A Contest Oughta Keep This Interesting: Banner!!!!!111one

Okay so I've been working a lot and planning lessons et cetera over the last 2 weeks, so I haven't had much time to have independent thoughts, hence the lack of genius ideas gracing this page. So howsabout in the meantime I open myself up for a little bit of 21st-century sabotage?

NEWSFLASH: You can text my phone from anywhere in the world, for free, at the following site:

http://www.vodafonesms.cz/?locale=en

Do you have my number? I'll give you a hint: it's triple seven oh six eight seven hundred. There's no way this is a bad idea. GodDAMN, I'm a fucking star. I should do this sort of thing all the time.

As if that weren't enough, it occurred to me the other day that a blog needs a banner, and as such this is not yet a blog. The first person to send one to rlongoz at gmail dot com (prominently displaying the title) will have their glorious banner proudly displayed atop this site for at least a week. I probably won't post it if it insinuates that I'm a pedo or anything like that, but almost everything is fair game. Plus I don't think anyone ever reads this shit anyways. I am relatively certain that this is another very good idea.

Masterful Czech Graffiti: #2

I apologize in advance for the awful formatting of this blog. Blogger is not very user-friendly or intuitive.

Anyways... You know how everyone holds within themselves the innate dream to just drop everything they're doing and write 'shit' on the wall? Well I guess some people are dreamers, and some are doers.

Such finesse.

I've recently moved to a new neighbourhood called Zizkov, and have been walking around a LOT over the past couple days, thus exposing myself to a great range of graffiti themes. All of the forthcoming photos were taken over the course of a two-hour walk. 

Take a second to consider that these people are taking time out of their days to translate their tags into a second, or even third, language for the viewing pleasure of those who speak English. That's pretty impressive when you think about it.

The first two tags which inspired me to take out my camera that day. Short, sweet, well put (not to mention punctuated):

My friend Matt stumbled upon a blue "CRIPS" tag his old Prague neighbourhood. This was a most beliwdering sight in Zizkov, completing my confusion over Matt's find.

Just down the block, a public service announcement, imaginably to combat the prevalence of 'BLOODS' tags:

The Hell's Angels confirming their presence:

And what the hell, how about some nine-year-old millenium paranoia to round out an excellent walk:

Masterful Czech Graffiti: #1

This is a feature I just know will become a mainstay on this blog.  The #1 and #2 national passions in the Czech Republic are (as everyone will agree) picking wild mushrooms and going to the store to buy yogurt, respectively. But did you know that the #3 national pastime is graffiti, followed closely by hating on narcissists and warmongers?

Take as proof this 'beaut' I found on the street the other day:

...and its poetic complement, just a few metres further down the wall:

Homer Simpson sits, watching his favourite cop show, McGarnigle.

Chief (On TV): You're off the case, McGarnigle!

McGarnigle: You're off YOUR case, Chief!

Chief: What does that mean, exactly?

Homer (screaming at TV): IT MEANS HE GETS RESULTS YOU STUPID CHIEF!

Moments I Wish I Spoke Czech: #1

A few nights ago I’m walking down the street. It’s Thursday, maybe 10 pm. I see this guy, around my age, lying in a dumpster full of brick roofing shingles. His white collared shirt is ripped open and he is not moving. Jesus, I think, someone should help this person.

I have no phone, I don’t speak Czech, and even if I had a fucking phone I wouldn't even know the number for an ambulance. Well, I think, maybe he’s just drunk. After a few minutes of standing there I decide this is a human being, and he's not okay.

Anyways, the rest of this story is boring so let’s just say he died in my arms and a car bomb went off at his funeral. SKEET!

A Most Sophisticated Return to Blogging

Okay so I'm posting again. I really hope I don't neglect this blog as much as I think I'm going to. Time will tell. 

It's been a really long time since I've posted anything here, and come to think of it, all of the posts thus far have been academic-related. Much has happened since I stopped. I've graduated university, thereby ceasing my scholastic pursuits for the time being, and I've moved to the Czech Republic. In memoriam of my academic career, I will now begin this blog anew with various musings about Central and Eastern European toilet- and bathroom-related matters.

First of all, my flat is arranged so that the toilet (avec un bidet élégant) and shower are separate. A common Eur-ocurrence, new to me in my Western ignorance, but not even really worth analyzing. But it gets stranger.

