Istanbul pictures from our pre-Marta years - 2003, 2004, and 2005. (This selection is my birthday present for Misha, actually.)

Moscow's complicated relationship with what is often known collectively as "Kavkaz" here:

Kyiv:

Another random snapshot - same day, June 7, Podil:

June 7, 2010 - Besarabka:

A totally random picture - St. Pete, mid-summer of 2004:



What I really miss now is having the time to walk around, taking pictures - and having the time and energy to post those pictures afterwards, and even to write something about them...

In between everything else (and that's A LOT right now), I'm reading this wonderful book about languages - The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher.

One of the first examples in this book comes from Turkish - an illustration of one of the "many exotic and outlandish features" of foreign languages (p. 2):

[...] The Turkish word şehirlileştiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than 'you are one of those whom we can't turn into a town-dweller'. (In case you are wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together - most of its components cannot even stand up on their own.) [...]

I've already seen something similar in one of my (many) Turkish textbooks - which promises to teach you Turkish in three months, but just scared me away by providing the following two "monstrosities" in Lesson 1, Part 5, which deals with seemingly innocent "vowel harmony":

Değiştiremediklerimizden misiniz?
Являешься ли ты одним из тех, кого мы были неспособны изменить?
[Are you one of those whom we've been incapable of changing?]

***

Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mısınız?
Разве ты являешься одним из тех, кого мы не смогли европеизировать?
[Aren't you one of those whom we haven't been able to europeize?]

***

Two more quotes from Deutscher on crazy irregularities in other languages - hilarious, got me laughing out loud, which doesn't happen all too often now, and that's why I have to preserve them here, for future reference... :)

English (pp. 40-41):

[...] Native speakers may be blithely unaware of the chaos that reigns in the English verbal system; not so anyone who has had to learn it at school. Here is a rhyme I wrote in memory of my frustrations:

The teacher claimed it was so plain,

I only had to use my brain.

She said the past of throw was threw,

The past of grow - of course - was grew,

So flew must be the past of fly,

And now, my boy, your turn to try.

But when I trew,

I had no clue,

If mow was mew

Like know and knew

(Or is it knowed

Like snow and snowed?)

The teacher frowned at me and said

The past of feed was - plainly - fed.

Fed up, I knew then what I ned:

I took a break, and out I snoke,

She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?)

With raging anger out she broke:

Your ignorance you want to hide?

Tell me the past form of collide!

But how on earth should I decide

If it's collid

(Like hide and hid),

Or else - from all that I surmose,

The past of rise was simply rose,

And that of ride was surely rode, 

So of collide must be collode?

Oh damn these English verbs, I thought

The whole thing absolutely stought!

Of English I have had enough,

These verbs of yours are far too tough.

Bolt upright in my chair I sat,

And said to her 'that's that' - I quat.

And German (p. 43) - via Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad, "an appendix entitled 'The Awful German Language'":

[...] Twain could not understand why, for instance, German rain should be a 'he', a German fishwife should be an 'it', and a German fish-scale a 'she'. So after a few more pages of rant, he went on to recount the following touching 'Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate', purportedly translated literally from the German:

It is a bleak day. Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth - will she swallow her? No, the fishwife's brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin - which he eats, himself, as his reward... [...]

The "audit" scandal - crazy, in many ways, including this (Kyiv Post):

[...] When asked how much tax payers’ money was and will be spent on the U.S. lawyers and investigators, Plato Cacheris with Trout Cacheris law firm said “it was much less than the money stolen” and would not elaborate further.

In turn, Ukraine’s Finance Ministry also refused to reveal any details, calling it a commercial secret.

A senior government official told the Kyiv Post that $2 million in state budget funds had been spent on the first stage of the audit.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the issue, said the aim was to recover a sum up to 100 times larger than the firms’ fees.

The official added that two further stages of investigations are planned, which will cost roughly the same each.

“So far we have done what we needed to. But there is a high possibility the Cabinet will ask us to do some other things,” Cacheris told Kyiv Post.

And this:

[...] Kroll and Akin Gump are not new to Ukraine.

