Dude, Other Languages Suck
One of the more annoying things I've found with American pop is the fact that a) it generally sucks and b) when there is something good, it's the stolen "sampled" part of the song from another song that got absolutely no play in the US. As an example of this, I've just been tipped off to one of the hottest songs... from two summers ago in Spain which is by O-Zone, a relatively unknown (in the US) group from Moldova of all places. I've included a YouTube embed below and you can watch the proper video here as this loser didn't allow for embeds:
The song is catchy. I dig it and despite the uber-Balkan, open-shirted, cheesy sunglasses, dancing on the wing of a plane quality to the video, it's a good pop song, albeit similar in beat to Remind Me - Remixed. Of course, there was no way in hell this was going to be allowed to play in the US by the powers that be. First off, it was in a foreign language. Secondly, it's by a group that will probably be a one-hit wonder, and who wants to put valuable marketing dollars in to that when you can jolt another album out of Britney Spears? So of course this results in the "borrowing" of the catchy part of the song for this craptastic venture between T.I. and Rihanna. I mean, Rihanna is at least hot and has some singing chops to her, but T.I. is a hack and the fact that this was how "dragostea tin dei" ended up getting heard by US listeners sucks since the mash up is just painful to listen to.
Europe has a great advantage in that due to how many languages there are in the sub-continent, people are used to hearing songs in different languages. In the US, if it ain't English, it ain't heard. But, again, I blame this mostly on corporate laziness more so than public laziness. There will always be those who won't listen to a song because they don't understand it, but really, how many of us have walked around with "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" stuck in our heads by Hendrix. The words aren't so important as to trump the beat and enjoyability of the song. If it can be danced to, who gives a damn how achy and breaky one's heart is?
My hope is such that the internet hipsters, bloggers, and general users out there will end this trend. We have after all greatly changed the manner in which music is stored and distributed. Perhaps it is possible to change the way music is marketed and allow for these one-off songs to get heard, enjoyed, and added to the collective sound that comprises a greater pop.
26 12 2008 1 comment
Tags: language, music, the balkans, the europe
Oh Yeah, The Croatian Wine Book is Published
I've had so much going on with Maneno and the damned site move that I forgot to mention that Vinologue: Dalmatia Herzegovina is now published!
For those who remember last year when I took off for about four months with my soon to be wife, y'all probably thought it was just to run around the Balkans for awhile and have a good time. While there was a definite element of truth to that, the real fact was that I was there to research a book about the wines of Dalmatia and Herzegovina in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina respectively. All told, it was nearly two and a half months spent traveling up and down the Adriatic coast meeting winemakers and getting my Croatian in much better shape, as well as my alcohol tolerance.
Well, over a year later, the book is done. It ended up being 135 pages with 20 pages of color photographs. Layout took forever because I'm either a writer, web programmer, or a photographer. I consider myself to be a graphic designer somewhere after tile setter and before olive picker. But, I muddled through InDesign, forcing myself to remember everything I had learned back in my days of managing IT for a publishing company and voila, a proper book was born.
This first printing is cool. It has an ISBN number, barcode and everything, so it's a real publication. Now being a published author (although admittedly self-published) I feel... hmm, the exact same. I guess the only thing is that now, in maybe a couple of years, if there is a lot of interest, we might do a second edition to update the wineries that are there as well as add in others that were unreachable in our last visit. Other regions in the future would be fun as well. But I gotta say that publishing a book really is a lot of headache with the writing, the layout, the printing, the marketing, etc. It's no wonder the web is killing print.
10 12 2008 2 comments
Tags: books, the balkans, vinologue, wine
Croatian Government Scared by Yugo Terror Threat
Someone went and left a Yugo in front of the Sabor (Croatia's main governmental building). And by in front of, I mean parked right in front of the main doors. It is pretty suspicious activity as most Yugos are currently within Serbian borders.
In the US, the equivalent would be parking a Chevy Citation (worst. name. ever.) on the steps of Capitol Building in DC. Obviously, this sort of thing can't happen in the US, but in Croatia, it's rather wacky how immediately accessible the federal government buildings are in the country. For friends and family living there, they know this is done due to the fact you will be going there a lot in your daily life.
