Owlspotting

It was an interesting “pick your poison” day in downtown Washington, D.C. with a the huge antiwar protest that brought more than 150,000 people into the streets (says the Washington Post) and a huge National Book Festival.

I took my camera off the shelf for the first time in a while and descended to the Mall to capture both the antiwar activists and bookworms.

Below you’ll find a couple shots from the march, and a stunning excerpt from what I like to call “The Thomas Friedman Show” (just look at the interpreter trying to keep up).

I uploaded full photo albums of both events on my Flickr page:
– for the antiwar protest pictures click here.
– for National Book Festival pictures (including one of Jonathan Safran Foer) click here.

Shot at the corner of Pennsylvania Ave. and 14th Street.

Shot at the corner of Constitution Ave. and 14th Street.

…and now Thomas Friedman in a fall production of “The World Is Flat, The 30 Minutes summary”:

I was cleaning ouy my grad school e-mail before it got purged and I came across this piece I wrote for one of Josh’s initiatives.

Yes, it’s satire — and it’s written in the fall of 2003, a couple of months after I got to the U.S.

>>>

Most Americans dress in a similar manner.

Actually some of them are actually dressed the same way! You might call it conformity, lack of personality, Greek tradition or whatever. How about nostalgia for a communist regime that never existed?

Parading down the street, it is always you looking like an alien, shoes instead of rainbow colored and rainbow smelling flip-flops, wearing long pants instead of grey shorts with the name of the school engraved across the ass and wearing a t-shirt saying “what the fuck is wrong with my t-shirt?” instead of a plain white school-logo tee.

Granted these might be the Americans that have just had their yearbook photo taken, but somehow I doubt it. Keep hanging around in school (any kind of school – haven’t you ever seen a bus of Catholic school kids all sporting the latest in the “Jesus is my dawg” collection?) until your thirty and your feet will be flip flop mutated!

When it comes to women, they are all the same when it gets dark as well. For a foreigner, the variety is a necessity! It’s expected and requires! You have your tight hot pants blondes on the right. The short black top, low waist jeans brunettes on the left. And of course, you have your hot “wearing nothing but pink panties, honey” red heads waiting at home for you to finish your social studies.

As I was saying… Instead of sporting the difference, they are sporting conformity! Communist wear is in all across America and no is witch hunting these people back to the stores. Stop buying the white sleeveless tops and the blue jeans! Stop buying the same Nike’s, the same “these are almost flip-flops sandals” and the same low key, small purse that barely fits the lip gloss!

Communism across the planet forced people to dress similar to prevent social difference and class conflicts. Thus, you had no idea who were the rich and who were the poor. You had no idea who the real fashion victims were and no idea who were those that smuggled trend magazines into the country.

If communists would have been smart enough to invent flip flops, the whole damned place would have been the same in a couple of years! Without ever asking for it! There is always that something that will give us the feeling of being equal. The feeling that we all own the same and we all deserve the same. Communist try to impose the uniforms, while the flip flops won the crowds on their own, without a gun to the owner’s head!

Flip flops are a communist tool! It’s last tremor from the grave! Communism is on everyone’s foot and McCarthy isn’t here to help! What now comrade?

So if conspiracy theorists likened hurricane Katrina to a fetus….

…what are they going to make of this image of hurricane Rita?

What is God trying to say?

It’s official — I (sort of) follow baseball.

It’s not my fault. It’s certainly not the fault of the game, which I’m still learning about and which I still consider a bore compared to soccer. It’s my city’s fault, I blame Washington.

This what happened. Washington finally got a baseball team this season — the former Montreal Expos, now the Washington Nationals. The city was excited to the point of tears — the District had a team and its residents a closer ball park to drive to than the home of the Baltimore Orioles.

Still, I’m far from what you would call a fan. I can only name one Nationals player and I’ve only been to two games. But with the team in play-off contention, it’s somewhat excited to follow the last dozen or so games.

