Author: Mick Hartley

From the EnglishRussia website:

While hundreds people quarrel online and offline about the Soviet Bronze Soldier monument moved to another place by Estonian authorities, some more Soviet monuments can be found treated totally with lack of any respect in the back yard of “Museum of History” in the capital of Estonia – Tallinn.

I like the contrast between the “heroic” Lenin, gazing boldly into the bright Communist future, and the prosaic surroundings where he now finds himself, in a back yard in Estonia. Lack of any respect? Damn right.

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And the explanation:

Here is a novel illusion that is as striking as it is simple. The two images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are
identical, yet one has the impression that the tower on the right leans more, as if photographed from a
different angle. The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single
scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede
from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with
two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as
they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from
below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion
reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if
part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as
separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of
Pisa’, whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.

Lots of good stuff in Julian Gough’s lament on the preponderance nowadays of tragic over comic writing:

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

Yet western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar. The Booker prize leans toward the tragic. In 1984, Martin Amis reinvented Rabelais in his comic masterpiece Money. The best English novel of the 1980s, it didn’t even make the shortlist. Anita Brookner won that year, for Hotel du Lac, written, as the Observer put it, “with a beautiful grave formality.”

Monotheism takes some of the blame: not very open to humour, these religious types:

It is interesting, but unsurprising, that all the satirists murdered and allegedly murdered on Muhammad’s orders were, among other things, Jewish. With its vigorous tradition of Talmudic debate, and with no Jewish state to stifle or control that debate, Judaism never fell into the paralysis of the younger monotheisms. It was, to put it mildly, never state-approved. Judaism, excluded from the establishment in so many Christian and Muslim nations, has consequently produced a high proportion of the world’s great satirists, comedians and novelists. And, in Yiddish, it produced perhaps the world’s first compulsively comic, anti-authoritarian language, with its structural mockery of high German.

In Christian Europe, the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical texts occurred when the habit of submission to authority was at its most extreme. When printing was invented, no one thought to use it for anything other than the Christian Bible, for that was the myth of Europe, the one true myth.

Then there’s the familiar problem, with so many of today’s authors having graduated from creative writing courses, of professionalism:

Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.

And, one might add, for philosophers, or literary critics.

Finally, a welcome riposte to this absurd article (via Pootergeek):

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty of ideas.

cratically elected Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora – backed, if opinion polls are right, by more than 65 percent of the nation’s people.

Yet the U.N. Security Council, which ordered the investigation soon after Hariri’s murder in February 2005, still can’t decide whether or not to bring the perpetrators to justice. […]

Having failed to kill the Hariri investigation through war, street action and targeted killings, those who do not want the truth to be fully established have now switched to diplomacy…

The carrot that Syria is dangling is the prospect of revived peace talks with Israel. Syrian leaders laid out this prospect for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she visited Damascus last spring. It is supposed to be so attractive as to trump all other considerations, including the Hariri murder investigation.

Syria believes that the Ha riri investigation was a pet project of the Bush administration and French ex-President Jacques Chirac. With Chirac retired and Bush’s time in the White House winding down, all that Syria needs is to buy time – which it’s trying to do by courting Pelosi and wooing beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Allowing such dilatory tactics to succeed, however, would have a deadly effect on the politics of the Middle East far beyond the Hariri case. It would endorse state-sanctioned murder as a legitimate tool of politics, and deal a further blow to the United Nations’ already shaky authority.

pressure group. Independent Chinese analysts said it provided a detailed account of confidential plans by the security authorities. “The main aim of ‘security’ for the Olympics will be the suppression of freedom,” the human rights group said. It challenged the International Olympic Committee to hold the Chinese government to promises it had made to guarantee human rights as part of its bid for the Games.

Yu has previously been identified by the state media as the second-ranking officer in the Beijing Public Security Bureau. The leaked speech shows he is responsible for overseeing what the authorities term “collective incidents”, a coded phrase for mass demonstrations.

Yu said he was planning the preventive detention of anyone organising “incitement” and of those who “plot behind the scenes”. He said police were building a databank of people known for bad behaviour, singling out Chinese who use the traditional right to petition government as a means to make trouble.

A typical “troublemaker” would be 50-year-old Ye Guozhu, who is serving a four-year sentence for campaigning against evictions in Beijing to make way for the Olympic building projects. Dubbed “the Olympic prisoner” by activists, Ye has allegedly been beaten and placed in solitary confinement.

The leaked speech also disclosed that during the Games, snatch squads of security men will be posted in Tiananmen Square and other sensitive venues.

