₦airaland Forum

Saw Live and Let Die again recently. I loved the fantastic soundtrack by Paul MaCartney, but was surprised by how little I enjoyed the movie after 30 minutes. Couldn't endure more than 10 minutes of Lazenby the first time. Might take another look at OHMSS.

ogbeche77:
non beat Roger moore.(With love from Russia).daniel Craig is a flop

His two movies are the highest grossing films in the history of the Bond franchise, and Casino Royale made the list of hightest grossing movies of all time.

'Funny' English men?

Seen District 9 yet? Best thing from SA so far, not as beautiful as Totsi, but better. Moulin Rouge's liberally coated with insanity. I've never seen anything like it. The evil count is indescribable, really. Most of the characters are. Not a Chigurh or lecter of course. It's a comedy. Catch Kylie Minogue as a naughty Blue Fairy shaking her tail when the artists get drunk on absinthe. MR will blow you away. Yes, you.

Inseminating machine. You are evil.

Don't take 12 Monkeys out of the running. I can't believe District 9 got such a low aggregate.

I didn't enjoy Sweeney Todd. I watched it for Depp and Carter and Rickman. I can guarantee you've never seen anything like Moulin Rouge. There are performances there manic and unbelievable. I adore that evil Count. He actually twirled his moustache like a textbook villain.

Kidman I happen to like.I haven't come across the one where she corrupts Innocent Youth though, thank gawd.Wasn't Jude Law in some mess where he slept with his children's Nanny years ago? What's the matter with the guy?You'd think he was the only good-looking man on earth.

Tom Hanks is the number ONE box office star in the world. He has made 19 films that have grossed over 100 million, and his box office movie totals almost 4 billion dollars. He's won the Academy Award for Best Actor back to back, an honour shared only with Spencer Tracy, one for his role in Philadelphia as a lawyer struggling with AIDS, the other as the iconic and inimitable Forrest Gump. He was the producer of the huge hit, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. From the likeable young un with fell in love with a fish (Daryl Hannah's mermaid) in Splash to Lovett in Apollo 13 to Sleepless in Seattle to Forrest Gump, a firm Top Ten of mine, to The Green Mile and Sheriff Woody in Toy Story, Tom Hanks has consistently captured the heart of fans and critics alike. He has to be the most likeable star in the world, moviewatchers liking and trusting him instinctively. Here's the man with the charming Southern accent and his wife of 21 years, Rita Wilson, an established actress in her own right. She was in Sleepless in Seattle with him, playing the part of his best friend's wife. They have two sons, and another two from Tom's previous marriage. To hear them talk so lovingly and respectfully about each other, after two decades, is delightful.

Enemy at the Gates. Enemy Lines was Owen Wilson. Thought Jude was good in Closer, Portman and Clive Owen phenomenal. That nighclub scene alone is money well spent. You don't like Zellwegger too? So you never saw Bridget Jones Diary? You sef. You don't know what you missed in Moulin Rouge. Kidman was in The Hours and you still pointed your eyeballs at it. Her roles are rarely boring.

Ah. Your husband was recently voted No 1 Sexy Male by all the women in the United Kingdom.
Yeh. Law's a little too self-conscious of his good looks, but he was the BOMB in Cold Mountain. Nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for that. It's a good movie, with some great performances from him, Natalie Portman, Phillip Seymour Hoffmann and Renee Zellwegger. But I know you'll skirt it by a mile cos Nicole Kidman's in it.

agathamari:
why should i hide it? my parents aopted 4 chilren who were vietnamese in the late 70's after the war. had a teachr who adopted 3 russian children. a neighbor growin up who adopted 2 korean kids. had two co worker one who adopted a mixedchild and another who was adopted as a child. none over there cares. if nothing they hold you higher for adoptinig. i dont undestand why here it is different here. i would never hide it from my child or nyone for that matter. why should i be ashamed of it?

Why indeed? I get you now. You married a Nigerian? What were you thinking?! I'm kidding. Our men are irresistible, yeh.

But come now. You didn't really expect attitudes to be the same the world over. I'm not disregarding the possibility there are people who look down on adopted kids. The thought is so annoying. It doesn't make sense. But I haven't come across any. It's an individual thing and doesn't hold true for everyone here. Mayhaps it's more prevalent in the villages and backwoods, where murky unenlightened opinion might hold sway. You'll always find weird groups with bizzarre attitudes in every country.

