Oh God not the chocolate things again.
Right just reinforce a fact to those greedy people out there,
'chocolate is good for you but, but, but
IN MODERATION!!!!
just because it's healthy dark chocolate doesn't mean it counts are one of your 5 a day nor does it mean eating 3 whole bars is good for you'
"Legal high kills two teens," cries the Daily Express. "Legal drug teen ripped his scrotum off," roars The Sun. A steady stream of stories in the UK media about a little-known "legal high" variously called mephedrone, plant food, miaow-miaow or m-cat reached fever pitch this month. Newspapers, teachers and parents demanded an immediate ban. Les Iversen, the UK government's chief drugs adviser, recommended that the drug be put in the same class as amphetamines, making possession punishable by five years in prison. Later today, the government is likely to announce plans for an emergency ban that could be enacted this week.
This knee-jerk response may be unsurprising, but what is far from clear is whether criminalisation is the right thing to do to reduce drug harms. While mephedrone has been implicated in at least 27 deaths in the UK, it has been confirmed present in just 11 of these cases and at the time of writing found to be a contributing factor in just one. There is virtually no published research on how the substance affects the human body. Iversen himself recently admitted that "there is no data on toxicity that I could find". Intrigued at the rush to action despite the lack of hard evidence, I decided to try to sort the facts from the frenzied speculation (see "Miaow-miaow myths").
Khat to chat
Mephedrone is a synthetic analogue of the herbal amphetamine cathinone, found naturally in the leaves of the khat plant, Catha edulis. Chewing khat leaves is a popular ritual in some east African communities. Mephedrone, or 4-methylmethcathinone, is part of a family of synthetic cathinones created to mimic khat's stimulant properties.
Its precise origins are unclear, though early reports suggest it was being supplied by an Israeli legal high seller called Neorganics as far back as 2007. Fearing it would affect army conscripts, the government there banned mephedrone later that year.
Around that time, mephedrone began appearing on internet chat forums, and the drug seems to have spread rapidly since then: significant use is now reported in Sweden, Finland, the UK, Ireland and Australia. The vast majority of mephedrone is produced in China and sold to dealers for between £2500 and £4000 per kilogram. No one knows how much is being exported globally.
Substance displacement
What is clear is that a lot of people are using it. An online survey of 2222 readers of British clubbing magazine Mixmag, published in January, suggested that mephedrone had become the fourth most popular drug among the readers of the website after cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine. Thirty-four per cent of respondents said they had taken it in the previous month. "We've never had a drug become so popular so quickly about which we know so little," says Fiona Meadham, a criminologist at Lancaster University in Bailrigg and member of the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).
The emergence of legal highs should come as no surprise. "When restrictions are placed on the supply of drugs and demand remains high you get substance displacement," says Danny Kushlick of Transform, a UK think tank opposed to drug prohibition.
Key to mephedrone's extraordinary rise in Europe has been the recent success of crackdowns on ecstasy and cocaine supply: there was a drop in purity of cocaine seized by the police in England and Wales from over 60 per cent in 1999 to 22 per cent in 2009, and about half of ecstasy pills seized last year contained no MDMA, ecstasy's active ingredient.
"When you're buying [controlled] drugs on the street you have no idea what you're getting. You can spend £100 and get nothing," a regular user of mephedrone told me. The 37-year-old, who wishes to remain anonymous, switched from taking ecstasy and speed about two years ago. "With mephedrone you can walk into a head shop or go online and feel safe going back to the same supplier."
"Plant food"
I decided to see for myself how easy it would be to get hold of mephedrone. A quick online search for "mephedrone" revealed hundreds of websites. Moments later I was on the phone ordering a special delivery of 5 grams of "plant food" for £60, plus £25 for a courier service. Two hours later a courier called from outside my house. He insisted I sign a disclaimer saying I knew mephedrone was not for human consumption, then handed over a brown, padded envelope. Inside was a small plastic bag half-full of white powder.
