Serena, legenda, (...)

Serena a fost de atata timp si inca este numarul 1 mondial dintr-un singur motiv, sa fie clar: pentru ca a muncit mai mult decat oricare alta jucatoare de tenis pe teren azi.
Serena a trebuit sa se ridice deasupra conditiei de persoana de culoare dintr-o America a anilor '80, a trebuit sa invete tenis pe terenuri acoperite de cioburi, a trebuit sa cerseasca mingi de tenis de la cluburi de tenis.

Serena nu este un tanc, nu este un Goliath, este o persoana. Este o femeie cu aceleasi vulnerabilitati ca celalalte femei, care trebuie sa indure toate aceste insulte, sa se ridice deasupra lor si sa faca toate aceste eforturi sa para ca si cum nu se chinuie. Data viitoare cand o comparati pe miniona Halep cu tancul Serena, puneti-va in locul Serenei, sau mai bine, imaginati-va copilul vostru in locul Serenei.
Atat de puternica si de admirat este aceasta Serena!

Daca vrem sa amplificam succesul Simonei si sa aducem un plus de respect Romaniei, pe langa cel adus individual de Simona, numai si numai prin munca ei si a familiei ei, haideti sa ne ridicam si noi la inaltimea momentului si sa nu ne purtam ca o tara mica ce inteapa cu un ac un imperiu, ce se bucura exagerat de succese sporadice in diverse domenii. Romania nu a facut nimic in sensul punerii unor baze in sport sau orice alt domeniu, ca sa zicem ca Halep e doar inceputul. Halep este doar o exceptie.

Asa ca bucurati-va ca aveti ocazia sa vedeti un roman jucand cu o legenda vie si lasati ura deoparte pentru acest meci.
Nu "Bafta, Simona!", ci "Munceste, Simona!"

Why shouldn't we slaughter dolphins?

You will say I've become a bit obsessed with this subject of saving the dolphins, but to me, this just doesn't add up to the life we live in the 21st century. It's unacceptable.
Yes, we have starving children in Africa and decapitations in Saudi Arabia. That also should not be 21st century, but that is humans responsible for other humans, it's a totally different subject, it's very complicated. But this... this is simple. It's a bunch of "humans" murdering intelligent animals for money, which they don't truly need and for food, which they don't actually eat.

    Why shouldn't we slaughter dolphins?

I will not make the case here not to kill any animals (although...), because i currently eat meat; and I won't make it like a 10-commendments thing either, I just want you to realise this for yourself:

1. Animals with self-awareness. There is a limited number of species with proved self-awareness, like chimpanzees, elephants, some cetaceans (killer whales /bottlenose dolphins) and a few others. I would say this makes them pretty special by itself. They realise they exist in this world and they realise they can be seen by others and they want to fit in and so on. Chimps are taught the sign language and when they have kids they teach it to them; parrots are not just memorising words, they can understand them and use them in sentences. I would say that's pretty human like.

The counter argument to this would be that i am being "racist" and i accept murdering of other species just because they are not smart and they are not human-like. That is true, i am being "racist" in this case, but we have to start somewhere, and i chose to start with those cases where animals realise what we are doing to them.
When you steal a baby killer whale from their parents and then you release the parents, the parents won't run away. They will follow you and wait for you to return their baby and communicate with him, while you're dragging him away to an aquarium or worse.

2. The "cute and cuddly" reasoning. I heard this reasoning a few times lately and it basically says that activists for the "Save the dolphins" movement favour the cute and cuddly animals and they don't really care for the other species, like sharks.

Me, I support the "cute and cuddly" reasoning, but only from the human mind perspective. What i am saying is that objectively, this shouldn't matter. After all, killer whales are pretty killery. However, you have to be pretty sick in the head to murder the family dog for food, after he's been your companion for so long, after he was waiting for you when you came home from work and he played with your kid and he rested his head on your stomach when your stomach ached.
Very much like that, I consider the human race to be pretty sick in the head to slaughter dolphins, after you saw Flipper (bad thing, but it made you happy), after they splashed you at Seaworld (bad thing, but it made you happy) and after you trained them to help autistic kids (still a bad thing but it made your autistic kid happy).
Also, sharks are not that smart, they are basically driven by instinct. Still, it is a wild animal and shouldn't be killed just so some can have their fancy shark fin soup.

There's much more to say but that's all I had to say for now and if you want to help, just don't go to SeaWorld or any aquarium that has dolphins/killer whales and make other people aware of this.

