Nebulous Blurs

The end of Facebook, the beginning of a blog phase
6 months ago
11 notes

The best party invite I ever received:

St Antony’s Soviet Santa Bop - Saturday 3rd December

Time for the final Bop of the Term…and it’s cold outside…so why not bring back the COLD WAR!!! That’s right, it’s SOVIET SANTA BOP! Ladies, slip on that sexy red Iron Curtain and gentleman bring some bricks because that wall is goin’ up again so we can party on top: XXX-Mass style! It’s the entire CCCP bumpin’ and grindin’ under a big red suburban Christmas lights…and inevitably one dude in a “Dick in a Box” costume.

Santa meets Lenin – Rudolf meets the KV-1 Tank – Frosty the Snowman meets (and is killed by) Stalin – The North Pole meets Siberia – the Christmas tree meets the ICBM – Christmas present meets Sputnik – the mistletoe meets Cuban Missile Crisis – vodka meets even more vodka!

The Data (provided to us by code breakers, satellite imagery, and double-agents)
When: 9pm-1am, December 3rd
Where: The St Antony’s Late Bar (now officially the Soviet Republik of Miloshistan)
Cost: £2 for Antonians, £3 for non-College members
Why: Because if you look really hard, Karl Marx and Santa Claus are totally the same person.

Christmas and the Soviet Union: we’re bringing on the Red Dawn with a military parade and a “Ho Ho Ho!” This ain’t no perestroika party…it’s f*ckin’ SOVIET SANTA

6 months ago

November 23, 2011

THE SEVEN FUNDAMENTALS OF GREAT MUPPET CINEMA

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As a lifelong Muppet obsessive, I awaited the new Muppet movie (which opens today) with a combination of giddiness and dread. Having grown up on the Jim Henson classics (“The Muppet Movie,” “The Great Muppet Caper,” and “The Muppets Take Manhattan”), and then held my nose through the post-Henson missteps (“Kermit’s Swamp Years,” anyone?), I knew that there was perilous room for error.



Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/11/the-seven-fundamentals-of-great-muppet-cinema.html#ixzz1f0mf9dhn

6 months ago

Moscow in the Snow

In the winter, the city is illuminated and alive: restaurants are full, sidewalks are crowded and you can have St. Basil’s Cathedral all to yourself.

6 months ago
32 notes

אלי, אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רישרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם

My God, My God, may this never end:
The sand and the sea,
The rustle of the waters,
Lightening of the Heavens,
The prayer of Man

6 months ago
31 notes
This slideshow, evidently sent from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Silvio Berlusconi about 24 hours after the Italian prime minister’s resignation, was intercepted by Slate, accompanied by this note.  February 2003 Remember when we went to that wildlife preserve? You whined about the cold like a little Ukrainian seal baby. But I still told you, “We are meant to be brothers!” I realized you are a courageous man like me and gave you a furry hat.

This slideshow, evidently sent from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to Silvio Berlusconi about 24 hours after the Italian prime minister’s resignation, was intercepted by Slate, accompanied by this note. 

February 2003

Remember when we went to that wildlife preserve? You whined about the cold like a little Ukrainian seal baby. But I still told you, “We are meant to be brothers!” I realized you are a courageous man like me and gave you a furry hat.

6 months ago
2 notes

What I Didn’t Write About When I Wrote About Quitting Facebook

by Michael Erard

The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.

Joan Linder, “Where Death Delights in Helping the Living,” 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Mixed Greens, NYC.

The first thing I didn’t write about quitting Facebook was a status update to my friends saying, I’m quitting Facebook.

I also did not write a proposal for the nonfiction book I imagined, which was about quitting Facebook. In the book, I would indulge the conceit that my Facebook friends are, actually, my good friends, and that the social network comprises a sort of community when taken as a whole. Then, as one does with one’s friends, I would call each person up or visit them and tell them I was leaving Facebook, which would create an opportunity to talk about Facebook and this whole social media thing, but mainly it would be to get to know something about who they actually were and why we were linked in the first place and what it all might have meant. 

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/what-i-didnt-write-about-when-i-wrote-about-quitting-facebook

7 months ago
13 notes

Had Lars von Trier ever decided to adopt Alice in Wonderland (he would probably have kept her in a sense deprivation tank for some weeks, fed her only raw seafood and blow sad tunes in the shells, but apart from that…) this is what would have happened. Jaromil Jireš’ erotic horror-fantasy will be my justification for learning Czech from now on. Спасибо, Иринок!

7 months ago
Amazon thinks it reads me like an open book. I am not quite sure what I did to deserve Hegel in a very short form for dummies.

Amazon thinks it reads me like an open book. I am not quite sure what I did to deserve Hegel in a very short form for dummies.

7 months ago
7 notes

The “Dance Your PhD” competition at Oxford this year was one by a student who transformed several chapters from his doctoral thesis into a dance show. The surprise element lies not in the competition itself (I would like to make my Russian novels into a dance show, but as a consequence of my dancing skills as well as the content of the books I study it would inevitably involve someone getting fatally hurt), the surprise is the subject of study. Watch in awe as three students explain the mating patterns of fruit flies in a 4 minute dance sequence!

7 months ago
4 notes

I just started working on Bulgakov today. Only to find out that the Master and Margarita is about to be turned into an animated cartoon. With Sing Sing Sing playing in the background. How appropriate. Or inappropriate. I am not sure.