Another one? Jude Law? Why him?
So many Hollywood couples. Watching Aladdin. Adore the introductory music.

@agathamari
I'm sorry to hear you can't have kids. But you know your kids aren't just biological ones. People sometimes bond with others and form relationships closer and richer and deeper than even that with their biological family. So it is with our children. They're out there, ours to love and cherish. When you see your son or daughter in an orphanage you just know. So you don't need to justify or explain yourself and your child to anyone. Why expose yourself or your child to anybody who'd 'look down' on you? Like much of what plagues this country and lies at the heart of most bad things, it's just a wasting disease called Ignorance. But it's not a common attitude, I don't think. People are a lot more open-minded here than we give them credit for. Just enjoy your child and don't spare a thought to what people will think.


@ aisha2

I guess it's possible to be in the same country and have different experiences of the adoption sector. Why do you assume your experiences are definitive, though? There's a website that might give you some idea of how many orphanages there are and the kids in them. It's not comprehensive though. www.linkachild.org. You're seriously telling me the majority of children in orphanages belong to women who say, hold on to my kid for a bit? A NEW social welfare system was instituted and it has completely eradicated women dumping babies all over the country?You work with  every orphanage in the country and did some research and have statistics on this? Majority of children in orphanages are wards of the state with relatives, not orphans. And so every girl who gets careless in every town in every state in the country comes to this social welfare dept and makes a deal, problem solved? And the orphans in these homes before the social welfare dept was formed? Were they weeded out of the orphanages to make room for children with relatives, or are they still very much there?

You work in Abuja and deal with adoption there, I think? It's a WONDERFUL initiative, encouraging women to not abandon their babies. You're doing really commendable work. They ALWAYS spend the rest of their lives regretting it when they know better, but by then there's no way to trace their kid and get him back. Perhaps abandoned kids are less than needy couples in Abuja, but I was talking about the entire picture, the entire country here. And please don't tell me you mean that as well. Consider the very tiny possibility I might know what I'm talking about as well. There is no way on God's green earth abandoned kids and orphans outnumber the couples who want them in a country. In ANY country on this planet. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in India, not in Ghana, not in South Africa, and NOT in Nigeria. No country.

Gorgeous Blair Underwood has won a Grammy and has been nominated and won several awards for his film and TV roles, including Sex and The City, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Dirty Sexy Money, Law and Order SVU, In treatment, and more. He's been in many films, from Set it Off where he played Jada's love interest, to Rules of Engagement with Tommy Lee Jones. He's won awards for his extensive humanitarian and charity work as well.

Blair traced his ancestry and found he was a descendant of the Ibo peoples of Nigeria.

He's been married to Desiree DaCosta for 15 yeas and they have 3 kids.

aisha2:
You are wrong, most kids in orphanages can not be adopted, i wason a committe that went round some orphanages to do a census of eligible children for adoption and they are just over 100 meanwhile in Abuja alone we have over 2000 couples on the witing list. We have an adopting culture in Nigeria now, Am not talking from a laymans veiw, more and more people are chosing adoption believe me, we have a huge difference between demand and supply. Lots of couples want kids, any kid.
That example i gave was not much different from this situation, did you read the part where she went and abandoned the baby eve after i told i her i would help her.

I was reading about some research done on infertile couples in Nigeria a couple of years ago. Only 12% had considered adoption. There are almost a hundred orphanages in Nigeria, with kids ranging anywhere from 50 to almost a thousand. I know this for a fact. Each state has adoption laws and requirements that must be fulfilled. There's a process, as there should be. Lol I don't mean Nigerian couples aren't adopting. Though my husband isn't Nigerian, I am and we adopt and are still adopting. I adopted my son before I gave birth to his brother. I have much much older friends in their fifties and sixties who adopt.Their kids are grown and flown the coop and they felt the house was 'too quiet'. Couples from foreign countries adopt Nigerian kids. So people are adopting. But we don't have a culture of adoption here.

