Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

More scary stuff

I awoke this morning to the news that another aircraft has flown into a tall building in New York. This time it was a small light-aircraft and the building appears to have taken only superficial damage.

It is of course shocking news, especially for Americans. The scars of September 11 have by no means healed, and my guess is that many people by now will have noticed the coincidental date one month on, October 11. It is still the 11th in the US but the 12th here in Western Australia. It gets confusing at times.

I looked at the BBC web page. They already had pictures of the scene. Then I took a look at the New York Times. The web is still amazing to me. I simply tap in NYT on the keyboard and voila, there it is on my screen. Not unexpectedly they were running minute by minute updates. The fire has been quickly extinguished and the inquisition has commenced. Two bodies had been located, both apparently connected with the aircraft. The occupants of the apartment appear to have not been at home.

The plane belonged to a New York Yankee baseball player. His file photo was being displayed by the NYT. He may have been in the plane. They seem to think so.

There were plenty of eye witness accounts. Notably several people described the plane as wobbling in flight. Perhaps there was some sort of struggle on board? From the photos it can be seen that the plane struck one of the floor levels rather than making a clean entry through a window. Much of the aircraft appears to have fallen to the ground.

Its a tall building by our standards, but not in New York. The paper says the 40th or 41st floor were involved. It's construction is interesting. The outside is of brick, right to the top. It seems to have sustained the impact very well. By now the cops will be saying, "Move on folks, nothing more to see here." So I'll move on too.

Yesterday a DVD copy of a movie called Team America was handed to me by one of my older sons. Produced by the people who are involved with the crude South Park TV series it was originally released in 2004.

Team America is also crude, although it cost plenty of money to make. One could ask if it was CIA money because it appears to be a propaganda piece aimed at the infamous North Korean leader Kim Jong-il? The South Park people have dabbled in other forms of crude propaganda in the past against US enemies, for example Usama bin Laden.

The film uses marionettes. I suppose they are clever, but marionettes have never appealed to me. I find them creepy, as indeed also seem to be the people involved with them. It's true, I've met weird marionette puppeteers in the past.

Team America is full of explicit violence and sex. Yes sex. The puppeteers amused them selves at first by experimenting with Barbie dolls and then adapted these actions to their marionettes. Like so much to do with South Park, many people would find these gratuitous hard core pornographic depictions offensive. I did. The film makers also mock the Rambo stereotype of American spy type, but that's to be expected. Everyone mocks them don't they? However in the end, the message I got was that for all the faults and blunders of these awkward characters, in the end they and what they stand for managed to prevail. Evil American was better than evil foreign.

Those observations aside, was was really interesting was the information alleged of Kim Jong-il. Many of the juicy titbits which journalists have been reporting this week about the Korean leader since he allowed a purported atom bomb to be exploded in his back yard are mentioned in one place or another on the Team AmericaDVD. For example, stuff such as his supposed liking for collecting American films and French cognac. I mentioned the cognac two days ago. Could I have been sucked in? Possibly.

I now wonder if the puppet show has been a primary source of information by the world's leading media? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

I learned from the DVD yesterday that the brand of cognac Kim Jong-il is supposed to favour is Hennessy. I took a look at the Hennessy website. On the first page you have to enter a country and birth year before proceeding. Yep, sure enough, one can scroll to North Korea. I gave it a go. That might have set off an alarm at ASIO or the CIA? Up came a picture of some very enticing bottles of cognac. Not reminiscent of the sort of Hennessy stuff I can buy at our local booze barn.

I discovered in my research that the origins of the Hennessy booze operations can be traced to an Irishman Richard Hennessy, who had been a mercenary for the French royalty in 1765. They rewarded him with some land at Cognac.

The company has been flogging products in the Korea/Japan region since 1868. They entered the China market in 1872. The motto on their labels translates into English as, "I live by the sword." The well known trade mark is of course an arm wielding a battle axe. Maybe that appeals in North Korea?

I note with respect that today is the anniversary of the Bali terror bombings by Indonesian Muslims in 2002. 202 people including many Australians were murdered. The Australian media mostly seems to have overlooked it.

© MMVI Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a million words.

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