John Mortell’s blog

A really good History Channel documentary on the history of Marijuana and how racism, immigration issues, control of non-whites and attempts to ban alcohol led to marijuana becoming illegal:
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This new book coming out from David King looks quite interesting and foreign policy have a nice preview of it here. My personal favourite though has to be this one of Stalin:

While watching the Blair Witch Project and just reading about it after, I heard about this film. As both wikipedia and IMBD notes, the film got some attention following the release of ‘Blair Witch’ owing to the somewhat similar manner and ‘documentary’ filming.

Thought it is fairly short and actually quite enjoyable, there is a very good reason why this movie remains much-less well known than Blair Witch. I’m going to give a few ‘spoilers’ in this so just beware.

Though for most of the film, the information being presented as though it was a real documentary, for some bizarre reason in the last 15 minutes, the movie jumps into third-person omnipresent camera which is both incredibly jarring and completely removes you from the film. In fact, when you’re watching it, if the movie changed around a few small things and finished at around 1.10, or added a completely different ending, it is quite possible that this film would be seen as an enjoyable ‘alternative’ to the Blair Witch. What’s incredibly annoying is that nobody thought to say it to the filmmakers that the ending was just silly. Especially as, if they simply explained the reappearance of the extra film in another way and never were able to reconstruct that final frame, while possibly adding another 10 minutes to unnerve you, the whole thing would be a much better contender for being the best ‘real’ horror documentary out there.

Instead though, you get something that’s an enjoyable, if perhaps somewhat wasteful way of spending a hungover bank holiday Monday..

A few things I really noted from this video – firstly, that Jacob finds it strange that how you act influences your behaviour shocking is something I find surprising. I mean, that idea doesn’t really shock me, I mean, what does he think that cults do to get you to behave? His final point in the video I also find very odd – on one hand he says that if you actually try to live by what the Bible says, you’ll find it impossible, yet on the other, that is not a good enough reason to dump using it. I mean, personally, if its the word of god, its the word of god and you can’t ignore all the things that you find personally unpleasant surely? Finally, how does one ‘cut the corners of beards’?

… is an event being run by a friend of mine Fearghal O’Nuallain. Here’s how the website describes it:

This November, Simon Evans and Fearghal O’Nuallain will begin the first Irish circumnavigation of the globe by bicycle. Their unsupported expedition will cover over 30,000km, passing through 30 countries and some of the highest, lowest, driest, coldest, warmest and loneliest places on earth. In doing so, they will be promoting the positive contribution that cycling can make to mental health and the environment, raising €100,000 for Aware and highlighting climate change

To get a feel for what the guys will be doing here’s their flickr site and a sample of their videos:

Aswan to Alexandria from revolutioncycle on Vimeo.

Another really cool video from the TED lecture series.. I love her definition of serendipity! Tho I am really starting to get annoyed with the video player on TED. I don’t know why, but it seems like it takes me going away from the page as an excuse to reset the video..

I love the title of this movie, from the director of ‘Super Size Me’.. Watching this is certainly better than trying to study for my exam tomorrow, for which I don’t know what to do as my lecturer is the worst I’ve managed to have in the three years of my college career. Anyway, enjoy the clips & I love that the trailer has Gogol Bordello’s ‘Wanderlust King’ as the soundtrack:

Seek and you shall find I guess. It’s interesting how in the opening clip alone, there are nearly more people than appeared in the ‘Rise and Fall’ and how people involved seem to back up Paul Heyman’s claim that he created ‘attitude’ in wrestling… Update: For example, this dvd shows up two of the main faults I have with the WWE produced stuff, there’s a proper explanation for what happend with the NWA and its championship AND they mention whats apparently the ‘first’ 3-way dance in the U.S between Sabu, Shane Douglas and Terry Funk. Now apparently its an hour long but why hasn’t the WWE put that on the ‘Rise and Fall’ disk? I mean, if it’s simply just becuase of the fact that they weren’t working for them its a bit of a blow to the fans…

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So as a few of the posts I have done before might suggest, I’m somewhat of a fan of ECW. Now, I have covered the ‘Rise and Fall of ECW’ before in the book form, but I recently picked up the DVD version of the same.

As I said in the book review, the DVD works better because wrestling is a visual medium, and the whole documentary works really well as a talking heads example of history. Now plently of the history and things that happened there are covered, though you can’t help but feel that the lack of Raven, Sabu and Shane Douglas harms the production somewhat (many wrestlers who weren’t under contract to WWE at the time were not involved in the DVD). In some ways, its an advertisement for the ‘Forever Hardcore’ documentary that Douglas did afterwards. Yet, despite the fact that it is a ‘WWE produced’ dvd, it seems to cover most of the bases pretty honestly. Many of the individuals involved are quite critical of each other, and so on, but to be honest, until I see ‘Forever Hardcore’ and see what that says about things, I won’t really know how to feel. Basically, its 3-odd hours of solid documentary and well worth a look.

There are one or two serious complaints though, both of which appear in my other reviews of ECW material produced by WWE. Firstly, as I said in the review of the ‘Rise and Fall book’ the whole ECW seccedding from NWA isn’t covered, while it’s mentioned in the book, it has no real role in the DVD. Secondly, I’m fairly sure they have the same ‘Bam Bam Bigelow VS Taz’ match on both the ‘Rise and Fall’ and ‘extreme’ dvds. Seriously! If your going to put out these dvds, try minimise overlap! ECW ran long enough that there should surely be enough good material to go around. Still though, the matches available on the DVD are quite enjoyable, with plenty ‘holy shit!’ moments so….

I love paranoia: