steal this idea

2006-01-13T09:49:00.000+01:00

Return of Kinoautomat

On 11 January, MfD reported that a new exhibit at the National Film Theatre in London would include Radúz Činčera's Kinoautomat (here's the full Czech text).

This from the British Czech and Slovak Association website:

A huge hit at EXPO 67 in Montreal, Kinoautomat is the first ever interactive cinema system created by a talented ensemble of Czech New Wave filmmakers. It centres on the hapless Mr. Novák who finds himself caught up in various situations which represent moral dilemmas. In a specially ‘voting cinema’, the audience members could alter the trajectory of the film at key intersections. As a part of the original experience, [Miroslav] Horníček himself would act out a moderating role, providing a human interface to the film's branching structure. The film was last presented in 1974 making this the first production of Kinoautomat for 31 years.

As you've probably noticed, interactive cinema never really took off, although it has inspired projects like Cause and Effect, a hybrid between cinema and live theatre, which premiered in Finland in 2002.

Mark Naimark caught up with Činčera in 1998 when the latter was working on the ill-fated St. Michael's Mystery. Naimark had previously written about Činčera in a 1997 paper called Interactive Art - Maybe It's a Bad Idea, in which he also touches on Činčera's Cinelabyrinth.

A new project to bring the kinoautomat experience to DVD received CZK 300,000 from the State Fund for the Support and Development of Czech Cinematography in 2004.

2006-01-12T07:59:00.000+01:00

Pretty skeptical

Two Indian news sources, WebIndia123 and NewKerala, have picked up a DPA report (which I can't find anywhere) that Frekvence 1 reported that Julia Roberts will appear in a film adaptation of Lolly Winston's Good Grief. Michael Cunningham is reportedly working on the script for Universal Pictures. And yet, it all seems unlikely.

2006-01-10T08:05:00.000+01:00

Last Holiday

Wayne Wang's remake of the 1950 Alec Guiness comedy opens 13 January in the U.S. ContactMusic.com has a snippet from Wang. The film shot at Barrandov Studios Hostivar stages and on location at the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary. Wang says the Pupp was 'nice but sparse': 'It was a bit like (the hotel in) The Shining.'

(Personally, I think he's being a little harsh on the Pupp. Interior hotel shots for The Shining were shot at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where I got married in 1993. I haven't been back since, but the Pupp is looking considerably better than the Stanley did at the time.)

I also visited the set for Last Holiday. Barrandov had recreated Pupp interiors at Hostivar as well as a portion of the facade of the hotel for a balcony shot. Opposite the hotel hung a huge screen backdrop of Karlovy Vary superimposed beneath the Alps. While KV plays itself in the film, the producers take advantage of certain audiences' ignorance of geography to turn it into an alpine ski resort.

2006-01-09T22:50:00.000+01:00

Shut Up and Shoot Me

Reading the Czech press lately, you have to wonder if maybe all the country's small exhibitors need to be put out of their misery. On Saturday, the Central Bohemia edition of Mladá fronta Dnes published the latest in a series of stories about the woes of small movie houses. No earth-shaking reporting here, just a round up of what some local exhibitors are experiencing. Here's the full text in Czech.

The story reports that the little guys' box-office numbers are way down and have been falling for a long time. They're trying to lure viewers back by investing in new comfy seats, sound systems and air-conditioning. A lot of these little cinemas are municipally owned and are accustomed to being subsidised (ah, socialism). Some towns are shutting their movie houses down, while others, like Kraslice, are downsizing.

Only one exhibitor interviewed for the story, Pavel Volf, one of the operators of the Hutník cinema in Kladno, blames a poor crop of titles. Several exhibitors name Román pro ženy and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as the best-attended films of the year.

Volf says his theatre is considering offering DVD rentals and asking local firms to subsidise tickets as a benefit for their employees. Suggestion: Hand out seat cushions. And free beer.
Or maybe loaded pistols.

2006-01-08T20:26:00.000+01:00

More multiplex-induced drama for exhibitors

An article by Petra Pospěchová in the 2 January issue of Týden holds multiplexes responsible for the collapse of traditional 'biograf' cinemas. (See full Czech text here.)

The article focuses on Olomouc, where a CineStar multiplex opened in November. The opening of the multiplex was behind schedule, but CineStar had exclusive rights to the premieres, which meant that Olomouc moviegoers had to wait weeks to see films that had opened elsewhere in the country. "We managed to work in only a few pictures in time, when the distributor offered them to us at the last minute," said Jan Joukal, director of Olomouc Cinemas.

Jana Borde Kalinova from distributor Falcon told Týden that multiplexes like CineStar get the premieres because that's where the money comes from. Fair enough. But Jiří Králík, director of the Summer Film School and also head of a cinema in Uherské Hradiště, says the situation in reversed – that the money is at the multiplexes because they get the premieres. Králík sees a cartel situation, wherein distributors take a larger percentage of the sales at the biograf cinemas that from the multiplexes.

The number of Czech cinemas has dropped by half in the last 15 years, Týden claims. At the beginning of the 1990s, there were more than 1300 cinemas; by the end of 2004 that number had fallen to 544. Among these were 15 multiplexes with 137 screens. Týden notes that some of the old-fashioned cinemas had shuttered even before the arrival of the multiplexes.

CineStar director Jan Bradáč rejects the notion that multiplexes could destroy the Czech cinema landscape. According to him the problem for single-screen cinemas is that they aren't able to stand up in the current competitive environment. (Týden fails to note that Bradáč is also director of distributor Falcon.)

Králík says small cinemas are afraid to speak up. "If someone protests the current situation, the distributors make his life difficult. And it will be hard to take the chance," he said, adding that the multiplexes behaving arrogantly. "On Thursday 15 December we didn't play, because the multiplex failed to deliver our copy of Harry Potter, which we had under contract," he told Tyden.

The magazine says it’s the consumers who win in this battle. Apparently most moviegoers visit multiplexes and indie houses. (Imagine!) One Olomoucer said he likes the multiplex's better sound, bigger screen and comfortable seats, but for 'independent films' he prefers the 'chamber environment' of a small cinema.

Týden lists an honour roll of fallen cinemas: in Olomouc, the Central and the Lípa (Pospěchová throws in a lovely detail about the latter, 'on whose darkened balcony generations of locals have made out [muchlovat] and drank too much'). In Dobřany, České Budějovice, Hradec Králové and Plzeň, other small houses have closed after CineStar opened multiplexes nearby. Exhibitors in Liberec are dreading they're next.

The article concludes by noting that small cinemas get some state support, but not much, and that the Czech parliament is supposed to take up an amendment in January that would raise ticket prices to generate more funds that could, possibly, maybe, in part help beleaguered small exhibitors.

2006-01-06T14:36:00.000+01:00

Kraslice seeks to revive traditional cinema

The Karlovy Vary issue of Právo reports today that the Kraslice city hall has begun looking for someone to take over the town's recently closed cinema. The city is now in discussion with a firm that is trying to revive traditional 'biograf' cinemas in smaller towns. Here's the full Czech text of the article as posted on the UFD site.

Právo doesn't name the firm or give details about the closed cinema. The report does indicate that it was city hall that formerly ran the cinema, but that they gave up because it was losing too much money. Presumably the cinema was in the town's culture center.

Films could be screened in Kraslice's culture center on the puppet stage. Another solution could be digital screenings. These would help Kraslice get new films sooner, according to Kraslice mayor Lubomír Zach. The city would first have to buy new digital equipment, which would run about CZK 500,000.

There have been a slew of stories in the press lately about the plight of small cinemas facing competition from multiplexes. I'll post more of them here as time allows.

2006-01-06T14:20:00.000+01:00

Just Like That

Saw The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe last night. I was a huge fan of the books as a child, so I was very apprehensive about the film adaptation. Happily director Andrew Adamson (Shrek 2) remained, I think, very true to the spirit and tone of C.S. Lewis' book. I recommend it.

There was a funny moment in the screening I went to. Near the end of them film, we see Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy as grown kings and queens. As we saw Peter's beard, the women's flowing gowns and everyone's feathered hair, you could everyone in the audience snickering as they realised the Pevensie children grew up to become Abba.

2006-01-06T10:45:00.000+01:00

Whose movie is it anyway?

Lidove noviny film editor Darina Křivánková says good riddance to the Czech films of 2005. She points out that a record 22 films will be competing for the 2005 Czech Lions, the Czech equivalent of the Oscars, but that most of them stink -- including some produced with the help of the state fund for the development and support of Czech cinematography.

Unfortunately, Křivánková writes, 2006 isn't off to a better start, judging by two new releases this month: Ještě žiju s věšákem, plácačkou a čepicí ('Still Living', opened 5 January) and Jak se krotí krokodýli ('How to Ride Crocodiles', opens 12 January). 'Still Living' was produced by public broadcaster Česká televize, which received support from the state fund for the project. 'Crocodiles' was produced by private broadcaster TV Nova, savings bank Poštovní spořitelna and energy utility RWE Transgas, among others. It's one thing if private investors like Nova want to help produce crap films, Křivánková writes, but it's quite another to spend public funds on them.

2005-03-17T21:32:00.000+01:00

Kapa ga nossa?

I'm starting to think some of the lunatic spam I get is in code (either that or lunacy can be spread by computer virus). Take the following excerpt from one I got tonight:

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed. Happiness is an agreeable sensation, arising from contemplating the misery of others.Hugs can do great amounts of good -- especially for children.
Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
Information is a negotiator's greatest weapon.

Loony? Or is that just what they want you to think?

And while you're getting out the tinfoil hats, this would be a good time to note that Scott has a theory that the Nigerian Fraud emails are computer generated. That's right -- the web has achieved sentience, and it's spamming you.

2005-03-11T14:52:00.000+01:00

Mic check

One two one two. This thing on?

2005-01-13T09:35:00.000+01:00

Brilliant

William Shattner has a new album, Has Been, produced by Ben Folds. Includes guest appearances by Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Lemon Jelly, Aimee Mann, Henry Rollins and Brad Paisley. The website has outtakes, as does this NPR story. Brilliant. Brilliant.

2005-01-09T19:48:00.000+01:00

Hotter than a pile of bloated corpses

From the San Jose Mercury News:

A search on Google.com under the words "tsunami" and "Petra Nemcova," the Czech supermodel who survived the tsunami in Thailand, turned up 59,500 results. A search under the words "tsunami" and "Nagappattinam," one of the most devastated port cities in Tamil Nadu, shows fewer than one-tenth -- 5,120 -- of the number of hits mentioning Nemcova's brush with danger.

Huh.

2005-01-05T11:11:00.000+01:00

You're overpaid

The Times (of London) reported Sunday on a Deloitte report on labour costs in the EU. (Hospodářské noviny picked up the ball today.) I didn't find the report itself on the Deloitte site; holler if you find it. Not surprisingly, Germany is the spendiest 'with average employment costs topping £35,000'. Lowball honours go to the neighbours: 'At just under £4,610 per employee the Slovak Republic has the lowest remuneration costs in the EU'.

According to HN's story, the Czech Republic has the ... 17th highest? labour costs in the EU25 at GBP 6970 (just over CZK 300,000) per employee per year (or CZK 25,000 a month).

Last month, Lidove noviny cited data from the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry indicating that the average monthly wage topped CZK 20,000 in the third quarter. The paper wrote: 'A manager in an industrial company, for instance, earned Kc52,554 on average in the third quarter, that is eight per cent more than a year ago. In contrast, the average monthly wage of electricians rose by two per cent year-on-year to Kc17,323.'

The ministry had reported earlier in December that the minimum wage would increase from CZK 6,700 to CZK 7,185 a month as of January, news which probably very nearly brought smiles to the faces of the 5,000 people who earn it.

Most people I know, Czechs and foreigners alike, weigh in around CZK 20,000 a month. That figure does a body handsomely considering that the earners probably have some sort of health insurance and live in a city where the public transport system relieves them of the need for a car.

Czechs may or may not want to rely on the state pension system and will save for their retirement accordingly. Foreign wage earners are in a different boat. If, like me, you're a US citizen whose been out of his home country's income tax loop for years ... well, there's good news and bad news. Bad news is you can't afford to retire, even in the unlikely event that Social Security exists when you get there. Good news is you haven't poured your hard-earned dough down the US drain. (Ok, so it wasn't so hard-earned.) We've had the pleasure of flushing it down the Czech drain. But oh well.

And then there's housing. We 20K/month earners are kinda in a jam, because the market demands we spend about half our income on shelter. Construction is up, which should bring housing costs down, but oil prices are keeping the prices on the rise (the Czech Statistical Office cited an 11 percent month-on-month increase in housing prices in October).

All this is to say that CZK 35 is too damn much to pay for a beer. Thanks for listening.

2004-12-22T13:19:00.000+01:00

PF2005

I'm heading out of town to spend the holidays in the mountains with Jim and his lovely wife Misha. I'd give you your Christmas presents now, except you've all been rotten little brats and don't deserve any. See you next year.

2004-12-21T20:16:00.000+01:00

That's no dragon, that's my wife

Those who are familiar with Czech media are aware of how entertaining CTK's attempts at English-language headlines can be. But I think the Jakarta Post has them beat today with Komodos from Indonesia capture Czech President at Prague Zoo.

Sadly the headline simply isn't accurate, but the truth is almost as good -- for as the lede tells us, "Indonesia's Komodo dragons -- the world's rarest and largest lizard species -- recently captured the heart of the Czech Republic's President Vaclav Klaus."

And they said the president loved no one but himself.

2004-12-21T20:12:00.000+01:00

Oh, this is a good idea_¡

2004-12-20T19:02:00.000+01:00

Dude

So like I heard this dude was on the radio and I was struck by two things: 1) His middle name is Fabius, and 2) he claims he stopped saying 'dude' when he finished grad school.

I like to think that I first started saying 'dude' out of irony. I mean, unless you're Doug, you probably started saying 'dude' after you heard Jeff Spicoli say it. If you're like me, you started using it in irony because you were definitely not the type of dude who said 'dude'. Or so you thought.

All this reminds me of something I call 'the dude shake', but which seems to be better known as 'the homey handshake' (which, I must say, sounds more hygienic). I'm sure some of you are familiar with it: One common variant begins like a normal handshake, but then the participating dudes press their thumbs together, wrapping their four remaining fingers around the back of the other dude's hand, before sliding their palms past each each other and hooking fingertips. They then bring their thumbs and index fingers together in a pinching motion as if to pass a doobie, raise the phantom spliff to their lips and drag on it. You've done this. You can be ashamed of it, but you've done this.

A couple years ago I was speaking with a young American lawyer at a cocktail party. After several drinks, it came to time to take our leave, and we found ourselves in mid-homey handshake (on second thought, that doesn't sound very hygienic either). Since then I've had the untested hypothesis that any (American?) man under the age of, say, 45 is susceptible to the, erm, aforementioned handshake and, regardless of his station in life, will reciprocate if you press your thumb against his.

I think of this as I notice the Czech Republic's business and political leaders getting younger and younger. Surely the handshake described above didn't permeate the same age level in Czech society, but if I ever get to shake hands with Stanislav Gross or Martin Jahn, I'll let you know.

2004-12-17T14:43:00.000+01:00

Do I have to smack you?

I was relieved to read in this entry on a Fistful of Euros that I’m not the only one who’s an utter klutz at cheekshaking. Years ago I found the kiss-hello and kiss-goodbye thing charming; now I’m just irritated by it.

Those Czechs who kiss with grace are either motivated by genuine sentiment (even better if shared by the other party) or they’re adept at faking it – which sorta makes them whores, when you think about it. I notice the Czechs tend to actually touch cheeks, while Americans, to pick on one nation, who adopt the custom tend to leave a couple inches between their faces. Personally, I like to nip at their ears.

Een my neyteef kontry, we’re a little more reserved with the physical contact. The only people who shake your hand are a) politicians, but only in a campaign year, b) preachers, but reluctantly, and c) bankers. (There is a growing trend to set aside a few seconds in the middle of worship services for congregants to shake hands with those seated near them – after which they can go back to pointedly ignoring each other.) Cheek-kissing is widely viewed as unclean, except among married couples in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

Physical contact among adult family members in Missouri is also frowned upon. My own family has made some progress, for lack of a better word, in this area, although we’re really bad at it. We try to embrace and shake hands at the same time. A more natural Missouri variant of the kiss-hello is simultaneously nodding your head once and waving two or three fingers from the steering wheel or side mirror as you drive past one another. Many believe this is how Jesus greeted his neighbors.

In the end, I say keep it real. If you really feel like getting cheek to cheek, by all means; you may want to consider the other person’s feelings in the matter, however. I, for one, promise never to be hurt if you don’t kiss me hello or goodbye; I’m more likely to be freaked out at your presumption, you harlot. So please don’t take offence if I extend a hand instead of a cheekbone. Or if I just nod and raise a finger or two.

2004-12-17T13:39:00.000+01:00

More bang for your crown

ČTK and ČT1 reported yesterday on the release of the National Report on the Control of Arms Exports. (The Foreign Ministry posts the report here, god love ’em.)

Representatives of Amnesty International and Transparency International pointed out that the country violates EU codes by exporting weapons to human rights abusers. ČTK has Barbora Pechotova of TI singling out Colombia, Georgia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka; ČT1 draws attention to Czech arms exports to Algeria, Columbia, Congo, Indonesia and, erm, Israel. Deputy Foreign Minister Jan Winkler said that the arms export process is thoroughly vetted, but that was really hard – like math is hard – to make sure more-or-less legitimate buyers in, say, Colombia don’t turn around and sell the guns to, say, paramilitaries.

The Czech Republic used to export more military material than it imported, but that changed in 1999 – the year the country joined NATO and started kicking tires on (sing along with Nena) super high-tech jet fighters. In 1993, the Czechs imported EUR 37 million in material; last year, they imported more than EUR 120 million.

In 2003, the Czechs sold EUR 82.9 million worth of bang – mainly light arms like the Skorpion. ČTK says the countries interested in such weapons include Bulgaria, Indonesia, and 'Arab and Latin American countries'.

2004-12-13T11:33:00.000+01:00

Terrorism, my eye

You know how you like to freak people out by shining one of those little laser pointers in their windows at night? Well you might want to stop, and not just because it's tired and immature.

First read this NYT story and/or this earlier LAT story. Does anyone think the military, or for that matter intelligence or diplomatic agencies, don't lie frequently? Aside from recent events, why would they even bother?

Thing is, they don't need to go so far as to plant bogus stories in the media; they can simply issue a genuine press release (which is nonetheless utterly unsubstantiated horsehit) to the AP and, presto, the nonsense has instant credibility around the world from Sydney to Prague. Of course, the AP aren't the only ones guilty of spreading manure, but they're good at it.

But to address the lasertag terrorists, a couple questions:
* How difficult is it direct a laser beam into the cockpit of an airliner that's flying a couple hundred miles an hour with enough accuracy to blind the pilot and the co-pilot, causing the plane to crash? That is, assuming the pilots are even flying the plane at all?
* By asking the above question, am I engaged in terrorist activity?

Update [15.12]
Well why didn't they say so?
Brendan I. Koerner explains.

2004-12-09T18:33:00.000+01:00

Yes, but you're not authentically wasted

As a sometime contributor Time Out Prague, I got a kick out of Elisabeth Eaves' piss-take on Time Out Andalucía. Hope she never finds my book.

2004-12-08T10:19:00.000+01:00

Ah, to je svoboda!

I recently had my bedroom floor refinished. When I moved in here a little over a year ago, the floor was covered by a butt-ugly grey tarpaulin that the landlord insisted was a carpet. This had been dumped on top of a strata of linoleum that dated from the Cretacious period. Under that was a parquet floor.

