i didnt know anyone watched that video i linked to. werent the videos hilarious? the clips on the american humvees being bombed put the fear of god in me. they really are incredibly brutal explosions. this is what you get for watching blooming, slow motion hollywood explosions all your life. but, really, theyre unbelievable. BANG and then just this huge cloud of dust goes up. its really really sad. all of this is so unfortunate. for all the talk about america fucking this up and making a mess and whatever im still not at all without sympathy for the people getting limbs blown off and shit on the ground. its brutal

or shit? are you talking about something else, some other middle eastern production? i was talking about the terrorists homemade promo videos

you have a new edge to you deviousj, whats up. youve levelled up, so to speak. im kind of afraid youre going to turn on me. dont hurt me

did you read the part of the email i sent you where i mentioned the medley? if so, do you want it now, because i, like a real loser, just went ahead and did it anyways. i had so much fun and it really turned out awesome. ive been listening to it for the past few days

Haha yeah, hit me up with that. Like usual I read the email pretty much within 2 days of you sending it, then I take my time replying. I'll stick it on my mp3 thing and enjoy. What's this about the edge? Is it because I'm missing the smiley face on some posts?

And yeah, I'm talking about those home movie things. Maybe they're inspiring, in the same way underground journalism can produce these low quality fliers and newsletters or whatever, that still manage to stir people because of their integrity and raw quality. The punk ethic. It's the graphics that really get me though, like the titling system built into old VHS camcorders. Reminds me of those old shows where people would send in their own home movies they'd made. But you're right about the reality of the thing, I think that cuts through a lot of the bizarre 'man this sucks' feeling, it does bring home the truth of these things a lot more. It doesn't have to be dramatic to have gravity about it.

But hey, what was I gonna say... oh yeah that's it, I might get a camera, got any digital recommendations? I'd like a proper film camera but I can get some practice this way, and it would work out better for me at the moment

The last sentence was that she's waiting for you. Then she said something about 'Ukraine - a country where something stinks(?) and that she's got this new project called 'ideal country'. I really can't say if it's Russian or Ukrainian, though.

Oh Yulia!

I didn't realize there was a Ukrainian language, I guess it would make sense that it's in Ukraininannan. Unless she's a big fan of irony

why you laffin? guy works hard and you jusst laugh in his face? see what i mean. new edge. youve become a ruffian!

no but seriously you just seem to be putting more of yourself on the line, becoming less reserved and the like. its not a bad thing im just saying. its totally a good thing, in fact

ok check your pms

but have you ever seen actual high budget stuff from that region? seriously not much better. their whole aesthetic is entirely foreign to us, its incomprehensible. their beauty is our ugliness and vice versa. although there are exceptions, like that song i sent you before with that wailing woman. the "all hit music" song. or wait. that wasnt arabic? i forget. also some of their older art, from the middle ages. that stuff is stunningly good
im sure the lo-fi quality gives them credibility yeah. i mean, in a way, they dont even really have a choice. not only because they couldnt pull of some slick, gorgeous video with the means they have available to them (or even with the means), but imagine what people would think if it was truly high quality and lush? theyd think it was just black propaganda from the americans or something


im still steeped in film and honestly dont even have a digital camera but i guess i can give you some advice. it would be easier to decide between some options, that would be better, becsause i dont really follow trends in this or whatever and know the whole market as whole, what existing models are available and whatever. but i know canon has a practical lock on the market and that their professional digital stuff is all any photojournalist will touch. their cameras really are great, ive used their newest pro SLR a month or two or go (fucking $10,000 in your hands. scary as hell) and its unbelievable. i can just tell you that their consumer stuff is, unless theres some huge fuck up, also in the top. nikon is also invariably fantastic, but not always perfect, and sony has some good stuff i think. it really depends on what price range youre in, what features youre looking for, what you plan on using it for and whatever. its hard to just recommend from a dead start

you should definitely give it a try, Lee. She's a billionaire and she can be hot, too, I mean look at her, she's 45:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/4...yuliaevita.jpg

why a big fan of irony? I actually wouldn't be surprised if it's Russian - it would actually make sense if she's addressing the whole country. Russian will hardly replace Ukrainian as an official language, on the other hand they don't seem to have very hard feelings against Russian and according to my understanding they apparently mix them often together, anyways.

