West Sumatra Earthquake (Indonesia) - six months on

It's hard to believe that the huge earthquake which struck West Sumatra last year, happened six months ago yesterday, the 30th of March. Since then we had the massive Haiti earthquake and an equally destructive one in Chile, and as a consequence, the West Sumatra quake has almost been forgotten.

My colleague Helena Rae wrote this story from Padang and it shows how far the Red Cross has come in helping the people of West Sumatra build back their lives. Thanks Helena for your story.

A completed transitional shelter built with support from the Red Cross. Sungai Karambia, Pesisir Selatan District, West Sumatra. Photo: Muhammad Fadli/IFRC


As neighbours put the finishing touches to her temporary shelter, Jusni and her seven children look on, smiling. “It’s still under construction but I’m really excited to have this new house”, she says proudly. Jusni lives in the village of Nagari Ketaping in Padang Pariaman district, West Sumatra. Her village was close to the epicentre of the devastating earthquake that struck the region on 30 September 2009, leaving 1,117 people dead and over 114,000 homes severely damaged.

Jusni, whose home was severely damaged by the earthquake, works with other members of her community to erect her transitional shelter. The shelter will provide a temporary home for Jusni and her family of seven children. Nagari Ketaping village, Padang Pariaman district, West Sumatra. Photo: Helena Rea/IFRC


The earthquake left large cracks in the walls of her home and gaping holes where large areas of the ceiling caved in. With nowhere else to stay, the living room of her damaged home became the only habitable space for Jusni and her large family. It’s a dire situation, especially for her granddaughter who is just learning how to walk. Even now, the mild aftershocks which continue to affect the region cause the family to run outside the house to sleep in the open yard.

Shelter – a critical need

Jusni is one of 2,500 people to have received a cash grant under the Indonesian Red Cross transitional shelter programme which is providing funding for 13,500 shelters to be built across the worst affected areas of West Sumatra. Her new home is a simple 18 square meter wooden house with cement pole foundation and sago palm roof. All of the materials are available locally and the earthquake resistant design is based on a model developed in cooperation with the local university – costing only 340 Swiss francs (318 US dollars or 237 euro).

“Shelter is a critical need after an earthquake. Getting people back into a home of their own makes a big psychological difference when recovering from such a disaster,” explains Jan Willem Wegdam, the IFRC’s Recovery Coordinator for West Sumatra Operation. Eligibility for the shelter programme depends on whether a house is severely damaged and not fit to live in. Priority is given to the elderly, the sick, families with young children and pregnant mothers, many of whom have been living in tents since the earthquake struck.

From tent to shelter – a community approach
The programme is community driven with affected families actively involved from the outset. Beneficiaries receive cash grants in instalments and procure the building materials themselves. Members of the community are encouraged to help each other in the building process and Red Cross volunteers are on hand to provide technical guidance.

One of Jusni’s neighbours, Jabarin, shares a similar story. The only room that survived in his house was the kitchen. He has been forced to live in a tent for the past six months with his wife and five children. “Living in the tent was difficult”, he says, “it was very humid in the rainy season and my asthma became very serious”. With the support from the men and women of the village it took Jabarin a few days to complete his shelter which was built on the foundation of the former living room of his old home. In the design he also used many salvaged materials like doors, windows and roof sheeting.

Jabarin stands outside his newly constructed temporary shelter built from windows salvaged from his old home and locally available materials bought with a cash grant from the Red Cross. For the past six months he has lived in a tent next to his severly damaged home. Nagari Ketaping village, Padang Pariaman district, West Sumatra. Photo: Helena Rea/IFRC

As the shelter programme continues; in May the local government is planning to start a cash stimulus program that aims to meet the permanent housing needs of earthquake survivors.

The Red Cross has also been working to improve or reconstruct water and sanitation systems in schools and communities as part of a wider community health and psychosocial support programme. So far, approximately 6 million Swiss francs (5.6 million US dollars or 4 million euro) has been spent on recovery efforts.

Do You Feel Safer Yet?

Soldiers and police in combat gear, armed with mega-powerful M4s, patrol New York City's subway.....because bombs exploded in the Moscow subway yesterday (?) .





