31
December
2006
We’re less than 90 minutes away from being part of the European Union. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you this year’s highlights, as I remember them:
+The ETA declared in June a permanent ceasefire …
- … which they might have broken recently.
+The birdflu didn’t become the apocalyptic pandemic it was predicted to be…
- though 2006 saw its first proven human-to-human transmission.
+This year’s Eurovision had the most interesting winners ever…
- Thanks to the Finns cheating with the use of Skype.
+The Poincaré conjecture was finally proven.
- … but the prover refused the medal that went with it and left the field of mathematics.
+Humanity gets back two stolen Edward Munch paintings…
- … but loses one planet, Pluto.
+Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic kick the bucket…
- … but we see also the disappearance of Stanislaw Lem, James Brown, Pink Floyd’s Steve Barrett, Steve Irwin, Milton Friedman, Hungarian Ferenc Puskas , Ligeti György and Suto Andras, Romanian Laura Soica, Gica Petrescu and Silviu Brucan. Tom and Jerry and Green Lantern were orphaned.
For me and my family it was a nice year, full of love and traveling. I hope the next will be even better.
Happy 2007, everyone! (now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to take care of a certain champagne bottle 
)
Posted: chestii
26
December
2006
I’m at loss with this weblog. I had WordPress’s Akismet spam catcher plugin for a long time until our hosting company started sending me angry emails about the fact that a huge part of their memory was occupied by the spammers’ battle with Akismet. Okay, I turned that off, found a Captcha plugin and y’all had to write the little numbers and letters inside the box. Not much time passed until spam started reappearing - it outsmarted the Captcha. Plus the hosting company started shouting again about resource overuse. So I turned off the Captcha, and spam started flowing in, at a rate of approx. 25 comments /day .
So now only logged in users can comment. Which is a nuisance, and I know it. I’m considering switching to Movable Type, installing any plugin that you tell me about and that works against spam effectively or shutting down the blog altogether . Ideas (either as comments here or mailed) are very much welcomed.
Posted: stumbled upon
25
December
2006
I hope your Holidays are filled with joy, laughter and lots of shiny stuff …
… and may all of you get even more presents next year!
Posted: chestii
16
December
2006
Timi fell in love with Garfield movies. She knows how to play them, rewind to her favorite scenes, restart the cartoon when it’s over - over and over again. When she gets bored, she just selects another cartoon that we downloaded for her and plays it. And I’m thinking about how different it was for me.
As a kid, I grew up during commie Romania’s last decade. No food in stores, no warm water on tap except for 4 hours /day, 2 times/week, no driving with your car on Sunday if it was the wrong Sunday (one Sunday, the cars with plates that ended in odd numbers were allowed ; next week, the ones with even numbers; no, I’m not making this up). There was also a lot more reading, a lot less violence and poverty than now. The two sides of the coin, I guess.
But that’s not what I’ll tell you about today. My story is about a movie.
We had one cinema in Cugir, called Patria. It was a big concrete building, cold in the summer and freezing in the winter. Me and most of Cugir’s kids went there each Sunday morning for an hour or so of cartoons, laughing our asses off at the adventures of Omide, Oache and Scaparici:
and the Russian-speaking wolf that never got the rabbit but made all of us wonder what “nu zaietz pagadi!” meant (apparently, it can be translated as “I’ll get you, $^% rabbit!”)
Other than the cartoons, there were the movies. They were changed once per week and were mostly Romanian war / action movies, old cowboy flicks and Russian/ Chinese/ Czech/ East German socialist fodder. We went to the better Romanian films and to the cowboy stories we saw less than 3 times. Generally, there were very few titles from outside the Iron Curtain, and the vast majority of those were produced before 1960.
One day in 1986, however, when the program for the next month was put in the window, people started gathering in front of it. They looked excited and were talking among themselves. Soon the whole town knew: there was an AMERICAN ACTION MOVIE coming on. A NEW one. Starring OMAR SHARIF, which WE HAVE PREVIOUSLY HEARD OF. People were first in a state of excited disbelief, which quickly turned into anguish over getting or not getting a ticket. Suddenly, the director of the movie theater, the ticket sellers and the cashier were offered bribes, getting phone calls from way up , threatened with bad grades for their kids - all of this for the tickets. They sold out for the whole week on the first day - there were only an insignificant number of tickets left when they were actually put on sale.
On the first day of showing, you couldn’t drop a needle in front of the cinema. There were three times more people than the capacity of the cinema, all hoping to get inside, with or without a ticket. My dad put me on his shoulders, so that I could get air, and navigated with me and my mom inside slowly, protecting mom from the aggressive elbows with one hand while the other made way for us, paddling upwards a tumultuous river. We finally got inside, found our places and watched the movie in a theater so filled with people that women were on the verge of fainting from the lack of air towards the end.
For one and a half hour, we weren’t in the humid, cold room. Under a blinding sun we were chased by Omar Sharif, stealing emeralds, running through the Amazonian jungle, shooting guns, saving the damsel in distress. There was no word said during the film, people were sitting in trance, absorbing the movie through all pores instead of just watching it . When it was finished, nobody felt like exiting for a while, trying to make the images last a tad more.