Why would anyone want to cover up ornamental flooring? Painting the ceiling? Temporary feeding lot for a small herd of angus? Extended glaciation?

Most people are loathe to get scratches on their floor; hence bačkory. But the landlord's fear of scratches is positively pathological. My hallway, for example, has a painted concrete floor -- no lino, no tile, just concrete, with a runner carpet down the middle. The runner is there (was there -- it's now rolled up in a corner) presumably to prevent scratching of the paint. The paint is there presumably to prevent scratching of the concrete.

The landlord has covered an alarming percentage of the surfaces in my flat with contact paper -- a wardrobe, a vanity desk, kitchen counters and the tiled surfaces in the bathroom. Let me say that again: the tile in my bathroom is covered with contact paper.

Anyway, I suggested when I moved in that, gee, it sure would be great to see that wooden floor all prettied up and shiny. The landlord's silence lasted about nine months until I suggested that I'd like to resurface the floor myself. He said no friggin way, but that if I wanted it done, he'd get it done by professionals. Sounds reasonable, I thought. I'm a devout amateur myself, but I understand the respect many people have for professionals and their gear.

I asked if the floor could be done last summer while I was in Karlovy Vary. No friggin way, the landlord said -- he and the family would be at their country home. I sucked it up and proposed November, when I would be in the US. Agreed.

So before I left, I moved all the furniture out of the bedroom. The landlord was very concerned that the painted concrete floor in the hallway be protected from scratches when the floor professionals arrived with their gear, so he gave me about a square meter of thin cotton rag to cover the hall floor with.

When I returned to Prague, I had a lovely parquet floor in my bedroom. Jeff, who had helped me move the furniture out of the bedroom also helped me bring it back in. It became clear in the process he's picked up a little of the landlord's pathology about scratches, to the extent I think he was hallucinating. 'Is that a scratch?' he asked more than once. 'Did we do that? Oh shit.' Then he proceeds to use my dishwashing sponge to remove phantom scratches from the new floor. (But hey, what are friends for?)

Now I feel perfectly free to do as I please with the floor. I drag furniture across it. I spill drinks on it. I let the dog walk on it. It's a floor. But I imagine the landlord looking at it at some point in the future and shedding a tears of rage when he sees the wear and tear of ordinary living before burying the parquet again under an avalanche of linoleum and carpeting.

I saw this letter to the Times this morning, and I thought 'What a concept: to be able to walk around without ID.' Doug wrote about this some time ago. And for all my complaining about the US, citizens there can still, often, for the time being, walk around without fear of being fined fifty bucks for not carrying a federal ID card.

'But if a policeman stops you in the street, how does he know you are truthfully identifying yourself?' He doesn't. In a free society, the line between security and freedom can become very fine. I'm not free to commit random acts of violence, for example, but I am free to walk down the street without proof that I don't go around committing random acts of violence.

Of course, without such controls, random acts of violence will occur. Without a manky grey carpet, I will get scratches on my floor. I'd sooner see the floor.

2004-12-01T18:14:00.000+01:00

It’s not just the economy, stupid

Give a listen to this NPR report. It really does matter what foreigners think about US policy.

See, when the US runs up a huge budget deficit fighting wars by itself, it has to borrow money to pay its bills. And since the US has a trade deficit with the rest of the world, much of that money has to come from foreign banks. Those lenders see a pariah dollar, a huge budget deficit, and an administration that likes to throw billions down holes like Iraq, ergo, they’re less likely to lend money. So the dollar falls further, interest rates go higher, and the economy sinks lower. Add to this the aggravating factor of soaring prices for oil – a commodity we’re burning plenty of in, you guessed it, Iraq.

Naturally you would hope that life, liberty, etc are more important than a weak currency, big deficit or the price of oil. But when the US exhausts its diplomatic, financial and military resources on a fool’s errand in Iraq, life, liberty, etc lose their defender.

2004-11-30T14:06:00.000+01:00

Go Ukraine

I'm more optimistic about Ukraine's future than I am about what the US has coming. I went to the US looking for ways I could help. I can't. America doesn't want help -- at least not the America I saw. The America I saw (granted, it was rural Missouri) is very happy with the way things are going. Ben Sargent sums it up perfectly here.

It's time for deep blue staters should consider supporting Libertarian candidates. The Big Government that the GOP has been squawking about forever has emerged. It's a heavy-handed, intrusive federal government that is restricting states' rights all over the map. From gay marriage in Massachusetts to medical marijuana in California, Washington is determined to silence the majority of voters in less-than-red states and enforce a country-fried agenda on the unwilling. Call it the talibanization of America.

Of course, you could try secession. Or emigration.

So I'm following events in Ukraine with interest. Will they preserve the Union? Probably. I'd been thinking I was contrary in rooting for the separatists until I remembered that Czechoslovakia achieved a peaceful and fairly amicable split in 1993. (Of course, Slovakia got the very short end of that stick, but it showed that separatism can work. Or not.)

RFE/RL reports that former Czech President Havel is firmly behind the people in the Ukraine. Here's his statement, originally in Czech, sent from Taiwan where Havel was on a visit (translation by Magda Sebestova of RFE/RL):

Dear Citizens,

Allow me to greet you in these dramatic days when the destiny of your country is being decided for decades ahead. You have its future in your hands. All trustworthy organizations, both local and international, agree that your demands are just. That is why I wish you strength, perseverance, courage and good fortune with your decisions.

Yours truly,

Vaclav Havel

Somebody tuck Vášek in -- he's plainly exhausted.

At any rate, the Radio is hosting a roundtable 1 December on 'Ukraine: What next?' If you want to go, RSVP by 10:00 a.m. tomorrow at lukaso@rferl.org.

2004-11-15T21:57:00.000+01:00

Gone huntin'

Getting back to my red-state roots for a couple weeks. I know you'll miss me. Some things to ponder while I'm away.

*Iraq needs help. No. I mean really. I still owe you my notes from the RFE/RL roundtable. Highlights include:
- Me getting spanked -- spanked! -- when I suggested maybe semi-autonomous regions might not be such a bad idea.
- The Shii'a representative saying with a straight face 'We are working with non-Muslim groups'.
- The Sunni representative saying that, although Sunnis would not recognise the validity of the elections, the elections must go foward.
- The Sunni representative saying that 'all of Iraq's problems are caused by neighboring countries' and pointedly not naming those countries, including the one whose name rhymes with 'you wait'.
- The Kurd representative saying, in response to the rather strange question 'Do your parties support the Iraqi army': 'Kurdistan has its own army.'

AvP. How come the interior of that pyramid was so well lit?

Czech democracy. As Doug points out, more than a small amount of the Czech population want their communism back. Bad on MfD for not reporting what the precise question was. Expressing 'nostalgia for the Communist era' may simply mean they got laid a lot in the seventies. Or could be they miss a time when they weren't being hassled to the polls to go vote for ODS again. Or not.

Aight. Got an early flight tomorrow. You kids be good and don't give your grandma a hard time. And no TV until you finish your homework.

2004-11-09T21:36:00.000+01:00

Faith-based humility

Earlier today, I noticed that Gary Hart is leading the Democrats' charge to retake the moral high ground.

2004-11-09T20:31:00.000+01:00

There are five important things about getting on TV ...

As Scott mentions, our zany election-night camera-jacking antics seem to have paid off, sorta. It's an old trick: Cameras are drawn to hand gestures like jackdaws to bright, shiny objects. Next time you're watching a press conference, notice how all the flashes go of when the speaker raises his or her hand; even better if the subject gives a thumbs-up, make an expansive gesture, rubs a bald head or rubs a semi-bald head.

2004-11-09T20:26:00.000+01:00

The baby and the Baath water

Jon Lee Anderson writes in the New Yorker:

'An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer's twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, "I had my guys coming up to me and saying, 'Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?' They all have to feed their families." He went on, "The problem with the blanket ban is that you get rid of the infrastructure; I mean, after all, these guys ran the country, and you polarize them. So did these decisions contribute to the insurgency? Unequivocally, yes. And we have to ask ourselves: How well did we really know how to run Iraq? Zero."'

2004-11-08T20:33:00.000+01:00

I'm so sorry

"It's rare that a successful apology happens. One where you apologize to someone, not for selfish reasons, but because you're really sorry and you want them to know that, and when the person you're apologizing to really hears what you're saying. Three stories of people groping toward that moment."
- Ira Glass, This American Life, Episode 277

2004-11-05T14:22:00.000+01:00

Room of one's own. Sleeps three.

Next Wednesday I will be attending a roundtable discussion on 'Political Developments In Iraq Ahead Of January's National Elections' hosted by RFE/RL. Speakers will include Mrs. Sallama H. Abdulla, Member of the Iraqi National Assembly, Shi'a; Mr. Mohammad S. Mohammad, Deputy of the Kurdistan Democratic Party's Public Relations Burea; and Mr. Baha Aldin B. Abdul Qadir, Member of Electoral Commission of Iraqi Islamic Party, Sunni. The event starts at 11 and is 'open to the public'. Let me know if you wanna go.

2004-11-03T13:24:00.000+01:00

Getting it and not getting it

I don't get it. Do you get it? I just don't get it. Either I don't get it or more than half the American voting public don't get it. And if the majority don't get it, then I guess I just don't get it.

By the way, Zlata hvezda sucks ass. But then, who am I to say?

2004-11-02T16:37:00.000+01:00

My opponent is a flapjacker

Campaign-Trail Quotes From George W. Bush, If He Were Running for President in 1848

"It is simply not true that we lacked support for the Mexican War. Our coalition was joined by Bohemia, the Papal States, and Lombardy. When listing our supporters, my opponent also forgot Schleswig."

2004-11-02T11:57:00.000+01:00

Of course, he'll lose the electoral college

Kerry continues to hold the lead in Czech polls, with the exception of the Czech World News poll, where Bush has moved in front with 52.94% of 34 votes (How does that work?).

Elsewhere in the Czech Republic, it's a Kerry landslide. The iDnes poll has Kerry with 9570 votes to Bush's 5124 (and the votes are coming in faster than I can keep track). Český rozhlas has Kerry with 61.4%, Bush with 32.0%, 'někomu jinému' with 5.0%, and 'nehlasoval(a) bych' with 2.0%.

The Prague Post's poll has Kerry winning with 59.7% of respondents, Bush 35.2% and Nader 5.1%. (I don't mean to criticise unnecessarily, but the Post's poll raises a couple questions, namely, Why have they put Kerry [begins with K] ahead of Bush [begins with B]? Maybe it's because the senator's ahead in the race. And why Nader but not Badnarik or Peroutka? I mean, sure, they won't get even as many votes as Nader, but their names sound Czecher.)

Across the border, Sme has a relatively close poll, with Kerry at 51%, Bush 43% and Neviem 7%. The Slovak Spectator has local beer leading the race with 52% of respondents, Kofola at 31% and mineral water with 17%. Wait, wrong poll. Oh well. Interesting to know that the summer drink poll had 1071 responses while only 572 Spectator readers had an opinion on 'Should Slovak forces be withdrawn from Iraq?' (55% said 'yes').

In Bulgaria, the Sofia Echo also has its thumb on the throbbing pulse of public opinion. According to their poll 100% of respondents are watching Big Brother.

2004-10-31T18:40:00.000+01:00

New Europe votes Kerry

Anticipating the US elections, I'm getting sick with nerves. I check the news every five minutes in the hopes that I'll find something to ease my mind. Not bloody likely. Given the likelihood of recounts, law suits and allegations of chicanery, we probably won't know the outcome on Wednesday morning. Hell, we might not know the outcome in January.

A couple local servers are polling their readers on the US race. All those I've seen give Kerry a handy win. A poll at iDnes.cz has Kerry nearly twice as many votes as Bush; as of this posting, it was Kerry at 2767 to Bush's 1480. Kerry also clobbers Bush in the Prague Post poll with 63.3% of 643 votes; Nader picks up 5%. An Atlas.cz poll has the race closer: with Kerry getting 53.1% of the vote and Bush garnering 40.1%. The pragmatists at Atlas also give voters the options of selecting 'jiný kandidát' or 'nešel bych volit'. Czech World News takes a slightly different angle, asking 'Who will win the election in the USA?', not 'Who would you vote for?'. Kerry still holds out, with 55.17%.

2004-10-31T18:32:00.000+01:00

Evidence of al Qaeda-Czech connection found in Třebíč

MfD article here; CTK article in English here.

2004-10-31T15:40:00.000+01:00

Bin Laden video

Full transcript of OBL's latest video here. Excerpts here. Bad grammar and feedback here.

2004-10-13T13:26:00.000+02:00

I live by the river

London Calling was released 25 years ago. Imagine that. I'll probably be forgiven for not rushing out and buying it when I was nine, but I think it's inexcusable that I waited another nine years before buying a used copy at Salt of the Earth Records and Skateboards.

I took it with me the following summer when I stayed with my parents in between semesters. On evenings when they were out of the house, I would put it on the stereo and turn it up while I made dinner for my grandmother and myself. Gram was almost entirely deaf and a little out of her mind, but you could never be sure. Once in the middle of 'Wrong 'Em Boyo' she squawked 'Now that's what I call music!'

2004-10-12T18:31:00.000+02:00

Aren’t you supposed to be coloring?

It's quiz time, US voters. And if you're still undecided, try this quiz (assuming the host server is keeping up with the traffic -- I've had trouble with it).

2004-10-11T14:17:00.000+02:00

Freedom isn't free

Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. -Rumsfeld

I promise I will return to topics of local import soon. But right now, there's a war on.

Normally, I'm not a fan of Naomi Klein, but she has some interesting thoughts on the economic disaster formerly known as Iraq:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was 'open for business.'
...
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And Iraqis don’t have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it’s on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the occupation: the blast wall. ... all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey, or even farther afield, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make them for $100.

2004-10-10T15:01:00.000+02:00

'We can’t win this war'

Scott Ritter is a Marine. A semper fi, leatherneck, jarheaded Marine. He has a simple, aw-shucks manner of speaking that you often find in military professionals.

'I love America,' he told me when we spoke last autumn. 'There’s no doubt about it. I’m willing to die for America, so I’d better love it.'

He is unfailingly polite and pleasant; military training taught him to keep his cool under fire. Still, you get the impression talking to him that, inside, he is deeply pissed off. Pissed off at television for not giving him a fair shake, pissed off at Stephen Hayes for cherry-picking his two-hour interview to contradict Ritter’s intended statements, pissed off at Hans Blix for being less than completely candid before the UN Security Council, pissed off at Tony Blair, at Richard Butler, the CIA, the Defense Department, and definitely, extremely pissed off at George W. Bush. All things considered, he really keeps it well inside.

That said, you might think he would get a certain amount of satisfaction at having basically been proved right by the US’s inability to find any weapons of mass destruction or WMD programs in Iraq. But he rejects the suggestion that he might feel vindicated. 'This wasn’t a guessing game on my part,' he says. 'Vindication would have been if I had been able to make a convincing argument that resonated enough so that people voted against this war.'

Since our interview, numerous reports have concluded what Ritter said had been saying all along: Iraq had no WMDs. Ritter has never been wrong, an unsettling fact when you consider his prediction that the US cannot win the war in Iraq and that the best course of action is to pull out immediately, leaving power in the hands of the only people with any chance preventing total anarchy: the remains of the Baathist power structure.

Ritter was in Prague to address a congress of American Voices Abroad. A card-carrying member of the Republican Party, Ritter finds himself in the unenviable position of approaching the political left from the back door, making the public-speaking circuit with three-part message: The US interfered with UN weapons inspection, the US invasion of Iraq was illegal, and the current administration must be removed from power in the next election.

'I voted for Ronald Reagan, I voted for George Herbert Walker Bush and I voted for George W. Bush for president of the United States,' he said. 'One of the reasons I feel so strongly about the position I’ve taken is the concept of accountability: the man lied to me. The man betrayed me, and he must be held accountable.'

Still Ritter sees himself not so much as an anti-Bush crusader as a servant of the truth, a Marine sworn to uphold certain ideals, among them being the rule of law. And regardless of what you may think of Scott Ritter, he feels there is only one possible conclusion: the US invasion of Iraq was not only in violation of international law, but that Washington had long used the issue of disarmament as a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

TS: Eight months after the invasion of Iraq, no WMDs have been found. Do you feel vindicated?
SR: That’s a term that a lot of people are throwing around. I don’t know what the exact definition of vindication is. I knew this wasn’t a guessing game on my part. So if vindication means that I’m relieved that I was right, no, I’m not relieved that I was right. I knew I was right. If vindication is supposed to imply some feeling of relief and happiness, no, I’m sad. Vindication would have been if I had been able to make a convincing argument that resonated enough so that people voted against this war. But that didn’t happen. How can you have vindication when you have Americans in Iraq dying in a war that you opposed? There can be no vindication on that so you know maybe I should feel vindicated but I don’t. I’m just deeply saddened by what’s occurred.

TS: In the months leading up to the war, you were the only person in any camp who had the temerity say Iraq had no WMDs. If that was the case, why did the war happen?
SR: First of all let me clear up the record. I never said that Saddam has no WMDs. I never had the knowledge base to make that assertion. I said that Saddam had been certified by 1998 by the United Nations as being 90 to 95 percent disarmed, that we didn’t know what the final disposition of the remaining 5 to 10 percent of the unaccounted for material was but that it was just that: unaccounted for. It wasn’t that we had data to sustain any notion that Saddam still retained it. We had no proof that Saddam had these weapons and that until such proof is assembled and until you’ve exhausted every venue possible short of war to resolve this failure to account you couldn’t talk about war. So I just wanted to make that statement – that I’m not going to sit here and say ‘Oh, I was saying he had no WMDs before the war.’ I didn’t say that.

I was saying that he was fundamentally disarmed and that you could demonstrate how Iraq – and I’d like to make a distinction between Saddam and Iraq – how Iraq reconstituted a WMD program because Saddam Hussein doesn’t build anything. He doesn’t build a WMD – Iraq did that. And how Iraq reconstituted a WMD production base I know we destroyed, dismantled and while inspectors were there was being verifiably monitored you couldn’t say he had these weapons.

TS: But wasn’t Saddam calling shots?
SR: Saddam Hussein was an absolute dictator. But Saddam Hussein did not create the historical forces that drove Iraq in the direction of acquiring WMDs. Saddam Hussein didn’t order Iran to develop a WMD program. He didn’t order Syria to develop a WMD program. He didn’t order Israel to develop a WMD program. And I would say that, you know, that Iraq’s defensive posture vis a vis all three of those nations had a bearing, the Iran-Iraq war had a huge bearing on, you know, the Iraqi WMD program. So I think it’s much more complicated than to simply say it’s Iran that’s calling the shots. I think the forces of history play a role in that too.

Do I think any weapons will be found? No. Not this late in the game. I mean, given the fact that, you know, we had a certain element of uncertainty about the final disposition of aspects of these programs, it would have surprised me but not shocked me if they had found something in the immediate aftermath of the war. But now we’re eight months into the occupation, they’re not going to find anything.

TS: What was Saddam Hussein thinking? Did he want people to believe he had WMDs? Was he bluffing?
SR: That always strikes me when people say that. How could Saddam be bluffing when he declared that he had no weapons. To bluff, you’ve got to be holding on to something. So a bluff is when in a poker game when you’ve five cards in your hand and you’re pretending you’ve got a great hand when you’ve got nothing. Saddam wasn’t even pretending to sit at the table. He wasn’t pretending to take a hand. He wasn’t playing the game. Saddam said ‘I am disarmed.’

Now, he lied the first time he said it. He lied the second time he said it. He lied the third time he said it. You know, from 1991 to 1995, the Iraqis were not fully cooperative. They were retaining, especially in the early, they were retaining weapons of mass destruction they weren’t allowed to. But that’s where the inspectors step in. And we forcefully compelled Iraq into compliance by tenaciously pursuing our mandate.

