Letter from Philip K. Dick for auction
Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick’s widow, is facing some financial trouble and will be auctioning off this letter from PKD, with a minimum bid of $900 at her blog.
Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick’s widow, is facing some financial trouble and will be auctioning off this letter from PKD, with a minimum bid of $900 at her blog.
Pedro Antonio Marín, alias Manuel Marulanda o Tirofijo, right, and Jorge Enrique Briceño Suárez, alias “Mono Jojoy” in happier times.
Jorge “Mono Jojoy” Briceño, the military chief of the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) a narco-trafficking Marxist group that has been fighting the government since the 1960s, was killed yesterday during a military raid.
Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos told Associated press that Jojoy’s death was “the most crushing blow against the FARC in its entire history” and that for his fellow countrymen, “[...] it is as if they told New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden had fallen.”
The 57-year-old joined the FARC as an illiterate teenager and spent his entire life in the jungle. At one point his 11,000 thousand man force ruled half of Columbia, making him—by some measure—the world’s most powerful narcoterrorist..
Since his death yesterday, something interesting has come out about the way the US-backed Columbian military found the rebel leader, in El Mundo:
He suffered from diabetes which, combined with the rigors of the life in the jungle, had caused painful injuries on his feet. That was the reason why he had to order a new pair of special boots. And that was when Operation Sodoma started and his death begun.
The guerrilla command sent a message asking for these special boots, which was caught by Colombian intelligence. The Colombians were able to intercept the boots and rig one of them with GPS circuitry. When Mono got them, his fate was sealed.
The Colombians made sure that he got the boots and started to track the GPS signal. They knew exactly where he was, and that’s when they decided to launch the attack against the base.
57 aircraft, jetfighter and helicopters, attacked the complex with fifty bombs, preparing the way for the Colombian ground troops, who took over the camp with little opposition. In fact, only one of their explosives-sniffing dog died in the attack.
Soon after arriving to the camp, the Colombian commandos found Mono Jojoy’s body, along with other members of the FARC’s elite.
Via Gizmodo
The Holy Spirit can really… fuck you up.
I love the gum-snapping blonde woman at the end. How much longer do you think their marriage is going to last with this new hobby of his?
Before all you “care trolls” come out in force to bitch about this, I was born and raised in West Virginny… Appalachia represent!
Via World of Wonder
You are an alien. You have traveled across galaxies and you have now arrived on earth. New York. Sometime in the futuristic 1980s - you get the picture. Your needs are simple: drugs - and plenty of them. You’re lucky, you have arrived atop the apartment of a drug-addled model, Margaret, and her drug-addicted partner Jimmy. You’ve found where to get drugs.
You observe Margaret and her friends. Then you discover something better: sex and drugs. For when humans cum their brains produce the very essence of the drug you seek. To obtain it, you have to kill them at their moment of orgasm. And guess what? Margaret can’t climax which is good news for you but bad news for her. Margaret is raped by a rancid creep. The rapist dies just as he comes. Margaret thinks she’s an avenging angel, who can “kill with her cunt” But really you are the killer and you know you’re just a drug-addled inter-planetary orgasm-addict.
More on ‘Liquid Sky’ and bonus clips after the jump…
Fresh out of his tenure with new wave stars Squeeze, 25-year-old musician Jools Holland had launched his career as a TV presenter on the BBC channel 4 show The Tube. Assigned to cover Jamaica’s music scene circa 1984, the confident Holland strode right in to Kingston and made it happen.
Expertly directed by Geoff Wonfor, Jools’s special features footage of rising stars Mutabaruka, Dennis Brown, Black Uhuru and the Wailing Souls, along with spotlights on legendary riddim section Sly & Robbie and maniac producer Lee “Scratch” Perry (who claims he “comes from the trees”).
Not satisfied with the established stars, Wonfor and Holland prove their cred by including a gritty dancehall sequence with star microphone men Yellowman, Billy Boyo, Massive Dread and Lee van Cleef. They all do well until the on-fire Eek a Mouse suddenly hits the stage in pancho and sombrero and turns the place out.
Bookended by his intro while swimming fully dressed through a hotel pool and a beautiful finale shoot in heaviest Trenchtown for his big-band/ska tune “Black Beauty,” Jools in Jamaica is a remarkably bright document of an island in its deepest post-independence economic and political depths.
After the jump, catch the rest of the doc…
A pack of drug and art addled young Germans run amok in a recording studio on a major label’s dime Even better, a pair of sisters, one of them a popular mainstream singing star, travel around Europe making weird tapes on a portable tape recorder and then lavishly package the treated results as a triple LP set in an elaborate and expensive silver and gold foil sleeve circa 1970 in Germany? I’m so there.
