Month: March 2025

Roll out the red… rug?

Marco Rubio is in Canada for the G7 summit and, well, Canada did not lay on the warmest welcome for him… this is kind of magnificent, it’s almost ruder than not laying out a red carpet at all. Mind you, I’ve not seen a lot of media coverage of this event, which did make me wonder if this photo were, in fact, real. This sort of thing isn’t that hard to fake, after all…

…Oh. Look at that, another photo of it from another angle.

More crucially, though, I saw someone credit the photo to AFP, whereupon I had the brilliant idea of trying to find it on AFP’s website…

…Which I soon did. So, evidently authentic. I wonder if THAT’s why I’m seeing so little coverage of it from the media…

Mid-air madness

That’s not really a combination of words I often see…

Less than a minute after an American Airlines flight took off from Savannah, Ga., for Miami on Monday night, a passenger began yelling and shaking. Flight attendants initially thought he was having a seizure.
But it turned out he was struggling because he believed a demonic spirit had invaded the cabin — and, at some point during the flight, began swallowing rosary beads to ward that spirit off.
As attendants approached the man, Delange Augustin, 31, he kicked one of them in the chest so hard that the attendant tumbled across the aisle and into a window on the other side of the plane, according to an arrest affidavit.
That’s when the cabin crew realized that Mr. Augustin, who was traveling with his sister, was not having a medical emergency. “Augustin’s choices appeared purposeful, though difficult to describe,” Savannah Solomon, a special agent with the F.B.I., wrote in the affidavit filed in the United States District Court in Chatham County.

Since the flight had only just started, it was easy enough for the pilots to turn around immediately and head back where it came from, but the guy kept freaking out:

In the detention center, Mr. Augustin’s sister told the authorities that they had been traveling to Haiti to “flee religious attacks of a spiritual nature,” according to the affidavit.
Mr. Augustin had told his sister “to close her eyes and pray because Satan’s disciple(s) had followed them onto the plane and the legion did not want the Augustins to make it to Haiti,” it said. He swallowed the rosary beads “because they are a weapon of strength in the spiritual warfare,” Mr. Augustin’s sister told Ms. Solomon.

I would question the bit about him not having a medical emergency; indeed I’d say BOTH of them are having one. And why would you fly to Haiti to escape from spiritual attacks? You’re going to the homeland of voodoo; if Satan is personally targeting you for some reason, wouldn’t he be even more likely to do it there? I see another article claiming the two are actually Haitians themselves, though, so maybe they were going there to use the, er, local knowledge? I don’t know, the whole thing is weird. I wonder what Satan’s putative agent made of it…

Now it’s just showing off

Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.
Until recently, the “moon king” title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.
“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.” […]
The moons were identified using the “shift and stack” technique, in which astronomers acquire sequential images that trace the moon’s path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect. All of the 128 new moons are “irregular moons”, potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometres across. The escalating number of these objects highlights potential future disagreements over what actually counts as a moon.
“I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be,” said Ashton. However, he added that the team may have reached a limit for moon detection – for now.
“With current technology, I don’t think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” said Ashton.

The thing that kind of puzzles me here is that, frankly, Cassini was in Saturn’s close vicinity for thirteen years and never spotted any of these new moons. It did find some, but only seven, not over a hundred. Weird how a probe actually orbiting the planet these moons are also orbiting never noticed them, but we’re able to detect them from here on Earth. Jupiter has 95 moons, by the way; I’ve always been amused by the scene in “Revenge of the Cybermen” where the Doctor expresses surprise at Jupiter having acquired a thirteenth moon, cos that line was dated before the show was even broadcast (an actual 13th moon was spotted in September 1974 just before filming even started for it), and it’s only got more so as decades have gone by…

Speaking of “America’s Hitler”…

I said to my housemate the other day that I was impressed by the speed with which Mushroom Cock and his mob have wrecked the US, and I actually meant that unironically. I know that destruction is always easier and faster than creation, but I would never have thought that nearly 250 years of a republic could be brought down quite as quickly as it has been; I do think it’s impressive, in the same way that the Hiroshima bomb was impressive…

…And I’m similarly impressed in an appalled way by the speed with which he’s got down with actual Nazi symbolism (I took the above screenshot myself). Via Snopes:

On March 9, 2025, Trump posted — without comment — a link to an opinion piece by Army veteran Jeremy Hunt titled “Army recruitment ads look quite different under Trump.” It featured an illustration depicting the pink upside-down triangle and a “no” symbol. We reached out to the artist, Linas Garsys, and will update this story if we get a response.
Hunt’s article mentioned the presence of LGBTQ+ people in previous Army recruitment efforts. It compared Biden-era advertisements that showed, for example, an Army officer marching in a pride parade, with an ad from Trump’s administration that featured a soldier in the gym lifting weights and “declaring to the camera, ‘Stronger people are harder to kill.'” Hunt wrote: “This sea change in advertising style isn’t merely about aesthetics; it signals to the world that our military is serious and prepared to fight.”