By 1995, no one could make the case that Iraq had WMDs. In fact the case that’s emerging after eight months of occupation and investigation is that Iraq was disarmed by that time frame, by 1995, 1996. So when Iraq confronts inspectors in the 1996 to 1998 timeframe, what is the confrontation based on? Clearly now history shows that it wasn’t based on Iraq’s efforts to conceal WMD or WMD programs.

Maybe if you investigate the events that led up to confrontation you will realize that all of them revolved around presidential palaces and presidential security. So maybe the point of confrontation wasn’t hiding weapons from inspectors, but protecting the president from an inspection process that the Iraqis were convinced was inherently corrupted by the United States, the United Kingdom – nations that were using the unique access afforded to the inspectors by the United Nations security council for purposes of disarming, but using it instead to target Saddam.

The United States had a policy since 1991 of regime removal, and three consecutive presidential administrations had enacted lethal findings authorizing the CIA to use whatever means necessary to overthrow Saddam. The CIA had a history of active participation in the inspection process for just that purpose. So what was Saddam thinking? What were the Iraqis thinking? They were thinking about defending their sovereignty.

TS: In any event, they don’t have their sovereignty now.
SR: Did Saddam surrender? Did the Iraqi army surrender? Did anybody surrender? Who’s in charge in Iraq? One hundred fifty thousand American troops. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.

TS: But couldn’t Saddam Hussein have prevented the war?
SR: It was a war that could not be prevented.

TS: Couldn’t he have opened the presidential palaces and asked the inspectors to stay?
SR: He did that.

TS: So what happened?
SR: I was ordered out by the ... well, I resigned out of protest to my inability to do my job, but that inability revolved around a number of issues, not just Iraqi non-compliance. It was tough for me to do my job when the Iraqis wouldn’t let me in to sites that were designated for inspection, because the second the Iraqis block that, they create the perception that they’re hiding something. The Iraqis weren’t going to let me into their sites so long as the United States was using my inspection teams to target Saddam Hussein, so you had this Catch-22 situation.

The Security Council wouldn’t defend their mandate either by enforcing the law when Iraq stood up to the will of the inspectors or confronting the United States of the fact of America’s unilateral policy of regime removal. The Security Council allowed the secretary general to step in on several critical fronts, diluting the authority of the Security Council. The result was, I couldn’t do my job. So I resigned.

Why did the inspectors leave Iraq? They were ordered out by the United States. After being used by the United States to deliberately provoke a confrontation that had nothing to do with disarming, everything to do with targeting Saddam Hussein.

In the aftermath of this, in December 1998, the United States and Great Britain bombed Iraq for 72 hours in Operation Desert Fox. Eighty-six of the 98 targets that were struck dealt with Saddam Hussein’s security, had nothing to do with an industrial base to produce WMDs or potentially produce. It was about targeting Saddam.

TS: So your inspections were a smokescreen for a plot to assassinate Saddam Hussein?
SR: It’s not even a smokescreen. They were putting personnel on inspection teams whose job it was to use … it was a Trojan horse.

TS: Were there assassins on your team?
SR: Well, first of all assassination is a term that I think a lot of people would probably dispute. A lethal finding authorizes the CIA to use whatever means necessary to Saddam Hussein, even those means which could result in the death of Saddam, but there’s still, you know, US law against targeted assassinations. So did I have assassins on my team with a rifle to ready pop Saddam? No. But I had CIA personnel on my team who were gathering intelligence about the security of Saddam to feed back into the process that would then trigger certain activities, whether it was a coup d’etat or other that were designed to get rid of Saddam.

TS: Did you ever find any WMDs?
SR: We didn’t find WMDs. The Iraqis declared WMDs and we oversaw the disposition of these weapons. We knew the Iraqis hadn’t completely told the truth and we investigated that and we put pressure on the Iraqis until which point they were compelled to admit that they were lying and they led us to where they were hiding the WMD. So we were very effective in disarming Iraq. But in terms of opening the door and going ‘Voila! WMDs!’ No, we didn’t do that.

TS: There was no Geraldo moment.
SR: We had better than Geraldo moments, because the Geraldo moment is false. We did a hard-nosed investigation that achieved tremendous results. But, you know, most forensic-based investigations don’t have a Geraldo moment. You gather bits and pieces of data which allow you to, you know, form a conclusion.

In a murder investigation, for instance, very rarely do you go out and find a body. What you do is find evidence that the crime had been committed and you confront the criminal suspect with that evidence and the criminal suspect confesses and leads you to the body. That’s what we did in Iraq. We confronted a criminal suspect with evidence that they were lying, and when the Iraqis couldn’t wiggle their way out of it, they had to confess that they had lied and they led us to where they were hiding stuff.

TS: In 1998, you wrote in the New Republic that Iraq retained WMDs and they were ‘not nearly disarmed’. When did you change your mind?
SR: If I said ‘they retain’ … I think you should re-read that because I think the way I wrote that article is I think I said that ‘we suspect they retain, we have evidence that they may retain.’ But I don’t I would be as cheeky as to say they retain it. If that’s what was written, then obviously that’s an error on my part.

I think the most important part of that article is to understand the context in which it was written and what I was saying in that article. I was saying that the United States was walking away from the inspectors. That at the same time I was writing that article, Madeleine Albright was saying the inspectors weren’t necessary. The United States was saying that inspections weren’t necessary.

But what I was saying was that the security council passed a Chapter Seven resolution authorizing weapons inspections to disarm Iraq and did so because they felt that Iraq represented – remember, it’s the Security Council that’s making this decision … and I’m writing this article from the perspective of an inspector, okay, so it’s the Security Council that determines the definitions and the definition of threat is Iraq possessing WMDs, so I say Iraq is an ugly threat, that’s Security Council definition, not mine. As an inspector, I had no choice but to echo the Security Council. They’re not nearly disarmed. The Security Council set the standard as 100 percent. We had not achieved that …

TS: But they were 90 to 95 percent disarmed.
SR: They were 90 to 95 percent, but that’s not total disarmament. That’s not what the Security Council wants. That’s not what the United States was demanding. So as an inspector, I have to put the marker down and say ‘We haven’t accomplished our mission. There’s still a mission to do.’ And that mission’s an important mission, because Iraq had WMD that the Security Council determined had constituted a threat to international peace and security. Therefore how could we walk away from that job?

We had important leads. I had a stack of leads that I was investigating, leads that said that Iraq might have anthrax, might have chemical weapons. We know that Iraq has a legitimate industrial base that could be reconfigured to reconstitute certain aspects of the programs within six months once inspectors leave, once inspectors were gone. We need to get inspectors back in.

So I would direct you to the final paragraph of the article in which I dismiss all the cases that were being made about going to war in Iraq. I said the only case that’ll work is to get inspectors back in properly mandated by the council, and then if Iraq won’t cooperate with these inspectors you then have the legal basis upon which to confront Iraq militarily. But the legal basis has to be derived from the disarmament mission not from any other hyped-up mission, and the United States can’t corrupt the integrity of the inspectors. You have to let the inspectors come in and, you know, with the pure intentions of the council, which is to disarm Iraq, if Iraq is in compliance, then to lift economic sanctions. But you can’t have the United States saying sanctions will be maintained no matter what, even if Iraq complies. And that was the importance of the article.

Now in the immediate aftermath of that article, what I warned about in that article took place: the United States corrupted the integrity of the inspection process and then bombed Iraq. And after Desert Fox, what I realized is that you can’t sit there and continue to defend an inspection process that has no legitimacy, because what legitimizes the inspection process is the rule of law, the rule of law as set forth in Security Council resolutions. And when the United States disregards Security Council resolutions, how can you hold Iraq accountable to them?

So I came up with the concepts of redefining Iraq’s disarmament obligation, concepts that broke away from the quantitative methodology used in the past, where we have to account for everything, 100 percent certainty. And I said if we use instead a qualitative judgement, Iraq’s disarmed. Qualitatively, they can’t produce these weapons. They don’t have them. We got rid of 90 to 95 percent of them. We can prove that. So don’t tell me we’re going to stick on the remaining 5 to 10 percent, but prior to that, the law said we had to stick on that. So that’s the importance of the New Republic article.

TS: You made a similar remark to Congress in September of that year, that Saddam Hussein remained a threat to world peace.
SR: That’s what the Security Council says. When I sat before Congress, I told Congress ‘I sit before you as an inspector. And I’m holding a mirror up to you, understanding that the United States voted for a resolution, under Chapter Seven of the United Nations charter, that called for Iraq to be disarmed, and that the United States had walked away from the inspectors.’ There was still a mission to be done.

TS: Would you make a different argument now?
SR: In defense of the inspections, if the inspection process I was involved in was still viable, and I was making the argument to get them back in, no, I wouldn’t. I would say the same thing. I would say the exact same thing, because it was an accurate statement.

The problem is, you know, maybe, you see, as an inspector, you can’t walk away from the mandate. The mandate hinges on the concept of Iraq representing a threat to international peace and security of such a great magnitude that the international community has to intervene on the sovereignty of a nation, of a member state and impose restrictions under Chapter Seven. I didn’t make that up. That’s what the community said, so as an inspector, I can’t walk away from that. I can’t walk away from that baseline of intent by the council.

So would I say the same thing, yes, because that’s what the council said. I would say to the council ‘You said that Iraq was a threat, and that Iraq will continue to be a threat until we achieve 100 percent disarmament. We haven’t achieved that. Now, you either change the rules, so that we don’t have to deal with the 100 percent issue, or if you’re going to stick to 100 percent, then you have to enforce the law. That’s the rules.

Now, if I step away from my role as an inspector, I would say things totally different, which is what I did after 1998. In 1998, I realized the inspection process had been corrupted by the United States, so I stepped away from my role as an inspector and took a broader perspective. The perspective of the inspector is a very narrow perspective. So a lot of what I was saying was very narrow. It was accurate, but it was very narrow. But when you step away and bring in a broader perspective, you can water down a lot of that rhetoric.

TS: In 2002, you wrote in the Guardian that if Iraq continues to play cat-and-mouse, then the US must take ‘decisive action’. So is that saying the same thing?
SR: I said that we have to send inspectors in and complete the mission. And if Iraq won’t let us complete the mission, then, you know, we can’t play this game. But the mission, in 2002 when I wrote that, go to my June 2000 article in Arms Control Today … that’s the article in which I make the argument for qualitative disarmament. So if you’re willing to change the benchmark upon which you are assessing Iraqis’, Iraq’s disarmament obligation to realistic standards and if you send inspectors in to, who are only focused on disarming Iraq, and if you acknowledge to the Iraqis that once they comply you’ll lift economic sanctions, and if under all those conditions the Iraqis still refuse to play the game, then you can take them out.

TS: Was Iraq ever going to comply?
SR: They did comply.

TS: Was Iraq ever going to comply to the extent that they could avoid the war?
SR: No, because the United States didn’t care. The United States had a policy of regime change that ...

TS: That was the US policy, but was Iraq willing to do …
SR: Iraq did do everything they could do. What more could Iraq do? I mean, do you want them to submit a declaration? They submitted 12,500 pages in December 2002 that have yet to be contradicted on a point of fact. That have yet to be contradicted on a point of fact. They told the truth. And the truth was irrelevant.

Colin Powell told the lies. It’s not Iraq that lied. Colin Powell sat before the Security Council on 5 [25?] February and said things, not a single one of which has been sustained. Tony Blair published dossier after dossier; again, not a single point in those dossiers has been sustained. It’s the United States and Great Britain that didn’t tell the truth. Hans Blix testified before the Security Council about the potential existence of weapons that today he claims don’t exist. Hans Blix was less than honest before the council. It was the Iraqis who in the recent years have told the truth time and time again.

Now you would be loathe, as I had been before the war, to take what they say at face value, but to be dismissive of it is absurd. Iraq did everything that they could. What more could Iraq have done? They let them in the presidential palaces. They allowed the U2 aircraft to overfly their territory. They let the inspectors come in with any sensor, any sensor they wanted. What more could they have done?

TS: Stephen Hayes [of the Weekly Standard] says you were bought off by Shakira al-Khafaji.
SR: I accepted $400,000. Shakira al-Khafaji is an American citizen – an Iraqi-American citizen … an American citizen of Iraqi origin, but never forget that he’s an American citizen. He’s beholden to American law just like I am, just like Mr Hayes is. When I undertook to make a documentary film … It costs money to make a film. I just would – as I encouraged Mr Hayes, I would – and I’ll say this right off the bat: Everything I’m telling you, I told Mr Hayes. ... What I would ask Mr Hayes is to publish the totality of the two-hour interview that we had so that the world can see how disingenuous and just how poor of a journalist he truly is.

TS: What did he leave out?
SR: Well, he left out all the good details, such as I didn’t receive $400,000. A production company received an investment which was in the form of a letter of credit – a loan, an interest-bearing loan, because this was a business arrangement. Shakira al-Khafaji was investing in a movie, which we believed that we could – that I believed that I could make and then market and then generate not only a good message but a profit. The investment was made into my production company to underwrite the expenses of a documentary film, a feature-length documentary film that involved international travel, you know, major editing. Normally, the budgets for these films run from $500,000 to $1.5 million. Shakira al-Khafaji could only come up with $400,000. I say ‘only’ because it may sound like a lot of money, but in the film business, it’s no money at all.

Not only is that the case, meaning that I did not profit from this movie, that money didn’t go into my pockets, that money didn’t buy me anything, it was totally expended, you know, making the movie. In fact, the movie finally, the ultimate budget of the movie was $458,000, and I’m the one who had to cough up the $58,000. I still carry $32,000 in debt on this movie. So Stephen Hayes’s article, the whole point of it was that I somehow profited from this, that I made money. I didn’t make a cent. I lost money on this venture, so it’s a pretty piss-poor way of getting rich off of a, you know, selling people out.

And you know the other thing is, where’s the movie wrong? I asked Mr Hayes, ‘Have you seen the movie?’ He hadn’t. ‘What problem do you have with the movie, Mr Hayes? Because it’s the most accurate movie made.’ Today it stands alone, of any documentary made on Iraq and the disarmament obligation. It was the only one that accurately portrayed what’s going on. And it wasn’t a pro-Saddam movie. It was actually a very anti-Iraq movie. It just spoke about the truth.

And then, I went to the FBI before I even made this movie, once the offer of investment was made, because Shakira al-Khafaji is an Iraqi, of Iraqi origin, and because he had ongoing contact in Iraq. I stipulated in the contract that there could be no there could be no influence by Shakira al-Khafaji in the editing of this movie, that if he was going to invest, he was investing in the blind hope that I would make a movie that was to his satisfaction but he could not dictate any of the terms. Furthermore, there could be no interest, direct or otherwise, by the Iraqi government in this. That $400,000 had to be Shakir al-Khafaji’s money. It couldn’t be a quid pro quo where he invests and the Iraqi government compensates him down the stream. And he had to sign documents certifying that this was the case. He did so.

And then I went to the FBI and the Treasury Department and had them investigate this, to find out if there was a quid pro quo … going on. And the FBI couldn’t find any evidence of any wrongdoing, and they have never found any evidence of wrongdoing. I opened up my books to the FBI so that they could edit this. So my point is that Mr Hayes wrote a completely deceptive article putting out premises spoken or hinted, alluded to that I was somehow bought off by the Iraqi government when it’s absurd. That never took place.

TS: Your visit to the Iraqi assembly in 2002 didn’t help any.
SR: The job wasn’t to earn friends. The job was to try and stop a war. The best way to stop a war was, as I clearly stated, to get weapons inspectors back in. The United States had walked away from the inspection process, was making no effort whatsoever to get weapons inspectors back in. George Bush and Tony Blair were going to meet in Crawford, Texas on September 8 and have a war council right before the president spoke to the Security Council on September 12. So my intervention in Iraq, speaking out the way I did, not only to the National Assembly – remember, I wasn’t speaking to the National Assembly, I was using the National Assembly to address Saddam Hussein, and address the world – it was a pre-emptive strike of my own against George Bush and Tony Blair’s war council.

And it succeeded, not only succeeded in disrupting the war council, but five days after I made the presentation, four days after I intervened with [Vice President Ramadan], [the foreign minister], [the oil minister], [Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister] and all of them said the next council meeting they would seek to prevail on the president to have him, the president of Iraq, to reverse his decision about inspectors, to allow inspectors back in, to invite them in, without any preconditions. On September 13, that’s exactly what the Iraqi president did. So, um, what problem does anyone have with this meeting again?

That was actually the most American thing that I could do, especially as a 12-year veteran of the Marine Corps who’s gone to war for my country and understands what war is, and understands the price that Americans and Marines are going to pay in war, understanding that every marine, soldier, sailor and airman took an oath to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America that key to the constitution is every article. You can’t be selective in the articles that you choose to embrace. Article Six says that when you enter into an international agreement or treaty with another party that’s been ratified by the United States Senate, that is the law of the land. Understand that we are signatory to a United Nations charter, I think as an American I had an obligation to go to Iraq and try to get the Iraqis to let weapons inspectors back in so that the United States could once again be given a chance to adhere to international law by supporting a properly mandated inspection regime.

TS: You said that truth was on the side of the Iraqis.
SR: And history has shown that to be absolutely correct.

TS: Do you still believe the truth is on the side of Iraq and do you support the insurgency?
SR: That’s the first tough question you asked. … As an American, I will never support a situation where American troops are subjected to hostile fire and I won’t support their absolute right to fight back and to take out any threat. I was against the no-fly zones, and I lobbied against the no-fly zones, but every time the Iraqis fired on an American jet, I would never speak out against the American fighter pilots’ right to bomb targets to protect themselves. What I said was they shouldn’t be there to begin with, that the best way that we can protect those fighter pilots is to get them out of the no-fly zones, because the no-fly zones were inherently illegal. But I’m not going to sit there and say I support the Iraqis’ right fire on them. I would implore the Iraqis not to fire on them because if you do, I’m going to support our right to bomb the hell out of you in return.

But what I would say is that international law is on the side of the Iraqis, was on the side of the Iraqis defending their sovereign airspace from illegal overflights. International law is on the side of the Iraqis today. All I would ask Americans is to remember how we felt about what we call a British occupation when we fought our revolution. We fought a revolution to free ourselves from an occupation, what we determined to be an occupation, that we are occupying Iraq today. If a foreign power came to the United States and did to us what we’re doing to Iraq, we’d resist and we have to understand that the Iraqis have an inherent right to resist an illegal occupation, an illegitimate occupation. And that’s what this is: an illegal and illegitimate occupation.

So while I don’t support the insurgency, I understand the insurgency, and I understand the legitimacy of the insurgency, and I understand that they will continue to resist us as long as we’re there. But my support goes to the American soldiers. That’s what I support. I support them.

My opposition to the war has always been … you know, key to that has always been my support of the American forces that would have to fight a war should we go to war. And understanding the cost that they would bear. So I want them out. Iraq’s on fire, it’s burning, from top to bottom, left to right, and the only way to put out that fire is to remove the fuel from the fire. The fuel that feeds that fire is the presence of American troops. Get ‘em out.

TS: But if you remove them, doesn’t the country just devolve into a--
SR: It’s already devolved in Iraq.

TS: But won’t Saddam Hussein come back to power and we’re at square one again?
SR: Well, square one was a whole lot better. People who say that Iraq is better today under American occupation, better than it was under Saddam are wrong. America was much better off under Saddam than it is under American occupation.

TS: A lot of people would disagree with that.
SR: I would challenge them on any point.

TS: The Kurds?
SR: The Kurds. How are they better off today?

