Archive for October, 2008

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Top 10 Movie Assassins

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

What is it about one of the world’s darkest and most evil professions that makes it seem so sexy and appealing on the big screen?

Whether it be slow motion shoot-outs, kicking kung-fu or just Angelina Jolie strutting around in next to nothing, the silver screen has always been kind to the morally questionable profession of contract killing.

So here it is, a list of the 10 best movie assassins to ever grace our screens…

10 – Michael Sullivan, Road to Perdition

Cold, calculated and – beneath it all – a family man, Tom Hanks makes a surprising turn as Michael Sullivan, a character who is not afraid to get his hands dirty. The final confrontation between Hanks and Paul Newman in the rain-soaked street is an intense and memorable scene and Hanks proves his versatility once again and pulls off the moustache look quite nicely.

9 – El Mariachi, Desperado

This guy is as comfortable behind a gun as he is behind the guitar, and bagging Salma Hayek on the side isn’t bad going either. The character El Mariachi played by Antonio Banderas was also in two other features (although Banderas only played him twice), but Desperado stands as one of the best action films of the 1990s featuring one of the best assassins.

8 – Vincent, Collateral

One of the Cruiser’s best performances and his standout of the last decade, Vincent is an impulsive assassin, going with the flow or whatever. He’ll chuck a fat Angelino out the window without batting an eyelid.

7 – The Jackal, The Day of the Jackal

Neither man nor watermelon stands a chance against this classic cinematic assassin. The role that made Edward Fox a star of the time was played in the remake by Bruce Willis (for some reason with a dodgy bleached haircut). The original remains a cinema classic and handed us one of the coolest cinema villains.

6 – Anton Chigurh – No Country For Old Men

Striking fear into any heart that lays eyes on his haircut. Anton leaves fate to decide whether to kill his victims or not. Deservedly winning an Oscar for the role, Javier Barden creates one of the greatest villains of all time.

5 – The Bride, Kill Bill

She made slicing through 88 trained samurais look like cutting through butter and managed to make someone’s heart explode by finger-tapping their chest. The Bride is fuelled by bloody vengeance, until she gets all weepy eyed at the end, that is. Still she remains Quentin Tarantino’s best creation.

4 – Martin Q. Blank, Grosse Point Blank

The most relatable assassin on the list, he’s depressed, lonely and stressed. Returning home for a reunion sets things back into motion and being hunted down, he brings out all the tricks to stay alive. John Cusack makes the character effortlessly cool and has unofficially followed up the film with this year’s War Inc, which is apparently a bit rubbish.

3 -T-800, Terminator

It’s not your average assassin that starts off walking around butt naked into biker bars but then this is a robot. Arnie’s most famous role had the Austrian hulk anything that moves and, with a near indestructible body, he is probably the hardest to kill on the list.

2 – Jason Bourne, The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum

We always thought that Matt Damon was like a Streisand, but he’s rocking the shit in this one! Damon came out of nowhere and smashed us around the face with a book, giving us the best assassin/spy of our generation. Silent and deadly, this guy could kill you with a bit of sticky back tape if he needed to.

1 – Leon, Leon

From start to finish Leon approaches everything with thorough thinking and complete dedication. He doesn’t make things up on the fly like Bourne, Vincent and Sullivan and it wasn’t until Natalie came along that he finally gained a weakness. The hardest, coolest, coldest killer around, Leon is cinema’s best assassin by a long shot.

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The Hanging Coffins of Sagada

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Have you ever been to Sagada in Philippines? The Sagada caves could get you mystifying just like the Pyramids of Egypt. The cliffs of Sagada welcomes you with dozens of coffins hanging in the cliff made of limestones.

The people of Sagada have devised a unique burial ritual involving the placement of dead relatives into caves after carefully preparing a hollowed out log. These coffins are carved by the elderly before they die; if they are too ill or weak their son or other close relative will do it for them. This ritual involves pushing the bodies into the tight spaces of the coffins (into the foetal position), and often bones are cracked and broken as the process is completed.

After the deceased are put inside these coffins they are then brought to caves high in the cliffs where they join the coffins of other ancestors. The Sagada people prefer to be buried in the cliffs than to be buried in the ground and have been doing this for more than 2,000 years and the latest addition is said to be put a decade ago!

In some caves hundreds of coffins are lined up, and unfortunately tourists are unregulated in this area, some have even taken some of the bones as souvenirs. If you do visit these caves, make sure you get a guide as some of the caves are hard to find and the roads can be tricky to navigate.

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Top 10 Most Overlooked Mysteries in History

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Over the last few months we have gone through 30 of the worlds greatest mysteries but what we haven’t covered are ancient mysteries. This list aims to put that right! Here are ten great unsolved mysteries of science. Do you have a theory that might solve one of these mysteries? If so, tell us in the comments!