I don't know, I haven't noticed. Check this one with the smiley face, see if it makes a difference. I know that it does, that's why I use it, but you know it's all about your personal perception.

I've seen a channel here called BEN - Black Entertainment Network, basically African programming and it's pretty similar, like you can tell they have crappy equipment and maybe don't even know how to get the best from it. I mean I don't see it as a bad thing exactly, it just doesn't fit so easily with our mindset because we're so used to huge amounts of money being thrown at these things, and everything becoming slicker and slicker. Look at our TV a decade or more ago, it's pretty bad in that respect. I think one part of it is that things like film were replaced by VHS, and it means that the cheapest equipment also takes a dive in quality. But yeah, it would look completely out of place, potentially at least. Hell I haven't seen a whole lot of tv from that region, some of it's definitely equivalent to ours though.

I think that Radio Sumatra song's Indonesian - I really liked that one too. Sometimes with this stuff it's just the fact that it's different that makes people dislike things - it's not actually ugly, it's just being viewed from the wrong perspective. Or a narrow one at least, that you might not realize you have until you come up against something that doesn't fit in. Expanding horizons and all that

Thanks for the camera tips, I haven't really been following it either. I'd just like something that takes good pictures, and has lots of settings I can mess with like exposure and so on. I love playing with that stuff

No arguments there. And I just meant it would be ironic if she was giving a speech about this new, ideal country she fought so hard to win for the people, from the old pro-Russian government - and doing it in Russian

she doesnt look a day over 25

Maybe there was some kind of nefarious magical conspiracy between her and Yushchenko - like she absorbed his life energy to become perpetually youthful, and poor V has to deal with the aftermath. Poisoning my ass

I wonder how much the looks will be important in this campaign. Look at this babushka, she has totally that Go Girl! expression:
http://www.tymoshenko.com.ua/img/pho...2299_small.jpg

but it's probably useless in fighting Victor I and his scars. It just doesn't feel to be fair. They were a great pair - president with a look of beast, PM angel on earth.

her daughter looks more like her friend, of the same age.
http://www.tymoshenko.com.ua/img/pho...1826_small.jpg

I wish our female politicians were hot like this. Why women in politics always have to be so ugly?

yeah some of it is. al jazeera is actually pretty high quality. it doesnt differ that much from CNN or whatever, its not this glaring difference.
and a lot of these things definitely fit into the "so bad its good" category too. canada is so multicultural that theres an actual demand for some of the more obscure foreign stuff on tv, especially on like sunday morning, so you can see the weirdest shit. i saw this one russian show with this really disgusting russian lounge lizard kind of guy singing on this huge set straight out of the nadir of 70's disco culture with all these purple flashing lights and two fat chicks flopping around him. it went on for like 5 minutes in ballad format and then all of a sudden jumped to this roaring, clap along kind of anthem. but all in russian and like torture to your ears. the crowd was loving it. i think a lot about there being universally "beautiful" things, like certain shapes or forms, visually, or certain textures or notes sonically but things like this constantly blow that all away. then again you cant really judge culture by looking at the banal popular stuff. thatd be like looking at a british infomercial or something and talking about how much the british suck. it means something, sure, but its not always so representative, i know

oh yeah, i read an article about the rebirth of the russian show tune kind of format , which used to be like the only type of entertainment available back then, and how its all blatantly imitating the old themes as well, appealing to nostalgia in the old and keeping the soviet spirit alive in the young. pretty sick


yeah man radio sumatra. that song fucking rocks. its funny because at first i had the reaction you described. i thought "what the fuck is this? whats with those drums?" it just sounded dated or cheap. but now i love every single thing about it. it all works and makes sense. i agree that its about perspective. the same music means different things depending on that and if the song has some kind of value but doesnt make sense you have to look at it differently.

im listening to it now too. that guitar solo is the best eh? great melody, i have to sy

yes you must get one with controls. i know all these people that have cameras they cant even control. its moronic. one guy cant even turn off his flash. with those control you could really experiment a lot and learn how things interrelate and whatever. very valuable indeed

Oh man, if I get a camera the first thing that's happening is the flash is getting turned off. Worst thing ever. See, that's why things like exposure controls are good, you can adapt to the light instead of making the light adapt to you. Obviously you know what I'm talking about here and this is probably hardly news, but man I hate flashes.