After the murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, Kroll was hired in 2001 by then-President Leonid Kuchma’s son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk to probe the case. In the end the firm issued a report saying Kuchma wasn’t involved, which was widely viewed an attempt to absolve him from suspicion arising from alleged discussions he had with senior officials about dealing with the journalist.

Akin Gump lawyers have also had experience working in Ukraine.

The firm’s lawyers have in the past defended Ukraine’s richest oligarchs and strongest Yanukovych’s backers – Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, and gas tycoon Dmytro Firtash.

At times these firms have pressured investigative journalists who write stories about both Ukrainian businessmen by threatening to file lawsuits against them. [...]

A chess game at Shevchenko Park:

In the much-discussed New Yorker piece on digital activism, Malcolm Gladwell writes this, among other things:

[...] As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. [...]

Yet, here's what Evgeny Morozov was writing at the time of the Moldova riots, in April 2009, on his Foreign Policy's Net.Effect blog (the post - titled "Moldova's Twitter Revolution" - has since been "archived," and, strangely and quite annoyingly, one is required to register to be able to read it, and this is why I'm quoting from my own GV post):

[...] Will we remember the events that are now unfolding in Chisinau not by the color of the flags but by the social-networking technology used?

If you asked me about the prospects of a Twitter-driven revolution in a low-tech country like Moldova a week ago, my answer would probably be a qualified "no". Today, however, I am no longer as certain. If you bothered to check the most popular discussions on Twitter in the last 48 hours, you may have stumbled upon a weird threat of posts marked with a tag "#pman" (it's currently listed in Twitter's "Trending Topics" along with "Apple Store", Eminem, and Easter).

No, "pman" is not short for "pacman"; it stands for "Piata Marii Adunari Nationale", which is Romanian name for the biggest square in Chisinau, Moldova's capital. [...]

[...]

Ever since yesterday's announcement that Moldova's communists have won enough votes to form a government in Sunday's elections, Moldova's progressive youth took to the streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs. [...]

[...]

The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate - I've been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes - and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with "pman" (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English). In the last few hours there have also emerged several "smart" aggregators of posts on the subject, like this one - they have to contextualize what exactly is happening -- and this one for YouTube videos. Many blog posts are also being updated in real-time - minute by minute - check this one. There are also a plenty of videos on YouTube and photos, including those uploaded to Facebook. [...]

Later, however, Morozov revised his position (again, the quote is from another of my April 2009 GV posts):

[...] 3. It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It's really good that the Moldovan students didn't organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world. [...]

***

Honestly, I find this fixation on the "tools" a bit frustrating. "The rest of the world" seems to be more concerned with whether it was correct to call the events in Moldova a "Twitter Revolution" or not; what actually happened on the ground at the time of the riots and later seems to be of minor interest.

I wouldn't blame "the rest of the world" for it too much, though: after all, the mess we are capable of producing it often too difficult to follow, too irrational, and too "local."

For the same reason, it's our own fault, too, that "the rest of the world" chose to focus on Yulia Tymoshenko's braid, legs and ass after Maidan was over: we just don't make sense otherwise. Even to ourselves.

As for Iran, which is also mentioned in Gladwell's piece, Michael Jackson's untimely death contributed to the thinning of the "rest of the world" crowd in summer 2009 as much as anything else.

"The Orphans' Revolution" seems to be a much better term for what happened in Moldova in April 2009. Here's what Dumitru Minzarari wrote back then:

[...] Their protests were labeled the «Orphans’ Revolution» because under the Communist government close to a third of Moldovan citizens (their parents) went abroad to earn money for a living.

That is another face of Moldovan protests, where kids got into streets because their parents betrayed them and their European dream proved to be a fake, because “EUROPE DOES NOT NEED MOLDOVA”. [...]

And, Twitter or not, the "orphans" are still there, unfortunately.

Looks like today we've had this year's last truly warm day - and Marta and I are leaving Pushcha Vodytsya/Pushcha-Ozerna in two days... We've stayed here two months...

Irpin, a town 15 minutes away from Kyiv.

