Mick Hartley

Female Afghan Students

What with Wikileaks and all, good news from Afghanistan is hard to come by at the moment. Indeed this photo gallery from The Big Picture, Afghanistan July 2010, makes on the whole for grim viewing.

Here, though, is the other side of the story:

[Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images]

"Female Afghan students attend Kabul university on July 6, 2010. The...status of women in Afghanistan has changed since the Taliban regime where women were forced to wear the burqa in public. The face of a woman was considered a source of corruption for men not related to them. They were not allowed to work and not allowed to be educated after the age of eight and then only permitted to study the Qur'an. Women wanting to be educated were forced to attend underground schools such as the Golden Needle Sewing School and along with their teachers risked execution if caught. They also were not allowed to be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male chaperone often leading to illnesses remaining untreated."

(Yes, the dummy in the bed is rather alarming.)

Betraying the Country

After North Korea's humiliating exit from the World Cup, there was dark talk of consequences for the wretched players and manager. And now...

New reports are leaking out of North Korea about the national soccer team’s humiliating return home after losing all three of their matches at the recent World Cup.

No one expected North Korea to do well – except, apparently, the leadership apparatus of North Korea.

Embarrassment was compounded when, after a competitive 2-1 opening loss to five-time champions Brazil, the country’s despotic leadership took the unprecedented step of broadcasting the team’s second game on live television. North Korea’s 7-0 loss to Portugal was one of the most lopsided in tournament history. 

According to early reports, the North Korean play-by-play team stopped speaking during the second half of the broadcast. The match went unreported in the next day’s newspapers.

In a country that takes perverse delight in punishing its most loyal servants, you could smell the payback coming.

It apparently arrived on July 2, shortly after the North Koreans returned home.

The 23-man roster – minus its two Japanese-based ringers, Jong “Weepy” Tae-se and An Yong-hak – was hauled up on stage in front of 400 attendees at the inaptly named People’s Palace of Culture.

The audience included a large number of university students and athletes, as well as high party officials.

For the next six hours, players were reprimanded for failures in their play, according to a jarring report from Radio Free Asia.

This included a damning player-by-player appraisal of individual mistakes in play, provided by the country’s leading sports broadcaster.

More alarmingly, they were accused of “betraying” the country in the “great ideological struggle.”

After the players received their collective rollicking, the team was then forced to round on its coach, Kim Jong-hun.

Things were far worse for Kim.

He was accused of “betraying the young General Kim Jong-un,” the shadowy son of North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il.

Though no adult photos exist of Kim Jong-un, he is thought to be his seriously ill father’s heir apparent. A nascent personality cult is quickly building up around him in North Korea.

When the team first qualified for the World Cup several months ago, the success was chalked up nationwide as “young General Kim Jong-un’s accomplishment.”

Kim Jong-un was also supposed to be credited with the currency revaluation last year which turned out so disastrously. The "nascent personality cult" for Kim Jong-un - aka the Immature Little Bastard - seems more like a stillbirth.

Rumours abound that coach Kim has been expelled from the Worker’s Party and forced into the construction industry as a labourer.

I Fall to Pieces

This was posted at Expecting Rain the other day in memory of songwriter Hank Cochran, who died recently.

What's astonishing is the presence and the poise that Patsy Cline shows here. It's such an unforgiving shot: an unbroken close-up that never changes, never lets up - but she's completely up to it; completely secure in her artistry and her talent. Really, a singer in total control (though the backing singers do get annoying...).

This was the Glenn Reeves Show, 23rd February 1963. Ten days later, March the 5th, she was dead, killed in an air crash. Four years later on, another day the music died.

Crazy, She's Got You, and, from her early days, Walking After Midnight.

From the Abernathy Building

This is fun for those who enjoyed Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. Afficionados will recall that each show started with a small vignette related by the husky-voiced Ellen Barkin: "It's night time in the big city...." Artist Jaime Hernandez was inspired to produce an illustration incorporating these episodes, set around the mythical Abernathy Building, where the show was supposedly recorded.

The next step, clearly, was to tie the sound to the image....

I was in my backyard, entertaining a friend with my hands

On the subject of Western society as the society of innovations (previous post)....

The can-do spirit that made America great (via).

The Tail End of the World's Progress

Saudi Ahmad bin Baz sums it up:

We Muslims have found ourselves at the tail end of the world’s progress. The Muslims are always on the receiving end, and their only role in life is to receive from others. Western society has become the society of innovations. It is Western society that produces and adapts itself to the changes of life, whereas we Muslims have become passive recipients of all these innovations, and all we do is sit down and ponder whether these innovations are permitted or forbidden by Islam.

Bound for Glory

America in color from 1939-1943: old Kodachrome pictures by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (via). These were first published by the Library of Congress in the 2004 book Bound for Glory, and quite a few have featured on Shorpy (here, for instance), but it's good to see so many together.

 
"A crossroads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area. Melrose, Louisiana, June 1940. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress."

Aspiring to Human Perfection

Iran's President Ahmadinejad believes that Paul the octopus - the cephalopod of World Cup prediction fame - is a symbol of decadence and decay, spreading western propaganda and superstition:

"Those who believe in this type of thing cannot be the leaders of the global nations that aspire, like Iran, to human perfection, basing themselves in the love of all sacred values," he said.

The suspicion grows that Ahmedinejad is, in fact, very very stupid.

Google currently gives about 102,000 results for an "ahmedinejad octopus" search. Serves him right.

Overcast July

Two years to go. Here's a more jaundiced view of the 2012 Olympics:

Nearby, the Lea looks lush, almost tropical. You can imagine bullfrogs on the lily pads; an alligator slipping quietly off the bank and into the water...

 ...though this is taken standing on the Eastway dual carriageway, with traffic thundering by and the cranes and concrete of the Olympic site behind.

Further round, in Hackney, a kind of toothy Muttley:

and, of course, a gas holder.

 
 

Nuclear Test Shock

As the South Korean and US naval forces continue their show of strength in the East Sea - somewhat regrettably code-named "Invincible Spirit" - in response to the sinking of the Cheonan, we're hearing more details of the North Korean response. Initially they threatened "a retaliatory sacred war of their own style based on nuclear deterrent any time necessary in order to counter the US imperialists and the South Korean puppet forces deliberately pushing the situation to the brink of a war". Well yes, fine, but what does that mean, in real terms?

Now they've clarified: they're threatening to......blow themselves up.

A North Korean mouthpiece in Japan on Monday issued a thinly veiled threat of another nuclear test by the North, which is peeved by a massive South Korea-U.S. naval exercise in the East Sea.

The Choson Sinbo newspaper said the North "regards a nuclear test as an essential procedural requirement to gain a nuclear deterrent. In the past, it has not hesitated to conduct a test if it decided it needed one."

Relax, everybody.

(I like that "peeved".)