If you want to help even more, you can visit http://www.dolphinproject.org and you can sign a petition or donate. You can also watch several movies and read several books on this subject, here's a few:
The Cove   Blackfish   Death at SeaWorld

Still LIVESTRONG

Photo courtesy of simplyRobin

Say some one tells you that you could save the lives of thousands, tens of thousands of people. That you could inspire hundreds of thousands of people to overcome their struggle or their close ones' struggle with cancer. That you could inspire millions of people to start running, cycling, "just do" something with their lives.
But all that will have to come at a price, at your own expense. You would have to become a sports hero, using illegal methods.
Would you still do those beautiful inspiring things by cheating?.............................................................................................................................................

Would you kill Hitler when he was still an innocent person at 19 years old? Would you stop the use of placebo medicine, just because in itself it is a deceitful medicine?

I am not saying that the answer to those questions is yes or no. It's just something to think about.

At the same time I'm not suggesting that that's what Lance Armstrong was thinking before conquering the cycling world. Actually almost definitely this was not his first thought, however... in the end, the good has been done.

My biggest disappointment with Lance Armstrong is that, even though I always knew in the back of my mind that he wasn't clean, he did not just deny the doping accusations. He was adamant against them and he went to incredible lengths to support his status. But that's probably also partly attributed to his arrogant, cocky persona.

Also the fact that he did not feel he wasn't doing anything wrong at the time, might sound ridiculous to some, but it certainly doesn't to anyone who knows a thing or two about cycling. Doping was and still might be as "water in their bottles" and "air in their tires" to the cyclists and most probably no cyclist in the Tour, at least in those times, could not consider himself as entirely innocent. So if you call Armstrong a big lie, might as well call the whole sport of professional cycling a big lie. However I can't and I still think it's a beautiful sport and I love it.

When I was younger, I read his book "It's not about the bike" (a title which coming from his mouth sounds ironic these days). It was my first online purchase ever, it was the first and only book that inspired me at that level to be a good and a fair person and to try to achieve something great.
I am one of those persons that do not possess that natural great drive to continuously work towards achievement of goals, I'm known to slack from time to time and I need these type of incentives to keep me going. His book and himself were and still are one of those incentives.

Whenever I go cycling indoor or outdoor I still wear his US Postal t-shirt in which he won his first Tour de France, a t-shirt that I've bought during a trip to London with the colossal sum for me back then of 75pounds, approximately a third of my allowance for that trip. Whenever I get out of a saddle to climb a small hill, I sometimes look back, as if I'm Lance looking back at Jan Ullrich on the Alpe d'Huez before attacking and when i look down to my shirt, I can still see his necklace going left and right in the rhythm of his upbeat pedaling.
Those are images that stayed with me and still motivate me after all these years and no one can take them away from me, no doping scandal, no confession and certainly no number of people who think the world is strictly split into good and bad, throwing rocks at him.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the emotions, the hype, the pounding of the heart when he won a climb  or when for the first time he couldn't keep up on a climb, the feeling that you can reach the moon... those were real... they still ARE.

So for all these, I felt that I needed to write this and say "Thank you, Lance!"

as i was saying

what you do in this life, does matter! this is a sentence that has been following me for a long time and always when i heard it it made my guts move around inside of me... and that is because i knew somewhere deep inside that this sentence holds some truth with it and i also knew that i am not treating this life as i should... i was treating it as if we're nothing but a quark in the infinity of the universe and we don't matter so what's the point of really trying to make the best out of this life...

right now in front of you, in front of the whole internet i declare NO MORE!... i have changed in the past month like i haven't changed in 26 years of life and it's in the best way possible and i have a most special person to thank for this... i won't say any names, because names wouldn't do justice...

therefore i have even changed the title of my blog and i am no longer imaginary... i now feel i exist and i feel that with this change i will be better in everything i do... but i will let you be the judge of that... for now i won't post any new photos because i am too busy absorbing life with the underestimated duo of eyes and brain, which is far better than any camera!

self-help from someone else

It's true! i know u can't believe it, but it's true. i can improve myself. i don't mean that i actually can, but there is room for improvement. and it's possible that the only way to do it is to compromise and express my feelings in the raw shape in which they're born in my mind. in my mind... in my mind.... and i say "compromise" because my raw thoughts would hurt a lot of people... they would make some people cry, they would make some of them laugh, and some of them go "hmm"... especially john tickle.... but it would certainly make some of them beat the shit out of me and we wouldn't want to ruin me pretty face now, would we?