I sent a sample to Mark Parkin at the Department of Forensic Science and Drug Monitoring at King's College London. Parkin compared a detailed chemical analysis of the compounds present with a reference sample. He found the two were "95 to 98 per cent identical". The remainder was likely to be unreacted precursor chemicals, Parkin says.
My sample was as pure as they come.
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So, I may not be advocating the use of this chemical drug but again an article that points out the hysteria caused by the mass media.
Charlie Brooker was right when he said the worst drug to society was the news. If drugs cause altered mental states then it seems the media is one too.
Ok so I checked my spam box about a month or so back and I had a message from people I had not expected to message me. The same friends I had issues with up in Manchester, and who I had cut myself off from, under the guise of their 'Binsraad' council, had invited me to take part in their stoner tournament. Now I have taken part in the two years before the falling out, but I found this invitation a bit weak. It was a general blanket email, not from anyone in particular. And I had previously made it known I would not socialize with particular people until some form of an apology was made. So of course I ignored it.
But then as a result they have kept messaging the same email again and again it seems. I finally responded with 'no'. That was the total of my email back. In response I have been deemed, by them, to lack manners.
Lack manners???
What the hell were they to think? I would happily give up a weekend to go up to Manchester, to get stoned, and socialize with people I no longer consider friends due to the poor treatment my wife has received from them, while any previous act of offering an olive branch by my self has been ignored? That I would go do this while my wife would have to remain behind because she is not welcome?
Sorry but fuck off. I may have considered this differently if I had been approached personally, and not under the anonymity of their precious 'council', as a way of bridging the divide. But no this is just a stealth way of saying 'It's all ok if you come. But we won't actually say sorry to your face first'. Again more of the same shit where I have to openly make the first step in saying sorry. To say sorry for something that is no longer my fault. For things I expected a greater understanding for.
I am tired of this hypocrisy and cowardly ways. This inivitation was no olive branch.
So since the last time I have posted a life update a lot has been going on.
Two weekends back myself and Sam had a fun time down in London for Aiko's birthday. Due to the expense of going out in London we kept to drinking at her place, met her housemates and other friends in London, and proceeded to go the the club called Paradise (which is an opulent setting except for the moronic customers who also attend). The only real issue was getting back in the morning. Classic tube delays/cancellations leading to an epically long bus journey back to Marylebone.
Unfortunately in the last few days we have lost one of our hamsters, the whitest of the two, Bianca. She died in her sleep. I already miss her constant rustling about in her cage. :(
This weekend involved a long jaunt up to Manchester, and from there to Liverpool as we visted Sam's mum for her birthday (we got a canvas print of one of our wedding photos as her anniversary present to us), and to see her cousins baby (who I got to hold, I did ok in the end, we bought a cute leopard romper suit for him) and then to meet some old friends from my degree/PhD days (lots of pizza was eaten and it was good to know how everyone was doing and that we were all in the same boat with work etc right now). So a good few weekends. Also more funding applications are being submitted and so I just need to soldier on and wait and see if we get the funding.
Once more organised religion shows it's ugly face. We should remember a few words from the Kybalion, as through it we can have belief in ideas and something greater while not loosing rational thought.
'At this point, it may be proper for me to state that we make a distinction between
Religion and Theology–between Philosophy and Metaphysics. Religion, to us, means that
intuitional realization of the existence of THE ALL, and one's relationship to it; while
Theology means the attempts of men to ascribe personality, qualities, and characteristics to
it; their theories regarding its affairs, will, desires, plans, and designs; and their assumption
of the office of “middle-men” between THE ALL and the people. Philosophy, to us, means
the inquiry after knowledge of things knowable and thinkable; while Metaphysics means the
attempt to carry the inquiry over and beyond the boundaries and into regions unknowable
and unthinkable, and with the same tendency as that of Theology. And consequently, both
Religion and Philosophy mean to us things having roots in Reality, while Theology and
Metaphysics seem like broken reeds, rooted in the quicksands of ignorance, and affording
naught but the most insecure support for the mind or soul of Man.'
