Standing in the way of control!

DC Comics and MAD Magazine

Popularity: 49% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

The Montauk Monster was discovered this week.

From Gawker: 

So that new picture of the Montauk Monster, you know the one from Newsday that makes it look a lot more like a dog? We say it’s bunk. The thing is in a completely different position, its little front legs aren’t bound, plus they claim the photo was taken on the same day as the original. And I’m no Bill Nye, but I’m pretty sure things don’t decompose thatstill a monster. The bigger question, though, really, is why are we and many other people so interested? What is it about the Montauk Monster that intrigues us so? I’ll try to provide some answers—in listicle form because it’s a fucking Friday—after the jump.1) We are fascinated by dead things
What did this creature know, where has it been? The odd thing is that, though we are still living, it knows more than us. It’s been somewhere we can only imagine. People are poking at this thing with e-sticks because we both fear and are fascinated by its morbid secrets. If we can discover the true history of this ruined life, maybe some tiny piece of life’s long puzzle will snap into place for us, for our silly existences.

2) Monsters are the world’s troubles made manifest
What with the economy and all. And gas prices the way they are. And no one can sell their house or pay their rent and everyone’s dying of cancer or their teeth are falling out or their plane got delayed or a kid they knew just got blown up in the desert. We walk around with these little walnuts of fear and worry and anger pitted in our chests all day, every day. And a monster—a terrible, gnashing, fleshy and physical thing—lets us release that valve in our hearts. Its little leathery paws pry that Pandora’s box open just a bit, just to relieve the pressure. It’s why we feel giddy and silly when we see it. Because something awful is just staring us right in the face, not shadowy and vague like the wretched and grim ideas of this modern world.

3) Everyone hates rich people
Montauk and its surrounding Long Island environs have long been the playground of summer wealth, of cold corn salads and hay-blonde hair and Thatchers and Kittys and twinges of gin sadness on sprawling porches. It’s the stuff of blousy green July dreams and most of us quietly hate it because we have never and probably will never have it. So a monster! A hideous hell beast washing up on their precious, opal-sanded shores? Hah! Serves you right, you twill-wearing, Saab-driving, piece of shit Andover alumni! I hope its family comes and eats your town and the last person left is a crazed Ina Garten wielding a shotgun she made from scratch, cackling into the humming, purple August evening sky.

4) We all love to share something
The world is a terribly lonely place. New York City especially, with its gray, echo-y corners and menacing towers sticking up like knife blades, piercing our beloved blue sky. Who among us hasn’t felt bewildered and lost in the rambling metropolis, in need of some sort of Poltergeist-like lifeline to scrape and crawl and pull ourselves back into the world of other people? And something like this, a funny monster mystery, is the perfect way to giggle and theorize with people, to send “WTF???” emails and joke at a bar on Smith street with a long lost friend from college. People are best at relating with one another, really, when there is nothing at stake. All we risk with Montauk Monster Mania is offending, perhaps, some avid dog lovers. And that’s not so bad.

5) Because we all knew, deep inside all along, that monsters were real
That creak in your closet? That strange thud and bump coming from the crawlspace when you were but a blankets-up-to-the-chin child? Monster. Totally a monster. Those strange shadow figures you see out of the corner of your eye? Monsters. Or, at least, Shadow People. We knew the real truth, somewhere in the mysterious and rarely-used rooms of our mind, long before the documentary Cloverfield made a noble effort to definitively prove it to the world: monsters are real and are everywhere. When we first saw Monty something just clicked on in our brains, a small switch flipped. There it was, all along, that ominous wicked knowledge. Whether we like it or not, monsters exist. And they’re coming for us.

Popularity: 29% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

Popularity: 21% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

Disturbing:

Man stabbed, beheaded on Greyhound bus by apparent stranger

Gabrielle Giroday and Ian Hitchen,  Canwest News Service  Published: Thursday, July 31, 2008

Canwest News Service

BRANDON, Man. — Screaming passengers fled in terror from a Greyhound bus as an unidentified fellow passenger suddenly stabbed a man sleeping next to him, decapitated him and waved the severed head at horrified witnesses standing outside.

The apparently unprovoked assault left 36 men, women and children stranded Wednesday night on the shoulder of the darkening Trans-Canada Highway near Portage la Prairie, Man., about 85 kilometres west of Winnipeg, watching while the bus driver and a driver of a nearby truck shut the crazed attacker inside the bus with the mangled victim. Reports Friday said the suspect tried to eat parts of the victim.

At a media conference Thursday afternoon, RCMP confirmed they have a suspect — who is not believed to be from Manitoba — in custody, but offered few new details about this baffling homicide. The suspect, a man in his 40s, is expected to be formally charged today.

“By the time the police arrived, the driver and the remaining passengers had all safely exited the bus,” said Sgt. Steve Colwell.

He said officers could see the man walking around inside the bus, but said he refused to exit. The standoff lasted for hours.

