Showing posts with label societate. Show all posts

There was a recent showdown in Oscars documentaries between Colectiv and My Octopus Teacher. I rooted for Collective and it reminded me of a long running Italian TV series from my childhood, La Piovra. Caracatita a castigat si traducerea in romana pe FataCarte.

A few weeks ago we celebrated 30 years (10x3 years, man!). A lot of documentaries and retrospectives and I hardly kept up with them. But I did watch a few and learned (or refreshed my memory with) facts I either did not know or had forgotten. I will first list, and then, time-permitting, summarize them.

There is open season on Viorica Dancila, the losing presidential candidate from PSD and former prime-minister of Romania. Today, Monday, she has even renounced the leadership of Socialist PSD, until not long ago the main Romanian party. For a contrarian such as myself, this is the perfect moment to announce my undying love for this misunderstood and not very presentable "prezidentiable".

Hotnews has previously interviewed Romanian diaspora people, which we covered, and we have also been profiling others in the diaspora ourselves. This interview is somewhat new in that the interviewee is "returned" - and we expect to be many more like him in the coming years.

In the past few days, most of the Romanians I know received two important gifts: PSD didn’t win the elections and Dragnea, its [widely considered] corrupt boss, was sentenced to jail and went there shortly thereafter. Though I’m not a Dragnea/PSD fan, I find the celebrations a bit empty. What bugs me is that only one candidate answered my questions re: #EP2019, and I fear that the vast majority of voters never tried to clarify the programme of the candidates they voted for, nor have they tried to interact with them. Let's try to find reasons.

I try to make sense of who voted for whom in this election, and especially who voted for PNL. Surprisingly for me, PNL managed to attract a majority of women / rural / “unoccupied” voters.

Cu exceptia introducerii, acest articol este in limba romana. As promised, I publish the answers received to the questions posed over the past few days with the deadline set on May 15. We did not specify a time for the deadline and as we write this article, it is possible that someone else may be sending us a reply. If that’s the case, comment on this article to let us know.

So many scandals in Romania, so little time. It's hard to decide what to write about. I can't read Romanian news - everything is clickbait and when I try reading something, I invariably find grammar, spelling or logic (or all of the above) mistakes. I choose to write about a "scandal" that happened toward the end of March, because none of the opinions I've read explain what's going on to my level of perception.

One thing about population in Romania that we can all agree on is that it is in free fall. A recent article has revealed to me that, supposedly, the number of Romanians moving out of the city and into the country side is greater than the number of Romanians moving into the city.

Romania seems increasingly divided between the “bad teeth alliance”, pro-government and protesting against the president Iohannis, and a massive, more numerous, happily protesting dancing flash mob who won’t take “corruption is bullshit” for an answer. What irks me is that in the international media coverage, so much is lost in translation.

Romania is once again going through some convulsive protests and it's fun checking out how they are seen on the dark side. I started with Mircea Badea, about whom I’ve written extensively in the past (Romania’s Glenn Beck, censured).

I am beginning to see the limits of my enforced-positivity in terms of absorbing and interpreting the current political events. Yet the political situation in Romania is remarkably similar to what’s happening in USA.

Whenever I talk to Romanians who want to come to Canada and I answer questions, I always end up being a bit upset. I find that people ask me too many simple questions they could answer themselves with Google and too few of the “important” questions. Maybe there’s a guru hiding inside of me, and here’s where I set him free.

About two months ago, Maftei, my math teacher in high school, has passed away (fb-maftei). I felt sorry, and that’s why the expression he used to invite us to the blackboard (“iesi pe straße” or “come out on the straße/street”) found its way in the title of this article, which is about the high-school physics teacher Sever Iosif Georgescu and his (or his kids’?) attempts to erase the negative events of his past. This is the third installment in the Georgescu, Iosif SEVER saga:

Some recent Romanian news led me to consider the possibility that many Romanian men suffer from an undiagnosed affliction: Uterus envy. Let us together discover what that means, and how this was already named “womb envy” by a psychoanalyst named HORNEY.

There was a time when women were dreaming of a “knight in shining armour” but a steady decline in the prestige of shiny things coupled with a long set of economic crises have put an end to those romantic times. Today women seem to want a man who’ll pay and they rely on the State for protection and Facebook and/or Twitter for DIY reputation management (aka PR). A recent article on dating and paying for it (ctch-tspr) reopened a long-forgotten subject, a subject I haven't attacked in a while (since between 12 and 12-B, to be exact), despite a desire and even a plan to do so.

After introducing the reader to a Tutea-like blogger (but without the mandibular shaking, and as a blogger, he writes rather than talks), today I was going to continue the cycle of Alexic Danopathy, as promised. Recently, National Geographic has written at length about Trajan’s Column (research first covered a few months ago), and surprisingly, Alexic Danopathy “scholarship” and research is nowhere to be found there. There’s more to be said, but I got sidetracked by his conversation with someone he calls Tartina Lol (caba-tl). 

My life has more and more strange, scary coincidences. Sure, some are part of the all-encompassing confirmation bias, but some are just out there. Maybe in my search for meaning I get too hung up on serendipitous occurrences, or maybe I'm turning into the bimbo cliché of RomComs who thinks that "everything happens for.. increased productivity". And no, it’s not this beach.

A recent Op-Ed in New York Times seems to have caused a fair amount of consternation in both Romania as well as among my diaspora friends. Ion could equally be Ion Iliescu, recently green-lighted to be re-investigated in the “Mineriada” file, Adrian Nastase, the suicidal former premier and failed presidential candidate who had become the first test case of prosecutorial overreach in the case of an elite aparatchik, or even Patrick Basham, not afraid to confront the warm, fuzzy racism/scepticism/antiziganism-fuelled consensus that Romania is “doing something”.

There are two subjects that seem to dominate the Romanian public sphere (I would say blogo.ro-oaie, but that's defunct): the religion choice in schools and the New York Times Op-Ed on corruption in Romania. I’m very tempted to make a nice hot stew out of both, but I’ll try to keep each to its own article.