Not even people are so sweet to each other…you Otters rock!

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If you click on the image, it will link you to similar interest groups….not sure how effective this is but give it a shot! http://ex.plode.us

Photo: AFP

Adisplay of thousands of cigarettes in a container in the main square of Xiamen city in Fujian province ahead of World No Tobacco Day. The mainland is home to one in three of the world’s smokers and is the world’s largest producer of tobacco. In 2005, WHO estimated there were 350 million smokers on the mainland.

Stop the Smoking and stop the pollution!

The Movie directed by Clint Eastwood, what a powerful Movie! Ken Watanabe is the best! It’s a sad movie but also one full of heroism and the sad truth about a hopeless war.

I highly recommend watching this Movie, it’s got a lot of excellent ratings and even if you’ve read or studied World War II, it’s still worth watching it as a grim reminder why Wars are stupid.

I can understand Hello Kitty or Disney bed sheets…but this? Is this what guys dream about??

I really like this rendition, it’s nicer than the first Rikku of Final Fantasy in my opinion…softer too and more real. I wonder if they are making a new version soon….

To follow up on my previous post, there is a song called "Cortez the Killer" details can be found here. Some of the details of this sound was listed on the site with a quote:

Peace is a theme of this song. From verse six: "But they built up with their bare hands, what we still can’t do today" indicates that even in the most barbarian times there was still peace, and in present day, as sophisticated as it may be, there is anything but peace. The Aztecs were peaceful, representing sort of a utopian nonviolent society. Cortez and the Spanish brigade used trickery to beat the Aztecs, people who had never committed any offensive acts towards the Spanish. The Spanish could represent the status quo society, completely antonymic from the amicable Aztecs.

Wikipedia has a lot of entries on this topic, the song is apparently still banned in Spain where Cortez is a National Hero for being a killer, interesting how History judges the Victors….

The Movie in itself is visually a very beautiful Movie but it’s quite disturbing with the quantity of deaths and corpses all over the place and lots of blood, it’s not for the squeemish.

The general theme of theMovie is set in either Aztec or Mayan times (prior to the Spanish Conquistadores not sure which one) and talks about the period shortly before the Conquistadores arrive who would eventually wipe them out both with guns and disease and eventually enslave and colonize the entire region for their gold.

At that time the Aztecs were quite an advanced society, and although violent no more violent than the Spanish Inquisition or the Crusades. The Movie depicts them as violent to the scale and level of mass genocide with scenes of litters of corpses and there is a strong undertone of a Civilazation rotting due to human sacrifices, oppression and cult like idol worshipping. The villains of that Empire are all stereotype bloodthirsty whacko’s. Although it is not explicit, there is a strong undertone that the arrival of the Spanish Conquistador ships harbour the beginning, a kind of justification about why such an Evil Empire like the Aztecs needs to be torn down.

Mel Gibson has recently been more and more religiously active after recording the phenomenal Movie the Passion of Christ and also got caught once blaming Jewish people for problems in the World, certainly in keeping with the whole Christian theme, even though he was drunk, they say when drunk you speak your truth.

Although the Movie is "fiction", history has recorded the brutal enslavement of the Spanish (and eventually Portuguese) for the Gold of the Aztecs and literally wiped out an ancient culture and burnt those on the stake who would not convert to their religion.

I picked this picture up on flickr in a green is wonderful discussion thread and although the creator didn’t know what he was making it looks so much like Keroppi, it’s certainly more Keroppi than…say Kermit, it’s cute!

It seems that flickr doesn’t allow you to link photos anymore directly….anyone know what’s up with that?

From HHell comes this…for the educationally minded fans!