I’d heard about in the news a few weeks ago ago a woman in Iran that had been blinded by acid, thrown in her face by a jilted wannabe suiter. In the subsequent trial, she had pleaded that, as punishment, he should have acid dropped into his eyes and be blinded as well. An “eye for an eye”, literally.

Yesterday, I saw that a verdict in the trial had been reached, finding in favor of the woman and when handing down the sentence, the judge actually agreed with the woman and ordered the man to have a drop of acid placed in each eye and be blinded. Hot DAMN!

To quote:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — An Iranian woman, blinded by a jilted stalker who threw acid in her face, has persuaded a court to sentence him to be blinded with acid himself under Islamic law demanding an eye for an eye.

Ameneh Bahrami refused to accept “blood money.” She insisted instead that her attacker suffer a fate similar to her own “so people like him would realize they do not have the right to throw acid in girls’ faces,” she told the Tehran Provincial Court.

Her attacker, a 27-year-old man identified in court papers as Majid, admitted throwing acid in her face in November 2004, blinding and disfiguring her. He said he loved her and insisted she loved him as well. [Full article]

A photo of the victim and douche who did the deed:

Do I see a slight physical resemblance to Richard Ramirez in the guy?

The thing I find the most ridiculous about this him is that:

Majid said he was still willing to marry Bahrami, but she ruled out the possibility and urged that he remain locked up.

Gee, thanks Majid. You’re a champ!

I can’t decide if this acid-blinding punishment is sick and fucked up or totally awesome.

On one end, it’s the fucking 21st century and a government is dropping acid into a man’s eyeball. Granted, he did some really bad shit, but still.

On the flip side, there’s a lot of acid throwing going on over there and often, the guy gets away with it completely. So, it’s nice to see someone drop the hammer on the guy in a way that’s getting some serious attention.

Right smack dab in the middle is the morbid fucker in me, that can’t stop thinking how cool it has to look. Strapping some guy down, immobilizing his head, retracting the eyelids and making that motherfucker scream. Quite the good mental picture.

I suppose it’s just a matter of time before there’s a Metal band out there with the name, “Acid Eye”.

Putzing around last Sunday, I decided to give MPD a try. I store all my MP3 files on my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu and I’ve wanted to be able to control music playback on that machine from my laptop, wherever I happen to be lazing about at home.

I had a bit of a hard time getting MPD set up, working and compiling a database. The main issue was file permissions, but once I got that hammered out, installed MPC so I could run commands, it worked nicely.

However, I much prefer a GUI to manage music, so I hunted around for a front-end for MPD. I first tried gmpc, which worked fine. But, I need support for last.fm and to handle this with with gmpc, you have to compile a plugin, which was a huge bitch.

While trying to get through the plugin compile, I stumbled on Sonata, which seemed popular and well regarded and contains built-in support for last.fm. Also, it’s in the Ubuntu repositories, which is a big plus for me. So, I dropped gmpc and gave it a try.

Sonata works well, it displays album art and all that fun stuff, but doesn’t have the smart playlists that I’ve grown used to with Amarok and exaile, which were two programs I’ve loved and relied on in the past. Truth told, it’s low on features, but so are most MPD front-ends. It works, though. It handles last.fm and doesn’t look too fugly. I’m going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes, since I really like being able to run a central music server. But, if there’s a better front-end out there, I’d like to know about it.

Last week, I caught “John Rambo” a.k.a. Rambo 4, the latest (and presumably final) installation in the 80’s Stallone juggernaut about a mentally scarred and overwhelmingly bloodthirsty Vietnam veteran, given to headbands, ripped muscles and monosyllabic, single sentence dialog. (Trivia note: His characteristic slurred speech and permanent snarl/scowl is actually a result of partial paralysis of the left side of his face, caused by a pair of forceps severing a nerve, during his birth.)

