If you’ve been following this blog, you should be aware that there’s a great deal of drama in my life.

In fact, the International Bureau of Standards has recently contacted me to gain my permission for them to use my name as a unit of measure for interpersonal drama.  The proposed unit, the ‘Scott’, would be used to quantify this whole drama situation, they explained excitedly … people’s lives, a workplace, a family home would be described in terms of the Scott-unit … for instance, a fairly close-knit, loving family (e.g. the Waltons) might be described as a Scott 0.01 environment, while Norman Bates and his mother (from the movie Psycho, children) might be described as a Scott 10 environment …

They went on, and on, gushing about what a boon it would be to sociology, to finally be able to document and describe human conflict in terms amenable to statistical treatment and –

It was right about this time that I told them to shove sociology up their arrogant asses and get the fuck out of my house.

This garnered significant glances between them. They each whipped out little black notebooks and began scribbling notes.

“A Scott  2 tirade?” the first asked.

“I’d go with a 2.5, or even a Scott 3!” the other exclaimed.

I sighed and reached for my emergency can of WD-40.

Don’t get me wrong:  there was nothing squeaky in my living room, and I had no intention of squirting the stuff into their eyes, before hammering in their heads with the can:  I am not, after all, a barbarian!

Instead, I squirted it at them and ignited the stream with a bic lighter, thereby making a home-made flame-thrower. (warning:  do NOT attempt this at home! There’s a really good chance that the can will explode!!! Personally, I don’t really give a shit whether I live or die, and care even less about your fate – but I absolutely do not want to be sued, so you have been warned, in no uncertain terms about the dangers of this procedure. Sign here.)

Ok, I reflected, as they ran screaming from the house, utterly forgetting to “Stop, Drop, and Roll”, maybe I AM a little barbaric…

The truth is, having grown up in an era of traveling salesmen (even more irritating than telemarketers), I had always had a hankering to try out the whole WD-40/Lighter – flame-thrower … but, having been raised a Christian, I’d been taught to forgive ass-holes who offended me, and treat them the way I wanted to be treated, despite the fact that I knew they wouldn’t actually treat me the way I wanted to be treated, so up till this point, I’d been a door-mat for any and everyone, and had never actually tried out my home-made flame-thrower. In this case, I calmly decided, they had gone too far. They didn’t deserve to die I admitted to myself – but a few 3rd degree burns might not be out of line!

Almost immediately, I felt bad about feeling that way. Then I felt good about feeling bad about feeling that way.  I suddenly remembered the Rain God from  Douglas Adams’ So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, who had experienced this exact progression of emotions, and I began to worry about charges of plagiarism – almost immediately feeling like an idiot because I hadn’t actually written anything down, and therefore couldn’t — er, oh. Oh, my. PLEASE let’s all stay calm and NO ONE call Mr. Adams! Please.

— also, I know a couple of guys from the International Bureau of Standards that are sorely in need of a Rain God, just now – or, at the very least, some guys with Fire-Extinguishers, and access to a world-class burn unit …

Horror movies are pretty cool, right? I watch a lot of them without knowing what they’re about, but just watch it based on the name. A few years ago I had invited my friend Steve-o Beevo over to watch a movie. He likes horror movies, so I figured he’d be into whatever I put on! The first movie I have popped in was Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. It’s basically just naked ladies being tortured by Nazis. WHOA FUN MOVIE! I think we only lasted for about 20 minutes because we both just felt really awkward when we thought we were going to have fun. Once I set that aside, I put in a movie that I knew was a little more well known in the horror community, which was Cannibal Holocaust. This movie was MUCH easier to handle…at first. Once the movie had gotten to footage of live animals being killed, for really reals, we both felt uncomfortable. We finished the movie, as we had gotten far enough into it to turn back, but I know that I look back on that night and kind of wished I had just had fun with my friends instead of watching movies that bummed me out. In Gut, both the ideas of friendship and pursuit of seeing something new, exciting, and possibly horrific are all put into question.