TS: Now there’s no one out there trying to systematically eliminate them.
SR: Well, actually under Saddam the Kurds had the greatest amount of autonomy of any Kurdish nation anywhere in the world. I’m not going to defend Saddam’s policies, but the Kurds today are in a very precarious situation where because of the instability in Iraq the Turkish government may intervene and occupy, so I’d say that the Kurds are actually under a tremendous amount of threat to have their civil liberties disrupted, not from Baghdad, but from Ankara, thanks to the instability that’s inherent in Iraq today due to the American intervention, in Iraq, in the greater part of Iraq today. If you go back eight months prior to the invasion, how many doors were being kicked in every night, people dragged off into the streets? Was there electricity? Were students going to school? Were hospitals operating?

All the things that we claim to be doing today in Iraq were already functioning fully under Saddam. Is Saddam a good guy? No. I’m not defending the reign of Saddam, but what I’m saying is that at least they had an Iraqi leader governing a sovereign Iraq state, as opposed to an illegitimate, illegal American occupier which is ... you know, the occupation is not only against international law in terms of the occupation. The economic rape, the ongoing economic rape of Iraq is in violation of the Geneva accords, and we have American soldiers – as an American, this is what everything should hinge on – American soldiers committing these crimes. And, you know, I’m not going to tolerate Iraqis committing crimes against Iraqis, but at least it’s them committing crimes against their own people. My soldiers aren’t doing that.

So I would say that, you know, we have to go back to the basics. Before we talk about keeping American troops there, we have to ask the question, do they belong there? See, the foundation of our presence in Iraq is corrupt. You can’t talk about continuing that presence.

TS: But doesn’t someone belong there to help Iraq get back on its feet?
SR: Well, look, it’s been eight months. I don’t think that the people that served in the Iraqi army have forgotten all their skills. And it wouldn’t take too much, it would cost considerably less than $87 billion to reconstitute the Iraqi army and turn security responsibilities over to them. The problem is that reconstituting the Iraqi army, you’d have to re-invigorate the Baathists. And that’s what it hinges on right now: allowing the people that ran Iraq to come back and run Iraq. That’s the solution. It’s the only solution. I don’t mean Saddam, I mean the Baathists. And the British government recognizes that and that’s the kind of proposal they’re putting forward – is to re-legitimize the Baath party and give them a say in how the country’s run.

TS: Wouldn’t that be something like in 1946 handing Germany back over to the Nazis?
SR: Well, no. Comparing the Baathists with the Nazis is an irresponsible extension. Comparing the neo-conservative administration of George W. Bush would be more apt in terms of global hegemony and the use of military force to violate the sovereignty of states and have a total disregard to international law. That would be a comparison that would be more accurate, but to call Saddam Nazi Germany? I mean, where are the jackboots of Iraq all over the world? How did Iraq threaten anybody other than their own people? People who – I mean, I’m not saying it was a bastion of democracy. Of course it wasn’t.

But you know we’re not even building democracy in Iraq today. We’re walking away from democracy in Iraq today, recognizing that we can’t bring in a western-style liberal-oriented democracy. We’re making shortcuts now in bringing … what? Stability. Under Saddam, Iraq had stability. It was stable not only internally, but stable externally, with the controls put on by the United Nations. So, you know, we can’t talk about continuing the presence. That’s like saying – that’s the argument made in 1967 as to why we have to keep American troops in Viet Nam. ‘Oh, pull the Americans out of Vietnam and there’s the domino effect. The commies will take over the entire area.’ So we stayed in Vietnam. Imagine how much smaller the Vietnam war memorial would be if we recognized and acted on our knowledge that this was a failed war in Vietnam in ’67 and we’d gotten out. I mean, the communists won anyways, right?

The Baathists are going to win this war. We lost this war already. We can’t win this war. It’s a war that cannot be won. So why not recognize that now and do our best to mitigate our losses? How big do we want this war memorial to be for Iraq. I’d like it to be, have it as small as possible.

TS: You compared 9-11 to the Reichstag fire. Are you saying the Bush administration orchestrated 9-11?
SR: No, and I admit very clear that I’m not saying the Bush administration orchestrated 9-11. What I said is that the Bush administration has used 9-11 in the way that Adolf Hitler used the Reichstag fire: to prey upon the fear and ignorance of the American people to get them to permit infringements on the rule of law and on individual civil liberties. That George Bush has used 9-11 to promote the Islamic threat the way that Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to promote the communist threat.

TS: Was he waiting for 9-11 to happen?
SR: I think the evidence indicates that that is a distinct possibility. We won’t know until we have a full investigation carried out. And that investigation must include the 900 pages of documents that the White House won’t release to Congressional committees. What is the White House afraid of?

TS: What’s on those pages?
SR: What the president knew and when he knew it. How he knew it.

TS: Conjecture?
SR: I think you’ll find that the president knew Al-Qaida was planning to attack the United States. He knew they were planning to attack the United States using hijacked aircraft, that he knew some of the identities of the hijackers. This is all in the presidential daily briefing, documents that won’t be released. ...

I think the damning thing is that president should have known, but this is a president that was disengaged on that issue. We’ll find out that the president was, you know, basically derelict in his duty. But … that’s what we’re going to find. There was a certain level of incompetence at the White House. The White House had a passive approach to this. Notice what the neo-conservatives have done in the aftermath of 9-11 – transferred blame to Bill Clinton, you know, and basically… People have published books that accuse Bill Clinton of being the one who allowed Osama bin Laden to walk away scot-free. I think these documents will show that George W. Bush did the same thing. Then you have to ask yourself, to what end?

You know, I get a little disturbed when I hear Condoleeza Rice speak of 9-11 as a historical opportunity. To me it was a national tragedy. You know, the death of nearly two to three thousand Americans is a national tragedy, it’s not a historical opportunity. But when she says ‘historical opportunity’ and then you associate that statement with some baseline documents such as the Project for the New American Century’s concepts on the direction that defense could go, the fact that their doctrinaire document is almost a mirror-image of the current national security strategy of the United States of America and that the Project for the New American Century’s thesis was endorsed by people who hold some of the most senior positions in the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney. And they spoke of the need for a Pear Harbor-type moment that would allow, that would trigger their ability to enact these. I get a little concerned that maybe their passivity was because they wanted something to occur that they could act on. Look how quickly they put forward the Patriot Act. This means the heart of that legislation was in place and waiting in the wings prior to 9-11. Look how quickly they started working on putting forward the national security strategy [unintelligible]. We know that that was in the wings waiting for 9-11.

So I’m convinced that the Bush administration was waiting for an event to trigger, that would enable them to move forward in the direction that they have. I don’t believe they thought for one moment that the World Trade Center would come down and the Pentagon would be attacked. I think they thought the attack would be in terms of striking against American interest targets in Africa or maybe new embassies or something. But the bottom is that they were passive.

TS: Is Iran next?
SR: Syria’s next. Because, as the Bush administration said, this is not – and as they pretty much acknowledged, that was not about WMD. That was always a fraud.

TS: When did they acknowledge it was a fraud?
SR: Paul Wolfowitz has said in interviews that that was just an issue that was picked because it was the one that could be sold to the American people. But this is about a larger purpose, which is bringing American-oriented stability to the Middle East, transformation of the region away from centuries-old feudalistic and theocratic roots to this new, pro-American, western-oriented liberal democracy. It’s about regional transformation. You can’t transform a region as long as you have an illegitimate Baathist regime in Damascus. You can’t transform a region as long as you have an illegitimate Islamic theocracy in Tehran. So, Syria’s next.

TS: Because of the Baathist connection?
SR: Syria’s next because it’s the easiest target. It’s the easiest target. Iraq was the easiest target to get the whole show rolling. It was a defenseless nation. No ability to defend itself. Look how quickly it fell. Now, that can defend itself from a conventional standpoint. Well, they’re defending themselves today. They’re not defeated, and that’s why this whole thing is going to fall apart. Because Iraq’s not playing according to the scenario. They didn’t welcome us with open arms. The Shii’a didn’t rise up and throw flowers before the American vehicles. And today the Iraqis are resisting and the resistance is growing. Because of that, you won’t want to move on to the tough target, Iran, you’ll go in on the easiest target, and the easiest target is Syria. Because Syria secures Israel’s northern flank.

Read more about Ritter in these articles. Here is a piece he wrote for the Prague Post.

2004-10-09T18:41:00.000+02:00

Stay tuned

I'm listening to Friday's U.S. presidential debate and it occurs to me that I've never shared with you my interview with former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. So I'm dragging it out, dusting it off and getting ready to post it here. Tune in tomorrow.

2004-10-07T20:53:00.000+02:00

Maybe it's part of the collective unconscious

Apparently, the man who invented the parachute was Slovak.

Stefan Banic, a Slovak inventor, constructed a prototype of a parachute in 1913 and tested it in Washington D.C. in front of the U.S. Patent Office and military representatives by jumping from a 41-floor building and subsequently from an airplane in 1914.

Or maybe not. As the same source notes in the sidebar

In fact, Stefan Banic had a predecessor in Slovakia who is not well-known. It was Professor Faust Vrancic (Vrančič, Fausto Veranzio, Faustus Verantius), originally from Croatia, who constructed a parachute (it was a frame wrapped with linen, 6 x 6 meters in size, to which the parachutist was fastened by four ropes) and jumped with it from the tower of St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava in the presence of many citizens in 1603. Later he repeated the experiment in Belgrade and Venice.

But you wouldn't expect the good folk at Slovakopedia to give undo credit to a Croat, now would you? Or an Italian. Or a Frenchman.

2004-10-07T20:50:00.000+02:00

One for the evil-doers

Pakistan Bombing Prompts Ban on Gatherings
A bomb attack on Sunni Muslim radicals in central Pakistan Thursday killed at least 39 people, wounded more than 100 and prompted the government to ban religious and political gatherings nationwide.

Well, that oughta show 'em.

2004-10-07T18:20:00.000+02:00

Les Mis?

The Interior Ministry has redesigned its website, or at least parts of it. They apparently have a English-language hotline: +420 974 841 722. I really don't understand what message they're trying to send with the image of the bohemian hottie on the homepage. Can anyone tell me where the picture comes from?

2004-10-02T19:33:00.000+02:00

Drinks for a New Century

Iraqi WMD

1 cup Remy Red Liqueur
1 cup milk
1 cup black vodka

Pour black vodka, milk and red liqueur into a tall glass, ensuring that the layers remain separated. Tell everyone that a prize is hidden in one of the glasses; the prize may or may not exist. Take back the glasses before everyone has finished. Smash them into the wall while shouting, "be free!"

2004-10-01T18:52:00.000+02:00

Tell me a story

Last weekend, I met a couple of my skydiving buddies at this cool little pub in Karlin called U Cerne kocky, next to the tunnel. Yes, I said 'a cool little pub in Karlin'. I'd never before been drinking in Karlin. I've never had a cup of tea in Karlin. And I think that's a shame. Karlin (or at least the two blocks of it I saw between Krizikova metro and the pub) is leafy, quiet, clean -- kinda like Vinohrady, but with less dog shit. I oughta check it out during the day.

Sitting in the back room of this basement pub, I felt old. Actually, no, I felt young. But I felt old because I knew I wasn't. Or not. Actually, horseshit -- I just felt naughty watching these impossibly hot Czech girls watching their boyfriends playing fotbalek.

At one point I stepped outside to make a phone call, and I see David Cerny stomping up the street. (Artists and stomping -- discuss.) I give him a 'Cau Davide' as he goes past (not like we're pals or anything) and he 'cau's back and continues his stompy way into the tunnel.

Now the Zizkov tunnel (Does anyone call it the Karlin tunnel?) has always held a certain sinister allure for me. Talk about the belly of the beast. (Talk about cliches -- can I get a few more swaybacked, toothless phrases in here?) Running as it does between Lower Zizkov and Midtown Karlin, it's got to be ... smelly? dark? lined with broken glass and vomit? filled with lurking (gasp) gypsies?!? I mean, colour me lily, but I've avoided going in there during the day.

So seeing David stomp up in there, two things stood out in the herd of things browsing through my brain: 1) David Fucking Cerny can sure as shit stomp through that tunnel and ain't nobody gonna fuck with him. 2) I'm going in there.

Another four beers did nothing to change my mind about entering the tunnel on the way home. Nor did the prospect of waiting for a night tram. Nor did my so-called friends. So on the back side of midnight, I start stomping.

Now those of you who know the tunnel probably gave up on me paragraphs ago, because you know it's not a frightening hole at all. It's well lit, cleaner than a lot of Prague 1 streets, and actually kinda like a park late at night. Or at least it was the night I stomped through it. There were couples heading home in either direction, walking slowly. A couple stompers like me.

And a lot of climbing. That's the thing that might not occur to you. Karlin is quite a bit lower than Lower Zizkov, so tunnelling from the former to the latter involves no small amount of uphill. But I didn't care. I had a tank full of high-test and a never-done-this-before grin on my face.

Both of which saw me about as far as Lipanska, which as you know is at significantly higher elevation than the tunnel. And that's only halfway home. Hell. Next time, we're going to the Green Valley.

Yeah, so anyway: What's your story about the tunnel?

2004-10-01T11:03:00.000+02:00

Listening to this NPR story about a study of why people don't evacuate burning buildings, I remembered a story.

Last winter, I was teaching a class near the top of one of the Motokov towers at Pankrac. The building was undergoing a major renovation at the time -- maybe it still is. Anyway, my morning class had barely started when there was an announcement over the building's public-address system (Do they still make buildings with PA systems?) asking everyone to please evacuate. I didn't catch the reason, but from the tone of the speaker's voice and the reaction of the others in the office, it sounded like a fire drill. (I love fire drills. Tornado drills are cool, too, except then you have to huddle among a bunch of smelly elementary school kids, but anyway ...)

A number of us went to the elevators. I was vaguely aware that in the event of a fire in a skyscraper, elevators are a bad idea. For better or for worse, the elevators in the Motokov building weren't working at the moment. So we headed to the stairs.

There were two stairwells on opposite corners of the building. For unclear reasons, we weren't able to use one of them, so we all started down the other. From the 24th floor or so, it took roughly 100 people 10 minutes to the ground. We were slowed down by what may have been the cause of the alarm: a water line had burst at about the 10th floor and water was gushing out of the wall and flooding a circuit box. (Rubber soles, anyone?)

Suffice it to say that had there been an actual fire, we would have been toast, even in this relatively short tower. Suffice it to say that in some circumstances, there are no contingencies. If you don't have prevention, you don't have anything.

2004-09-14T19:23:00.000+02:00

Semi-Automatic LiveJournal Update

Today was really tiring. I got out of bed really early because my mom was yelling at me. I feel unusual because my antidepressants are making me hairy.

I'm so hardcore. Me and Buzz went to the mall today, and I stole a whole heap of stuff. I got a Good Charlotte CD, a couple of DVDs and some new boots. Buzz got caught, but he fought his way out, and then we stole some lady's car and smashed it into a phone booth.

Last night I had to finish my term paper on the history of pre-communist Russian society. I focussed on the needs of women. I think it's ok, but if I don't pass this I'll lose my scholarship.

I want to tell the world that my girlfriend Amy is the bomb! She made pizza last night, and even though I burnt my lips on the cheese, it was awesome!!!

I am updating this journal for the first time in ages, because I've been in prison. Today, I got a digital camera! Yes! But I don't know how to work it. Can you help me?

I want to say thanks to simon and Abbey and Dave and the other Simon for helping me on Saturday. You guys are the best. By the way, if you happen to find my wallet, keys or underwear, could you SMS me? Adrian has my number.
I went to the doctor yesterday, and he said I have bipolar disorder, which makes me different enough to be interesting, but the same as all the other cool people with bipolar disorder.

You should all do this quiz! It's amazingly accurate. You just put in your name and birthday, and it will tell you you're a moron.

Oh monkey buns! Monkey loaves, croissants and biscuits! Monkey croutons and crust! Crust! Monkey! Crust! Monkey! Crust! Monkey Crust! Crust monkey!

That's enough for now. But I'll leave you with this thought - sharing your life with strangers on the internet is the cheapest form of therapy available. Leave a comment and tell me I'm beautiful.

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2004-08-21T15:34:00.000+02:00

Save Ferris

As some of you know, my friends Alice and Jeff Buehler are about to have a baby. They haven't settled on a name yet, but with your help, they might see there way to name their child Ferris.

Jeff has been living with jokes about his last name since John Hughes' film came out in 1986. But he admits that he sorta likes the name Ferris. Never mind that the character's surname is spelled slightly differently, and never mind that the baby may be a girl.

You can help by pledging to donate funds to the Buehler family, payable in the event they do name the child Ferris. I have no idea how the money would actually be handled; in an escrow account I suppose. Several people I've already spoken to have pledged a hundred dollars or more. Our goal is to reach six figures, U.S. Anyway, please indicate your interest and the amount you could donate in comments below.

It Means Everything.

2004-08-18T22:20:00.000+02:00

Dearth

Dearth dearth dearth. Dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth. Dearth dearth. Dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth. Dearth.

It's not that there's nothing going on. Me, I'm busting my heinie, which is why I'm not posting. But I check my homeboyz on the blogrole (Why are there no women on my blogrole?) and they're slacker than me. Dearth.

Dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth dearth.

2004-08-12T19:14:00.000+02:00

This movie Su-XX!

Didn't anyone warn them?

Sukhoi Is the Star of a New Action Flick

2004-08-07T20:24:00.000+02:00

If I had a hammer

Is Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross a fascist? Of course not.

On 5 August, The Final Word mused:

As interior minister, Stanislav Gross was often accused of using his traffic and other crackdowns to similar political advantage. As premier, he'll be tempted to take this a step further. Don't be surprised if the number of terrorist threats and siren blasts in Prague increases.

The Final Word doesn't back up it's argument, so allow me. Gross was interior minister -- 'the baby-faced minister of fear' -- when protests against the IMF and World Bank turned violent in September 2000. Gross had praised police for their actions that day (like you do). But reports of violent abuse of protesters by police at detention centers became widespread. In the end, an Interior Ministry investigation found that while abuses had occurred, the perpetrators could not be identified. (I've been looking for a copy of that report; if you see it, holler.) So in the end, no one was held accountable.

Gross was among those initially supporting the Prague connection to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. On 18 December 2001, in an article titled 'Iraq link to Sept 11 attack and anthrax is ruled out', the Telegraph noted:

The story of Atta's possible link to Iraq first surfaced in Czech and US newspapers and later appeared to be confirmed by the interior minister, Stanislav Gross. In a briefing to journalists two months ago, Mr Gross said the Czech counter-intelligence service, the BIS, had evidence of a meeting in April this year between Atta and an Iraqi spy, Ahmed al-Ani, who was working as consul at the Prague embassy.

But yesterday Jiri Kolar, the police chief, said there were no documents showing that Atta visited Prague at any time this year, although he had visited twice in 2000.

Atta could have entered the country using false papers, but Mr Gross questioned why Atta would do so when he was not a wanted man. "I don't see any reason for him to visit under a false name," he said. "He was 'legal' when he was in Germany."

(It's interesting to note that Gross' replacement as interior minister, Frantíšek Bublan, said the supposed meeting between Atta and al-Ani was implausible.)

Fast forward to the Madrid train bombings in 11 March 2004, which provoked discussion on an anti-terrorism law in the Czech Republic. Gross was behaving consistently, putting firm emphasis on protecting his country against violence. In principle, that's a very good thing to see in an interior minister.

In his first week in the prime minister's office, Gross had two opportunities to show what he was made of: 1) a grenade attack on a downtown casino, and 2) an open-air dance party. In both cases, Gross reacted with big swinging arm movements. In response to the grenade attack, he wants to shut down the Casino Royal and clamp down on casinos in general. In response to the techno festival, he sends in the riot troops. (Arellanes has been following the CzechTek story closely.)

