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efcodpalama
Hometown: Reno
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My name's Ben Garrido. I'm a Korea-bound journalist and aspiring snob who loves Hemmingway and hates sentimentalism. I just finished my first book, The Cult of Benedict Arnold this year. My second, The Blackguard, should be done early next year. Drop me an email if you want to talk about books, botulism, or priapisms.
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Interests
Activities: Speaking bluntly about touchy subjects, automobile racing, hiking over tall mountains, inflicting sports injuries on my poor body, advocating unpopular causes, independent thinking, eating sushi, cooking pork and torturing partly rotten leaves to death in boiling water.
Favorite Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tool/A Perfect Circle, Zepplin, BB King, Hendrix, The Mars Volta and a local band called Greyscale.
Favorite TV Shows: Mythbusters
Favorite Movies: American History X, The Kingdom, No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Little Miss Sunshine, Superbad, The Hannibal Lecter Trilogy, Redemption, Donnie Darko, The Departed, Lucky Number Sleven etc.
Favorite Books: Benediction by Lu Xun, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemmingway, East of Eden by Steinbeck, The Road by McCarthy, The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon, The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Farenheit 451 by Bradbury, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Othello by that Shakespeare fellow and Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes.
Influences: Paul Beatty, David Gessner, Earnest Hemmingway, the as of yet unpublished Jeff Walden, Carlos Fuentes and the Coen Brothers.
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AngelaLao -
Happy New year 2009 and best wishes for you!! ^o^ Angela Lao
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efcodpalama's Featured Art
Intro-Cult of Benedict Arnold
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Watch Your Step
Welcome to The Auditorium, your seat is to the left of the stage, in the front row. Be careful with the stairs, Mrs. Andrews broke her nose there last week and it’s a miracle none of the children have killed themselves.
Given your importance and influence, The Committee has asked I prepare you specifically for the atypical nature of this conference. They want me to tell you the true story of Mfecane. They think it’s a fitting anecdote to prepare you for what’s to come because, in both the narrative our guests will deliver and for Mfecane itself, there’s a bit of history with a bit of violence and a bit of treason. You’ll probably see those things as good, bad and very bad. But that moral approach, like using duct tape on your ducting, probably won’t work for either story.
The word Mfecane comes from a version of South African Bantu spoken in the early Nineteenth Century. It means “the crushing” or “the scattering,” very much in the same way South Africans of the time would have crushed grains and scattered the husks in the breeze. More specifically, it refers to the time Shaka Zulu destroyed his rivals and consolidated power over the whole of South Africa. It encompasses both Shaka Zulu’s dream of a powerful royal family and the countless groundlings he slaughtered to achieve it.
Shaka Zulu entered the world the bastard son of a chief. Shaka’s mother, Nandi, told the village elders as soon as she realized she was carrying a royal fetus. They refused to believe her womb nurtured a chief’s son, insisting her rounded belly came from an intestinal beetle. The Zulu referred to this parasite as an “ishaka,” thus Shaka’s name. It’s like William the Conqueror’s parents, at the last minute, deciding their little one should go into the world as Tapeworm the Mediocre.
Shaka, then an early teen, fought under his powerful contemporary, the ambitious young royal Dingiswayo, while still a boy. Fellow warriors knew the young Shaka for his intimidating physique, his unshakable bravery, and his fierceness in battle.
Most South African wars of the time were bloodless, halfhearted affairs. The two sides would run at each other, make lots of noise, and whichever one got scared first ran away.
Shaka despised this pretend battle and advocated the sort of total warfare General Sherman would use some 50 years later against the American south. He also invented a thrusting spear, designed to slice soft organs in the lower torso, to replace the flimsy tr...More >>
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