I start the morning the same exact way, except I usually look a lot more sad when staring at my crotch.

Bored with his job, his family, and almost everything in his life, Tom (Jason Vail) has come to terms with the fact that there’s no significant lifestyle improvement on the horizon. His childhood best friend Dan (Nicholas Wilder), who also happens to be his coworker, doesn’t have it much better, as he spends most of his nights drinking alone and watching horror movies. Dan is at least able to get Tom to come over to watch a new movie he got, and what the friends see in the movie leaves them confused and disturbed. Tom has a hard time looking at his wife and family the same way, but Dan feels somewhat charged by what was on the videotape, and even decides to ask out the waitress he’s been pining over for as long as he can remember. Tom encourages Dan to destroy the tape, but considering how the footage has affected his life, Dan actually ends up getting more videos like the one that he watched with Tom. With his curiosity getting the best of him, Tom watches the new video, only heightening the disturbed and confused emotions he was going through. Tom starts developing feelings of resentment towards Dan, but with the waitress disappearing, it’s hard to tell exactly where Dan’s feelings have gone. The rest of the film explores the concept of the effects that curiosity can have on different people and the lengths that some people are willing to go to experience anything new at a point in their lives when they think they can only feel boredom.

I think there needed to be more shots in this movie that were homages to Bruce Springsteen album covers.

Most people associate the word “pornography” with sex or naked ladies or videos of butt stuff, but pornography is defined as anything that can be considered obscene or explicit. Even though what these two friends see on the video isn’t footage of dongs flopping around, I’d definitely say that it can be considered obscene and explicit, and can absolutely be considered pornography. With that in mind, the thematic elements of Gut reminded me a lot of the thematic elements of A Serbian Film. By no stretch of the imagination is Gut anywhere NEAR as graphic as A Serbian Film, but both films involve characters who feel they’ve reached dead-ends in their life, are willing to accept opportunities into their lives for something new or different, but end up getting sucked much further down the rabbit hole than they wanted to. It’s a concept I find very interesting to be explored, so even if all the movie is doing is kind of putting the question out there about how far people are willing to go to experience new things and if the risks or damages are worth the reward. In addition to those concepts of escaping someone’s everyday life, themes of loyalty and friendship also come up. You get the sense that there are aspects of Tom’s life that Dan is jealous of, and aspects of Dan’s life that Tom is jealous of, so they both have this unspoken, unresolved tension between the two of them. Despite Tom blaming Dan for bringing this video into his life, Dan also has the freedom to watch more videos and doesn’t have to worry about a family that he would then have to act “normal” in front of. Although the themes of friendship didn’t resonate with me as strongly, it was still ambitious in the way those themes were worked in with subtlety.

So it IS normal for a girl to request a guy wear latex gloves before touching her?

Despite being quite ambitious contextually, it does still show signs of being a low budget, independent film, most notably with its cast. The two leads are fine in their roles, and considering most of the feelings expressed by the actors were those of exhaustion, boredom, and depression, they make it out okay. I think the low key approach works fine enough, but were the budget bigger, there could have been some more opportunities to showcase some more dramatic or confrontational scenes. One thing I noticed was how almost every shot was a static shot, or at least involved a camera being on a tripod, and there were hardly any shots involving a handheld camera. I think this worked in the film’s favor as the feeling of being locked into one position or the feeling of not much movement could have been an active decision to replicate the feeling of being stuck in one’s life. Even though the film does have a handful of graphic effects scenes, they are small scale enough to have been pulled off quite well, definitely taking the idiom of “quality over quantity” to heart, so it plays out as more of a thriller than a straight up horror film. It has some great concepts and was clearly aware of its own limitations, but it could have left far more of an impression had the audience been able to connect more with its lead characters. If nothing else, I recommend you check out the trailer, which is just as ambiguous as this review intentionally is by not telling you what you actually see in the video. Watch it! Seriously! It’s like, just an inch or two below what you’re reading right now! Are you really that lazy? WATCH THE GODDAMNED TRAILER.