Abraham Maslow is credited with saying 'When all you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.' Gross has demonstrated that he knows how to swing his hammer. Question is, will he learn to use any other tools? Let's hope so, inasmuch as Gross will be handling ethnic minorities and human rights in the new government.

2004-08-04T20:17:00.000+02:00

Ježíšmarie ...
Pink Flees Prague After Bomb Blast

2004-08-04T19:45:00.000+02:00

Counting the Americans
or
Reason #421 Why I'm Not a Statistician

Or even a mathematician. I'm so bad at math. (But not as bad as the guy who was making change for me earlier today, but more on that later).

To everyone who's ever heard that there were 30,000 Americans living in Prague back in the day: It's a lie. The number was picked out of thin air, and I know who did it. So just stop.

Anyway, ČTK reports that the ČSU has new stats on the number of (detectable) foreigners living in the Czech Republic.

By the end of March, 249,464 foreigners lived in the Czech Republic, with 82,415 foreigners staying there permanently and the remaining 167,049 with visas for over 90 days stays.

...

The five largest minorities living in the Czech Republic have not changed since 1996, according to the Czech Statistical Office [or ČSU as it's know to its friends]. "In individual years, only Slovakia and Ukraine alternate at the top, while Vietnam and Poland occupy the third and fourth positions," the statisticians said [in unison, presumably].

So you've got

249,464 foreigners, of which
66,109 are Slovaks,
65,647 are Ukrainians
30,400 are Vietnamese
16,939 are Poles
12,846 are Russians.

So the Russians are the smallest of the largest. (This is ČTK of course, so they might have the story wrong.) But assuming the article and the stats are right, the remaining 57,523 includes people from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, etc, etc, the UK, and the US.

If any other group came close to the Russians, it stands to reason ČSU would note it. But let's assume arbitrarily that the next largest group is 10,000. I think many of us would assume that there are more Americans than there are, say, Belgians -- or Britons, Canadians, or Germans, etc. (If you disagree, I'm all ears.)

So if those 10,000 were Americans, let's get really crazy and divvy up the rest of the 47,000 or so like this: 9,000 Canadians, 8,000 Britons, 7,000 Germans, 6,000 French, 5,000 Belgians, 4,000 Swedes, 3,000 Norse ... people, 2,000 Finns, 1,000 Italians, and 1,000 each from Spain and Portugal. Of course, that can't be right because it doesn't count Africa, Asia or South America.

So while it's virtually impossible for there to be more than 10,000 Americans, that number is probably high. How high? I'm squishing the numbers around, but I think it's highly unlikely that there are more than 8,000 documented US citizens in the Czech Republic.

Read the ČTK story, do your own math and let me know what you think.

Oh yeah -- the guy who was really bad at math: Okay, so I get my hair cut and buy some expensive pomade -- I'm a Dapper Dan man -- and my bill is CZK 760. I tell the dude at the register to make it CZK 800. (How much are you supposed to tip a stylist anyway?) He gives me CZK 350 in change. For extra credit, tell me how long I should have tried to explain his error to him. (In the end, I gave up and just paid CZK 760.)

2004-08-01T15:37:00.000+02:00

Just cool out, people

Yes, there was an explosion, but please stop calling it a bomb. You see worse damage -- and more injuries -- on Silvestr.

As the BBC and everyone else is reporting, at least 16 people were injured Sunday afternoon when an unknown assailant threw a hand grenade near (or perhaps at) a casino on Na Prikope. The BBC has footage of the scene shortly after the attack. Everyone notes that the police ruled out terrorism. The Washingon Times' UPI copy, perhaps typically, takes the terrorism bait the furthest:

The Czech Republic is a member of NATO and has a small contingent of troops operating in Iraq. But police officials said they believe it unlikely the attack was related to Middle East events.

The AP's headline is Pedestrians Wounded in Prague Blast while British papers, including the Telegraph, emphasise Britons injured in Prague blast.

The most interesting story comes from Maariv International and points out:

Israel Police officials are estimating that the attack, which targeted a local casino, was an attempt to assassinate Asi Abutbul, who owns a casino chain that operates in the area, and who is considered one of the leading crime figures in the Israeli underground.

Two years ago, unknown gunmen assassinated his father, Felix Abutbul, at the entrance to Casino Royal in Prague.

Update
It's just past 9 p.m. local time. Alex, Scott, Vladan and I stopped by the site of the explosion and watch more than a few people walk past the little hole in the street and point, murmuring 'grenade' in various languages. Other than five or six missing cobblestones (the little ones), you'd scarcely notice anything happened. The casino is still open. The cafes are still serving outside just meters from the ka-boom site. There's one shrapnel ding in the wall of the casino, some flecks taken off a nearby billboard, and one of those J.C. Decaux signs is busted out. I picked up a piece of glass from it.

And this from Ireland On Line: 'Three Irish hurt in Prague bomb blast' (itals mine).

2004-07-29T15:48:00.000+02:00

Yes, everyone has lost their friggin minds

Its intentions were nothing but good

A retail chain in the Czech Republic was planning to order female cashiers to wear red headbands when having their periods, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) says.

2004-07-28T21:01:00.000+02:00

Off message
Has everyone lost their friggin minds?

Sorry, but I thought we were over this sort of thing:

The United captain turned his Los Angeles-bound 747 jet back to Sydney on Tuesday after fearing that the letters BOB on a sick bag stood for bomb on board.

A defensible action among the paranoid, perhaps. But then:

"Nonetheless, someone has been irresponsible at least and horrendously selfish and stupid at worst, and every effort will be made to find the person responsible."

What would be next?

Authorities said the backwards 'B' at the beginning of the word led them to their suspect, 4-year-old Robert MacDonald. MacDonald faces 12 years imprisonment and fines of up to $4 million.

No, it's not in the story, you dolt -- it's only hypothetical.

So whatever you do, do not write your name on a sick bag, especially if your name is John. In some quarters, JOHN stands for 'Jihad Of Holy Narwhales', a shadowy and dangerous pod of underwater Islamists. PAUL, it goes without saying, is an acronym for 'Pakistan's Angry Ululating Liberationalists', a vocally gifted but grammatically challenged group of evil-doers. Counter-terrorist experts have long been aware that GEORGE is quick way to say 'Get Everyone Out of Rear Garage Exit', the appropriate and necessary action to take when the front exit of a parking garage, perhaps the one where you park, is threatened by a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon. And one shouldn't forget the self-explanatory RINGO: 'Really Intense Nuclear Gadget On (Board)'.

In the name of global peace and national security, I'm considering changing my name (which may be misinterpreted as an acronym for 'To Hell, Evil Oligarchs') to a series of 1s and 0s expressed as a barcode. I recommend you do the same. For the children.

2004-07-27T10:28:00.000+02:00

Grossová sells Amway

2004-07-21T20:14:00.000+02:00

Edward Kelley strikes again

Is 16th-Century Voynich Manuscript A Hoax?

The Voynich manuscript has consistently foiled powerful computers and some of the world's best cryptographers, who have never managed to decipher the 16th-century encoded book. But now, as RFE/RL reports, one scientist says the manuscript could be a sophisticated hoax.

2004-07-21T20:12:00.000+02:00

Off message

Paul Simms writes in the New Yorker

Most of the rhymes kicked therein cannot be quoted in a family publication, but observers gave Mr. Cheney credit for his deceptively laid-back flow. Mr. Leahy was applauded for managing to rhyme the phrases “unethical for certain,” “crude oil spurtin’,” and “like Halliburton.”

2004-07-18T22:21:00.001+02:00

Sto dvacet jedna, sto dvacet dva, sto dvacet tří ...

So I’ve started skydiving. Most people think I’m at least a little bit nuts, for a couple reasons. For one, it looks like an incredibly, stupidly dangerous hobby. For another, I will have to jump 35 times or so before I can do anything really cool. Why exactly am I doing this? I’m not sure. But let me tell you about it.

The plane Impact is using this summer is an AN-2 – the Anatov “Colt” – an old Russian biplane that rattles and roars like a cast iron stampede and smells like the fuel is sloshing around your feat. The crew has added Czech labels to the originals indicating latches and switches and emergency information. It’s a wonderful machine that moves unbelievably slow, takes off in 200 meters and is pretty much ideal for jumping out of – you sort of want to.

My favorite part is the instant you jump out the door. Everything is suddenly quiet, relatively. The roar of the plane slips quickly away and you’re left with rushing wind, the flapping sound of your parachute opening and/or the sound of your own screaming.

Jana at Impact gave us very thorough instructions on what to do in zvláštní situace: your main canopy can not open at all or open only partly; there can be tangles, tears and twists; there can be problems with your harness; your reserve canopy can open accidentally. Some of these situations are easily fixed, others mean you have to cut away and rely on your reserve canopy. Thing is, for all the instruction you get on what to do when your main canopy doesn’t open, there’s nary a whisper about what to do if your reserve canopy doesn’t open. Hardly surprising, given that there’s not much you can do.

Before I started training, I had made two tandem jumps. Tandem is a great way to get introduced to skydiving. You’re strapped in a harness and attached to a ‘pilot’ – closer than you’ll ever be to man with your clothes on. The pilot does all the work. He opens the canopy and, more importantly, jumps out the door.

Of course, that’s the hard part. Instinctually we recoil from getting close to an edge like that, when you look down and there’s a sort of postcard of fields, roads and villages. Maybe a couple clouds. Too far away to look like someplace you would actually attempt to go. And then somebody yells běž, and you jump.

The first jumps you make are static line: your main canopy is loosely attached to a cord that's hooked inside the plane and opens your canopy as you fall. In a static-line jump, it takes the Falcon canopy we're using about four to seven seconds to open. Not really long enough to worry much. Sort of like a really high high-dive.

From my tandem jumps, I know that after about 10 seconds of falling, you feel like someone’s playing a joke on you. You just don’t fall that long. None of your ancestors ever fell longer than 10 seconds and lived to pass on their genes.

I’ve found with some relief that my reaction is to the falling is to laugh. Maybe everyone does. I’ll have to ask around. I have noticed that most of us newbies have silly grins on our faces as the plane goes up, grins that get bigger and sillier as the plane levels off and slows and someone opens the door and points at you and you think Am I really going to do this?

My first jump was a disaster. Well, not nearly, I guess, inasmuch as I can tell you about it. My training had been all in Czech – something which I was alternately proud of and extremely paranoid about. Did I really understand it? Is it possible that I missed something? Do I really just jump out the door and count sto dvacet jedna, sto dvacet dva, sto dvacet tří ... Or is there something I failed to understand, a lever I’m supposed to pull?

Anyway, there I was standing on the threshold of a plane looking at the bucolic countryside when somebody yelled běž, which for some reason was not the word I was expecting. I thought maybe hop would be a more likely choice, or jdi. But běž? I looked at the guy at the door with my best stupid face. He looks back with barely concealed disgust and fury at my apparent cowardice in the face of 1200 meters of air, and yells (with feeling) BĚŽ!

Jsem běhal. Maybe I counted sto dvacet jedna, sto dvacet dva, sto dvacet tří ... I don’t remember. I do remember the canopy opening and having the presence of mind to look up and see if it was functioning properly. It was, mainly, but the lines were twisted around each other spiral fashion. This is not a big deal and in fact it’s happened in all my jumps so far, so it no longer alarms me. I didn’t quite panic, I don’t think, and I reached up to pull the lines apart while kicking to spin myself around while they untangled, like I had been taught. No problem.

Except now I had no idea where the airport was. The yelling man at the door had pointed out the airport from the plane, but I couldn’t really see it. I knew, however, that it along a road between two villages and there was a pond a little distance away. But as anyone who’s flown over any part of the country will tell you, everything is along a road between two villages with a pond a little distance away.

I turned the canopy this way and that, eventually found the canopies of the two students who jumped before me, and steered towards them. What I didn’t know was that they couldn’t find the airport either. (And unless you think we’re complete idiots, the airport has a grass runway, so it sorta looks like another farm to the untrained eye.)

But not to worry, Jarda is on the ground with his binoculars and a radio to give us instructions. Blue parachute turn left 90 degrees. That sort of thing. Which he does. Loudly. In Czech. He speaks so loud, his voice is distorted in our tiny little speakers, so all I hear is žžřřááásslsdsáčžýá právožřělthéé prdele!

Anyway, despite our collective cluelessness, gravity eventually brings us all down. Jarda spends most of his time getting the first two jumpers to the target, which means that by the time he gets to me, I’m something of a lost cause. Or just lost. I landed fairly safely on my face in a muddy wheat field about a kilometer from the target. The only damage was to my pride, but I knew immediately that I could only improve. I remembered how my grandmother used to recommend eating a live toad each morning – your day could only get better after that.

The flight up takes about 10 minutes, and it’s about the same coming back down. The plane’s trip is about 40 minutes, depending on the number of passengers and their destination altitude. On a busy day like last Saturday, the AN-2 made 14 flights. My group jumped three times, which means we spent a lot of time sitting around. But that’s what you do at airports. You sit around. You wait. You get bumped from flights and put on standby. You play cards. You want to sit in the hospoda drinking beer, but that would be a really bad idea in this case. But eventually your number comes up, you strap on a parachute and climb in a rattletrap plane that you're not coming back in. It's fun.

Maybe this is about confronting fear, and once I've overcome that panic at jumping out the door, I'll go do something truly frightening, like karaoke. I think it's more about not waiting until that moment that you're completely ready, a moment never comes.

There was a guy on my third flight Saturday who had just graduated from static-line jumping to freefall. He had made a bad landing earlier in the day and Jarda had given him a hard time about it. The guy was obviously shaken up and looking for advice or instructions from Jarda, who was also jumping from this flight. Jarda thought what the guy needed was to learn to make his own decisions. So when we got to 1600 meters, Jarda just opened the door and turned his back on the guy. The jumper stood at the door for what seemed like forever. Then I guess he heard somebody yell běž.

2004-07-18T21:02:00.001+02:00

Harmony and a lack of understanding

Can anyone explain to me the Czech love of musicals? It’s something I noticed fairly quickly when I arrived years ago, back when the Pulp Fiction soundtrack was playing somewhere in Prague 3 pretty much every minute of the day. I stumbled across Radio Limonadový Joe – all show tunes, all the time. Everyone had a copy of the Hair and Grease soundtracks. Eventually we would be subjected to Rebelové, not to mention Cleopatra, Drakula, Excalibur ... I think there is actually a musical playing in Prague for every letter in the alphabet. I welcome any efforts to explain this phenomenon away (and will punish severely all attempts that fail).

2004-07-09T17:55:00.001+02:00

I was reduced to describing Samira Makhmalbaf as an enigma. That was a tidy way of saying ‘There’s no way I’m gonna be able to fit all this in at under 650 words and still give you brief synopses of her three films that are screening here.’

Suffice it to say I didn’t break any news. A few details, however:

Contrary to what viewers see of her in The Joy of Madness (a video documentary of the making of Samira’s At Five in the Afternoon shot by her younger sister), Samira is not immediately unpleasant. You definitely get the impression that, when pushed, she will push back, and back, and back a little more. And if you still disagree, she’ll let you know how you’re throwing your life away.

She’s actually very gracious when she speaks – lots of thank-yous and easy laughter – and her chin weaves around, making her look a little like a wobble-head doll. She creates a sort of continual drama around her face, resting the point of her chin on her fingers, or smoothing her hair underneath her headscarf.

Her wearing of the headscarf seems to me to be totally subversive. Although she says she believes in god, she has no use for religious superstitions. Her headscarf doesn’t cover much, and as I said she’s constantly running her fingers under it, not so much to keep her thick black hair in line as to remind you that there’s something under the scarf that some people don’t want you to see. Something naughty. Not that she wouldn’t mind showing you, but it might not be proper. Oops, I did it again.

So I finally get her alone. And we talk about how other Iranian filmmakers are jealous of her because she’s Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s daughter and protégé, and how she doesn’t have to rely on subsidies to make her films, so she has more freedom on what and how she can shoot, and how such jealousy is only natural.

Then she took off the headscarf.

I had been so taken in by the whole drama that the sight of her uncovered head put me in a cold sweat. She just reached up and calmly pulled the scarf off the back of her head -- no ceremony, no theatrics. This was a backstage gesture, not intended to excite anyone. But still.

We talked about how she hopes digital technology will make filmmaking more democratic, but she’s said all that elsewhere. And then I asked her about the absurd moments in her films (absurd in that Camus-Sisyphus sort of way). And she didn’t know the word ‘absurd’. I thought that was great.

In the end, my interview didn’t lead our section because the boss thought our interview with Theodora Remundová was more important. But when the Czech section’s interview with supermodel Karolína Kurková turned out to be less than brilliant — kinda like Pope Leo X turned out to be less than Lutheran — they decided to lead with Samira. But they wanted to do their own interview. You know. Just to build it up a little. For a Czech audience. You understand. But if they used any of my material, they’d share the by-line.

So it’s really too bad that Samira wasn’t available to talk.

And I know you were wondering about Nick Holdsworth. And Steven Gaydos, I'm sure. Provided you're not just googling for their names, I'll tell you about it later.

2004-07-07T20:07:00.000+02:00

Whrrrrrzzzziiiiizzzz ... smack!

Has anyone else noticed a direct relationship between the degree of irritation caused by a ringtone and how far the user is from the phone? Or perhaps how often it rings? I remember a couple years ago how Hana's phone was always ringing and how she was never around to answer it. This year, Coilin's phone is forever going off with like three different utterly maddening melodies.

Next entry: Ringtones and the Doppler effect.

2004-07-07T17:25:00.000+02:00

She's not coming

Several times a day, the phones of all the journalists at KV twitter and beep simultaneously as we receive another text spam from the festival press office. Usually it announces that a press conference has been rescheduled or a press screening has been cancelled. Last night it was to remind everyone that spolocensky oblek was required at the Media Party. As if.

Other text message today: John Cleese doesn' t want to be photographed at the presser. Huh.

The really useful information just sort trickles and oozes around the Thermal, however. Like the news that Sherilyn Fenn is not coming. Just as well, I suppose. I was just getting my mojo up to interview her, as our Czech colleagues hadn't a clue who she was, which would have meant that as soon as they knew we had an interest in her, some enterprising young hack would cherry-pick the interview and leave me standing there with my tape recorder in my hand, as it were. Not that I'm bitter.

Tomorrow I've got Samira Makhmalbaf. The Guardian ran this bit of worshipful drool as a lead-up to the release of her latest film. I really don't know what to expect. The interview was supposed to be today, but she begged off. Her handler said she was exhausted -- she had just arrived in town after a flight from Tehran -- and had 'a problem'.

2004-07-06T21:31:00.000+02:00

Prepare yourselves to the Scottish Shower!

After a long exposition to the heat, as it happens in the the rmo-the rapy treatments, it is always advisable that the client has a scottish shower insidc Sprizzy Professional Cabin. ...

During the duration of the program, which is automatically proposed by the equipment, but that can also be manually programmed, each cycle provides to massage separately the following four parts of the body: calves, thigs, thorax, head; from bottom up to the top. ...

The business goes through the shower.

[Thanks, Will.]

2004-07-05T20:44:00.000+02:00

Choose life

Cowboys & Angels is a cloying load of tripe, but Michael Legge is the next Elijah Wood.

So where's the party?

2004-07-05T18:34:00.000+02:00

Better than in the Maly sal

Last night's party was at the Zanzibar tent outside the Thermal. Actually, the real party was the MTV bash at Roxy-Lazne I, but we didn't have VIP cards, so we went with the punters to the Mistri party. In addition to Mistri director Marek Najbrt and producer Pavel Strnad there were Jiří Macháček and Tereza Brodská (who is so fine). Also Silny Cafe director Börkur Gunnarsson, who was was giving Radio Prague journalist Ian Willoughby an earful about the sorry state of modern football and journalism. Ahem.

