Sunday, February 28, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Cabin fever, even outdoors
The temperature has stayed below freezing for 40 days, and I detect significantly less talk about winter wonderland and significantly more madness in the air, including the air coming out of my mouth. There's been snow-worm infestations reported, and some Arctic scorpion problems (learned to identify them from Mingus), along with the more mundane issues like astronomical heating bills and not being able to see more than 10 feet because of the eye-level ¤%&¤/ snow dikes that line every sidewalk. And the serious, ever-present threat of icicles falling on your head while you are navigating the narrow clearance. So far the only serious falling ice injury has occurred in St. Petersburg, in line with the rule of thumb that the really bad things usually happen in Russia, but everybody should look up and be aware in Tallinn, especially with those high facades along Narva mnt or the Old Town with its absentee landlords and the Russian Embassy, which isn't removing its icicles -- it's sharpening them.
Speaking of embassies, I love how the US Embassy on Kentmanni always has a perfectly cleared, bone-dry 4x4 metre square of sidewalk in front of the security valvepod. It is 60 degrees there year-round. Don't ask me how or why they do it. Regime change and season change -- amazing.
Will it stay cold long past the Biblical 40 days, for all six months of the Estonian winter? Well, don't bank on it -- Tartu Ski Marathon is a week away, and sure enough, if I check ilm.ee, already numbers like 0 (as in freezing point) are creeping into the forecast for this Monday. My own prediction is the temperature will return to a depressing 43 degrees F (6 F) around the clock for March and April.
***
In the spirit of the middle bimester of a real Estonian winter, this blog will dedicate February to chaos, rants, and off-the-cuff anything-goes ravings on just about anything. After all, Inno and Irja are posting pornography on their blog with faces of Estonian officials crudely photoshopped on. That's a new step for them, though logical in the grand scheme of things. Must keep up. How to make this blog more sensationalist? I await my ideas!
But first, long, long-unfinished business. An linkscape update coming up soon, maybe tonight. Check the sidebar soon. Plenty of good blogs out there. The blogosphere is changing, fresh blood is everywhere, and it's not even scary. Not so fresh blood in a new package is everywhere, like Livonian Chronicle, which can be top-notch. Lots of blogs that are light and topical and well-written that have been unfairly neglected here. People who have often commented, but whose profile I never thought to check, have good blogs, like Pierce Bacchus. So check the right-hand column for links I think are worth my while -- soon! (Also, please visit our sponsors - in the Google ads box.)
**
Eventually your number comes up. The number being 4 8 15 16 23 42. Ah, Lost. Been watching it. The first and second seasons, though. I'm still mercifully many, many hours away from season six -- which is for now exactly where I want to be. As of early January, I must have been one of the only people on the planet, or in the Western cultural space, not to have ever watched the show, to know nothing about it.
My wife had watched all five seasons, week after week, but I was in an anti-TV phase at the time. Sometimes I would see Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, looking like a young Jerry Garcia with a major head start on Meat Loaf and Mama Cass, and beautiful beaches. But that is all I knew. I dismissed Lost as a shaggy-dog adventure story with some paranormal themes.
Which may have turned out to be absolutely correct, except it is closer to Infinite Jest -- that is, not the novel but the super-addictive videotaped entertainment in that novel. Lost is far from perfect, but still, I have to doff my cap to the writers, extremely belatedly and very low. Some kind of cross-fertilization has taken place between TV and Charlie Kaufman and Quentin Tarantino, whom I admire for several reasons.
There are a few continuity and factual problems and in season 1 at one point I thought several of the writers might have gone off on their own island and failed to confer, but they always postmodernly manage to cover their own tracks.
And reliably, every three episodes or so, the writers write one that is just marvellous. Even profound. Laughagainistan? I crumple it up and weep.
***
Good TV, but I saw a really bad movie for the first time in 2010, only redeemed by the fact that I saw it on a date with my wife. A washed-out one-dimensional effort on the theme of the equally idiotic Billy Crystal movie City Slickers, so weak and unfunny I can't even remember the syntax of the title. I just call it "Morgans". Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker were in it. They're not even old, but I felt they were being trundled out in front of the cameras to do a parody of their own method acting. Actually, Wilford Brimley was trundled out in this movie, as the crusty proprietor of a Wyoming cafe, but I felt worse for Parker and Grant. Hugh Grant looked like he has been partying hard, though oddly he looked OK in jogging shorts. Still, this is probably a good movie for drinking and drinking games.