Wolfman Moon Scale

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This video from Harvard University in the USA says about itself:

Dec 8, 2011

As a historian, what if you took the entire premise of your research and turned it upside down? What if what you found was not a story of rehabilitation, but a story of torture, murder, and massive cover-up?

Ten years of work by Caroline Elkins, a professor of history at Harvard University, exposed a massive cover-up by the British Empire in colonial Kenya. What was billed as a rehabilitation program during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950′s was in fact widespread torture and murder of the Kikuyu people.

Elkins sits down with Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast to discuss her research and her role as an expert witness in the landmark court case of a group of elderly Kenyans seeking reparations from the British government.

In the 2012 spring term, Elkins taught the online course “Africa and Africans: The Making of a Continent in the Modern World“. She’s also co-teaching a 2012 study abroad program in Mombasa, Kenya through Harvard Summer School.

Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,” is available on Amazon.

By Jean Shaoul in Britain:

Britain’s victims during Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising expect compensation

22 May 2013

Thousands of Kenyans are expecting to receive reparations for the abuses they suffered at the hands of British imperialism, during the suppression of the Mau Mau resistance movement.

Negotiations with the British Foreign Office are reported to be near completion.

Gitu wa Kahengeri, the spokesman for the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, explained, “They have offered to negotiate out of court. We have agreed. Then it all depends what offer they are going to give.”

The talks are the product of a 14-year legal battle by the Mau Mau veterans seeking justice and recompense for war crimes committed against them in the 1950s during the closing days of Britain’s rule in Kenya.

Dan Leader, a partner with Leigh Day, represents three Kenyans seeking compensation, which will set a precedent for many others.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) declared in a statement of truly breath-taking cynicism, “We believe there should be a debate about the past. It is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history.”

If the British government does settle the case, it will be the first compensation settlement resulting from officially sanctioned crimes committed under colonial rule. It would have broad implications for thousands of people who suffered under the illegal and inhumane methods used by the authorities in Britain’s former colonies. More than 10,000 Kenyans are expected to file claims, likely to cost the government tens of millions of pounds. It will pave the way for many other claims from Malaya, Palestine, Aden, Cyprus, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The announcement follows a landmark ruling last October when a judge granted three elderly survivors of the insurgency the right to a full High Court trial over allegations of British government complicity in torture, and thus the right to seek an apology and compensation. It was the first time the court had allowed colonial victims to sue the British state, and the decision rested upon the likelihood of a fair trial given the lapse of time, as opposed to the validity of the claims. As such, it was tantamount to the first official acknowledgement by the British government that torture had taken place during one of the bloodiest chapters in Britain’s retreat from empire in Africa.

The judge overruled the FCO’s objections to such a case, saying that a fair trial was possible. Justice McCoombe pointed out that there were the more than 8,000 documents in a secret Foreign Office archive and “ample evidence even in the few papers that I have seen suggesting that there may have been systematic torture of detainees during the Emergency.”

A vast archive of files from 37 former colonies, held at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, has been kept secret for years. The files seen were only discovered after historians called as expert witnesses during the preliminary hearings into the case realised that the government’s disclosure of information was incomplete.

A damning memo from Kenya’s attorney general, Eric Griffith-Jones, described the mistreatment of the detainees as “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.” Despite this, he agreed to draft new legislation that sanctioned beatings, as long as the abuse was kept secret. “If we are going to sin,” he wrote, “we must sin quietly.”

Both the colonial officials in Kenya and the government in London knew that their counter-insurgency strategy based on illegal collective punishment and consisting of interrogation and detention practices was causing widespread abuses. Rather than put an end to the practices, London covered it up, both at the time and for decades afterwards.

The Royal Air Force carried out bombing raids to crush the guerrilla insurgency of 1952 to 1956, resulting in the deaths of around 11,503 Mau Mau fighters, according to official British figures. However, Harvard professor of history Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize winner for Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, estimated that more than 150,000 Kenyans were killed. By comparison, there was a loss of less than 200 British lives.

