Because it adds a whole new layer of usefulness to www.voyantes.net: select the services you are interested in, touch the phone number of the medium of your choice in the results list and it offers to place a call:

This is brilliant! makes life much much easier…

So one thing you notice when you are in Finland is how incredibly white the place is. there are almost no black (or brown) people to be seen. I think when i was in Helsinki for the last time in june 2006 i saw 3 black people in 3 days.

So we brought up this observation over dinner yesterday and were informed that there are lots of black people but that one would need to go to ‘Mogadishu Avenue‘ to actually see them. Mogadishu Avenue, we were told, is the nickname of a street (Meri-Rastilan tie) in the eastern suburb of Meri-Rastila. Apparently the neighborhood (which has inspired a television series of the same name, which was filmed elsewhere, because the actual neighborhood is too tidy to convey the underlying idea of multicultural tension) got this name because it is the primary area of residence of members of the Somali community in Finland.

But then only a mere 20% of the area’s population are immigrants (mainly Estonians and Russians though) which seems to be shocking in the Finnish context. So special that according to the international edition of Helsinki Sanomat…

… taxi drivers driving through the area still have fun counting the number of dark-skinned faces they see.

But then the taxi driver who drove me back to Helsinki from Meri-Rastilan (because i was stupid enough to take the last outbound metro and there is no obvious other public transport back to the city) didn’t count the number of black skinned faces. instead he did not say a single word during the entire ride (very finnish) and i suspect him of having been a bit drunk (very finnish as well).

In fact the amount of black people in Meri-Rastilan by no means justifies calling the place Mogadishu Avenue. The highest concentration of black people in Helsinki can be observed in the foyer of the Tennispalatsi cinema hall in the center (thanks for the tip Kari-Hans). Earlier tonight it was full with lots of extremely well dressed (compared to the average Finn) Somali teenagers hanging out there. Not sure if any of this (the stylish clothes or the hanging out) was in any way related to Eid Ul-Fitr or if this is where these youngsters usually spend their Friday nights.

photo by: Jukka Ritola taken from this gallery with more pictures from ‘Mogadishu avenue’.

While looking for photo material for the 4th edition of the crossing borders newsletter (which is a pretty pointless undertaking anyway as my old school anarchist friends continue to send me texts that are way to long to get any photos included in the newsletter) i came across the website of the European Union Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine, which has been set up because – according to the EP – they have one of them ‘black holes in which illegal trade in arms, the trafficking in human beings and the laundering of criminal finance are carried on’ somewhere in the general area east of the EU (probably in Transnistria).

Now EUBAM has a mighty impressive website (especially when compared to the miserable FRONTEX website) that contains shitloads of highly amusing pictures. Especially if you are into photographs of meetings, euro-uniform pr0n and h4wt chicks doing the passport checking thing.

They even have an online photo exhibition titled ‘crossing the borders‘ [wtf?], which manages to give a remarkably dull picture of the average border police officer. looks like most of them are fat bastards with unfashionable beards and or hats who are extremely fond of their dogs:

#1: the first iphone i saw in the wild in the netherlands (o.k vincent evers’ iphone does not count because he is making a fool out of himself by riding around on a segway all the time) was carried by a 19 year old white boy who got off the train in breukelen when i was going to rotterdam yesterday evening.

#2: because apple is acting like the borg these days: there is a brilliant mash-up of one of the ‘think different‘ apple ads that pretty much sums it up (even more so, this really makes me think about switching away from apple).

update [16.oct.07]: most stupid post ever, should have never posted this pathetic nonsense. see here why i will buy one

Bech over at remakz shares a rather amuzing metadata conflict involving Hezbollah and Snoop Doggy Dog:

from the anecdote file where we find the joys of being a researcher on Hizbullah

Buy one of the many cds of Hizbullah ‘chants’ (anashid). For example, the volume 12 of Firkat el Asra’, Al Moqawama wal Tahrir. Open it, and rip the cd on Windows media player. The software checks for titles through its search engine. When you get back to your computer you find copied to your hard drive:

Artist: Snoop Doggy Dog

Album title: Doggy Style

Example of song name: Shitznit, for all my Niggaz & Bitchiz, etc.

I changed the name of the songs so as to at least remember what I am listening to. But I cannot erase the “Doggy Style”. So I get: “Hamdan lil Lah atah al Zafar” with “Doggy Style”, right under it.

Please keep in mind that at the bottom of the cd back cover there is a mention of protected copyrights.

Which – off course – is totally not true, but this barricade tape by San Francisco design firm MINE is just brilliant:

Picture (cc-by-sa-nd) by laughing squid.

So over the last three weeks i have been watching ‘kaafila‘ which bills itself as a movie based on the ‘global issue of illegal migration’. It took me 3 weeks to watch because (a) it is a Bollywood movie (and thus runs for three plus hours) and (b) because it is so incredibly bad that i could not muster the courage to watch bits that were longer than 15 minutes. Matter of fact it is so bad that that the songs (those ridiculous dancing/singing scenes that are required to interrupt Bollywood productions every so often) were more bearable than the ‘story’ itself.

