Top Diaries

If your Remora if could be,
we'd glide together, swimmingly,
all in some palméd tropic bay,
if you but were my Manta Ray.

(runs)

by PIGL (stevec@boreal.gmail@com) on Sat Jul 26th, 2008 at 09:06:01 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I was chased to shore by a sting ray when I was a little girl, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. Also, my greatest fear is drowning. I'd rather be eaten alive by wolves than drown. I can't really think of anything more terrifying. Also, I am a Virgo, an earth sign. (Bring it on, J!) So, as much as the idea having a school of cleanerfish following me around and keeping me beautiful is intriguing, I am afraid I cannot be anyone's Manta Ray.

Also. I am NOT a bottom feeder!

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 11:44:35 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Îf you'll be my Manta Ray,.... (none / 1)

The struggle to resist the sureness of death would be the same for drowning as for wolves. The actual process of death though, is much faster in drowning - so I understand. The first lungful underwater causes no coughing or choking, but a gentle descent into suspended animation and, soon, blackness.

Being ripped to shreds by wolves over a period of several minutes after the acceptance of the sureness of death, holds far less attraction. ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:19:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I'd easily prefer acute prolonged pain over lungs filling with water. It's a phobia. It's not meant to be rational.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:43:26 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Not rational (none / 1)

and not a choice either, when the time comes ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 03:22:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Îf you'll be my Manta Ray,.... (none / 1)

<Thought Police notes proposal for suspect #38020083455's final re-education programme in Room 101>

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 04:39:50 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Manta Rays are gentle filter feeders, who strain yummy plankton from the salty briny deep. They are not slimy gross indiscriminant bottom feeders, like your flounders, and lobsters. They also tolerate free riders, like Remora, who apparently they do ow harm particularly to their hosts, but I would not have one for dinner (well, not as a guest).

by PIGL (stevec@boreal.gmail@com) on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 09:21:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (4.00 / 2)

"In the interests of safety they didn't come out to work -- the people are scared by the invasion of bears," the spokesman said.
A bear killed two geologists at the worksite on July 18, officials said.

The one and only Soviet horror-adventure-action film I saw (and it was a good one) was about a hunt for a man-eating bear in Siberia. (Featuring: endless forests, endless tundra, endless swamps.) Where the final twist was that the man-eating bear was so hard to track because it was two man-eating bears.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Sat Jul 26th, 2008 at 03:35:34 PM EST

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (none / 0)

They're only eating humans because they don't have enough fish, probably because of global warming. I would probably be eaten alive by a bear if I were to encounter one. Because I don't think they are scary at all. I think they're cute, precious. Even the big ones. I think I could befriend a bear.

I really hate it when they put them on a leash and make them dance for money. Have they outlawed that yet?

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 11:49:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (4.00 / 3)

That's usually called journalism.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:47:45 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (none / 0)

Being eaten alive by a bear would be no fun. They look cute and cuddly, but they are very scary, even the black bears. I'd rather be eaten by a grizzly, because you'd be dead much quicker. I am a little afraid of bears, and so are most people who work in the bush. Think of them as curious, short sighted tigers who startle easily, are always hungry, and are not really afraid of anything. Non-stripy, humpy tigers, who not very graceful, but can run much faster than you.

by PIGL (stevec@boreal.gmail@com) on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 03:38:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (none / 1)

I'm surprised bears don't kill more people than they do: when we were in the Rockies for a week a few years ago (actually, lots of years ago, yikes!) I saw at least three instances of people doing things so stupid that I'm surprised they survived - like approaching the bear cub by the side of the road so they could take pictures of their kid with it (where's Mommy Bear???) or chasing a black bear around with a video camera at short range. At least I had a 500mm and was pretty far away.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 03:45:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds Ends: Manta Ray of Political Analysis (none / 1)

Met a geologist who was part of an anual research project mapping the rocks of some parts of Canada. One of their crew had woken one morning to find a Bear chewing on his Legs through his sleeping bag

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 03:58:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds & Ends: shchi and kotlety (none / 1)

people raised on shchi and kotlety.

As part of my college (mis?)education I learned a little ditty: shchi da kasha, pischa nasha "Kotlety" seems like a big step up. Do you know the context of the little ditty I learned?

Wonderful diary, BTW.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jul 27th, 2008 at 03:48:49 PM EST

Re: Odds &amp; Ends: shchi and kotlety (none / 1)

Standard meatless fare of peasants all over the word, nothing more, nothing less.

by Sargon on Sun Jul 27th, 2008 at 04:37:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds &amp;amp; Ends: shchi and kotlety (none / 0)

I was wondering if it was something specific to the civil war period or what. Our text books were published by the Soviet Union, but I think the ditty might have come from the instructor, but I can't remember.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Sun Jul 27th, 2008 at 07:19:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds & Ends: shchi and kotlety (none / 0)

I think it's much earlier than the Civil War

by Sargon on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 04:51:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Odds &amp; Ends: shchi and kotlety (none / 0)

"Kotlety" seems like a big step up.