1. On Artificially, Albeit Very, Intelligent Urinals

There are these urinals here in Prague which, upon sensing a person is finished, flush. "Well we have those in North America," you say. Shut your damn fool mouth, I'm not done; this flush is IMMEDIATE and the amount these urinals flush is RELATIVE TO THE AMOUNT OF LIQUID DEPOSITED BY THE USER. 

The North American urinal sensor operates in a binary fashion. It's either '1', someone's standing here pissing, or '0', nobody's pissing, time to flush or sit idle. We were all very impressed upon its public release. "How does it know?" we all asked moronically. "How innovative!"

I had a bizarre epiphanic experience a few weeks ago while pissing in a local pizzeria. I finished, and before I could move out of the range of any typical North American sensor, the fucking thing flushed. So there I stood, in front of the urinal, flabbergasted. I had not budged. "How does it... ...goddammit." No visible sensor. I scanned the upper corners of the room for cameras, anything to explain this shit. As a force of habit, I spat into the urinal and watched in awed reverence as a quick stream of water sprinkled down the white porcelain, just enough to wash away my liquid addition. I started thinking about the Russian Mafia and how you're always hearing rumours about their immense resources and how they control everything in Central and Eastern Europe. "How do they know?"

...I don't know, but they do.

Pros: 

- Easy to use

- No wasted water, down-to-the millilitre flushing technology

- Fun to spit in 

Cons:

- May cause paranoid schizophrenia

- That's about it

2. The Downfall of Automatic Bathrooms

So there's an awesome restaurant by our place. Its bathroom looks like an IKEA showroom from the mid-90s when everyone was obsessed with primary colours and basic shapes. The lights in this bathroom are automatic, triggered by the same technology Vancouverites use to scare poor people away from their garages at night. Not unlike in Vancouver, the light stays on for a couple minutes once triggered. Well guess what, some people take more than a couple of minutes.

Pros: 

- Ecologically and financially friendly

Cons: 

- Shitting in a pitch black room with no windows and a slippery floor both degrading and hazardous to safety

3. On the Hungarian Toilet, a.k.a. Exhib-shit-tion

I had the pleasure of spending the week of my 23rd birthday in Kisvarda, Hungary with Deidre, Matt, Deidre's stepdad George and his family, which was ballin as hell. The food was unreal, and in my opinion the best part. Every minute of every single day was spent thrusting home-cooked food into our gullets. It was great until I had to shit.

(Okay so after a bit of research I've discovered that this is actually a German design, but I've never been to Germany so fuck it. It's Hungarian.)

You do what you gotta do, then flush using a manual lever, which I like because you choose how much water to use, thus preventing global

 warming and saving thirsty babies the world over. Unfortunately the logic ends here.

To say the design of the toilets in Hungary is interesting would be the understatement of the fucking decade. Instead of a watery hole beneath yours, you have what can only be described as a display shelf featuring a small puddle. Water flows literally across this shelf (not down) into a hole at the front of the toilet. You can try squatting, or any number of perching positions, but it is impossible to drop it right in the hole. This would simply go against the design. For better or worse, this means once you're done, your magnificent excrement rests gloriously, like a Fabergé Egg minus the glass box, in a dirty little puddle mere centimetres from your ass. 

If you're in Hungary and you've eaten a feast of lamb and cabbage rolls and are thinking about flushing your shit down the toilet, fuck you. Seriously. Forget about it. Remember when you 

were a kid at the water park, and there would sometimes be that stubborn little pussy of a kid 

who'd get cold feet sitting at the top of the waterslide, and he'd just lay there weeping, hanging on to the edges for dear life as torrents of water pass him by? And everyone's just waiting there like, "alright kid, fucking go down the slide already, we don't have all day." Remember that kid? Well I'm usually the last guy to anthropomorphize human waste but I actually had a case of deja vu from the water park as I stood there, a grown-ass man, experimenting with pulsating flushes in a bid to coax my shit across a watery plateau with a decline of maybe 2 degrees. 

Now I know I'm not perfect, and I probably have no right to criticize things that are clearly established in European life and that just seem new and unusual to me. But come on, this is fucking stupid. 

Sidenote: As I experienced while taking a bar 

deuce in Budapest, there is nothing more humbling or sobering, nothing to more effectively spark your awareness that you are no different from a standard barnyard animal, than to 'make brown' and immediately notice the steamy heat and the smell (my God, the SMELL!) usually shrouded by the 'downward funnel/bowl of water' design of the typical North American toilet. So maybe just take it from me without having to experience it yourself. You're no better than anything else.

