The Null Device

2003/3/12

The Norwegian black metal scene claims another casualty: Concertgoer hit by flying sheep's head at Mayhem show. The dead sheep in question was being dismembered on stage as part of the show, when the head flew off the lead singer's knife and hit 25-year-old Per Kristian Hagen, fracturing his skull.

"My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air," Hagen told The Associated Press Monday from his hospital room. He is expected to recover.
Mayhem member Rune Eriksen, whose stage name is Blasphemer, said the incident was unfortunate. "The whole thing was an accident, but maybe it would be an idea for another show," he said.

Eriksen offered Hagen a free ticket to the next Mayhem gig in compensation; this doesn't seem to be good enough for Hagen, who is suing the band for assault and battery. (via bOING bOING)

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Fed up with being kept in the dark and fed bullshit by local news outlets, increasingly many Americans are turning to British and European news sites for world coverage. (via bOING bOING)

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

One of the overseas news sites cited there is none other than the Guardian, that much-vilified mouthpiece of Saddam Bin Laden and his evil cronies. It's funny, because even before 9/11, "Guardian reader" was British shorthand for a certain type of urbane moderate leftist, a person attracted to worthy causes and seeing themselves as a fundamentally good human being in a specifically liberal-humanist way. Nowadays, in parts of the US (or at least of blogspot.com), it has become this generation's equivalent of "Vietcong sympathiser" or something. (See also: "Communist" as generic term of abuse, as in "dot-communists" being stock-optioned yuppies putting rents up.)

Meanwhile, the Graun has this piece on al-Jazeera, the controversial Arab news network which has made many enemies in the Middle East, and now plans to roll out an English-language network to compete with the BBC and CNN.

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