Speaking of embassies, I love how the US Embassy on Kentmanni always has a perfectly cleared, bone-dry 4x4 metre square of sidewalk in front of the security valvepod. It is 60 degrees there year-round. Don't ask me how or why they do it. Regime change and season change -- amazing.
Will it stay cold long past the Biblical 40 days, for all six months of the Estonian winter? Well, don't bank on it -- Tartu Ski Marathon is a week away, and sure enough, if I check ilm.ee, already numbers like 0 (as in freezing point) are creeping into the forecast for this Monday. My own prediction is the temperature will return to a depressing 43 degrees F (6 F) around the clock for March and April.
***
In the spirit of the middle bimester of a real Estonian winter, this blog will dedicate February to chaos, rants, and off-the-cuff anything-goes ravings on just about anything. After all, Inno and Irja are posting pornography on their blog with faces of Estonian officials crudely photoshopped on. That's a new step for them, though logical in the grand scheme of things. Must keep up. How to make this blog more sensationalist? I await my ideas!
But first, long, long-unfinished business. An linkscape update coming up soon, maybe tonight. Check the sidebar soon. Plenty of good blogs out there. The blogosphere is changing, fresh blood is everywhere, and it's not even scary. Not so fresh blood in a new package is everywhere, like Livonian Chronicle, which can be top-notch. Lots of blogs that are light and topical and well-written that have been unfairly neglected here. People who have often commented, but whose profile I never thought to check, have good blogs, like Pierce Bacchus. So check the right-hand column for links I think are worth my while -- soon! (Also, please visit our sponsors - in the Google ads box.)
**
Eventually your number comes up. The number being 4 8 15 16 23 42. Ah, Lost. Been watching it. The first and second seasons, though. I'm still mercifully many, many hours away from season six -- which is for now exactly where I want to be. As of early January, I must have been one of the only people on the planet, or in the Western cultural space, not to have ever watched the show, to know nothing about it.
My wife had watched all five seasons, week after week, but I was in an anti-TV phase at the time. Sometimes I would see Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, looking like a young Jerry Garcia with a major head start on Meat Loaf and Mama Cass, and beautiful beaches. But that is all I knew. I dismissed Lost as a shaggy-dog adventure story with some paranormal themes.
Which may have turned out to be absolutely correct, except it is closer to Infinite Jest -- that is, not the novel but the super-addictive videotaped entertainment in that novel. Lost is far from perfect, but still, I have to doff my cap to the writers, extremely belatedly and very low. Some kind of cross-fertilization has taken place between TV and Charlie Kaufman and Quentin Tarantino, whom I admire for several reasons.
There are a few continuity and factual problems and in season 1 at one point I thought several of the writers might have gone off on their own island and failed to confer, but they always postmodernly manage to cover their own tracks.
And reliably, every three episodes or so, the writers write one that is just marvellous. Even profound. Laughagainistan? I crumple it up and weep.
***
Good TV, but I saw a really bad movie for the first time in 2010, only redeemed by the fact that I saw it on a date with my wife. A washed-out one-dimensional effort on the theme of the equally idiotic Billy Crystal movie City Slickers, so weak and unfunny I can't even remember the syntax of the title. I just call it "Morgans". Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker were in it. They're not even old, but I felt they were being trundled out in front of the cameras to do a parody of their own method acting. Actually, Wilford Brimley was trundled out in this movie, as the crusty proprietor of a Wyoming cafe, but I felt worse for Parker and Grant. Hugh Grant looked like he has been partying hard, though oddly he looked OK in jogging shorts. Still, this is probably a good movie for drinking and drinking games.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
I murdered Stalin on FB
I recently received a Facebook friend request from Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili Stalin.
Yes, I'm aware: alter egos are proliferating on FB; it's become a miniature version of the Internet with trolls and even viruses running amok. Everybody can have a second joke profile, it seems.
Still, who knows? Maybe it WAS Stalin. People come back. The rumour in this case was that the Iosif Stalin page was created by a bunch of Italian students. And, you may know what happened in one of Umberto Eco's novels -- a bunch of academic types fed a hodge-podge of classic conspiracy theories into a computer...and they became true.
So my first reaction was to become frightened. Besides killing 40 million in a detached, banal manner, this guy probably started the whole tradition of polonium ingestion and brutality that persists to this day in Russia. He's the kind of guy who's not smart enough to invent a gas chamber but will get envious when he hears someone else has done it and takes it out on everyone around him -- before maybe stealing the gas chamber for his own use.