More tripping and flipping after the jump…
Of all the wonderful prog bands I was introduced to in 7th grade by a friend’s older brother (doesn’t it usually work like that?) I’m most thankful for Henry Cow. In place of the D&D imagery most prog bands employed, the Cow were of a distinctly leftist, worldly bent. Dead serious and as likely to quote Schoenberg, Webern and Messiaen as they were to freely improvise an entire set, this was powerful and stern stuff. As is proclaimed on the sleeve their 3rd LP, 1975’s In Praise of Learning, “Art is not a mirror, it is a hammer”. Yeah ! Being comprised of some of the strongest, most idiosyncratic players in all the U.K. : guitarist Fred Frith, Drummer Chris Cutler, Keyboardist Tim Hodgkinson, reed player Lindsay Cooper and vocalist Dagmar Krause, each of whom deserving of multiple posts of their own devoted to their massive amounts of notable great works, they were one of the first bands signed to Virgin records and toured with the likes of Faust and Captain Beefheart during their relatively breif run in the mid-70’s. I seriously doubt that any hardcore Cow fans don’t aleady know about the following beautiful footage, the only known to exist of the band, playing most of the aforementioned LP live in a field somewhere in Switzerland in 1976 as released as part of a lavish box set a few years back. Still, I’ve been meaning to post these here since I first joined the DM crew and I hope you enjoy them.
Much more vintage live Henry Cow after the jump…
I have no idea if this is true or not and I really don’t care in the slightest, aside from the obviously pleasurable schadenfreude that comes with seeing a sanctimonious right-wing tightass feel the heat. Who really gives a shit if Oompa Loompa-orange Republican House leader John Boehner (OH) is having an affair or not (besides, of course, his wife or election opponents?) To me, the bigger story here is that some folks on the Left have (finally) decided to get a little nastier in the lead-up to the crucial mid-term elections. IT’S ABOUT FUCKIN’ TIME!
Republicans have demonstrated for well over 20 years that they will say and do anything to get into power and hold onto it. No lie is too big or too small for the GOP. Facts? Don’t talk to me of facts because no one CARES about facts anymore and the Republicans have known this since at least the Reagan-era. (I recall watching the televised Iran Contra hearings and thinking at the time: “These fucks are going to get away with this because the story is too complicated for the general public to care about it.” Sure enough… next came the Savings and Loan crisis where George Bush the first used billions in taxpayer money to bail out friends and his son, Neil. Another story too complicated to rile the public up much, of course).
In this day and age, politics IS skullduggery and that is the way the game’s got to be played. Do two wrongs ever make a right? Probably not, but in modern American politics it’s got less to do with doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and a lot more about doing it TO them before they can do it to you. If one side plays by those rules, then the other side has no choice but to play the same. It’s about time the Left realizes this. Read more at The Daily Kos and Page Six.
One last thing: Note that he doesn’t deny it. No proof of anything, but if I was asked if I cheated on my wife, I’d have a ready answer. Why doesn’t Boehner?
Ministers in the South Pacific island of Fiji think they know the cause of climate change: homosexuals.
The revelation came at a conference at the University of the South Pacific considering the implications of Climate Change and Creativity.
Academics were apparently thrown off their consideration of “Arts in the Age of Global Warming” and “Ecology in Poetry / Poetry in Ecology” by reports of Church Ministers who maintained that climate change in Samoa are clearly attributable to to homosexuals.
The revelation prompted one attendee USP student, Shaiza Janif, to opine: “We need to educate our ministers and not turn this into an agenda.”
Details of exactly how the ministers think homosexuals are pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, thereby trapping heat around the planet, driving up the average temperature and causing massive economic and environmental dislocation are scant.
Ya don’t say…
Via The Register
This is really, really creepy stuff.
(via HYST)
The Gleaming Spires were a Sparks-related group of mid 80s New Wave-sters who had a local Los Angeles radio hit called “Are You Ready for the Sex Girls?” The tune is a perennial favorite on various artists New Wave compilations, but I always liked this song, “A Christian Girl’s Problem,” better.
I was just reading on the House of Self Indulgence blog that this song was part of the soundtrack for Greg Dark’s moody/mock doc 80s fuckflix classic, The Devil in Miss Jones 3, starring punky porn icon Lois Ayres. That makes sense.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Scotland carried out a series of social experiments, which dealt with an acute housing shortage caused by the sudden increase in the post-war population. Over two decades, thousands of working class families were moved out of slum tenements, from the city of Glasgow, into a series of New Towns, literally modern housing schemes, scattered across the country.
In 1947, East Kilbride was designated as Scotland’s first New Town, with the aim of bringing together “new methods of production and assembly in order to create dwellings, serving humanity and also reflecting a type of technological progression.”
More from Hedgefund after the jump…