I’ll admit that I am actually quite a fan of Sylvester Stallone, albeit only recently. I find the majority of his work during the 80’s and early 90’s to be intolerable schlock—akin to porn, only substituting severed limbs and arterial spray in place of tits and ass. However, his very early films, such as the original “Rocky” and “First Blood” (the first movie featuring the character, John Rambo, in case you don’t know), are in my opinion, pretty good flicks. Stallone, in his best moments, is not a bad actor, an excellent writer and some of his films actually have real characters with plots.

At some point in the late 90’s, when Stallone’s career as an action superstar began to tank, he started appearing in low-budget, more independent films. Since that transition, his credibility with me has soared. Movies like Cop Land and Get Carter, and Rocky Balboa have been Hollywood gold as far as I’m concerned.

So, with that in mind, I felt I had to give the new Rambo a chance. I wasn’t disappointed.

The movie is scandalously graphic in it’s violence, especially towards children (which is fine by me). You’ve got kids being shot, pasted by mortar fire, stabbed with bayonets, hacked with machetes and thrown into fiery wreckage, only to be finished off with a flame thrower.

But, believe me, the adults have it much worse. The key phrase is, “an orgy of severed arms and legs“. The transformation of humans into an organic pink mist via explosives also features largely. The movie basically explores just about every easily available method of killing Asian people. Shit gets deep.

As Rambo succinctly states, “Killin’s as easy as beathing.” Epic!!!

Sent to rescue a posse of bitch-ass Christians from a constantly smoking, implacable Asian dude with sunglasses, Rambo heads up the river into Burma with a group of mercenaries.

As expected, Rambo basically rips out everyone’s asshole and feeds it to them, but with style.

There’s no jokes. There isn’t much of any dialog, especially on Rambo’s part. What you get is death, dismemberment and general mutilation and it works surprisingly well. At one point, I actually had to pause the film, just to absorb how much I was really enjoying it.

Nobody fucks with John Rambo!

Rent it. It’s a good time.

Look at this…just look at it:

This a a bacon cheeseburger, beer and onion rings from a bar called Royale in on Avenue C and 10th Street. I popped in there yesterday afternoon, prior to a mammoth evening of two concerts in a row. Since I’d be missing dinner, I wanted to have a rather big lunch. It was the third time I’ve been there. I ordered the same thing I’ve had each time.

Why?

Because it fucking rules. There’s a sign out in front of the place, declaring “Best Burger In NYC”. Whether that statement is entirely true or not, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s one of three burger places in New York (the others being Stand and Schnack) that I personally think are the best I’ve had so far.

This place definitely has the best onion rings I’ve eaten in my life. I don’t particularly like onion rings, being more of a french fry person, but these kick ass.

If you’re in Manhattan, around that area, try it. Do it, if only because I told you to.

It’s a late Saturday morning for me (past noon, for you other people who get up early on the weekends). This normally consists of camping on my couch with some coffee, a laptop and a shitload of RSS feeds to go through. During this time, I like to listen to a little music. It’s nice, you should try it. Anyway, I just finished listening to the first album by the Norwegian Psychedelic Stoner Doom band, Sahg for the first time and it’s so fucking good, I’m compelled to write a blog post about it.

Sahg combines strong influences from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and a host of other awesome 70’s bands, bringing it all together into an original, modern sound. They kill. Sahg is one of those Norwegian super-bands, comprising members of well known bands, covering several genres (the bassist from the Black Metal band, Gorgoroth is a member, for example). Their sound is tight and the production is very high quality. All together, they make you want to grow your hair long, take a few bong hits, knock back a bunch of beers (possibly with a tab of acid), bang your head, nail some groupies and worship Satan.

Trust me, it’s good. Get it.

[Official Sahg website]

On Monday evening, I caught a showing of “Iron Man“—the movie that seemingly everyone I read or speak to loves and is willing to gush about. There was one problem, though. It bored the fuck out of me. I actually think it kind of overall sucked.

