Hey, Chumps! There's a New RSS in Town

I see you all still subscribed to this old blog and not re-directing your readers to my new blog.

If you don't correct your ways, you'll miss stories like today's rumination on Central Asian minstrelsy in Russia and the continuing saga of Jimmy the Disco Dancer in my life.

So move your subscription over.

A Good Run

After 22 months, 30,000+ visitors from six out of seven continents, and 240-something posts, MTBE died.

Those waiting for the resurrection should have known that I don't believe in resurrection. But in reincarnation.

Find my scribblings at rotelearning.wordpress.com from now on. Subscribe!

Al Jazeera's People and Power Presents Black Russian

It's a little too sensationalistic for my taste and I could nitpick a number of points, but I AM ON BLOG BREAK.

(h/t to anonymous)

Nice Jewish Girl Falls in Love with Indian Dentist, Leads South American Country

After a long life committed to social justice, Janet Jagan has passed.

From the NYT:

Born Janet Rosenberg in 1920, she was a student nurse at Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern University and the eldest of 11 children of an Indo-Guyanese family of sugar cane workers. His grandparents had arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured laborers.

They married, despite the fierce opposition of her parents, who were Jewish, and in 1943 they moved to British Guiana, where he established a dental practice and they both became involved in radical politics. In 1950, they founded the People’s Progressive Party, and in 1953, in elections under a new Constitution providing greater home rule, Dr. Jagan became chief minister. But the Jagans’ Marxist ideas aroused the suspicions of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sent warships and troops to topple the new government. The Jagans were jailed.

...

After her husband died in 1997, she ran for president and won. At campaign rallies, her followers respectfully called her “bhowji,” a Hindi term meaning “elder brother’s wife.” But her government was plagued by street protests and tension with the opposition People’s National Congress.

After a mild heart attack in 1999, Mrs. Jagan stepped down, opening the way for her Moscow-educated finance minister, Bharrat Jagdeo, to become president, a position he still holds.

In that part where there is an ellipsis above is a complete simplification and mess-up-ification of Guyanese history. I imagine that someone (not it!) should write a spirited letter to the editor at the NYT.

(For a quick slice of Guyana and Cold War history, check out the Jagans back in the day in the footage here. To really get to know more, you might start with the book reviewed here and move on to things like this and this.)

Now back to my renewal efforts. This blog is still, technically, on pause.

Dry Spell

I've hit one.

Looking for things that are haunting, inspiring, bizarre and refreshing.

Music, art, holes in the wall, the unexpected.

MTBE is on pause, pending results.

Russian Rap Friday: Optik Russia Presents New Russian Standard

Taking the aggressiveness of Onyx and sprinkling in a bit of Wu-Tang ensemble myth-making, German label Optik Russia ups the ante with New Russian Standard:

South Texas Vacation Notes

1. My friend says, "Let's go get some breakfast tacos!" He means to take me here:


2. My untrained, picked-up-here-and-there Spanish does fine here when it comes to ordering two different types of tacos and it even works when I have to make a substitution because they ran out of chorizo.

3. Later on the same day, said Spanish (in)competency does not cut the mustard when I have to run into a gas station after the radiator hose on my friend's custom-built Shelby Cobra blows off. No problem getting water, but the phrase "large flathead screwdriver" proves a little more difficult. Help comes in the form of a bilingual man wielding three tall Budweisers, Clamato and lime-flavoring packets.

4. When wandering around the local public university in search of an air hockey table, I see this sign in the middle of a fountain. I am told not to be surprised.

5. It is not uncommon for buildings to get in the way of cars in South Texas.

Russian Rap Friday: Noize MC

He's kinda obvious, but likable all the same:





And live, indy-rock style, near Arbat:

Ethnic Violence in Russia: 2008 Numbers by Reader Request

A reader writes in:

...for my undergrad thesis I am doing foreign migration's influences on hate groups in Russia. I am going to make a chart, but I cannot find the number injured or the number killed, and/or the total for 2008. Usually the SOVA center published yearly stats, but I can't find them anywhere on the site. I would like to use this source because all of my other stats come from SOVA as well.

SOVA has published this information here, but it's only available in Russian. Here's a quick translation of the basic findings into English, for you and other readers who might be interested:

In 2008, there were no fewer than 525 victims of racist and xenophobic violence; 97 of these victims were killed. These numbers are minimal estimates of violence, excluding incidents occurring in the north Caucasus, massive brawls, attacks with a financial motive and assaults involving the use of a firearm (except in instances where racist motives were declared by law enforcement agencies), and other types of dispute-related altercations.

...

Overall, in 2008, racist and neo-Nazi attacks were recorded in 44 regions. The main centers of violence, as before, are the Moscow (57 murders and 196 injuries) and St. Petersburg (15 murders and 38 injuries) regions. After a two-year break, neo-Nazis have become active again in Voronezh (2 murders and 18 injuries), once again taking third place in these miserable ratings.

...

The main victims of xenophobic aggression are natives of Central Asia (49 murders, 108 injuries) and the Caucasus (23 murders, 72 injuries). However, for those with non-Slavic features, there is no insurance against racist attacks, nor are representatives of leftist youth movements or alternative youth subcultures (punks, goths, emos, etc.) safe, as neo-Nazis consider them "traitors to the white race."

The report goes on to list examples of everyday racism, vandalism and other manifestations of xenophobia and extremism, followed by comparative tables at the bottom of the post.

Anyway, good luck with that thesis, dear reader! And if you get a chance, I'd love to see the results as would, I imagine, other MTBE readers. So keep us posted, okay?

Tajikistan in Crisis: On the Ground Reporting

Journalist Ilan Greenberg and photographer Carolyn Drake are in the middle of a series of reports from Tajikistan over at Untold Stories.

The first report on life in and around Dushanbe is mix of typical dire-situationist journalism with touristy-impressionism:

The countryside is wracked by devastating problems – from catastrophic water and energy shortages to rampant child labor practices in the cotton fields to jobless villages where Tajik men returning from Russia face unending unemployment.

And then:

The grass is still yellow and chalky from the dry winter and leaves have yet to take hold on trees, but the muddy-red mountains ringing Dushanbe are beautiful. Women in traditional, cheery, and colorful Tajik coats walk the sidewalks. The roads are pleasantly dominated by vans --new and quiet, privately-run and Chinese-made vans-- a gift from the Chinese government. The small-wheeled vehicles furiously ferry people around this otherwise slow paced, even laconic city. The Chinese are also building new roads and tunnels and Dushanbe has a lot of new Chinese restaurants. There's a zippy vibe to the place.

The next post from Greenberg and Drake focuses on resource issues and expat bars, followed by a little story of trying to cross over into Afghanistan.

A longer piece by Greenberg has also gone up over at Slate with scary buzzwords like destabilization, crime, and terror; as the writer probes deeper into the Tajik provinces, he signals imminent danger by noting that "cell phone coverage had evaporated."

(This last bit has me wondering about how long it will be until some whipper-snapper grad student publishes an article on "'Cells': Space, Terror and Mobile Phone Reception as a Device in 21st-century Journalism and Popular Culture." Not it.)

Like the gimmicky photo reproduced above, the reporting is a little cliche, but there are some worthwhile on-the-ground details.