I never did reply to that one email, but I really liked that photography stuff, with the uh blue chemicals. You didn't send me your pictures though, you kind of implied you were going to I think, but yeah. I'll get around to replying to that soon. Honest.

That drums on that song are actually like what I was saying before, about how cheap new technology can just bring quality levels right down. Like those drums sound kinda cheap in a way, but they have real character to them. Nowadays you can just load up some cheap or free software on your computer, throw in some free samples et voila! a really weak sounding, soulless drum track. You need to run that through an amp and let it get messed up a little! I don't know if they did that but it's the same deal, the (lack of, if you like) sonic quality gives it character and it just wouldn't be the same without it.

I was thinking of Al Jazeera too when I said that. Have you seen Control Room? I forget if I asked you that. But I saw this one documentary once, about the residential towers Stalin had built, and about the people who lived in one of them. One resident turned out to be the son of the guy who basically created the KGB, except he was like a variety performer who juggled and threw vases onto his head and played the piano. He was singing a song about meeting some girl, but suddenly she pulled a gun from her coat, because she worked for the 5th Directorate or something. It was surreal.

Have you seen any of the Borat stuff? They do a pretty good job of aping that low-budget tv look. Plus he seems to run into a lot of anti-semitic hicks
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...44083395232117

yes for sure i completely agree. id turn it off in most circumstances and when i need it id diffuse it. those cheap flashes that come with the camera make everyhting look like hell. youre the first person ive really heard rail against that, how refreshing. i have this really junky flash i bought at a garage sale and i cant tell you how much better photos look when its diffused. i just get a piece of a thin white plastic bag, the kind you get anywhere, and put a layer in front of it. crude but effective pretty effective. better still you can deflect the flash, which can be great. its all about indirect light. direct light has its place but as a general rule of thumb

the dumbest thing with flashes is when people use them in like stadiums or shit like that. do you know how you can see during some televised event all these little flashes going? i remember for the olympics seeing a million of them. its totally senseless. at that range the camera wont pick up a single thing of the flash so theyre just wasting their battery power. it dosnt annoy me too much, its just really stupid. theres no mystery about how many people do it either. you can see a zillion flashes. to be fair, im sure a lot of them are just using automatic settings and the camera detects darkness and just flashes accordingly

but, oh yeah, a good idea would be to get a camera that comes with a flash mount. if you want to, like, maximize the versatility of your camera and whatever itd be a good idea. you can buy all kinds of cheap flashes used from anywhere, tilt-able ones too, and you can experiment so much. a fun thing to do is putting the camera on really slow shutter speed or just locked open and taking the flash with you and flahsing it at shit. i did some of this before and its really fun. you just throw up some leaves here and then flash a tree there annd then flash a fence somewhere else. then you have this weird pastiche image of really hard, bright, sharp objects in near darkness. so yes, dont give up your freedom!

ok ill attach some of those the next time. ive been having some trouble with that tricolour stuff. its really awkward. i think i mentioned how there are a huge amount of variables, all ambiguous and inconsistent and hard to control, and how fishy the whole thing is. i, as weve talked about, like having it a bit out of my control but ive been becoming really frustrated with just how much this is. it freaks me out sometimes


yeah weak and soulless, right on. people who do that are really missing the point of drums. or of music in general. they take the result of the point, the products of genuine quality intention, and just imitate that. its all on the wrong level. and in doing so they miss all those glorious intricacies and nuances (all of which spring naturally from honest intent) that are what make it interesting in the first place. i think those qualities are what people recognize most and its no exaggeration to call that kind of stuff soulless. it is. we are in agreement, i recall, about the fundamental desirability of retaining some organic-ness and happy errors


yeah man control room is great. ever since i saw it in theatres ive been watching it every few months for fun.