And at noon, the mayor of Karlovy Vary gave Jacqueline Bisset a special prize (Oof! -- Right in the Velky sal!) In her interviews, Bisset goes on at some length about her clothes and who over the years has lighted her the best.

Now here's a murky story: Three German women apparently drove 16 hours just to see Elijah Wood. They turn up at his presser yesterday and present him with a large envelope, which -- like the innocent he apparently is -- he opens in front of everyone. In addition to chocolates and cookies, there's a big photo montage of him and another Rings star (Orlando Bloom?) doing things to each other that will get you arrested in many states. (Oof! -- Right in the Velky sal!) Doctored photos, mind you. He just sorta smirked and said 'That's too much'. and put the picture down. Totally unruffled.

Which brings me to a debate I just had with my colleague here. Does anyone not understand the term 'beefcake' as it might be applied in the above anecdote? Buehler? Anyone?

Tonight I'm going to try to catch Cowboys & Angels and either House of Sand and Fog or The Machinist.

2004-07-04T00:17:00.000+02:00

Nggghhaahhh!
Grrr arrr Rum and Monkey.

2004-07-03T23:30:00.000+02:00

Šeli jsme do Puppu!

The party was at the Grand Hotel Pupp. Rhymes with 'soup'. I didn't get there until nearly 1 a.m., but it was still fairly swinging. As I mention in tomorrow's issue of the Festival daily, anyone can start a party, but it's the one's that finish that really get my respect. Those would include actors Colm Meaney and Bernard Hill, director David Ondricek, the ubiquitous Nils Jebens, erm, us, Prague Post film dude Ray Johnston, and that guy. You know, the one in this year's KVIFF trailer. He also appears in Rex-patriates as Radek. His name is Petr apparently, and I think he should be a star. But then, I think you ought to be a star.

Harvey Keitel's acceptance speech last night was really good. It was brief, to the point, and relevant. He recalled his first hearing about what was then Czechoslovakia. He had been asked to sign a petition asking the communist regime to free some playwright he'd never really heard of. He did, and a bunch of NY artists went down to the Czechoslovak embassy and knocked on the door. The door opened a crack, they shoved the petition in, and then the door slammed shut. Good story. He even pronounced 'Václav' properly.

You know how the Czech press is kinda funny sometimes? There's a cutline in our Saturday issue: "British actor Bernard Hill enjoyed the carriage ride. The gentle spa wind ruffles his hair and Marek Eben laughed."

Mmm ... planter's punch ...

2004-07-02T18:21:00.000+02:00

And no, he doesn't have big, furry feet

Nearly forgot. Elijah Wood is coming, right? (The starlet factor is really low this year. We do have Sherilyn Fenn, however.) Anyway, when the Czech staff isn't referring to him as 'ten Pitlík' or 'Frodo', they call him 'Ellyah'. So the star lineup comes out Ellyah Vode, Harfy Keedle, Yawn Irfink, Jaskeleen Biscuit, Collin Money, Yawn Sleaze, etc. But the only celeb I've seen is Yeary McMockchek.

So where's the party?

2004-07-02T17:42:00.000+02:00

Just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You're gonna love it.

We had been told there would be a press screening of Sunshine this afternoon, which which is unusual in that we fest hacks are normally treated like mushrooms. Given the way protocol here at KV is running like a well-oiled avalanche of hedgehogs on bad acid, I thought maybe, just maybe, I'd better check with the press office to make sure that my staff ID was enough to get me into the screening. Good thing I checked: As we're sorta working for the festival, we have staff accreditation. You can only have one kind of accreditation. Industry. Press. Staff. Etc. So I don't have press accreditation. Which means that, under normal circumstances, I don't have access to things like, oh, press conferences.

Anyway, the press office assured us that they would get us in the press screening. We got to the screening room, which seems to be reserved for industry screenings, which the press are not invited to. So the security guard wouldn't let any of the press in the press screening.

It was eventually straightened out, but that's the way things go here. Take the coffee machine, for example. The daily's offices have been given a lovely little espresso machine. There are a dozen or so people in our office. They gave us three cups. So I went downstairs to 'production' to ask for more. A very friendly, helpful young lady took a stack of plastic cups off the water cooler and gave them to me.

And the Thermal is lousy with security guards. Jeebus. They're everywhere. And they're all about 17 and bored. And they look like they'd rather be sitting at a tram stop somewhere, spitting. I have this well-nigh uncontrollable urge to slap them.

So where's the party?

2004-07-01T17:04:00.001+02:00

Kick 'em when they're down

I'm in Karlovy Vary at the 39th KVIFF, working on the festival's daily paper. It's not really journalism -- more like PR. So, for example, tomorrow's issue will not include the following paragraphs:

The quest for the Crystal Globe has only just begun and already the field has been narrowed by one. KVIFF announced Wednesday that the Slovenian entry Beneath her Window would be removed from the Official Selection.
The film, from director Metod Pevec, screened at the Ljubljana Film Festival last autumn. Per International Federation of Film Producers Association (FIAPF) rules, films that have screened in competition at other international festivals are not eligible for the KVIFF Official Selection.

Producer Danijel Hocevar told the Karlovy Vary program board that, despite his long career in film production, he had not been sufficiently familiar with the FIAPF regulations to that Window could not compete at KVIFF.
Although out of competition, Window will still screen at KVIFF.

Us hacks on the daily are working on Macs, because ... because we just do, okay? Now I used to be fully adept in Mac, but in the last couple years I haven't used one and now I'm completely flummoxed. We're cursed with blue IDs, as opposed to the red ones that get you into the best parties, and generally get no respect. Not that we deserve it or anything. Plus, the best part of the festival is getting into places you're not supposed to be (like using that secret entrance to the Thermal's Velky sal).

The star factor looks a little better this year than last. Supposedly showing up are Colm Meaney, John Cleese, Harvey Keitel, Charlie Kaufman. Sherilyn Fenn. Jacqueline Bisset is apparently coming, although no one is sure why.

I'm finding that most of the things I want to write here ... gossipy hearsay and unkind anecdotes about ... can you infer that I'm talking about ... and that as you might have expected ... oh, just ask me about it when I get back.

2004-06-21T17:49:00.000+02:00

Can I say 'sod off'?

What the hell is Ben Yagoda going on about? And how badly does he need a slapping?

2004-06-17T15:12:00.000+02:00

Troops put down insurgents

I want to know more about the revolution of 1848 and Fürst Alfred zu Windischgrätz.

2004-06-14T11:16:00.000+02:00

Není vlajka jako vlajka

From today's Týden

Village didn't have an EU flag, so they found a different one

In Vikantice in the Jesenik mountains, they didn't get a European flag. Instead, they flew the banner of Alaska, which is very similar to the EU standard. Immediately before the start of the elections, the Interior Ministry learned of the situation; what followed looked like a comedy of errors.

There is a shortage of blue flags with twelve stars in the Czech Republic. Nonetheless, the election law says that polling places must be marked by an EU flag. The mayor of the small town of Vikantice in the Olomouc region found his own solution. 'At the company where we wanted to order [the flag], there was a two-month waiting period and I really didn't have time to drive around the country looking for a flag,' said Mayor Miroslav Kročil. He first considered calling off the elections entirely, but then came up with an idea worthy of King Solomon. He hung an Alaskan flag at the polling place.

The difference isn't great. The Alaskan flag has yellow stars on a blue field, but twelve instead of eight, arranged not in a European ring but in the shape of the Big Dipper and the North Star.

'They've had this flag in Alaska since the 1920s. European heraldists weren't doing much in the '50s except plagiarism. If I can't fulfil the law, I'll at least approximate it,' the mayor said.

His decision last Friday drew in one state, one regional and two municipal offices. Word got around that polling places in Vikantice were flying the Alaskan flag instead of the EU flag got around Friday afternoon. When Interior Ministry official Václav Henych learned of the situation, he said 'Jesus Christ, they can't hang that there! I'm calling the the region immediately to get them to do something. Surely they've got one somewhere, or can borrow or rent one.'

Just before two o'clock when the polls were to open, Týden called the regional office in Olomouc, which is responsible for the village. 'The European flag should be hanging there [now]. The municipal office in nearby Jindrichov helped us find one,' said municipal clerk Lubica Koláčková.

Ultimately the EU flag flew at the Vikantice polling place. The flag's older Alaskan sister remained, at the mayor's request.

When asked exactly what would happen if the building hadn't flown the EU flag, Henych said 'It would have no affect on the outcome of the election, but it would be a disgrace.'

In any event, it looks like our [Czech] lawmakers are more Catholic than the Pope [as it were]. In Germany, the EU flag wasn't hung before polling stations. The German election law doesn't require polling stations to display the EU flag; it can fly there, but it isn't required.

2004-06-13T21:26:00.000+02:00

Not going gently

Went with some friends to Lidice last Saturday. After a 20-minute trip, the bus stopped in a wide spot in the road. The bus LED display said 'Lidice' but there was nothing in sight. Then again, what did I expect?

But about 50 metres behind us, I could see something that was plainly a monument. We crossed the road and a path led us to a plaza of sorts that overlooks the valley where the village of Lidice once stood.

What's there now is a well-maintained and exquisitely peaceful park dotted with reminders of the tragedies of 1942. Peaceful except for the roar of jets taking off from nearby Ruzyně airport. Memorials stand on the sites of the village church and school. The foundations of the buildings of the Horak farm have been excavated. Largely obscured by a row of evergreens is a low wall that marks where the men of Lidice were shot by a firing squad in groups of five and ten.

Just up the hill from the wall is a memorial where the men's bodies were buried in a mass grave. The memorial was covered with wreaths from the 10 June anniversary of the massacre. Many of these were from Czech and German cities. There was one from President Klaus. Her Britanic Majesty's Ambassador had brought a wreath, as had representatives of France, Germany, Japan and Russia. But not the U.S. I'm not sure why not. Hell, even Belarus brought a wreath, so you would think Washington could pony up for some flowers. I'm going to put in a call to the U.S. Embassy and ask about it. If I'm mistaken, I'll let you know.

The memorial museum is small but very well put together with lots of artefacts. I hadn't known before that villages in Illinois and Mexico were named for Lidice, as is a square in Montevideo.

A new Lidice was built soon after the war. One of the children who survived the war is the current mayor.

The Nazis flattened the old village graveyard, but the locations of the old family plots are marked. Next to these is the new cemetary where villages are buried nowadays. Not a few of the graves bear the words 'Lidická žena' -- Lidice woman, indicating the grave of a woman who had survived the massacre, deportation and the war.

Several tombstones bear identical inscriptions, which I translate:

There were millions of us ...
But even the cruelest death will have meaning
if like millions of stars
our fate tells you the way to humanity

Other epitaphs are bleak nearly to the point of absurdity. One had to be there to appreciate it, I suppose. But still:

Why was fate so evil
and did not let me live
Why did I have to leave so early

and

My life was only suffering,
my life was only full of tribulation

Scott recently asked a very good question: What effect did Heydrich's assassination have on the war? I've been over the political reasons Beneš wanted it to happen, and we've seen the adverse effects it had on Bohemia and Moravia. And of course it removed an extremely unpleasant Nazi from the picture. But did it help defeat the Nazis? I'll get back to you on that.

Meanwhile, back in Prague, voters were staying away from the polls in droves. Early exit polls put voter turnout very low -- under 30% -- with most voters supporting the centre-right Civic Democrats (President Klaus' party) or the not-so-centre-left Communists. PM Špidla ruling Social Democrats seem to have received a proper spanking, finishing third behind the Communists. Behind the Communists is historically not a good place to be.

Last week I was interviewed by Greek public broadcaster ERT3 about the then-upcoming elections. Main question was: Would a poor showing by the Social Democrats have repercussions for Špidla and his government? I told the reporter then that SocDems had been suffering in the polls almost since the gained power, but that the low numbers at the polls wouldn't be a death knell for this government. Now I'm not so sure. It depends on what the media does with it, I think. If the press and pundits play into the CivDems hands, we could see a shake up before Senate elections in November. I expect that in the normal course of events, Špidla will step down as head of the party. Heir apparent: Stanislav Gross, the 'baby-faced Minister of Fear'. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, back in Lidice, the Czechs and Germans are snatching enmity from the jaws of reconciliation again. As ČTK reports, Klaus and Špidla oppose efforts to rewrite history (like you do). (See also this AP backgrounder.)

Colour me a sentimentalist, but why can't we all just get along? I don't think anyone considers the destruction of Lidice anything other than heinous and barbaric. The Beneš decrees, while understandable to an extent considering what the Czechs had suffered, were a failure of humanity. Germany's efforts to irrigate the wounds of the war are noted; the world made a significant step in its continuing recovery when Germany was invited to the recent D-Day anniversary observation at Normandy.

But the Czech Republic refuses to engage in constructive communication on the Beneš decrees. There are some, notably exiled Sudetens and the survivors, who want the decrees repealed -- as well they should. I'm not saying that the decrees actually should be repealed, but the Czechs should commit to dialogue on the issue for as long as it takes, which is probably a generation or so. Burying the issue, as both countries agreed to do in 1997, only poisons feelings on both sides.

2004-06-10T09:33:00.000+02:00

Lidice and the Reprisals

No, it's not the name of a band. I'm back on the Heydrich thing again. When we left our story, Heydrich had just died of shrapnel wounds from Kubiš's hand grenade. (Everyone, including Scott, loves the bit about the horsehair in the spleen. Horsehair in the Spleen. Now that's a great name for a band.)

Needless to say, the Nazis were pissed that Heydrich was assassinated. Many were pissed at Heydrich for getting himself killed. The Reichsprotektor had ignored Berlin's insistence that he have an armed escort at all times and that his car (a convertible, not a Humvee) be outfitted with armor (which probably would have saved his life).

Hitler said of Heydrich 'That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic.' The Fuehrer fairly flew off the handle and ordered the immediate ('this very night') arrest of 10,000 intelligentsia and the execution of the 100 most important.

On hearing of the attack on Heydrich, Himmler cried. Tears. Himmler. He told other high-ranking SS officers that, if they were as cavalier about their own security as Heydrich had been, 'you are a sitting target for the lunatic who is lying in wait for you...' Not only was Himmler a sensitive Nazi capable of weeping, he also believed in Divine Providence: 'We cannot leave everything to the Good Lord and make him our personal security guard.' Huh.

MacDonald has Goebbels on record as saying he would arrest '500 Berlin Jews, and I will warn the leaders of the Jewish community that, for every Jewish plot and every Jewish attempt at rebellion, 100 to 150 Jews who are in our hands will be shot.' Shortly after the attack, the Nazis killed several hundred Jews in Sachsenhausen.

The Nazis feared that the absence of a firm response to the assassination would encourage more such attacks. Prague was put under curfew at 9 p.m. on 27 May. German and Czech troops conducted house-to-house searches, arresting 541 people. Of these, 430 were later released. (Does this sound familiar to anyone? -ed.) I'll follow up on the search for the assassins in another entry.

But the Nazis wanted blood, and lots of it. MacDonald writes:

On 9 June a special train left Prague marked 'AaH' (Attentat auf Heydrich or Assassination of Heydrich) carrying 1000 Czech Jews to their deaths in the SS extermination factories. It was followed by two more transports from the ghetto at Terezin. ... For the Nazis, however, the murder of Jews was almost routine. Something more was required ...

That something was Lidice, a small village near Kladno. MacDonald's research turns up several possible indications why Lidice was chosen, but the ultimate reason for the decision remains murky. Then again, this is barbarism we're talking about.

Anyway, the Gestapo concluded the assassins were hiding in Lidice. Although two searches failed to turn up any, shall we say, agents of Nazi destruction, that didn't prevent the Nazis from staying the course. Hitler wanted Lidice destroyed.

On 10 June, the village men were shot. The women and children (except a few particularly blond ones) were shipped to concentration camps. Gestapo figures were: 199 men, 195 women and 95 children. The houses were set on fire and the remaining wall bulldozed. (The exhibition at the army museum has a film of Nazis strolling through the burning village. It looks for all the world like a Laibach video.)

The Lidice Memorial has a good website where you can learn more about the massacre. You might also want to read this recent Radio Prague report.

And then there's this op-ed piece, published in the Scotsman: 'Czech heroes unleashed Hitler's terrible revenge'. The dek muses 'Would they have gone through with this mission if they had known the sequel?'

The author, Lord Douglas-Hamilton, a Conservative MSP for Lothians, says they would have. He's probably right. Records indicate that Gabčík and Kubiš had their mission blinders on, and nothing short of Beneš calling off the mission would have stopped them. As noted below, the Czech resistance didn't want the assassination to go forward. If the people of Lidice had known ... but of course they couldn't have.

On the other hand, Heydrich's victim would doubtless have taken certain satisfaction in seeing him writhe in pain, or at least in his grave. The assassination was a psychological and strategic blow to the Nazis. There is some debate over whether it actually shortened the war and reduced the overall suffering.

As Douglas-Hamilton notes, Havel said of the assassination in 1992:

It was one of the most significant acts of resistance on a pan-European scale. It was an act which had a significant influence on the decision to recognise our government in exile. It was an act which had much to do with the fact that we finished the war as a victorious state and not as a defeated one.

He's right about the significance, but he's got it backwards on the government in exile, as we've already seen. The last sentence is loaded: Beneš was aware that anything short of total Nazi capitulation would result in the end of an independent Czechoslovakia. After what happened in Munich in 1938, he knew that Bohemia, Moravia and the rest would most likely become part of Germany in a negotiated settlement. Unless he could prove that the Czechs really, really, really didn't like the Nazis. The assassination did that, sorta. But it did prove that the Nazis really didn't like the Czechs, and the massacre at Lidice didn't help the Nazis' approval ratings in the Protectorate.

Is 'victorious' an odd word? Discuss.

2004-06-04T12:23:00.000+02:00

Fotky

Jorn Ake is a photographer and poet living in Prague who sends email to me and a small army of followers when he updates his website with new photos. He just posted new photos from Terezín and Freud's neighborhood in Vienna, among others. Check it out.

2004-06-03T18:06:00.000+02:00

There but for the grace of god

According to the Sofia Echo, Bulgaria is considering requiring applicants for permanent residence to produce certificates of proficiency in Bulgarian.

UK citizen Matt Willis said: "I would predict that the outrageous amendment will simply open up a new black market opportunity for false language course certificates".

Can you say ty vole?

2004-05-31T19:51:00.000+02:00

Sprízneni volbou
"If that's your best, your best won't do" -- Dee Snider

Since Doug is otherwise occupied this week, I'll pick up the mantle of minding the Czech press. Two stories jumped out at me tonight (and damn near got my wallet): Dajdou wants to go into politics, and Dolly Buster is suing the state for financial mismanagement. Both women are demonstrating a damn-the-torpedos attitude that reminds me of President Klaus.

If you're not familiar with Dajdou, you should be. If you're not in the know as regards Nora Baumberger, aka Dolly Buster, she's the lead EP candidate for the Independent Initiative (NEI). Now please try to keep up.

Anyway, Blesk put the Dajdou story on page one, below the fold. The poor translation below is mine.

Dajdou: I'm going to be a politician

Anna Gleisnerová (18), also known as the "Czech Dajdou" has set her sites to politics! "But I haven't chosen party yet, because each one is worse than the next," the ever-critical Anička told Blesk.

"Each one has a bad platform. I would simply do things differently," says Anička, who would participate in municipal politics once she comes of age.

The young anti-star of the "Česko hledá SuperStar" television contest show wants to change the world for the better. And she believes that she is well suited to be a politician. "In a year, when I'm of age, then I'll see my candidacy realistically," says Anička.