“At 1:28 a.m., the suspect . . . attempted to jump out of the bus after breaking a window. He was immediately subdued and arrested without incident and is currently in RCMP custody,” Sgt. Colwell said.

The victim’s name has not been released but a number of tribute groups on the social networking Web site Facebook identified him as 22-year-old Tim McLean, a carnival worker.

The Facebook group posted early Friday entitled R.I.P. Tim McLean lamented the young man’s death.

“R.I.P Tim McLean, You are loved and you will be missed dearly!” the site description read.

McLean’s father, Tim McLean Sr., told CBC News on Thursday night that he was in the process of trying to get confirmation from the police that his son was, in fact, the victim of attack.

Witness Garnet Caton said the attack was unprovoked.

“The guy just took a knife out and stabbed him, started stabbing him like crazy and cut his head off,” said Mr. Caton, 26, a passenger on the Edmonton-to-Winnipeg bus.

“Some people were puking, some people were crying, other people were in shock. . . . Everybody was running, screaming off the bus.”

Mr. Caton said the attacker was only on the bus for a brief time, after boarding in western Manitoba.

Passenger Cody Olmstead said he had been watching a movie on the bus just before the attack began.

“We were watching Zorro; next thing I know, I hear someone screaming.”

Mr. Olmstead, 21, told reporters he had smoked a cigarette earlier in the trip with the victim, who got on the bus in Edmonton.

He said the victim said he was going to Winnipeg.

After the bus pulled over and the terrified passengers fled, Mr. Olmstead said the attacker was taunting those outside with the victim’s severed head.

“He came back, standing in the doorway with the head, looked at him, dropped the head and went back and started cutting buddy back up.”

He said when police showed up, the taunting continued.

“He come up and picks the head up and he’s waving it in the window. I just smoked a cigarette with this man earlier — like, the head. He’s shaking it back and forth in the window.”

Mr. Caton said he and other passengers prevented the attacker from getting off the blood-soaked bus by threatening him with makeshift weapons — a hammer and a crowbar.

“We were telling him, ‘Stay put, stay put, stay there, don’t try to come out.’ He tried to get the bus working and the bus driver disabled the bus somehow in the back. I’m not sure how he did it, and at that point, I think the police showed up,” he said, adding officers rushed them away.

Mr. Caton and other passengers said the attacker and his victim, who was listening to music on headphones, were sitting together at the rear of the bus, and the attack appeared to be unprovoked; no words were exchanged.

He told a TV station the attacker had actually changed seats to sit next to his victim just before the killing.

Mr. Caton described the man who attacked the passenger as bald and wearing sunglasses. He seemed oblivious to others when the stabbing occurred, said Mr. Caton, adding he was struck by how calm the man was.

“There was no rage or anything. He was like a robot, stabbing the guy,” he said.

Mr. Caton said the victim boarded in Edmonton, was wearing hip-hop clothing and appeared to be around 20 years of age.

After the killing, the other passengers were later taken to Brandon, Man., to be interviewed by police and to stay overnight at a hotel there.

Crisis counsellors were also at the hotel to provide support to the passengers, and counsellors could be seen chatting with them outside the hotel as groups went out to local stores for snacks or to smoke cigarettes.

One small boy, who was with an adult man and woman, was given a plush teddy bear by a crisis health worker.

“The first thing I heard was something like a terrible type [of] yowl, and that was from the guy who got stabbed,” said an elderly woman on the bus, from Winnipeg.

The woman and her adult daughter said they were three or four rows in front of the man when the attack began.

“[My daughter said] ‘Oh my God,’ and everybody else started screaming,” she said. “They had terror in their eyes.”

Two other passengers on the bus, a 22-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman from France, said they were heading to Winnipeg after visiting the woman’s father in Whitehorse. The 22-year-old man said in French that he saw a man holding a long knife repeatedly stab another passenger. He and his girlfriend said they were shocked by the attack, and the isolation in the middle of the prairie when it occurred.

“There was nowhere to go,” she said.

Speaking in Quebec City, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the issue of safety on buses may need to be examined more closely once the legal process of this case is over.

“We’re never closed to looking at how Canadians can be more safe and more secure,” Mr. Day told reporters in Quebec on Thursday. “This particular incident, as horrific as it is, is obviously extremely rare.”

Greyhound spokesman Eric Wesley, speaking from Texas, said drivers are trained to get help as soon as they can when incidents occur.

Read on…

This is so sick….

Popularity: 27% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

Turns out Jon Qwelane and the Press Ombudsman of South Africa, Joe Thloloe has a history. In fact it seems as though the two are comrades.

This claim is not made by the gay pressure group, who formally laid charges against Qwelane for his now infamous column, expressing his disdain for gay people but according to Qwelane himself in a column he wrote in 2005:

I remember one Sunday afternoon in Rockville, Soweto, when my close friend and colleague Joe Thloloe and I were leaving what had been a rather heated political rally in Regina Mundi Catholic Church.