I don't know. At least you know what's in the shchi and kasha. FWIW, I love cabbage soup, so I don't judge anyone for their "peasant" food. And I think I'd have to have a bowl of borscht if I could choose my last meal. In fact, I could live off the stuff. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is in cooking school, who was lamenting the popular attitude towards beets in in this country... But mystery meat cutlets freak me out!

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:00:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Off-topic but... (4.00 / 2)

...odds & ends that might interest you. So yesterday I was at the get-together at my sisters' where they showed pictures of their Moscow visit and told stories.

That about the concrete buildings proved a mis-communication, of course. But my sister, her boyfriend and their little child, as well as their host, and a couple of visiting relatives all fit into one 60 m² apartment of one concrete apartment block. At that get-together, there was allegedly a toast every two minutes, ending in scenes reminding of 4...

On politics, they say everyone said that the government is hard at work to build the New Russia image, and that as part of it, there is an effort to remove old Soviet and communist symbols where they aren't historically protected. The closure of Lenin's mausoleum is allegedly a decided matter (on which they confirm what I heard elsewhere, that most locals think the display of Lenin's mummy is something silly). They also listened to rants to the tune that Lenin & the communists have ruined Russia (uhm, was what was there before really that good? Not to mention the ruin by the Nazis?)

Moscow is said to be very expensive, but while they confirmed that for real estate (that 60m² concrete block apartment was worth more than a 200m² house in a posh district here), they say everything else was much cheaper than in Budapest, except for a trendy café with bad service. Speaking of public places, they say there was music from megaphones from the shopping streets to through the apartment blocks to the village in which a relative had a dacha. (I knew this madness from Czechoslovakia, where it is going out of fashion since.)

They photographed all kinds of public transport for me, praising the inside of the new Elektrichka; but just to the airport, they thought a taxi is more convenient with a child than the airport train links.

And this will surely make you happy: back to the airport, the taxi driver asked them: "Why do you go back to the EU? The EU is finished. But here we have a boom, there are lots of unexploited opportunities!"

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 06:40:22 AM EST

But my sister, her boyfriend and their little child, as well as their host, and a couple of visiting relatives all fit into one 60 m² apartment of one concrete apartment block. At that get-together, there was allegedly a toast every two minutes, ending in scenes reminding of 4...

I'd taken this to be a pretty widespread phenomenon, as I've experienced is countless times both in Russia and here in Chicago, among Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans... You mean this completely mad tradition doesn't extend to Hungary? I'm surprised. They say it's a result of Communism, where people holed up in their small communal apt kitchens to let loose, discuss life, etc. But there are similar scenes in 19th Cent. literature, so I don't know what is the origin of this type of soiree. Endless toasts, fire-code violations, and something almost but not exactly like a hostage situation (getting up and leaving in the middle of it is simply unheard of!) seem to be the defining characteristics of these events.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 12:17:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

You mean this completely mad tradition doesn't extend to Hungary?

What comes closest to it starts with "...but don't leave before you tried our homebrewn pálinka...", where you have to know that home-made pálinka is said to be about the fastest way to ruin by alcoholism (worse than vodka). Toasts are involved, but may not be necessary. But this tradition survives most strongly not in Hungary but among the Szeklers (a subgroup of ethnic Hungarians in Transsylvania). Being an abstainer myself, on the rare occasions I meet upon the tradition, I do manage to escape these downward spirals, though :-)

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 28th, 2008 at 04:34:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I experienced that once. In 2002, I was invited as a speaker in a conference organised by the Privolzhsky Federal District in Nizhny Novgorod. It started at the end of the conference by a toast-session around a huge table with a few things to eat and a lot to drink. Each one of the 40 conference participants had to make a toast (and it was impossible to fake drinking...). I waited until the twentieth to make my speech (so I was sure everybody was still able to listen, but dizzy enough not to remember what I would say) and I made a very sentimental speech about our common culture (quoting Dostoevsky and Bulgakov) and about our common destiny... It was a great success!

It ended very late in a tiny office inside the beautiful Nizhny Novgorod's Kremlin after many more toasts with a group of totally drunk collaborators of Serguei Kirienko (Putin's representative in the Volga Federal District)...

That's my only experience of Russia so far, and it's a very surrealistic and good memory...

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

by Melanchthon on Thu Aug 7th, 2008 at 04:37:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Russian MFA Information and Press Department Commentary in Connection with the Signing by the US President of the Proclamation on Captive Nations Week, 2008

Great story! Very common "real" Russian experience. Bonus points for getting drunk with Sergei Kirienko's men.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Thu Aug 7th, 2008 at 04:50:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Off-topic but... (4.00 / 2)

On politics, they say everyone said that the government is hard at work to build the New Russia image, and that as part of it, there is an effort to remove old Soviet and communist symbols where they aren't historically protected. The closure of Lenin's mausoleum is allegedly a decided matter (on which they confirm what I heard elsewhere, that most locals think the display of Lenin's mummy is something silly). They also listened to rants to the tune that Lenin & the communists have ruined Russia (uhm, was what was there before really that good? Not to mention the ruin by the Nazis?)