"I don't know, but I think that people will vote for me when they hear my radical opinions." For a moment she hesitates, but quickly adds with confidence that she is broadly gifted and is better than almost everyone, and so she has the best background for a political career.

And then there's this story from ČTK about Dolly Buster, or as the agency calls her for the first time I've noticed, Nora Baumberger. Does this mean the former porn star is gaining more mainstream cred? Is Nusle gentrifying?

"I learnt from citizens that the Czech state debt has been growing in the past years. [Now here's a politician who's in the loop. -ts] This made me believe that the state is unable optimally to manage its finances," she said.

Of course, the pity is that the Prague 1 District State Attorney's Office will blow off Baumberger's complaint because a) she's done the nasty, repeatedly, on film, for money, and b) it's an election year. Discuss.

2004-05-29T13:16:00.000+02:00

Not ironic, isn't it not

Via Prague TV, Molvania -- A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry. Be sure to listen to the Molvania entry into the Eurovision song contest.

2004-05-27T11:23:00.000+02:00

The assassination

After Heydrich’s clampdown on the Czech underground, such as it was, Beneš recognized that any further sabotage or intelligence gathering was going to rely on paratroopers trained in Britain and dropped into the Protectorate. Squads were also trained for ‘anti-personnel attacks’ – assassinations. As MacDonald writes,

If Beneš felt his credibility in London and Moscow depended on dramatic evidence of Czech resistance, he also feared for his position at home as a result of Heydrich’s police measures. The parachute groups were not only to impress the allies but also to act as a rallying point for the badly shaken underground.

But Beneš was careful never to go on record calling for an assassination, although he did meet with the assassins before they left Britain. He would later deny any role in its planning and execution.

Two soldiers were chosen to carry out the assassination. Josef Gabčík (first photo at right) was a Slovak and Karel Svoboda was a Czech. Svoboda later suffered a concussion in parachute training and was replaced by Jan Kubiš (second photo at right), also a Czech. Informed of the mission, they volunteered without hesitation. They were to work without the foreknowledge of anyone in the underground, to reduce the chances the mission might be leaked. The assassination was originally to be carried out on 28 October, the anniversary of the country’s independence.

Several other missions were prepared parallel to Operation Anthropoid. Two of these, Silver A and Silver B, were to help re-establish communications between the resistance and London. Operations Iron and Tin were planned as assassinations. Iron was later cancelled, but its target appears to have been the doddering President Hácha. Tin was to kill Emanuel Moravec, an ugly little toad of a man who was Minister of Propaganda. A sabotage mission, Operation Steel was renamed Out Distance. (No, I don’t know how they came up with these names either.)

Anthropoid, Silver A and Silver B – nine soldiers in total – were dropped east of Plzeň on the night of 29 December 1941. Silver A got separated in the jump and Silver B lost their radio. Members of Silver A promptly went to visit their mothers and started fighting over sweethearts, but managed to set up radio communications. Anthropoid had a rough landing far off target and were lucky not to be discovered by the Gestapo. Several months later, they were reunited with Josef Valčik of Silver A.

In April, Gabčík, Kubiš and Valčik were diverted to assist in bombing mission, which largely failed. Many parachute squads were being dropped in and many of them were being captured. The Nazis were on the alert and rumours of assassins were abroad in Prague. Even Heydrich was aware of a plot to assassinate him, but he refused to believe the Czechs would commit suicide by killing him. The contacts the men had made in the underground resisted the plan, fearing the reprisals that would follow, and begged London to call off the mission.

Beneš refused. His parachute missions were failing and he needed both military and political victories. He wrote in a message to the resistance that action was necessary ‘even if it had to be paid for with a great many sacrifices’.

Before they left Britain, Gabčík and Kubiš had determined the best way to kill Heydrich would be to attack him in his car with gunfire and explosives. Heydrich’s residence was in Panenské Břežany, just north of Prague. From what they knew of Heydrich’s schedule, the day would have to be 27 May. The assassins needed to find a sharp turn on Heydrich’s route where his car would slow down. They found one north of Holešovice, where the streets Zenklova and V Holešovičkách meet today.

I went to the site on Tuesday. Even today, cars have to slow down considerably to make the turn. There are no markers of the event, but three streets in the area preserve the memory – Gabčíkova, Kubišova and Valčikova. A man I stopped on the street told me the attack would have taken place roughly at the Vychovatelna stop for buses headed to Nádraží Holešovice. At the corner of Zenklova and Gabčíkova (photo at left) is a fence that looks very much like one in photographs taken at the scene of the attack by investigators, but the man told the streets had changed much since then. At that time, it was largely a green area with few houses. Today, it is dominated by major traffic arteries, underpasses and an ugly blue building with the name Prometheus on its wall.

On the morning of 27 May, Gabčík, Kubiš and Valčik rode bicycles to the planned scene of the attack. Valčik took a high position watching and was to signal with a mirror when Heydrich’s car was approaching. Kubiš stood under some trees on the inside of the sharp corner, ready to throw grenades into the car. Gabčík stood on the opposite side of the rode with a light automatic.

After a long wait, Heydrich’s black Mercedes Benz 320 came down the hill. At about the same time, a tram was climbing the hill. As the car slowed into the turn, Gabčík walked into the street, aimed at Heydrich and squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. Realising Gabčík was an assassin, Heydrich stood up, drew his pistol and ordered his driver to stop. At that moment, Kubiš threw a grenade, which landed just outside the car (photo at left). Shrapnel hit Heydrich, his driver and Kubiš and shattering the windows of the tram, which had come to its stop.

The driver went after Kubiš, who got on his bicycle and rode quickly down the hill. Valčik escaped undetected. Heydrich attempted to chase down Gabčík, but was too seriously injured to pursue him far. As Heydrich collapsed, he ordered his driver to follow Gabčík, who apparently ran up the hill and down the street that now bears his name. He attempted to hide in a butcher shop (the only building in the vicinity today that looks like a storefront is at Gabčíkova 19), but found no help. He barely escaped into a side street.

Heydrich was mortally wounded. Shrapnel broke a rib and bits of horsehair and wire from car seat penetrated his spleen. He was delivered to Bulovka hospital, where he died a week later.

The Czech Army Museum has a pretty good exhibition on the assassination, with lots of artefacts like letters Gabčík and Kubiš wrote, weapons and Heydrich's car (photo at left). The Mercedes was repaired, but the museum has 'restored' it to something like the condition after the attack. There is also a wealth of material on the soldiers' capture and the reprisals, but I'll leave that for another day.

2004-05-26T17:27:00.000+02:00

Reinhard Heydrich

On Monday I attempted to shed a little light on the sort of man Edvard Beneš was and the role he played in the Heydrich assassination. Today I’m taking a look at Heydrich himself. There has been a lot written about Heydrich; two books in particular that I’m drawing from are (again) MacDonald’s ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich’ and Mark Roseman’s ‘The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution’. There’s also a pretty good examination of Heydrich here.

Heydrich was not a likeable fellow. The son of a poor musician, he was a social outcast almost from the beginning. Other children picked on him because he was a pigeon-chested pansy who was rumoured to be Jewish. He responded by becoming a ruthless and bloody-minded athlete and womaniser who was pathologically anti-semitic.

There was a lot of that sort of behaviour going around. After World War I, it became fashionable in Germany to blame the country’s defeat on Jews. Heydrich’s involvement in militant nationalist organisations began when he joined the paramilitary Maracker Freikorps at 15. He eventually became a naval officer but was discharged in 1931 for bad behaviour; womanising again. His pride and career prospects wounded, he joined the Nazi party. He would seek his revenge on the officer class later.

Heydrich made a great Nazi, as it were. He was an ambitious climber, continually scheming against those above and below him. He built up the Nazis intelligence wing to dig up dirt on people who got in his way. Anti-semitism was reaching manic proportions. To be called a Jew was accusation, trial and sentence. Such accusations were useful to monsters like Heydrich. Of course, rumours of Heydrich’s own Jewish past continued to linger, and he responded by trying to be the most ruthless anti-semite around.

He wasn’t the only one. The Nazi machine in general and the SS in particular get painted as monstrous models of calculation and efficiency. True, they made the trains run on time and could devote enormous amounts of resources to inconceivably grim statistics, but it was because every individual knew that slacking meant personal ruin of the worst sort. (It’s interesting to note that when the Jewish charge didn’t stick, there was always the accusation of homosexuality.) So when a Nazi couldn’t be efficient and exacting, he went to extra lengths to be brutal, to show his heart was in the right place, sorta.

Many people associate Heydrich with the infamous conference at Wannsee in January 1942. The common understanding of that conference has it that this was where the ‘Final Solution’ was unveiled and that Heydrich was in charge, but I think that’s putting too fine a point on it. As Roseman writes, Nazi policy was not established by anyone other than Hitler, and Hitler was not at Wannsee. Murderous opinions and plots were undoubtedly discussed, but we can’t know for sure because Heydrich wouldn’t let anyone except Adolf Eichmann take notes. Furthermore, Eichmann’s notes apparently look more like an essay, not minutes of a meeting. So Wannsee emerges as an opportunity for Heydrich to impress a bunch of Nazi middle-managers not just with how deep his anti-semitism ran, but with how ruthless and controlling he could be. Read Roseman for more.

Even when he was SS Obergruppenfuehrer, Heydrich had set his sights higher. Just how high he hoped to climb in the Nazi organisation we don’t know, but he saw his path there as leading through Bohemia and Moravia. In 1941, the Reichsprotektor was Konstantin von Neurath, an old-guard army man who distrusted the SS. Heydrich wanted to turn the Protectorate into a model SS state. To that end, he compiled a dossier on Neurath’s administration. He sexed-up the dossier to make the Czech underground resistance to look like more of a threat than it actually was – just as Beneš was doing, but for completely different purposes. So when Beneš’s boycott of the Protectorate press came off, Heydrich pounced. Within a week, Hitler named Heydrich to replace Neurath.

The new Reichsprotektor immediately declared martial law and raised the black SS flag over Prague Castle. He set about expediting the execution of hundreds of suspected resisters, many of whom were intelligentsia and former army offices, to eliminate any potential resistance leaders. At the same time, he increased some rations, distributed shoes and took other measures to depoliticise the Czech population and get individuals to concentrate solely on their jobs and material needs.

Heydrich arrested Prime Minister Alois Eliáš as a traitor and sentenced him to death, but postponed the execution and let it be widely known that further testimony could be expected from the doomed man. This put the fear of god in many officials who were quietly resisting the Nazis, including the aged and ailing president, Emil Hácha. The president eventually denounced Beneš and accused him of being a troublemaker who did not have the interest of the people at heart.

It’s unclear what effect the underground’s ‘undetectable sabotage’ was having on industrial output, but it seemed to be in everyone’s interest to inflate the damage caused – well, everyone’s interest except that of ordinary people and what remained of the resistance after Heydrich launched his initial reign of terror. While Neurath had been loathe to punish the entire population for the actions of a few, and thereby push the country toward rebellion, Heydrich decided to shock and awe the Czechs by executing 3000 men. It was an act that Beneš felt he had to answer.

2004-05-24T19:09:00.000+02:00

Saints

I neglected to mention that today commemorates Cyril and Methodius. More on this later in the week.

2004-05-24T13:06:00.000+02:00

Edvard Beneš (1884-1948)

Speaking of whipping boys ... The second president of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, would have turned 120 yesterday. Beneš is best remembered for the decrees that bear his name, which expelled Czechoslovakia's German minority after World War II. He also stands out in popular memory for having been on watch during two putsches: The Munich Agreement of 1938, which kinda sorta resulted in World War II, and the Communist coup of 1948, which introduced Czechoslovakia 41 years of state-sponsored unpleasantness.

Although he died shortly after the arrival of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Beneš has been in the news again lately. A measure before the Czech parliament earlier this spring would have recognised Beneš for his contributions to the state. He was Masaryk's No 2, after all. But the Senate rejected the bill and sent it back to the Chamber of Deputies, who overrode the bill and sent it on to President Klaus, who refused to sign the bill, but who said yesterday that Beneš is getting the short end of the stick.

I have to agree on that last bit, but there's an awful lot about Beneš that just doesn't come up in the recent discussions. May 27 marks the anniversary of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one-time SS Obergruppenfuehrer, General of Police, Reichsprotektor and generally unlikeable fellow. This week, I'm taking a look at that assassination and events leading up to and resulting from it. And I'm starting with Beneš. I'm also relying heavily -- nay, stealing liberally from Callum MacDonald's excellent book 'The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich.' I have condensed and paraphrase a lot, and have attempted to indicate direct use of MacDonald's text by quotes and block text. I've undoubtedly inserted errors and typos in the rush -- sorry. Buy the book.

And for everyone without the patience to read the below: Beneš couldn't win. He might have helped himself by not not being such an insecure control-freak, but under the circumstances he held up pretty well. His love of intrigue and politics got a lot of innocent people killed, but undoubtedly saved many lives as well. I still haven't made up my mind about him. As they say

Kdo chce s vlky žíti
Musí s vlky výti

Beneš's involvement with Czechoslovak statehood dates back to the nation's struggle for independence from Habsburg rule. During World War I, while Masaryk stumped abroad for international support for an independent Czechoslovakia, Beneš remained at home to work with the resistance. He was forced to flee in 1915, but continued to forward intelligence to Paris and London. As MacDonald writes, the experience left Beneš with a taste for intrigue.

In the post-war period, Beneš served as Foreign Minister. He was described by others as 'a difficult man to know well', 'machine-like' and 'unemotional', and said of himself

'In the most difficult position I have never despaired. In politics I always behave as though I were playing tennis. When my opponent is "forty" and I am "love" and the next ball may be the last, I am still convinced that I can win the game.'

MacDonald also notes that Beneš was vain and insisted 'that photographers take his picture from angles which concealed his lack of inches.'

Beneš became president as the Nazis began exploiting the Sudeten problem. He saw Czechoslovak national unity as fragile and opposed calls for Sudeten (and Slovak) autonomy. He was criticised somewhat unfairly for not being Masaryk and developed an intolerance of opposition. MacDonald doesn't say as much, but it would appear Beneš was beginning to suffer from profound insecurity. Still, he was pragmatic:

Beneš hoped to convince the major powers that supporting Czechoslovakia was in their own best interests. The Czechs already had a security pact with France but in May 1935 Benes sough additional insurance in a new treaty with the Soviet Union. This committed the Russians to defend Czechoslovakia against aggression although only if the French first fulfilled their military obligations. The pact reflected his conviction that Czechoslovakia could survive only within a European security system which included both east and west. He saw no advantage in excluding the Russians and believed that Czechoslovakia could balance between communism and capitalism, incorporating the best of both sides.

It's hard to appreciate how hard the Munich crisis hit Czechs in general and Beneš in particular. In addition to insult delivered by Britain, France and Italy, he faced pressure from his army to reject Munich and take on Germany alone. Beneš knew that fighting Hitler was suicide, but yielding the Sudetenland wasn't much better. Forced to resign, he fled to Britain and later to the United States where he stewed in his bitter juices.

For Beneš the reversal of Munich became both a national crusade and a personal obsession. As he later recalled: 'From September 1938, sleeping and waking, I was continually thinking of this objective – living for it, suffering on its account and working for it in every one of my political actions.'

By July 1939, Beneš had returned to London to promote the Czech cause. Confident that the coming war would result in Hitler's defeat, he wanted to be sure Czechoslovakia had a place at the peace conference table. But his view that Hitler's aggression had nullified the Munich agreement won little support in London or Paris. Both capitals resisted his attempts to set up a government in exile until the outbreak of war. Even then, the Czech cause played second fiddle to the Polish one, and the French wanted someone other than Beneš to lead the government in exile. And then there were the Communists:

In 1940, Beneš complained that continued delay might lead his people to turn to Moscow, despite the Nazi-Soviet pact and the defeatist propaganda of the Czech communists, who condemned the war as an imperialist quarrel. As he complained to a high Foreign Office official, how could he 'prevent his countrymen displaying hatred towards the West, which betrayed them and now would not even regard them as equals in adversity …? Why should they join the army and how could the rise of the Communist movement at home be prevented?'

Beneš feared that Czechoslovakia would be negotiated out of existence at the peace conferences at the conclusion of the war. He distrusted Britain and France, and neutral America gave him little encouragement. He clung to what little he had: the underground resistance in Czechoslovakia. He exploited the intelligence and exaggerated the strength of the underground to make the resistance appear stronger than it was, and to prevent a compromise peace which would leave Hitler in possession of Bohemia and Moravia. To some extent it worked: Britain became excited about a possible fifth column at the German rear.

Beneš knew that if the Soviets entered the war before Britain rejected Munich, his people would give up on the West entirely. The Czechoslovak people would also demand the expulsion of all Germans from country after the war – which required Munich be repudiated. Beneš needed to convince Britain that the Czechs were pulling their weight in the war. To this end, he massaged intelligence and intelligence officials. Soon word was out that the Czechoslovak resistence was the most formidable in Europe. True, the intelligence network that Beneš had continued to nurture since before World War I was extensive. But it was also plugged in to Soviet intelligence. Beneš was determined that Stalin support the exile government, not the Czech communists.

The fall of France made Beneš organisation even more valuable to the Allies and the exiled president finally gained an audience with Churchill (and official recognition) in 1941.

Beneš represented the underground as active in three areas – undetectable sabotage against German communications, passive resistance such as slow-downs in the factories, and the collection of intelligence. 'Then the underground would emerge into the streets, seize key positions and send flying columns to reoccupy the Sudetenland.'
In 1941, with Germany appeared poised to invade the Soviet Union, the Czechs got the go-ahead to start dropping intelligence teams into Bohemia-Moravia. These men were members of the Czech Brigade, which had barely escaped destruction after the fall of France.

When the Germans invaded, the Soviets were keen to have all the help they could get from Czech intelligence and repudiated the Munich agreement. Beneš used the new arrangement as a lever to break loose Britain's conditional rejection of Munich.
But the Soviets wanted more than intelligence – they wanted to see the Czechs fighting. Beneš was loathe to expose his underground, only to have it destroyed by German reprisals. He claimed that underground had stepped up 'undetectable resistance'. The intelligence teams that were being dropped into Bohemia-Moravia were given orders to engage in sabotage. But the calls for greater efforts continued. Moreover, Beneš was also under pressure to out-perform Czech Communists in Moscow, lead by Klement Gottwald.

So Beneš orchestrated a move to impress Moscow and London with the effectiveness of his resistance. 'On 14 September 1941, the BBC Czech service called for a boycott of the Protectorate press … In the next few days, newspaper sales declined by up to fifty per cent…' Beneš said the boycott demonstrated that events in Bohemia-Moravia could be co-ordinated by orders from London, and that Czechs would obey the Czech service of the BBC before that of Moscow Radio. The boycott also sent a message to Emil Hacha's puppet regime: if forced to choose, the people would follow Beneš.

But the boycott had a third, unexpected development. Perceiving a weak administration in Prague, Hitler recalled Reichsprotektor Konstantin von Neurath and replaced him with SS Obergruppenfuehrer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich.

2004-05-22T15:57:00.000+02:00

Help wanted: whipping boy

At Tulip's Sofistica party last night, the conversation turned to who would become the Prague expat community's whipping boy now that Alan Levy is no longer with us. You know, the person whose name occasions the rolling of eyeballs and statements like 'Who does he think he is, anyway?' Of course, like Mr Levy, this person should have many supporters, and popular opinion would probably be split fifty-fifty as whether he (or she) was using up too much oxygen.

