Pay it Forward Soviet-style

Remember Misha, the Soviet Olympic mascot?

Here’s another example that in the Soviet Union the good things were good: The animated short film “Thank you!” by Vladimir Tarasov.

It’s very Soviet, but in a good way. Three children fly in a plane, enjoy the flight and thank the pilot. The pilot is flattered, but he suggests them to thank the engineer who designed the plane, so they do. The engineer is hinted to be Jewish, and he’s smoking a cigarette while designing the plane—in the 1970s nobody complained that depicting smoking is dangerous to children. The engineer suggests the children to thank the factory workers who built the plane. The factory worker turns out to be Georgian and is depicted as an orchestra conductor; he suggests the children to thank the forgery worker who made the metal for the plane.

The forgery worker, who turns out to be Ukrainian, and even says a couple of Ukrainian words, suggests the children to thank the miner who brought the ore to the forgery. The miner suggests to thank the geologist, who found the ore. And the geologist suggest to thank the pilot, who brought him from Moscow to the far easy, where he found the ore.

As with many Soviet animated films, this one is both simple and arty.

Possible censorship of Putin and Medvedev’s names on Russian television

Here’s a somewhat curious story: The Russian TV channel NTV showed a performance by the rock band “Leningrad”, which is famous for incorporating many Russian expletives in its lyrics. The expletives were censored by beeping, which is the usual and expected practice, comparable to beeping on words like “fuck” in American TV. The surprise in this performance, however, was that the names of president Putin and prime minister Medvedev, who were mentioned in the song, were censored the same way. The name of the the Church of Christ the Savior, which recently became famous as the stage of Pussy Riot’s notorious performance, was partly censored as well, although the name “Pussy Riot” itself was not censored.

NTV started out in the early 1990s as one of Russia’s first independent TV channels, but now it’s controlled by the Kremlin.

Here’s the original story at Lenta.ru in Russian. The only thing in English I could find about it, was this story, which is probably machine-translated. So I made a rough edited version so the English would be readable. It’s a reaction of the NTV host and of the former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi to the incident:

“Quacking’ over the names of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev during the performance of the band “Leningrad” on NTV was irony, not an act of censorship. On this, as reported by RIA Novosti , December 10, told the host Vadim Takmenev. “We thought it was a funny trick in this song, so here it was sung openly with a giant duck will quack over the names of the president and the prime minister and the famous building with a dome,” – said Takmenev. He expressed regret that no one understood self-irony. The words “Putin” and “Medvedev” were masked duck quacking during the performance of Sergei Shnurov’s song “Moscow” in the program “CCTV” on December 9. Some cursing was masked, too. Many media saw this as an act of censorship. Meanwhile, according to Vadim Takmenev, if the purpose was censorship, the authors of the program would have chosen a different way: “The options were a few – well, for example, ask the “Leningrad” to sing the song in a more ethereal version. There was an option to score the words that are now all the talk , the names of two people, the music, so no one noticed… Or we could do the song and not put it on the air. If it would be about a censorship. What prevents us to throw this song?” Takmenev also noticed that topical songs on the air has been retained, and by “Leningrad” no questions to transfer arose. The presenter also said that accusations of censorship to the management of NTV in connection with the release of “Central Television” in any case unfounded, since the program is in the external production.

Earlier on Monday, President of the Foundation “Russian Television Academy,” the former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi said that the names of Putin and Medvedev have been removed from the air legally, as is the norm in the law on the protection of the dignity of the president. He did not see political implications in the actions of the authors of ” Central Television”.

Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2012, Almaty – intro

The first Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Almaty, the largest city of Kazakhstan was held last weekend.

Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2012 logo by Batyr Hamzauly. The design of the "TWC" letters is based on Old Turkic runes. licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Turkic?

“Turkic” refers to Turkic languages. The most prominent Turkic language, in terms of number of speakers and international awareness of its existence is Turkish, the main language of Turkey. There are, however, many more such languages; Most of them are spoken in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union, and a few are spoken in China, Afghanistan and other countries.

There first sign of this conference was given in Jimmy Wales’ closing speech of Wikimania 2011 in Haifa. By coincidence, in the same speech Jimmy’s pointer broke down, so I came up on the stage to push the button that moves the slides for him. At some point he asked me not to go too fast, and then he praised Rauan Kenzhekhanuly – the head of WikiBilim, a Kazakh association of people who contribute to Wikipedia, which expanded the Kazakh Wikipedia by many thousands of articles. He was so impressed by their activities that he promised his support for holding a regional Wikimedia conference, and now it happened.

Even though Russian is not a Turkic language, it is the most common language for the majority of the conference participants. As I am one of the few Wikimedia Foundation who speaks it, I was invited there.

Why and how to write Wikipedia in your language

At the conference I delivered several talks. The first was one of the opening keynote speeches – “Why you should write Wikipedia in your language”. In the talk I repeated my usual thesis – writing content and developing software in your native language rather than in a major language is important not just because of nationalism, politics or ideology, but simply because many people don’t know major international languages and thus they cannot access information if it’s written only in a language they don’t know. Before this talk I was told that even in Kazakhstan, where most people know Russian, native Kazakh language speakers often find it easier and more natural to read in Kazakh, especially when it comes to textbooks in schools and universities, and this went along perfectly with what I tried to present.

In that talk I also mentioned practical things that can help people to write in their languages and to join the global Wikimedia community – our mailing lists and our language support tools.

To make it more entertaining and memorable, I said a few words in Hebrew to give the audience the feeling of bewilderment when encountering a foreign language, and told people to stand up and sit down if they know this or that language. Beyond having fun, this little game also had a practical purpose: I delivered most of this talk in Russian and I wanted to make sure that everybody understands me. People from Turkey and other non-Russian-speaking countries were present in the audience and even though there was simultaneous translation into English, I wasn’t completely sure that they understand me. People laughed and applauded, so I guess that it worked.

My answer to the question “will Wikipedia ever carry advertising” was “NO”. This also received thunderous applause.

To be continued…

Glasnost

In 1988 i was an eight years old boy in Moscow. That was the time of “Glasnost” – “Transparency”, the policy of unprecedented freedom of speech and openness in the Soviet Union. A lot of American films and songs suddenly appeared on television. One of them was Blondie’s “Union City Blue” (Flash):

I knew a little English and understood the word “union”, so i thought that it’s a song about the Soviet Union. “Americans must really love us, if this pretty woman sings such a beautiful melody about our country”, i thought.

International Phonetic Alphabet WIN

You love the International Phonetic Alphabet, do you? I mean, everybody loves the International Phonetic Alphabet. You know, these funny weird letters that tell you that the pronunciation of Eyjafjallajökull is [ˈɛɪjaˌfjatl̥aˌjœkʏtl̥].

But seriously, if you didn’t study Linguistics or didn’t at least study in a school in Russia, where English pronunciation is taught using the IPA, then you probably hate the International Phonetic Alphabet. In fact, chances are that you hate the International Phonetic Alphabet even more if you did. It’s weird, it’s hard to read unless you practiced for many months, it’s impossible to type and common computer fonts don’t support it well.

But people in the world of Free Software don’t like to reinvent the wheel. That’s why the developers of Mozilla Firefox, for example, strive to support defined standards, unlike the developers of Microsoft Internet Explorer who (officially) try to play nicely with existing websites and “not to break the web”. And that’s why Wikipedia chose to write all pronunciations in the International Phonetic Alphabet – because it’s an accepted standard, which is in principle common to all languages. Prof. Asher Laufer of the Hebrew University, a member of the International Phonetic Association, praises Wikipedia for deciding to stick to the IPA in all articles in his textbook “Chapters in Phonetics and Phonetic Transcription”.

But there’s still the problem with the fonts. There are Free fonts that support the IPA well, most notably Charis SIL, but unfortunately it is not included with Windows, even though it is Free and beautiful. So if you use Windows to browse Wikipedia, you may see IPA pronunciations not as they should look. The fonts support in Windows XP is quite broken; it’s better in Vista and Windows 7, but still imperfect. So you should download and install Charis SIL. Until today, however, even if you would install it, correct display of IPA wouldn’t be guaranteed, because different browsers made weird and inconsistent decisions about the font selection.

So here’s the WIN: I opened a bug asking to make Wikipedia display IPA consistently in different browsers on Windows, and Derk-Jan Hartman, a.k.a TheDJ, very quickly fixed it! Thank you, Derk-Jan Hartman.

Avatar

So what’s the deal about this Avatar thingy? Some people say that it’s amazing and groundbreaking. Some critics say that it is so bad that it can hardly be called “cinema”. Russian paleoconservative communists say that Cameron should be executed for ripping off the plots of classic Soviet science fiction novels, by which they probably want to say that it is good.

All the images that i’ve seen from this movie look like screenshots of an early-00′s 3d video game, such as Black & White. It was a very good game, but it doesn’t convince me that it will work so well as a movie.

Social networking

“Facebook sells a 1.96% stake to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn.”

In Soviet Russia the book faces you.

Hmm, actually it’s a good thing.

Reality – Original Israeli

“Original Israeli Music Line. Leonid Ptashka, Marina Maximilian Blumin.”

Ptashka was born in Baku and Blumin in Dnipropetrovsk.

I love this country so much.

Finger itches in the hair

When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.

“The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism”, V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 113

More Soviet Animation

Contact—This should be Ian Brown’s favorite animated film. The creators stole the theme from “Godfather” and based on it a short film about contact between an earthman and an alien. Avantgarde and funny.

Hedgehog in the Fog—The title says it all. If you think that it doesn’t say much, you are right. This beautiful short film has a lot of dialogue in Russian and it is translated, but don’t try too hard to understand the plot. Just enjoy the visuals.

There Once Was a Dog—before Russians and Ukrainians hated each other they made lovely colorful movies about each other. The fat wolf breaking through the fence is one of the most unforgettable moments of my childhood.

Film Film Film (part 1), Film Film Film (part 2)—Like “Ograblenie po…”, this is another masterpiece of “film about film”, a love poem to the cinema industry. The director running on the ceiling at 8:20 of part 2 is another unforgettable childhood moment.