thats weird. i mean if you ever want some good anecdotes and whatever the soviet union is where you turn. there is certainly no shortage of bizarre social constructions there

haha 5th directorate. good band name or soemthing

i love borat and youre right about his show perfectly aping that low budget style, i didnt even think of that. they really got it down so so well. the other character too, the gay one, is also good. the "in or out" montage. perfect. with borat, did you see that one where he went to that wine tasting place? i nearly shit my pants at that part where he cant figure out how to drink from the cup and, after what feels like a week of struggle, just chugs the thing and says "i win." i hope youve seen that one because now i just ruined it for you

and did you take that picture above? i first thought you were just using it as an example of interesting lighting but i now get the impression its yours. i had no idea you owned so much audio equipment, whats going on. what is the mixer hooked up to?

wow fuck. i never saw that episode. the actor is jewish too, as im sure you know, so it must have been hard for him to bite his tongue there with some pathetic hick like that. wow. and i thought the "throw the jew down the well" thing was harsh. but its funny just how much that guy embodies the worst of the right wing hick stereotype. its unreal. i almost dont even believe it. "we killed two of those deers.. yup, the extinct ones." then with the blacks and jews ("kill em all"). i cant even wrap my head around this

She's cool, she has some kind of vitality in her eyes. She's alive and she knows it!

Or maybe she has a cold, I don't know

Oh well I'm not against flashes in general, just the ones built into cameras that people insist on using every single time they click the shutter, even in daylight. Actually i remember this thing at a science museum when I was a kid, they had a screen of some kind of material that absorbed light and released it slowly, so it had this protracted glow to it - what they did was they got people to stand in front of it and set this big bright flash off, and when you stepped away your shadow was stuck to the screen. Then they gave people those little separate flashes and let them play around - like you could angle it against the screen to produce these rays of light, have them looking like they're coming from the shadow's head, stuff like that. But yeah, I'd definitely play around with those kinds of tricks.

I think that's why I tend to dislike 80s music in general, it's when these cheap synths started to really flood the place and people started picking them up and running them direct into mixers, and you get that kind of cheap flat sound. Have you heard Trompe Le Monde, the Pixies album? At the end of the album there's this piano sound that's unrealistic enough to sound fake, but not so far from a real piano as to have its own independent feel, if you get me. It sounds like a bad piano ripoff rather than some skewed take on what a piano sounds like. It grates on me. I like the synth sounds earlier in the album, though. And errors and noises are definitely good - I've tried to keep as much of that feel as I can on the xmas song (coming soon!).

I hadn't seen that Borat, so thanks jerk. Actually I haven't been keeping up with any of that, but I've seen a few before, and it's nice to see a bit now and again. I saw some thing he did for MTV, like a promo for some awards, and he was doing Pimp My Ride Kazakhstan-style, with some old farmer's cart getting painted up and sprayed silver, little dudes holding smoke machines and purple star wipes and everything. That was awesome. I was gonna try and find the 'throw the jew down the well' one for you, that one was just sickening. Those rednecks were really getting into it. Such a catchy song though, that's really using music for evil

And yeah, I took that - it's not my mixer, when my ex-band was recording an EP I borrowed a crappy camera and took some shots of the recording space for posterity. Meaning I dicked around with exposure settings (it was a pretty sunny day, see window area in top right of pic), got myself into weird positions and generally entertained myself. That mixer was hooked up to a.... 16-track recorder I think. The singer/guitarist dude owned all this stuff, it was absolutely ridiculous how much equipment he bought. Did I show you his pedal setup? Here's part of it

yeah there was someting like that material here too, i remember that

ive never really cared too much for the pixies and dont remember anything from that album, sorry. but i get what youre saying. in a way a badly recorded or performed take on a real instrument is better than a perfect (in a narrow sense) take on some deadpan synth or something. unless thats the point. i mean all of these elements have malleable meanings and can always have their place. i sometimes forget tht and just kind of blindly pursue a "good sound" as opposed to the just the "right sound." they are, of course, two different things. dissonance, for isntance, sometimes sounds so, so much better than harmony. have you heard that radiohead song "big boots"? that song uses dissonance really subtly but very effectively. radiohead is good at that in general, theyre real musician-muscians. how oddly rare that is in such genres of music