so what should i do? should i say or should I draw?... should i jpeg or should i raw?...

this article is based on andrei (not me), a guy, a true story, a stig, an esteemed collegue of a true artist.. and this guy, story, stig says... u could be better: don't use the english in your stories, just spice them up with it....

mmm... considering this as the first step in improving myself i would have to say no... i love writting in english, because
a: i am no patapievici with romanian words
b: if u're no patapievici with words, my writting in romanian would sound like rudarel singing led zeppelin...

deci, in concluzie, i prefer writting in english and spice it up with romanian and i prefer to stay at this level, sounding like a semidoct... a snob above the average... a noblesse oblige lookalike... a masculine lolita pille...

andrei did give me a push to start improving myself, so the next thing i'm gonna do is beeing more honest to me, to you, to all my closest friends... but not to the world... because as we've learned in a previous post, sharing your feelings with the world is a faux pas... but beeing dead honest in a more restricted environment can be refreshing...

and on this bombshell, it's time to end... (did it make more sense now?)

Rotterdam on a noisy august day

Some would spend hours admiring a rembrandt... others would spend their day laying down on the grass thinking about how blessed they are that they're hippies... me... just show me a beautiful bridge and i'm a happy happy man!

" I stole Rossi's bike and he can't catch me hehe... they sent him directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 25 points!"

Nelson Piquet on the Renault F1 car on a roundabout in the center of Rotterdam

Today i write about dolphins

Today i write about these inspiring creatures who actually do make you feel like there's more to them than making kids laugh... they seem to know more than we do, with that smug smile on their faces, don't they?... even though when you look at them and you say they're so friendly they would never harm you, i can never stop thinking that best thieves never look like thieves.
What if some day they will say: "goodbye and thanks for all the fish" :) whilst they launch an attack on people who bathe in the shallow waters, an attack that would make sharks go "daaamn"... that would be too obvious... but what if one day, while doing a double tulup with a screw they will unveal some major secret on us.. like in the end of "the sixth sense" or like in "matrix"...
to be honest... i really think that's possible, i really think that dolphins can one day make all your history, all your knowledge about mathematics and all your accomplishments become absolete...
a dolphin can make stephen hawking pretty effortlessly look like a horseshoe... which is not far
and on that bombshell it's time to end.

The greatest encore that ever lived - part I

I was telling u about the smashing smashing pumpkins.. well here they are for you to half understand how awsome they are.. be patient and listen to the entire three parts.
Here it is - "Gossamer"!

The greatest encore that ever lived - part II

The greatest encore that ever lived - part III

The smashing Smashing pumpkins

a minute ago i had 15 rows written here about the concert, and it was all rubbish.. and you know why, because i am a rubbish writer and as the arctic monkeys singer said between songs... jklasdflkjalk;jjfalskf...

one thing i have to say... the festival lived up to its expectations: good music, rain, feet that hurt, lives that made u forget about the feet... But the smashing pumpkins, well they blew my expectations away, out of the orbit of the earth, past the moons of mars...and bla bla.. here are some pics:

The Queen

First i recommand that you go see the movie instead of reading this. This is just a vulgar, rough opinion of mine, the movie is a dignified opinion of true brits.

At first I liked this movie. It was good. But after thinking about it, i was wrong. Because it actually was very good.
It's not neccessarly a movie about Queen Elizabeth II and it's not a movie about Lady Di either. I guess you could call it a movie about how people change, how culture in people is not the same as it was, say 50 or 100 years ago. And i mean that in the bad way.
Of course, it's a movie from the point of view of the royal family, but pretty flawless in my opinion. It's in the same time a slap on the press' and on the common people's cheek as it is a small black ball on the royal family's side.
The royal family was most criticised about how they were never open to diane's death and never showed their feelings on this. They explain it by how they grief in silence and not in public. Of course that the grief part might not be entirely true, but it's also true that you're not supposed to do this kind of thing in public, you need to keep your dignity intact in these kind of moments. In the end they caved in to the public's and tabloid's wishes to have a public funeral, a funeral at which all the celebrities were invited. Are you kdding me people? elton john got the best selling song at the funeral and a whole bunch of other freaks were invited there. And you know what's the sad part. I know it's wrong to say this but Diane might have actually liked this. This is what sets her appart from the royal family. The vulgarity of the modern man keeps him from understanding that dignity is a very noble trait of people, which seems to get lost faster and faster these days and i blame the american movies which lure you to say what is it that's on your heart. It's ok for us to put our feelings in a movie for the whole world to see it, it's ok to make millions from the songs from my heart, it's ok to show all the fucking time that you're sad, happy, gay, bi, wifeloving, flowerloving, niggerhating, bushhating, sorry for your sorry ass, they say it's even ok for a man to cry when he's puppy got hit by a bus. No it's not fucking ok, it's vulgar! no i haven't got the wrong word, it's vulgar, stop sharing your silly feelings to the world all the time and start having some dignity for crying out loud!
If you've got nothing to say that's worth a quarter of a shakespearian feeling than shut up!
And that's also where the royal family made a mistake and stopped being royal and also made a bigger mistake, brought the english people to the same level as the others. Because of that i now know that they're only a few true brits left in the world. The royal family actually caved in to the prospect of losing the monarchy and didn't have the guts to go out like true royals.
Now what i wrote here, is not dignifying, but i made this sacrifice for all of you who cried at the end of that august to understand. I felt sorry too then , but i was 15, what was your excuse?

