Category Archives: tragedy

Pulp Fiction, by William Shakespeare

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Jules and Vincent. Shakesperean names if ever I heard them

Okay, so now we’re up to (I think) five worthwhile things on LiveJournal. This just might be the greatest of them all: nothing less than Quentin Tarantino‘s genre-busting post-intellectual masterpiece Pulp Fictionas the Bardhimself would have written it.

And he would have, you know. Everybody knows what playwrights will do for money.

From Metaquotes:

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know’st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

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Albanian Explosion: up to 160 feared dead

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Tirana Explosion destroys billboard

In Gerdec, Albania, a series of explosions at an old munitions depot has killed at least five people (estimates range as high as 160, but the total is sure to be considerably larger than reported so far) and injured over 200. The blasts were so powerful that they were heard over 200 kilometers away, in Skopje, Macedonia.

From the CBC:

The initial blast at the depot at Gerdec village, about 10 kilometres north of the capital, Tirana, set off a series of explosions, and ammunition continued to detonate for hours…Houses more than a kilometre away from the dump were damaged by the blast…Police said the cause of the explosion was not immediately clear, but terrorism was not suspected…

Albania has some 100,000 tonnes of excess ammunition stored in former army depots across the country, according to Defence Minister Fatmir Mediu.

At the site were an international team of 110 munitions experts, including some American civilian contractors, who were dismantling the old army depot in accordance with requirements for Albania’s expected entry into NATO next month. Government officials have received offers of assistance from Italy, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, the United States, and France.

From the Guardian:

People suffering with burns, concussions and broken limbs were rushed to local hospitals following the blasts, believed to have begun while teams were dismantling munitions at a store base. Many of the injuries were a result of flying glass or shrapnel.

“We do not know the exact number, but we fear the worst for the three teams, each of 21 people, working there at the time,” said Juela Mecani, spokeswoman for the country’s prime minister, Sali Berisha. “Several were US citizens.”

A spokesman for the Albanian interior ministry, Avni Neza, said army and police forces were trying to reach the area in armoured cars. “Helicopters have not yet managed to land because the explosions continue,” he said.

From Reuters, some additional background on how the explosions occurred:

The explosions began as Albanian and U.S. teams were moving stocks of World War Two-era bombs, bullets and shells stored at the base, a central collection point for the arsenal amassed by Albania’s Stalinist-era dictatorship.

Albania hopes to be invited to join NATO next month.

Many were hurt as enormous shockwaves hit nearby villages and cars passing by on the adjacent highway. A company involved in destroying the munitions said there were 3,000 tonnes of explosive material stocked at the site…

…the first explosion was not that big, allowing many of the estimated 110 workers on the site to get out. “Ten minutes passed before the biggest blast and many workers used this time to flee,” a press statement said.

Eight hours later, the fires continue to burn and live ammunition now lying scattered over the site, some of it dating back to the Second World War, continues to present the very real threat of more deadly explosions.

Albanian explosion on CNNFrom CNN, more background on the situation at the depot:

The army depot is used as a site for ammunition destruction.

Albania has some 100,000 tons of excess ammunition stored in former army depots across the country, according to Defense Minister Fatmir Mediu. He has said the country needs at least $77.8 million to destroy them.

“The problem of ammunition in Albania is one of the gravest, and a continuous threat,” Berisha said. “There is a colossal, a crazy amount of them since 1945 until now.”

He said he did not exclude human error in Saturday’s blast, but added that the ammunition could have exploded spontaneously because of its age.

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Heath Ledger’s Nick Drake video: Black-Eyed Dog

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Unfortunately, the video is marred by the incessant nattering of a group of twangy Australian talking heads, some of whom grin in the most merciless fashion while discussing Nick Drake‘s suicide and Heath Ledger‘s depression, no doubt thinking all the while of their ratings. If I find a version without them, rest assured I will post it.

For those who don’t know, Nick Drake is a formerly-forgotten British troubadour who, for the past year or so, has been experiencing a Renaissance along Tim Buckley lines. He wrote this in 1974, not long before committing suicide by overdose; the “Black Dog” was Winston Churchill‘s term for the clinical depression that marred his life from time to time. Lyrics over the jump, courtesy of APlaceToBe – Reflections of Nick Drake.

