Girl Scout Cookies Overseas

Girl Scout hopes to get cookies to troops serving overseas

Staff report
Tuesday January 22, 2008


Martinsville

Cookies and Kool-aid.

That's what one Morgan County Girl Scout thinks troops overseas need, as the cookie season sales get underway for the year.

Tulip Trace Troop 391 member Molly Dirrim is selling Girl Scout cookies and hopes people will buy 300 boxes to send to Indiana National Guard Troops overseas in April. They might even include some Kool-aid to go with the tasty treats.

"We thought it would just be nice to send them," Molly Dirrim said. "Kool-aid and cookies are a good combination."

The Martinsville Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1257 has offered to pay for the postage to send the cookies to Iraq, which is where members of B Co., 1-151, headquartered in Martinsville, are expected to deploy to later this year.

This is not the first time soldiers overseas have received care packages from the Dirrim family, according to Molly's mother, Bobbie. Bobbie said they have been sending care packages that include food and cards and letters of support to troops with family ties through their church. Most recently they sent a package to a solider who grew up in the Center Grove area.

"We just kept asking for people, and his name came up," Bobbie Dirrim said. "We always ask for soldiers that don't have much family to send our packages to. They like the food too, but they really love the letters and the pictures in the package."

Cookie sales for the Girl Scouts will continue until March 10, and are available through any Girl Scout, or they will be available at several locations around Martinsville.

"A person can buy a box for themselves and one for a solider," Molly Dirrim said.

Sir Bin Ladin WTF?!

Islamabad - A hard-line Pakistani parliamentarian and head of a religious political party on Wednesday demanded a "sir" title for Osama bin Laden, the lead of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, in retaliation for Britain knighting author Salman Rushdie. "Muslims should confer the 'sir' title and all other awards on bin Laden and Mullah Omar in reply to Britain's shameful decision to knight Rushdie," Sami ul Haq, leader of the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, said in a statement, referring also to the leader of the Taliban.

Such a move would not only go against the political grain of Britain, who joined in the international effort to drive the Taliban from power and al-Qaeda from their Afghan safe haven in 2001, but it would also break knighthood rules, under which foreigners may not be addressed as sir.

Rushdie, 60, was given the recognition at birthday honours for Britain's Queen Elizabeth II on Saturday, about two decades after his book The Satanic Verses sparked protests in Muslim countries, including Pakistan, in 1989.

The novel also became the subject in the same year of a fatwa, a religious edict, by late Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomenei, who demanded Rushdie's death.

"Europe and Western nations are intentionally pushing Muslims towards extremism by awarding a nefarious person," Haq said.

The hard-line leader, who is also a parliament member, called upon the Pakistani government to withdraw its support for the US-led war on terrorism.

The honour for Rushdie triggered diplomatic tensions between Islamabad and London Tuesday as the Pakistani Foreign Office summoned Britain's high commissioner to Islamabad, Robert Brinkley, to protest the award.

Britain in return expressed deep concern over comments by a Pakistani minister that the honour could provoke radical Muslims to carry out suicide attacks.

Brinkley had conveyed the "clear message" that, in Britain's view, "nothing can justify suicide bomb attacks," the Foreign Office in London said.

Earlier, thousands of Pakistanis held protest rallies in various cities and burned British flags and effigies of Queen Elizabeth II.

The supporters of a radical Islamic group in the eastern city of Lahore were planning Wednesday to stage a public hanging of an effigy of Rushdie, an Indian-born author who is under constant British police surveillance and has moved house more than 30 times in two decades of hiding.

According to some press reports, British police are reviewing his security after threats from Islamic extremists since his knighthood.

More My View

'300' a visceral feast for the senses
By BRUCE KIRKLAND - Sun Media

Zack Snyder’s 300 is an ultra-modern movie about an ancient battle, a vanished culture and a rigorous code of conduct that only an insane man would adopt in contemporary times.

That violent intersection — of slick new digital technology and the elusive rites of antiquity — has resulted in the first unique cinematic experience of the year. 300 is a savage spectacle of scope and bravado.

Geared to adults and based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, it tells a mythological version of a true story.