So I have completed the first few chapters of my fan ebook for Manchester. So now the completed chapters covers the basic history and geography of Manchester, while the next two chapters covers the setting for Vampire, and details all the NPCs for the setting. Next up I am working on my ebook for Changeling: Venice. Right now this stands at two complete chapters covering the history of the city and the changeling setting. So yes... more NPCs. Hopefully along the way will make all my ST notes for Vampire available and start on the history chapter for Manchester: Mage.
Oh and here is the link for all the Vampire goodness.
p.s. I will update the cover at some point but for now the image above will suffice
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very Low |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Low |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Very High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Low |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | High |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very High |
| Level 7 (Violent) | High |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | High |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | High |
No place like home: the generation who can't afford to buy
The average age of the first-time buyer is now 38 - and the typical deposit on a property is more than half the average income. Tim Walker finds out how his generation got priced out of the market
Richard Mildenhall
Ten years ago, a first-time buyer had to raise a deposit worth, on average, 16 per cent of their annual income. In 2009, that figure was 64 per cent
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My parents bought the house I grew up in at the end of summer 1980, three months before I was born. It was a semi-detached in a Surrey village, with three bedrooms and a big garden, and it cost them just £32,000. Half of the rooms were a converted former Wesleyan chapel; Mum remembers that when she saw the original ecclesiastical windows she had one of those TV property-show moments – this, of course, was before TV property shows actually existed – and was gripped instantly by the desire to make the place her own.
Dad tells it slightly differently: they'd seen a lot of houses, he says, "and this was the one that had the least wrong with it". Even so, there was plenty that needed fixing. They invited their friends over for DIY parties and re-fitted the bathroom, then the kitchen; they re-floored, re-wired, re-plumbed, re-plastered and re-roofed, all with a newborn baby (a delightful one, mind) learning to suck his thumb in the background.
The house was in the already desirable commuter belt, close to Guildford and at the far end of what's now known as the A3 corridor. Savills estate agents recently described the area as the most sought-after in the country for homebuyers. My parents have been divorced for some time, but Mum still lives there. She had the property valued not so long ago at £350,000, more than 10 times what they paid for it as a young couple. Even accounting for inflation, it has at least tripled in value over the three decades I've been alive.
That mortgage represented around double my baby boomer parents' combined annual income in 1980. If I wanted to buy the same house today, it would cost me 10 times mine. Even if I had a pregnant wife with comparable wages, it would still be well out of our reach. The same would be true of a studio flat in north London, where I currently rent – or one in south London, for that matter. And I have a decent job, unlike a lot of other young people in this economic climate. The average age of first-time buyers in the UK is now 38; at the tail end of our twenties, my younger brother and I are looking at another decade each of letting. Little wonder, then, that we're being called "Generation Rent".
An Englishman's home is no longer his castle: it's a bedsit on a six-month lease that he's not allowed to redecorate. In 1999, private renters accounted for 9 per cent of British households. Now it's 14 per cent. Figures from the Department of Communities and Local Government suggest that 3.1 million people rented a property privately in 2008/9 – a million more than in 2001. According to the latest English Housing Survey, home ownership has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years.
In London, reports the National Housing And Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU), only one in 10 couples under 40 with children can afford to buy a home. And some people can't even rent – one in three British men aged between 20 and 34 still live with their parents, as do one in five women. Research by unbiased.co.uk recently found that two million homeowners may this year sell their homes and start renting instead, many citing geographical mobility as one advantage of being a tenant. Home ownership, many of the sell-to-renters said, was no longer an aspiration.
David Willetts is the the Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills and author of The Pinch: How The Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back. In the past, he says, "Home ownership might have been analysed as an issue of social class, but one of the biggest challenges now is to spread ownership and opportunity to the younger generation."
Bob Pannell, head of research for the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), agrees. "Before the credit crunch, the housing market didn't much affect when young people left home. They went into private renting rather than buying; that was the generational shift compared to their parents. But now there are pressures both on rental values and house prices, and the jobs market is problematic. So will young people have the same ability as their older siblings to leave the parental home, even for renting?"