i tried to find that wine one but i couldnt. if you ever come across it check it out. i saw one with him at cambridge university that had a similar thing, but with cricket. some old man trying to teach him how to swing the bat and him jerking about, kicking the ball, and doing all kinds of inept stuff for like 5 minutes, its great

what do you use to record now again? you kind of sound like your longing for the good old days or something. what happened to that band anyways?

Yeah, you can't really define what a good sound is because it depends on context - one particular thing could either totally make or completely break whatever you're working on. I have a tendency to want to mess things around a little, if they're completely clean and perfect then there's something missing. It's the dissonance thing too, definitely - I mean how much do you know about music theory? Dissonance is a huge part of it, like the tritone, the most dissonant interval in western music, the diabolus in musica, that's the key sound in the last chord of that corny progression they always make you learn when you first start out on guitar, the completely inoffensive one. It's about whether or not you let it resolve I guess, and I like not doing.

But I'm a big fan of noises and little things in general - like when we were recording, I kept wanting to add little bits in there to give it more depth and texture, just so there'd always be something new to discover. Half of the parts I wrote were about exactly what I did with my gear at a given moment, not just the notes I was playing. I mean I'm not trying to pretend I'm good or anything, but I was all about switching pickups and whacking parts of my guitar and playing certain bits with my fingers and stuff. One song we recorded, all I did in the verses was add hell loads of delay, use wah and distortion and basically grab my wang bar (probably not what you're thinking, non-guitarists) and throw the guitar around. Musical no, fun and awesome noises yes. I totally recommend this approach

Uh, that band... I don't even know, I quit because fun levels were at an all-time low and they were talking about hiring some building as a rehearsal space - we already rented a slot at a practice space and didn't use that as often as we should, and we'd only actually played 3 actual real actual shows, so I wasn't peachy keen about throwing $$$$ at renting a building. I know the drummer quit a few months after, but the other two were still going. The three of them did play a couple of shows after I'd gone, but I haven't spoken to them in months so who knows. I wanted to know what was happening with this EP which had been ongoing for something like a year or whatever, but I just got sick of asking.

The stuff I send Jan is mainly recorded with a cheap $2 mic plugged into the computer (it all has an annoying fan noise running through it), or my mp3 player has a built-in mic so I'll sometimes use that. I have a digital multitrack but I haven't really used it so much, I never know what to record you know? I usually just get down little ideas and never turn them into anything. I also have an awesome karaoke mic

You know, Sacha Baron Cohen used to do these little short clips here on a comedy channel, which was where he got started - he did the Bruno character, who was just this not-really-camp fashion reporter, and when I saw him actually use it on the show, only uber-gay, I wasn't sure about it. Then I saw him at some football game in the US, dancing with the cheerleading squad while fans screamed 'GET OFF OUR FIELD YOU FUCKING FAAAAAAAG!!!!!' with their veins bulging and eyes popping, and I saw how it could work

Also, on topic, looks like they had a pretty big demo after all

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/news...UK-BELARUS.xml

I mean several thousand, it's not a huge number (and that's basically what the guy said anyway) but if this is going to gain any momentum this is how it's going to start. It will be interesting to see how popular this movement gets though - obviously some people see the bad points of the government as a decent tradeoff for the benefits they're seeing

yeah when it comes down to it you cant define what a good sound is, but its just really easy to lose touch with that truth and just pursue these kind of narrow-minded ideals. i do it all the time and its a real sin. i mean we talked before about this vis a vis machina right? i was just about to go into that album as an example of that misguidedness in action but nevermind. it is a great example though. "good sounds" as opposed to actually sounding good, if you will.