Anyways, enjoy the embed below. If Croatian media outsmarts me, then try this oldskool link technique.
Yup, the media done went and foiled my plans. Curses! Use the link above if you want to see the coverage, although it's about as exciting as the second hour of the OJ chase.
09 12 2008 0 comments
Tags: croatia, the balkans, transportation
Google Maps Loves Italy. Balkans, not so much.
I've driven around the Balkans a bit. Probably the craziest driving is in Belgrade. The easiest is in rural Slovenia. People generally always drive fast. They love it, like this moron who I assume is on the A1.
Driving fast is fine when you know where you're going. When you're a tourist, things get dicey. A map is necessary. I always had mine from Freytag & Berndt when I was driving and I was thankful for it. There are those who think that Google Maps technology trumps the age-old paper map though. For those interested in using it, you might want to think again as shown here and here for going between Dubrovnik and Mostar and Split and Dubrovnik. I know I like a ferry to Italy, how about you?
Cross posted on Čevapija
14 11 2008 0 comments
Tags: google, maps, the balkans, transportation
Please Help to Save the Serbian Panda
This was spotted on Belgraded yesterday. I think he was the first to "break the story".
For those unaware, most Serbian (and Bosnian and Croatian and Montenegrin etc.) meals consist of meat. Followed by more meat. Followed by a side of meat. Then maybe a potato or bread just to make mom happy that you're not eating meat all the time. Then just a touch of meat at the end to wash away the bread or potato. While in Belgrade, I ate tons of meat. While in Novi Sad, I shared what must have been five kilos of delicious delicious meat with my cousin Ivan and #1 Fan. My heart nearly stopped halfway through the meal. We weren't able to finish all of it to which the server just laughed and asked if we weren't from around there. It's damned good meat there, but damn it's a lot of it.
24 10 2008 0 comments
Tags: food, humor, serbia, the balkans
An Impressive Retrospective of Rijeka, Croatia
It's usually the case the proper names of places get squat upon on the internet quite quickly. For instance: unitedstates.com, congo.com, and spain.com are all crap sites that someone is sitting upon to collect advertising money or until they get the right offer to buy it off of them.
So it was the other day that I was bouncing around various Croatian city names to see what came up. Much like the examples above, the variety of names that I tried were all being held by cyber squatters. For kicks, I tried rijeka.com which forwards you to this gallery page. While the gallery takes and insanely long time to load, it's worth it as it's one of the most comprehensive collection of old photos from Rijeka that I've ever seen. If you're feeling bored, got to the page, get a cup of tea/coffee, come back, and give it a look.
To give a little history, Rijeka is Croatia's most northern coastal city east of the Istrian Peninsula. It also happens to have one of the most boring names in the world as 'rijeka' simply means, 'river' in Croatian. This was derived from the original, Italian name for the town which was 'fiume', that also means, 'river'. Visitors to Croatia will know Rijeka as a northern hub for trains connections to the interior, buses to Istria (probably Rovinj or Pula), and the end of the line coming up from Dubrovnik. I've been there twice although my gallery is pathetic at the moment. Despite its grunginess and overall aura of being a port town, I quite like the place. I don't know if this comes from the fact that until the last century, it was a crossroads between Romance language and Slavic language speakers, as well as serving as the main port for the Austrian Empire, but there's something to it. Croats often call it a feeling of "rock n' roll".
If you ever pass through, spend a day checking out the few sites and getting in to the vibe of the town, which I like a great deal more than Split. If you never fancy yourself hitting up Croatia's main port city, then just enjoy the photos of the link above.
18 10 2008 0 comments
Tags: croatia, history, photography, the balkans
Let's Stop Saying, 'Balkanization'
A word that is oft tossed around freely is Balkanization. In its truest form, it refers to the breakup of the country that was formerly known as Yugoslavia. In its most idiotic form, it is used to refer to collection of smaller items that separate from a larger one. I have a crazy idea: stop using this word.
As you can see from the Wikipedia article that I linked to, there isn't really any history given as to how the word came about. Obviously it came in to use as former Yugoslavia started to fall apart, but there isn't any mention as to who was the first person to coin it in to the common vernacular. At this point, it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that it's an offensive word. Why people can't simply say, "breakup", "collapse", or "separation" is the same reason that we use French words for wine varietals, in that one believes one has the air of being educated if one is to use this bigger, fancier word.