We’re going to see a lot more incidents of ASDS, I imagine.

t anyone has ever seen of all time.” Banksy responded to the Sotheby’s sale by posting a painting on his Web site. It featured an auctioneer presiding over a crowd of rapt bidders, with the caption “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.”

I don’t know – am I meant to think he’s some kind of hypocrite because Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for his stuff? Good luck to him. There are worse people around making claims on our attention.

“The art world is the biggest joke going,” he has said. “It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.”

the kindness and the hearts of the women,” she said. “This is the kind of war that we are fighting.”

Our meeting takes place in the privacy of an outhouse built from mud bricks and donkey dung. Sacks of food aid are stacked along the walls.

If other villagers knew what had happened to Awatif, she would have little prospect of marriage. She insisted, however, that her name and photograph be used in the international media.

“I want you to use my true name because I have told you the truth of what happened,” she said, fiddling with a tiny passage from the Koran hanging around her neck.

“This will be a message to other women over the world to support the women here.”

A Dutch gorilla makes a bid for freedom:

A witness, Robert de Jonge, told NOS radio that he didn’t see the gorilla escape but began following it and tried to help after he saw people running and screaming that the animal had grabbed a woman.

“I saw the beast running through the park with a woman behind him, him grabbing her forearm,” De Jonge said.

At a distance of around 30 yards, he saw the gorilla lie down near the woman and then heard her scream.

“He bit her, or I think he bit her, because when he stood up his mouth was covered in blood,” De Jonge said.

He said he then stopped to tell arriving police what had happened…

If only all gorillas were as helpful.

attacked the wealthy oligarchs who had privatized — often illegally and with disastrous effects for regular Russians — many state enterprises. Some who had dared to use their affluence to support Putin’s political opponents decided to flee the country.

Russians have never had much experience with independent news. “In Russia, there never was freedom of speech. The population had 80 years of communistic propaganda — they have gotten used to this type of television,” Panfilov said. “Only a small part of the population can search for independent sources of information through the Internet, or by the old Soviet tradition of listening to programs of foreign radio stations in Russian.”

The lack of interest in independent news was demonstrated recently at the annual Andrei Sakharov journalism awards — Russia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize — for investigative journalism. Only about two dozen people were present at the awards ceremony in Moscow, with almost no press coverage.

Anna Lebedeva won the top award for her work in a small town in central Russia. During her acceptance speech, she said that because of the danger of her work and the lack of public interest, she was considering switching to “writing restaurant reviews.” “It is a terrible situation,” said Alexei Simonov, the head of the award committee and the president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation. “If you want to risk your life for very little reward, then join this profession.”

Indeed, Russia is the third most dangerous country in which to practice journalism, after Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists…

As far as I can tell, this is not a joke (via):

Iran is to start manufacturing “Islamic bicycles” for women that conceals their figure, the government newspaper Iran reported on Thursday.

“This bike has a cabin which conceals half of the cyclist’s body,” the newspaper said. Elaheh Sofali, an architect of the project, told Iran it would encourage women’s sports in the Islamic republic.

Nor is this:

Owners of trendy internet cafes, as well as bars and restaurants popular with young Iranians have received a letter signed by national police authorities in which new measures are announced to enforce “the country’s moral health.” “Public places will not be allowed to use dark windows anymore or curtains which make it impossible to view from the outside what is going on inside,” said the letter, which states in particular that men and women must not be allowed inside internet cafes together but in separate days or schedules “to avoid unpleasant promiscuity.”

And this, via b&w, is definitely not funny:

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the recent arrests of four Iranian student editors of Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran following the publication of newsletters carrying articles deemed insulting to Islam. The students say they had no involvement in the publications, calling them a fraud designed to disrupt student elections. All of the university’s student publications were nonetheless banned by the school administration, according to online reports.

In the run-up to the Islamic Student Association annual elections at the prestigious polytechnic institute, newsletters bearing the names and logos of four student publications were distributed throughout the campus on April 30, according to AUTNews, the Web site of the Islamic Student Association of Amirkabir University. They contained three controversial articles and two caricatures deemed critical of the Iranian regime and insulting to Islam.

One article questions the infallibility of the Prophet Mohammad, the first Shiite Imam Ali, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to CPJ sources familiar with the Persian-language newsletters. Another story criticizes the regime’s crackdown on modern female clothing, and a third ridicules Islamic women’s attire…

“We are outraged by the arrest of these four student editors,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. “Iranian authorities continue to crack down on political and pro-democracy activists. These arrests show the extent the regime is willing to go to silence dissenting voices.”