The New York Post calls them "armed guards".

Fudge You, You MotherFudger

By Darryl Mason

Okay, it's not Bye Bye Birdie or Hello Dolly!, but why isn't Scarface a good morality play for kids?

Sure he flies high, but Tony Montana pays dearly for his crimes.

The peak of success sees him become a prisoner in his own home, crippled by paranoia, under constant pressure from dirty cops and politicians, hated by his wife, he ends up estranged from his mother, killing his best friend, watching his beloved sister die and then losing his own life.

How is any of that a positive message about drugs and breaking the law?

Besides, this is seriously fudging funny, hypnotically surreal. The kids did an excellent job. They should feel proud.



I suppose the dead silence of the audience registers how shocking it must have been to see, particularly if you did not know what the school play this year was going to be.

The kids did an excellent job. They should feel proud.

Sadly, it will be hard for them to ignore the expected hysterical media reaction, particularly from the likes of Fox News and the Murdoch tabloidia, that will explode all around them.

UPDATE : Moral Panic Cancelled, Not A Real School Play

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Does Hollywood help pre-condition Americans for coming new realities?

I wonder if George Lucas watched Woody Allen's 1973 sci-fi satire Sleeper when he was writing early Stars Wars screenplays? Am I the only one who can see similarities between Allen's android character and C3-PO? Head movements, attitude, shuffling walk? A famililarish robot-dismantling moon in The Empire Strikes Back?



Maybe my coffee's too strong.....or not strong enough.

Incredible. 'Condition 1' weather in Antarctica :

Michael Crichton on the denigration of society by the mainstream media, back in 1993 :

There has been a great decline in civility in this country. We have lost the perception that reasonable persons of good will may hold opposing views. Simultaneously, we have lost the ability to address reasoned arguments - to forsake ad hominem characterization, and instead address a different person's arguments. Which is a tragedy, because debate is interesting. It's a form of exploration. But personal attack is merely unpleasant and intimidating. Paradoxically, this decline in civility and good humor, which the press appear to believe is necessary to "get the story," reduces the intensity of our national discourse. Watching British parliamentary debates, I notice that the tradition of saying "the right honorable gentleman" or "my distinguished friend" before hurling an insult does something interesting to the entire process. A civil tone permits more bluntness.

And where can you find this kind of debate in today's media? Not in television, nor in newspapers or magazines. You find it on the computer networks, a place where traditional media are distinctly absent.

So I hope that this era of polarized, junk-food journalism will soon come to an end.

Is it coming to an end now, 17 years later? Or is it in fact getting worse, and spreading deeper into society, hosing shit all over intelligence?

The Full Michael Crichton Story Is Here

The Future Is Now! But With PayPhones & Faxes

How the future was envisaged in a series of AT&T ads back in 1993. Note cute importance still placed on faxes, the lack of remote controls for TV units, and non-existence of 3G phones with inbuilt movie studio editing and worldwide instant broadcast capabilities :

China Fires Back At US Over Human Rights : "The US Citizens' Freedom To Access & Distribute Information Is Under Strict Supervision"

China has compiled a detailed, well sourced report on human rights' violations in the United States, through 2008-2009. It makes for some very interesting reading, not only for the view China expresses of the United States, but for the vast number of human rights' violations listed, and the massive amount of general criminality it exposes.

Reading all this about the United States from inside China would make the US sound a quite scary, freedom-restricted, dangerous place. Much like the way China is portrayed by some or most of the commercial American media.

An excerpt :

Chaotic management of prisons in the United State also led to wide spread of diseases among the inmates.

A report by the Human Rights Watch released in March 2009 said although the New York State prison registered the highest number of prisoners living with HIV in the country, it did not provide the inmates with adequate access to treatment, and even locked the inmates up separately, refusing to provide them with treatment of any kind. (www.hrw.org, March 24, 2009).

While advocating "freedom of speech," "freedom of the press" and "Internet freedom," the U.S. government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens' rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs.

