My Favorite New Non-Romanian Political Weblog: Bush supporters might not like it as much as I do.... Make sure to buy a button!

06/17/2004 02:25 PM  |  Comment (1)

Hello From Bucharest! Hi boys and girls, Matt here, from the lively and surprising capital of Romania. I'm in one of approximately 477 Bucharest Internet cafes (approximation mine), a couple hundred meters from our apartment. They're blasting Eminem in my ears right now, which I don't mind. As is customary when I'm in Europe, I A) have already eaten in a local McDonalds (which I never do at home), though I didn't try the "McPorc"; and B) have seen more music videos in 24 hours than I have in the past 365 days of occasionally trying to figure out which Americans MTV channels still play the things. What's surprising in Romania is that there are multiple Romanian music channels, filled with pretty damned good locally produced videos that go far beyond the usual Central European 1979-era visual style (guy playing Casio in pastel room). Plus, they've got explicitly political rap, which is pretty good (one band ... Ca$$a Locco, I believe, had this elaborate video where the three white-boy rappers were political candidates for the PDS, a take-off of the despised governing party PSD ... it's a long story). Anyway, the kids here seem to be pretty all right, according to my extremely scientific research.

You'll want to know about the stray dogs. Yes, there are a few ... thousand. Found mostly on dimly lit back streets, in the courtyards of grim commie housing blocks (which also frequently contain churches ... weird country, this), in empty lots that have become open-air trash dumps ... but not necessarily the high-traffic pedestrian areas. And there's less dogshit on the streets than in Paris, as Emmanuelle has noticied. I had envisioned it'd be a bit like Mexico -- half-starving whippets walking around with crazed expressions -- but these are definitely former pets, or their descendants. German shephards, English sheepdogs, that kind of thing. Saw one demented shephard yesterday who spent his time on a busiesh street, chasing each car that drove by, trying to bite the doors, etc. But mostly they only bark when in packs, and the only packs I've seen have been ... well, in the courtyard of our commie housing bloc. So every night we hear what sound like 200 hounds of hell braying to Satan, and then you look out and see six and then renew your appreciation for the power of the Echo....

Sorry, the Euro-disco is getting to my brain. I wanted to say -- if you've sent me e-mail since Monday afternoon, I haven't read it. I'll try now, but I'm guessing there are several thousand messages on my server, which makes me sad in the heart. So please, only send me stuff that's real important, not the fact that you've made a post on your Internet website or whatnot. Alienatin' you from 5,000 miles away, suckaz!

Oh yeah -- I won't have much time here to read the comments on this website, so please do try to keep your rabid historical re-enactments of the Iran-Contra trials to a tasteful minimum, mmmK? Those of us who were outraged by the illegal behavior then (and by the exhumation since of several vintage '80s National Security liars) are not brain-crippled communists who heart Castro, and those who love them the Reagan are not (necessarily!) baby-eating Afrikanners. This has been my public service contribution to the "debate."

Ooh, now they're playing Warren G, talking about the LBC, the G-funk era, the East Side Motel, etc. Regulators!!!! OK, check out Emmanuelle's Buzznet site for Bucharest pictures later today, and go Lakers!

06/11/2004 02:40 AM  |  Comment (24)

Good Morning, Portland! At a ripe 7:20 a.m., I will be live on Daybreak With Larry George, on KUIK 1360-AM, talking bollocks about how cities shouldn't subsidize pro sports stadiums. You can call in and heckle me, if you'd like. Of all the cities in the world, of course, it had to be Portland, Oregon, home to two dozen of my closest relatives, including those who would most likely disagree with me, perhaps passionately. My late grandfather was a charter season-ticket holder to the Trail Blazers & went to every home game for something like 25 years in a row. My Dad grew up a Portland Beavers fanatic, etc. UPDATE: Scratch that. Reagan tribute trumped denouncing corporate welfare queens.

06/06/2004 11:03 PM  |  Comment (10)

Bye, Ron: Reagan's dead; go turn on your television or radio.

I loved him in 1980, his rise coinciding with my brief childhood fling with right-of-center born-again-flavored patriotism, and I was shocked and confused when some of the black kids at Junior High cheered him being shot in '81. Then I began to have my doubts after a life-changing incident at the gold medal Olympic baseball game at Dodger Stadium in 1984 (long story; no time for it now), and those doubts deepened my senior year in high school when I started reading about the 1960s California counter-culture & Reagan's professed eagerness to initiate a "bloodbath"…. By the time I slammed into college (fall of '86), it was all about Iran-Contra, South Africa, Ed Meese, the FMLN, Jello Biafra, Ollie North, $5,000 toilets, shocking revelations from ex-CIA college lecture circuit vets like John Stockwell, etc.