In 480 B.C., 300 Spartan warriors marshalled at the Gates of Hell to defend their nearby city state from an invasion force of one million Persians.

Their strategy was brilliant and simple: Force the Persians into a narrow gorge between two cliffs, meaning the Spartans could not easily be dislodged, run over or surrounded. Of course, that also meant the defenders had to be fierce, disciplined, well-organized and each willing to submit to what they called “a beautiful death.”

Arguably, you could make the case that the Battle of Thermopylae, with Spartan King Leonidas aligned against Persian god-King Xerxes, changed the course of Western civilization.

But you are not thinking about that when bathed in blood and thrilling to the event. As a film, 300 is smashing entertainment more than it is accurate history. Prepare for an assault of violence, heroism, duplicity, action, surprising humour, sensuous interludes and startling moments of agonizing pathos.

In short, 300 provides the qualities that Rudolph Mate’s 1962 movie, The 300 Spartans, lacked when it also did battle at Thermopylae. That plodding sword-and-sandal epic, with Richard Egan as Leonidas, was wooden. It creaked and it groaned under the weight of pomposity.

Yet the movie inspired artist-writer Miller. Of course, he was only five years and impressionable. Years later, in 1998, he published his version as an adult comic book. Now, after a seven-year production ordeal typical of projects that do not hew to Hollywood formula, it is a film by co-writer (with Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon) and director Zack Snyder.

The technical side is dazzling, especially for a film with a relatively modest $63-million budget that was shot in Montreal to take advantage of tax credits and boutique-shop special effects houses.

Smart decision. Except for one scene, the enterprise was executed on sound stages. Like the ground-breaking Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, all the environments — indoors and out — were created through digital diddling. The artistry is staggeringly beautiful, except for the cheesy attempt to show a storm swamping the Persian navy. But, with scenery and weather, rampaging rhinos, bellowing elephants, bizarro mutants, hordes of archers, masses of both Spartans and Persians both alive and dead, and the gigantic persona of Xerces, the special effects are marvellous.

This technique also allowed freedom to Snyder (known for his deliciously diabolical re-make of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead) to play with tone, mood and stylistic flourishes. Like Miller’s Sin City, which morphed into Robert Rodriguez’s noir film, 300 is a surreal film dreamscape with live action humans at its core.

They are well cast, starting with Gerard Butler as Leonidas. Like all the main players, he physically trained into a magnificent human warrior machine.

You haven’t seen this many buff bodies on one screen, maybe ever (women audibly gasp as mostly naked men with washboard tummies march off to war — and it’s also homoerotic).

There is also eye candy for the straight guys in the audience: Lena Headey as Spartan Queen Gorgo (some viewers may want to be Gorgonized, even at the risk of impalment on a Spartan sword).

Others in key roles include Rodrigo Santoro (from Lost) as the exotic Xerxes and David Wenham (from The Lord of the Rings) who plays Dilios, a warrior and the storyteller-narrator.

This clever twist allows the entire saga to be given a Spartan propaganda spin.

Real war is hell, but this version is heaven, in a mythological heroic sense. It is an experience, not literal history.

(This film is rated 18-A)

NOT MY VIEW

'300' Flick Is Ready-Made for the Right-Wing Crowd

By Steve Burgess, The Tyee. Posted March 10, 2007.

If new acquaintance tells you that their favorite movie is 300, back away slowly -- they probably kills cats for fun.

What's your favourite movie?

Someday soon, you may ask a new acquaintance that question, and just maybe -- because it takes all kinds -- your new friend will reply, "My favourite movie is 300."

If this happens, back away slowly. Your new friend probably kills cats for fun. Worse -- your new friend may be George W. Bush. Director Zack Snyder's new dramatization of the epic Spartan stand at Thermopylae will probably go down real well at the White House, and wherever disturbed young people massacre hundreds in violent video games. Others should exercise discretion.

This is a historical epic, but its real history is not so much ancient Greek as recent comic book. 300 is another film taken from the work of graphic novel auteur Frank Miller, following very much in the CGI tradition of last year's Miller-inspired Sin City. Nothing in 300 is natural -- not a ray of honest sunlight falls on a single frame of the movie. Like Sin City and the execrable Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, 300 was filmed entirely in front of blue screens and subsequently built around the actors digitally.