Mike Applebee, a 49-year-old father from Bristol, last month sent an angry letter to The Independent on the subject. "I have three children leaving college with enormous debts, no hope of earning enough to buy their own homes and therefore unable to have a significant stake in society," he wrote. "Does anyone take time to consider how despairing the current generation feels by being born too late? What about the consequences for our society, now and in the future?"
***
A few young people of my acquaintance have managed to get a foot on the first rung of the property ladder: those with families wealthy enough to give them a leg-up. My own parents and their peers got no financial assistance from our grandparents when they bought their homes, and they didn't need it. But by 2009, 80 per cent of first-time buyers under 30 had help from their families, according to the CML. "All the first-time buyers round here – even those in their 30s – are funded by the bank of Mum and Dad," a Surrey estate agent explains. "If you're trying to finance yourself and stump up your own deposit, you're not going to be buying in Guildford."
One of the many striking statistics in The Pinch is that in 1974 the average 50- to 59-year-old earned 4 per cent more than the average 25- to 29-year-old; by 2008 that discrepancy was 35 per cent. Maybe that's why the last census found 150,000 baby boomers with not just one home, but two. "The baby boomers are doing disproportionately well in terms of both earnings and the likelihood of having a job," says Willetts.
"They see their own kids struggling so they reach into their back pockets, run down their savings or take out a further mortgage on their property to help them, but that's family doing its best to offset a wider failure of public policy." The problem with more affluent parents helping their children to buy a home, he explains, is that it makes home ownership "more and more hereditary".
Yet even the power of baby boomers to help their children has been greatly diminished by the crunch, explains Pannell. "Parents might be in a privileged position as homeowners, but watching the value of your house fall by a fifth rather batters your confidence about extracting equity to help your kids. That's why there are so few first-time buyers now."
Many of those who did help their children before the recession might now regret having done so. Of the 900,000 UK households in negative equity at the end of 2008, Willetts writes, two-thirds belonged to the under-35s. "All their wealth is tied up in that property and it is wiped out. They are asset-less." Some of the first-time buyers who took advantage of Northern Rock's 125 per cent "Together" mortgage and its equivalents have seen their homes repossessed, the unsuspecting victims of a modern morality tale.
Meanwhile, the slump in prices that we could be forgiven for expecting has never materialised. Property values fell by about 20 per cent after the crunch, but have quickly crept back up again. Moreover, says Pannell, "Mortgage lenders have become highly risk-averse. Typical lending criteria used to require, say, a 10 per cent deposit before the crunch. But while prices may have recovered, deposits are now stuck at 25 per cent, so the goalposts are shifting ever further away from would-be first-time buyers."
Ten years ago, a first-time buyer had to raise a deposit worth, on average, 16 per cent of their annual income. In 2009, that figure was 64 per cent. The cost of property may be 10 per cent below its 2007 peak, but deposits have increased by an average of 124 per cent. In London, the deposit on a typical flat is a whopping £57,213. Anyone who wasn't on the property ladder before the crash has seen its bottom rung kicked away by the last people to make the climb.
Up North, property is significantly cheaper than elsewhere, yet buying a home is even more difficult. Average earnings in the South-east have at least increased alongside house prices. Remarkably, relative to income, it is areas of suburban London that are most affordable for first-time buyers, while Propertyfinder.com last year named Berwick-upon-Tweed and Hartlepool the least-affordable in the country.
Despite the huge drop in prices, says Jonathan Copeland, a Hartlepool estate agent, "the young people I'd have expected to be first-time buyers are renting instead. In the past, people were relying on 95 per cent mortgages, knowing they didn't actually have to save a deposit. They just don't have the savings for a deposit on the 70 or 75 per cent loan-to-value products that are available now."
My family features one exception to the rule. Ed, my stepbrother, who's a year younger than me, somehow bought a flat in London with his own money in 2006 – including the deposit. When he was about 11, he says, his mother (my stepmother) told him to start saving up. "My sisters just went to the sweetshop," he says. But Ed put the money away for a rainy day.