Pros:

- Manual flush, very little wasted water

- Potential for Buddhist-style enlightenment through realization of anatta or 'not-self'. You are not 'you'. There is actually no such thing as 'you' or 'I'. There is no unconditioned self within our constructed sense of self. At the end of the day, everything was meant to shit in the woods. Toilets are a source of dhukka, or suffering.

- The perfect display accessory for a ratemypoo.com user

Cons:

- Potentially nauseating, depending on level of tolerance 

- Running out of options when the flowing water just won't make it budge (Use your imagination. And some toilet paper unless you want to get your hands dirty.)

las vegas: an ethnographer’s wet nightmare

Nov. 30/2007 – Adam’s presentation introduced the Kozinets article on the Burning Man festival, which offers a discussion of the pervasiveness of promotional consumer culture. Kozinets concludes, “whether in cultural capital-laden appeals to authentic communities that exist outside the market or to so-called radical self-expression that fits within subscultural and commercial norms, the urge to differentiate from other consumers drives participation at Burning Man and does not release [participants] from the grip of the market’s sign game and social logics,” (36). In other words, despite even the noblest of our efforts, it is difficult (if not impossible) to escape the influence of promotional consumer culture.

In discussing the Burning Man festival as a sort of spiritual pilgrimage, I was reminded of a music festival I once attended. Taking place in the desert of Las Vegas (well, not exactly the desert per se, but in the grassy surroundings of UNLV’s football stadium), the ‘Vegoose’ festival was a celebration of the arts (er, rock concert) rooted in an embrace of community and personal freedom (at the hardly-free cost of about $100 a day). The festival was a weekend-long celebration of eclectic style, taking place right around Halloween and inspiring some truly wacky costumes.


























What attracted me was, firstly, the fact that I had never visited Las Vegas before, followed closely by the impressive lineup of bands that would be attending. The bands were excellent, and the crowd was great too. It was strange, though; people were treating the event like it was Woodstock 2005, as though it were some major spiritual event, some deep religious pilgrimage, even though it was the first annual instance of the festival. Maybe it was the open drug use that affected everyone’s attitude, but there was a distinguishable buzz and a feeling of tolerance and community among the festival-goers. I was sober (really) and I still felt that hum of collective humanism, a refreshing and rare feeling that I hadn’t experienced in ages. But then it occurred to me: why is it that people need to spend 300 bucks to connect with one another? The freedom we felt was mediated by the manned fences that surrounded those of us who could afford to participate. Vegoose was a concert, a really good concert, but it was hardly a metaphysical retreat - everyone went back to their themed neon hotels on the Strip afterwards, and nobody’s life was changed forever (with the exception of those who probably swore off psychedelic drugs after a bad trip).

In the same way that a Britney Spears concert, while formulaic and commercialized, offers the authentic experience of a Britney Spears concert, I don’t regret spending the money on Vegoose, and I have some great memories from my encounter with expensive freedom. But I never try to fool myself that it was anything more than a massive capitalist venture, taking place in a city that exists as a monument to Western excess and artificiality.

…now with realistic needy clinging action

Nov. 23/2007 – I’m really glad that Raf showed the Barbie video in his presentation today because I have felt for years (since well before I was a CMNS student) that Barbie products represent the archetype of consumer socialization, “the process by which young people acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes relevant to their functioning as consumers in the marketplace,” (Kline, 288). The degree to which Barbie and her vast line of related products engage in naturalizing traditional gender roles in the minds of children is as offensive as it is blatant. As such, the whole notion of Barbie’s limiting mediation of play in children is perfectly relevant to this week’s material. I’d like to show one video I came across while browsing toy ads on Youtube a few months ago:

Ah, Cool Shavin’ Ken. When will you understand that your scraggly beard is destroying your relationship with Barbie? Sure, she laughs and says it tickles, but can’t you hear the disdain in her voice? You’re lucky you’ve still got your boyish charm, man, otherwise she’d be out the door. I mean, clue in – haven’t you noticed how differently she acts towards you when you’re clean shaven? She fucking kisses you TWICE! What’s your secret, Cool Shavin’ Ken? It’s your aftershave, right? I knew it. It’s gotta be the aftershave. Hey, do you – do you think if I took a cue from you and bought a crate of Old Spice, the blondes would be hanging off of me, too? I’ve got a date with Cookin’ and Cleanin’ Barbie tonight and I really want to woo her, cause I hear she does all the housework and keeps her mouth shut. I bet she doesn’t eat a lot either, so I’d save money on food, which would be nice.