I checked Stalin's page. Yup, born in 1953. Information on secondary school attended. A pretty avuncular looking official portrait as his profile pic, exactly what Stalin would choose. the silly moustache, the hair that has coincidentally always struck me as Reaganesque (sorry, Reagan), the trick of the eyebrows and creases making the eyes appear halfway intelligent. Not much "progress" in the FB profile sense of the word.
I checked the names of his 12 friends. The names (Strauss, Fusfus) sounded like a pack of fellow travellers and existentialist professors.
My next reaction was to get angry. A friend request from Stalin - how dare he? It had that "my-reputation-precedes-me" air of many a FB friend request and didn't even include a personal message. Here's this guy who slaughters hundreds of thousands of my countrymen by proxy, and now wants to be my FB friend in his afterlife -- without so much as an apology or an explanation about how he found Jesus or something. Maybe we're too connected these days; Stalin couldn't be that obtuse or brazen as to approach an Estonian with a request, could he?
I went to the Friend notifications and saw that there was no "Decline" button. There was only an "accept" and "ignore". It would have to do. I "ignored" him. I nearly broke my mouse ignoring him. It was like Eli Roth in Inglourious Basterds, the guy with the baseball bat. I went into a frenzy of total disregard for Stalin.
**
I had second thoughts about my slaying of Stalin. After all, I was a believer in "there is nothing to fear but fear itself" -- and I don't think highly of revenge as a concept, either.
Of course, an online "friendship" with Stalin would have been hard to explain away to most of my contacts. But everybody's got one black sheep among their FB friends -- it's one of the first rules of Facebook. (Stalin would stretch the definition, admittedly.)
It would have given me access to post on Stalin's wall. I could write whatever popped into my mind, things like "hey, bro, last weekend was cool, we got to do Ukrainian mixed grill again".
I could upload Picasso's portrait of Stalin and tag Stalin in it, just to pester Stalin.
And of course, I could expose Stalin in the ultimate way, by suggesting Hitler to Stalin as a Facebook friend. That would be the big question: a possible online reconciliation with Hitler. Smart money is that four little years (1941-1945) and another 20 million are no impediment. It doesn't change the fact that, for Stalin, Hitler was role model and maybe even the love of his life. Stalin would accept Hitler's invitation in a heartbeat.
I searched Facebook for Hitler. But Hitler wasn't on Facebook! Other than a viral clip of Bruno Ganz playing Hitler as fake funny subtitles flashed. How unfair. Stalin had a fan page -- obviously there long before his profile -- with thousands of fans. "Other Public Figure." But no such page for Hitler. And no profile page. Was there a FB ban on Hitler pages or something? I Googled Hitler in Facebook. No, nothing on a ban, as far as I could see.
This wasn't fair to Stalin. Stalin could be friends with Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha and Mao, but not Hitler? Not that I cared about what was fair to Stalin, but if he wasn't able to consummate his deadly embrace with Hitler in cyberspace, the results could be catastrophic!
I entertained the explanation that the Hitler profile page and fan page must have been relegated to some special closed section of Facebook. Stalin's page should be there, too.
So I reported the Stalin page as miscategorized.
Then I got angry that I had merely reported the page as miscategorized. Stalin deserved worse.
So I reported him again on general principle for inciting hatred.
Just in case it was a fake page, I reported it as a fake page.
I had now reported Stalin three times to FB.
**
My friend says I did a bad thing, something that could get the Italian undergrads in trouble with Facebook. My friend says Stalin should be allowed to have a page, so people can mock him. I understand his logic. But what I did is the only way to beat him back underground. People had to wait over 70 years - way too long - for him to finally die, and it's way too dangerous to let him start going viral like this.
Stalin isn't the Comte de Germain or Cagliostro, folks. He's Stalin. You don't want Stalin living for hundreds of years in cyberspace, or bad things will eventually begin to happen. Maybe even to your personal data. Trust me on this.
So if you see Stalin on the social networks in a way that's clearly not like Bruno Ganz in that Hitler clip (i.e. funny) or historical, report him as inappropriate. Let's see if we can beat him down.
Yes, I'm aware: alter egos are proliferating on FB; it's become a miniature version of the Internet with trolls and even viruses running amok. Everybody can have a second joke profile, it seems.
Still, who knows? Maybe it WAS Stalin. People come back. The rumour in this case was that the Iosif Stalin page was created by a bunch of Italian students. And, you may know what happened in one of Umberto Eco's novels -- a bunch of academic types fed a hodge-podge of classic conspiracy theories into a computer...and they became true.
