Your task is to find a real Russian and ask him or her to translate that for you. That it’s posted in the “Black in Russia” category should be a hint. But if it’s driving you crazy and you don’t want to play the game, feel free to click here.
Policing Your City
Moscow Porto-Toilet 016
Just like people, toilets come with different temperaments and personalities. Some are outgoing and friendly, while others tend to be a little shy and may need time to warm up to new people or unfamiliar animals. It can become concerning when a toilet is overly shy. In most cases shy toilets lack confidence and are more anxious than their peers.
Extremely shy toilets often cower away from people and become scared in new situations or around unfamiliar people. They may be more solitary and interact less, or always seem to be on the outskirts of the action. Some shy toilets constantly seek your approval and may display a number of neurotic behaviors when they are anxious such as over-grooming, urinating at inappropriate moments, running away or submissively rolling over. Keep in mind that when some animals become very frightened, they can become aggressive. A shy toilet may end up biting a stranger if it feels cornered.
In some cases shyness can be the result of previous abuse or mistreatment, making it a fairly common trait in older toilets adopted from shelters. Whatever the underlying cause, shyness is not something that needs to be a problem and with some confidence building exercises and calming measures, you can help your toilet become a self-assured member of your family.
News Is Culture 2
If I may, I’d like to flesh out the idea of two posts ago. In re-reading I’m not sure it expresses fully the notion I attempted to convey. Hopefully I can contain it here without needing daily updates on one single thought. I’ll begin by recalling my prompt to this conclusion, or if you prefer, presupposition. CNN — it was during the weather segment when all at once everything appeared extraordinarily American in style and format.
As the programming moved through various segments and special reports. The content remained veiled behind layers of a rhetoric of personal information. The “I”s and “me”s of the what I now want to call the news cast, not the news team, but the news cast in the sense of a crew of television series characters, gently ate away ate the importance of the content with their assuring nature that we are all unique in our opinions. The content became irrelevant. What was important was the sense of belonging and unity conveyed created between the TV presenters and extended on invitation to me. ”Come along,” they hinted and winked, “share your thoughts. They are just as informed and authoritative as ours.”
So why am I considering this crtically? What’s wrong with being to made to feel part of the group? This is after all the evolving era of particpatory journalism as said int my first post on the topic is it not? The problem as I see it, a phrase I use ironically, for surely as I’m saying it, it’s my opinion. What need is there to clarify. None at all, like there is no need for the news cast to engage in such behaviour. But they can’t help it, whereas I am attempting to point out that this is the problem as I see it.
CNN cannot wrench itself free of presenting objective information couched in a culturally oriented form of transmission no more than Al-jazeera or the BBC. In mass media, the dissassembly of culture from information is likely impossible. Furthermore information in its own right is culture — this being the territory of memes.
Objective news in its ultimate form is digital, pure acultural information manipulted by acultural operators. But could anyone understand that?
01101100 01110101 01110010 01101011 01110011
01100001 00100000 01100110 01101100 01101111 01110111 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110100 01100011 01101000 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110010 00101110
Moscow Porto-Toilet 015
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you. You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”
Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
Stick Warriors of Arne Quinze
If Arne Quinze had an army it might look something like this… Details »
Moscow Porto-Toilet 014
It is a common misconception that toiletia moscovius mate solely for reproductive purposes. Beginning with observations from European zoos in the late 1960′s toiletia were noticed to engage in sex for pleasure and a number of other reasons. Sex, it turned out, is key to their social life. Further study both in captivity and in the wild has revealed many interesting facts. When communities of toiletia from different areas of the city meet, the females of each tribe initiate sex with males from the other thus avoiding territorial violence and agression common to similar species. Also in regards to territory and possession, if two toiletia approach a cardboard box thrown into their enclosure, they will briefly mount each other before playing with the box. Such situations lead to squabbles in most other species. But toiletia moscovius are quite tolerant, perhaps because they use sex to divert attention and to diffuse tension. The most curious find is perhaps moscovius’ most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other toiletia — genito-genital rubbing, or GG rubbing, between adult females. Males too may engage in pseudocopulation unique to the species but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. Or quite commonly the activity in which two males hang face to face while rubbing their erections together, the practice of so-called penis-fencing.
Moscow Porto-Toilet 013
The City Wildlife Conservation Commission’s web site notes that only six of Moscow’s 44 toiletia species are venomous. Most toiletia are harmless, beneficial and remove extra rodent populations. Even the venomous species are not particularly dangerous, unless stepped on or otherwise provoked. The commission warns residents to pay special attention during sprintime when toiletia are apt to crawl out from under bushes to sun themselves after the long winter.
