br23 blog - minsk, belarus

Recently, JewishTheatre.com published an article about Marc Chagall, “Magical Modernist”. Here I quote the best part, the key sentence:
“Chagall’s lifelong touchstone was Vitebsk, the Russian village where he was born in 1887.”
If I were a wicked black-hat hacker from Vitebsk (a modern Belarusan city with 350,000 inhabitants and a 1000 year old history), I would’ve […]

For the first time ever I’ve tried online banking on 26.04.2002 (which incidentally was also the 16th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe, and a date when Chernobyl computer virus usually activates itself). It felt weird: one mouse click — and in a glimpse 750 euro went away from my account.
Since then I’ve got totally used […]

Bravo, mister Onyszkiewicz!
Kudos to the Vice-president of the European Parliament Janusz Onyszkiewicz who today openly critisized the Russian-language broadcasting plans of “Deutsche Welle” to Belarus. The Vice-president of the European Parliament said, I quote:
“this [the Russian language launch] squares with Minsk’s plans to destroy the Belarusian language, relegate it to a kind of regional […]

A Minsk branch (www.swisshost.by) of a Swiss web hosting company (www.pchighway.com) which in turn is a reseller/client of a a Swiss telecommunications company Sunrise (www.sunrise.ch) has launched a free e-mail service for Belarusians (www.telegraf.by).
Their emailing service offers 2 gigabytes of free space, with free IMAP/POP3, spam blocker, three domain choices (telegraf.by, biz.by, me.by); the web […]

Tom Stoppard was in Minsk this week! It’s interesting how the news got spread. First, one livejournal user wrote in his journal: “Guys, I’m not bullshitting. I just saw Tom Stoppard in Bar London [a famous little cozy bar on the central Minsk street]”, then another blogger claimed he saw Stoppard on Minsk streets. […]

I’ve been reading some news and bloggers’ reports from New Orleans. It sounds totally insane. Like in a horror movie. I just watched one like that, it’s called 28 days later (dvd), an awesome sci-fi horror about the virus called Rage that destoryed Great Britain, and how a handful of survivors tried to exist in […]

(A sign on the castle wall. Karlstejn. July, 2004)
Just wanted to say that the two versions are going to be different. The siamese twins are going to get separated and are going to walk their own separate ways. I just don’t think that those daily translation exercises are a good investment of my time.
So, basically, […]