The colonial authorities’ attempts to suppress the rebellion involved show trials resulting in the public hangings of more than 1,000 Mau Mau fighters, collective punishments such as the large-scale confiscation of livestock, fines and forced labour, the torching of entire villages and the massacre of their civilian inhabitants.

They used 25,000 troops to purge the capital Nairobi of Kikuyu people, who were placed in barbed-wire enclosures. In a two-week period, 20,000 male detainees were sent to be interrogated, while 30,000 women and children were placed in the reserves, ultimately to be moved to militarised “protected villages” with 23-hour curfews. More than a million rural Kikuyu people were forcibly resettled into what were little more than concentration camps.

They ordered the “screening” of the entire population by violent interrogation to force confessions of Mau Mau oath-taking.

Thousands of people—estimates vary between 80,000 and 300,000—were detained in a network of prisons and forced labour camps, where atrocities were committed wholesale. Suspected rebels were transported with little food and water, and no sanitation. Malnutrition and disease were rife. A brutal regime of interrogation developed, including beatings, starvation, sexual abuse and forced labour. Among those who were tortured was Barack Obama’s grandfather.

Work camps were established whose conditions were described by a colonial officer as “short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging—all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

Emergency rule, which provided legal protection for the perpetrators of repression, was not lifted until January 1960, a few years before independence in 1963.

Last October, in a last-ditch attempt to sweep Britain’s crimes under the carpet, the FCO said it would appeal the judge’s decision. A chance of a settlement came only after considerable international political pressure. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, had called publicly for the UK government to “provide full redress to the victims, including fair and adequate compensation”, and had written to Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him that Britain’s position was undermining its moral authority across the world.

He wrote, “In our view the response of the British government to vulnerable and elderly victims of (acknowledged) British torture is shameful.”

The recent election of Kenya’s new president, Uhuru Kenyatta, caused further embarrassment. His father Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president and head of the Kenyan African Union (KAU), was imprisoned by the British. Britain banned the KAU and arrested him on charges of running the Mau Mau rebellion, even though it is now widely believed that he was opposed to the Mau Mau. After a flawed trial, he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour and indefinite restriction afterwards, and only released in 1961.

Finally, the FCO wrote to Leigh Day last month, saying that it would adjourn its appeal against the High Court ruling and would like to negotiate a settlement.

The vast number of colonial-era documents discovered in an FCO archive meant that the government had little chance of winning an appeal, and they and everyone else knew it. Crucially, a full hearing would reveal to the public, not just in Britain but all over the world, the brutality of British colonialism and give rise to new investigations into its criminal record and bitter legacy in Africa and Asia.

This is all the more dangerous for Britain’s rulers, as they have again turned towards neo-colonial wars, mouthing humanitarian rhetoric while committing similar brutality in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and potentially Syria and Iran.

Related articles

• Britain mulling payouts for Kenyan Mau Mau victims (capitalfm.co.ke)
• Kenyan Mau Mau victims in talks with UK government over settlement (guardian.co.uk)
• Thousands of Kenyans May Receive Reparations from the UK for Mau-Mau Conflict (atlantablackstar.com)
• Kenyan Mau Mau: official policy was to cover up brutal mistreatment | Huw Bennett (guardian.co.uk)
• Ian Henderson (telegraph.co.uk)
• Britain to pay out to Mau Mau victims (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• Mau Mau: British Government begins landmark talks to compensate elderly Kenyans tortured during uprising (dailymail.co.uk)

Trevor and his collaborators produced a series of visualizations of the flight network between Guantanamo and various black sites, some in digital form (like Terminal Air) — the image below is a screenshot of a remarkable animated sequence –

– and others displayed on physical billboards, like this one:

Today the Guardian publishes the results of a three-year programme of ESRC-funded collaborative research between Ruth Blakeley at the University of Kent and Sam Raphael at Kingston University in association with Reprieve into the system of extraordinary rendition and its associated practices.  This is of more than historical interest; they write:

The Rendition Project aims to analyse the emergence, development and operation of the global system of rendition and secret detention in the years since 9/11. In doing so, it aims to bring together as much of the publicly-available information as possible on the detainees who have been held in secret, the detention sites in which they have been held, and the methods and timings of their transfers.

