"Why has God forsaken us, the innocent children of Promised Land?"

On July 17, 2000, around 200 people died when a waterlogged avalanche of garbage obliterated much of the suburban Manila community inexplicably known as Promised Land. It was a sad, sad day.

Some residents reacted with keen insight: "This is the Land of Hell," offered one Wilson Carpio. Others were more reportorial: "They have found my daughter's body and it was badly burned," conceded Conchita Ramos. "They have also found the body of her daughter but its head was gone."

"Badly burned?" you might very well ask. "I thought this was a garbage avalanche." No, that's correct, badly burned. In the dry season, when garbage avalanches are rare, fires are endemic to the Philippines' many garbage dump suburbs. They start spontaneously. Well, surely not spontaneously, but at the slightest provocation and with great frequency. But even in the wet season, after each tsunami of refuse wreaks its awful toll, overturned cooking stoves tend to incinerate the garbage from within.

"And where," you might then ask, "is Ms Ramos' granddaughter's head at?" We suppose no one had the heart to ask.

Having donned his jaunty captain's hat, a young Filipino hits the buffet.

 

A naked Bruce Friedrich protests against something, and to a larger extent, everything.

Bruce Friedrich works for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and as PETA's Vegan Campaign Coordinator he masterminds projects such as the ultimately unsuccessful drive to dictate what Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh would eat for his last meal. Friedrich hoped that McVeigh would, in a final cathartic act of beauty, decline his allotted portion of cooked flesh in favour, perhaps, of something lentil-based.

"Now that the prison system offers a vegetarian meal plan," wrote Friedrich, "Mr McVeigh should not be allowed to take even one more life." "At the very least," he continued, "Mr McVeigh's last meal should not involve bloodshed and the slaughter of an unwilling victim."

In the end McVeigh, who didn't live to see his life's only achievement reduced to the equivalent of toppling an especially precarious game of Jenga, sought solace in two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream — no animals killed, but at least one cow's teat severely inconvenienced.

Bruce Friedrich stares down the t-bones of ignorance. "Feeding inmates bean burritos rather than baby back ribs," he wrote to McVeigh's prison warden, "might just help break the cycle of violence."