Комментарии известных личностей к креативу А.С. Пушкина "Евгений Онегин"

(Троляша по айсикью прислала)

Наталья Пушкина:
Первая нах! Ща почетайу...

Наталья Пушкина:
Затронуло до глубины души. Сашенька, обязательно пешы ещщо!

Лермонтов:
Пушкен жжот!

Дантес:
кг/ам Афтар, убей себя!

Кюхельбекер:
Жжошь, Санёк! Взаправду жжошь!

Turgenev:
Ya seichas v Baden-badene, poetomu pishu translitom. Kreativ ponravilsya. Peshi escho!


Гоголь:
Афтар - аццкий сотона! Крео п*здат.

Чехов:
Местами прошибало слезу, местами улыбало, и все чиновники поглядывали на меня с явным недовольством. Думал уволят нах*й.

Л.Н. Толстой:
Прекольно, но мало...

Салтыков-Щедрин:
Неплохо, правда сказки у афтора намного лучше получаюца, да и повеселее.

Достоевский:
Щедрин, не песди! Ты со своими сказками совсем йобнулся. Афтар реально отжог, просто это абсолютно другой жанр.

Есенин:
Про ра*пездяя. Понравелось...

В.И. Ленин:
Толстой всё сказал

Набоков:
Не раскрыта тема йобли!

Бунин:
Согласен с Набоковым

Маяковский:
Жму руку, товарищ! Как говорят буржуи: "Респект!"

Чуковский:
Неасилил

Людмила Гурченко:
Ничо так, гламурненько!

troliasha (9:40 AM) :
Юрий Куклачёв:
У ката уши дленнее беспесды

Н.С. Хрущев:
Бля, да ты ох*ел столько песать! Чуть глаза не сломал!

Н.С. Хрущев:
Сцука, предыдущий камент не туда запостил. Это было к "Войне и миру" Толстого. гыыыы... А у Пушкина ничо так, жызненно...

В.В. Путин:
Буду краток (с) готичьно!

Sunsets of The Second Life

To those who say gamers should get a life: if the real life was fun, I would not have been logged on.

Nostalgia: Blagoevgrad

photo: Nikola Gruev

US Skater Wears CCCP Jacket

"Wearing a jacket of the former Soviet Union, Johnny Weir warms up before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in January."
USA Today / AP

Good To Go

One of the best pieces of advertising commentary in ages:

The only thing that's "good to go" is your worthless existence.

My hatred of Taco Bell's advertising campaigns is well-documented. Aside from Toyota, I don't know if any other major company has struck out so poorly for such an extended period of time. Most commercials suck, but Taco Bell consistently bottoms out the playing field so deeply that it ceases to exist as a vertical axis and actually transmogrifies into a black-holed vortex of suckitude.

-- This Is What We Do Now

Branded Coke TV Set

Found this wonderful German Coke-branded TV set from the 70s on eBay.

Got Fish?

source and explanation

Film Strips of Shared Childhood

Having lived in one foreign country or another for ten years now, I keep coming back to one question – what it is that makes it hard for an immigrant to blend into the landscape of his new country. This question is not so much about whether the hosts begin to perceive you as one of them as it is about whether you perceive them as a part of you. It is like when you buy new clothes, and you like how they are new, clean and crisp; and yet it takes time for them to start feeling as comfortable and invisible as those old sweats you’ve been wearing since the first episode of Friends. Some countries break this wall and you feel in them as if you have lived there forever, some fail and remain an expensive but forever restrictive Sunday suit even as the novelty wears out.

The answer lies beyond the physical space, of course, and even beyond the language. Shared culture, too, is only part of the answer, for contemporary collective cultural practices of the Western world differ from one country to another no more than they vary among city neighborhoods. I wake up in Sofia, take a cab to the airport, get on the plane, land in Logan, take a cab to my dorm within the span of a single consciousness. At least on the surface, nothing has changed; the cabs are the same and Brittney Spears on the radio is the same, billboards peddle the same Coke in the familiar two-liter bottles. My TV plays the same CNN; a Big Mac on Mass Ave tastes and feels just like the one on Slaveikov Square. Even the jet lag conjures nothing but an aftertaste of last week’s crunch time in the office. With clothes that smell of airplane food being the only indication of the distance just traveled, culture shock ceases to be a function of space.

It should not have been harder to make friends here than it was there, yet it was. Same bars, same drinks, same gossip; same friendliness and really a lot in common, yet a chasm in between. This chasm is not culture, or more precisely, not present culture. It's the past, but not the type of collective historical past upon which nations construct their mythological identity. It is a nearly immediate, a very recent past, as collective as it is individually intimate, the past also known as childhood.