I went to the sweetshop too, I tell David Willetts sheepishly. "Well, some young people do more discretionary spending than others on a Friday night," he replies. "But saving is much harder than borrowing. You get junk mail offering you loans, whereas saving is regarded as an extremely dangerous activity, and is massively supervised and regulated. Some of the obvious ways people started saving automatically in the past – like joining the company pension scheme – have disappeared or are much less generous than they once were."
"It's not as if I live like a monk," Ed insists, as I imagine him reclining comfortably on the sofa in the sitting room that he owns outright. "But I've always enjoyed the process of saving. Even at university, cash never burned a hole in my pocket. If I earned a bit I just put it away somewhere and pretended I didn't have it... I sound like a freak, don't I?" Of course not, I tell him. You just sound like a smug git.
***
In September 1980, Mrs Thatcher had only been in Downing Street for 18 months, and my parents' mortgage remained the one socially acceptable form of debt. I, on the other hand, managed to burn through five figures of credit before even leaving university: on student loans, credit cards and overdrafts. And I've no assets to show for it besides a fractious relationship with literary theory and a killer-CD collection.
"Thatcher sold off the family jewels," says psychologist Oliver James, author of Affluenza and Britain on the Couch. "She let people buy the national housing stock, and at the same time deregulated finance and made it possible to lend money to many more people in vastly greater quantities. Prior to Thatcher you had to build up a relationship with a building society or bank to prove your viability as a borrower. The huge increase in home ownership, combined with the greater availability of credit, created a gigantic property casino.
"Then New Labour persuaded students to rack up huge debts, which meant that potential homeowners were already in debt when they left university, locking everybody into working long hours in as high-paying and stressful a job they could find. So now we all feel time-starved and debt-ridden. If you're in the younger generation and you don't have rich parents to help you buy a house, you're in trouble."
Thanks to those TV property shows, we dream of installing chrome kitchens, built-in bookshelves and wall-to-wall windows – and then selling it all to move somewhere bigger and "better". But before it was an investment, a house used to be a place to live. Now it's a financial safety net. Home, once a source of comfort, has become a source of equity. Mum remortgaged the house to pay for our educations, then did so again when times were a bit tough. Without a large pension, it will be her only significant asset by the time she retires.
The author Iain Sinclair, who has lived in the same house in Hackney since 1968, wrote in these pages last year that there is something seemingly "perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis?" That restlessness among homeowners has, says James, "helped to fragment society. Greater geographic mobility has smashed the collectivist extended family network and contributed to the 'broken society' that David Cameron claims he wants to mend."
I may not have a pregnant wife (or, indeed, a non-pregnant one) just yet, but without the possibility of a roof over our heads, which of my contemporaries is going to want to start a family anyway? No wonder so many first-time parents are now in their late 30s and early 40s. "A lot of people associate settling down with a partner, having kids and buying your first flat or house as things that go together," says Willetts. "And that rite of passage has become much harder and messier to achieve."
***
Maybe I don't need to own a house. France famously has a thriving rental culture. In Germany, almost two-thirds of private homes are rented. In Italy, 59 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds still live with their parents and don't seem too fussed about it. But with no property, and minimal pensions prospects, what are we supposed to live on when we retire? Our parents have such inflated life expectancies that we might not even have inherited anything by then.
And renting here is not like renting on the continent, or so says Penny Anderson, who has been a tenant in Manchester and Glasgow for 20 years and blogs under the name Renter Girl (rentergirl.blogspot.com). "I'd love to buy somewhere but I've never had enough money," she says. "Renting is cash down the drain, and landlords seem to want their tenants to feel insecure. Not even being allowed to decorate your home is a nightmare. And I have plenty of evidence of landlords throwing out tenants for no reason. The culture needs to change; there should be a legal assumption that a tenancy will endure unless there's a really good reason to end it."