Do any of you who use this word think of the people who actually live in this region of the Western Balkans and what this means to them? It would be like saying every time you serve a bad meal that it's suffered "Britization". No one wants that and it's an unfair association to a region that never asked for the word to be used in the first place. And I pick on the British in this example as I suspect them of starting common use of the word, such as in this article on the BBC that's actually about Africa. It's just one of many.
Beyond the offense of the word, there is just the complete blindness to history. Yugoslavia was actually comprised of various states that had been independent at various points throughout history. So, Yugoslavia was an artificial entity that was bound to separate just like countless other larger countries that have broken up over the centuries. Of course we don't say USSRization, Czechoslovakization, British Empirization, or even Austro-Hungarization. No, we say Balkanization and we say it too much. It's a word we need to lose and just revert back to the normal words I mentioned before. Saying Grenache instead of Garnacha may sound "fancier" to some, but saying, Balkanization just shows that you have no true grasp of what you're talking about, leaving you to fumble for large words to attempt to cover that fact up.
30 09 2008 6 comments
Tags: language, politics, the balkans, the europe
My Precarious Adventures through the Dot ME Domain
With the breakup of Yugoslavia, various member states fared better than others. At the bottom of the list would probably be Bosnia who unfortunately inherited the front lines of a war between the power hungry assholery of Milošević and Tuđman. After them comes Macedonia which mostly seems to have inherited a name conflict with Greece. It gets harder after that. Croatia got amazing coastline for a ready made tourism industry in the postwar economy, but they were also somewhat shunned by the west due to barbaric actions in the war. Serbia didn't get the coastline, got the same shunning as Croatia and then some, but they also inherited all of the built-up institutions of former Yugoslavia such as the seat on the UN. Slovenia came out quite well, despite a touristic coast, as the West loved them as seen by their amazingly quick admission to the EU, EuroZone, and now even Schengen.
The one odd apple in all this group is Montenegro. Until this year, they were just kind of puttering along, doing their own thing. Sure, they had coastline, but it's somewhat polluted and being devoured by Russians at the moment. In fact, they were really low on my list of successful post-Yugo states until the most amazing thing happened. As I mentioned earlier, funny things were a foot when it came to the domain extension of Yugoslavia which went from .yu to .cs for Crna Gora (Montenegro) Serbia, and then, once Montenegro voted for independence in 2006, the name was split again to .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro.
What a windfall for this tiny nation of 600,000 people. The combinations are endless. Everyone who ever wanted www.fuck.me or www.la.me could have their dreams come through. Perverts who may have been desiring www.co.me are out of luck though as they've reserved that for country use, much the same way are co.uk exists in the United Kingdom.
I took a little trip down new domain registration land myself. I decided to take on registering www.taste.me as I thought it would have multiple uses from culinary to perverse. Unfortunately a lot other folks felt the same way which led me down an interesting path with how they are coordinating the deployment of these names.
Montenegro made a very smart initial move in that they didn't handle selling the domain names themselves. They bid out the rights to that. There's nothing new in this as most countries do this. So, when you're buying a .me name, you're not actually buying from Montenegro, but from some reseller in your country. I ended up trying GoDaddy for the first (and last) time. I searched around for a name that seemed to be available, which was taste.me, filled out the forms, submitted the credit card info and thought that I was the proud owner of this name. Oh how I was wrong.
First off, it turns out that GoDaddy had some problem with me. I registered this name while in Europe and for some reason they came to the conclusion that I was a fraudulent registrar. Given that assumption, they froze my account, locked me out, and sent me a single email that had no information but to contact them. I tried to contact them and the monkeys on the phone didn't seem able to do anything or tell me why I was locked out. They eventually refunded my money and I gave up on my dreams of owning taste.me.
It turns out that this was all for the better as paying that initial $100 for the name was not actually buying it. It was reserving a place in line to be able to bid in a domain auction further on. All of this is not readily apparent and with good reason. I doubt most folks would be $100 for the right to then bid on something as small and silly as a domain name. Let me also emphasize that it was $100 for each .me name you wished to chase down.