Let me get things straight. With more than 150 games per season, at an average of three or so hours per games, baseball takes a heck of a lot of time and rarely delivers the thrill of a Champions League night. But you can’t beat city-centered patriotism, and it so happens I’m starting to pay attention to the Nationals.

But there’s a world of different from paying attention to whether the Nationals won or not to following their schedule and reading the post-game stories.

I feel like a Romanian wife who complains to the national television for broadcasting live all the games of the World Cup, practically chaining her already lazy husband to the sofa. And then, about the time quarter finals roll around, a team or a player (usually the latter) somehow hooks her and every afternoon she sneakily pulls the sports paper out of the trash to read the post-game analysis.

I became this Romanian wife this morning, when before 10:40 I had already read four baseball stories:
– a New Yorker story on Rickey Henderson, a baseball multiple-record holder now embrassing himself in the minor of minor leagues. In the paradigm of “why the heck don’t you just retire” this sounds like the baseball equivalent of European soccer stars transferring to Major League Soccer when they turn 35 (goalkeepers excluded).
– a Washington Post story on “wild-carding.”
– the Nationals’s Web page post-game story on the team’s victory against the San Diego Padres, which in my opinion is about the coolest name a team can have.
– a Washington Post magazine column on jinxing the Nationals by showing up to their games.

Geeez. I’m starting to pay attention to baseball. What will I do next? Take a ball to the park and start pitching?!?

Growing up in Eastern Europe, one had to choose his favorite actor carefully. Your pick would not only unveil your manliness to the whole block, but the actor would also have to act as a virtual bodyguard to your psyche. He would have to battle the other kids’s pick at least twice a week.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger were popular choices, but they fared poor in virtual combat once stripped of their machine guns, rocket launchers and boxing gloves. Jackie Chan and even Chuck Norris were smart bets.

I went with Jean-Claude van Damme because he was virtually unknown in the early nineties, and as his name received more and more recognition, so did my choice. My hero could pretty much kill all the other kids’s heroes asses. Except one. As a Romanian ska-punk anthem by Coma put it “Bruce Lee beats up Van Damme.”

You couldn’t mess with the Dragon — no one could beat him.

This is probably what the people of Mostar, Bosnia, were thinking of when they decided to erect a statue that would appease both the Catholic Croats in the West and the Muslim Bosniacs in the East. After years of civil war, the town needed a hero everyone could relate to and Veselin Gatalo, president of the organization Urban Movement Mostar, picked the right one.

“He’s a hero from childhood of all of us,” Gatalo told NPR.

The municipal government agreed to put up the statue, which will be poured in bronze and will feature Lee in a defending position facing North. Why North? Because you have to make sure the Dragon doesn’t point his wrath at either Croats or Bosnians.

“It’s not monument to one actor,” Gatalo said in the All Things Considered interview. “Not monument to China. It’s monument to universal idea of universal justice.”

Unity through a statue is not a new idea. Russians tried it by putting Lenin and Stalin all across their empire. It’s true that it failed, but Bruce Lee might work. So would a marble carving of U2’s Bono in Rwanda and Sudan.

I wonder what would work for Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, and the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq. Batman maybe?

We are on the heels of a week of embarrassing debates regarding blame in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Embarrassing because the government, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are trying to pass the buck to state and local officials, while urging the country not to play “the blame game.”

This week’s episode of This American Life called After the flood, resolves the issue of blame — it does lie heavily with the federal government. “Remember, you heard it here first,” says host Ira Glass before pointing out why there is plenty of passivity to be accountable for:

1. FEMA and its parent, DHS had “all the authority in the world” (quote from William Nicholson, a policy expert who spoke on the show) to step in after Bush declared a state of emergency the Saturday before the hurricane — they didn’t need any permission from state and local officials.

2. Even if Bush hadn’t declared an emergency, DHS — according to its statute – could have done it themselves and could have taken charge of the situation.

“[The federal authorities] did not need to wait for the state,” concluded Nicholson, an expert on homeland security policy.

There you go, This American Life is playing the blame game and play it well they do.