In February the Housing Minister John Healey proposed some tenant-friendly measures such as a "housing hotline" offering free advice to renters, and a national register of landlords, which would at least make them more accountable for the upkeep of their properties. "In the past six or seven years there's been a real expansion in the number of small-scale buy-to-let landlords," says
Anderson, "and they're the worst of all. They make tenants feel like they're living in a piggy bank, not a house."
I avoid mentioning to her that my Dad is one of them: my brother rents his Croydon flat at a family discount. It's a common story – many baby-boomer parents are buying new properties and installing their children as tenants. So common, in fact, that Dad and his wife bought another flat for my stepsister to rent. Both properties have interest-only mortgages, he explains, so he doesn't expect to make any money out of them. He's not by any means a rich man, and yet he's become a miniature property magnate without even trying.
It's all very well me deciding to rent for ever, but rental stocks are just as low as purchase ones. Thanks to the shortage of decent properties – or the mortgages to pay for them – many property owners have sold their homes only to find themselves stuck in the rental market, unable to find somewhere else to buy. Last month, the letting agency group Countrywide reported that 2.9 tenants were now competing for every one of their properties.
The British Property Federation advocates a more professional, European-style rental market, and firms such as Aviva and Legal & General have assigned multimillion-pound funds to acquiring large blocks of buy-to-let stock, backed by the Government and the Mayor of London, for just that purpose. But the only real solution to high prices and low stocks, say Willetts and Pannell, is more house-building. All the major political parties agree on that end, even if they disagree about the means of achieving it.
In the last decade, between 130,000 and 170,000 new homes have been built each year. The NHPAU estimates that housing need is around double that number. "The population is growing and house-building is not keeping pace with it," says Pannell. "If that chronic undersupply continues it will affect everybody. House prices all through the market will continue to increase relative to incomes. That will exacerbate affordability problems for young people, and make it very expensive for those already on the housing ladder to move up it."
It came as no surprise to me to read that stocks of rental property in central London are down by 50 per cent on their customary levels. When some friends and I started to look for a house that we could share last autumn, we encountered predictable problems. Our budgets meant we'd have to rent either a house with a Harlow postcode or a shallow hole in Hoxton. In the end, we went our separate ways instead. I found a room in a shared flat – a big, well-lit one that's starting to feel like mine, even though it isn't. The strangers I moved in with were two sisters with whom I had the good fortune to get along. But who owns the flat? Their Dad, of course.
ED Balls has condemned children's commissioner Dr Maggie Atkinson for using her years of professional experience in forming an opinion.
The schools secretary has called for an inquiry into how a qualified person with qualifications qualifying them to do their job could qualify their statements on matters they are qualified to comment on.
Balls said: "Responsible governance is not about taking the advice of proper experts, it's about Jamie Oliver making a nice salad or asking that large television nanny to dictate childcare policy even though she does seem to limit herself to houses with steps."
Julian Cook, professor of public policy at Reading University, said: "The public is often caught between highly trained experts who have studied a subject in depth and actually know what they are talking about and the bastard, son of a bitch whores we call politicians who spend their entire lives with the throbbing penis of the editor of the Daily Mail lodged firmly inside their filthy, lying mouths.
"It's difficult to know who to trust."
Meanwhile Dr Atkinson's statement - that children are qualitatively different from adults and should perhaps be treated as such - was condemned by members of the public who did not understand most of the words in it.
Nikki Hollis, a female thing from Carlisle, said: "This woman is basically saying that all children under 12 who are possessed by the devil should be given a loaded machine gun.
"If I see her round here I'll set my evil dog on her."
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Finally my paper and the journal for which it is the cover article is published physically!
Holy Shit! Zod (Superman), Kemp (Being Human), Dog Soldiers, Aliens. Media with great actors who are now involved as voice actors in this WH40k film.
I cannot fucking wait!