PS: And if the high class americans try to get closer to the royal habbits of the brits, by sucking up to them and giving the Oscar to Helen Mirren, they should try harder. They did in the end gave the oscar to a true american movie, The Departed. So if you tell me that "yes, mozart is pretty good, but we're still going to recognize madonna", i don't really buy it! They should understand these movies are from different categories, and while i had a blast at "The Departed", i silently enjoyed and applauded inside of me "The Queen".

Storm

Microscopical sparks fly around following the fast reel retreat of the fishing rod... orange and grey, all sails are downed... white and blue, the rudder is strongly turned; while she's hit by the first wave, the boat faces a different kind of horizon... black and black.

A wind gust tries to fix my hair, the sensation of one miligram of water on my hand, a drop of water falls on the glass of my watch and breaks into five... millions of drops of water wait to fall on me.

A breath of wind plays with the thorns of a wired fence fallen to the ground, a highway of ants connects two trees, nothing of this can be seen from twenty thousand feet above the ground; from this height... it takes a bit over a minute for me to touch the ground together with billions of raindrops.

A colour begins to be distinguished, the reflexion of light on the wave that left in its path a destroyed vessel, the first attempt of a woman to cross the Pacific and the world with one of the most beautiful tales - July 8th 1976

Five minutes of rain way below expectations, the remains of a twenty year old storm, the last outbreak of the most powerful storm - October 23rd 2006

I race the rain to the ground, i can't keep up, in front of me billion of raindrops hit the earth simultaneously with the power of ten nuclear bombs. The water swaps places with the cloud dust which has risen above the plain... October 24th 2006, the most powerful storm... in my imagination...

Strip down to your soul!

I feel like i'm getting old by still liking Vama Veche. Everybody seems to advance along with the times, only I and a bunch of other misfits would seem we can't let go of the past. People my age think so, people your age think so, even my grandma' thinks vama veche are of the past. Only that I think you're all wrong.
I think you're the ones that are of the past. Only in the past people moved with the flow, ignoring the fact that what they had at the time was better compared to a seemingly better but false future.
Only in the past people moved from rock to disco, gas engines to diesel engines, weed to ecstasy, Concorde to Airbus A380. Today, in the future, we, people of the next, stick with what is beautiful, what is best.
Back to my first sentence, Vama Veche still strike a cord of my emotianal part, they're still the ones that sing from the heart and actually, if you can believe this, i can't think of any other romanian band that sings about sad things anymore... well at least not the way they do. We should stop caring for a moment about the originality of the future and maybe think how to fuel our future with things that we actually love, and things that make us happy. "We have to go back and wait for our souls to catch up with us" an old movie quote used to say. Well, i think that when it comes to eveything that is artistic it's very utterly true.
Undress yourself of the thick cover which is your stylish way of life, your care of not looking good in front of your friends, the coldness in your eyes towards people you don't know and... show me your soul!

Noblesse Oblige the Departed

On my way to work i listened to the whole new noblesse oblige album "Privilege Entails Responsibility"... i had to, they had a perfect start from the commercial point of view. They are the burgeois rich kid style, semi-cult to cult, doing drugs during the day, then trying to understand the night, hating the petty common people, driving their rav4 on all 6 lanes of the champs elysees, the lolita pille "hell"stupid cunt style, so to sum up, everything i like, everything i wanna be...

All they had to do was come up with a decent album and they would've rise up quickly in my likings. They failed miserably, but still, their image is so perfect i will wait for their emancipation.

