Video Of The Week: A Devil's Din

With their most recent song, A Devil's Din are trying to make lemonade out of a tragedy - the fire of the building that housed their jam space - by writing about their misfortune, and making a video asking for donations so they can re-equip themselves:



Obviously, being gear-less makes for a sound that isn't stellar (and the video even pokes fun at that), but you can definitely feel their hearts in the right place, and trying to make do of a shitty situation.

In just 8 hours, they came up with decent riffs and (perhaps obvious) lyrics, and a song was born. Good work, all told.

Feel free to help their cause, by Paypal-ing adevilsdin@gmail.com

Lest We Forget

I'm usually big on Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day for my American friends), a day in which I tip my hat to those who have sacrificed so much for the general ''us'' (and myself in particular), our freedom, our present. It's like a more honest Thanksgiving, without the turkey, and celebrated privately rather than with relatives.

But I'm not feeling it as much. Not that I don't respect it, just... the world we live in isn't all that great, for starters, especially towards those who have served their country:

But also in light of natural disasters such as today's Typhoon in the Phillippines, there are countless people who give or lose everything they have, every single day, with no one to benefit from their actions and losses.

Then comes the thought of all the unjust wars, both ones in Iraq starring in that role, but also Vietnam, and on a lesser scale, the Korean war - in which my grandfather served as a sniper - which, lest we not forget, pitted a communist government (North Korea) against a right-wing government (South Korea), and despite being less than a decade removed from WWII, the United Nations supported the right-wing, starting a spiral for North Korea that, with the help of blockades and embargoes, left them bitter, poor, starving, technologically impaired even to this day, and pissed off at the Western world - for good reason.

It takes a special person to be willing to sacrifice their life for their country, for their beliefs; it takes an even better soldier to go through with it despite disagreeing with orders, as many U.S. troops have since 2003. It takes a righteous person to serve as a means of defense rather than invasion or regime change, though.

More than all of that, though, I really despise profiteers pinning poppies to their suits when they use other humans - mostly kids and young adults yet to reach their prime - to unjustly invade another country for profit or territory after everything we know now. And to, at times, even poison their own troops while doing so.

Then there's the ''after'': those who come back perfectly healthy still struggle to find decent work; those who come back mentally scarred receive no help whatsoever; those who come back maimed and missing limbs being refused any type of disability claim, financial help, often having their insurances cut soon after their (first) hospital release.

The problem is those in charge see it as a mathematical equation: what will it cost, versus how much do we/some of us get back? I've heard time and time again, if senators, politicians and big company executives were to send their own children to war, would they hesitate at least a little more before pulling the trigger?

That's the wrong question, though. When a soldier's life is equated with his $30K salary and negatively evaluated as a three-year investment, how many can you spare in order to help Halliburton make billions? Where is the cut-off line where they would have to think twice about putting kids in danger? What if they made $100K a year, $250K? With a life insurance worth 5 to 10 times their yearly salary, would insurance companies warn not to risk losing them uselessly?

Unfortunately, that is the world we are left with today. Corrupt leaders doing a small group's bidding, sacrificing everyone they have to in order to keep going at it. I used to love the picture at the top of this post, the sacrifices of the past supporting our care-free way of life. Except more and more, it seems like their sacrifice was for nil, that the hell they're in transposed to the upper level, that the grass is no longer green, the future is bleak, the people are poor, starving, bitter and rightly pissed off, but it doesn't even matter, because the powers that be have us all in check anyway, throwing fake laws and militarily-equipped cops at us, restraining our education, our means of purchase, access to decent jobs, clean air, fresh water, natural fucking food...

I'll tell you what: I'm pretty sure that's not what my uncle Jean-Marc (late 1970s), stepdad Daniel (late 1970s), grandfather Raymond (Korea, later Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's personal bodyguard), great-uncle Gérard (WWII) and the others I'd rather not get into at the moment had in mind when they joined the Canadian Forces, nor what Joseph, Jack, Kevin, James and John had in mind when they joined the U.S. Forces.

Chicks To Blame

Remember that boat that crashed in Italy late last week?

Turns out supermodel Eva Herzigova is to blame. She was the one who christened the boat in 2006 - f.y.i: you christen a boat by throwing a champagne bottle at it, because the bigger the piece of machinery, the bigger its thirst for alcoholic beverages. That's why I throw a beer at small-to-mid-range cars and wine bottles at cars worth over $100,000.

In any event, Eva (pictured below hesitating between another glass of bubbly and a fifth orgasm provided by yours truly - she got both) isn't as strong as she looks, because the bottle didn't break, which is considered bad luck. Which apparently takes 6 years to materialize. Because the sea prefers having broken glass in it than people diving to retrieve a bottle of booze.

Poor Eva is distraught. She hopes she didn't cause the death of 6 or more people. To make her feel better here are more pictures of her bad self.

Titanic 2012

A luxury cruise ship with 4200 people on board crashed on an Italian shore. More than 70 people are missing, 3 are dead - and no one knows what the fuck happened.

In this day and age, 100 years after the actual Titanic crashed.