From Ye Old Blogge: Sunday, March 28, 2004

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Elena kiddofspeed

I'm sitting looking at a picture from Chernobyl. A woman named Elena, who likes to ride her motorbike really fast, has a lot of them on her website/log.

There's a tree growing through the concrete floor inside a house, and it looks surreal. Elena caught the perfect shot, it's just so dark and brooding, and there's the window, and there, growing out of the concrete floor, straining towards the light, is a young tree. You need to go and take a look at Elena's pages.

That picture has a place in my desktop wallpapers now. So do about four other pictures she took, including a particularly thoughtprovoking one of miles and miles of military vehicles,all abandoned due to being radioactive.

Are we humans stupid or what?

Here's a quote that's shattering in what it doesn't say: this is Belorusian cemetery, in many villages scratches on that crosses the only chronicle that left. I couldn't find particulary this village on my map and on cemetery I saw that all people that lived in this village for last 200 years were Smirnovs. It must be sectarian village, one of the sect where brothers have been marrying sisters and they all used to have one last name. I put this village on my map as Smirnovka.

This village could well have falle right through the cracks of history - in fact, its name is already lost to us - and while it's not a good thing to be remembered for being so inbred that radiation probably couldn't affect the genome any worse, it's an even worse thing to go totally unremembered.

One lost village, how many others? How many people died in radiation fires or more slowly of rad sickness? How stupid do we humans have to be?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

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