A childhood viewed from the distance of passed years is not a continuum; it's an assortment of colorful shreds - a flash here, a smell there, a sound maybe. These shreds make up a childhood DNA code. Regardless of having been born and having grown up time zones apart from each other, my friends remain kindergarten buddies, sharing a collective childhood.

"Do you remember diafilms?" I asked them the other day, typing away at my instant messenger with a buddy roster of nearly two hundred and a VIP friend list of merely a dozen. "Of course!" they would answer.

Diafilms, a bit of the common DNA, are fairy tale comics printed on short strips of film, approximately 30 frames total, one panel per frame. A diafilm, immutably linear, projected on a white surface through a hand-cranked magic lantern, is a technological cousin of a slide and a grandfather of PowerPoint presentations. Unlike more traditional comics, diafilms had their all captions and dialogs in the bottom of the panel.

For us living in a pre-VCR era, diafilms were our movies on demand, and demand we did. My family had an elaborate set of rules regarding show-times; very quickly, diafilms replaced traditional bedtime fairy tales and were my irrevocable reward for being good throughout the day. Around nine, mom would goad me to bed, and programming negotiations began. A diafilm couldn't be shown twice in the same week; and on my good days I would be rewarded with longer strips. A few of the strips were of double length, that is 60 or 70 frames, which easily could mean a whopping whole hour of magic; those strips were reserved for the occasions when mom had to compensate for not showing up the night before.

I learned to read when I was five and switched to books some time later; the diafilms were for the illiterate younger me. The text had to be read out loud and thus my mom was instrumental to the success of the performance. For it was a performance: the most convincing voice-overs I’ve ever heard were moms' lines for the big grey wolf. When the stage was set – that is, the bed was made and I was in – the lights would go off, and the show would begin. Like millions of other apartments in the country, ours had wallpaper all around, so the diafilms were projected on the ceiling, very convenient for the authorities to keep the spectators in bed.

We had our commercial breaks, too. Half-way through the show, dad would burst in to peddle warm milk or vitamins or other goods praising their obvious advantages for one’s health and wealth, and well being of the humankind in general. Every once in a while, the pitch was complemented with a story how dad, now a film maker, had set up the first outdoor theater in their town to project and read diafilms to the local kids, charging a random nickel, a frog, or an equivalent in other boys’ currencies. That was in the late 1950s, when he was barely 10.

Unlike movies, diafilms were rarely discussed for they were not a socially synchronous experience; unlike today’s DVDs, diafilm releases were not widely announced or anticipated.

Nor were diafilms a pull medium. The film containers where bland and so unattractive to kids - at least in contrast with today’s gaudy packaging - that it must have been our parents who chose them for us.

For other kids, as I learned much later, the circumstances of their diafilm experience varied. Some would watch them as today’s kids watch TV – on their own during daytime, window shades down. We even had "multimedia" diafilms - film strips that came together with stories recorded on a vinyl disk. For others, diafilm shows were a party ingredient, with the oldest kid doing the reading, a distraction their parents would put together to keep the children occupied and the adults undisturbed. Yet everyone I talked to remembers diafilms as something special, almost magical. Unlike the plug-and-play VCRs of today, diafilms always required special ceremonial preparation: deciding on what to use for a screen, seating the audience, darkening the room, adjusting focus, appointing the reader.

Few of us now remember what the strips were about, apart from a handful of stories made famous elsewhere and then retold on static celluloid. But the magic of total immersion in a dream world remains, as remains the smell of hot metal, the screech of the crank and the memory of a white sheet on the wall.

Boston, 2004

Diafilms are still made by Diafilm Studio (site in Russian).

AUBG: Mission Possible

photo: Magrat


What mission? Nurturing future leaders does not count as a mission—future leaders are a by-product. Liberal arts? Providing liberal arts education is not the University’s mission—it is one of the Blagoevgrad’s downtown edifice. "American University in Bulgaria" shines proudly off its sides over the town. What a confusing misnomer. The real University is not brick and mortar, glass and marble. It's not in any of the classrooms, labs, gyms, dorms or even canteens. Not exactly. AUBG is in the hearts. There it teaches. There it lives.

AUBG's true mission is to reverse the story of Babel, re-blend the tongues of the ever-warring region into one Absolute Esperanto. Its mission is to bring together young people dispersed and locked in their hundred (nevermind their eighteen) years of ethnic, cultural, historic loneliness. Its mission is to amalgamate an Über Nation without wars and hatred, where Knowledge is an elected President and where Friendship holds the monopoly of power. In that AUBG has never failed.