With this data in place, we will seek to identify specific ‘key moments’ that have shaped the operation of rendition and secret detention, both regionally and in a global context. We are particularly interested in the contest between the executive, the judiciary, and the human rights community (comprising human rights lawyers, human rights NGOs, and some academics), over whether and how domestic and international law applies to those detainees held within the system. A key aim of the project is therefore to identify how rendition and secret detention have evolved within the context of this struggle to defend basic human rights.

The Rendition Project also examines the ways in which this system has evolved over time, including during the Obama administration. While President Obama has ordered the closure of CIA-run secret prisons (the so-called ‘black sites’), and revoked authorisation for use by US agents of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, many thousands of detainees in the ‘War on Terror’ continue to be held beyond the bounds of US and international law. Moreover, continued rendition and proxy detention have not been ruled out by the US Government, and may still form a central plank of counterterrorism policy.

The website for The Rendition Project includes testimony, profiles and documentation together with a detailed database and an interactive map (produced in collaboration with Craig Bloodworth from The Information Lab).

The composite map is daunting, as befits the terrifying scale of the process itself:

But the ability to disentangle the threads and to interrogate the database changes the terms of the engagement, making it possible to track the experience of individual victims and to identify the major circuits and the global network of complicities in which they were enmeshed.

Chillingly brilliant work.

By Shi Xinhong

(Minghui.org) My name is Shi Xinhong and I am a Falun Gong practitioner from the Changping District in Beijing. I am retired from the Beijing No. 2 Woolen Mill. I was overjoyed when I started to practice Falun Gong in 1996, and have benefited tremendously physically and mentally. My health improved rapidly shortly after I began to practice and I was always in good spirits. I strictly followed the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance and the requirements that Master had set forth for practitioners. However, such a wonderful practice was oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Jiang Zemin. The persecution of Falun Gong began in July 1999, and practitioners were brutally tortured. This is my account of what I suffered for adhering to my faith.

Persecuted in Forced Labor Camps for Four and a Half Years

Because I refused to renounce my belief in Falun Dafa, I was illegally sentenced to forced labor twice, and spent a total of four and a half years in forced labor camps between 2004 and 2012.

The guards at the Beijing Women’s Forced Labor Camp, Squad No. 4, once organized a meeting to slander Falun Gong publicly. When a person cursed the founder of Falun Gong, I stood up and walked toward the podium. Two guards stopped me and asked what I was doing. I told them that I wanted to represent all the Falun Gong practitioners in the squad to make a solemn announcement. I explained to them that I wanted to announce all that had been said and written to slander Falun Dafa at the labor camp was invalid because it didn’t reflect our true selves.

The guards panicked and used all their strength to push me back to the office. Team lead Zhang Shoufen threatened to send me to the “intensive training team” of the camp. I told her, “I am not afraid. It’s not easy to come here, so I might as well make it worthwhile. I want to see every corner of this camp so when I get out I can tell people about the evil things that happen here.” Realizing that her threat didn’t work, Zhang changed her tone of voice and said, “The ‘intensive training team’ is not a place anybody can go as they wish. They don’t have room for you. We will ‘train’ you right here in Squad No. 4.”

Abuses Suffered in the Forced Labor Camp

After that, the guards started to lock me up every day in the warehouse. They made me sit in the corner of the warehouse on a brick wall less than a meter square and assigned two inmates to monitor me. I was not allowed to go to sleep until late at night or to use the bathroom when I needed to. After a while I was not able to relieve myself and it became extremely painful and itchy to urinate. My abdomen was distended. It didn’t matter how I explained to the guards and the inmates that my condition was caused by not being able to relieve myself and having to hold my urine for long periods of time, they ignored me.

