Why I need my very own fact-checker

Disclaimer number two. Or, allow me to elaborate on my rationale

I thank all of you for the feedback from my first post. It was all helpful and useful. A few more things to share on that note:

1. It was, after all, my first posting and there was bound to be a bit of rust, especially with all the [superfluous?] explaining I felt obliged to do.
2. I haven’t yet necessarily figured out what the purpose is in this blog, but it’s definitely intended to mimic the styles of emails, group or otherwise, that I’ve sent out in the past. As many of you know, I do tend to ramble in my emails. Just be glad you weren’t one of the [un]lucky recipients of some of my late 2008 drivel where I gave a detailed rundown of my online stock trading addiction. Hell, it beat working and was far more lucrative.
3. You think that was long? I haven’t even started waxing philosophical yet!

It’s a work in progress and I’m still trying to get my head round what I’m attempting to do. I’m a long ways away from taking myself seriously as a writer, so for the time being, this is a convenient way to keep people in the loop. I don’t have very good internet access, so I’m not able to attend to as many people as I’d like on an individual basis. In the future, I aim to keep things in manageable, bite-sized chunks with appropriate section headings. So if you see something entitled ‘A diatribe on Kyrgyzstan’s uptight women’, then you can easily skip it if need be. And yes, that will probably be coming soon.

The always sagacious Grant has also pointed me in the direction of Raymond Carver’s dictum regarding short stories: ‘Get in, get out, don’t linger’. I don’t intend to.

Now that that’s out of the way…

As for that Air Base I was talking about… Or, another point for the Commies

No sooner had I filed my last dispatch when I received notice that Manas Air Base is set to close. In fact, just minutes after posting it, I checked the news and got word. A bit hasty of me, but it had been rumoured and vehemently denied in the press over the past couple of weeks and I for one didn’t think it’d really happen. Either way, it appears as though the Russians have got another one up on the Americans. To quote Dr Yuhan Vevaina: ‘the US was paying $63 million a year for the shit hole and now the Russkies are outbidding them w/ petro-dollars... what the #$%^ is the world coming to when good old fashioned US greed (I mean globalization) doesn’t win out???’ I know, it's tragic.

Now I can’t confirm this figure exactly – I’m not entirely au fait with the situation – but I believe Manas Airport was charging the Americans, on top of that gargantuan rent (representing a substantial chunk of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP no doubt), some of the steepest landing fees in the world at $9k a pop. That’s a lot of revenue lost, but then Russia is promising a lot in return. See below for more details.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/kyrgyzstan-us-base-afghanistan

Also of interest perhaps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_kyrgyzstan

However…the plot thickens

Other than the Guardian article I’ve linked to above, I’ve read nothing else in the American or British press. But naturally, as I tend to do, I asked all of my students about this, despite being warned by my boss on day one that under no conditions am I to mention the following three things: religion, politics (including the issue of Manas) and illnesses (?!?!?). Most of them were ambivalent, but one allegedly highly-connected source assures me that the base will absolutely not be closing and this is merely a bargaining manoeuvre to extract more money - his English was not that good, but I think that’s what he was trying to say. So, you heard it here first.

Waitresses of Bishkek, look out

I had great luck Wednesday finding a charming coffeeshop with outstanding coffee, albeit at a price: $3. It may not seem like much, but on my paltry salary here, I’ll have to ration them. On top of that, the waitress was very lovely and actually smiled at me and had halfway decent customer service skills, even displaying remarkable amounts of patience as I tried to order in Russian. Now, I overcomplicate things as it is, so I didn’t just order in Russian, but I instead attempted to ask whether they were Arabica beans, what country they were harvested from and even whether they were fair trade, in the interests of making conversation of course. Keep all of your comments about this to yourselves, but I really am making valiant efforts to improve my Russian. Besides, she was a good sport and even played along, answering ‘da, da, da’ to everything I asked. I will undoubtedly be going back soon. As my former Latvia colleagues can attest to, no waitress or barmaid is safe from my advances. It is surely only a matter of time before I make an utter twit of myself.

An ever so brief note on Arsenal signing Arshavin

Just one more reason why having a blog is fun: I get to throw in non-sequiturs like this simply because I want to offer my two cents on some mundane topic.

Anyway, I don’t get it. It makes no sense to me. I think he’s a brilliant player, but Arsenal need a ‘creative midfielder’ like the Patriots need another quarterback (I’ve now just lost or confused 95% of my reading audience). Surely they have a far greater need for a centre-back or defensive midfielder more in the Gilberto or Vieira mould. I don’t see Arshavin propelling them into the top four, nor will he obviously be of any help to them in Champions League.

The final word on my initial posting

‘I made [it] longer than [I intended], only because I [did not] have the time to make it shorter’. (Blaise Pascal)