You’ll only find [one article](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/03/wkryg03.xml) on it in the British broadsheets, but Kyrgyzstan has spent the past five days in the middle of massive, peaceful anti-government demonstrations. The protesters are principally calling for a change in the constitution to reduce the power of the president, but they also want to get rid of the President, [Kurmanbek Bakiyev](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurmanbek_Bakiyev) and Prime Minister [Felix Kulov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Kulov).

I love watching the role of blogs in all this. [Edil Baisalov](http://baisalov.livejournal.com) the protesters’ unofficial spokesman, is posting frequent (Russian) updates on Livejournal – from a yurt outside the parliament building. Meanwhile Yulia at [New Eurasia](http://kyrgyzstan.neweurasia.net/) is keeping up a commentary from the opposite side, very critical of the opposition and worried that repeated coups will turn the country into a banana republic. Even Kyrgyz news agency AKIpress has turned to livejournal: they were having trouble keeping their site up, so they set up a livejournal and started posting reports up there.

If you want to follow what’s going on in English: here are news updates, analysis from people outside the country here and here. Currently [Eurasianet](http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav110706.shtml#) is reporting that things have started to turn violent – here’s hoping for a compromise of some kind.

Rather than another blow-by-blow accoutn of what’s going on in Kyrgyzstan, I thought it might be more useful to do a ‘who’s who’ of the protesters. I’ve also tried to touch-up/create bios for some of them over at Wikipedia. Beware: the below is neither comprenensive nor fully checked…

• Almaz Atambaev. Social Democratic Party Businessman, failed presidential candidate in 2000, briefly minister for Industry, trade and tourism
• Omurbek Tekebaev. Speaker (former speaker?) of the Kyrgyz parliament, presidential candidate in 2000. Is his brother, Asylbek Tekebayev, also involved?
• Edil Baisalov: NGO-wallah, blogger, victim of an assassination attempt earlier this year. No formal party affiliation, as far as I know.
• Roza Otunbayeva, former Foreign Minister. Founder of the small Ata-Jurt (Fatherland) party. She was banned from standing in the 2005 elections because she hadn’t been resident in Kyrgyzstan for five years (she had been serving as ambassador to the US!)
• Isa Omurkulov. Former minister of railroads.
• Timur Sariev. Being quoted a lot, but I can’t find anything about him, except that he’s a member of parliament.
• Kubatbek Baibolov – leader of the Union of Democratic Forces
• Melis Eshimkanov. Deputy chair, social democratic party, and former presidential candidate.

This post is brought to you by the awestruck feeling of finding yet another underexplored bit of world history….

We all know Gutenberg wasn’t the first person to experiment with movable type; it had been tried in China before. What I hadn’t realised was just how international the world was first time round.

One of the first examples of movable type comes from the [Tangut Empire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_Empire). They were printing in a [language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_language) unrelated to Chinese, written in a script inspired by Chinese characters – but with a set of 6000+ totally different logograms.


And some of the first texts that they tried to print like this were buddhist text translated from Sanskrit (possibly via Tibetan).

So: this culture created a writing system inspired by the Chinese, a religion from India, and out of them developed movable type 400-odd years before Gutenberg. Impressive, no?

But, there’s a flaw. Movable type makes a lot less sense with 6000 characters than it does with an alphabet of 30-something. So for the most part, they just printed by carving wood-blocks, one per page. So when they created a Tangut version of the [Tripitaka](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripitaka), the Buddhist scriptural canon, they used 130,000 blocks. Most of them are now in London or St. Petersburg, having been raided by people like Aurel Stein. Here are some papers on Tangut history and language.

[The picture is a fragment from a written Tangur text of the Platform Sutra, taken from the British Library]

Interesting bits from David Sifry (of technorati)’s annual [state of the blogosphere](http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000443.html) post:

• “About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months”
  
  Really
  
  ? I find that extremely hard to believe
• World political events cause major posting spikes. That seems to suggest a
  
  lot
  
  of people write about political things.

Remember the Free Hugs meme? Somebody in Australia started hugging people in the streets, it spread to Russia, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, Poland, and pretty much the rest of the world.

Then, some people in Shanghai tried it – and were promptly arrested

Before the arrest, presumably

The huggers were released after a couple of hours, but still: a big ‘meh!’ to the Chinese police

[cross-post from livejournal]

John Updike reviews Salinger’s _Franny and Zooey_. Reading about the Glass family, like [reading about the Bagthorpes](http://lzz.livejournal.com/229036.html) or watching _The Royal Tenenbaums_, is a guilty pleasure tinged with recognition and wish-fulfilment. Updike says much the same:

>Of Zooey, we are assured he has a “somewhat preposterous ability to quote, instantaneously and, usually, verbatim, almost anything he had ever read, or even listened to, with genuine interest.” The purpose of such sentences is surely not to particularize imaginary people but to instill in the reader a mood of blind worship, tinged with envy.

Many of the stories are online [here](http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/)

It was only a matter of time until somebody wrote it. But it’s a pleasant surprise that they wrote it really quite well

FIRST VOICE Listen. Through the compromised quiet of Cardiff’s early, toe-stubbing, lavatory-flushing morning there comes a strange sound. A rhythmical seesawing, like a latchkey scraped along a bass string of a piano, appropriately edited and enhanced. A sound that has challenged and comprehensibly defeated onomatopoeic artists for many a decade.

(thanks, whotheheckami)

Remember the Free Hugs meme? Somebody in Australia started hugging people in the streets, it spread to Russia, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, Poland, and pretty much the rest of the world.

Then, some people in Shanghai tried it – and were promptly arrested

The huggers were released after a couple of hours, but still: a big ‘meh!’ to the Chinese police

This US opinion poll analysis is interesting: apparently religious whites have basically the same political priorities as everybody else. They “

do not tend to list moral or values issues as their top priorities at all

“.