This is a copy-and-paste of the top 10 most-visited Salon weblogs for today, Wednesday, June 23, 2004, copied and pasted just a few minutes before the end of the 24-hour tallying period at midnight. I received a record 14,000-plus hits (visits) in the 24-hour period (a record for me, I mean).
Headhunters bring in record number of hits
I got more than 14,000 hits today -- a whopping number of hits for me in one day. (To put this in perspective, in the more than a year and a half that I've had this weblog, I got only about 30,000 hits total, whereas today alone I've gotten almost one-half of that total.)
The vast majority of my hits right now are coming from search engines -- from people who want to see pictures and videos of the recent beheadings in the Middle East. When you keep such images from people, as the mainstream media do, they really want to see them.
I figure that if I can draw people in by giving them what they want to see and then perhaps stimulate those people to think -- then fucking great.
OK, continuing to give the people what they very obviously want:
Two Web sites that I know of have the video of the beheading of Kim Sun-il: ogrish.com and consumptionjunction.com. Ogrish.com reports that it's being attacked by hackers who don't want you to see the video, and whether it was because of that or because of high Internet traffic, I was unable to watch the video via ogrish.com, which apparently has a long version and short version, neither of which I was able to watch. However, I was able to watch what I'm guessing is the long version on consumptionjunction.com.
Consumptionjunction.com makes jokes about Kim's murder -- much further than I would ever go, I mean -- but, unlike the right-wing nutjobs who are trying to block Michael Moore's new movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11" (and instead are just giving it more publicity -- duh), I fully support others' right to free speech whether or not I agree with what they have to say and how they say it.
Consumptionjunction.com's video is 3 minutes and 45 seconds long. In the first portion of the video, an understandably hysterical Kim is pleading for his life. I can't understand most of what he says, but "I want to live! I want to go to Korea!" near the beginning of the video is clear.
The video shown on consumptionjunction.com is two videos spliced together. In the first part of the video, Kim is quite vocal, pleading for his life. The video is not continuous, but jumps to another piece of video, as evidenced by the fact that the time stamp in the lower righthand corner of the frame abruptly changes and Kim is no longer hysterical but is now quiet and still just before he is beheaded, and the actual beheading is not shown very well.
I'd be struggling and screaming if they were beheading me, but Kim doesn't appear to move a muscle and what sounds like him making a little bit of noise easily could have been edited in.
While the video shows Kim's severed head, so that we know that he was beheaded, I suspect that he was already dead but was propped up before he was beheaded, or perhaps he was drugged until he lost consciousness and was propped up and then beheaded. (I hope that he was dead or unconscious when he was beheaded.)
The Kim video is not as disturbing as is the Nicholas Berg video, and that's not (just) because I'm being desensitized to beheading videos (I have, after all, seen only three: Berg's, Kim's and Daniel Pearl's, which, like Kim's, didn't show the actual beheading very well, if memory serves). I think the reason the Berg video is more disturbing than the Kim video is than in the Berg video we see the cutting off of Berg's head from start to finish, while in the Kim video we see little of the actual beheading. (Consumptionjunction.com irreverently notes of the Kim video in comparison to the Berg video, "the sequel is never as good as the original, ya know.")
P.S. Haven't seen any pictures/video stills of the Kim beheading yet. Will post them if and when I do.
11:57:01 PM 
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