Year: 2004
The Prez 2004: Is John Kerry ‘The dude’?
Our new regular look at the fight for the Oval Office by our man in the States, Alex DeJong... A couple months ago, my vote was in the Kerry/Edwards camp. I looked forward to watching Kerry easily pick Bush apart and saunter into the oval office. Unfortunately this has not been the case and now my eagerness to vote has followed a similar path to that of the notorious Zeppelin. Not wanting to vote for either camp I am considering wearing a blindfold when the time comes. It is not difficult to see why Kerry has been accused of “flip-flopping” based on his blatant wavering on several issues. In today’s Boston Globe, Kerry was quoted during a speech in Canonsburg, Pa. saying, “I would have done everything differently than the president on Iraq”. Kerry continued by declaring, “It’s the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” After...
Florida No More: Will Hurricanes Lose Bush the Election?
Because there's no Florida left to screw up the voting! Received from the future: Late October 2004 During August and September, a series of violent hurricanes (Charley, Frances and Ivan) completely destroyed the US state of Florida, forcing President George Bush to reduce the number of US states to 49. The entire state vanished, swept away into the ocean by the extreme weather. 'Florida just ain't there no more', said President Bush at the time. 'And now I got my brother Jeb and his family camped out in the Lincoln bedroom. They're driving me batshit crazy. I can tell you, the Bush family has never experienced a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude'. But worse was to come. The Bush Administration had spent four years ignoring the effects of industrial pollution on the atmosphere, as well as the threat of global warming and extreme weather. It had failed to ratify the...
Blather appearance on Spin 1038
For anyone who heard Blather's Dave speaking on Dublin's Spin 1038 FM today... Some of the stuff I was talking about: Recent Lake Monster shenannigans in Norway » My report from the 1998 debacle in Norway » Big cat sightings in Ireland » Antelopes in Wexford »
St. Brigid’s (Bríd’s) Well, Liscannor
Photographs of a not-very Christian holy well, in the wilds of Ireland... On the road that runs along the coast of Co. Clare, between the Cliffs of Moher and the holiday hamlet of Liscannor, there's an innocuous looking Catholic grotto, sitting next to a pub. From the outside, it just looks like every other shrine in Ireland - tacky, and slightly decrepit. Inside the gate, beside the statue of a woman in black and white, wielding a staff (a black and white Virgin Mary, if you like) there's a dark tunnel, leading into a holy well dedicated to Saint Brigid. There's dozens of such holy wells around Ireland, but this one is different. People come from all over to visit this well, and to leave a bizarre collection of offerings inside the small, man-made cave. Apart from the candles, there's scarves and handkerchiefs, holy statues in various states of disarray...
Near Death By Parrot
It's not the fall that kills, it's the impact... South Island, New Zealand. It's the 4th of July. I'm in a helicopter, about 2000m above the Fox Glacier. After flying beside the 3750m-high Mount Cook, we descend into a snowfield, where I go running around in the shin-deep virgin snow. I'm getting incredible photographs of the gargantuan formations of snow and ice. My brain can barely handle the scale of it all. We take off again, flying down the Fox Glacier towards home. I'm in the front seat, beside the pilot, eye glued to the viewfinder of my camera. 'Bumffff!' - there's a big impact, the helicopter rolls and shudders violently, and drops momentarily. My stomach almost comes up my throat. The pilot pulls the stick back, screaming 'shiiiiitttt!'. The first thought that enters my head is 'did we clip the cliffs to our right?' My second is 'we're still...
The Editor Surfaces
Where the hell has he been? At bloody last - I'm posting articles again, and will be doing so for the next five or six weeks. Since May, I've been in Amsterdam, New Zealand, all over Ireland, and in London. I've been too busy actually doing stuff to get round to writing about it (except in the case of the Mysteries of the Deep Weblog). After spending some of May and most of June in the middle of the Tasman Sea (between New Zealand and Australia) on the Rainbow Warrior. I spent a couple of weeks driving around NZ's South Island. Got back to Ireland, and went on a rampage down the west coast, with a fellow shipmate as co-pilot, followed by a weekend in London that involved making zombie movies. Currently resting in Dublin... but will be spending September in Amsterdam, where I'll be updating the site with photographs...
How To Drink Absinthe
Absinthe glass in Marsella Bar, Barcelona » Dave finally gets his finger out, and publishes an article on the legendary green fairy. First posted at DrugWar.com on July 14, 2004 all images from Aberration of Society <!-- --> "Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it." - Ernest Hemingway So much has been written about absinthe, yet it's so poorly understood. Absinthe literature is full of yarns of ear loss, family murders and ruined livers. Books and museums are dedicated to absinthe spoons and glasses. There are reviews of the various flavorings and essential qualities, and comparisons with other drugs and liquors. We're told about the famous souls who drank Absinthe - Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Wilde, Picasso, and others....
The adventures of Jasper the dimension-hopping archaeological cat (Volume 3, Episode 2)
He's back. Kind of... First things first: our apologies for the notable absence of reportage on the black-hole jumping feline. The reasons for this are multiple. They include (in no particular order) a complete-meltdown in communications with Jasper, Daev's terrifying ordeal at the hands of a group of marauding tree-huggers and my forced absence from cyberspace due to unwanted attention from the intelligence community and that girl who keeps following me home from the chipper. Now, as previously reported , our investigations had led us to the deepest, darkest vaults of the National Museum of Ireland and, ultimately, to our acquisition of the little-known Gnostic Gospel The Book of Bob. Decoding of the manuscript has been furtively trundling along for months now, with the help of a small army of linguists at the Vatican, Professor Noam Chomsky and that guy who used to do the funny dance in the Guinness...
The Cold War is Over
'Bring on the heatwave....' by guest writer Katja Oestreicher Kyoto Since the USA refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, Russia’s signature has become vital to the treaty’s ratification. Two weeks ago, just before Putin bailed out another extension for their decision, the Russian Academy of Sciences gave the Russian president the official advice that the “Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gases has no scientific basis and puts the Russian economy at risk.” In other words, the world’s leading scientists on climate change got it all wrong. Okey doke. But what’s that about the Russian economy? Could it be – in any possible way – connected to Putin’s plan of doubling the gross domestic product in the next 10 years? Good Soul Putin, the good soul, always anxious to please those nagging environmentalists: “At least fur coats would become redundant with the advent of global warming.” Great. Millions of...
That Random Thing
Barry Kavanagh attended the Random System Festival 2004 in Norway in April... Oslo, Norway, 15-18 April 2004. I am inside Oslo’s Parkteatret only five minutes when a Norwegian music journalist tells me “the extremes thrive in Norway.” It’s Thursday and I’m at the first night of the first ever Random System Festival, a festival of electronic and “adventurous” music featuring both international and home-grown acts, and we’re waiting for one of the latter, Jazzkammer, to begin. “Metal, jazz, electronic noise,” the journalist says, “are the extremes of music.” I suppose he is right. This is what Norway is known for. Parkteatret, in Oslo’s Grünerløkka area, was built in the 1920s as a theatre for the working class. Now it’s an interesting space for film screenings and unexpected art events. Tonight there are two performances by the duo Jazzkammer, Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, best known for their album Timex (2000)...