They still have the 3rd International Street:





And Sovnarkom Street:



And Karl Marx Street:



And the Ukrainian and Rebel Song Festival is taking place in Irpin right now - Haydamaka.ua - an event that's making some Party of Regions folks feel extremely paranoid:



The venue for the festival is the local Victory Park:

I took this picture from a cab a few days ago - a banner on the building of the Ukrainian People's Party on Shevchenko Boulevard, calling to dispose of education minister Dmytro Tabachnyk - send him to the trash bin. The banner's been there for a long time, I guess, but I've been more or less ignoring our "big" politics since the winter election, never had it in me to bother photographing it. But this time we were waiting for the green light right next to this building, so I quickly opened the window and took the picture, just in case.

The cab driver - speaking in Ukrainian, not Russian - asked me whether I really thought that a trash bin was where Tabachnyk belonged. Yes, I said. The driver continued: What about the education minister before Tabachnyk - who was it, by the way? - was he any better? I told him that if we were talking about Ivan Vakarchuk, then yes, he was better, a lot more presentable. The driver didn't seem to share my view. I assumed he was a Party of Regions fan and explained to him that Tabachnyk, among other things, was actually hurting whatever remained of his own party's image, by saying and writing things that made it appear as if the party represented some regions of Ukraine and not others. He even hurt the feelings of his comrade, Hanna Herman, I added, when he said all those things about Western Ukraine, where she is originally from.

I almost forgot about this conversation, but saw this item (RUS) on Korrespondent.net today - Volodymyr Yavorivsky's comment (UKR) on Tabachnyk's latest fart (RUS), which seems to target writer Yuri Andrukhovych more than anyone else - and decided to make a note here.

Yavorivsky, who is a BYuT MP, calls Tabachnyk "a politically sick person" and a foreign "agent" - and makes a special note of Tabachnyk's ethnicity:

[...] The worst thing is that this is done by a representative of the Jewish ethnicity. I'm surprised that the Jews themselves aren't protesting and demanding his resignation. Because he is casting a shadow on all the Jewish people. Every Ukrainian today knows perfectly well what Tabachnyk - who is pretending to be a peaceful rabbi - really is. [...]

Nothing's changed since I last paid attention: as before, most of our politicians, regardless of the political force they belong to, are so much better at making idiots of themselves than at moving the country in the right direction.

Ten years since Georgy Gongadze's disappearance today.

Yuri Kravchenko, who is said to have committed a suicide in 2005 by shooting himself in the head twice, is in the news again, as the one who ordered to kill Gongadze (UKR).

A few months ago, I found a tennis magazine near my mailbox, picked it up and ran into a piece about an "international" junior tennis tournament that was launched in 2008 in Kravchenko's memory by his daughter and a charitable foundation named after him.

Kravchenko Cup. This past spring, the tournament was held for the third time, just outside Kyiv.

I meant to write about it here, but kept getting distracted. Today, I decided to google it, and here's their site - http://kravchenko-cup.com.ua/ (RUS).

Two sentences about Kravchenko from the text on the tournament's history (it is making me sick to try translating the rest - and today it would be a sacrilegious thing to do):

[...] A statesman who was used to thinking globally, Yuri Kravchenko understood that in order to eliminate crime, much attention had to be paid to the development of sports. He thought that it would help thousands of children to follow a healthy and happy path. [...]

Bastards.

I love this blog dearly, but keep cheating on it.

Tumblr is where I am most of the time now.

I moved there after all my iPhone Twitter apps started acting up, refusing to let me in. I still have no idea why it happened. At some point, I lost my patience and deleted them all. I used TweetDeck for a while, but it kept crashing, so I deleted it, too. I continue to post on Twitter occasionally from my computer. But when I'm not home, I post my iPhone pictures on Tumblr. These posts are automatically mirrored on Twitter and Facebook. And there's a sidebar Twitter feed on this blog as well.

I can't figure out the commenting system on Tumblr - I don't think there is any - but that's a minor problem, I guess.

I sort of hate this chaos, but can't do anything about it. And I really enjoy my new freedom from the 140 characters limit - an addiction.

Some of the places where I might be when I'm online but not here:

- Tumblr

- Twitter
- Twitpic

- Flickr

- Facebook

- Global Voices Online
- Work Log

- Linklog