Category Archives: Crime

Willy Pickton had a point?

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mmmmmm-mm good!

Perhaps you’re familiar with the tale of Willy Pickton, the Port Coquitlam pig farmer who picked up and murdered several dozen women from Vancouver’s Downtown EastSide. Perhaps you’ll even recall that I went for coffee with the fellow once and lived to tell the tale.

After he’d killed his victims, he took souvenir parts and the rest he put through the wood chipper, alternately feeding the product to his pigs or packaging it with ground pork and sending it to market as sausage meat. A friend of mine made a quarter of a million dollars from the pork marketing board, who hired him to get the price back up (it had fallen by half).

According to the Japanese sommelier robot, we don’t taste like chicken. We taste like bacon. Or prosciutto.

Well as everyone knows, all journalists are hams.

…when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated. Japanese unveil robot wine steward [South Coast Today]

Quiz: the Interview interview

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Be a journalist; or smell just like one!

This is the pop culture quiz given to hopeful job applicants at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Ah, remember the Eighties? Well it seems so does whoever wrote this quiz: I’m a little surprised it doesn’t have Peter Beard and Maud Adams on it, but maybe there’s a Page Two I haven’t located yet.

See how well you do, and yes, it appears that the last one is a typo. I thought it was that scam artist John Hawkins but no, they really meant Stephen Hawking, with whom we are, of course, intimately familiar, featuring as we do his Christmas album. Oh, and did you hear Romeo is divorcing his wife? No idea if it’s for another nurse or just for physical protection, but if there’s a god in heaven Elaine Hawking will end up with David Gest.

I have ticked off the ones I can identify; how’d you do, and if it’s “not well” can I have your job?

From The Smoking Gun:

Barry Diller Checked box symbol
Joel Schumacher Checked box symbol
Bridget Hall Checked box symbol
Ellen Von Unwerth Checked box symbol
Phillip Taaffe
Michael Roberts
Faith Popcorn Checked box symbol
Helmut Lang Checked box symbol
Karole Armitage Checked box symbol
Joe Dolce Checked box symbol
Kevin Aucoin Checked box symbol
Julian Schnabel Checked box symbol
Wayne Maser
Donna Tartt Checked box symbol
Hamish Bowles Checked box symbol
Francesco Clemente Checked box symbol
Harry Evans Checked box symbol
Miuccia Prada Checked box symbol
Michaelangelo Signorile
Bob Colacello Checked box symbol
Polly Melon (sic) Checked box symbol
Douglas Coupland Checked box symbol
Jack Pierson
Tibor Kalman
Juergen Teller Checked box symbol
Rei Kawakubo Checked box symbol
Tina Brown Checked box symbol
Gabriella Forte Checked box symbol
Liz Smith Checked box symbol
Billy Norwich Checked box symbol
Sophia Coppola Checked box symbol
Jason Weinberg
Lillian Hellman Checked box symbol
Terri Toye Checked box symbol
Steven Klein
Victoria Bartlett
Peter Lynch Checked box symbol
Steven Hawkin (sic) Checked box symbol ?

Office Space, the slasher pic trailer

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via Fark. We always knew someone would push Milton too far one day. Best slasher trailer since Sleepless in Seattle.

imprisoned video blogger accepts award

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He's watching...Do you know the tale of Josh Wolf? He’s a video blogger who filmed people taking part in a protest and who was then ordered to turn over his footage to a Grand Jury investigating the protest. He refused, citing journalistic privilege, and promptly found out the government doesn’t consider videocasters to be journalists, at least not when it doesn’t want to. He’s currently serving his indefinite sentence in Dublin, California; he’s been told he’ll be released when the Grand Jury ends, which is projected for July of next year.

At the recent Vloggie Awards, Josh won the People’s Choice Award for Best Male Vlogger (they split these things up by gender? You’ve got to be kidding me!) and his video, All Empires Must Fall, won the Judge’s Choice Award for Most Controversal Video, which it undoubtably was. The goverment declined to let Josh out to pick up his award, figuring no doubt that someone there would surely throw a blanket over him and smuggle him offshore to some copyright-free banana republic, from whence he would fire YouTubes of such intensity that they would shake the very foundation of the nation.

Or maybe they just thought nah, fuck ‘im!

In any case, Josh‘s big day came and went with no Josh, but with a letter written from prison and read out on the podium, and here it is, although Robert Scoble had it first.

It seems like mere moments ago that I was here in this venue for blogger con. I remember telling my story about how the federal government was trying to send me to prison for refusing to turn over my unpublished material and testify in front of a grand jury for asserting that I am a journalist, and for refusing to be an agent for the government by providing intelligence to aid in an anarchist witch hunt. Some were shocked by my story, others were not surprised that the government would go to such lengths, and still others maintained disbelief, preferring to think of me as the boy who cried wolf, rather than opening themselves up to the idea that their government would do such a thing.

That weekend at vlogger con was one of the best in my life. It was euphoric getting to hang out and party with so many stellar individuals, and I am disheartened that I can only join you in sprit to tonight. I’ve always heard that the best par t of award shows are the after parties and I’m sure that it will be a rocking good time. I’ll be there for the next one.

Thanks for the awards guys. It feels good to know that I’ve been able to stir up a bit of controversy in the blogosphere and I’m touched by being awarded best male blogger.

I’d like to thank everyone who has blogged or vlogged about my situation, whether you are in agreement with what I’m doing or not, and I’d also like to thank everyone who has supported me throughout this endeavor, whether its through sending me books or letters, donating money to my legal fund or helping out with my blog, wiki or the various projects I’ve been involved with.

Thank you all and have fun tonight I’ll be out soon enough.

Diebold, Die Bolder: electile dysfunction

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Die Bold, DIE BOLDER! Yippee kiyay, motherfucker!

from MSNBC, which I always wanted to hate but which has, too often, far, far too often, taken up the slack that CNN has left as it happily knits itself into a fluffy, news-free straightjacket.

Man 1, Machine 0.

That’s at least one vote that can’t be interfered with; too bad the same cannot be said of the others in the machine. Or, indeed, the rest of the US.

“He came in here very peaceably and showed his ID, then he got on the machine and just snapped,” volunteer Gladys Pezoldt told the Morning Call of Allentown.