The U.S. citizens' freedom to access and distribute information is under strict supervision. According to media reports, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) started installing specialized eavesdropping equipment around the country to wiretap calls, faxes, and emails and collect domestic communications as early as 2001. The wiretapping programs was originally targeted at Arab-Americans, but soon grew to include other Americans. The NSA installed over 25 eavesdropping facilities in San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago among other cities. The NSA also announced recently it was building a huge one million square feet data warehouse at a cost of 1.5 billion U.S. dollars at Camp Williams in Utah, as well as another massive data warehouse in San Antonio, as part of the NSA's new Cyber Command responsibilities. The report said a man named Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider trading and sentenced to six years in prison after he refused to participate in NSA's surveillance program (http://www.onelinejournal.com, November 23, 2009).

After the September 11 attack, the U.S. government, in the name of anti-terrorism, authorized its intelligence authorities to hack into its citizens' mail communications, and to monitor and erase any information that might threaten the U.S. national interests on the Internet through technical means. The country's Patriot Act allowed law enforcement agencies to search telephone, email communications, medical, financial and other records, and broadened the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting foreign persons suspected of terrorism-related acts. The Act expanded the definition of terrorism, thus enlarging the number of activities to which law enforcement powers could be applied. On July 9, 2008, the U.S. Senate passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act of 2008, granting legal immunity to telecommunication companies that take part in wiretapping programs and authorizing the government to wiretap international communications between the United States and people overseas for anti-terrorism purposes without court approval (The New York Times, July 10, 2008). Statistic showed that from 2002 to 2006, the FBI collected thousands of phones records of U.S. citizens through mails, notes and phone calls. In September 2009, the country set up an Internet security supervision body, further worrying U.S. citizens that the U.S. government might use Internet security as an excuse to monitor and interfere with personal systems. A U.S. government official told the New York Times in an interview in April 2009 that NSA had intercepted private email messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by U.S. Congress the year before. In addition, the NSA was also eavesdropping on phones of foreign political figures, officials of international organizations and renowned journalists (The New York Times, April, 15, 2009). The U.S. military also participated in the eavesdropping programs. According to CNN reports, a Virginia-based U.S. military Internet risk evaluation organization was in charge of monitoring official and unofficial private blogs, official documents, personal contact information, photos of weapons, entrances of military camps, as well as other websites that "might threaten its national security."

The so-called "freedom of the press" of the United States was in fact completely subordinate to its national interests, and was manipulated by the U.S. government. According to media reports, the U.S. government and the Pentagon had recruited a number of former military officers to become TV and radio news commentators to give "positive comments" and analysis as "military experts" for the U.S. war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in order to guide public opinions, glorify the wars, and gain public support of its anti-terrorism ideology (The New York Times, April 20, 2009). At yearend 2009, the U.S. Congress passed a bill which imposed sanctions on several Arab satellite channels for broadcasting contents hostile to the U.S. and instigating violence (http://blogs.rnw.nl). In September 2009, protesters using the social-networking site Twitter and text messages to coordinate demonstrations clashed with the police several times in Pittsburgh, where the Group of 20 summit was held. Elliot Madison, 41, was later charged with hindering apprehension of the protesters through the Internet. The police also searched his home (http://www.nytimes.com, October 5, 2009). Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.

The Full Report Is Here

How The US Intends To Stop The Next Financial Crisis : 'We Will Ask People To Stop Cheating'



And so it is up left up to the 'funny coz it's true' alternative news like The Daily Show to expose just how vulnerable the US economy and financial institutions was to theft, fraud and apocalyptic greed, and how vulnerable they remain still :

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
In Dodd We Trust
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

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EGG ROLL

“ SO DOCTOR, COULD I BE TREATED FOR MY NYMPHOMANIA”?

Sarah Palin Won't Settle For Just Any Old Private Jet

Really, Sarah Palin is just like you, and me.....If you and me were 1990s high-flying rock stars, on a massive ego trip, looking to cash in at every opportunity :

Palin’s contract, according to Shreeve, who had a look at it, called for her to be paid $100,000 for the event. It also included $18,000 for private jet travel for her and her entourage. Shreeve told me Palin's contract — standard among political stars who make the speaking-circuit rounds — specified what type of private jet she requested for the trip to Nashville. “It was like, she had to have this or that size plane,” Shreeve recalls. “It was like when a rock star comes to town, the contract was that detailed.”