On the other hand, "The Departed" is such a 8.75 movie on my 1 to 10 scale. And let me tell you, it's been a while since a movie ranked so high for me. Martin Scorsese never really shook my movie cords, maybe except the aviator and raging bull. I still have a small disappointement that the movie could have been better, close to perfect, if scorsese wouldn't have exagerated things a bit in the end...and maybe a bit in the middle too... he did exactly what nicholson tends to do towards the end of his life, exagerate, make funny faces, too funny faces... there are scenes where he's more a clown than an actor and everybody says at those moments: "god he's so good!"... bullshit... he could be so good if he doesn't pull that stuff... the star of the movie was by far leonardo dicaprio which like scorsese he's reached a close to perfection status, the difference is that scorsese is at the end of his career, while dicaprio is not.

Go see the movie in a movietheater! It's well worth it!

futureligion

i'm sick of commercials starting with "imagine a world where technology..." well fine, i'm doing it...
it is pretty obvious to me that technology and religion cannot coexist. Sure we've all seen nuns dancing to the beat impregnated by the ipod headphones into her prayer friendly eardrums and why not, if not you, i've seen laptops giving the alarm call for morning prayers and simulating the priest in a muslim_prayer.exe file. Sure this cannot go for much longer, and since religion had its turn, u can see where i'm going...
but is this good? where is this future taking us...i believe that technology is moving kind of fast, and even if we didn't get flying cars by year 2000 like spielberg and vernes predicted, we can duplicate people, we can fly two times the speed of sound, we have mobile phones which play music and videos and go on the net and we even have illuminating headphones which light to the beat....... and we're progressing exponantially, we start caring less about reliability and we're more and more concerned about the next step without being sure of the present step. We want more power, more precision, more future, less present.
At this pace things will evolve really fast and we might even get closer to the great answer for "what is our purpose in life?". But i'm afraid we're gonna reach for it like a prisoner is reaching through the bars of its cell to a key three meters further and as we bend the bars through the power of our technology, the lack of reliability might straighten them when we're getting out head first and we might get blown into the past in a thousand million of a second.
So what do i think of this future, where cars will go three times the speed of light but might disintegrate at a "speed hump" and we die? what do i think of a future, where computers could make the earth turn the other way at the glance of F2 key?...
I say BRING IT ON!!!... but quicker, we don't have much left to live and i want to see the end of the world before i die.

Days of Thunder

Remember, remember the fifth of november: gunpowder, treason and plot...tons of horsepower, minuscule ride heights and air vents the size of airbus' flights, air vents which according to a good "friend" of mine are ment to suck toddlers in to give a boost to the beasts... but i don't really believe him.

We all loved the guy with the "get out of jail free" card that drove the orange porsche and the couple that got their hands on the merc gt cls with the "accelarate in straight lines only just like my grandma' " driving style and of course the priceless moment when a touareg got lost on the track on his way to the mall.
But this was just a preview for things to come... next may, the 20th, fia gt will bring its first race to "Bucharest Ring"... how does that sound?... my thoughts exactly...

eminem vs eminescu vs bucurenci

i had beautiful thoughts stacked in my mind;
i had photos i wanted to show the world stacked in my computer;
i even had a bad case of cold stacked in my lungs... but did all these wonderful things make me wanna create a blog? well some of them almost, but the thing that made me create it in the end was anger... anger stacked in my soul.
i didn't wanna give the name of the blithering idiot that made me write this, dragos bucurenci but this guy actually has a thing against Eminescu. I'm not sure why that is, but it's got to do with the fact that he was tortured by eminescu's poetry during highschool and probably got a 9.90 at literature. he can't understand how all his knowledge cannot comprehend the intricate emotions in eminescu's entire work. Well Dragos, "have i got news for you", to quote one of your favourite tv persons, you cannot even fully understand the life and lyrics of vali vijelie, and you dare to think that you fully understand eminescu? Can you imagine that after all of your studies on Eliade, there is a ten times bigger story behind eminescu. can you imagine in what you've got yourself into? can you imagine that therea re people who studied their entire life eminescu and still didn't get to the bottom of his story? can you imagine that there are people who know more than you about eminescu? can you answer any of these question or should cioroianu stand up for you?
and one more thing... eliade is not the most well known abroad... how about.. brancusi... and it's not even about the name.. it's about their work... so if u want to compare... compare one of his works to coanda's jet engine, or nadia's 10 or brancusi's coloana infinitului.. go on.. i'll let you pick whatever work you wish...