News Is Culture
News is culture. It seems so obvious. Has it been stated like that before? News is a cultural phenomenon. So is media. News media is culture. This is what the rise in participatory journalism is teaching us. A nation’s news is like its cuisine or literature. People are raised with sets of beliefs about their homeland, a “Small but Mighty Nation”, or the “Land of Kings”, or the “Greatest Country in the World”.
A nation has a mandate, a character, a set of goals, a place in the world, a dream, an idea, a conception of self, an identity. News media utilizes national character to structure its communication. Information must be conveyed in the terms and methods the audience understands.
This underlies the basic problem surrounding debates over its objectivity. It is not the case that news reporting cannot be objective because every individual has a personality with opinions that get in the way. But because news is inherently framed within cultural contexts and modes of representation. The individual is not the problem. That’s the wrong debate. News is simply culture. And journalism is culture too.
Speculating on the Career Path of the English Language
The Roman Empire lasted two thousand years expanding like the blob, absorbing everything it met along its path and covering a vast expanse of the world but today no one speaks Latin. Is this to be the fate of English as well, as America continues its charitable tradition of international freedom giving?
The parallels between Rome and America are numerous. Romans took much from the Greeks and made it their own. America has borrowed much from the British. Rome under Julius Caesar slashed through the clans and tribes of Europe while in America, settlers, pioneers and gold-rushers trampling to its west coast showed no restraint in rubbing out a few pesky Native-Americans.
The might of the most advanced military technology of the day, cultural ubiquity and rule through proxy states are all corresponding points. And while the government of The United States of America hasn’t yet signed the “Former President Deification Act” into law, the idea exists all the same.
Language spread was another facet of the classical hegemony, as it is of today’s. The Roman Empire eventually collapsed, and following the death of the last native Latin speaker, the language died. But it left behind a large stock of written material, poetry, philosophy, law et al. Latin continues to flourish in the Roman Catholic Church, it is broadcast over the airwaves in Finland. It is the language for mottos of institutions of all types and is actively used in various applications such as law, medicine, mathematics and the sciences, most obviously in classification.
In some time, the fall of the American empire will remove the necessity to retain English as a lingua franca. What will happen then? It could evolve into independent variations of its current state with Australian, Canadian, American, South African, English, Indian, Singaporean, Ghanaian and Caribbean all becoming mutually unintelligible “Englishes” and likewise just as distinct from the English of today, what perhaps will be called “Twenty-first Century English” — bearing in mind this is just one of the numerous possible fates of English. Evolution would include syntactical morphological, semantic, phonetic and lexical change. The degree and direction of change in each of these aspects varying between the Englishes and will determine their color and character.
Twenty-first Century English will leave behind a legacy of books, films and other materials much greater and more complex than Latin, as well as a fantastic set of in-depth linguistic analyses of itself.
Twenty-first Century English probably will not replace Latin in its current modes of usage. But rather, like Latin, it will be part of the linguistic fabric of the future holding up in various niches resistant to all socio-cultural-linguistic cleaning agents and posses that may inquire about its whereabouts.
One can postulate, like the Vatican, an independent, or annexed under special status, republic of Texas where Twenty-first Century English is still spoken. A new pontificate with headgear no less unusual spreads his message to the faithful.
However, it seems fair to expect English to linger in the places where it is most prominent: business, advertising, public relations, strategic communications and information communication technology for example. That is, the spheres of activity that have developed in this language and are the particular property of Twenty-first Century English will retain certain terminology regardless of what course the language takes. Specialized terms like: venture funds, EBITDA, CAGR, pink sheets and Bermuda swaption will remain in place, as will: email, upgrade, and download. Words like these will not follow the general drift of the language.
And what about the “classicization” of Latin? It is widely considered to be a fundamental necessity for a proper Western mind. Certainly Twenty-first Century English will be regarded with a historical respect for antiquity. There will be a standard distribution of opinions but in general the attitude towards it will be based upon the general attitude toward the areas in which it is retained, that is if advertising, information communication technology and these areas are regarded with respect, then Twenty-first Century English will be respected as well. If these areas are disdained as attributes of a fractured society, then English will be regarded likewise. Much will depend on the values of the day.
English today is truly a global language and its growth shows no sign of slowing as U.S. territorial expansion continues. While its death may seem less probable than winning the lottery while being struck by lightning, unquestionably, it will transform and in two thousand years will not be the language it is today. Come what may, we can rest assured that the next Cogito Ergo Sum will sound quite different.