Most kids are wards of the state, with existing relatives? That isn't so. Abandoned children form the bulk of these kids, brought in as babies. These orphanages depend mostly on charity to survive. While one can't deny Nigerian bureaucracy can be maddening, neither they nor the orphanages have anything to gain by denying needy couples a child. We adopted and it was a smooth process, there are law firms specialising in this. Unfortunately the process here isn't transparent; there isn't a single credible adoption agency to facilitate the process and unite a couple with their son or daughter.

@Texazzpete

You certainly like the word 'illogical'. Makes you feel like the quintessence of logic, yes? Whatever makes you feel good. I couldn't care less. Your arguments weary me.

Remember those children some bastards under the guise of 'pastors' labelled witches in Eket? Many of them killed in horrible ways? It seems the State Governor is 'trying'. He instituted child protection laws that make it illegal for a child in the state to be labelled a witch, and one madman pastor guilty of this was arrested. To support the organisation that's been providing help to these children, (of course, started by a European. Nigerians don't have 'time') visit

http://www.steppingstonesnigeria.org/howtohelp

I recall the incident made you as angry as it did me, and I thought you might wish to do something about it.

bolanleodu:
I fink there are bit nd pieces of legal provisins dat can take care of d children. Even if d women own their bodies, it doesn't giv dem d right 2 trade children like market wares. This is not Surrogacy let not b fool. This demented set of women ve means of livelihood as seen in d text, so it not a case of pov this' child trafficing in its crudest form. Those women shuld be lock away nd d kids given to social worker 2 help place in good homes. If its time 2 intro. Surrogacy them let it be done decently

I share your sentiments. If they were conceiving for infertile couples, if it's real surrogacy, there's nothing wrong with it. They would carry the couple's baby to term and make them very happy when they have their own child at last. But the horror here is those kids are these women's, and they're for sale to anyone. Orphanages are full to bursting with abandoned children praying to have a family, but Nigeria doesn't have a culture of adoption. Yes, childless couples want children, but in most cases, they want their own, not someone else's. They will wait ten, twenty years praying for a child and it will not occur to them to adopt. They think that by adopting they have admitted defeat and have closed the door on having their prayers for their own child answered. The police should crack down on these women before things get out hand.

Nigerians have a knack for taking things into dimensions you can't imagine. By the time they're done with this, who knows what it would have evolved into. If I think they're mad for selling children like chickens I certainly have a right to think so. Everything you say is coloured by your experience with a lady in circumstances not related to this. I CAN condemn a thing if it is wrong, and since this is an online forum there is nowhere else to sit but behind a computer to do so. I'm entitled to my thoughts on an issue, and I think they're heartless to offer a child to a stranger for sale, for a factory worker to act as a love-vendor and have a group she solicits this sort of thing for.

You assume every baby that is sold is sold to an infertile couple? I don't see that in the story. You simply don't KNOW that! What kind of naivete is this, in a society where people use human beings for ritual purposes? Do you have any idea how potent new-born babies are considered by these ritualists, for one stupid reason or the other, and the fresher the child the more 'powerful' the 'juju'? Something about 'purity' and 'just coming from heaven'.Did they ask the reporter his reasons for wanting a child? NO. He was simply told to produce money and the baby was his to take away.

Instead of condemning them I should help them? Find out why someone with a job would have a clique of girls that sell babies for anyone with 150k? Perhaps her job doesn't pay enough? No job satisfaction at the factory? I cannot have compassion for an undeserving lot with the facts of the story as they stand, and with the things I know about what rituals children are used for. I'm not interested in asking them why. There are no justifiable reasons, plain and simple, and the case is half lost with an approach that suggests there are. Perhaps if they had mentioned the reasons they were going into selling babies to strangers, one might then consider the facts. They have ventured none and the ones you insist on providing for them simply isn't in that story. All there is is blind, unreasoning greed and callousness. I should ask them why they're doing it. When one of the infants they sold has been chopped and pureed for some richie rich to fortify himself with, who's asking WHY on behalf of that child?

Can you believe I was rooting for him and not Maximus in Gladiator? He is too supremely talented. Blocked? Thanks.

JeSoul:
Max were you bitten by the enchanted bug?

I don't get it. Did you mean the movie?