Listen to this episode because it includes some gutwrenching accounts from New Orleans residents and evacues. These are stories of people who were shot at by police, people who were mistreated and humiliated by authorities, people who were not allowed to leave the city and people who owe their life to unseemly Robin Hoods — those we called “looters,” those that officials wanted to “shoot to kill.”

“Our government betrayed us,” one woman says, and her story supports her conclusion.

Romania’s anthem is called “Wake up, Romanian.” We might be slow at getting out our post-communist beds, but it seems most Americans are sound asleep while the poor and underprivileged get trampled and abused by authorities who just don’t like to play “the blame game.”

What’s sad is that I am not making this up. Take a listen. There will be free audio of the episode on Monday. Until then you can catch re-runs on dozens of stations across the country.

Go through the past couple of weeks worth of coverage of hurricane Katrina and you’ll see scores of themes recurring: from George Bush’s trinity of mistimed comments (the best of which involved Trent Lott and his porch) to the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s 2002 story that laid out the scenario for a devastating hurricane.

Semantically, there have also been things popping up repeatedly. One word in particular, “refugees,” has sparked editorials and news stories. And, then we have two of the most commonly used construction describing of the aftermath of the storm: residents evacuating with only “the clothes on their back”, and New Orleans’s “haves and have nots.”

On a Friday’s night perusal of the Internet, I found the following:

>>> go to Google News and search for Katrina and “clothes on * back” as your search terms. The result was 674 stories. The Katrina and haves have nots search string returned 118 stories.

>>> On Yahoo! News. Katrina and haves have nots returned 51 stories and 15 images at 9:07 PM, while Katrina and “clothes on their back” returned 226 stories at 9:08 PM.

>>> On blog aggregator Technorati, Katrina and haves have nots brings up 219 blog posts, while Katrina and “clothes on their back” returned 112 posts.

>>> News search tool Lexis-Nexis brings up 330 stories when searching for Katrina and “clothes on their back”. Searches for Katrina and haves have nots are confusing on Nexis.

If William Safire takes on these phrases in his language column on Sunday, I hope he’ll give me some props. If you like hurricane searches, look at this list of pairings.

There are some people that just shouldn’t try to write about Romania. Joel Stottrup from the Princeton Union-Eagle is one of them. Granted, there’s not much to expect from a paper serving a little over 4,000 people in Princeton, Minnesota, but the disastrous story the paper ran a week ago is a gem of horrid journalism.

The story is an epic poem dedicated to local 25-year-old Princetonian, Mike Lundell, who has been to Romania eight times in the past five years, and who believes more church initiatives could save the country from capitalist depravity. After all, Mr. Lundell says (and the paper doesn’t bother to check) Romania has the second highest rate of abortion in the world, and the largest number of children with HIV/AIDS.

Mr. Lundell loves the idea that he can one day save Romania from the hell it got itself into. His ministry will salvage all the post-communism orphans that live in Auschwitz-like conditions. I didn’t say this, he did:

“Lundell described orphanages not having sufficient diapers or food and seeing some of the children who were ‘too energetic’ tied to their cribs. Lundell said that conditions at some Romanian orphanages reminded him of Auschwitz, the infamous World War II German Nazi concentration camp.

Romanian officials are getting some pressure to correct conditions in their country, Lundell said. Romania wants to become part of the European Union but the EU says Romania must first clean up its human rights abuses, including its orphan situation, according to Lundell.”

Luiza pointed this story out to me, and I decided to send a letter to the editor, which you’ll find below. Still Luiza’s critique remains more furious and sarcastic than mine. After reading a quote in which Mr. Lundell offers his expertise on Romanian children with HIV, Luiza writes:

“[This] leads me to believe Lundell should be shot, Stottrup and his editor fired out of journalism and the Princeton Union-Eagle burned to the ground.”

I can’t say I disagree.

Here’s my letter to their editor, Luther Dorr. Feel free to share your thoughts with him as well. He can be reached at: luther.dorr@ecm-inc.com.

