Over the weekend Roger Waters mocked Donald Trump with a satirical video display during a performance of the song “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” from the 1977 album Animals. Waters posted it on his Facebook page in time for the inauguration, but the Mexico City performance was recorded last September when Trump was only the Republican nominee. The song and the video are more relevant now that Trump is the actual president, and now that we’re celebrating Pink Floyd’s Animals‘ 40th birthday in 2017.

Here’s some footage of a show in Anaheim in 1977 featuring one of the pig balloons exploding into a ball of fire above a concert crowd that were probably watching a very enhanced version of this flaming swine crashing from the sky…

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This past Friday afternoon I read an article reporting that Fidel Castro had bid the Cuban people adios as he felt he would be dying soon. Early Saturday morning I found out the former lawyer/revolutionary fighter/prime minister and president had indeed passed away. Castro was a complex man who lead a complex life in complex times, and neither the damning attacks or the blushing praise that’s fomented in his wake really does justice to this true survivor, his revolutionary days, and his impact upon them. Estela Bravo’s documentary Fidel Castro: The Untold Story offers a worthy window on Cuba, the revolution, and the man at the middle of each for more than half a century. Here are some words from Bravo’s website…

To some he is a champion of the poor and the powerless; to others he is a ruthless dictator. He is often dismissed as a relic, yet many revere him as a saviour. He is Cuban President, Fidel Castro.

FIDEL covers forty years of the Cuban Revolution and provides a unique opportunity to consider the life of one of the most influential and controversial figures of our time.

Director, Estela Bravo, has obtained original and unusual interviews with Castro and exclusive footage from Cuban State archives. For the first time on film, we see Fidel Castro in a more intimate light, swimming with his bodyguards, visiting his childhood home and school, joking with his friend Nelson Mandela, meeting with Elian Gonzalez, and celebrating his birthday with the Buena Vista Social Club.

Bravo allows the story to unfold through the words of Alice Walker, Sydney Pollack, Ted Turner, Muhammed Ali, Harry Belafonte, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Congressman Charles Rangel, Ramsey Clark, Wayne Smith, and others. Family and close friends, such as the Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, also offer a window into the largely unknown private life of Fidel Castro.

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Last week my girlfriend shared a link with me via Facebook chat that seemed custom-made for one of my blog posts. It concerns a faraway country, political power, folklore, religion and lycanthropy. Here’s the story from Argentina as reported by The Independent…

The President of Argentina has adopted a young Jewish man as her godson to “stop him turning into a werewolf”, according to tradition.

President Christina Fernández de Kirchner met Yair Tawil and his family at her office last week to mark the unusual ceremony, which dates back more than 100 years.

According to Argentinian folklore, the seventh son born to a family turns into the feared “el lobison”.

The werewolf-like creature shows its true nature on the first Friday after boy’s 13th birthday, the legend says, turning the boy into a demon at midnight during every full moon, doomed to hunt and kill before returning to human form.

As well as feeding on excrement, unbaptized babies, and the flesh of the recently dead, the lobison was said to be unnaturally strong and able to spread its curse with a bite.

Fear of the lobison was so rife in 19th Century Argentina that some families abandoned or even murdered baby boys – an atrocity that sparked the unusual Presidential practice of adoption, aimed at stopping the deadly stigma.

Obviously, this story is already riveting, but I became even more interested when it turned out that this viral report originated from the mistaken conflating of a folkloric werewolf myth and a politico/religious tradition with only coincidental connections. Either that or Argentina is doing a great job containing their werewolf plague. Here’s the rest of the story…

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