Whatever the Tea Party is now, it was not meant to be anything to do with all that.

Gurney's at it again

Former champion Steve Gurney congratulates his girlfriend Clare Brockett of Christchurch on day one of the Speight's Coast to Coast on February 12, 2010 in Greymouth, New Zealand.

Gooney as I first knew him, is an amazing tri athlete and adventurer. He was quite an up and coming mountaineer in the late 80's, and I remember his in his first Coast to Coast race with a cycling helmet with two eyes on 10 inch long springs.

Then I remember when he dumfounded Robin Judkins the Coast to Coast organiser, by finding a loophole in the regulations and used a pod on his racing cycle to smash the Coast to Coast record.

We were on stage together in Aucland in 1990 with his race-winning cycle and pod, and recommended to a large audience we start a new national triathlon body, called F.A.R.T, the Federated Association of Recreational Triathletes

Now Steve Gurney is after another world record, Burt Munroe style, as he and four other Kiwi kite-buggy enthusiasts head to Las Vegas to try to break a land-speed record. If Gurney can keep his hands out of the cassinoes there, I would bet my last dollar he will come home with a world record, a la Bert Munroe. Like Burt, Steve is a mad inventor.

Now Gurney is joining four Kiwi kite-buggy enthusiasts who head to Las Vegas to try to break a land-speed record, Burt Munro-style. (See photo above)

Steve Gurney has teamed up with Peter Lynn, who invented the kite-buggy 20 years ago, and Craig Hansen, Matt Bedford and Gavin Mulvey.

They will fly to the United States this weekend to compete in the North American Buggy Expo (NABX) and attempt a world speed record.
The world kite-buggy record is 127kmh.

Gurney said team members had adopted a "Burt Munro attitude" – made famous in the film about the Southland motorcyclist, The World's Fastest Indian – with a "backyard invention" they designed and built.

Steve Gurney in Dancing with the Stars

"Our thinking is Burt Munro-style. We're taking on the Dutch and the US. They know a lot about wind and have a lot more resources," he said.

"We're just inventing as we go."

Last September, Hansen and Gurney , along with Australians Geoff Wilson and Garth Freeman, became the first group to attempt a crossing of the Sahara Desert by kite-buggy and the first to travel by kite-buggy for more than 1000 kilometres.

During the crossing, Gurney was thrown from his buggy face-first into a rock. He suffered concussion, an injured shoulder, a burst eardrum and severe swelling to an eye socket and face.

Gurney said his shoulder "still isn't right" but he would leave for Las Vegas on Sunday regardless.

There would be no rocks at the Ivanpar Lake Bed near Las Vegas, where the NABX would be held. "The terrain is a bit like the salt flats, but instead of salt it's a dried-up mud lake – hard with a sandpaper surface," Gurney said.

Hansen said the team had a good chance of breaking the record.

"If our homework's correct, our machine is technically superior and nobody will be able to go as fast as us," he said.

Gurney said this trip would be a "continuation" of the adventure started in the Sahara, but this time the team would aim for speed, not endurance.

"In the Sahara we used buggies built tough like quadbikes. They would only get up to 60kmh before they started to wobble," he said. "The speed-buggy has a much longer wheelbase, is wider and only about two centimetres off the ground."

Dave Devries sensational and occasionally downright disturbing artistic reworkings of children's drawings make you wonder whether four year old kids really see the monsters in their imaginations, that they try to get down on paper, as vividly horrific as these :




They really are the creatures of nightmares.

More Of Dave Devries Work Here

The Next Generation Of Astronauts Will Be Inspired By Homer Simpson, Not Neil Armstrong

Every now and then it's good to pause and really take in the mind-blowing Future Now! wonder of what the internet brings to us. The part of me that is still a wide-eyed 8 year old all-things-space-&-NASA-total- junkie was absolutely thrilled to discover that real live astronauts are on Twitter and posting photos they took on a space station orbiting this planet.

