 Boxing monster Nikolai Valuev is 100 pounds heavier, over a foot taller, and eleven years younger than former champ Evander Holyfield, but they are going to duke it out next month. Maybe the child-support payments to Evander's 11 kids have left him strapped for cash. Or maybe all those blows to the head have left bro a little brain-damaged. |
How the fuck do dudes in flip-flops, dinky boats and a couple of rusty rifles manage to hijack a $1 billion supertanker that's three times the size of an aircraft carrier?
This happened despite the fact that these waters are patrolled by an anti-piracy taskforce made up of modern NATO warships. What the fuck is going on? Hollywood leads us to believe that western intelligence agencies like the CIA can track our every move from spy satellites, but they can't even find a massive supertanker? So far this year the anti-pirate taskforce has failed to prevent pirate gangs from seizing ships carrying dangerous chemicals, battle tanks and heavy weaponry, bagging themselves over $100 million in ransom money. Most of the hijacked ships are taken to the port of Ely, a notorious pirate lair on the Somali coast. I'd love to go there and hang out with these ballsy motherfuckers. However, it's pretty dangerous - the last photographer who went there had to be accompanied by a 15-man militia for protection.
"From the beginning, I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted it to feel like... like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice's books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was... it felt like it was everything, you know? It's like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that... you're there, you're in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up. So I think it just started from that feeling, that it could feel like you were there with them, like Max was there with them, and not just in some fantasy movie."I really hope they don't fuck it up.
 My friends Danalog (then 19) Jamie-James Medina (then 15) and Zain (also 15) were in a band called Fruit Cocktail. They practised in the attic of their mum's house in Highbury Fields. I always wanted to be in the band, but they always kept me on the periphery, a bit like the way the Rolling Stones treated Billy Preston.Anyways, at that time we were all really into the then newly-formed Queens Of The Stone Age. OK yeah, I know, now they're fat, rich rockstar dudes with boring songs. But back in 1998 - I'm talking way back, before their eponymously-titled debut album had even come out - Queens were amazingatronic. Their first ever UK show took place at the Highbury Garage on November 3 1998. Fruit Cocktail went along to the venue before the gig, befriended the band, and somehow managed to convince Josh Homme to play guitar on one of their songs. Jamie-James, who has a knack for this sort of thing, went back to the band's tour bus with Josh, who then overdubbed a solo on a little 4-track recorder. A decade later and the song still sounds rad. Homme's robotic arpeggios are way better than anything he's done recently. Oh yeah, Zain's vocals are in Bengali. What he's singing does not actually makes any sense though. Just jibba jabba. Still incredible though. "Seraseri" - taken from Fruit Cocktail's third record In the House of Disco Duck * Josh Homme was just one of many musicians who recorded with Fruit Cocktail. They also somehow enticed Mike Patton, Buzz and Dale from The Melvins, Tim from Rancid, and Ben Kweller to come around to their mum's house and record in the little rehearsal space/studio in the basement. Look out for a new Fruit Cocktail album, The Sound of Victory, out in 2009. |