Must be just that people they were talking to were anti-communists. There may be too many streets and monuments dedicated to revolutionaries, but attempting to rewrite history 90 years after the fact or to re-fight a virtual civil war is a bit stupid.

Orthodox church made a few noises recently about communism (I understand that this must be coming from the Foreign Russian Orthodox church which formally reunited with Russian Orthodox) and general tone of the blog/media comments was that church is risking followers if it is to push for anti-communist campaign: for one, the church is overstepping boundaries by talking politics, and secondly, communists left the church and religion alone, and church should do the same for the communists.

by blackhawk on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 12:51:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Off-topic but... (4.00 / 2)

Talking about "official":

Last week US President George Bush signed a regular proclamation on the theme of "captive nations," with which he annually comes up on the basis of a law adopted way back in the Cold War era. Well, it's business as usual, but this time around one "novelty" has appeared: quite unambiguously the equal sign is put between Nazi fascism and Soviet communism, which are now coupled as a "single evil" of the 20th century.
By the way, one cannot but see that such assessments simply feed the efforts of those, who for political and selfish ends are striving to falsify the facts and rewrite history. All this takes place against the backdrop of the surprising tolerance being shown in the United States toward those who in a number of European countries are trying to whitewash "their own" Nazi accomplices.

by blackhawk on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 12:55:26 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Off-topic but... (4.00 / 2)

At what point did Nazism and the Soviet Union/Communism become interchangeable evils?

I remember being taught that both were baaaad growing up, but there seems to be a recent concerted effort to link the two indelibly. Which seems a bit rich to me. And kinda weird since, you know, the Soviet Union is now defunct and it seems the time has passed for propaganda and demonization. Seems like this would be the time to begin to look back and try to understand what happened, why it happened, what can be learned from it. Also, it seems pointedly aimed at Russia, solely Russia (not countries in which some people collaborated with Russia, not places like Ukraine, not Communist countries that, uhm, still exist, etc.) and at all of Russia, as if it were some monolithic entity collectively responsible for everything that happened. Also, and this is probably what gets me the most, Nazism required human rights violations, atrocities. The extermination of ethnic peoples was part and parcel of the ideology. Atrocities were committed in the name of Communism (as we've also seen them committed in the name of Democracy and Christianity and so on) but were not exactly the cornerstone of the ideology. I have to struggle to find anything redeeming whatsoever about Nazism (can't) but it's -to me- possible to understand and even appreciate the noble and humane sentiments inherent in Communism. And even now, I repeatedly hear those who lived under Soviet regime lament the loss of some of aspects of life which seemed more humane than what has replaced it, without nec. calling for a return to those days. This is so completely lost on Americans. They hear "Communism" and think "pogroms, gulags, censorship." Which are in fact things we should condemn. But that's not exactly the whole story...

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.

by poemless on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 12:41:52 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The anti-Lenin ranters they mentioned were certainly anti-communists (whether religious or nationalist, I can't tell from what I heard second-hand; only that they weren't anti-Putin liberal intelligentsia), but they mentioned the programmatic removal of symbols as something coming up as observation in several discussions with strangers (in a café or on a boat or at a marketplace). (They might have been disapproving communists as well!)

communists left the church and religion alone

Do you mean after 1991, or after Stalin, or throughout?

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 02:51:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Off-topic but... (4.00 / 3)

but they mentioned the programmatic removal of symbols as something coming up as observation in several discussions with strangers

Attitude to the communists did not change much, and when did, became slightly more positive. Consensus is that Russians in XX century suffered more from the Nazis and Anglo-Saxon free marketeers than from the communists.

Say, in Levada poll the question "What October Revolution brought to the people of Russia", "new era in their history" was the opinion of 23% in 1990 and 30% in 2006, "gave impulse of social and economic development" gets 26%/28%, "slowed down their development" is at 18%/16% and "was a catastrophe" for 12%/10%.

communists left the church and religion alone

Do you mean after 1991, or after Stalin, or throughout?

State stopped attempts to eradicate church in 30ies, more or less official truce started in 41 and after the war church was left alone in "don't ask don't tell" style.

by blackhawk on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 03:22:41 AM EST
[ Parent ]

About the poll results, thanks, interesting! However, here the question is not what the people think, but what the authorities think who (at least allegedly) pursue that policy.

About the latter, OK that way. I add that Khrushchev also conducted an anti-Church campaign, where the irony is that he is buried at Novodevichy Monastery (which my sister also visited).

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 05:05:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]

I have not heard of any such policy at the federal level, locally there may be under the radar street renamings and removals of monuments to Lenin.

Authorities do not want to deal with demonstrations of the elderly and leftist youth and pick up a fight with communists, the largest opposition party, so I would not expect anything that could be considered as symbolic or be too visible: this kind of political capital can be spent on something more tangible. In particular, this means that Lenin is going to stay in mausoleum.

by blackhawk on Tue Jul 29th, 2008 at 05:29:53 AM EST
[ Parent ]