Author: old_wp_importer

Today, blow by blow. Recommended for stalkers only

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This post

almost

nails something about Russia:

> “The fetishization of actual freedom [pop culture]…has allowed for the restriction of formal [political] freedom”

Almost, but not quite. There has never been

either

actual/economic/pop-culture freedom

or

political freedom in Russia, during or after the USSR. The difference is what gets fetishized or dreamt about most.

In the Bad Old Days ™ there was relative prosperity (everything is relative), no political freedom, but an idolization political freedom. Now there is relative political freedom, economic collapse, and dreams of consumer culture.

[all this brought to you by the talking-out-of-my-ass department: obviously I don’t have any real knowledge here]

Just back from London, dripping wet (Cambridge station is very, very in the wrong place!) but happy. Will probably write about it in dribs and drabs [1], but for now I’m going to have a binge of friending people who I befriended at the_alchemist and verlaine‘s housewarming.

And while my head’s in Saturday, I might as well say it was fantastic, in a way that events usually are when they’re full of fascinating people I don’t know. Since the thing was organised on lj, I’d spotted a couple of people I’d been aware of for some time without ever talking to: smhwpf, libellum, and verlaine himself. So, of course, they were the people I didn’t talk to at all, and instead chatted excitedly to squirmelia, pseudomonas, publicansdecoy, angelofthenorth, and robert-jones. Also a couple of others who will now be written out of history because they don’t use livejournal, or because they use it but have non-memorable names [2]. So it goes.

I’m now 5 days behind on lj, and won’t be doing more than skimming back through it. If there’s anything you’d particularly like me to see, point!

[1] Yes, I can use silly phrases if I want to

[2] I know, I know, oedipamaas49 is about as bad as it gets on those criteria. I’ve been regretting it for 18 months now, and I’ll be changing it just as soon as I can come up with something better. Suggestions welcome

Hungering for a picnic_meme outside Cambridge, or a mass pillow fight outside San Francisco? Trying to recreate a zombie flash mob, but can’t find enough fellow undead? Or do you plan to take zombies global?

Inspired by a 40-foot puppet elephant walking through London? Wanting to walk the length of the London Underground? Accompany adventurous plastic ducks?

Didn’t hear about some of those? Heard about the rest too late, and wished you could have joined in?

Maybe you should join creativehive, a community to bring together people who

wish

interesting things would happen in the hope this this will

cause

interesting things to happen.

verlaine, who created it, explains why here. And the name? Because, as onyxblue1 points out, using a hive-mind to break out into individual creativity is a fairly odd concept in itself. Please propagate, and then come do silly things with me! The first suggestion is a game of hide-and-seek across London.

Loud road-digging outside the window when I’m trying to sleep does not a happy Dan make. Expect extreme grogginess this evening and most likely me collapsing in a heap on the_alchemist‘s floor tomorrow.

Ironically, what they’re doing is adding traffic-calming bumps to the road, partly to reduce noise

Edit

: It took me a while to notice that this is

yet another

post about my sleeping patterns. Must stop doing that!

One week of holiday each year of a working life is equal to about a year’s work in total. So in a sensible world you’d be able to take an extra week of every year, and retire a bit later to make up for it. Or if you wanted to retire early, you could take less time off.

Which would you choose, and why?

poll-biasing below the cut

Channel 4 yesterday had two documentaries on Iraq – both with good aspects, but both quite seriously flawed.

The first was devoted to Dispatches: women in Iraq. It’s quite poorly edited and planned for a mainstream documentary like Dispatches, the same footage keeps on cropping up multiple times, and there are some dubious-sounding statistics. Despite that, it’s good to see footage of Iraq from beyond the usual ‘violence and high politics’ perspective, and having programmes made by Iraqis rather than Brits is a Good Thing.

Then a couple of hours later we had John Snow in “the real Iraq”, talking about why documentaries like that one are made by Iraqis – or rather, about how impossible it is for Western journalists to get enough access to interact with the real Iraq. He’s right, and it’s a useful thing to drum on about. But it all falls down because his perspective is not “why the world can’t know about Iraq” but “why Jon Snow can’t know about Iraq”.

It doesn’t do the rest of us any harm at all to be forced to rely on Iraqi journalists and bloggers, and to ignore Western reporters for anything except high politics.

He did at least make a very good point about the lack of nuanced understanding of Iraqi current affairs, in what could almost be a mission statement for the Iraq Analysis Group:

“What we have in iraq as a result of bloggers, fledgling journalists, new media of all sorts, is a kind of scattergun effect – we have a a little bit of knowledge about different bits and pieces. What there is very little of, partly because there is so little western media here, is any real analysis or interpretation of events that we can relate to”

[Zeugma](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeugma_%28city%29) is such a fantastic name for a city; I’m disappointed not to have run into this one before. Ho-hum, yet another mostly-ignored corner of the ancient world then.

Also, the BBC finds underground pyramids in Bosnia, including one with a 2.4-mile-long underground tunnel. That’s pretty huge, no?