we call them whammy bars. or at least i do
i obviously agree with what youre saying. its funny how much ground weve covered in discussion already, we keep on stepping on each others toes (sounds sexual but i really didnt mean it like that shut up). again its about the contrast between a narrow-minded, inflexible conception of music and its creation and one that conforms everything, absolutely every thing, to the entity of the song. that latter one is ideal i think. to adapt the old mussolini saying to this conversation (sadly, probably not a first with me): everything for the song, nothing outside the song, nothing above the song! thats not totally true but from a practical perspective it might as well be. everything should work for the song and you have the right idea with that noise stuff. i mean its not necessarily about noise, of course, but about just, like you said, texture or colour or character. i mean if playing the guitar normally would serve the ends of the song than thats what you should do. to repeat exactly what i said from the time we discussed this before (hard not to do), radiohead really are the undisputed masters of this. of crafting songs and paying as much attention to overall sonic product and its impact as the "music" part of it. i mean listen to climbing up the walls and tell me they arent just geniuses when it comes to this stuff. i think i talked about this in the last email actually, but its all about the net experience, what everything, all elements, ends up creating. its on that level that the creator should keep his eyes locked, i think.


you sound pretty jaded about the whole thing. do you jam with anyone else? (do you use the world jam a lot over there? or at all? ive been using it for years and jan called me out on it and said i sounded like a fag. not in those words though. that would be funny if he did) or do you play alone now? are you actually recording stuff for some purpose outside of just personal enjoyment? you should start something up. ill sing on it. i mean; are you a quitter or something?

the cool fruit. larger than a large baby



hahahaha veins and eyes popping. i can really, really envision that. that drawn out 'a' in fag especially. hoarse voiced, red faced, and spitting. god bless america
but dont you sound anti-american now. nothing wrong with that, but this thread... or the other one? im getting them confused. these threads have really brought that side out of you. but, really, what else is one to think after watching some of those ali g videos, its really exceptionally pathetic. im still reeling from that hunting one. "yup, the extinct ones". what? what on gods fucking green earth? how is it that these people exist? i am just unable to understand. i cant. i dont know how. somebody teach me how to understand

i guess you skipped over my post on that yesterday? that page 2 thing is a fucking everything up


if what milinkevich is quoted as saying in that article is to be taken as true and not just rhetoric, then this is indeed shaping up nicely. they were barred from the square but the protest still going in spite of that is almost more of a statement and creates more of a cause or perception of struggle. good things. i hope they, like i said before, just keep with this thread and not let go. they can afford to just totally lose momentum on this

this was an interestinh notion:
that very well may be true, but i also think lukashenko himself knows full well that a violent clamp down would be a huge, huge, huge mistake right now

Victor II did win in Ukraine, so it looks like they will again lean more to Russia. It just makes me wondering if the western democratic system can be fully implemented in these countries. I mean look - Ukraine wasn't doing well under the last pro-Russian government, but still the economy was slightly growing. It fell on its knees after Orange Revolution and people are rightly disillusioned (again). I am not surprised - in these countries it always looks like economic mafia takes all benefits of 'democracy' and the rest is suffering. But hey, we have a freedom of democracy, ain't that cool?
It looks like over there it would be always choosing between two evils - which one is smaller?

Well they're called whammy bars too, but I thing 'wang' works better in this context - cos that's what I was doing, holding the guitar by the bar and wanging it up and down everywhere. It pretty much always stayed right in tune, too. You're definitely right about doing what's right for the song, but I think it's about determining what that is and the direction you want to go in. I find it hard to think of things from an endpoint and work backwards though - like I can't think of a song in my head and then work out how to play it, because I just have that gap in my ability. Not so much with sounds exactly, but it's all part of that idea of a completed whole or whatever, it's hard to pull things apart sometimes. Gestalts! Somehow things can make sense in the moment though, which is why I like to record things since I'll always forget them. Hell we've been over this

