Christ, they’re making a reality show about Silver Lake hipsters… Maybe I should apply?

Oh boy. Perhaps trying to capitalize on Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat’s in the works Williamsburg-to-Silver Lake comedy, some reality show producers are looking for rich, poorly-dressed Silver Lakers to show off their lives on television. Here’s the Craigslist pitch: “A new Reality Show is casting Silver Lake’s rich, wealthy, hipster GUYS and GIRLS 21-30 whose personal style is homeless chic: Guys with beards, ratty hair and raggedy yet stylish clothing ?

Oh for f’k’s sake… not content with covering the whole country with surveillance cameras, the UK police are now planning on implementing US-style spy drones to catch suspected pedophiles (read: everybody in the country) or something. Drones are planned to be implemented by 2012.

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the “routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use ?

The Guardian discusses the “fun” of sharing a bed with somebody. Various positions and all. The article checks in with various British media people (?!) on how they do it. American mileage may vary, I think we’re all too drugged up on ambien and slathered in fried chicken grease to care as much…

It’s one of the first things to go in the war of attrition between romance and pragmatism ?

 
Watch until the end!
 
(via Nerdcore)

 
In his 60+ years on Earth, Mick Farren has worn many hats. He’s one of the founders of the “underground” press in Britain, he was the doorman at the psychedelic UFO Club (where Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine got their starts), a political activist, a well-respected science fiction novelist, a TV and media columnist, a poet, and, not least, he was the lead singer of the proto-punk band, The Deviants. His autobiography Give the Anarchist a Cigarette is an indispensable volume in any library about the ‘60s and ‘70s. In short, the man is a counterculture legend, and one of the last of the “gonzo” journalists.

Saturday night, Farren will be reading at La Luz de Jesus Gallery from his recently published anthologyZones of Chaos (which features an introduction by sci-fi great Michael Moorcock) accompanied by fellow Deviant, guitarist Andy Colquhoun.

La Luz de Jesus Gallery, 4633 Hollywood Blvd, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2009, 6 ?

 
What an unsavory looking bunch ! What a truly odd video ! What a lovely/ trippy/ timeless jam this is ! It’s Dies Irae, another in a fine line of one album wonders from glorious early seventies Europa. Produced by Conny Plank, no less. I can’t stop playing it.

(thanks Ustad !)

 
Get tickets at www.firesigntheatre.com. And you can listen to an NPR interview with David Ossman and Philip Austin here.

We can finance stable housing for Haiti for the same money that would otherwise be wasted on disposable relief tents. Check out this document proposing the use of Hexayurts in Haiti I just helped Hexayurt inventor and disaster housing specialist Vinay Gupta put together to see how.

The Hexayurt is a tent for the real world. Relief tents are a lie: they last for a year. By the time the tent has rotted and the people are homeless again, the eyes of the media have moved on to some other disaster, and everybody says the situation is fine. “Transitional sheltering” is supposed to take over from the tents, but it’s always, always, always too little too late. Nobody can afford a thousand bucks a family anyway. Not for all of them. NGOs, being fairly small compared to the size of the problem, generally count the successes rather than the failures anyway.

In Hexayurt Country, we count the dead, and we ask their names, even if all we have left at the end is a picture.

If you put half a million to a million Haitians in tents, a year from now, when all the tents have rotted, how many do you think will have permanent homes again?

A million homeless people. Five people a house. Two hundred thousand homes. Let’s say $1000 each for a transitional shelter. That’s two hundred million dollars - the lion’s share of the pledged support - and that’s on top of $400 per family for the initial tent - another eighty million dollars per million people.

Do we have two hundred and eighty million dollars for rehousing in Haiti before we start taking infrastructure (water, sanitiation etc.) costs into account?

There is not enough money on the table to take care of Haiti. And everybody in the industry knows this

Nobody will tell Joe Donor that they’re sticking a bandaid on a gunshot wound, because then he stops sending money and things get even worse. Lose-lose.