The movie is two and a half hours long. Most of it is buildup, filled with frat-boy banter à la Jon Favreau. While the special effects are good, the action is mediocre and short-lived. The finale…after sitting through all the dull-ass shit, did not rescue me from boredom.

The sad thing is that Iron Man could have been a great movie. Would that a better director had the job. Jon Favreau was not the man for the flick. At best, the movie’s a rental, assuming you can stay awake through it.

This is my foot. It’s all fucked up. It hurts like all Hell and is seriously pissing me off.

On Saturday evening, after watching a movie, I headed down the stairwell of my building to step outside for a smoke. As I neared the stairs, I whipped out my trusty BlackBerry and started composing a tweet. Memory escapes me as to what.

Eyes and attention on my phone, my brain decided that I’d reached the bottom of the stairs and I stuck my foot out, expecting to encounter floor, only to find that I hadn’t reached it yet and had two more steps to go. Down I went.

I managed to not bail completely and landed upright, but my left foot folded in at the ankle. Not a pleasant feeling. At first, I suspected I’d broken a bone or three, but as I stood with the pain settling in, I found I could walk okay. I smoked a butt and went back upstairs, passing the evening a little bit sore, but otherwise fine.

In the wee hours of the next morning, I awoke in serious pain. I tried getting up to grab some painkillers, only to find that I could not put any weight whatsoever on my left foot. I’d sprained the living shit out of it. I could move only by holding the wall and hopping on my one good foot.

I spent the majority of Sunday with my ankle wrapped in an ace bandage, propped on pillows and icing the shit out of it, hoping for improvement. By the end of the evening, I could sort of limp around instead of hopping, but I still needed to hold onto something for balance.

This morning, I tried again to stand up, only to find myself pretty much back where I started, hopping and in a lot of pain.

So here I am, not at work, bored out of my skull. After spending the morning elevating and icing, I ‘m seeing a marked improvement. I can stand normally and put most of my weight on the foot and I now can move about, but very slowly and with a pronounced shuffle. It sucks, but at least I’m getting somewhere.

I’m pretty sure that if I wake very early tomorrow and start icing, I’ll be okay enough to make it through the commute to my desk in Manhattan. Granted, I’ll be a fucking charity case cripple, but at least I’ll have some use.

That said, I’ve learned my lesson. Twitter is addictive. Twitter is fun. Twitter is good. But, one should not Tweet while descending stairs, crossing the street, operating a chainsaw or performing a triple bypass. It’s just asking for trouble.

Considering that I swear a lot, someone recently sent me a link to the Cuss-O-Meter, a nice little script that spiders and returns stats on the amount of curse words from a given site.

According to the meter, 42.5%of the posts on this blog contain swear words. Of all the sites that have used the meter, my site rates 372% more in sheer cursing.

Well, fuck me with a fucking shit-stick.

This result does please me, but I’ll admit that I am a bit disappointed that the percentage wasn’t a bit higher. I guess it’s something to fucking work on.

Jesus freaks have the lamest video games for kids:

[Link to video]

Not to mention the lamest superhero shows:

[Link to video]

The Power Rangers would totally flatten Bibleman and his douchebag posse.

Seeing High On Fire play live for my first time this past Sunday was absolutely epic. There was literally no room except to stand in the club and I managed to to get right up close to the stage and marvel, mouth agape like a halfwit at the epic output of Matt Pike. I have never seen a person so charged and possessed by the music they’re playing. The dude is a Metal juggernaut. I was amazed and fully fucking entertained.

I’d eaten a rather pricey ticket to another concert that I’d purchased prior to finding out about the High On Fire gig. It was a totally worthy loss. I had a great time and I nailed a pretty sweet t-shirt. Next time, I’m pulling some strings to get backstage.

Anyway, I took photos. Arguably, a retarded amount of them, but hey, I fucking love High On Fire. You can find the complete set of the night here.