Touching story. But what has it to do with the crazies selling children? Are their stories the same? When something is evil and all sorts of excuses are found to justify it, it's entrenched even deeper and it is that much harder to combat. The girls mentioned in the story are employed, or you didn't see factory worker in the article? There's more than those girls at stake, those babies are human and no one has a right to conceive and sell them.A girl who has a baby for her lover in exchange for luxury is very different. The one that chilled me was the pregnant lunatic who was ready to sell the baby to anyone who would pay. Is there anything to indicate in the story that they were starving, is why they're doing this? Did they say so?

There's such a thing as misplaced compassion. That should be going to those children whose fate no one knows once they're sold and handed over. If a thing is evil, there are no two words for it, it is evil. There are people pouring acid on children and burning them alive in Eket because some pastors called them witches. There are parents selling children into a lifetime of servitude. Now this one. It is all we need right now. And justifications and excuses for it. Not a single one of those girls said they went into it because of poverty, or because they were hungry. It's just greed and a horrible callousness against infants that cannot defend themselves.

I deal with kids and friend, I have adopted and I'm adopting like mad and I can't stop because I feel like expanding like a balloon and covering all those wounded kids and protecting and loving them half to death. You have no idea what human beings put them through, the evil and cruelty people are capable of. Justify their baby selling all you want, assume their stories are the same as those of the very different people you've met, when nothing in the story shows any such thing. Keep handing them reasons and excusing the inexcusable.

ThiefOfHearts:
Sawyer could have had a beautiful black woman deal with him and his loud mouth instead of some dorky looking Asian

Go and kick her out and plant yourself in his house na. Shebi you're black. Odaleru. Scatterer of House. Where ya been anyway? No one to fight with here jere.

Good grief? Where's the very long, snippy one on Russell Crowe and his wife? I remember posting the darned thing yesterday. Will have to repost.

He walks off sets if the changes he wants to a script aren't carried out NOW. When confronted he tells you, I am the Greatest actor in the world. He's known for his temper, and for insulting talk show hosts. For instance he grieviously insults a British BAFTA host's mother to his face just before the Oscars, when accepting the BAFTA award for Best Actor. This cost him the Oscar award for Best Actor for his superb performance in A Beautiful Mind, which he otherwise would have won. His loss was Denzel Washinton's gain. And yes, there's the infamous affair with Meg Ryan, which cost her her marraige to actor Dennis Quaid.

But Russell Crowe is a supremely gifted actor. He's also sort of a good guy. Three of his movies were nominated for best Picture and he for Best Actor for three consecutive years. The Insider with Al Pacino, The Gladiator with Joaquin Phoenix and A Beautiful Mind with Jennifer Connelly. The last two won Best Picture. Two other movies of his got Best Picture nominations, the wonderful L.A Confidential, and Master and Commander; The Far Side of the World. But it is as Budd in L.A Confidential and Maximus in Gladiator that I love him best.

Here he is with is wife Danielle Spencer.

texazzpete:
How exactly did you come to the conclusion that its original purpose is not being served in some cases? There are corpers who benefit immensely from the scheme - just as there are some who do not. Either way, the NYSC scheme indirectly serves as a means to provide education to the nation, seeing as how over 60% of the corps members are drafted as teachers in rural communities.
All i see is people crying over every little adversity. It could certainly have been a lot worse.

We're here complaining about NYSC when kids from many other nations go through even more adverse circumstances in the name of National Service.
The federal government has offered the statutory gratuity of N500000 to the family of the dead corps member. That's what they are mandated by law to offer. The Borno State Government offered N2 million naira as compensation, which they are in no way mandated to offer. Your reference to 'well oiled legal system' is frankly illogical. There is no legal responsibility on the part of the Borno State Government for the girl's death.Keep your bias away from your thought processes. Would you insist that the Lagos state government bear responsibility for any and every death in Lagos?If you need me to explain the difference between these two scenarios - and the absurdity of using this as an analogy - i'm afraid there's little i can do for you

You found compulsory military service in some countries on wikipedia, and so NYSC is justifed? Did the Federal Government consult Wikipedia for just such a list before instituting the programme in the first place, did they inform you they factored your wikipedia list into thinking up NYSC? A huge percentage of the countries on your list aren't even African countries, but are historically some of the bloodiest, war-torn countries on the planet. Their issues and priorities certainly differ from Nigeria's. Their instituting compulsory military service somehow obligates Nigeria to copy them in some way? And what about more peaceful countries, similar to Nigeria, where no form of compulsory service is required of fresh graduates? What of those countries?