Now, technically speaking, it’s not really Drumpf himself using the pink triangle, it’s the Washington Times which is the Moonie-owned newspaper that loves him; as Snopes observes, the pink triangle with “no” sign is the work of one Linas Garsys, whose Instagram header describes him thus:

…”Gay shit”? Linas Garsys is gay? A gay artist drawing the pink triangle with a “no” sign? Why would… OH! I’m so fucking dense. Of COURSE, he’s being IRONIC, it’s a PUNK STATEMENT, it’s SUBVERTING, the Washington Times is probably taking it out of context and maybe even without his permission…

…Oh. OK, so much for irony and punk, now I’m more confused…

Anyway, the Snopes article charitably asks whether Trump actually knew what he was doing in reposting this article with this particular image; did he even read it, or did he just reactively repost it because he can’t resist sycophancy? And does he know what the pink triangle means? That’s actually a fair question, given that he is a pig-ignorant idiot, but at the same time… yeah, I’d be surprised if he didn’t. Does Jeremy Hunt hunt know what it means? Did he have any idea this would be the accompanying graphic? Read both it and the article together, it looks like it’s saying the US military is indeed serious and prepared to fight, like Hunt says, but it’s mainly prepared to fight its own queer members of the corps. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t enlist to begin with. Maybe Linas’ illustration was meant sarcastically or subversively after all. I don’t know any more. Fuck all these people.

Good question, JD

I saw this on Threads last night:

Now, this is an eight year old tweet, which I’m not sure the original poster realised and evidenly neither did some of the responders, but never mind. This was J. Divans back in his “America’s Hitler” days of loathing Mushroom Cock before being content to become America’s Himmler himself, not the present day model. Either way, this is a bizarre question to ask and I’m puzzled by what his purpose was in asking it even back then…

Happy 80th, Micky

George Michael Dolenz Jr. turned 80 the other day. He’s the last survivor of the Monkees, a band I’ve never really loved for some reason (watched the TV show when I was little and saw Head when I was somewhat older), but by whom I should probably at least obtain a best-of or something like that. There actually is some really good stuff in that catalogue, and this magnificently titled tune (which I’m presenting here in mono form, because obviously) was probably Micky’s masterpiece.

Now this is just silly

I know there’s been a lot of ill-feeling between Canada and the US in recent weeks, what with Mushroom Cock gibbering about annexing Canada and Canada understandably not wanting that and then him putting tariffs on the country and Trudeau tariffing the US right back, hockey fans booing the US anthem when the US and Canada played, shops removing American-made goods from their shelves, Ontario threatening to end electricity suppplies to the US (cos they make enough that they can actually export it to areas like Michigan and New York)…

…but this just feels ridiculous. Apparently a bald eagle was observed going after a Canadian goose and, though the latter was the less powerful bird, it sent the American one packing:

Mervyn Sequeira, an Ontario photographer, was out with his family on a recent morning when they spotted a bald eagle descending towards a frozen lake.
Sensing a looming attack on unsuspecting prey, Sequeira scanned the landscape and saw a Canada goose, alone and vulnerable.
For the next 20 minutes, lens trained on the battle, Sequeira watched what he expected would be a lopsided fight with a grim coda.
Through bursts of his shutter, however, he captured a defiant goose fending off death.
“I’ve seen bald eagles take a lot of things, from ducks to muskrats. But this is the first time I’ve seen a bald eagle go in for something as big as a goose,” he said.
Despite multiple attacks by the eagle, the goose remained unbowed. The raptor, defeated, flew off. […]
Sequeira, a retired airline pilot and avid bird photographer, is hesitant to impress symbolism on to the pictures.
“It’s quite a coincidence that it should have happened at this time. And I’m not entirely surprised. I like to look at things from the naturalist point of view and from the wildlife photographer’s point of view and not put a spin on it. But it’s quite natural for people to look at it in the context of what’s happening,” he said.

Yeah, trying to read symbolism into it is kind of absurd, though given the world situation it’s understandable. The timing of it certainly is kind of marvellous, and after all everyone loves a good underdog story. Or should that be underbird?

The White Reindeer (1952)

Do you like reindeer? Then The White Reindeer is very much the film you’re looking for; apart from the titular white reindeer, there must’ve been hundreds of the bloody things serving as animal extras. I don’t know much about Finnish cinema other than the Kaurismaki brothers and the bits I gleaned from Wikipedia before watching this film; I now see it was, in fact, a somewhat rare example of a Finnish film making it to the US, where it actually won a Golden Globe award in 1956, having previously won a special jury award at Cannes in 1953. I can see why, cos although it’s obviously recognisable as a horror film (the “folk horror” resurgence seems to have boosted more recent interest in it), it also works as a piece of perhaps relatively exotic Euro-arthouse. Apparently it’s not based on actual Sami legendry, but director Erik Blomberg and his wife Mirjami Kuosmanen (who also plays the female lead) certainly wrote something with that feel; it’s the sort of story of that feels like it takes place in a kind of mythical setting, but the wedding scene later in the film takes place in an obviously Christian church, which kind of complicates that when you remember that it’s a shamanic spell that creates the eponymous reindeer. Actually, I’m not 100% sure what exactly Pirita becomes, a shapeshifter, obviously, but we get a couple of flashes of vampire fangs too… Anyway, Blomberg was also a cinematographer going back to the mid-30s, so you might expect the film to look good, and The White Reindeer delivers the imagery in fine style; I mean, given the Arctic Circle winter landscapes in which the story takes place (and which do a lot of heavy lifting for the film), you’d be hard put to not do so… the only real reservation I have is an unfortunately serious one, that being the music; not that it’s bad as such, just that there’s so damn much of it… it’s like the composer, Einar Englund, thought he was through-scoring a silent film, or that he had so many ideas that he didn’t want to give any of them up. It’s not bad, but it is a bit unrelenting and excessive. Still, a solid little film on the whole, I’m glad this has come out of obscurity again.