So my first reaction was to become frightened. Besides killing 40 million in a detached, banal manner, this guy probably started the whole tradition of polonium ingestion and brutality that persists to this day in Russia. He's the kind of guy who's not smart enough to invent a gas chamber but will get envious when he hears someone else has done it and takes it out on everyone around him -- before maybe stealing the gas chamber for his own use.
I checked Stalin's page. Yup, born in 1953. Information on secondary school attended. A pretty avuncular looking official portrait as his profile pic, exactly what Stalin would choose. the silly moustache, the hair that has coincidentally always struck me as Reaganesque (sorry, Reagan), the trick of the eyebrows and creases making the eyes appear halfway intelligent. Not much "progress" in the FB profile sense of the word.
I checked the names of his 12 friends. The names (Strauss, Fusfus) sounded like a pack of fellow travellers and existentialist professors.
My next reaction was to get angry. A friend request from Stalin - how dare he? It had that "my-reputation-precedes-me" air of many a FB friend request and didn't even include a personal message. Here's this guy who slaughters hundreds of thousands of my countrymen by proxy, and now wants to be my FB friend in his afterlife -- without so much as an apology or an explanation about how he found Jesus or something. Maybe we're too connected these days; Stalin couldn't be that obtuse or brazen as to approach an Estonian with a request, could he?
I went to the Friend notifications and saw that there was no "Decline" button. There was only an "accept" and "ignore". It would have to do. I "ignored" him. I nearly broke my mouse ignoring him. It was like Eli Roth in Inglourious Basterds, the guy with the baseball bat. I went into a frenzy of total disregard for Stalin.
**
I had second thoughts about my slaying of Stalin. After all, I was a believer in "there is nothing to fear but fear itself" -- and I don't think highly of revenge as a concept, either.
Of course, an online "friendship" with Stalin would have been hard to explain away to most of my contacts. But everybody's got one black sheep among their FB friends -- it's one of the first rules of Facebook. (Stalin would stretch the definition, admittedly.)
It would have given me access to post on Stalin's wall. I could write whatever popped into my mind, things like "hey, bro, last weekend was cool, we got to do Ukrainian mixed grill again".
I could upload Picasso's portrait of Stalin and tag Stalin in it, just to pester Stalin.
And of course, I could expose Stalin in the ultimate way, by suggesting Hitler to Stalin as a Facebook friend. That would be the big question: a possible online reconciliation with Hitler. Smart money is that four little years (1941-1945) and another 20 million are no impediment. It doesn't change the fact that, for Stalin, Hitler was role model and maybe even the love of his life. Stalin would accept Hitler's invitation in a heartbeat.
I searched Facebook for Hitler. But Hitler wasn't on Facebook! Other than a viral clip of Bruno Ganz playing Hitler as fake funny subtitles flashed. How unfair. Stalin had a fan page -- obviously there long before his profile -- with thousands of fans. "Other Public Figure." But no such page for Hitler. And no profile page. Was there a FB ban on Hitler pages or something? I Googled Hitler in Facebook. No, nothing on a ban, as far as I could see.
This wasn't fair to Stalin. Stalin could be friends with Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha and Mao, but not Hitler? Not that I cared about what was fair to Stalin, but if he wasn't able to consummate his deadly embrace with Hitler in cyberspace, the results could be catastrophic!
I entertained the explanation that the Hitler profile page and fan page must have been relegated to some special closed section of Facebook. Stalin's page should be there, too.
So I reported the Stalin page as miscategorized.
Then I got angry that I had merely reported the page as miscategorized. Stalin deserved worse.
So I reported him again on general principle for inciting hatred.
Just in case it was a fake page, I reported it as a fake page.
I had now reported Stalin three times to FB.
**
My friend says I did a bad thing, something that could get the Italian undergrads in trouble with Facebook. My friend says Stalin should be allowed to have a page, so people can mock him. I understand his logic. But what I did is the only way to beat him back underground. People had to wait over 70 years - way too long - for him to finally die, and it's way too dangerous to let him start going viral like this.
Stalin isn't the Comte de Germain or Cagliostro, folks. He's Stalin. You don't want Stalin living for hundreds of years in cyberspace, or bad things will eventually begin to happen. Maybe even to your personal data. Trust me on this.
So if you see Stalin on the social networks in a way that's clearly not like Bruno Ganz in that Hitler clip (i.e. funny) or historical, report him as inappropriate. Let's see if we can beat him down.
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