I mentioned that 2M is a paltry amount to offer the family. And it is. You come up with some maximum amount the govt can give. Does that make the sums involved any less paltry?

You were the one saying by my description of 2M as small, I was putting a price on the girl's life. Compensating a family for loss has nothing to do with the price of life. And my analogy is relevant, since it is the appropriateness of monetary compensation for loved ones lost that is under discussion, not whether the circumstances are similar. I see a reference to the well-oiled legal systems in America and Europe where compensation for human loss is ingrained into the system, is 'illogical' to you. Man.

Just read the yahoo article.Making children swallow cement, bathing them in acid, setting them on fire? God god god god god. Aren't there laws, law enforcement and a government in place in the area? I'm getting tired of being a Nigerian and defending the indefensible. Arbitrary geographical classification I had no hand in. Hopelessly backward country, disgraceful setta people. And of course Nigerians won't step in to save these kids. That's forever the job of Europeans.

They should scrap the useless scheme. It's lost focus and its original purpose isn't being served. What reasons have YOU for wanting it to remain? Offering the family money isn't it. Offering them such a silly amount is even worse somehow. By someone paying, I meant Justice being done one way or the other, CONSEQUENCES, so they don't just make noise for a while and then sweep it under the carpet, until the next person is killed. That's the THIRD TIME a Corper will be murdered in that town for crying out loud. And nothing happened the first two times either.

And please. Cut out the 'putting a price on the girl's life' thing. In some countries with a well-oiled legal system families are compensated for losing loved ones all the time. It has nothing to do with putting a price on the loved one's life. That's why it's called 'compensation', not 'Life purchase' or 'Life Price'. Everyone knows there is no price for a life. When a plane crashed in Nigeria and the airline shelled out to the victims' family, were they 'putting a price' on all the lives lost?

Premature to say her killers knew they could kill with impunity,ehn? I was referring to the typical Northerner's attitude towards the rest of the country, borne out by how many times they have killed with impunity, hiding their hate behind their barbaric religion. I heard of a corper who was murdered in Kano by a few secondary school students. She caught a boy cheating during a test and 'seized' the piece of paper and tore it. He and his friends waylaid her and her small child and cut both their throats. They told people she had torn a page from the Holy Quran to shreds. That was the end of that. Teenagers did that! If that's not 'killing with impunity' I'd like to know what is.

Lol crazy thread

A surrogate mother carries the fertiilised sperm and egg of a couple to term. In no way is it her child and it's not an all comers affair as not everyone who applies to be a surrogate mother is granted that status. It's all proper and monitored and legalised. What these useless, mad women are doing is NOT surrogacy.

And what poverty, when those women had jobs? If they were so desperate they should go into prostitution proper and leave innocent babies out of it. Those babies are human beings and we all started that way. Poverty? What kind of ridiculous justification for something immoral and insane is that? People are selling children. One of them agrees to sell a strange man a pregnancy that isn't his, and it's all right, because it's 'poverty'. Are they the first and only poor in the world? They should go to Sudan and Niger and Ethiopia and learn first hand what poverty is. Are women selling babies in those countries? NO! If they do it in Asia that somehow makes it all right or what? HABA!

He walks off sets if the changes he wants to a script aren't carried out NOW. When confronted he tells you, I am the Greatest actor in the world. He's known for his temper, and for insulting talk show hosts. For instance he grieviously insults a British BAFTA host's mother to his face just before the Oscars, when accepting the BAFTA award for Best Actor. This cost him the Oscar award for Best Actor for his superb performance in A Beautiful Mind, which he otherwise would have won. His loss was Denzel Washinton's gain. And yes, there's the infamous affair with Meg Ryan, which cost her her marriage to actor Dennis Quaid.

