Sebastian

SEVEN SAMURAIsevsam

Dir. Akira Kurosawa Perf. Toshirô Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Toho Company, 1954 Film

If Sebastian taught me anything, he taught me to dial the first two digits of the emergency number first – before you got yourself into trouble. Convulsing from electric shock, you might still manage to fumble the last digit (so that paramedics could come and resuscitate you), but you’d never manage all three.

Sebastian got his start wiring together surveillance devices for mistrustful husbands under Colin Mitchell at Talking Electronics. When ASIO shut Talking Electronics down in 1992, Sebastian started a private company in the city called Teragen International, doing God only knows what. Their only discernable business amounted to a dialup internet service with too few modems called Aardvark Internet. But Teragen worked day and night, propelled to a frenetic pace by ephedrine tea they imported under a loophole in the Australian import restrictions. After working for days at a stretch, they’d retire to electrocute themselves with homemade electroshock weapons. Continue reading

Three Tone Tan

simple_art_of_murder

THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER

Chandler, Raymond (Houghton Mifflin, 1950, ISBN 0394757653)

In his remarkable essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler points out that, in the real world, using elaborate means to commit a murder, disguise one or to fabricate an alibi will only serve to incriminate the perpetrator. It gives a methodical police force too much to work with. Instead (if I comprehend Chandler’s meaning), just bludgeon the victim with some commonplace object found near the scene of the crime and when the police ask for your alibi, tell them to go fuck themselves. Continue reading

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