Music video
The animated music video for "Do the Evolution" was co-directed by Kevin Altieri, known for his direction on Batman: The Animated Series, and Todd McFarlane, better known for his work with the popular comic book Spawn and Korn's 1999 "Freak on a Leash" video.[10] The video was produced by Joe Pearson, the president of Epoch Ink animation, and Terry Fitzgerald at TME. It was written and developed by Pearson and Altieri with input from McFarlane and Vedder.[10] The total production time on the music video was 16 weeks.[10] The animation pre-production was produced by Epoch Ink Animation at their studio in Santa Monica, California. Under Altieri and Pearson’s supervision the Epoch team boarded and designed the short in less than six weeks.[10] Once McFarlane, Vedder, and Sony gave their final approvals, the short was taken to Korea by Altieri and Pearson for animation at Sun Min Image Pictures and Jireh Animation. Over a four week period, a team of more than one hundred artists worked to deliver the finished animation.[10]
Once the final animation was back in Los Angeles, California, Altieri, McFarlane, and Vedder edited the final cut at Vittello Productions. In a press release, McFarlane stated, "We choose to work with people who convey a particular attitude and this video is a tribute to that attitude," while Pearl Jam stated, "As artists we are challenged to expand the meaning of our work and by utilizing this visual medium and working with a visionary like Todd, we were able to further explore some of the themes we depicted in the song "Do the Evolution". Basically we've tried to make a good stoner video."[11] The video premiered on August 24, 1998 on MTV's 120 Minutes.[12] The video was the band's first since the final video for Ten, "Jeremy". At the 1999 Grammy Awards, the music video received a nomination for Best Music Video, Short Form.[7] The video clip for "Do the Evolution" can be found on the Touring Band 2000 DVD as one of the Special Features.
[edit] Video summary
Collage of scenes from the "Do the Evolution" video featuring an archetypal representation of death as a seductive female among other scenes of post-apocalyptic industrialization.
Throughout the video, a black haired woman (similar in appearance to the character Death from the DC comic book series, The Sandman) dances and laughs, representing "Death" as it follows mankind through all of its history. The video is misanthropic in its underlying message. The video begins with the evolution of life, from the smallest cell to the extinction of dinosaurs and reign of homo sapiens. The video then cuts back and forth throughout human history, depicting man's primitive, violent nature as essentially unchanged over the centuries. Such depictions include a knight preparing for the coming slaughter during the Crusades, a ritual dance by America's KKK (the dance is repeated with other groups throughout the video), a rally by Nazi-esque troops (with a symbol reminiscent of the Sig Rune instead of a swastika), Auschwitz-like prisoners with the stripes going vertically instead of horizontally on their uniforms, carnage upon a World War I-era battlefield (apparently a tribute to Peace on Earth, a 1930s MGM anti-war cartoon directed by Hugh Harman), the apparent rape of a woman, and the bombing of a Vietnamese village by an American jet, the pilot of which removes his mask to reveal a skull laughing wildly. Every scene portrayed complements the song's meaning and tightly follows the lyrics. When Vedder sings "Buying stocks on the day of the crash," a scene is shown where businessmen are committing suicide by jumping from buildings, similar to Black Thursday and the resulting suicides from the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Other social and environmental issues such as whaling, Manifest Destiny, vivisection, pollution, genetic modification and techno-progressivism are included. The music video blames humankind's brutality on leadership; with various scenes depicting a cardinal or priest, an American President, and an Asian leader. It is eventually revealed that the world leaders are being controlled as puppets by the hand of Death. The video concludes in what seem to be future scenarios of the self-destruction of the human race, including the carpet bombing of a city of clones by futuristic aircraft, computers hijacking the human mind, and finally a nuclear explosion which leaves a city in ruins. During the sequence of flashing images near the end of the video an image of a yield sign being smashed at the corner can be seen, which references the album title and cover art.
I love this video!!
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Houska CastleHouska Castle is an early Gothic castle, 47 km north of Prague, in the Czech Republic. It was built by Ottokar II of Bohemia during his reign (1253–1278) and became an important royal abode. It later passed to the hands of the aristocracy in which it remained until 1924, the times of the First Republic. It is one of the best preserved castles of the period.[1]
Houska Castle was featured on an episode of Ghost Hunters International which aired on SyFy on July 22, 2009.
