The Commonplace Shock

This week's been too strange to be true, and yet it happened: every single day bringing about more shock, forget about readjusting!
Monday's email read:

Astazi dimineata (27 oct), colegul si prietenul nostru Stefan Paun a incetat din viata datorita unui cancer la colon; nu a mai putut fi salvat in ciuda celor 3 interventii chirurgicale.

Dumnezeu sa-l ierte !

Inmormantarea va avea loc joi, la Botosani. Sa-i fie tarana usoara!

it left me muttering some Can-you-believe-that's to myself and a strange bitter taste surrounding the day.
Afterwards, I just stopped trying to keep track of it, whilst the BBC headlines kept going:

...'Human catastrophe' grips Congo...

...India explosions death toll rises...

...300 feared dead in Pakistan quake...

...Cleric held over Somali car bombs...

...West Africa slavery still widespread...

...Car bomb targets Spain university...

And they just keep coming, no room for breathing out of this, no time to give it a thought, almost no reactions spurred.
Well, I find it horrifying.
Truly so, too 'ordinary' to believe it any longer, and still happening Every Single Day.
The fact that "everything's possible these days" stopped being a novetly long ago, and still...
I'd like to wake up to a day without Shocking News, would that please be possible?

counter-intuitive & a tad ironic

Remember Jörg Haider? The guy in the photo? [image from here]
Clue: a while ago, he scratched the image of Austria amongst European friends due to certain accusations of Nazi sympathy.

Yet this is not the entire story;
from what it appears, Haider's recent death revealed a handful of 'dirty lil secrets' [sorry to be the one wrecking this bubble but it was simply too ironic to be true...]:

Haider, who voted against a parliamentary motion to lower the age of consent for homosexuals, had presented himself as a family man who drank sparingly. But after the car crash it was revealed that he had been driving at twice the speed limit, his blood alcohol level had been four times the legal limit, and he had spent his final hours in a gay bar in Klagenfurt, the capital of the southern state where he was governor.

[entire article in The Guardian].
... and such was today's lesson on strong views and retribution...

the return trip to Lizzo

Another trip, the same companion, yet this time with much more echoing, possibly because I have some knowledge of Europe rather than the US..., possibly because it contained more 'colourful' depictions..., possibly because this book was written not only 2 years after the previous one, but also based on a trip that the author had undertaken as a teenage boy/ young adult [always a harsh choice of words...] - thus entailing some funny comparisons as well as unmatched memories.

In any case, the 'Neither Here Nor There. Travels in Europe' does not lack in irony, fresh notes, and that certain sense of complicity induced by a tone of personalised confessions - I, for one, had great fun reading it! [... and an enhanced desire to travel a bit more in the near future, should the opportunity arise...]

Here's a taste of the book's outline:

Bryson doesn't mince words. Of Norwegian television, he says:
"It gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience."
After traveling from Brig to Geneva by train, he observes:
"Everywhere there were pylons. ... The Swiss are great ones for stringing wires. They thread them across the mountainsides for electricity and suspend them from endless rows of gibbets along every railway track and hang them like washing lines on all the city streets for the benefit of trams. It seems not to have occurred to them that there might be a more attractive way of arranging things."

just how powerful are words?

the question of meaningfulness was raised last year, but then it returned: Blog Action Day came back this year, with a plea against Poverty.

some [myself included] might tend to think of this in terms of rights and duties and point that the debate is not a debate at all, given the non-contested existence of the 2nd generation of human rights, the so-referred-to Socio-Economic & Cultural Rights; after all, the World already did commit in this direction when creating the ICESCR, haven't we?... [and that was a while ago!]

others [much more pragmatic] think of devising solutions to address the root cause and thus use the Internet to more obvious purposes: Ripple is a case in point, whilst the Washington Post gives a handful of other examples.

and yet, there are also those who wonder what's the efficiency of having bloggers address Poverty today, when words might amount to nothing by tomorrow: here's the full article.

How much will bad#08 manage to accomplish still remains to be seen, but we can all see why addressing a topic might be more helpful than keeping silent; and the current financial crisis should prove as an incentive in this respect. As for the "why" of it, that's self-referential:

poverty, n.

1. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.

[definition taken from here]


http://blogactionday.org/js/72216bd17ad528d3530995144bbaf25846e4d835

The World Beyond Legal Memos

After spending more than a total of 30 hours of typing, retyping, proofreading and plain blank-staring at a legal memo, I have to admit there is a world outside of it. And it's sunny, colorful and awfully loud. The customers from Molly Pitcher's Ale House across the street are relentlessly competing with the construction noise next door. I can stop dreaming about defamation now and focus on maybe going to the movies or meeting up with all those people who think I dropped off the face of the earth.

Or remembering important dates... like Marian's wedding, so....

CONGRATS, MARIAN!!!!! CASA DE PIATRA!

I'm sad for not being there on the big day... Please send me pictures soon. Va pup.

Off to the real world, the one beyond evil legal memos...

P.S.: how did the cultures [inter-]dialogue?

Ján Figel’, European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, announced on 25 September the winners in the “Cultures on my street” photo competition, organised by the European Commission as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008. More than 2,000 entries were received in response to the invitation to portray the theme of intercultural dialogue.

[from here]
This was chosen as the jury's 1st prize:

It's artistically-pleasurable & funny, in my view, but does it really pertain to Intercultural Dialogue?...

P.P.S. The adjacent description provides one with the following:

A jumble of shoes, tools, religious ornaments and Elvis posters provides the crowded setting for a tradesman and the locals who often meet in his workshop. “Freddy's shop is a meeting place for friends, locals and even the occasional tourist! I was intrigued by this man's 'cultural' vision: the juxtaposition of religious icons next to those of pop stars”, says Smith. According to Professor Chris Wainright, the UK photographer and academic, and chairman of the jury, “intimacy, multi layering of meaning and elegant mood and composition” were what convinced the jury of the merit of this picture.