space ocean

In the incarnation of a dvd viewer I was recently rocketed into space to take up residence in a 1970's Russian space station.

SOLARIS.
Tarkovsky.
Outer Space ocean.

Space ocean presents people with the repercussions of their actions not in a*punch* "that'll get ya for what you did to my uncle" way, but in full examine of conscience past and present, and being constantly confronted with conscience and trying to find the right way to be, which doesn't necessarily lead to undoing any bad, any sure feeling you are now doing better, or any reward at all. But you wont be able to live with yourself if you don't do.

Space ocean keeps raising ideas and questions you can entertain yourself with forever and never come any closer to an answer.

Even Tarkovsky's enemies must've bitten their knuckles.

On the back of a pirated dvd of a Tarkovsky collection at Petrivka market he was quoted as saying something like that he wanted this film to give the message that we had to be careful and act in good faith toward all things at all times.

Was space ocean a god? A brain? Or just something that sent out mess-with-your head energy by chance when scientists zapped it with x-rays?

I am only surprised it doesn't have a title as its own specific school of philosophy.

The type in which none of the adherents claim to have any better of an idea of what it is.

The type in which all of the adherents wear a special pendant.

a victim of crime

although i put on a bold font i sit before you as a victim of crime.

but not murder, or this would be a ghost blog.

somebody tried to loosen my attachment to the material world, but not of the possessions that i didnt want anyway.

unfortunately it wasn't confidence tricksters or a shyster in that coin under the walnut shell game, but a comparatively boring burg. But not that boring. The configuration they made with the possessions i didn't want anyway looked pretty jazzy.

cops even came. one did the dust for fingerprints thing. when i saw that everyone except me was allowed to go through the crap that remained it made me really pleased that i wasn't the owner of any kind of self stimulating equipment or substances.

the final verdict was that the thieves "knew what they were looking for".

but even when i am not sure what i am looking for I don't throw absolutely everything in the flat in the middle of the floor. and anyway, what they were looking for was all on one desk, so the cupboards didnt even need to be opened.

that was what criminals probably refer to as a 'superfluous gesture'.

just in case they decide to return to the scene of the crime i have decided to spare them thier energy by not cleaning up, then if they forgot anything last time they will know exactly where it is, and cause no further disturbance.

unfortunately, attempts not to disturb the evidence have meant the dog and i are only free to move in about a one by one and a half metre area of living room, which may not be viable in the long term.

please, if you are out there dear junkies from the 9th floor of my building who hang out on the stairs and apparently monitored my movements, if there is anything you put down for a second and kicked yourself about afterwards, stick a little post it note on the door. i am sure we can come to an agreement.

gone all skypey

My dad wanted to do something spectacular for me and my brother when we were in Prague.
He had the idea of using these modern times better, so that we didnt have to get a phone card and run to a functioning phone booth to get 2 minutes talk time for 10 bucks just to stay in touch.

He is a modern man.

He decided, and he didnt care how much it cost, he was going to buy us a skype.
My mum pointed out that she thinks you can get it on the computer, and that she thinks it is free. "Well, you know what I mean Kate. Lets get them all on the skype."

Keen to share the technological wave my parents are surfing, I did get myself a skype.
Begin: skype mania.

Mum was right, it did come from the net.
You can download all sorts of stuff onto it, mp3s and all that, but you should be careful of viruses. Maybe run a virus scan. In case it has trojan horses on it.

I saved mine as a jpeg onto the hard drive, just to be sure. But actually the only way you can really be sure is to back it up. Or get one of those encryptions.

quirky?

That word got a lot of airtime in describing a glut of post Twin Peaks tv shows that threw unlikely dialogues into the usual soap mix , eg "I am wearing a cat on my head today, please don't bother me".
Luckily this was soon identified as contrived zany, and 'quirky' fell out of fashion again.

Not completely.

It resurfaces so often in written materials about Ukraine that it is odd to see a text without it.

It sure made me excited to move here. The idea of an (albeit impoverished) Wonka -land of amusing characters certainly holds a charm. My antennae were on the alert: for the first couple of months I acted like I was flicking through a giant Where's Wally book, trying to spot the oddity. Yeah, I spotted a few.

But there is of course something problematic about this approach, ie the danger of becoming one of those repugnant hostel types in expensive and incongruous climbing gear, for whom the world performs in anecdotes.

It is worth asking if a quirk highlights disfunction of the quirky or the the banality of the non quirky? Or the lack of 'human' at the core of an esteemed idea of rationality?

I don't want to be the straight man in all of this, but I want to be in all of this. At any rate, Ukraine doesn't hold exclusive rights on eccentricity, but it deserves a mention in the credits.

Who can really predict the weather? And what do we really need to know? Last week for three days running the weather report had the symbol of a question mark. As if the Bureau of Meteorology was sick of all the layman smart mouthing and acknowledged "Look, this week is anyones guess". The good news was that the forth and fifth days had a sun, so everything was going to be alright.

There have been two times where a pair of shoes with nobody in them, stand neatly on the median strip, as if someone was waiting for the traffic to clear and suddenly vanished. But if they had been spirited away, why had the shoes remained? why did the rest of their clothes go invisible but the shoes not? Had they been otherwise naked? Were there any witnesses? By the next day in both cases the shoes had disappeared. Perhaps there had been a time lag in teleportation, like in a long distance phone call, or that the shoes were too heavy and had to be sent in a different parcel.

As is the fashion in lots of places, a mobile operator has put cameras in various cities and you can go on the internet to look at the city square. It is not a live web cam kind of thing , but a series of photos of the town. Kind of. It is clear that he person who posts the photos has to amuse themselves somehow. Or express themselves artistically. At any rate, to communicate something to whoever is trying to get a feel for a city, and doesn't know any other way than to google.ua it. One city has two photos taken at different times of a rainy day. The camera had also been rained on, so it was difficult to see what city it was. But there is atmosphere. In another city a seagull had sat right next to the camera and adopted a number of poses. It looked like there was some kind of town behind the seagull, but lets say it isn't the star of the show.