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[hide][edit] Local Folklore
Houska castle and most specificaly the chapel has been built a large hole that is supposedly so deep that no one could see the bottom of it. Half animal half man creatures where reported to have crawled out of it and dark winged creatures flying in the vicinity of it. When construction was begun on the castle all the inmates that where sentenced to death were offered a pardon if they consented to be lowered by rope into the hole and reported back on what they saw, when the first person was lowered in after a few seconds he began screaming "pull me back up", and when they did he looked as if he had aged 30 years in just a few seconds, he had grown wrinkles and his hair had turned white. He was admitted into a insane asylum and died within 2 days. The castle was built with no fortications, near no trade routes, built with no water, no kitchen, and no occupants at its time of completion. Houska castle was not built to keep inhabitants or as a protective sancuary, it was built because they thought the hole was the gate to hell and they were trying to keep the demons in the thickest walls in the castle are the lower levels closest to the hole and the people who work there know and they are just as spooked as you would expect them to be.
[edit] Nazi Connection
During the Nazi occupation of this area in the early 1900's many physics experiments where done by the Nazi Reich in the castle and most specifically in the chapel where the Nazi's made attempts at opening dimensional portals and other physics/science experiments.
[edit] References
- ^ DURDÍK, Tomáš: Encyklopedie českých hradů, Libri, Prague 2006, S. 104–105
[edit] External links
Coordinates:
50°29′28″N 14°37′26″E / 50.491°N 14.624°E
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Perhaps some inspiration for WoD
So what has been going on in the last week or so?
Well since the last update I have finished my application to the Leverhulme Trust and I am hoping to get all the references in for that very soon. The last weekend involved a trip down to London, and this weekend just gone we went to Birmingham. It's really weird having money to spend once again. More inportantly Sam is happy she can spend money again. My purchase in Brum failed though. It was an unusual shirt from H&M, but once we got it home we noticed that the button holes were fucked. Fortunately the H&M in Leamington refunded us but of course don't stock the same line, nor will they be able to get it in. Arse. So instead the money went on nice new patent leather black shoes which will come in handy for smart occasions.
Otherwise this coming weekend is London for Aiko's birthday, and then the weekend after that is Manchester and Liverpool to see Sam's cousin and his new baby (we went baby present buying in Brum leading to brooding feelings.... some stuff we saw was quite cute), and to have a mini reunion with my UMIST/Manchester Chemistry crowd now that we have be cast to the four corners since all graduating.
On the work front I've been retraining my model on a new database, finishing coding tweaks for the entire group, and now coding up a new multi-objective conformational searching method that would be of use for molecular docking and polymorphism.
On the RP front this week and last week are session free since Mark is being operate on etc so I have had a chance to catch up with writing the last of the Ordo Dracul NPCs and then the independant NPCs and the chapter (and essentially the Manchester book for Vampire) will be complete. Also read most of Cthulhu tech which has been really good but I doubt I will be running it any time soon.
So I saw the article on this video in the Metro on the way to work, and then spotted Neil Gaiman had posted this. Very awesome video.
OK so you remember that big falling out I had with the rp guys up in Manchester.
Well just after it all I posted on a LJ of one of the writers for white wolf. It was talk of a game, one I have recently bought, Cthulhu Tech.
I had posted that (without naming) that the ex-friend in general had mentioned cthulhu tech. My words were 'ex-friend (long story)' and also I said it was surprising that he had picked up this game due to it's heavy anime feel.
Well just today the same ex-friend found the writers lj with respect to his white wolf work. Fair enough. But then, finding the comment I had made on a post 3 months ago posted 'LOL'.
Ok I know I took a swipe at him back then, and things were tense back then. But for that type of comment today when it is clear as day I made that comment back in the heat of the moment. Well. Was there really any need? I mean just to reignite things?
That or I maybe reading into 'LOL' too much.
Oh well back to work.
via 