Pretty dumb

It's certainly better than Sky Captain, visually at least. 300 has an undeniable beauty, a burnished look intended to evoke the mythic. Think of the dream scenes in Gladiator and imagine a whole movie of that. Don't imagine much else, because you'll be disappointed.

Someday, somebody is going to make one of these comic book movies that isn't quite so depressingly comic book. Not this time. 300 is an adolescent wet dream to its very core, a homoerotic paean to half-naked Greeks and their bloody, thrusting swords. And to make all the Chippendales-style posing more palatable for the young straight male target audience, there's a little bit of rough doggie-style hetero sex too.

The plot -- don't blink now -- is this: 300 brave Spartans, led by the heroic Leonidas (Gerard Butler), guard a pass against the Persian hordes commanded by King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro). There's a small bit of politics thrown in, and the aforementioned boinking (featuring Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo). But it's mostly just the glorious, sexual thrill of slow-motion violence and orgasmic geysers of spurting blood. Really. Such unabashed tributes to slaughter are usually delivered with a wink in slasher films, but 300 does not know how to wink. It is deadly serious in the way that so often provokes giggles.

Certain parallels

There's virtually no development of the Persian side, almost no real sense of who they are and why they are so scary -- except that there's a whole lot of them, and their leader Xerxes is seven feet tall, like Darth Vader and with pretty much the same voice. When it finally arrives, the big sacrificial climax doesn't even make a lot of sense. It's just heroic.

Regardless, 300 will likely be a masturbatory experience for the Ann Coulter crowd. Cruel, militaristic Sparta is the ideal; weak, artsy Athens is mocked, particularly in a scene where Athenian soldiers are revealed to be potters, sculptors, poets. Brave men who leave what they love to defend their country? Bah! Weaklings, according to this flick. As a tribute to a particular world view, 300 could play on a double bill with Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

And no doubt it will be screened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. President Bush will certainly relish a film in which King Leonidas tries, and fails, to get authorization from Sparta's governing council for an attack against the forces of Persia, a.k.a. modern-day Iran. Leonidas goes ahead anyway. History calls him a hero. So much for congressional funding.

There's even evidence that the film consciously grasps at this clash-of-civilizations message. "Today we will rid the world of mysticism and tyranny," shouts a Greek soldier, leading a charge against the Persians moments after we have seen an image of dead Spartans in Christ-like poses.

Most of the bloodthirsty teens in the audience won't care about that stuff, of course. But Dick Cheney will cream himself. I guess Dick can use a little diversion. He's had a rough year.

Harry Scarry

Terrorists have vowed to kidnap or kill Prince Harry when he fights in Iraq, it is reported.

The 22-year-old is due to be sent out in May with colleagues from the Blues and Royal regiment.

Threats have been posted on extremist Web sites since his deployment was revealed, The Sun says.

• Visit FOXNews.com's Iraq Center for more in-depth coverage.

One message said: "Prince Harry will be sent to Iraq to be killed by Muslims."

Another added: "May Allah give him what he deserves — like his fellow crusaders."

Read the original report from SkyNews.

Army officials fear the Prince will be paraded on television if he is kidnapped.

Harry was 'over the moon' at his deployment A Blues and Royals source told the paper: "Officially Harry is being treated just like any other soldier but in reality everyone knows how desperate the insurgents out there will be to get their hands on him."

Internet terror expert Neil Doyle was quoted as saying: "Harry would be the ultimate prize for one of these insurgent groups.

"He would be worth his weight in gold in propaganda terms if killed or captured."

From the end of May, the prince will be patrolling in Scimitar armored reconnaissance vehicles in Maysan.

Harry will this week pose as a hooded hostage in a special training exercise, the paper says.

His men will use tear gas and stun grenades to free him.

More than 100 British soldiers have been killed since the 2003 invasion.

Complete coverage is available in FOXNews.com's Iraq Center.

Swiss Accidently Invades Lichtinstein

How do you accidently invade someplace?

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) -- What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.