I remember myself on my first day: a foreign freshman stuffed in a room with three Bulgarians, not even knowing how to nod correctly in this strange country. My Bulgarian has crystallized out of the Bulgarian-English-Russian-Moldavian lingual soup my roommates and I devoured. A young Kazakh woman speaks Serbian to a Montenegrin, watching his jaw drop. Another, a Bulgarian, converses in Bucharest with its natives. A Romanian starts singing along to Russian music. Making grammar mistakes? To hell with mistakes! Understanding each other—that's what matters. "Te dashuroj, te obicham, te iubesc, ljubam te, yes kez si'rumem, liubliu tebia, volim te, szeretlek te'ged." Can one really mispronounce "I love you"?

We moved beyond understanding, slowly developing a common system of symbols. The landmarks are equally familiar and dear to all, regardless of age, sex or origin: Underground, hiking, Bansko, beer, MUD, IRC, deadline at 11.59 p.m. Sunday, dead computers, Volga’s lobby, JMC, Pegasus, a Chavdar bus, Napoli. Banichka is now an international word. So is otpor. AUBG kept converting ethnicities into all possible permutations: Belarusians into Bulgarians, Moldovans into Albanians, Armenians into Macedonians. We became a whole, throwing our nations' squabbles and politicians aside. Instead of the solemn building, the University’s seal should've featured a canteen scene: a Kosovar hugging a Serb over CNN’s bombing coverage.

AUBG is not about what others, the untouched, think it is. Liberal arts, English, computers, books, Western philosophy, black leather-clad diploma printed in a gothic font make only a fraction of the university’s true unique meaning. After all, this quality academic matter is similarly available elsewhere. What AUBG truly means to us is the four years of mastering the Absolute Language, breaking the shells of our stereotyping seclusion. To one generation after another, AUBG means growing from a humble "stupid" freshman into a cutting-into-the-canteen-line senior hand in hand with people we previously thought to be from another planet. For us, the acronym A-U-B-G stands for

Aaaaaaa! Awesome! Ask asl. Answer ASAP. Ah, Angela, Anguel, Anastasia, Atanas, Andrej, Andreia, ans960@, "Amigo, abstaining?!" An Aspirin after—aposteriori. Anthropology 101–-all A's. ABM, ad-hoc, Algiers, abdication—A’s again. Aspecter and airian--an attitude. Alkazelzer—all-time aid against Absolut Armageddon, Alt+F4. April. Away. Alt+Ctrl+Del.
At

Underground--U2 unplugged. Ulcer--unavoidable. Unisex underwear--utterly unnoticeable. UDF—unifying utopia. Uninstalling UNIX? Unacceptable, undo. "Understand utility, UCC, unemployment, uncollectibles?" "Uh-huh."
Unwashed

bus brings back Bachinovo, Bistritza.
Break-up bashes, bends:
Bewildered boyfriends babbles: "B-b-but..."
"Bye, bambino." Bonjour, bachelor.
Buddies beckon, beginning banichka baptism. Ben’s busy buying "Bankja", bananas. Bansko-Blagoevgrad-Borovetz. "Boje!": BUS 354 brought B-. Bragging 'bout bossoms, "Baaasi bebeto!...,"

girls grin. Gossip: "Gencho, Galia? Graffiti?" Giggles. Georgians greet: "Gamarjoba, genatsvale." Geniuses going gradschoolward: GMAT, GRE’s "gait, gall, gallivant, gregarious..." Geez! Graduation: goofy gowns, gaping grandparents. "Good gang, guys’n’gals. Go, govern!" Greece, Germany, Grenoble, Gabrovo. Gone.

Gone? Never. Simply relocated.

A friend of mine, who writes for a large newspaper in Bulgaria, complained to me once. "You know," she said, "you guys are everywhere."
"How do you know it’s us?" I asked. Had she run across boastful AUBG pins, ties, t-shirts or framed diplomas, I wondered.
"No, no. Somehow you all are different. Everywhere I go I spot one or two and then ask. Never got it wrong. It’s something in the eyes, if you know what I mean." I knew exactly what she meant.

AUBG is in the hearts and the hearts require no shiny bronze. The eyes say it all. I remember walking down a London street once. As my eyes did the sightseeing part of the trip, they stumbled over a pair belonging to a thoughtful stranger. For a moment his stared at mine from under stylish glasses in quiet perplexity, then smiled as broad as the eyes can. The stranger passed by without uttering a word, without looking back, but by then I knew. He might not have been a leader of his region. Yet he was one of us, carrying AUBG, a symbolic 4 a.m. banichka in his heart around the world. He spoke the Language.

Sofia, 2001

Toilet Paper Packaging

source

A brief explanation for the non-Russian readers. Sguschionka is a generic name for sweetened condensed milk, so popular in the country that it has become an icon for Russian childhood. Although sguschionka is now manufactured by several different companies, most of them employ the classic blue can design to capitalize on the product's giant equity. Now toilet paper manufacturers are joining the fun.


Condensed milk makers employ the classic design.