We take the space missions for granted now, but it is absolutely unbelievably fucking cool that we have an actual space station orbiting above us, visited by a (soon to be phased out) reusable space plane. Space tourism and permanent settlements on The Moon, and Mars, are not an if, but a When. And that When is within only another couple of decades.

There are 8 year old kids around today who, if they don't become astronauts themselves, will be able to take a Trip Of A Lifetime to The Moon, before they hit their 70s, and they won't have to be multi-millionaires in order to afford it.

If you'd told me at 8 years old that the above was a coming soon new reality, and that in a few decades I also wouldn't have to constantly, diligently, scan newspapers and magazines one or two grainy new photos every few months taken in space, via human or robot, because they would be freely available, by the tens of thousands, whenever I wanted to go and look at them online, I probably would have pissed my pants with delight.

But that is this reality now.

That was probably a way too long intro for this photo, but fuckit, I haven't ranted anywhere near enough on here lately.

Clayton C. Anderson was an astronaut on Expedition 15 to the International Space Station. Here's a beautiful photo he took over the 'World Resort', United Arab Emirates :





More Of Clayton C. Anderson's Photos Here

It's also very cool to learn that the Homer Simpson in space episode, Deep Space Homer, is in the DVD library on the international space shuttle.

BABY BOOMERS REMEMBER THE HAPPY DAYS OF THEIR CHILDHOOD.

Happy days spent playing on bomb sites.


Summer Holidays. This was the nice secluded part. It was always more crowded nearer the pier.


“So children, when the siren goes off in the church yard, we have four minutes to say goodbye to everyone and get comfortable”.

George Lucas has been a good sport in not demanding YouTube take down the massive number of Star Wars re-edit clips. Some are instant classics :







(via Reddit)

Drugs : "A Brief Holiday From Society's Unrelenting Bullshit"

Charlton Brooker warns of a dangerous, powerful, legal drug :

It's perhaps the biggest threat to the nation's mental wellbeing, yet it's freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness. Tragically this "awareness" is a delusion. As they grow increasingly detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they've even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it's called "a newspaper"...

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often "cut" the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.

(headline quote is taken from Charlton Brooker's story)

Christopher Nolan's brilliant reality-redefining movie Memento, in six minutes :

A wondrous, beautiful ride on a Market Street, San Francisco, tram in the early 1900s. Utterly hypnotic :



It's widely claimed the film was made shortly, a matter of days, before a massive earthquake struck San Francisco in 1906, killing some 3000 people. It's easy to assume that some of those who died are also the same people you see walking, dodging cars and trams and waving to the camera.

The same film again, but if you go to about 4:10, you will see the unknown cameraman returned Market Street after the quake and the firestorm that followed, and filmed from the tram the same view towards the clock tower :



Much of the city was all but leveled by the earthquakes and fires.

More views of Market Street, in the aftermath :







Soldiers patrolling in the devastation :



And soldiers looting :



And Market Street from a tram, again, but this time in 1941 :



It's as close to time-travel as we're going to get, at least this century.

Former Nepal Prime Minister dies in Kathmandu

The former Nepalese Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala has died in Kathmandu, his aides and state TV say.
Mr Koirala, 86, served four terms as PM with the Nepali Congress Party and led protests that brought down King Gyanendra's authoritarian rule.
Thousands of supporters had gathered outside his daughter's house where he was taken after being in hospital for several days.

In 1975 while working for the International Red Cross in Nepal I met his eldest brother Matrika Prasad Koirala (photo left) at the family home in Biratnagar. Matrika, or MP as he was known to many, talked to me under the shade of a Banyan tree in his garden about his family and his two famous brothers. I recall him telling me his two brothers were in exile in India at that time. Matrika Prasad himself served as prime minister in 1951–52 and 1953–55 and Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala from 1959 until King Mahendra overthrew the government in December 1960. Bisheshwar Prasad and Girija Prasad were subsequently imprisoned. After his release in 1967, Girija Prasad went into exile with other leaders of the Nepali Congress Party (NCP) and did not return to Nepal until 1979.

