Tag: Found

The Nation has a long article containing inverviews with U.S soldiers that were stationed in Iraq. You want to read it: thenation.com

“As an American, you just put your hand up with your palm towards somebody and your fingers pointing to the sky,” said Sergeant Jefferies, who was responsible for supplying fixed checkpoints in Diyala twice a day. “That means stop to most Americans, and that’s a military hand signal that soldiers are taught that means stop. Closed fist, please freeze, but an open hand means stop. That’s a sign you make at a checkpoint. To an Iraqi person, that means, Hello, come here. So you can see the problem that develops real quick. So you get on a checkpoint, and the soldiers think they’re saying stop, stop, and the Iraqis think they’re saying come here, come here. And the soldiers start hollering, so they try to come there faster. So soldiers holler more, and pretty soon you’re shooting pregnant women.”

A guy in Iraq is recording a song, and someone fires through his window. He finds it funny, everyone else is depressed: http://nabilsblog.blogspot.com.
Make sure to follow the link to the recording itself.

Having spend a lazy sunday looking up swingers websites and posting indecent proposals, it was refreshing to find the page www.weneither.com, a simple dating/community site that only allows you to list stuff that you don’t like (thus the name). Not very big, and almost exclusively US-folk, but the idea is fun and the interface is nice enough to permit occasional browsing.

I’m quite hooked on podcasts, possibly to an unhealthy degree. At the moment I’ve almost completely stopped reading books in favour of movies and audiobooks/podcasts.

I don’t know if it’s something worthwhile, but in case you’d like to follow suit and listen to something interesting, the list below might be for you.

* Escapepod is a weekly science-fiction podcast. 20-50 minutes of good short stories. Well worth your time.

* Pseudopod is an offshoot of Escapepod, focusing on horror. Not really frightening most of the time, but good enough to listen to.

* Scott Sigler is a loudmouthed American that prides himself on doing gory thriller- & scifi-stories. He’s been podcasting his books for some time, and is putting in enormous amounts of work to promote himself. He has a rabid following that is spreading word about him, and even though his stories often are predictable in that thrillerly-kinda-way he’s a good reader and his books Infection and to a lesser degree The Rookie are good enough. It’s really rather addicting.

* How to disappear completely is a now finished novel by Myke Bartlett that is reminiscent of Neil Gainmans’ Neverwhere and Haruki Murakamis Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. At times the characters blend together, but over-all the reading and the story is both fun and gripping.

* How to succeed in Evil. Exceptionally fun, and brilliantly read by the author Patrick E. McLean. It’s not updated all that often lately, but Patrick has promised that he’ll be more frequent in the future. Either way, if you go through the archives of the show you might fall in love with the characters as much as I did.

A good place to get an overview of available audiobook podcasts is www.podiobooks.com. Just like when destop publishing became accessible and everyone thought that setting fonts in bold-italic-shadow-underscore made them look professional, there’s a lot of crap being podcasted. Either the production is poor, the reading laboured or the material sucks donkey-balls, but if you have some patience and give stuff a listen you’re bound to find something good.