weed.

Six months ago he released “Never Get Busted Again,” in which the former star of West Texas’ Permian Basin Drug Task Force gives tips on hiding marijuana (dashboards are rife with nooks and crannies) and throwing off drug-sniffing dogs (coat your tires in fox urine).

“I’m not helping them to break the law. It’s clear the law is already being broken,” said Cooper, 38, who left law enforcement a decade ago. “I will do anything legal to frustrate law enforcement’s efforts to place American citizens in jail for nonviolent drug offenses.”

CBS News story
Never Get Busted website