br23 blog - minsk, belarus

According to Google Video, this is basically the only time Belarus was mentioned on any of the American TV channels (excluding C-Span) in the last several months:

- Where do we start? Oh, let’s try a “B” country for $400.
- What is Bhutan?
- Let’s try it for $800.
- What is Belarus?
- Let’s have “B” country for […]

I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately, so we decided to rent something funny today, ended up taking a DVD with six episodes of “Friends” from their first year (1994). And the very first episode that we see had a weird reference to Minsk as a kind of place where American physicists are dying to […]

In October, Harvard University is hosting a symposium on Belarus and a theater from Vitebsk (according to NAABS newsletter, this is “the first North American appearance by any professional Belarusan theater”). Besides, professor Curt Woolhiser from Harvard is going to teach a course in Belarusian at Harvard for graduate students. Great news, professor Woolhiser! Bravo, […]

To wrap up with the UN topic, here’s a photo from NYC:

By the way, Lukashenka was in USA less than 24 hours, and met only with two other presidents. Guess whom did he meet? Presidents of Iraq and Iran. What a terrific choice.
And Iranian president just had his speech in front of the UN General […]

President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenka, today, at the United Nations, in New York, delivered a rather shocking speech (in Russian, of course, and here’s English translation [PDF]). Here are the three excerpts which I found most interesting:
Quote #1, about “his country” USSR and current unipolar world:
“15 years have passed since the break-up of my country, […]

Worker error kills power to half of L.A.
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — About 700,000 electric customers in Los Angeles lost power Monday afternoon after a worker mistakenly cut a wrong line, triggering a cascade of problems in the city’s power grid.
One of my websites is hosted by a web-hosting company in LA, so as you […]

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 […]

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 […]