I am kinda jaded, I guess there was this idea and these plans but after a couple of years or more things weren't really going anywhere, yet I was expected to make all these financial commitments which just didn't make sense at the time. It was a conflict of ideas - I saw being in a band as being a bunch of people playing and writing together, putting together some stuff to play and then getting out there and performing shows. The more shows you do, the better you get, the more sense things make, and the better your progress. The guy who formed the band had an idea that he'd write songs, we'd practice until we seriously kicked ass, then we'd play like 3 awesome shows and be instantly catapulted to fame with a major label deal. It's a nice idea, and I'm sure it will actually work for a couple of bands, but it was completely unrealistic. So he was throwing money at things like a pro - that pedal setup, amps, guitars, mixers, mics, all kinds of things - and expecting everyone else to do the same. He wanted (actually expected) me to buy a JCM800. I mean we were playing small clubs, he had a Marshall stack and never turned it above 1 there, it was just pointless at that stage. I'm sure you get the point anyway

But no, I don't really have anyone to jam with, and right now I'm too busy for it to be honest. I did get this one guy to play some songs with me - like I'd tell him the chords, shout out the changes to him while I'd play lead - but it was just for fun at the time. I would like to play again, I do miss the actual good times side of things. I did like jamming (is there even another word for it?) - did you ever hear that 20 minute+ jam my band did? That was hilarious, but I thought it was pretty good too - lots of good ideas even if it didn't exactly, uh, flow. Ain't nothing wrong with a jam session. You sing do you?

And no, I'm not anti-American at all - I just recognize the large number of assholes there. I mean it's the same here, and anywhere I'd expect, I think it just tends to take on different characteristics in different countries. It's easier to be critical of the US in general too (meaning as an international power) simply because of their position, you know? I think the place has gotten a bad rep over the last few years, they need to put a bit more money into their tourism promotion sector. Unless you're talking about something else :eek:

I didn't miss that other post actually, I just thought you were talking about them being blocked from the main square - I didn't realize they'd managed a successful protest elsewhere. I thought it was newer news, news that's new to you

I was just gonna post about this - are the final results in now, or are these the exit polls? Does Victor I have the chance of a coalition?

It seems pretty soon to me to have another election, I mean it can't be easy going in there and trying to fix everything up in one year, especially when you have to remove some of the important infrastructures (if corruption was really widespread). But yeah, there's idealism and pragmatism, and if people feel like things aren't working they're pretty likely to change their minds. I still think it was a stupid move to fire the other face of the whole Revolution. Where's the idealism in that?

preliminary results -the official ones should be known on Monday.

Victor II - over 30%
Yulia - 22%
Victor I - 13.5%

please don't encourage him to use that word. I prefer to say we'd 'play some music together', since that's what we're doing. We're not technically jamming.

ive only seen the exit polls so far, but it is fair to assume that theyre representative of the actual results. those results arent that drastic either (Viktor II with like 33%, tymoshenko with like 22% and yushchenko with like 15%), so the real concern now is coalition building. either way yushchenko is caught between mud and a puddle, indeed. joining tymoshenko would mean, amongst many other things, having the roles reversed and being subordinate to her as prime minister, and joining the other viktor would ridiculous for the obvious reasons. god willing theyll reunite and get their house in order because this is nonsense

i do think democracy can take root there, but that there just has to be enough time. more important than just having that form exist is having the institutions and infrastructure there to support it. one year certainly isnt enough to do that, id think we would agree, but yushchenko hasnt exactly been visionary either

what do you parents think about the "then and now" with czech... Česká republika? i mean pre and post communist times? do they long for the good old days? or not any more?
there is a lot to like about that system, we have to admit. its very cozy. everyone had a stable job and income. prices were locked and the economy was stable. it is attractive for those who arent interested in, you know, social mobility or actual freedom. offer a lot of people the choice and i think they will gladly choose the former. fuck i have to watch "goodbye lenin" again. i saw it in theatres and fell asleep during it like a real idiot and, as i hazily recall, it dealt a lot with all of this this

Hey, that's close. So Yulia kicked his ass? Oh man

And jamming's jamming. If you're just playing stuff that isn't pre-written then I count that as jamming. You could also play Jammin', which may or may not qualify as jamming

fuck you beat me to posting the results


how would we technically 'jam' though? that sounds disgusting man what the fuck

we'd technically jam if I just told you 'hit it!' and we'd create something on the spot, out of blue. And that's not what's happening.


jam and yan - the most hated words in my life. thank you very much