A hexayurt is a hundred bucks of plywood and some screws. Even really poor people can afford that, and you can buy four of them - 12 years of decent shelter, maybe - for the price of a sodding relief tent.

(Vinay Gupta: Hexayurt Country)

(Specs on the Hexayurt)

(Previously on Dangerous Minds: Hexayurts for Haiti)

 
A website with the odd name of “Neon Tommy” is not exactly where you’d expect to find good solid reporting, and even, gasp, investigative journalism, but that’s because it’s not obvious with a URL like that that the site is the digital domain of the prestigious Annenberg School for Communication at USC.

One story in particular, The Real Reason Behind California’s H1N1 Racial Disparity by senior editor Olga Khazan, caught our eye this morning. Noting the recent California Department of Public Health findings that blacks and Latinos are much more likely to be hospitalized and die from H1N1 than whites, Khazan takes issue with state epidemiologist Dr. Gilberto Chavez’s vaguely worded statement that blacks and Hispanics suffer higher rates of chronic ailments because “for cultural reasons, they may be waiting too long to seek care.”

Huh? You mean “cultural reasons” like no access to quality healthcare?

“[...] while “cultural reasons” cannot fully explain why H1N1 kills people of some races more than others, socio-economic ones can. In any case, there’s no culture-based reluctance to protect against H1N1, according to Al Hernandez-Santana, executive director of the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, a Sacramento advocacy group.

‘The conclusions by the chief epidemiologist are flawed,’ he said in an e-mail interview. ‘There are no significant differences in cultural attitudes towards vaccination that we have seen. If anything, flu shots, polio vaccines and others have a long history of acceptance in Latino communities.’

When controlling for insurance coverage, Latinos get seasonal flu shots at rates comparable to whites, according to data from the 2005 and 2007 California Health Interview Survey, and insured Latinos are vaccinated at slightly higher rates than insured whites.

Furthermore adult African-Americans have a higher rate of vaccinations, nationwide, than whites. The “cultural reasons” Gilberto Chavez speaks of, can be, once you look behind the statistics just a little bit, better understood like so: the uninsured poor often have chronic diseases that they can ill afford to treat, so when H1N1 hits them, it hits them much harder than it would hit healthy folk, you know, the kind who can actually afford health insurance. The article further reports:

‘If someone is sick to start off with, and they have an underlying condition, if you add flu on top of that, it’s a tipping point,’ said Elizabeth Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

And behind those underlying conditions lies the root cause for the health department’s startling figures, and it has little to do with culture. In California, chronic diseases tend to afflict minorities more severely than whites with the same conditions, because in California, Latinos, blacks and Asians are all uninsured at much higher rates than whites.

For those without health insurance, minor problems left untreated can grow into chronic conditions and debilitating diseases. It’s important for people with underlying health issues like asthma, diabetes, obesity and kidney disease to get vaccinated before these conditions, coupled with the H1N1 virus, kill them.

Cross posting from Brand X

 
“Necron 99 has destroyed himself!”  With all the talk of Avatar these days, I find it curious that no one’s made note of that other Avatar (and not the Airbender).  It’s the good magician Avatar from Ralph Bakshi‘s animated, post-apocalyptic science fiction/fantasy, Wizards. 

And like the Cameron film, Wizards offers up an epic battle between the forces of nature and technology.  On the side of nature, there’s Avatar with his good magic and hot fairy sidekick.  On the side of technology, there’s Avatar’s bad-ass but anorexic-looking twin brother, Blackwolf, who’s just discovered the amazingly persuasive powers of Nazi propaganda.  And for fans of Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (who of you out there in DM-land isn’t?!), actress Susan “Queen Mona” Tyrell provides the narration.

Bakshi’s Wizards came out in ‘77, after Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, and a year before his own take on Lord Of The Rings.  I’ve seen that later film just once.  I’ve watched Wizards nearly a dozen times.  Part I follows, with links to the entire film below:

 
Wizards Part II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII