Max Mirnyi && Tennis
So, the tennis season is basically over. Max Mirnyi of Belarus had an average and somewhat boring year, finishing 34th in the world and making $1.1 million dollars (a total of $6.2 million), the only highlight of the year being his doubles grand slam victory at the French Open. And our starlet Victoria Azarenka was also a bit disappointing. She’s still very young though.
Now the final event of the year, Masters Cup, which starts in China in two days is probably going to be boring too, because Marat Safin, Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick all withdrew due to injuries. Of course, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and (my favorite) Andre Agassi are there. But the other five I don’t fancy at all. Guillermo Coria, Nikolay Davydenko, Ivan Ljubicic, Gaston Gaudio, David Nalbandian: who are they? They are no big stars, no big personalities. They were simply lucky that the good guys got injured…
November 13th, 2005 at 7:41 am
I happen to like Minyi and your site a lot. I made a link for this site over at http://bhtimes.blogspot.com. This is the BEING HAD Times news page. We are located down in Pinsk and unfortunately at the moment, almost entirely in English, but I am working on it.
Cheers,
Adam
November 13th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
Hi! Wow, Adam, you’ve got a very interesting blog, I’m surprised I haven’t found it before. I’m definetely adding it to my blogroll. :)
P.S. I have a colleague who grew up in Pinsk. He always tells funny stories about his native city when he’s drunk. They are hillarious. And he tells them in a local kind of language (a trasianka mix of Belarusian and Russian and I guess some Ukrainian).
November 14th, 2005 at 1:43 am
Pinsk dialect is not as bad a Brest’s, but even with my strong American accent and crap grammer, I got pegged one time on a train by some guy from Moskow.
He said “You have such an interesting accent. I think you are from….”
“Yea, yea I am an American.” I cut in “I know my Russian is terrible.”
“No, that is not right, your Russian is fine. But you are not American.”
“I’m not?”
“No, You are from Pinsk, yes?”
Anyway, cheers to you for actually doing this blog in two languages. I know how much more work it must be. And and thanks for reminding about the hunger strike. I had neglected to cover it myself.
November 14th, 2005 at 5:59 pm
LOL thats a rather nice story beinghad :) Amazing how he managed to guess so accurate :) Its great that this blog is bilingual, have to thank rydel for taking the effort :)
November 14th, 2005 at 6:25 pm
:)
P.S. Actually, I wouldn’t call it “bilingual” anymore, because the content of the two parts are 80-90% different. It’s almost like two different blogs. The English version is more like news of interest regarding Belarus plus a bit of personal stuff/reflections, while the Belarusan part is almost 100% non-political. It’s more personal and less structured. And it’s definetely not as focused: I just write down short random entries about things that draw my attention. For example, here are the latest entries in Belarusian:
* Our Silicon valley
* Photos of a young Hrodna photographer
* Bird flu and Y2K bug parallels
* Spelling of the word Valentine in Belarusian
* Some new websites that appeared this autumn
* New Russian-Belarusan pharamacological dictionary…
November 15th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Ah… well its still nice :) About that silicon valley thing.. I read about it somewhere.. some large tech park with special tax cuts and such right?
November 15th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
Yea, something like this. The idea is interesting, but I’m quite skeptical about its implementation. As one blogger commented, the current Belarus government only knows how to run collective farms and milk the money out of businesses, so that’s how it will be probably: a “Silicon valley” operated like a collective farm, used as a cash cow for the government, who wants to control the IT sector in Belarus.
November 16th, 2005 at 5:47 pm
Most likely… I was thinking the same thing… of course the offer is attractive to businesses but for how long will the special treatment last? I am also concerned about it being used like some kind of trophy… or to use as an example… its going to be milked one way or another.
September 3rd, 2006 at 2:04 pm
Are you there?
I would love to hear more about this …
March 27th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Do you have more information regarding Max Mirnyi? What is his current standing? I would very much appreciate it if you could feature more about him. Thanks.