Matrika Prasad became Vice President of the Nepal Red Cross in 1973, and when I spent some days in Biratnagar in 1975, he was a very active leader of the district Red Cross, doing a lot for the poorer people of that area. He use to come to Kathmandu regularly and I enjoyed meeting him. Often he told me of his youth in Biratnagar, where he was a union leader and championed for the rights of oppressed workers. He also told me of his great respect for Mahatma Gandhi, a man he and his brothers modelled their early life on.

However, dark days for Nepal started from 2000, during Girija Prasad Koirala's third term when the Nepali Congress government became embroiled in corruption and the Maoist insurgency, started in 1996, began gathering momentum.It was also this time that the then King Birendra and nine more members of the royal family were killed in a shocking massacre in the royal palace, a turning point for Nepal's monarchy. Koirala was forced to resign in 2001 when the army, called in to combat the Maoists, refused to heed his command.Though his protege Sher Bahadur Deuba became the new prime minister, a leadership tussle between the two led to a vertical split in the largest party in Nepal that eventually contributed to its humiliating defeat to the Maoists in the 2008 elections.In 2005, Koirala was chosen as their undisputed leader by the political parties after the then king Gyanendra followed in his father Mahendra's footsteps and tried to seize power with a military-backed coup.Consistently rejecting offers by the king to join the royal cabinet, Koirala led a coalition of parties in a peaceful protest against it whose biggest achievement was reaching an understanding with the Maoist guerrillas.The united protest led to the fall of the royal regime in 2006 when Koirala became prime minister again and held the first historic constituent assembly election in 2008 to pave the way for a new constitution.However, the leadership during crisis became tarnished during peace and Koirala's Nepali Congress fared badly in the election with most of his family members, including his daughter Sujata, losing.He also earned the wrath of the victorious Maoists by delaying handing over power to them, which led to the latter opposing his bid to become Nepal's first president.The Maoist government also saw a covert opposition by Koirala's party to the pledge to merge the Maoist army with the state army and eventually led to the collapse of the shortlived Maoist government in 2009.During his last days in politics, Koirala also faced revolt from his own partymen, who had been urging him to relinquish his grip on the party.The rise of his daughter to the post of foreign minister and deputy prime minister also came under attack.

I think a summary is best left to one of the world's greatest statesmen, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who expressed condolences. and said "Koirala spent his entire political life championing the cause of the people..."

Mr Koirala's body will lie in state at the national stadium on Sunday, with his funeral later in the day at the Pashupatinath Hindu temple in Kathmandu, his aide Gokarna Poudel said, according to AFP news agency.

HOW ARSENAL FOOTBALL CLUB HAVE RUINED PEOPLES LIVES #2. PHIL BROWN

"Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest."


Phil Brown was a hard working full- back who, in an 18 year career as a footballer played over 600 games, never played in the top flight and the only trophy he ever won was the 1988 Sherpa van Trophy.


He used his win bonus to buy his dream car.


Towards the end of his career as a player he earned his coaching badge and became assistant to Sam Allardyce at Bolton.


By this time he was already drinking many cans a day…..


…..and had well and truly been Tangoed.

After a brief unsuccessful 7 month experience managing Derby, Brown got a job as a coach at Hull in 2006, which was pipped only by Middlesboro in the Times top 10 worst places to live in Britain. After the manager was sacked he took over as caretaker, saved them from relegation and was given the job as permanent manager of the club.


It was at this time that Phil started consulting a guru…..and it worked!


In his first full season he led the team to the top level of English football for the first time in the club’s 104 year history by winning the play-offs at Wembley. He was living the dream, but it was to get even better….

In his first game in the premier league his team beat Fulham and then off to Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.


Because Brown had never played for, or managed a team in the major division, he had never been up against a big team like Arsenal before. As the football gods smiled on him, out of the blue, his very own Brazilian, Geovanni, fluked a 35 metre shot which flew in the Arsenal net, which won the game. The win was described by the Hull press as the greatest victory in the clubs history. Two more wins followed and he was awarded the Manager-of-the-Month award for Hull's performances in September.
However those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, because that was as good as it got. Arsenal had done his head in.


After winning the Manager of the month, the press came to Phil’s house for a photo shoot.