So why did i buy it in the first place then? Kaafila contains a scene that depicts what has become to be known as the ‘Malta boat tragedy‘: the sinking – off the coast of the Sicilian town of Portapalo on December 26th 1996 – of a ship carrying more than 300 south-east asian migrants bound for Italy. More than 280 migrants lost their lives in this disaster (the worst post WWII maritime accident in the Mediterranean) and i was curious how this would be portrayed in a feature film made in one of the countries where a large part of the victims was hailing from. Plus some of the reviews actually did sound quite intriguing:

… in their effort to forge ahead closer to their dream, the innocent dozen finds itself trapped sometimes by the Russian mafia involved in the plutonium smuggling racket and sometimes by the militancy on the Afghan borders. Here they meet an Afghani girl…

Now as i said the movie is exceptionally bad. The story is erratic at best, the characters depicted are extremely unrealistic (although the opening credits of the film actually try to make a somewhat realistic introduction into the migrants’ motives for seeking their luck elsewhere) and, on top of this, the trajectory of the journey defies any logic at all:

From India our group of migrants is first flown to Moscow where they are held captive by a Pakistani trafficker for 5 months. He finally takes them across the border to Ukraine (shooting one of them on the way) but decides to take them back to Russia after one of them lights a fire at night, which, according to the trafficker, will alert the border guards and guarantee the group’s arrest.

On the way back another of the migrants freezes to death under fake styrofoam snow while hiding from a helicopter. Back in Russia the group heads towards the Black sea coast where they board a ship that is supposed to take them to Malta. In real life this would mean crossing the Black sea, sailing through the Bosporus, crossing the Aegean sea, sailing around Apulia to continue to Malta (or to be more exact Sicily where the real ‘Malta boat tragedy’ took place). In Kaalifa our heroes board the boat and immediately burst into another dancing scene to the films theme song ‘Chala Kaafila’, a strange mix between eurotrash and hindi film music:

Chala Kaafila is a outcome of a confused state of mind. With music lingering somewhere between the genres of folk and club mix, Chala Kaafila boasts of a strong blend of North Indian music with unnecessary westernized musical goof ups. [from: RS Bollywood Online music reviews]

The song opens with the singer (the only female on board who somehow disappears before the ship goes down) shouting ‘i don’t want to wait no more let’s bring the house down’ over extremely annoying house beats. this is followed by mad dancing of the assembled 300 migrants on the deck of the doomed ship and once the song ends the ship’s passengers become aware of a giant wave (clearly inspired by the 2004 asian tsunami, which coincidentally also happened on a 26th of December) slowly approaching and jump ship in fear.

For some reason (supposedly because they cling to pieces of wood taken from the ship before jumping into the sea) our 10 remaining heroes are the only ones to survive and wash up on a beach (which turns out to be the Russian Black sea coast again). here our heroes meet the wife of an mad Indian nuclear engineer who is selling liquid plutonium to the Taliban (with the help of the Russian mafia). For rather unclear reasons the wife is shot dead by the Mafia and in this moment, out of nowhere, the above-mentioned Afghani girl appears, secures the liquid plutonium, a bag of giant diamonds and offers our heros a lift to Kazaksthan.

From here on the ‘innocent dozen’ comes under the protection of a dubious Pakistani I.S.I agent who teams up with the Afghani girl to fend off waves of waves of Russian mafia killers and Taliban fighters attempting to kill our heros while they cross Tadzhikistan and Afghanistan heading towards Pakistan (along the way various attempts to put them on a plane to Europe fail). En route 4 more of them are being killed despite the incredible marksmanship of the Pakistani agent and the Afghani girl, who kill dozens after dozens of the attackers.

Finally, in Pakistan the I.S.I agent somehow reconciles with his superiors (in one scene he seems to be talking to Pervez Musharraf himself) who had been pissed off with him for another unclear reason (there are hints that he was suspected to be involved in some Abdul Qadeer Khan style nuclear smuggling operation) and arranges for our heroes’ safe passage across the border to India. in the final scene the 6 remaining migrants plus the Afghani girl can be seen walking to back towards an imagined India, now being completely cured of their initial desire to leave mother India and find their luck in England…

Even if i was willing to accept that Malta is an island located in the Black sea, that the Taliban ‘look like Indians wearing fake beards‘ who can’t shoot straight and that liquid plutonium can be handled safely in open containers, this still is the worst movie i have ever seen (with the mask being a close second). Here are some screen shots of the malta boat tragedy dance:

There were meanwhile reports from Canal Sur of another four immigrants rescued a short distance off the coast of Cabo de Gata on Sunday evening after their boat sank just a mile off shore. Another man was arrested on shore after he managed to swim to the coast. All five were said to be healthy.

Taken from a news-item on typicallyspanish.com. makes sense, dosn’t it?

I guess it is since i first read Enki Bilal’sPartie de Chasse that i wanted to go visit the various public bath houses in Budapest. there is a scene in Partie de Chasse where Vassili Alexandrovitch Tchevtchenko comes to Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1966 to talk to Tibor Illyes, the local stalinist party leader, in a thermal pool to convince him to step down. later Illyes is found dead in the pool and officially it is said that he committed suicide. It is a fairly small scene, but it has somehow etched itself into my memory. Last week i finally had the chance to visit some of the bath houses in Budapest myself. my favorite is the Rudas, an old turkish bathhouse from 1566 that as been recently renovated (but essentially left unchanged):

If i was living in Budapest i could imagine myself spending a lot of time there (like a lot of the old fat locals do). The best thing about the Rudas is that it is open for mixed bathing till 4 in the morning on friday and saturday night (normally it is men only), which makes it an excellent last destination when having a night out (although going out with swimming shorts in you pockets feels a bit strange).

The Rudas was build in 1566 by the Turks, when Budapest was part of the Ottoman Empire, which makes me think that it is a shame that the Turks did not conquer all of Europe so they could have build places like this all over the place. Gives me one more reason to dislike the Austrians even more than i did before coming to Budapest.

Apparently someone at the BBC has tracked down some of the migrants who got rescued after hanging on to a tuna fishing net for three days in the Mediterranean back in may. They will be featured in the documentary ‘Destination Europe‘ which airs tonight at 2030 on BBC one. There is another article based on interviews with five of the migrants available on the guardian website.