The group now plans to appeal the finding made by Thloloe.

More here at the Facebook page of “Appalling Homophobia in our midst!!”

Popularity: 27% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

From The Namibian:

DECLINING academic standards at the University of Namibia (Unam) have again come under the spotlight after a senior lecturer was allegedly told to drop his standards or resign from the Department of Political and Administrative Studies after only 60 out of 148 students passed their examination last semester.

About 50 students who failed the two-year Diploma in Local Development in July drew up a petition in which they demanded to be given an automatic pass and that Professor Piet van Rooyen be removed as course lecturer.Van Rooyen was subsequently brought before a disciplinary hearing at which the Dean of the faculty, Dr Boniface Mutumba, allegedly twice demanded that Van Rooyen let these students pass or hand in his resignation.The meeting was attended by Unam Vice Chancellor Dr Osmund Mwandemele, Registrar Alois Fledersbacher, Head of Examinations John Ockhuizen, Mutumba and Head of Department Dr Tapera Chiwaru. PRECEDENT? However, Mutumba denied that he had asked for Van Rooyen’s resignation or that the meeting amounted to a disciplinary hearing. “We were just meeting as colleagues, but it was not a disciplinary hearing… the matter was resolved,” he said. What was resolved was a decision to allow all the failed students to repeat the course, free of charge - raising questions about the legal precedent this decision could create, other academics and students said. The two-year diploma course was designed to allow students who did not achieve high enough marks at school - 25 points on the ICGSCE grading - to enter university. Successful completion of this course would allow them to enrol for further studies at Unam - seemingly the main reason why most of the students enrolled, students said. Van Rooyen declined to discuss the issue, but agreed to allow a reporter to attend a lecture on Wednesday, in which he outlined to the students why they had failed his course. It was a lesson not much appreciated by those who had failed, judging by complaints from the back rows. WHYS AND WHEREFORES Van Rooyen told the students that while there were 148 students enrolled, only eight copies of the prescribed textbook had been sold by the campus bookshop in the past semester. Class attendance the past semester was also very poor, with only 40 students on average attending lectures in spite of a Unam regulation that they have to attend at least 80 per cent of classes in order to sit for examinations, he noted. Further, their ability to communicate in English was poor - but not one of the students had a dictionary with them, and even the better students asked for explanations of words such as “locality”. Assignments handed in often were of very poor standard, both in presentation and terms of language, with some students unable to distinguish between words like “policy” and “police”, he said. While Van Rooyen admitted freely that his Afrikaans-accented English was perhaps hard to understand at times, students had the right to ask him to explain or ask for help, he said. However, as a senior academic, he had responsibilities to make sure that students meet minimum standards, as he refused to hand out “phoney” qualifications, Van Rooyen told the class. WHAT ABOUT US? The rowdy group of first years generally welcomed news of the appointment of a new, more junior lecturer. While efforts were made to speak to students who had failed, only those who passed the first module were generally willing to be interviewed. Asked why so many students had failed, top student Aino Mundilo suggested that these students “preferred their independence” to enjoy student life away from the strictures of parental control. The main reason was because they failed to attend lectures - and then as a result could not understand the prescribed textbook, she said. “But if I fail one of the next modules, will I also be allowed to repeat the course free of charge?” Mundilo asked. Too many of the failed students merely took the course because it allowed them to say they were studying at Unam, others felt. “The biggest problem is that many of them, especially those who come from schools in the North, have real difficulty in expressing themselves in English,” said Sibongile Tshabalala. Another Unam academic said the problem was exacerbated by a political decision by Unam’s senior management to force their most senior staff to teach undergraduates. This meant that some lecturers were shouldering massive workloads while neglecting essential research and publication, the measure by which universities worldwide are judged. An obvious problem was motivation: senior lecturers such as Van Rooyen earn salaries less than half the generous packages that Unam’s administrators have given themselves, it was established. By stressing access to higher education rather than quality of higher education, Unam management has “diminished the very currency of education” and this held very serious implications for Namibia’s future development, one academic said. While Unam has spent N$4 million on modern teaching aids such as computerised touch-screens over the past year, its students appeared unappreciative. After the class had left, the room was left filled with litter from food and junk left behind in spite of clear signs that say: ‘No eating in class allowed’.

Popularity: 23% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)

Let us kick of the month of August and the weekend for that matter with a fun new sports blog. The Spoiler is a football blog with a section entitled Sporno….which they describe as follows:

Sport tries its best to be clean, porno is always dirty. Sport is noble and healthy. Porno is always bad and wrong. Yet for all their efforts to keep a distance, they just can’t help running into each from time to time and making sporno, without meaning to at all.

‘Nough said. Here then a sample on offer:

More, many more, here…

Popularity: 30% [?]

ShareThis

(Sponsor Link: assetant.co.za)