But Russell Crowe is a supremely gifted actor. He's also sort of a good guy. Three of his movies were Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and he for Best Actor for three consecutive years. The Insider with Al Pacino, The Gladiator with Joaquin Phoenix and A Beautiful Mind with Jennifer Connelly. The last two won Best Picture. Two other movies of his got Best Picture nominations, the wonderful L.A Confidential, and Master and Commander; The Far Side of the World. But it is as Budd in L.A Confidential and Maximus in Gladiator that I love him best.

Here he is with his wife Danielle Spencer.

They're stupid for offering the poor girl's family 2M.The amount is offensive.If they can, the family should sue the government of that state and NYSC, just so there's a lot of publicity and someone, anyone, pays for this. The poster who said this sort of thing keeps happening because there are ZERO consequences every time, is right.The average Northerner knows he may kill with impunity, esp since his fellow lunatics are in Govt, and this makes the North a danger zone to other Nigerians.And yet they go about unmolested in other parts of the country. It's not right to kill innocent people in retribution.It doesn't make sense.But we should stop letting these people get away with murder time and again. Honestly if anyone generates a petition here to demand justice for the girl and that they scrap that useless NYSC scheme I'll extend a paw and sign it in a sec.

This one isn't surrogacy. It's just people selling babies and it's crude. It's unregulated so they're playing ten-ten with the babies' fate. Anything could happen to them when they're handed over. All those who use human beings for ritual purposes must think they've died and gone to heaven.

If the so-called childless couples in Nigeria are so keen for other people's children they should go to orphanages and adopt. I didn't hear childless couples mentioned in the story and it's no justification for selling new born children like fish in the market. Whick kain nonsense 'survival' makes people do this? Some of the women in the story had jobs. It's just greed and a female conscience gone dead dead dead.

Now where?
Yes. Julia Roberts.
She's winning and smart and funny. Has a smile a kilometre wide and a distinctive laugh. OK she brays like a goshdarned hyena, but who cares? She's the highest grossing female movie star ever, her movies having made well over 2 billion dollars at the box office.

Yeah she's had a LOT of boyfreinds, and sometimes made cameos in their TV shows: Law and Order when she was dating Benjamin Bratt, and Friends, when she was dating Mattew Perry. She also dated Kiefer Sutherland, and broke off their wedding 3 days to the event, Liam Neeson, Dylan McDermott, and Sutherland's buddy Jason Patric (whom you might remember as the lovely officer with the great screen presence alongside Matt Damon in Geronino). She married Lyle Lovett, and the couple were called Beauty and the Beast, surely unfair to the intelligent and impossibly cultured country singer. In 2000 she met cameraman Daniel Moder and the couple have been together ever since. They have three children.

Angela Bassett lends a dignity to movie roles for African American women that is often lacking in Halle Berry's. She's played biopics, portraying Tina Turner in the acclaimed What's Love Gt to Do with it, and Michael Jackson's mother. She was the star in How Stella Got her Grrove Back, Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep and many other movies. She's been with Courtney Vance for 15 years. Unable to conceive they couple were blessed in 2007 with twins by surrogate motherhood.

She's 51 here. Stunning.

The most talented actress alive.
Nominated for Oscars an incredible 15 times. She is DIVINE. The weight behind some of the very best movies in the past few decades. There is no middle to her career because there appears to be no end in sight. All the superlatives in the world do not do her justice.
Here is Meryl Streep with Don Gummer, her husband of thirty one years.

We all know Michelle Pfeiffer. She's lent her fabulously talented presence to such films as Scarface, Dangerous Liaisons, The Witches of Eastwich, Hairspray, I am Sam, and many more. Nominated for three Oscars, Golden Globes and many other awards for her great screen presence and sheer acting chops. Previously married for a decade before, she's been married to David E Kelley for sixteen years. With her husband and very good-looking kids.

"Do yer feel lucky, punk?"
"Go ahead. Make My day."

This living legend and icon of machismo is seared into our consciousness, and there's no letting up. He's hit us in the past few years with a series of Oscar winning and nominated movies, from Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby to Changeling. No praise is too high for this spectacularly talented wonder whose brilliant career has spawned decades and has too many hits and greats to mention. He's a one woman man, and has been in a few long term relationships. Here he is with his wife of over a decade, Dina Ruiz. We love you Clint Eastwood!