Anyway, I immediately proposed two of my friends, Scott MacMillan and Evan Rail, for the role of whipping boy. Scott's blog probably tells you all you need to know -- if not, just ask around: Tulip owner, former PBJ staffer and editor of Prague Insider, and stringer for Screen International and for the Four Seasons' magazine, and not the Scott who started Prague One. Evan of course is the erudite restaurant critic at the Prague Post and, as such, is a large, slow-moving target for statements like 'I just hate Evan Rail's restaurant and other culinary reviews.'

So nominate your candidate for whipping boy using the comment link below. Assuming there are at least two more nominations, I'll put a poll on this site to accept votes.

2004-05-20T19:06:00.000+02:00

Vewy powewful und pwecise

As I mentioned earlier, Bryn's on vacation. I was able to speak to him just now via Teamspeak, thanks to Lufthansa's in-flight wifi connection. The airline is offering complimentary in-flight wifi access until 31 May. (In the future, the service will cost passengers USD 38.) The connection was at least as clear as the one we use when Bryn's in Prague. I could hear that ambient jet rumble and the children sitting near him. Bryn said it reminded him of the first time he saw images from space that had been taken only minutes earlier.

Of course, this means that during some future flight you could be subject to a fate worse than sitting on the train next to that jackass with the mobile phone.

Bryn also reports that the plane's seats' headrests have retractable wings that you can fold forward to cradle your head as you sleep, allowing your drool to fall on the person next to you. How cool is that?

2004-05-20T15:25:00.000+02:00

What's wrong with this picture?

NPR reports that scientists at the California Institute of Technology have developed a visual illusion that they believe will help explain how human brains make sense of the world.

Those wags at ATC probably had this in mind when they budgeted Kevin Kling's commentary on public transportation in Minneapolis. Kling's essay is brilliant in a dozen different way, bust-a-gut funny, and reminds me a lot of riding the night tram. But anyway ...

... [M]ost motorcycle accidents happen because people driving cars say they don't see [the motorcycle]. The study concluded that most people who do not have a motorcycle or a relative or a close friend with a motorcycle simply do not see them. This theory seems to hold true for people who've lost touch with those in need. They just don't see them. Or maybe it's like the time I opened up a Mexican jumping bean. There are just some things you do not want to know.

So going back to Caltech and the 'binding problem' (if you haven't tried the experiment yet, you should): The human brain tricks itself to make sense of the world around it. This usually works. But there are times when the world doesn't make sense and you need to put aside what you think you know, take a step back and look at it all again.

Now read that again.

Which is why Prague Daily Monitor subscribers didn't get today's issue until sometime around noon today. My fault. Bryn's on vacation and -- wouldn't you know -- his plane had barely left the tarmac before I'm totally hosing the entire operation. The mistake I was making -- repeatedly -- was so moronic that I won't dwell on it here, but it was akin to not having the computer plugged in. But I reached Doug and he saved my ass, but not before I had stared at the screen for a couple hours watching all the red dots fall.

2004-05-20T15:18:00.000+02:00

Pravda vítězí

Snoop Dogg is down with Ivan Lendl:

"I used to like Ivan Lendl. He was sharp. An old schooler. Make it happen and roll out. Now I like Venus and Serena, but Ivan was the truth."

2004-05-20T15:08:00.000+02:00

The plot boggles

I think the drama in Iraq needs a new narrator, because I don't know how we arrived at this latest development: U.S. Troops Raid Chalabi's Headquarters in Iraq

"They have been putting political pressure on us for weeks. It's part of an attempted character assassination and it's politically motivated, but it won't work," Moussawi said.

"When someone stands up independently and puts his views firmly it appears the Americans don't like it, it scares them."

Moussawi said he did not know what the raid was related to, but called it a worrying development. "They think they can do whatever they want. They didn't even have a warrant."

But wasn't Chalabi the guy who ...? When he said there was ...? So we said we ought to ...? And then we ...? Because he said ...? But then we didn't ...? And no one else ...? So it turns out that ...? Then we learned that ...? And suddenly ...?

2004-05-17T12:40:00.000+02:00

Cicadian rhythms
or
History shmistory -- let's molt

As Naomi Lewin points out on NPR, the last time Brood X came to visit, Iran-Contra dominated the news. Before that it was 1970, and the U.S. had just invaded Cambodia. Which got me to wondering: What does history look like to Brood X? The bugs have only come out 117 times in the past 2,000 years. I'm not geek enough to go all the way back, but I did figure out the hatchings since the Europeans liberatee the inhabitants of the western hemisphere. I'm limiting my overview to what the cicadas might have seen if they had read newspapers in North America, so please pardon the Atlanticist bias. All the dates and events below were lifted from Timelines of History and the History Channel, and any errors may be mine.

1987 This would be the first time Brood X saw personal computers. The Soviets were still occupying Afghanistan.

1970 U.S. invades Cambodia. Four students killed at Kent State. 'Catch-22' enters the English language.

1953 Korean War ends in stalemate. Lung cancer linked to smoking. Watson and Crick decipher DNA.

1936 Spanish Civil War begins. Mussolini and Hitler form Rome-Berlin axis. Chaplin stars in 'Modern Times'.

1919 U.S. prohibition begins. Afghan/British war. British massacre at Amritsar.

1902 U.S. gains control of Panama Canal. Women gain right to vote in Australia.

1885 Benz builds gasoline engine. Marx publishes 'Das Kapital' vol. 2.

1868 Ulysses Grant becomes U.S. president. Disraeli becomes British prime minister. Queen Isabel II of Spain is deposed.

1851 'The New York Times' begins publishing. Melville publishes 'Moby Dick'. Louis Napolean leads coup d'etat in France.

1834 End of the Spanish Inquisition. Charles Babbage invents the principle of the 'analytical engine'. France at war in Algeria.

1817 Spanish colonies in Latin America fighting for independence. Turkey grants the Serbs limited sovereignty.

1800 Eli Whitney makes muskets with interchangeable parts. Napolean kicking butt left and right.

1783 Britain declares formal cessation of hostilities with its former colonies, the United States of America. Montgolfier brothers launched their first hot-air balloon.

1766 Samuel Wilson, the future Uncle Sam, born in Menotomy Mass. Menotomy later became Arlington. Samuel moved to Troy, New York, where he and his brother set up meat packing plants which later provided food for the US Army during the War of 1812.

1749 The Georgia Colony rules slavery to be legal. King George commissions Handel’s 'Music for the Royal Fireworks' to highlight the end of the War of the Austrian Succession.

1732 Benjamin Franklin starts publishing 'Poor Richard's Almanac'. Stanislaw II August Poniatowski, last king of Poland, George Washington and Joseph Haydn born.

1715 In the Americas, Yamasse Indians rampage in South Carolina. In France, the Sun King dies of gangrene. In Russia, Peter the Great holds a funeral for his favorite court dwarf.

1698 Abenaki Indians and the Massachusetts colonists sign a treaty ending the conflict in New England. Peter the Great imposes a tax on beards. Wagner born.

1681 William Penn becomes sole proprietor of colonial American territory of Pennsylvania. Huguenots emigrate to England. Last dodo seen. Treaty of Radzin ends five-year war between Turks and allied countries of Russia and Poland.

1664 British drive Dutch out of New Amsterdam. Black Plague rages in London. French and German troops defeat Turkish army at St. Gotthard, Hungary.

1647 First Salem 'witch' executed. Pressure cooker invented. Treaty of Ulm.

1630 First criminal executed in Britain's American colonies. Fork introduced to American dining. Kepler dies.

1613 Pocahontas marries John Rolfe in Virginia. Afghan warrior-poet Khushhal Khan Khattak initiates national uprising against the foreign Moghul government.

1596 First Jewish author in Americas falls victim to Spanish Inquisition. Sir Frances Drake dies. Shakespeare writes 'King John'. Descartes born.

1579 Sir Francis Drake claims New Albion for England. Roshan of Afghanistan killed in battle with Moghuls.

1562 England enters the slave trade. Ferdinand I signs 8-year truce with Suleiman I of Turkey.

1545 In Mexico, Bishop Fray Bartolome de las Casas champions Chiapas Indians. Typhus epidemic in Cuba and New Spain. Counter-Reformation begins at Trent.

1528 Spanish expedition invades Florida; all but 15 die. Wheat introduced to New Spain. England establishes first colony in New World. England, France declare war on Spain.

1511 King Ferdinand of Spain: "Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all hazards - get gold." Portugese capture Malacca; discover the dodo.

1494 First Roman Catholic Mass in New World. Columbus arrives at Guantanamo Bay, enslaves Indians. Ottoman sultan Suleiman I the Great born. First reports of Scots making whiskey.

2004-05-16T10:55:00.000+02:00

Repeating History in Iraq

On Saturday, NPR reported on a paper by William Beeman, director of Middle East studies at Brown University.

The U.S.-led effort to bring stability and democracy to Iraq resonates with echoes of recent history. William Beeman ... has written about the tumultuous period after World War I, when Britain and France divided the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. New countries emerged, including Iraq, forged by arbitrary political boundaries.

In 1920, Beeman notes, Sunnis and Shiites held mass demonstrations in Baghdad that quickly grew into a full-scale revolt. Several months passed before the British could regain control, and thousands of lives were lost.

I went through Beeman's paper quickly. Most of the paper is dedicated to understanding Shi'ism and Shi'ite rivalries, and taking a stab at what a Shi'ite dominated government in Iraq would look like. As regards United States following in British footsteps:

From the perspective of Iraqi Shi'ites, the United States is neither better nor worse than the British seventy years ago. One would think that the situation would be improved today with all the hindsight at our disposal. The current Iraq crisis and the failed diplomatic interaction with Iran recapitulates almost every mistake the United States has made in Iraq since the beginning of the conflict. First the Bush administration listens to the wrong people. They take the wrong action, and then they try to blame someone else (like Iran) for their mistake. Finally they stand firm and repeat slogans to cover their ineffectiveness. Even when the people they try to blame are as denigrated as Iran, the world can see how pitifully weak both the actions and the excuses for these actions have become.

That much from Beeman. NPR's story is more about Gertrude Bell:

Among the British nationals who helped establish Iraq was Gertrude Bell. Fluent in Persian and Arabic, she founded an archaeological museum in Baghdad. In letters home, Bell made detailed observations about the new country and its people. Today, U.S. and British leaders are finding new value in her insights. Her letters are circulated at the Pentagon.

NPR provides a link to the Gertrude Bell Project, where you can read Bell's letters from 1874 to 1926. The letters are sorted only by year, so you'll have to go through them with your history book at your side to determine when she might have written about what.

2004-05-14T17:12:00.000+02:00

Reason #43 why I'm going to hell

What is up with the elderly? Do people suddenly lose all sense of social responsibility when they retire, or is it something that develops over time? I'm particularly peeved at elderly women, because they're the ones I'm having bad experiences with. The old dudes I think are resting at home, recovering from spanking the carpet.

You've seen it: they get on your tram and hover. They won't sit in the three seats in the front because those are reserved from the decrepit and invalid. And they're so proud as they weave and totter on their one good crutch, preventing anyone else from sitting in the seat. 'Great job!' I want to shout. 'Way to totter! Someone pick this superstar up and give her a hug!'

Then there are the ones that hover over your seat. These are the younger ones. You can actually give up your seat to them if you're burly and fight dirty, and if their hands are full. And arthritic. With palsy. But you can whoop 'em and stuff 'em down in your seat so you can have a little peace, free of their sighing and muttering and ježíšamarieing until they get to the ješte jednou stanice they're going to.

(They're lying, by the way. The next time the biddy tells you she's only going one station, thank you, stay put and watch what happens. It's a riot.)

When I think about it, I think this behavior must be something people develop over time, like a grand unifying theory of life, the universe and how to be a total pain in the ass. This would explain a lot, including the tendency of tramriders', regardless of their edge, to stand in front of the only empty seat on the tram, preventing anyone from sitting in it: 'If I can't have this seat, then no one else will!' Which reminds me of a joke -- I'll tell you in a minute.

The reason I have this stuck in my craw is that I often travel on the tram with my dog. She doesn't take up much space. In fact, the tram is the one place on the planet where she behaves. DPP requires I muzzle her. People think this looks cute, silly or cruel, but actually it's quite necessary. She bites, especially children. She hates children -- or loves the way they taste -- I'm not sure. Anyway, children reach out with their sticky fingers -- Koukej mami! Krasný pejsek! -- and chomp! So I figure DPP has a point.

DPP also requires dogs remain in the front of the tram and that there be no more than one dog per car. At least, I've read this before, but I can't find proof of it now. Maybe they've abandoned it. I think the one-dog rule is a little unreasonable, but I abide by the front of the car rule because there's that extra floorspace right behind the driver's seat where a dog can sit and not get stepped on. And the seat is reserved for the elderly and decrepit, who my dog usually gets along with.

But as you might guess, there's often a perfectly able-bodies punk sitting in the seat working out how best to be a pain in the ass, when the back half of the tram is empty. Dude, be all you can be, but my dog trumps your self-actualization. Sometimes I move to the back, and sometimes I hover.

This joke comes from those comedians over at RFE/RL:

A genie says to a [Russian] peasant, "I will grant you any wish, but remember that I will give your neighbor twice what I give you."
The peasant thinks for a while and responds, "Poke out one of my eyes."

2004-05-13T18:18:00.000+02:00

Beat me -- I feel dirty

I'm not sure what I'm watching here in the garden. Elderly men who I've never seen before, but who apparently live in my building, are taking their rugs out into the garden and beating them. Of course, they're cleaning them -- I know that. And yes, they're using that little shamrock-shaped braided wicker rug-beating thing. And the, uh, big, gray frame thingy, the sole purpose of which -- other than taking up the center of the garden and looking instutional -- is to hang a rug over whilst one beats it.

Right. So all that's mundane enough. But it's the way they beat the rug, going at it with a certain tak já nevím co, as the French would say if they spoke Czech. It reminds me of the erotic relations characters in Svankmajer's Conspirators of Pleasure have with objects.

'Erotic?' you say. Well, let me try to explain.

First, let's assume that dancing is basically an erotic acting out -- mating behavior. (If you can't accept that, take a hike.) Second, note for one uncomfortable moment the unfair generalization you've heard more than once: that Czechs can't dance. (It's a rhythm thing. Of course, anyone who can keep up with traditional cimbalom music, with it's lack of time signature, definitely has an innate sense of something, if not exactly rhythm, and no small amount of my respect. [Kundera addresses cimbalom in The Joke.])

Where was I? Oh yeah. So here's these geezers who, nearly as I can tell, emerge from their warrens each spring to molt the carpet. They raise their hackles and demonstrate their virility in a sort of rhythmless carpet-whacking dance. The thwump! thwump! thwump! echoes across the hills. This goes on until they feel they've exhausted themselves or until a female calls to them. Then they go back inside with their freshly spanked carpet. And drink tea, I hope, for another year.

2004-05-12T20:04:00.000+02:00

Tongue bites man

I was going to tell you alert you to a troubling story in today's MfD, but that dastardly Doug Arellanes beat me to it: the Czech Senate has decided that it's ok to call this country 'Česko'. Read Doug's take here.

To further confound matters, someone who speaks much better Czech explained to me that 'Česko' is Czech for 'Czechia'. Sorta like 'Deutsch' is German for 'Tedesco', I suppose.

That's the Senate. Earlier this month, the Chamber of Deputies rejected a provision to require broadcasters to use correct grammar, which is just as well. But as a struggling -- nay, floundering -- student of the Czech language, I get dark urges to see native Czech speakers suffer. Especially when they're grammatically incorrect. Tell me you haven't felt this way.

Liar.

Meanwhile, LN publishes a page one story about how Czech bureaucrats are struggling with something called 'euročeštině'. Apparently, they's all sorts of high-falutin words in them thar EU documents what ain't got no good Czech e-quivalent. Case in point:

Jeden z náměstků ministra pro místní rozvoj dokonce údajně nabízí deset tisíc korun tomu, kdo dokáže co nejdokonaleji přeložit do češtiny slovo implementace.

And I'll give a bright, shiny nickel to whoever best translates into English the word 'oblivious'.

And you thought abusing Babblefish was fun: There are few on-line translators that handle Czech, but here's one that produces gems like 'Dolly Bust: storied Cesko since Ciny az about America' and the above-mentioned 'OUT OF uredniku are modern obrozenci, solicitude their eurocestine unreason'.

Speaking of unreason: The city has another pipe dream for the Stalin plinth. Prague 7 has announced plans to install a sightseeing balloon on Letná plain. The balloon will apparently be able to take 32 passengers 150 meters up to give them a really good view of ... the ground. I mean, I wish them all the best and I'll totally be in line for the ride, but as anyone who's gone up in the Žižkov TV tower knows, Prague's hundred or thousand or miliard spires sorta disappear when you go above a certain point. Of course, if it's hectare after hectare of orange roof tiles you want, knock yourself out.

2004-05-11T13:02:00.000+02:00

Wang dang sweet new template

All joy and praise to Blogger for the mad new templates. That green-and-orange number I started with was just reminding me way too much of ... Ted Nugent. A member of Tribe Nuge I'm not, but ... maybe I should explain.
Rural Missouri -- my people called it 'miz-ZUR-ee', not 'miz-ZUR-ruh' -- is a good place to be from (ahem). One of it's more charming aspects is the annual swarm of cicadas (and I'm dismayed that I'll miss this year's 'Brood X' hatch -- remind me to tell you that story). One of it's, shall we say, challenges is that the collective wardrobe of the population contains an improbable amount of bright orange and dull green. The orange is 'blaze orange', a highly visible shade that outdoorsmen wear so they don't get shot by other hunters. The dull green figures in the hundreds of varieties of camouflage, worn by the hunters that get shot by other hunters. ('Do they really shoot each other?' you ask. 'Indeed.')
But I was talking about the Nuge. In case you were wondering if the bow-hunting sportsman and host of 'Spirit of the Wild' is the same Ted Nugent that was once known as the Motor City Madman, heis. Nugent was favorite of the hessians who road my school bus and was duly feared by upstanding, church-going folk like my parents. Ironically, now that Nugent's main line is promoting hunting, my dad watches his show all the time and has even seen him in concert (although Dad says the guitar's still too loud). Next: Alice Cooper takes over Martha Stewart Enterprises.
Anyway, now I've got this rather snooty template, which I'll probably get tired of quicker than you can say 'Cat Scratch Fever'.

2004-05-08T20:43:00.000+02:00

Crazy Neighbor #1 -- The Garbage Bomber

I live in the back half of my building, which is in a row of houses. Outside my windows is a double row of gardens -- for our block and for the next block north -- sort of a green canyon between two cement cliffs of flats.

Now, this green swath is thick with blooming forsythia, lilacs, chestnuts and other shrubs, trees and flowers. But in the winter, it's a wretched wasteland of black twigs punctuated with plastic Tesco bags suppurating garbage. It seems a man who lives in the block opposite likes to pitch his trash off his balcony into his neighbors' gardens.

One day last winter, I found a half-hearted attempt at a Molotov cocktail in our garden one morning -- the shattered remains of a vodka bottle with a paper towel stuffed in the neck. The paper towel had been lit but hadn't burned very well. I suspect the bottle was empty before the bomber threw it.

The landlord says the man also connected to the mafia and warns me not to look up when I'm in the garden. Before I got that warning, I never considered looking up. But now it's like an eclipse -- I know I'm not supposed to look, but ...

2004-05-08T17:33:00.000+02:00

File under 'Unmarked Helicopters':
Oklahoma City Bombing Was Larger Conspiracy
Attorneys representing Terry Nichols in a state trial that could result in his execution present evidence suggesting Timothy McVeigh had other accomplices in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. [NPR]

2004-05-08T17:31:00.000+02:00

Lo, the tyranny of the empty page.