Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead (2010)

Vares - Pahan Suudelma (2011)

Kill the Irishman (2011)

Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Reel Injun (2009)

Monday's cartoon

Funny.

Via LL over on Facebook.

Blackburn, a Novel by Bradley Denton (Picador USA 1993)

Blackburn was surprised that it was so easy. He hadn't thought he would be able to shoot another man. But here was Number Two trying to pull on his pants. The man was big, and his footfalls shook the telephone on the nightstand. A hole in his stomach pumped dark blood. The blood glistened on the man's skin, on the bedsheets, on the floor.

The woman on the bed was screaming. She scooted back against the headboard and stuffed part of the top sheet into her mouth. She screamed louder.

"Don't do that," Blackburn said. His ears were buzzing from the gunshot.

Number Two pulled his pants up as far as his knees, then fell. The telephone jumped. The man grunted. He lay on his side, and the blood ran down his belly to the floor. The woman continued to scream. Her screams were why Blackburn had come into the room. But there was no need for them now.

"It's all right," Blackburn said.

The woman screamed and screamed.

"What else could I do?" Blackburn asked.

Tales From The Script (2009)

Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosley (Tandem Library 1997)

A lot of people might not like how I acted with that white woman. They might ask: Why didn’t he get mad? or Why would Mouse be breaking his butt to get money out of a poor farmer when this rich white lady would be so much of a better target?

Mouse was just doing what came natural to him. But there’s a reason I wasn’t angry then, why I’m still not angry and why the people of Pariah didn’t rise up and kill that woman: It’s what I call the ‘Sacred Cow Thinking.’

Miss Dixon lived alone out in a colored community that hated her because she owned everything, even the roads they walked on. But Miss Dixon, and every other white person, was, to that colored community, like the cow is to those Hindus over in India. They’d all starve to death, let their children starve, before they’d slaughter a sacred cow. Miss Dixon was our sacred cow. She had money and land and she could read and go to fine events at the governor’s house. But most of all she was white and being white was like another step to heaven...

Killing her would have been worse than killing our own children; killing her, or even thinking of it, would be like killing the only dream we had.

Hateland by Bernard O'Mahoney and Mick McGovern (Mainstream Publishing 2005)

The army seemed the least unsatisfactory alternative, although my friends laughed hysterically at the idea of me as a soldier. They didn't think I'd last five minutes in an environment where I had to take orders. The British Army was the first extreme right-wing organisation I ever joined. Patriotism, or rather a narrow, arrogant, Rule-Britannia, God-save-the-Queen jingoism was rammed down our throats at every opportunity. And, like the other far-right groups I later encountered, the forces of the Crown didn't seem to care too much about the presence of criminals in the ranks.

The People of the Abyss by Jack London

These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.  She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.  And the lie they preach is “thrift.”  An instant will demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other words, to live on less.  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure.

How To Rob An Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

Mitchell Alden had been born with a number of gifts, but overshadowing them all was the Curse of Poor Decision Making. It was genetic. He remembered sitting in the kitchen in the house where he grew up in Queens, listening to his father talking to his business partner, who wanted to get out of the indoor air-cleaning business and invest in computers. "Dammit, I don't know how long this computer fad is going to last," he remembered his dad saying, trying to talk his partner into staying with selling Smoke-Eeters. "But as long as I'm alive, people will be smoking in bars in New York City."

These words turned out to be true. Mitch's dad died on the Long Island Expressway, six weeks before the ban on smoking in New York City bars went into effect, because of another error of judgement, this one involving a tractor trailer's stopping distance. Mitch carried on the family tradition by joining the army and getting kicked out six weeks later for failing a drug test, then going to community college and majoring in English.

Those 2012 New Year Resolutions In Full

Drink more water.

Finish that Eggers book.

Scargill, Springfield and Status Quo

Obscure politics? - check

Eighties music? - check

Random stuff about the footie? - check

Yep, 2011 was pretty much a continuation of 2010.

Long may I cliche.