Oddly enough, I continued to receive updates about the auction for taste.me. This was interesting to follow because unlike a normal auction where there is a set time frame, the way this auction worked was that once someone submitted a bit, if there was a new bid submitted within 24 hours, the auction would continue. It basically just encourages people to bid like crazy to own the domains. In the case of taste.me, the auction went on for about two weeks and ended up at a final price of $6,505. Crazy, huh?
In theory, a large percentage of money from the sale of domain names if going back in to the country. It had better as it's apparent that Montenegrin's aren't buying .me. It's also about $20 now to register a name since this asinine auction system has ended and it's business as usual. There does seem to be some black box business going on with the registration still. If you try to register something like asdasjj90.me, you can. But if you try to register something like theearthiswaitingfor.me it will most likely tell you it's already been bought, but you'll get the offer to bid on it. I don't know what they're doing, but it definitely seems shifty and I hope that it's not just a few entrenched Montenegrin politicians making off like bandits on this.
This article is cross posted on Čevapija
01 09 2008 2 comments
Tags: internet, montenegro, the balkans, the europe
Of War Criminal Websites and Default Statements
So for those who are really, really not reading the news, super duper, incredibly wanted, biggest butcher from Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić has been captured and is being prepared to stand trial in The Hague once his extradition hearings have concluded in Belgrade. Of course, there are a number of bizarre twists to all of this. For one, he was living in Belgrade, in the center, and working with an assumed alias. You can read all about this story everywhere as well as see the massive beard that Radovan was sporting to hide his true identity. What's even a good deal more amusing is the website: Dragan Dabić. This was the alias that Radovan was using in Belgrade and some smartass went and set up a website to appear as the good fake doctor's personal site. For everyone who thinks that this was Radovan's real site, let me emphasize that it most definitely was not. When you do a WHOIS lookup on the shebang, you see that it was registered July 22, 2008, which was one day after Radovan was taken in to custody. For those not good with math, this means it was registered yesterday. It's as fake a site as was Radovan's psychiatric care he was providing some people in Belgrade.
On another note, I have a request to make of all future war criminals that are most likely going to eventually stand trial before the ICTY which is: stating, "I am not guilty and I don't recognize the legitimacy of this court" is not original. It's so incredibly Milošević and most likely not even his to start with. I mean, yeah, we get it, you think you're not guilty and that this UN court is a sham. It doesn't matter because they're going to try you for genocide nonetheless and put you in their illegitimate jail. In the future, please just say, "Yeah, what Slobo said." or "Default Sentence #1. Default Sentence #2." when arrested and extradited. It would save me two redundant sentences in the news that I read and I need all the time that I can get as I'm a very busy man what with drinking tea, reading the news, sleeping, and waking up and all.
And for those interested, you can read a Croatian blog roundup of reactions to this event on Global Voices.
22 07 2008 0 comments
Tags: internet, the balkans, war
Praving meets the 21st Century
My main man, Dinko is as Balkan as they come. That being the case, he loves his čevapčići and his pravs. It's in the blood. My father was a super praver whose work still stands at my parents' house despite years of nearly falling apart. Being a second generation Croat didn't stop my father considering bailing wire to be one of the most important tools in his toolbox.
Maybe it's because Dinko is Bosnian or maybe it's because of years living in the west have changed him, but the fact is that Dinko's praving is actually pretty damned good work. One could go so far as to say it's quality and that the only praving lies in the initial approach, which for pravers is somewhere along the lines of, "Hmm, this is going to require my big smashing hammer, the smaller pounding hammer, and a lot of bailing wire." For instance, in his recent job of mounting a flat screen TV, Dinko started out with, "Since I don’t have a laser level, I attached a regular presentation laser pointer to my level using cable ties." Genius. Cable ties, while not my favorite (I stand by bailing wire) are the choice attaching system for a 21st century praver.
From there, you'd think things would start to go downhill and his project would turn out looking a good deal like any Homer Simpson project, but no, the end result was quite nice. You can read all about it, here and see what happens when one strays beyond the principal that, "Any tool can be a hammer".
27 03 2008 4 comments
Tags: praving, slavic fixes, the balkans