One day, I overheard that someone from a different organization was giving a tour at the camp so I shouted, “They won’t let me use the bathroom and I have developed a condition because of it–I have blood in my urine.” The guards were all afraid. Team lead Zhang Shoufen said, “I’ll take you to see a doctor if you stop shouting.” Sure enough, they took me to the camp clinic. The doctor touched my belly and said that I had a tumor. They called an ambulance and were going to take me to a hospital for surgery. I said, “I don’t have a tumor. It is caused by not being able to use the bathroom, and I will be fine as long as I am allowed to use it.” The guard who took me there said, “Don’t listen to her. The bathroom at our squad is always open. Whoever wants to use it can use it. Nobody cares.”

I insisted on going to the bathroom at the time, but the guards wouldn’t let me. The ambulance arrived after a while. While being escorted to the ambulance, I ran away and went into a nearby bathroom when the guards weren’t paying attention. I locked the bathroom door and tried to urinate. The guards came kicking the door and told me to hurry up. Twenty minutes later, I finally was able to urinate. Once I came out of the bathroom I asked to be examined again. After the exam, the doctor said, “Her belly has softened up dramatically. You should not deny her use of the bathroom, otherwise her condition could become a real problem.”

Seeing that their trick didn’t work, the guards used a different way to torture me and started to force me to do hard labor. They made me work in the vegetable beds alone during the winter. It was so cold that the top three inches of the soil was frozen and all I had was a shovel as a tool. I didn’t know how to make a vegetable plot so I dug a few holes. I worked for a few hours straight and sweat profusely.

As soon as I stopped to catch my breath, they yelled at me and said, “Who told you that you could rest?” I had to work non-stop. Although I was older, I was very healthy since I practiced Falun Gong, and I didn’t feel tired at all. The guards all wore heavy jackets over a layer of cotton padded jackets and still seemed to feel very cold. I only had a light blouse and a long sleeve t-shirt on, yet I didn’t feel cold. The guards also thought it was odd–they didn’t know that it was because I practiced Falun Gong that I seemed extraordinary. I later gradually came to realize that forced labor is also a form of persecution, because I had not broken the law. What is wrong with believing in Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance? So I refused to work.

An “attack team” was created by the camp officials in March 2006, specifically to persecute Falun Gong practitioners who refused to “transform.” There were three guards assigned to “attack” me, including Li Ziping and Zhang Ran. The guards assigned criminal inmates to torture me every day. My ration of food was not even enough for a child. I protested and the guard yelled, “You think it’s too little? Well, you won’t be getting any from now on!” After that, I was only given a small piece of steamed bun each day with no vegetables or water. When I ate the small piece of bun, I had to sit on a small stool in a standard military posture.

I was only allowed to use the bathroom once each day at 2 a.m., accompanied by a criminal inmate. Sometimes I was forced to go back before I could finish. My cell was very cold, and I had very little to cover myself with. I was not allowed to sleep very long to begin with, and I often woke up because of the cold after sleeping only for a little while.

In order to “transform” me, guard Li Ziping made me sit on a small stool, put my hands on my knees, and form a line with my feet by putting the backs of my heels together. Then she made me bring my knees together. I couldn’t do it so Li Ziping assigned inmates to put their feet against mine to hold them in place, and then pushed my knees toward the center. It hurt as much as being on a tiger bench. The mobility in my legs decreased as a result and has yet to completely recover.

The guards employed numerous methods to torture me. They later made me sit on only one corner of a stool for long periods of time. After sitting for a while, I felt as if I were sitting on the edge of a cliff. It seemed to me that if I moved ever so slightly I would fall into the abyss. The fear of falling made me mentally distressed and physically exhausted. Ever since then, I have experienced pain and numbness from the waist down and have difficulties urinating and defecating.