>> Dear Mr. Dorr,

I had the unfortunate displeasure of reading a story your paper published on Sept. 1, 2005. The story, “Romania has lure for PHS graduate,” is fraught with gross inaccuracies and fails to meet basic journalistic standards, such as verifying the information you publish.

Both as a Romanian citizen and a journalist living in the United States, I express my disbelief that an American newspaper could print a story without checking the facts (and even names) contained in it. Mr. Stottrup should work as Mr. Lundell’s spokesman, because his blunders have failed the craft, and have certainly failed any reader interested in learning about Romania.

Here is a sample of the mistakes that destroy the credibility of both this story and its author:

1. Transylvania, as maps will show you, is a region located mostly in the center of of Romania, with only a marginal area touching the Western area.

2. Romania’s communist dictator was named Nicolae Ceausescu and not Nicolae Ceausesecu. Also, he lead the country from 1965 to 1989, not from 1974 as your story suggests. More details here.

3. Romania had indeed troubling policies regarding child bearing. The communist government encouraged child bearing and outlawed abortion, but your story offers nothing more than anecdotal evidence as hard facts. Painting such issues with a broad brush is speculative journalism. Mr. Lundell cannot possibly be considered a valid source to say 200,000 children were institutionalized at the time of Ceausescu’s death. There are very few reliable statistics, as this BBC story proves, but Mr. Lundell is taken at face value for all the numbers he provides.

4. Mr. Lundell’s comparison to Auschwitz is shameful and should not have been printed. This type of moral equivalency has no place in journalism.

5. The reporter has not taken any steps to determine whether Mr. Lundell provided accurate information regarding the number of foundations working in Romania or the number of workers in orphanages. As a journalist I hate to say this, but one hour spent on Google would have made the story better and would have spared Mr. Stottrup the embarrassment.

6. The deeper we go into the story, the more loose the facts are. There is no source confirming Mr. Lundell’s speculations that Romania has the highest abortion rate in the world. A quick Google search would have brought up different results, such as those displayed here.

7. Probably the worst and most damning misuse of facts is Mr. Lundell’s suggestion that Romania has the highest rate of AIDS among children in the world. I don’t know where Mr. Stottrup learned his journalism, but I can guarantee you he was sound asleep when fact checking was taught. If he would have paid attention, maybe he would have thought of visiting the Web site of an organization called UNICEF, which tracks HIV/AIDS prevalence. This site might help him.

While I appreciate your paper’s decision to present life in a foreign country, you’ve done a disservice to your readers and the credibility of your publication. The errors you published call for a correction if not an editor’s note, and I would suggest disciplinary action against your careless reporter. It’s hard to believe that any newspaper that wants to serve its community can confuse opinion and third-hand information with facts.

My Washington, D.C. apartment is in a cool neighborhood. But location alone rarely makes one feel better about the cost of rent. I needed an extra to justify the price and I found it on my roof, pictured below. The little extra is a view, albeit minuscule, of the Washington monument. I circled it for Washington illiterates.

I still haven’t been lucky at tracking down a bottle of Coca Cola C2, something I’ve been trying for two months (as I mentioned in a previous post).

Today I received an e-mail from a Coca Cola official in Atlanta who among other things said the beverage is available in his city along with Zero, the crap that seems to have kicked C2 off the East Coast shelves. Here’s an excerpt from the official’s e-mail:

“[C2] is absolutely still available and is performing well. C2 has resonated with the core target — the dual user, those who alternate between sugar and diet drinks.”

I always felt an integral part of that core target and hearing Coca Cola say that makes me even sadder that I can’t consume their corporate goods. Mr. Coke guy said C2 recently added a 2-liter bottle to the packaging mix (I knew that), but also acknowledged the marketing fiasco of the C2 launch last May.

“Volume was initially below projections due to initial pricing issues, but sales have picked up as pricing has been adjusted.”

If anyone spots a bottle or can of C2, please drop me a note.

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