I looked up the movie a few days ago. It was called Green Ice, and it doesn’t even have a page on the Wikipedia.
It looks now like a B-list clone of Indiana Jones. It was English, not American. It was also shot 5 years before ‘86. It starred Ryan “Love Story” O’Neal as the friggin’ action hero. But then again … who cares? The time when it was shown and the effect it had on that little town will forever sprinkle magic dust on it.
Posted: chestii
12
December
2006
In one of my recent insomniac nights I dug out my old diaries and read them , after a few years of almost forgetting about how my pre-university self was like. Most of the reactions to the reading involved banging my head to various objects, including but not limited to walls or desks.
I don’t know if it was only me or it’s a general tendency of the female humans at that age but as a pre-teen and teenager I could easily pass for a total idiot. Over and over I felt like reaching through time and space towards my old self and smacking the shit out of her. I mean, really. You need arguments? I’ll give you arguments:
7th grade - When someone you don’t know sends you a note during break telling you to get lost, because he’s not into you, it probably means that somebody told him a false gossip and you can go to him calmly and explain the situation. It doesn’t mean that you have to fall in love instantly with the guy, thinking that said note is just his intricate way of telling you he likes you. It also doesn’t mean you have to agonize over the guy a whole year.
8th grade - When moving to another town, bragging to the new class about the many trips you took while showing your dad’s (who happens to be a Geography teacher) collection of foreign postcards and presenting it as yours isn’t a good strategy for the long run.
9th grade - When the guy you like in the karate classes tells you he’s not over his ex yet and therefore not ready to start a new relationship and next week he flirts with another girl, it means that maybe, just maybe he doesn’t like you in that way. Also, getting bored of the boyfriend that falls for you mainly because he said that he loves you ain’t too damn logical.
10th grade - When the twin girls that sit in your bench move for a few days to another place in the class, it doesn’t mean that you have been cursed from birth, nobody will ever like you and that God, Karma and the big, big universe hate your guts. It also doesn’t justify long lamentations and death wishes.
11th grade - When the English guy you met in the summer camp doesn’t write / phone to you as he promised, phoning his ex-girlfriend to ask about his whereabouts might not be the smartest move.
12th grade - When the (much older) boyfriend gets into “whatever” mode after you make it clear that you’re not ready yet for doing the deed and doesn’t call or visit, the proper reaction is to send him on his merry way and concentrate on the exams. Not to sink into your life’s first (and only, thankyouverymuch) depression and fail graciously the admittance to University.
……I started to grow a spine and learned to see things more closer to reality during that last year of high school. Better late than never.
Posted: chestii
4
December
2006
Timi likes bathing, but only if I bathe with her. Therefore, I have to fill the tub with lukewarm water, get her in, get myself in, get 12 plastic cubes and a pee-capable swan in, let her dump the water from the bucket in which the cubes were in on my head, so that I can do the same to her and therefore be able to shampoo her li’l noggin properly, and then scream at the top of my lungs for Robi to get her out of the tub so that I can wash too.
She recently became interested in her body parts, which we name while I wash them. One day, she pointed to my boobs and asked what were they called. I told her those are my dodos (kiddie Hungarian term for the boobs). She pointed to herself, showed me where her dodos are and we continued the washing. I forgot all about it until Friday.
We went with Timi to Kaufland, a local supermarket. The Christmas decorations were everywhere and we were checking them out while Timi continued her love affair with the treadmill on display at one of the aisles. The kid goes on the machine and either runs or walks backwards on it until we beg her to let some other child play too.
So there I was, looking at some silver bears with flutes in their hands
when out of nowhere comes Timi, gropes my boobs vigorously and screams “DODO!!!” then runs back to the treadmill. People snickered around me, while I stood there confused trying to figure out what was that all about. The I remembered the bathtub teaching and started giggling myself.
I’ll have to show less cleavage when going to a public place from now on.
Posted: Timi
3
December
2006
Zu has tagged with the making of a list for Saint Nicholas’ Day, which is on Dec 6th. Saint Nicholas is celebrated here as an anticipation for Christmas, with kiddies all around the country shining their boots and putting them in the window for Nicholas to bring them gifts. The bad kids are supposed to get a stick instead of the presents. I have yet to see a kid that got one of those, though.
Anyway, here’s the list of things that I want from Mos Nicolae for 2007:
-A second baby, at least as gorgeous in every way as Timi is.
-Health for us and our loved ones
-To get a new and better paying job along with / instead of the one at the hospital
-For Timi to learn to speak well both Romanian and Hungarian in the next few months, and to be able to meet the kindergarten germs without getting sick
-To be able to pay the loan for the car entirely.
I’m tagging Romerican, Deea, Andy and Mirona (I tried to choose only people living in Romania this time, what with the national day of Ro and all, but any non-Romanian that feels like being tagged with the list … please, go ahead)
Posted: stumbled upon
