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6:00 PM
Posted by
Ashwin Bryan Pinto
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Dark Tourism
The words in focus are related to the trends in Travel
Dark tourism - Act of travel and visitation to sites, attractions and exhibitions which have real or recreated death, suffering or the seemingly macabre as a main theme.
Types:
1.
Grief tourism - Travel somewhere to visit a scene of some tragic event (Eg: Ground Zero, cemetaries etc)
2.
Disaster tourism - visit disaster zones – especially when little time has elapsed since the disaster (eg: Onslaught of visitors following some kind of natural disaster, such as those visiting south-east Asia following the 2004 tsunami crisis, or people traveling to New Orleans to see the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina)
3.
Poverty tourism - Tours to slum areas and poverty stricken towns.
4.
Suicide tourism - categorised into two types:
- Traveling to a particular destination with the intention of committing suicide, often by jumping from a famous landmark (Eg: from the Eiffel Tower)
- Terminally-ill people travel to countries where euthanasia is not illegal to end their life legally (eg: Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland)
5. Doomsday tourism - Travelers seek out to critically endangered habitats and ecosystems and try to experience their grandeur before they vanish (eg:e Great Barrier Reef, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Galapagos Islands)
(source mainly: http://www.vagabondish.com/)
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5:34 PM
Posted by
Ashwin Bryan Pinto
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Something I came accross. A special from the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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5:30 PM
Posted by
Ashwin Bryan Pinto
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Oxford English Dictionary- Latest word entrants
(September 08)
"
phwoar" - "expression of enthusiastic or lubricious approval"
"
stud muffin"- an attractive man
"
arm candy" - a good-looking date
"
hairy eyeball" - the look made by someone expressing "hostility or disapproval
"
mallrat" - someone who spends too much time hanging around shopping centres
"
shagtastic" - uttered by Austin Powers "Shagtastic" was made popular a decade ago by Mike Myers's spoof spy and is also used to describe someone very sexy
"
Britneys" - for beers, to rhyme with the name of Britney Spears.
at
5:26 PM
Posted by
Ashwin Bryan Pinto
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CONTROL (2007)
One of my favourite movies!
Based on Deborah Curtis's biography "Touching from a Distance", Control is the biography of Joy Division lead singer Ian Kevin Curtis, taking his story from schoolboy days of 1973 to his suicide on the eve of the band's first American tour in 1980. In this time we see Curtis grow from David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison,-infatuated teen to Sex Pistols-inspired punk, and eventually to rising new wave star.
The movie portrays Curtis's secondary school romance with Deborah, their marriage at a very young age, his problems balancing his domestic life with his rise to fame, his affair with Annik Honoré, his struggle with poorly medicated epilepsy and depression and his suicide. In the early hours of 18 May 1980, Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen after having viewed Werner Herzog's film Stroszek and listening to Iggy Pop's The Idiot.
TRIVIA:
Initially, the band was called Warsaw before changing its name to Joy Division in 1978, due to conflicts with the name of another band, Warsaw Pakt. The name "Joy Division" stemmed from the sexual slavery wing of a Nazi concentration camp in the 1955 novel The House of Dolls.
Curtis's memorial stone is inscribed with "Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" (currently reported stole
The actors playing Joy Division in the movie Control, learned how to play the songs themselves. So the scenes where the band is playing live is not from tape, but actually the actors playing live.
Thing to watch out for: The unique dancing style with swaying hands reminiscent of the eplileptic seisures that Ian Curtis experienced, sometimes even on stage.
(Sources –mainly www.imdb.com and wikipedia.org)