10. Rongorongo

While many people know of the Moai of Easter Island, not that many people know of the other mystery associated with Easter Island. ‘Rongorongo’ is the hieroglyphic written language of the region’s earlier inhabitants. Rongorongo is strange in that no other neighbouring oceanic people used a written language. It appeared around the 1700s, though was unfortunately lost after the early European colonizers banned it because of its ties to the native islanders’ pagan roots.

9. Lost City of Helike

In the late 2nd century AD, the Greek writer Pausanias wrote an account of how (4-500 years earlier?) in one night a powerful earthquake destroyed the great city of Helike, with a Tsunami washing away what remained of the once-flourishing metropolis. The city, capital of the Achaean League, was a worship centre devoted to the ancient god Poseidon, god of the sea. There was no trace of the legendary society mentioned outside of the ancient Greek writings until 1861, when an archeologist found some loot thought to have come from Helike – a bronze coin with the unmistakable head of Poseidon. In 2001, a pair of archeologists managed to locate the ruins of Helike beneath the mud and gravel of the coast, and are currently trying to peice together the rise and sudden fall of what has been called the “real” Atlantis.

8. The Bog Bodies

This mystery may even be a problem for those legendary investigators from CSI and the like! The bog bodies are hundreds of ancient corpses found buried around the northern bogs and wetlands of Northern Europe. These bodies are remarkably well preserved, some dating back 2,000 years. Many of these bodies have tell-tale signs of torture and other medieval “fun”, which have made some researchers postulating that these unfortunate victims were the result of ritual sacrifices.

7. Fall of the Minoans

The Minoans are best known for the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, but it is in fact the demise of this once-great civilisation that is more interesting. While many historians concentrate on the fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Minoans, who resided on the island of Crete, is an equal, if not greater mystery. Three and a half thousand years ago the island was shaken by a huge volcanic eruption on the neighbouring Thera Island. Archeologists unearthed tablets which have shown that the Minoans carried on for another 50 years after the eruption, before finally folding. Theories of what finally ended them have ranged from volcanic ash covering the island and devastating harvests to the weakened society eventually getting taken over by invading Greeks.

6. The Carnac Stones

Everyone has heard of Stonehenge, but few know the Carnac Stones. These are 3,000 megalithic stones arranged in perfect lines over a distance of 12 kilometers on the coast of Brittany in the North-West of France. Mythology surrounding the stones says that each stone is a soldier in a Roman legion that Merlin the Wizard turned in to stone. Scientific attempts at an explanation suggests that the stones are most likely an elaborate earthquake detector. The identity of the Neolithic people who built them is unknown.

5. Who Was Robin Hood?

The historical search for the legendary thief Robin Hood has turned up masses of possible names. One candidate includes the Yorkshire fugitive Robert Hod, also known as Hobbehod or Robert Hood of Wakefield. The large number of suspects is complicated further as the name Robin Hood became a common term for an outlaw. As literature began to add new characters to the tale such as Prince John and Richard the Lionheart the trail became more obscure. To this day no one knows who this criminal really was.

4. The Lost Roman Legion

After the Parthians defeated underachieving Roman General Crassus’ army, legend has it that a small band of the POWs wandered through the desert and were eventually rounded up by the Han military 17 years later. First century Chinese historian Ban Gu wrote an account of a confrontation with a strange army of about a
hundred men fighting in a “fish-scale formation” unique to Roman forces. An Oxford historian who compared ancient records claims that the lost roman legion founded a small town near the Gobi desert named Liqian, which in Chinese translates to Rome. DNA tests are being conducted to answer that claim and hopefully explain some of the residents’ green eyes, blonde hair, and fondness of bullfighting.

3. The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval document written in an unknown script and in an unknown language. For over one hundred years people have tried to break the code to no avail. The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book’s origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. The document contains illustrations that suggest the book is in six parts: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, and recipes.

2. The Tarim Mummies

An amazing discovery of 2,000 year old mummies in the Tarim basin of Western China occurred in the early 90s. But more amazing than the discovery itself was the astonishing fact that the mummies were blond haired and long nosed. In 1993, Victor Mayer a college professor collected DNA from the mummies and his tests verified that the bodies were all of European genetic stock. Ancient Chinese texts from as early as the first millennium BC do mention groups of far-east dwelling caucasian people referred to as the Bai, Yeuzhi, and Tocharians. None, though, fully reveal how or why these people ended up there.

1. Disappearance of the Indus Valley Civilization

The ancient Indus Valley people, India’s oldest known civilization had a culture that stretched from Western India to Afghanistan and a populace of over 5 million. le—India’s oldest known civilization—were an impressive and apparently sanitary bronze-age bunch. The scale of their baffling and abrupt collapse rivals that of the great Mayan decline. They were a hygienically advanced culture with a highly sophisticated sewage drainage system, and immaculately constructed baths. There is to date no archaeological evidence of armies, slaves, conflicts, or other aspects of ancient societies. No one knows where this civilization went.

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