Vanity, an inflated ego and a big gob are Phil’s trademarks. Notice above how during the photo-shoot for his award how the first shot is in the garden, then a quick splosh over with quick tan and another shot indoors.
The remainder of his Hull career has been one embarrassing incident after another.

After watching and being inspired by one of his favourite films he figured bullying tactics was the way forward.



Against Manchester City at half time, he marched his team over to the end where the Hull fans were seated, made them sit on the grass, then humiliated them by telling them off like schoolboys playing a Sunday morning game.


The team got their own back the next time they played City with this goal celebration.


Phil considers himself a modern manager, so he started to show an interest in the player’s dietry requirements.


Some men could get away with a pink sweater….Phil couldn’t, (pink and orange don’t go, right?) especially draped over his shoulders, looking like he’s just stepped out of a 1980’s fashion shoot, for this appearance on Goals on Sunday.

As Tony Cascarino said: “If Brown was an ice-cream he’d lick himself to death”


He wore the outfit as a mark of respect to his favourite designer.


He introduced the “Spice Girls” headset to the football field. At Hull's game at Chelsea on the opening day of the season, his trademark headset made him a target for the home supporters, one of whom constantly bellowed a series of imaginary orders, while claiming Brown was actually a call centre manager who had wandered into Stamford Bridge in error.


Phil’s headset sponsors.


Last season, after winning only one match out of his last 21 he had to face Manchester United in the last match of the season to save his club from relegation. Man U fielded such a weak team that 6 players had played in a youth team match the previous week. His relegation rivals all complained about United, saying it wasn’t fair. However United still won 1-0, but Hull weren’t relegated because of other results.
Instead of making a statement saying something like; “We’ll try harder next time”….,He serenaded the crowd about the glory of ….well…him!


He was advised to do it by one of his showbiz pals.


Last October, after taking his team for a walk over the Humber Bridge he reported to the press that he had talked a woman down from attempting suicide. Unfortunately the woman didn’t come forward, the team didn’t remember the incident and the Humber Bridge authority didn’t have any reports either.

But is to Arsenal that he has saved his maddest moments on the football field, trying to recapture the magic moments of that sunny September


In an FA cup tie he accused Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger of not shaking his hand. As you can see by the image, he did. After Phil’s statement came out it mystified Mr Wenger, who looked at his hand and thought to himself....




This was followed by the bizarre accusation that Arsenal’s phlegmatic captain, Cesc Fabregas sprayed his assistant Brian Horton’s shoes with his spittle, something the Spaniard denied. This had left the Hull manager apparently foaming at the mouth all day. The veracity of his claims were tested, by an FA investigation, which kicked off with a letter from FA HQ at Soho Square to the KC Stadium, Hull, containing the words ‘what’, ‘hell’ and ‘talking about Phil’ and at least one question mark.


Some people believed that Phil’s drama queen tactics were down to watching too much TV.


Phil’s players having an exchange of views with Arsenal’s Nasri during a league match.


Last week was a bad one for Phil. Earlier in the week his team were training in the local park when a fight started between two Hull players. Unfortunatly it was in front of a Women’s Institute rally. Phil had to make a humble apology to the ladies organization. It was not the best time to play the team that had haunted him….Arsenal.

Phil announced that the game was “The start of a massively important era in my life and a massively important era in the history of Hull City'.


He thought to himself “What would my hero do”?......Then ordered his team to do it.


Who knows where his finger has been?

'I apologised to the Women's Institute for the fighting spirit we showed in public, but I make no apology for the fighting spirit we showed today. Phil Brown.


Spot the ball?

“He didn’t let me down, he went out there and did the job I asked”. Phil Brown.


“George Boateng has no reason to apologise to anybody" Phil Brown.


Justice was done when Arsenal’s Danish striker, Nicholas Bentner looked up, saw the goal with his one good eye, buried the ball in Hull’s net and buried Phil’s Premiership career.


As the sun sets on the events in Hull last week it’s interesting to reflect back to when Phil was manager of Derby County. He was asked in an interview what his favourite movies were. Ironically one was….. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest!

Bye, bye, Phil, it was a laugh.