(they take video down, someone re-uploads it; let me know if it goes missing again)

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Broken Promises: Parents Speak About BC’s Child Welfare System

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Pivot Report Finds Kids Lost in Child Protection System

Vancouver, February 20–The plight of British Columbia’s poorest children is the focus of Pivot Legal Society’s new report, Broken Promises: Parents Speak about B.C.’s Child Welfare System. Based on interviews and affidavits from service providers, social workers, lawyers and, in particular, parents whose children are or have been involved with the child protection system, the report depicts a short-sighted, crisis driven child protection system.

The report finds that children are all too often apprehended as the first form of intervention—even where there are less disruptive alternatives that could keep them safe. And many children are left lingering in care, cut off from family, community and cultural roots.


These current child protection practices violate the guiding and service delivery principles that are set out in the Ministry of Children and Family Development’s own Child Family and Community Services Act (CFCSA), the foundation of the child protection system. The CFCSA mandates: using the least disruptive intervention, apprehending children only as a last resort, and reunifying families as quickly as possible.


“We cannot continue to think that putting kids in care is the solution for families who need help and support,” says report author and Pivot lawyer Lobat Sadrehashemi. “Taking children into government care in order to ensure their safety and well-being is not working. The state is a poor parent and outcomes for children coming out of the foster care system are devastating.”


Aboriginal children and families are particularly devastated. “The child protection system continues to fail Aboriginal families,” says the executive director of the Aboriginal Mother Centre Society Penny Irons. “The current child welfare system is just another version of the residential school system.” Aboriginal children are nearly ten times more likely to be in care than non-Aboriginal children. Less than 16 percent of these children are placed with an Aboriginal caregiver.


Samantha, a 34-year-old aboriginal mother of two, feels that her aboriginal roots and her own history of growing up in foster care was the basis for her children being apprehended. She explains,

“I feel like the Ministry is using my history against me. I have been working consistently. I do not have a drinking or drug problem. I have worked so hard to ensure that my children grow up in a healthy and loving home. Yet my children were still taken from me by the Ministry.”

“Perhaps the most disturbing finding,” says Darcie Bennett, co-author of the report and sociology PHD candidate, “is that 65 percent of the parents that took part in this study spent time in the foster care system themselves as children. If we don’t invest in providing families with the support they need to care for their kids in the home and break this cycle we can only expect to see more and more children lost in the system.”

About Pivot Legal Society

Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins. We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such as opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Pivot Newswire, just send a note with that subject line to newswire at pivotlegal dot org.

today in “People Who Are Better Than You” news…

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Seriously, seriously, I thought I was doing well. I mean, not great. Not epic. But, well, well.

Well, enough.

I got two paying blogging gigs. I get enough blogging students to get by. The immoveable object in my living room appears to be moving towards movement, or making a move towards moving towards movement, which is what at least a nanophysicist would call progress, of a sort and if only relative.

And he’s not even a relative.

But there are always those, according to various Desiderati, who do it better.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

And now, it appears, there are even those who do it for a larger and more loyal audience despite being dead six months.

Writer/artist Theresa Duncan, subject of a January Vanity Fair cover story (among plenty of other coverage), is updating her blog from beyond the grave. Cries for help: now available months after they’d be useful. Duncan—whose intentional overdose on pills last July led to the suicide of her partner Jeremy Blake a week later—had become, according to acquaintances and friends interviewed by Vanity Fair, increasingly erratic, paranoid, haggard, hard-drinking, and depressed in her last year or two. She was convinced that Scientologists were harassing her and Blake, trying to sabotage her stalling career (movie and TV projects that never got off the ground, including one that was supposed to star erstwhile friend of the couple and famed Scientologist musician Beck) and his ascending one (a scheduled retrospective of Blake’s work at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery ended up going on posthumously). So: what does a dead woman blog about? Dick Cavett, Sherlock Holmes, and T.S. Eliot.

So, pretty much no change there, if she were a book-blogging Typepad type, of which she was only 50%. Come to think of it, this isn’t the first time we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have been out-blogged by a dead woman, although the circumstances of the last time were quite different.
The last post that appeared when Theresa Duncan was alive posted on my birthday. Aw, thankies! Since then, she’d set two autoposts: a spooky, Basil Rathbone one for two days before Halloween, and one for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps she’d miscalculated the date of All Saint’s Eve, or maybe her calendar simply had a faulty October? Or maybe there’s a deeper meaning (there always is, with conspiracy theorists).

October 29th is Saint Narcissus’s Day.

Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake