In Romanian, “firea”, the articulated form of the noun fire, is part of many idioms. It is also the name of the current Bucharest Mayor, who recently had to shamefully backtrack on announcing the winner for a logo contest, due to a likely case of plagiarism. This fickle-mindedness seems to be common to her entire party, PSD, struggling as it is with the conflict between its deep desire to "forget and forgive" cases of corruption and the public commitments, forced by weeks or #rezist protests to the contrary.

The new contest winner (by Alexandru Mihai Nenciu) in the Bucharest logo contest is actually better, in my view, than the previous one (by Narcis Lupou), which had the undesirable distinction of being extremely similar to the Taipei logo and even a little bit like Montreal’s.

The logo shows, in “B”’s vertical bar, a simplified representation of Romanian l’Arc de Triomphe, CEC Palace, Romanian Athenee and National Arena. Personally, I would have left out “Arcul de Triumf” as that’s a copy after Paris, but many Romanians are, for some reason, proud of this copy.

The difficulty in designing a winning logo is not the technical ability or level of proficiency with tools, but rather creativity and vision. Yet most people don’t bother participating in such design contests because they do not consider themselves good enough. In terms of tools, most professional logo designers use Adobe Illustrator (a commercial package), while the cool ones use Inkscape, which is free software. These packages allow you to create vector graphics, which are “resolution-free” (i.e., you can save it at various resolutions with no artifacts). However, you can probably get away with using GIMP or paint.net, also free.

When discussing originality in visual arts, one can allow for involuntary plagiarism, though a designer should use due diligence before submitting their work – reverse picture searches are provided by quite a few engines. With the printed word, things are, however, clearer.

Take, for instance, the plagiarism inside Adevarul (“truth”), a crappy news outfit that traces its roots to the Romanian Communist Party voice of disinformation, Scanteia (“spark”). We’ve covered their idiocy in a previous article and mentioned this plagiarism first in Venus Incident III. There, Ciprian Plăiaşu signs as the author of an article that is more than half identical to one published only a couple of months prior under the name Alexandra Georgescu:

And this goes on and on not just in the Romanian press, but in doctoral theses and published books.

LE: On May 19, he’s also changed his mind on compulsory vaccinations, after Italy (the other country with major epidemic due to anti-vaxxers) committed to same (hn).

The other incident of PSD dithering is Senator Serban Nicolae, who, together with former president Traian Basescu, has voted for an amnesty of corruption. I don’t see Basescu coming back from this one, at least not in my eyes. He’s toast.

In an about-face, Dragnea called Nicolae for a “man-to-man” discussion. I doubt that Dragnea can fool anyone, even though it looks as if “si-a venit in fire” (came to his senses) and now “se prapadeste cu firea” (does his best) to convince us he doesn’t want amnesty.

It’s hard to “pastrezi firea” (keep your cool) these days, when leaders supposedly “in toata firea” (mature) act with so little regard for the common good.

Sources / More info: scribd-lupou, hn-simi, PDF-lupou, hn-dragnea,