And so it was that when the old fella said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I laughed at his blustery naivete, as I did whenever he uttered the phrase "Evil Empire." Needless to say, I was wrong about that, and he was right, and I'm still ashamed about it. Last night, in the company of a few foreign-passport holders, some were groaning pre-emptively about the impending Reagan lionization. "Hey," I said, only half-joking. "Lay off!"

"But you didn't really like him, did you?"

"No, actually in the late '80s, I basically hated the guy," I said (quotes are inexact, etc.). "But the man was right about a few fundamental questions."

For Californians between the ages 35 and 50, he just towered over our lives; Nixon was a piker in comparison, despite the spectacular flameout. Judging his life inevitably means re-examining our own. Since I don't have the time or inclination to do that just now, I'll leave it to the Culture Warriors. But I'm sure it will be interesting to see what the Romanians have to say.

06/05/2004 02:47 PM  |  Comment (49)

The Face of Cowardice: I see over at Harry's Place that the American Chamber of Commerce in China refers to the Tiananmen Square massacre as the "Tiananmen incident," while (surprise!) railing against "unilateral economic sanctions imposed for political reasons." China, of course, is very keen on decoupling the words "massacre" and "Tiananmen"; just last night I met with a few former employees of Hong Kong's enormously profitable South China Morning Post, who told me that the m-word became verboten right after the 1997 change-over, because the Malaysian owner does billions worth of business on the mainland. Though they did express astonishment and hope that the word was used more than once in the paper's 15th anniversary coverage….

06/05/2004 02:04 PM  |  Comment (1)

Wanna Give Iraqis Stuff? Then go check out the activities of the good folks at Spirit of America, and consider making a donation.

06/05/2004 01:49 PM  |  Comment (0)

Lock the Doors and Hide the Mike Davis Books -- Brady Westwater Has a Weblog! Brady is the one-man Davis debunker, a tireless L.A. civic activist, serial & slightly deranged commenter on our old L.A. Examiner site, true believer in the Competition Newspaper idea, and an amazing repository of Southern California history. Love him, hate him, buy him a whiskey sour -- but if you care about any of the above, bookmark his site.

06/05/2004 12:51 PM  |  Comment (1)

Rock Therapy Recommendations, From Dr. Frank

06/05/2004 12:04 PM  |  Comment (0)

What Are Your Favorite Romanian Websites? OK, maybe you can't name many … at least not yet! But I've stumbled across a few, learned quite a bit, and thought I'd share.

@rgumente -- Business-oriented weblog of a bright young software company chief named Dragos Novac.

Halfway Down the Danube -- So named because proprietors Douglas and Claudia Muir, an expatriate couple with small children, started it when they still lived in Belgrade. Wry observations about life; here's the Romania-centric stuff.

The Bullet: Shooting Down News for Students -- Edgy looking online newspaper put out by the smart kids at the Bucharest School of Journalism, with help from the local Center for Independent Journalism.

Ulmablogger: The Media Blog From Alex Ulmanu -- Alex is an assistant journalism professor at the University of Bucharest, who helps out with The Bullet.

Albino Neutrino -- The weblog of expatriate Frank O'Connor, who runs a web design firm. "Where art and mathematics meet, shake hands, stand in an awkward silence and then kind of shuffle off wondering what happened," his tagline/motto reads. Here's his Romania page.

USbiz.ro -- "The American Business Community in Romania website." Biz-related headlines & stories; exchange rates, links.

Kit Blog -- The site of Christian "Kit" Paul, founding partner of an advertising company called Brandient. Writes about branding, art, technology … and Romania.

Flogging the Simian -- A pretty amazing and mysterious site, explained only as "a paxblog by Soj," who is also seen contributing over at the Daily Kos. Don't know her nationality (seems to be able to translate from Spanish and Romanian, and writes English perfectly well), don't know if that's her picture, don't know what she does … but she certainly writes in enormous detail about stuff like terrorism investigations in Saudi Arabia.

Kitsched -- Weblog of young freelance web developer who lives in the small town of Baia Sprie (known in Hungarian as Felsöbánya), and likes drum n' bass music so much that he contributes to, well, drumandbass.ro. Make a note, Pieter!

Perfectly Imperfect -- Reflections of a young, free-thinking mother.

That's just a sampling. If they or anyone else can offer some recommendations and/or clarifications, fire away in the comments!

06/02/2004 12:03 AM  |  Comment (3)

Hi! What are you doing down here?