Retirement Pension Withheld and Pay Increase Denied

I was released when my term ended. I am retired from the Beijing No. 2 Woolen Mill. Li Xinhui and two other company officials refused to pay me my retirement pension for the past two years. They also denied me twice when I was supposed to get a raise. When I went in and asked for my pension, the officials evaded responsibility, and I have not yet been compensated.

What I have been subjected to is only a tiny tip of the iceberg. The Communist regime continues to arrest and persecute practitioners of Falun Dafa. We call upon everyone and all international organizations to uphold justice and help to stop the atrocities against Falun Gong practitioners in China.

Chinese version available

CATEGORY: Torture of Women

Firstly, the exhibition offers an insight into how we understood the body, and the importance of our health during the 1800′s; the ‘Beginning of Life’ and how we entered the world is one of the more eye opening sections to set your eyes upon. On the surface it delves into chastity, conception, fertility and birth however deeper down a more sinister view of  life is rooted.

Adjacent to the ‘Beginning of Life’ is a section called ‘End of Life’; which exhibits the obvious skeletons in the closet, plague, and funerals. What’s most hair raising however is the preserved mummified body, encased in a glass cabinet for viewing. Curled up in the fetal position, shielding itself. On closer inspection you notice the facial expression; anguish, pain and fear evoked in a single glance.  You automatically feel empathy, and sadness but also a curiosity. Curious as to why Wellcome would want to collect something like this.

After browsing ‘Seeking Help’, ‘Votive Offerings’ and various paintings Wellcome collected over the course of his life comes the interesting stuff! Metal instruments, personal photographs, masks and… torture chairs. Saws, hooks and brides; insights into the many layers of Henry Wellcome’s life. Interestingly, the ‘Chairs’ section is cut off the list of information available at the exhibit. This part of the collection is small, is if to purposefully push you onto the next cabinet. Maybe, as to not tarnish the perfect existence of Henry Wellcome? This is baffling, because this is the most interesting part – how punishment and pain were acted out in past centuries.

In short the Medicine Man exhibition is a dark insight inot the world of Henry Wellcome and his colourful studies into health, well-being, and torture. On the surface appears a martyr of science yet what lies beneath is a gloomy disposition of terror stooped in shadows.

Do I impale them now and watch them bleed or do I torture them first?

-Rica, on playing God with characters, and exhibiting early signs of sadistic personality disorder

I can only hope the Dean is Jim Rash.

Every Monday and Wednesday for the next eight weeks I’ll be submitting myself to the monotonous torture that is Summer School at my local community college. At first I assumed there was a typo in the program summary because surely a single class couldn’t last three and a half hours! But alas, I must drag myself to two different classes that, combined, total the number of hours and brain cells I spent in a single day at high school.

Today my adventures consisted of me trying to track down the text books for each class. I bought/rented both online but they won’t be here until tomorrow night and I need to read up on the Circular Flow Model and Factors of Production ASAP. Between the hours of 12:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. I visited three different bookstores, two different libraries, and alternated between two different campus buildings trying to locate at least one book of who’s pages I could take pictures of and study from until my actual books came in the mail. I was unsuccessful in my quest; after feasting on Double Chocolate Fudge ice cream and Game of Thrones, however, I’ve decided not to worry to much about it. Sure I might go into class tomorrow and fail a pop quiz, but on the bright side I was regaled by Peter Dinklage and his golden heart.

Job Update: I was discussing my waitressing fears with my ex-server mother and she definitely put my mind at ease. This might be obvious for people who have been through this situation before or who actually have common sense, but when I’m put to work on Thursday I won’t be given a whole section by myself. Instead, they’ll only be giving me a few tables to see how I handle myself and if I can work well with the other servers. I’m still nervous but very confident that by the time I’m through with my shift I’ll be able to manage a three tables at once. Now all I have to do is find and by sensible black shoes with arch support that’ll treat my soles like the queens they are. If anyone out there has any waitressing tips, don’t hesitate to let me know.